Debate on Character Valuation

Looks like Storm was released in 2019 (to a collective "ugh" from the forum). Puzzle Gauntlet seems to have started in 2021. I doubt the two were related.

Anyway Storm is a fine example of what I was talking about. She does board control, which is occasionally quite useful. But her damage is very low.

If she did, say, 75 or 80% more damage than she does today, would that make her less "fun" to use? Is there a large group of players using her now, who would stop using her if she hit way harder? Why can't she have good board control and also do damage?

@entrailbucket said:
Anyway Storm is a fine example of what I was talking about. She does board control, which is occasionally quite useful. But her damage is very low.

If she did, say, 75 or 80% more damage than she does today, would that make her less "fun" to use? Is there a large group of players using her now, who would stop using her if she hit way harder? Why can't she have good board control and also do damage?

I mean she's bound to get her balance pass eventually.
Maybe they'll do just that.

I would be very interested in this game mode variation.

Gauntlet, no mirror matches, enemy teams based on actual teams played by similar size roster.

So 25 match straight line path. Scale so the last 5 matches are +100 teams.
The main “twist” is that enemy selection is “elo” based pvp. But no retaliation nodes, the server simply presents the last 8 teams in your MMR range with scaling modifier.

The idea/challenge is allowing players to creatively beat meta combos and see hw far you can advance based on what players view as meta

I agree, but I think that's a problem they should try to solve. Some characters in this game aren't obviously overpowered, but they do a thing that can very easily break a new character.

The best example is 5* Hawkeye. He's mostly fine on his own, but his passive AP generation limits the design space they can use for countdown-based characters. Remember, 4* Cap was only broken combined with Hawkeye's AP generation. Now Hawkeye has showed up in another combo, with Kang. I think that combo is probably ok, but any new countdown character that uses red or blue has the potential to be broken because Hawkeye exists.

And, like, obviously nobody is screaming for Hawkeye to get nerfed, and neither am I, really, but he's sort of a hidden problem that can easily create issues for new characters that otherwise seem ok.

@Borstock said:

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@entrailbucket said:
I agree, but I think that's a problem they should try to solve. Some characters in this game aren't obviously overpowered, but they do a thing that can very easily break a new character.

The best example is 5* Hawkeye. He's mostly fine on his own, but his passive AP generation limits the design space they can use for countdown-based characters. Remember, 4* Cap was only broken combined with Hawkeye's AP generation. Now Hawkeye has showed up in another combo, with Kang. I think that combo is probably ok, but any new countdown character that uses red or blue has the potential to be broken because Hawkeye exists.

And, like, obviously nobody is screaming for Hawkeye to get nerfed, and neither am I, really, but he's sort of a hidden problem that can easily create issues for new characters that otherwise seem ok.

So, is that how they need to create new characters? Is that why we're seeing new tile types? To force characters who can do a lot of dmg into isolation? Good characters get to do dmg, but can't have a dangerous synergy, and characters who do synergize well have to get pre-release nerfed into laughable numbers? Doesn't that sound a lot like Chasm and Magik?

It's possible. I think the explanations for both Chasm and Magik are pretty simple though, for different reasons.

I think Chasm is an example of overvaluing downsides. They've made this mistake on quite a few other characters. For example, when he was released, Thanos was insanely powerful compared to characters of the time. He was considered to be balanced, though, because he hurt your own team so badly. The downside made up for how strong Court Death was.

Chasm, on paper, is way, way too good. But -- he has a very significant downside. He eats your own AP! If you played MPQ as it was back in like 2014, I'm not sure he'd be so popular, because he makes it very hard for you to cast powers. The problem, of course, is that in 2023 we have a ton of characters who can kill you super dead, super fast, and never cast a thing. Chasm's downside might look bad, but in today's metagame it's an absolute nonfactor.

Magik, I think, is a case of overvaluing new mechanics. Again, this is a pattern. Look at Ultron's red. The damage is low for its cost, so the designer clearly placed a very high value on "cannot be reduced.". How much would you pay for that power without that mechanic? 3AP? 4 at most? Is a one-shot "cannot be reduced" worth 3-4 extra AP? No chance.

I think they overvalued Magik's permanent damage, and that's why she does less of it. Permanent damage is a cool mechanic, but I don't think it's worth as much as they do. It's only useful against healers -- if the enemy doesn't heal, then permanent damage is just regular ol' damage. Paying this much for it is a bad deal.

