Devs... Stealth Nerfs & Withholding Information is BAD for the game...
February 11, 2016 12:39AM
edited February 2016
I just want to relay a message to the developers. Stealth nerfs in a game where people invest immense amounts of time and money into specific characters is a terrible idea. For those who don't know yet, Poe was nerfed today to 142 speed, dropping him from a tier 1 speed character to a tier 2 speed character. This is much more of a nerf to Poe than the tenacity/expose nerfs you said you were going to do last week instead.
Why create an entire thread about Poe and say that you are nerfing his tenacity/expose chance and then you guys will monitor his performance afterwards and then sneak a much bigger nerf to Poe directly into the update? The 1 speed decrease is much more of a nerf than the expose/tenacity changes were.
Also, I want to make something very clear... I don't have an issue with the nerf itself. Balance changes are needed to keep the game competitive and having a character that can go first and make his entire team go before the enemy team was in my opinion unbalanced. But what I dislike is that you withhold information from us until it is live in the game. WHY?!?!?!?
I would have stopped farming Poe last week and saved myself thousands of Cantina tokens had I known Poe would be a tier 2 speed character after this update. And you didn't even inform us of the change. You just threw it in there.
Also, I've been told that you modified the damage modifiers of certain characters basic attacks. I haven't confirmed this for myself, but why do you even hide the damage modifiers for abilities in the first place? In-game statistics like "Physical Damage" are completely worthless without knowing the damage multiplier of the ability. Chewbacca has one of the highest physical damage stats in the game but his basic attack multiplier is garbage so he hits like a wet noodle.
Don't you devs realize that we need this information to make informed and strategic decisions about what characters to invest our time and money in? Knowing "Physical Damage" & "Special Damage" without knowing the damage multipliers is like knowing half of the ingredients in a recipe and being told to just make the recipe anyways and fill in the blanks, then hope it turns out good. The same can be said about armor, speed, penetration or any of the other in-game statistics that are worthless without an explanation about how they function.
I really enjoyed this game when I started playing it. So much so that I have spent over $500 supporting it. But I am continually disappointed with the lack of communication between the developers and us players and if I don't see some improvements from the developers in how they communicate with us in the future my support for this game will stop.
It wasn't a threat. I simply stated I would stop supporting the game if communication didn't improve. A change, whether intentional or not, without informing the player base of it is a "sneaky" or stealth change. This boils down to not documenting all the changes that go into an update rather than just the ones you see fit. For example, in the current update, re-prioritizing when the leader bonuses are applied is a very important change that was not documented inside of the patch notes. It's things like this that whether you intend to or not, vastly change the landscape of the game and you're requiring your player base to discover these things for you.
But I would love to offer some constructive feedback, here you go:
Why create an entire thread about Poe and say that you are nerfing his tenacity/expose chance and then you guys will monitor his performance afterwards and then sneak a much bigger nerf to Poe directly into the update? The 1 speed decrease is much more of a nerf than the expose/tenacity changes were.
Also, I want to make something very clear... I don't have an issue with the nerf itself. Balance changes are needed to keep the game competitive and having a character that can go first and make his entire team go before the enemy team was in my opinion unbalanced. But what I dislike is that you withhold information from us until it is live in the game. WHY?!?!?!?
I would have stopped farming Poe last week and saved myself thousands of Cantina tokens had I known Poe would be a tier 2 speed character after this update. And you didn't even inform us of the change. You just threw it in there.
Also, I've been told that you modified the damage modifiers of certain characters basic attacks. I haven't confirmed this for myself, but why do you even hide the damage modifiers for abilities in the first place? In-game statistics like "Physical Damage" are completely worthless without knowing the damage multiplier of the ability. Chewbacca has one of the highest physical damage stats in the game but his basic attack multiplier is garbage so he hits like a wet noodle.
Don't you devs realize that we need this information to make informed and strategic decisions about what characters to invest our time and money in? Knowing "Physical Damage" & "Special Damage" without knowing the damage multipliers is like knowing half of the ingredients in a recipe and being told to just make the recipe anyways and fill in the blanks, then hope it turns out good. The same can be said about armor, speed, penetration or any of the other in-game statistics that are worthless without an explanation about how they function.
I really enjoyed this game when I started playing it. So much so that I have spent over $500 supporting it. But I am continually disappointed with the lack of communication between the developers and us players and if I don't see some improvements from the developers in how they communicate with us in the future my support for this game will stop.
Ok everyone, take a deep breath and relax a second, there is a LOT going on today as you can see.
