Poll on Big Picture Game Change and Development Priorities

[Dr Causality]

2 hours ago, Leo_G said:

Because teaming becomes boring. Players overall don't want to face challenge as evident when some deaths occur, maybe a wipe, the reaction is usually the same: "I've got to go suddenly", "let me hop on my incarnate max IOs farm character", "lets invite more people".

Okay, walk me through how Nerfing over performing sets and Nerfing before before buffing underperforming sets fixes any of those problems or complaints?

 

• Are players suddenly, going to want to face challenges?
• Are people magically going to stay around, or not want to switch to their more powerful toon after team wipes?  Or not suggest inviting more people to deal with the challenge that caused the team wipe?

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If the encounters are expected to be easy because that is what the meta allows, no one will put up with hardships. If progression is highly accelerated, normal progression is perceived as glacial. 

 

I understand your frustrating with the game becoming so easy.   But nerfing in no way addresses the issue of players not being willing or interested in putting up with hardships.    If we make the game harder again, some people who don't want to put up with hardship will quit or play less.  Others will go back having to strict requirements to join their ITF team.     You want players themselves to be different, and the nerf bat only works on in game characters.

Edited March 12, 2020 by Dr Causality

[Leo_G]

15 minutes ago, Dr Causality said:

Okay, walk me through how Nerfing over performing sets and Nerfing before before buffing underperforming sets fixes any of those problems or complaints?

 

• Are players suddenly, going to want to face challenges?
• Are people magically going to stay around, or not want to switch to their more powerful toon after team wipes?  Or not suggest inviting more people to deal with the challenge that caused the team wipe?

The very reason you are asking this question specifically is the answer you are looking for. If you want powers that under perform to be brought up, why should you not accept a compromise to have over performing sets brought down? 

 

You site perception as your base (people's enthusiasm and all) but refuse to accept feelings also play a role in the enjoyment of varying aspects to include rp, meaningful progression, pvp, character creation and lore content. 

 

Basically, you're asking for feelings and then telling us feelings aren't a good answer because your feelings. 

 

15 minutes ago, Dr Causality said:

I understand your frustrating with the game becoming so easy.   But nerfing in no way addresses the issue of players not being willing or interested in putting up with hardships.    If we make the game harder again, some people who don't want to put up with hardship will quit or play less.  Others will go back having to strict requirements to join their ITF team.     You want players themselves to be different, and the nerf bat only works on in game characters.

My frustration isn't with the game being easy, but rather changes advocated for always aim to make the game easier. There's a difference. Fixing a quirky set that has some issues or not very good mechanics is good, pressuring for the changes to push performance into a specific direction to mostly benefit min/max hi output face roll pace is homogenization. 

Edited March 12, 2020 by Leo_G

[Bartacus]

The poll doesn't have an option for response to nerfs as "I would welcome them and enjoy them." They're all negative, which shows your bias. Anyways, I think when it comes to teams and playing content with other people... having powersets and ATs that are ridiculously broken makes you feel useless and like you aren't contributing, as has been mentioned. The problem with buffing everything up to the level of the 'broken-tier' powersets, is something called power creep. Power creep is especially bad in a game like this where most of the content is already easy. 

I do think the focus should be on buffing things that are undertuned, but I don't see why you wouldn't nerf things that are way overtuned as well. TW stands out as an obviously overtuned powerset. I don't think anyone wants to see it made into something that underperforms, but certainly made into something that doesn't make everything else look like trash by comparison. 

I think in short, it feels bad to play a superhero game and feel not useful (or super) compared to the person next to you that decided to build a fire/fire blaster and can clear everything before you touch it. You might think that's petty and I'm insecure or something, but this is an MMO that's meant to be played with other people. I want to be able to play something different and also be able to contribute meaningfully in a team. Sometimes when teaming with stuff that's overpowered, it feels like I'm not.

Edited March 12, 2020 by Bartacus

[Dr Causality]

1 minute ago, Leo_G said:

The very reason you are asking this question specifically is the answer you are looking for. If you want powers that under perform to be brought up, why should you not accept a compromise to have over performing sets brought down?

 In case you haven't noticed, I'm not hardline arguing for no nerfing or rebalancing of overperforming sets.  I just saying, let's address underperforming first (or at minimum at the same time.)   

[_NOPE_]

Nerfs and buffs are both tools to use to correct issues. The issue is some powers/powersets being "out of balance" of others. Everyone should feel "useful", and every powerset should have an equal chance to shine in a team. This should be solvable with hard numbers. The developers should be able to mine the data that players generate with their actions. If the devs AREN'T currently doing that, they should start, is my opinion.

