Does SG regret Telly/Vela?

They probably rely more on beta metrics than on what beta players report. But if they aren’t testing the right combinations of heroes then the metrics will not be accurate.

Most players felt Vela was a weak(ish) hero on her release so probably didn’t consider testing that combination in beta. Plus beta doesn’t seem to be open for very long to allow thoughtful consideration of different combinations, and unless you have Vela already you likely didn’t get her in beta to test with Telly.

Synergy between heroes in the game is becoming more and more dominant. Probably there needs to be more guidance in beta on what different combinations to test and more thought pre-beta on what those combinations are likely to be.

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If there were no Telluria, SGG would have no reason to regret Vela. Perhaps the opposite is also true, but I wouldn’t know, as I have Vela but not Telluria.

Vela was undoubtedly underestimated in isolation before and after release, but she would not be in the cross-hairs as OP if they hadn’t released a green tank that basically requires a red stack to defeat consistently. Others have pointed out that the real problems with Telluria are a) her ridiculously high def and b) her mana debuff, but here we see SGG dickering around with her damage output that nobody actually cares about anyway while taking giant whacks at Vela.

I was OK with the first Vela nerf, but I sure am tired of seeing more proposed nerfs to Vela, one of the best heroes on my (F2P) roster, just because she works too well with a hero I don’t even have. It’s like Jerry Tarkanian’s quote that " The NCAA is so mad at Kentucky, they’re going to give Cleveland State another year of probation."

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Releasing Telluria as a healer + beefy minion producer + mana generation slow at average mana speed was a mistake.

Pre-Telluria, Yunan was the best green tank. He’s slow and adds DoT, but doesn’t prevent you from gaining mana to clear the DoT. Yunan-Vela didn’t seem like a broken combo because you were still in a race to clear the DoT if the defense fired, which was no different than what the meta was at the time.

Telluria-Vela, however, makes it so that you gain less mana, the defense heals over time, gets minions, does water DoT, and debuffs your attack if you stack on the tank. That is a lot of things to counter for 2 heroes and at average-tank and fast-flank; especially given that you are slowed from gaining any mana to counter it. However, they released Telluria this way and folks paid good money for it. Many have heavily invested emblems and built alliances around it. I can’t imagine them making a massive adjustment at this point, as they already tinkered with these heroes in a previous version.

A thousand times this.:heavy_heart_exclamation:

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I believe not. They’re pretty stubborn.

I guess they should listen to Beta Testers more and filter good ideas granted here in the forum.

We all make mistakes and they’ve made a bad calculation on some heroes powers, it happens in all games. The major problem is how they dealt with it.

How could this problem been prevented in the past and future? LISTEN to your Beta Testers. They didn’t and this is the mess resulting from being deaf. I’m not one, but from what I’ve seen posted on this forum, it seems pointless to have Beta Testers if SG is not listening to them. If they are going to do whatever they want with feedback be damned, just shut the process down.

However, I think there is like a 0.1% chance of SG changing their outlook. Remember how messed Alliance Wars were when they first started? How about Raid Tourneys? The upgraded buildings? SGG has had plenty of messes in the past and will continue to have in the future. This is just the latest example.

I don’t think SG regrets releasing them, I think they are just forced to rectify the backlash that resulted. Besides, they’ve got the money people spent.

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Part of me think that they known before hand where we were going with the Telly-Vela combo before release, but the income perspective was high and they not predicted such a large portion of playerbase pull for them.

They are greedy, yes, but not stupid.
Gaining 1 million the month before and losing 2 the month after is not a great investment.

Part of me think they really have some balancing problems.

Noor and Skadi now are clear examples of mystakes in the other sense.

It seems that some skills like minions or auto-heal are clearly overrated in their calculation, while sinergies between good skills not so much.

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SGG can and should learn from this experience and use this as a platform to better develop their Beta testing infrastructure and process. The players who take the time to Beta test for them are a tremendous resource, but I feel SGG have somewhat failed to deploy them correctly, and continually fail to properly listen to feedback. Nowhere is this more evident than in the release of Telluria and Vela. If testing like that which was performed in V1 balancing and that which is currently ongoing had been performed pre-release, we could have avoided this whole affair. One of the aspects of this game that I admired when I first started playing was the involvement players had through the community forums and Beta testing and I honestly hope to see this improved in future, for a better game development.

I do believe their impact on the game post release was unintended and I don’t believe that SGG planned it this way. I think the caliber of their synergy was unforeseen for the reasons that @DaveCozy explained above. Lack of testing, whether internally or through Beta resulted in a release that shouldn’t have happened and now they are now attempting to restore some semblance of balance. There is no easy solution to this other than the current dance we’re all enjoying so much :see_no_evil: :hear_no_evil: :speak_no_evil: and no matter what they do, some part of the playerbase will be unhappy.

Will this impact spending? No doubt a few will have lost confidence in SGG and a few will follow the #Nospend. Will this have a huge impact? I doubt it. I would imagine that the percentage of players who visit these forums and follow the saga of Beta news, balances and so on is pretty small and the big spenders and will likely keep on spending.