I am checking with our designers on this, but I can assure you we are not trying to "stealth nerf" anything. We've been very open with everything, posting exhaustive update notes and responding to all of your questions. There is a chance that something was overlooked when we were adjusting Poe's gear when working on his tenacity.
This relationship works both ways. We are trying to be more open with all of you on these forums, and we would like all players here provide constructive feedback to us. Threats of quitting and accusing us of hiding things is not going to get our attention quicker.
It wasn't a threat. I simply stated I would stop supporting the game if communication didn't improve. A change, whether intentional or not, without informing the player base of it is a "sneaky" or stealth change. This boils down to not documenting all the changes that go into an update rather than just the ones you see fit. For example, in the current update, re-prioritizing when the leader bonuses are applied is a very important change that was not documented inside of the patch notes. It's things like this that whether you intend to or not, vastly change the landscape of the game and you're requiring your player base to discover these things for you.
But I would love to offer some constructive feedback, here you go:
- The mechanics of this game should be openly accessible information (not needing to be data-mined) and well documented. Things like the ability damage modifiers, how armor and armor penetration interact with each other (damage formula), crit/dodge/resistance/deflection/penetration ratings and how they interact with each other, potency/tenacity, etc. as well as the base values for these things.
- All changes made to the game should be well documented internally and then any of those changes which directly affect the players of your game should be informed of those changes. EXAMPLE: The developers were aware that they re-prioritized the order that leadership abilities were applied, making +speed leaders apply their speed bonus prior to the turn meters filling up in turn 1. This is vastly important to the player base, as it opens up the opportunity for dozens of characters to act first in the game and with the current Speed / Damage meta going before your opponent can make all the difference. FOLLOW UP EXAMPLE: There are certain bits of information which you can't post in the patch notes because you aren't aware of it. For example the bug that increased the amount of speed QGJ's leader ability was giving to his allies. In those scenarios, it is up to the QA/play testers to find that information or have the community find and inform you of that which is what happened. This is fine, however I would argue that the change with Poe was not one of these scenarios. Regardless of the speed decrease being a secondary and unintentional effect of changing his gear, the gear changes should have been documented in the patch notes. IE: Mk II BLAHBLAH gear has been replaced with Mk I BLAH gear. This will affect Poe by reducing his tenacity X amount and his speed Y amount.
- When CG/EA makes a mistake, we would appreciate an apology and some type of gesture of good faith as compensation for that mistake. EXAMPLE: You recently had a droid bundle in the store that you stated was a 30% off the cost of training droids in the shipments container when in actuality the bundle was only a 1.5% discount. You responded stating that the discount was taking into consideration the cost of refreshing the shipments container multiple times, however if you do the math including the cost of crystal refreshes the discount far exceeds 30% so that is not a valid explanation either. The truth therefore is either that A. The discount was stated as 30% in order to appear like a better deal than it actual is, or B. The discount was input incorrectly and was not a true 30% discount. You can read about this issue here: https://forums.galaxy-of-heroes.starwars.ea.com/discussion/9031/pack-45-t5-training-droid-30-discount/#latest
Post edited by oTradeMark on
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Replies
It's totally unfair that they don't communicate major nerfs to us, I wasted almost a month seven starring Poe...
I've been saying this for ages.
It's very, very disappointing
They'll probably respond with something like "oops, sorry guys got lost in the pile of notes and you know.. lots of complicated stuff blah blah..."
Sorry, no more excuses EA/CG because this is not the first time. Get your **** together, highlight the important stuff like balance changes and make sure its not lost in the process!
I'll start, give him back his expose chance and tenacity.
I'm not kidding.
Still hoping this is a bug. They know how controversial Poe is and I can't believe they added this last minute without telling us.
Or give him his speed back... one or another, not both, we don't want another Barris nerf
Another thing that I didn't appreciate is that they released that bundle without announcing it. Several of us spent money right before this bundle in hopes of getting shards for our Jedi's for the Yoda event. Then this bundle comes out and I definitely would have LOVED to purchase it. But now that I just spent money, that's not going to happen.
He's totally useless now.
Any comment on why this wasn't mentioned in the massive notes.
+1
The most contentious stat in the game (Poe's speed) went down and the devs didn't even know? That isn't much better.
Ty EA
But to add to that, nobody knew about the leader effect changes either. Somehow, they excluded the most revolutionary PvP change since Order 66 from the patch notes while a ton of UI changes/visual bug fixes that nobody cares about were included. Oh and lets not forget that they managed to screw it up with QGJ too
The changes to keycard battles are just mindboggling as well. The base return is cut to 15% of what was already a poor rate. Their explanation is that the events are now available all day-but that was never a limiting factor anyway, energy was the only constraint. Now, nobody in their right mind would use these battles.