 

We should be able to know the average fire brute's DPS, and be able to compare it to the average FF Defender's DPS, and in my opinion, the Devs should be able to EXPLICITLY state what their "expectations" are for these sets. Just like what the "Brawl Index" used to be, the Devs should be able to come up with a spreadsheet of overall general numbers, trends, and performance analytics, and tell us where the powers and powersets ARE, and where they WANT them to be.

 

Now, whether or not that vision matches the vision of the playerbase, is another story, and another discussion to have. But, before you start talking about trying to SOLVE a problem, you have to DEFINE the problem first. The game has many, many different powersets and powerset/archetype combinations, and some are obviously performing well over others. But, until we know what those numbers actually are, we can't begin to think about how to resolve those discrepancies, because we need to know first what level of discrepancy is acceptable, and what level is not.

[Caulderone]

6 minutes ago, Dr Causality said:

I just saying, let's address underperforming first (or at minimum at the same time.)   

I have no doubt in my mind that the Devs will never do all of one or all of the other.  It will be more akin to a seesaw, tilting back and forth as they have time.

[Leo_G]

1 minute ago, Dr Causality said:

 In case you haven't noticed, I'm not hardline arguing for no nerfing or rebalancing of overperforming sets.  I just saying, let's address underperforming first (or at minimum at the same time.)   

And your reason to dictate this pace is feelings. 

 

At the very least, I'd like people to acknowledge their overly emotional reactions with rationality. Admit that you want it that way because you want it and prefer your feelings over the balance of the whole. 

 

Which kind of change happens first is irrelevant to me. My stated issue is how changes will make sets closer to being copies of each other because players that found the "winning pattern" now want to copy that pattern and put them on repeat. 

[Dr Causality]

4 minutes ago, Bartacus said:

The problem with buffing everything up to the level of the 'broken-tier' powersets, is something called power creep. Power creep is especially bad in a game like this where most of the content is already easy.

This is a strawman.   I haven't seen a single person arguing to buff sets up to broken-tier peformance levels and it would clearly be foolish to do that.   Buffing underperforming sets up to median is what is being suggested.

 

 

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I do think the focus should be on buffing things that are undertuned, but I don't see why you wouldn't nerf things that are way overtuned as well.

Personally, I'm okay with rebalancing nerfs, as long as undertuned sets are buffed first or at the same time.   It's starting with nerfs that I'm firmly against.  
 

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[....] compared to the person next to you that decided to build a fire/fire blaster and can clear everything before you touch it.

Holy Christ!  Now you've done it.   The other nerf threads don't have have a hint of the flames we'll see if this goes into a Nerf Fire/Fire Blaster territory.     Please delete and take that back right now.    😅

[Dr Causality]

2 minutes ago, Leo_G said:

And your reason to dictate this pace is feelings. 

 

At the very least, I'd like people to acknowledge their overly emotional reactions with rationality. Admit that you want it that way because you want it and prefer your feelings over the balance of the whole.

 Feelings matter.  We play this game because it feels good ( or least distracts us from things that feel worse...).    But that doesn't mean we can't be rational too.   And to that point since feelings matter, ignoring them is actually very irrational.  

 

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Which kind of change happens first is irrelevant to me. My stated issue is how changes will make sets closer to being copies of each other because players that found the "winning pattern" now want to copy that pattern and put them on repeat. 

If I'm following this, then you're not even necessarily for nerfs you just want powers and sets to be diverse, so cookie cutter play is less possible?

 

 

But I can promise you one thing, no matter what changes are made or not made to the game people are going to continue to try to find and copy the "winning pattern" and request shared builds from other players they think have found the "winnning pattern."   Again it seems to me that you want players themselves to be different and I don't see how any of these game balance issues we're discussing will impact that.

[Infinitum]

I think if we are objectively going to look at something like TW we have to look at it in the scope of melee as a whole.

 

Yeah it's top of the scrapper list but not tank or brute.  On the Scrappers the TW bio combo are half of the TW users - take out its combo with bio I think it's 7th place.

 

I've never really seen the hype of TW aside from being able to hit high DPS, but to me it's a clunky arcady feel that I've never liked.  So ultimately I wouldn't give 2 cares whether it was nerfed or not.  But based on the FOTM stats it's not popular outside of one AT and one combo on that AT with bio.

 

My point is perhaps TW only needs to be looked at on Scrappers - specifically its synergy with bio.  Arbitrarily nerfing it across the board across all ATs I do not think is the answer.  I can't think of but maybe 1 or 2 people I know that use TW, and we are an active elite group that plays regularly every night.

 

As for feeling unneeded, any AT and any powerset can be subjected to that - that's why we need more content, and an added difficulty option for diverse enemies that do more exotic and non traditional damage.

