What DEVS don't understand about BUFFS / NERFS

Marvel Puzzle Quest MPQ General Discussion
1

I was looking over the health changes, based on the other thread listing the percent increases, and created my own spreadsheet, listing all characters (not just HP boosted ones)

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/ … sp=sharing

And what struck me is that while the health buffs are good for underused characters, they nerfed many of theMOST-LIKED / TOP-RANKED characters really hard. I color-coded my sheet to demonstrate what I mean.

GREEN characters got a double buff (health increase + reworked powers to be more usable)
NO COLOR characters got a health buff
LIGHT RED characters got a health nerf (i.e. powers untouched, but not boosted with the rest of the pack)

DARK RED characters got a DOUBLE nerf (no health increase, and either powers dependent on health regen / healing, or powers that’ve been heavily nerfed now or in the past)

My takeaway from this, is that from a players perspective, use of blanket health changes as a means to buff / nerf is a poor way to rebalance. The proper way is to rework powers of weaker characters to be more powerful / useful, rather than upping health overall, which primarily has the effect of making matching take longer and be more grindy+ harder for players to keep playing for fun without buying a ton of health packs.

The nerfs seem specifically targeted at the following categories: healers or self-healers, primary damage dealers, utility characters (some of whom have already gone under pretty heavy nerf-bats - e.g. Hood, OBW), and to some degree tanks

Whether or not this motivates people to start using more of their roster I guess remains to be seen, but off-hand it seems like a poor design decision that will slow down combat and make it harder for players to play the game for fun (i.e. progress at all without buying lots of health packs / shields etc..). I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, buffs should be centered around reworking weaker characters powers to make them more desirable, not making the characters people like using less enjoyable (i.e. that thing that keeps people actually playing and not moving to some other pastime), especially considering how much time and in-game/real-world resources many players put in to developing the characters they like to play.

I’ve been playing this game casually since I came back from retirement. Whether or not I continue playing depends a lot on how these changes effect my ability to progress in the game. I don’t know if it will have a positive or negative impact on my playtime in this game, but I hope the devs did some thorough testing for whether people would actually enjoy these changes, and that it’s not just another way to nerf the more useful characters in the game (which is kind of how it looks without having played under the new system). It’s a pretty big change.

2

Looking from that side, Hood got a buff since he no longer dies to 8 colour (1 or 2 match) move.

3

I am confused by your thought process since he got no health buff. He is now the squishist of the squishy. So I shall name Hood squishy, and he has been hit with the Nerf bat.

4

The move most commonly used to annihilate Hood has been nerfed: XF Green.

But from the other side he didnt get the health buff (almost) everyone else did, so thats a nerf.

5

The way to rebalance X-Force would have been to give Hood more health, and destroy extra AP in green / black every turn from enemy’s team so it served as a better check. Likewise, tweak other character powers to be more powerful to serve as a better check. Also, Hood’s powers already were nerfed in the past (hence why he’s in the double-nerf category).

I quit right as they’d started releasing more 4*'s - I have 7-cover XF/IW and 2-star NF and that’s it. I haven’t been going after 4* covers since I returned, and they’re all base level, so the nerf-bat the 4-stars received bothers me from a perspective of the impact it has on the rest of the community, even if it helps me personally (though some of the other changes are less immediately clear). I’d prefer they reworked gameplay modes to be more fun for everyone, rather than constantly reworking things to screw one segment of the player base in favor of another segment, or to make things equally unfun for everyone.

Maybe this will help things, or maybe it’ll just amount to screwing everyone equally; it’s a bit too soon to tell, but either way, I prefer they show a bit more respect to the amount of time/effort/money/fairy dust people put into developing characters they enjoy playing when they make changes, be they affecting characters I use, 2* players, or 4* players.

6

But abilities didn’t get damage increases across the board so its a total non-issee.

7

I mean, some characters got buffs to health. People see it as heroes not getting that boost as a nerf. But by going same reasoning, if characters biggest counter got hit by nerf, that means themselves are getting buffed, no? Either way, it’s semantics really. Hood did get squisher by comparision but also his main nemesis no longer one shots him so it’s a wash imo, he still is as strong as before.

8

I think if you look at IF with a passive attack tile, Daken, Blade are all good against hood. A maxed Xforce can still come close to 1 shooting Hood. With the tile destruction it should do around 3K damage. You can also hit 3k damage with HT who go a nice health buff. Punisher and Psylock can also take Hood Down rather quickly as well. All these characters can now withstand a twin pistol and keep going. There are a lot more ways to take out hood. He will is still very strong on offense and I will use him, but I do not believe I will leave him in on D. I think making a longer match with more potential damage. I do think Hood and Loki should have at least 7k health. They can have less, but having almost 2k health less than the true healers is the Devs saying “stop playing Hood”

9

You don’t explain how you get from here…

to here…

My takeaway from this, is that from a players perspective, use of blanket health changes as a means to buff / nerf is a poor way to rebalance.