I think the idea of evaluating a character solo vs a character in a combo is worth talking about, but generally people are doing the latter.

I'd say that, at least when I'm doing it, it might sound like I'm evaluating a character 1-on-1, but I'm generally not. To revisit Magik, her damage is quite low, but when paired with a power booster she can be much more effective. I would compare her to iHulk, for example, as she fills the same basic role in a team -- "damage dealer who allows you to double-dip on passive boosts/strike tiles."

When I compare Magik to Hulk, I'm not comparing them as 1v1 characters -- they are both quite bad in that role (Hulk is worse -- he just downs himself fairly quickly!). I'm comparing Magik's performance in her role to Hulk's performance in that same role. Magik does permanent damage and can offer more double-dips, but Hulk can't die and his attack is passive. Most times, I'd choose Hulk to do that particular job.

And that, I think, is the problem. Most characters can be sort of roughly sorted into different "jobs" that they do on a team (damage dealer, support/boost, stun, AP generation), and lots of the bad characters are really good at a job that's not terribly useful in today's game. Others do a useful job, but someone else already does the same thing much more effectively.

The best characters do multiple jobs really well. Look at Beta Ray Bill's powerset, or Apocalypse, or Chasm himself. Some of these characters are among the best at multiple useful roles all at once!

@Bad said:
He has changed the way pvp is played and probably many players are playing for battles instead of points because of him.

Once I climbed to 600+ in Jeff's PVP he became a lot more frequent, and once I got to 700+ practically every other skip was Chasm. Speaks volumes that people feel more comfortable putting out two unboosted 5s on defense than two boosted ones. You'd also think it'd go without saying that having a character capable of almost one-shotting someone before the opposing player has even had a chance to touch the board would have raised some flags.

@Alex502 said:
Excellent comments and evaluations, everyone. I appreciate the viewpoints.

MtG is a hard comparison to MPQ but the ideals of character release are very close. And frankly, the gameplay isn't far off either. You mentioned how nearly any card is legal in certain formats of MtG, well here's the thing, almost any character can have their day if paired correctly. I'm sure no one has forgotten that 1 star Spider-Man still does one thing any 5 star team would be happy to have with them, making crit tiles.

So if even a 1 star can be a valid choice, I feel the comparison is actually rather on point. Each new release of cards is like a single character. That set has some new dynamic the cards are meant to highlight and take advantage of. Same thing with our new characters, the overall interaction with the character base is something they consider.

Soooo... I may have led you astray here with the Magic comparison, and in thinking about how I'd address that, I realized there's a valuable contrast to draw with MPQ.

In the MTG "Eternal" formats (there are a few different ones but that doesn't matter), yes, huge numbers of cards are legal, tens of thousands in some cases. But in competitive decks, only a few hundred are powerful enough to be viable. Decks are so powerful and so tuned that games are generally over in a few turns. The equivalent of 1* Spidey would be destroyed in seconds -- he wouldn't even get a turn.

The barrier to entry for playing these formats is also massively high. A competitive Vintage deck costs nearly six figures, and that's if you can even find the ultra-rare cards you need. Occasionally a new card is good enough to be playable in eternal formats, but it's at most one or two per year. Generally 4 or 5 archetypes are able to win, and they've been the same ones for many years.

The result? Competitively, these formats are largely dead. They're played by a few enthusiasts and collectors, and that's about it. To their credit, the game designers realized things were headed in this direction many years ago, and now the most popular competitive format is rotating. Only the last year or so of cards is legal, and every year all those cards get phased out as the newest sets become legal. Sometimes there's a "best" deck, but there are usually several that are about equal, and 1* Spidey is probably playable. This is how competitive Magic is played now -- professionals play rotating formats.

What does this have to do with MPQ? Well, we're all playing "Eternal" MPQ. In most events, all characters back to 2013 are technically legal, but if you actually want to win, you need to use the most powerful ones. I can't bring any old guys to shield sim against 550 Chasm/Hulk/Colossus -- I'd lose without getting a turn. At the highest levels, only a few teams are truly viable.

The barrier to entry for competition is massively high. New characters that are competitively playable are rare, because we're evaluating them against the strongest possible strategies from the entire history of the game. If we had some kind of rotating format (and the boosts kind of do that), then someone like Magik might be more playable -- she'd be compared to a weaker set of characters, so she'd look much stronger.