[Dr Causality]

36 minutes ago, Bartacus said:

The poll doesn't have an option for response to nerfs as "I would welcome them and enjoy them." They're all negative, which shows your bias.

The poll is biased.  I tried to cover positions that aren't mine but the two question poll limit, and other format limitation doesn't really give room to create well rounded poll options covering all views, randomizing order to avoid bias etc..  

 

But you should have been able to account for your "I would Welcome and enjoy [nerfs]"  stance by choosing:

 

Question #1:  Option (a)  -- That you prefer to "Nerf overperforming powers, sets and combinations"

 

in combination with

 

Question 2:  Option (c)  --   "I would have more fun knowing those sets no longer had out of balance unfair advantages"

 

 

That would show you prefer nerfs and that you would enjoy them.

Edited March 12, 2020 by Dr Causality

[Bartacus]

16 minutes ago, Dr Causality said:

Holy Christ!  Now you've done it.   The other nerf threads don't have have a hint of the flames we'll see if this goes into a Nerf Fire/Fire Blaster territory.     Please delete and take that back right now.    😅

I did not read the whole thread... just the main post and a few others. I didn't mean to assume that everyone is calling to be TW/Bio tier for every powerset; just that I worry that underperforming powersets will always feel underperforming compared to the god-tier stuff.

18 minutes ago, Dr Causality said:

Holy Christ!  Now you've done it.   The other nerf threads don't have have a hint of the flames we'll see if this goes into a Nerf Fire/Fire Blaster territory.     Please delete and take that back right now.    😅

lol! 😨I mean someone had to say it I guess!

 

[Coyotedancer]

Another thing to keep in mind... and a point that tends to get completely lost in these forum discussions, if it's even brought up at all... is that there's a very big difference between how this game plays for someone with a Min/Maxed to the nines, billion-INF build rolling on an eight-player smash team vs. how it plays for a solo or a duo/trio small-team player running a non-optimal build on common IOs or even SOs. What feels OMGOverpoweredLikeWHOA in the first case might not be so ludicrous in the second.

 

When we're talking "balance" here, are you shooting to balance around the highest end or the lowest? In these discussions, it's almost always the high end that seems to be drawing most of the "Nerf it!" attention, while very little attention is given to how Thing X may handle under less than high-end situations.

 

Granted, I'm biased here. I'm a mostly-solo or small-team player who typically runs solid, though far from top-flight, builds... So, I see more of how the "other half" lives than the average forum build-wonk, I guess. It's just something to keep in mind. There's a population of players out there, in game, who don't always run in PermaDom/Soft-capped/SoloingTFs territory. You need to think about the effects nerfs have in that space as well as in Ubertoon Land.

[Obus Form]

Can we please get back to the main topic and discuss Yellow Salvage Prices?

[Infinitum]

There is only 1 problem with buffs, everytime they try to or do, theres a host griping about that too, either not good enough or too good.  Just look at the recent dark melee fiasco.  They were IMO really close to perfecting that too.

 

I dunno, none of it would affect me, and I tell myself each time to stay out of it, but its like watching a storm off in the horizon - usually it will eventually affect you too when talking about nerf s - and thats coming from, a former energy melee refugee.

Edited March 12, 2020 by Infinitum

[Galaxy Brain]

28 minutes ago, Dr Causality said:

This is a strawman.   I haven't seen a single person arguing to buff sets up to broken-tier peformance levels and it would clearly be foolish to do that.   Buffing underperforming sets up to median is what is being suggested.

If outliers also arent adjusted on the top end, the median is inflated upwards a smidge which throws off where everything else is balanced around. What we need is to group up sets and get concrete info on what the good ones are, vs the bad and amazing ones.

 

 

As for TW popularity, on Tanks and Brutes it's still in the upper quarter of picks, right behind the always popular thematic picks.

[Infinitum]

1 minute ago, Galaxy Brain said:

If outliers also arent adjusted on the top end, the median is inflated upwards a smidge which throws off where everything else is balanced around. What we need is to group up sets and get concrete info on what the good ones are, vs the bad and amazing ones.

 

 

As for TW popularity, on Tanks and Brutes it's still in the upper quarter of picks, right behind the always popular thematic picks.

There is a reason its more popular on scrappers though and I think we all know why.

 

Its the same reason those scrapper dark melee test builds were so out of whack with OP damage.  I wasn't seeing that with the tank I was testing on either build.

 

We can blame the scrappers I think. Hehe. Jk.  Maybe....