They used a technique, you documented the technique and somehow by documenting what they already announced you came up with it being a bad way because…

You don’t have purchase stats, or old/new usage stats or any actual evidence for your position, but by putting what was already announced in a spreadsheet you think that somehow proves that your methods are better than their methods.

The proper way is to rework powers of weaker characters to be more powerful / useful, rather than upping health overall, which primarily has the effect of making matching take longer and be more grindy+ harder for players to keep playing for fun without buying a ton of health packs.

Hmm.. I think they are doing that too. The problem is that we rather heavily lean on Laken/Patch/Groot/Xforce because they are true healers. Let everyone hit harder so that the healing is less effective? Or give everyone who doesn’t true heal a higher health pool to offset the attractiveness of regeneration?

The nerfs seem specifically targeted at the following categories: healers or self-healers, primary damage dealers, utility characters (some of whom have already gone under pretty heavy nerf-bats - e.g. Hood, OBW), and to some degree tanks

Or the ‘nerfs’ which in reality are just ‘not buffs’ (people can call anything a nerf if they try) are based on that TOP-RANKED thing from earlier. Don’t buff the guys who are the most used ergo most functional, buff the people who aren’t. That seems logical to me if you want to balance something.

And there isn’t a utopia where you can have 40 characters with unique ability sets where the abilities and synergies are all comepletely equal in terms of power. There will always be characters who are better and worse, or you need to start making the abilities more and more similar so that you can balance the numbers and outcomes. Or you can start adjusting a second variable such as health to comepensate for the minor differences in abilities and use buffs/nerfs only for the way OP/Underpowered abilities.

Whether or not this motivates people to start using more of their roster I guess remains to be seen, but off-hand it seems like a poor design decision that will slow down combat and make it harder for players to play the game for fun (i.e. progress at all without buying lots of health packs / shields etc..).

Why buy health packs? Your characters will take more hits but will have more health to compensate. And your non regen characters may be good for 2-3 fights so you get more out of rotating your roster instead of HPing XForce when things go wrong. One mega cascade should be less likely to wipe you. Sure, shield hopping will become more difficult but I’m not convinced that that is an intended use of shields, so it isn’t something they put much weight on when buffing/nerfing for the 95+% of the player population who don’t shield hop.

10

Please remember that I started this thread to share my thoughts and generate discussion, not start an argument.

I see this both ways. On one hand, maybe they thought the double-nerfed and nerfed characters were impeding gameplay / use for all the others and they decided the easiest way to fix that was to nerf them hard and buff everyone else. It should be noted, Patch, Daken, Hood are now effectively 2* characters with 3* ratings (well maybe 2.5* in the case of patch), and Xforce is 3* territory now.

While I understand the motivation, which is the same motivation for every nerf/buff they’ve done, I still feel it’s overall the wrong way to approach it.

Weak characters should be rebalanced to strengthen their powers, and boost their health where necessary. Characters that are already functional should be left alone. The reason they should be left alone is that they cost a lot of effort either in time and/or money to acquire covers for and level, and there’s no easy way to respec characters or get fair refunds (even boosted refund prices are generally an insult unless you have a barely covered hero).

It’s actually not as complicated as people make it out to rebalance weak characters into stronger ones. Look at their powers, and tweak them and/or change them until they’re stronger. That’s NOT what this is. This was a blanket buff to most characters except some of the better ones that a lot of people put money and / or time acquiring, and for those ones it was largely a hard nerf. It should be about making the other characters feasible alternatives, rather than making the other characters feasible alternatives by dropping a star rating from most of the top characters.

The devs also claim they have some new things coming out in the coming weeks, so to some degree a lazy nerf/buff-fest is understandable in that context, but it’s still a lazy-rebalance - the kind that’s been bothering vets and causing them to quit for quite a while. I’m holding off judgement until I see how it plays out in practice. It’s good that they’re listening to feedback, but part that also is keeping in mind how much many players put into developing their rosters.

11

Side-tracking for a second to point out that a discussion with opposing views is an argument. I will argue for my opinion, you will argue for yours. Sometimes one of us will switch our views and then we’ll be discussing how much we agree with each other – which is never as much fun. So by saying that you wanted to generate discussion, you’ve as much stated that you wanted to generate an argument, unless you knew ahead of time that no one was going to take an opposing view to your opinion (almost never going to be the case with such a wide audience).

I guess what I’m trying to say is that as long as an argument doesn’t get heated and devolve into personal attacks or name calling, it’s not necessarily a bad thing. icon_e_smile.gif

Cheers.

12

Agreed entirely, but sometimes it’s a good thing to preemptively remind people of that fact BEFORE things start getting heated if it seems like things might be potentially heading in that direction. icon_e_wink.gif

13

Some characters needed health (Psylocke, Punisher and HT most glaringly imo, though most of the 6800 group needed it), but to me this seems to be a speed nerf. To be more specific, shield hopping. With the mmr change and now characters having higher health, it seems like 2 fights in between hops will nearly guarantee you get hit. You may even get popped in just one fight. I’m not sure what the end-game is on this one. Unless they’re really going to reel in the progression awards for pvp…

Hint hint…wink wink…nudge nudge…