[Galaxy Brain]

@Coyotedancer, that is why I try to always evaluate changes on an SO lvl. Generally, IOs just push what the base already could do and rarely do you get a tremendous change (usually due to say, KD proc). 

 

@Infinitum this also leads to me wanting to see more sets treated like Dark Blast. It is slightly different on every AT it's on and that could be a benefit to many.

 

 

[Coyotedancer]

The old Live devs did the same. They claimed to balance around SO builds.

 

A fair few people who played at the high end back then used to complain about that, saying it was an outdated standard, and it made the game "too easy" for their IOed set-builds.

 

Sound familiar? XD

[Infinitum]

Just now, Galaxy Brain said:

@Coyotedancer, that is why I try to always evaluate changes on an SO lvl. Generally, IOs just push what the base already could do and rarely do you get a tremendous change (usually due to say, KD proc). 

 

@Infinitum this also leads to me wanting to see more sets treated like Dark Blast. It is slightly different on every AT it's on and that could be a benefit to many.

 

 

Yeah I think if I remember the energy melee nerf it was mainly because of stalkers and PvP.

 

I had a pve EM tank and it utterly ruined the feel of it.  Stalkers still had AS by losing whirling hands which is a crap power anyway, and that's why it didnt affect them as badly.

 

But having 2 super high fast attacks like ET was too much, on tanks though with no reliable AOE the nerf was overkill.

[Galaxy Brain]

I think that is a direction we should be pushing instead. Why do Scrappers and Tanks have the same TW? Why does Stalker EM have to effect Tanker EM? Etc

[Infinitum]

Just now, Galaxy Brain said:

I think that is a direction we should be pushing instead. Why do Scrappers and Tanks have the same TW? Why does Stalker EM have to effect Tanker EM? Etc

Bingo

[Leo_G]

19 minutes ago, Dr Causality said:

But I can promise you one thing, no matter what changes are made or not made to the game people are going to continue to try to find and copy the "winning pattern" and request shared builds from other players they think have found the "winnning pattern."   Again it seems to me that you want players themselves to be different and I don't see how any of these game balance issues we're discussing will impact that.

I literally just told you how they would impact balance, performance and enjoyment. The changes that will be advocated for that brings up your "under performers" will be confined to the "winning pattern" of the over performers and if those over performers are ever brought down, they will further resemble each other. The ceiling of those over performing sets directly affects the direction of what the underperforming sets will do. 

 

For example: Electric Affinity had problems supporting whole leagues. So what? Why does 1 support guy need to be capable of keeping 18+ people fully buffed by himself? Because buff sets have a higher ceiling thanks to those premium buff sets like Time manipulation. My voice in the ocean of praise for how overly stacked Electric Affinity is now is pointless. Expect pefectly balanced sets like Empathy to get AoE buff versions of their ST buffs and under performing sets like FF to get loaded up with +Absorb. 

 

The overall meta pushes things UP which is unnecessary with how easy the encounters are. It's because they don't see sets that perform "fine" as fine but rather see them as gimped. And they see them as gimped because they don't compare to the ceiling and they don't compare to the ceiling because your feelings won't allow *logically ordered* adjustments to tow things closer to the line of balance. 

[_NOPE_]

1 minute ago, Galaxy Brain said:

I think that is a direction we should be pushing instead. Why do Scrappers and Tanks have the same TW? Why does Stalker EM have to effect Tanker EM? Etc

Because the code is spaghetti, and splitting them out is a NIGHTMARE. You might be surprised at how much work it would be to make a "separate version" of the same set for different ATs to allow them to have different powers and numbers.... I shudder thinking about it.

 

It is, of course, POSSIBLE. But it's a lot of freaking work. That's why powerset proliferation was so much easier, because they essentially just added "references" in the game files that pointed to the already existing powersets, and used the modifiers of the ATs to make the difference.

[Infinitum]

2 minutes ago, The Philotic Knight said:

Because the code is spaghetti, and splitting them out is a NIGHTMARE. You might be surprised at how much work it would be to make a "separate version" of the same set for different ATs to allow them to have different powers and numbers.... I shudder thinking about it.

 

It is, of course, POSSIBLE. But it's a lot of freaking work. That's why powerset proliferation was so much easier, because they essentially just added "references" in the game files that pointed to the already existing powersets, and used the modifiers of the ATs to make the difference.

But its to the point where either do it the right way or dont do it.

 

Right?

 

The timframe or difficulty shouldnt be an automatic exclusion for balancing it, otherwise why balance it in the first place?  Especially if its truly needed.

 

If its not worthy of the best effort, why is it worthy of a punitive effort or half baked effort?

 

Or maybe it isnt worthy of any effort and it is just punitive.

 

Those are questions that need answers.