Tl;dr
For the sake of all our sanities, SGG needs to both listen to and make better use of their beta testing team!!!111

True, true, true :frowning: I maxed her early and didn’t regret it…

Jut re-read the old HOTM thread for Vela *giggle “not going to be impactful”…yeah if that green monster wasn’t released…

I just don’t understand why they weren’t tested in Beta together, are the previous HOTM not there anymore when a new one is tested? And shouldn’t it be clear that the problem is Telly?

Serious question. Coming from someone who has never been involved in a beta myself, not knowing how it all works… when you guys do betas, are you actually supposed to all try to test all hero combinations together? Because there are a metric crapton of heroes overall…

I mean personally, I thought both Vela and Telluria looked pretty good on their own. Didn’t even consider how they would both work together on the same team, because I didn’t even expect to pull one, let alone both (and I didn’t)… but you’re saying that the problem arose when they were tested together, after the fact. Does that mean that the beta testers were asked to test different combinations of all different heroes? Are they given access to fully emblemed versions of all the old heroes during that time, and asked to test all of them together?

That’s… a lot of different combinations! And it would probably take more than a dozen test runs or so to see exactly how one specific combination would fare.

Is it possible that there aren’t enough beta testers? Could that be part of the underlying issue? Or is it more the fact that beta tester input was largely ignored even after the issue was identified?

I’m not knocking SG or beta testers at all, just curious. I kind of just assumed that SG knew that the combination was OP as all getup when they released them, and that it was intentional at the time. If you’re saying otherwise, I would ask: what do you think should be done differently in the future RE: beta testing that might prevent this little um… “awkward” kind of situation from happening again?

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before answering this question, I just want to say that if I answered it generally it would imply that we’re getting some sort of direction in beta :stuck_out_tongue: which we are not, or at least not until recently (to be fair they have started improving by giving us direction on what kind of feedback they’re looking for).

So me personally, I do try and test different combos with the heroes I have. I cannot speak for every tester though (I imagine most do though as it seems logical).

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Ah, okay. I’ve never participated in any game beta myself, so I didn’t know exactly how they worked. I know you guys are supposed to give feedback? Just wasn’t sure if they actually directed you all to test certain things or if you’re just like playing the game as normal…

EDIT: if it’s just playing as normal without access to all of the heroes, I’d be absolutely useless as a beta tester. Like “here, try out Telluria”. Okay.

Well I tried her out. She was okay on titans and farming 1:8-7, I guess, but no real noticeable difference.

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Actually, in beta they should want the full spectrum of player interaction with the new hero, including those with nothing much else. There will be players in the live game who pull that hero and have not much else, and knowing how it impacts them is important too. Especially if that single hero can suddenly make them an order of magnitude stronger.

But I agree that the beta program does need more direction from SG (not just “go ahead and play”) and SG need to better uncover the hidden synergies in the new heroes they are creating before going live with them.

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(There is a TLDR version posted at the end of my post for brevity)

I definitely think there is good discussion here about the need for SG to listen to beta testers and it mirrors a lot of the discussion about powercreep from within my own alliance. As has been pointed out the lag between release of HOTM and other HOTM often prevents beta testing of some combinations of heroes and that results in a similar train wreck to what Telluria+Vela became after release of both. That said I feel it is necessary for SG to consider new release heroes that are OP. Unfortunately this is a factor that lead to the death of a very good moba game for PC and or console from a few years back. The idea of tweaking every single hero until balance is achieved is unreasonable, but that doesn’t mean I don’t see a way for SG to mitigate future OP releases of other HOTM.

APPLIES THE WISHFUL THINKING CAP.

If SG would consider slowing their release of HOTM to only say quarterly so they can test more HOTM in batches it may allow SG to test synergies so we don’t get a telluria and vela hellscape that results outside of beta to the same degree, I don’t think this would totally stop the bleeding with OP releases, but it may stop the need for multiple nerfs to the same heroes within only a few patches. As in the future nerfs needed will be less severe.

REMOVE WISHFUL THINKING CAP.

I don’t see SG really changing up the HOTM release schedule for any reason and unfortunately the number of players buying in shows no sign of going down. Evidence from the last event where at one point I saw that I was over 1millionth place in rare, in other words more than 1 million people played at least the rare tier of event. I might track that later and see if the player base seems to be expanding from that angle. As a result I think SG has a formula to continue making copious amounts of funding from the game for a while yet.

One final side note. I also think there is one more player in this. SG is not the only factor in this case. Zynga Games is the company that technically owns SG and they have financial metrics that I am sure factor in to things. To borrow a few words from an accounting professor from my college “If you report consistent net revenues of 1 million dollars across ten quarters and then suddenly only report ‘only’ net revenues of 500,000 suddenly stockholders become very nervous” obviously this is paraphrase, but the same situation applies here where if Zynga sees consistent revenue losses, despite making profit, they may decide to move on.

TLDR: SG made a mistake, that can be addressed, but Zynga may be partial to blame because of their interest in maximum net revenues in a position far above things beyond SG staff direct control.

Full disclosure I am not an investor in phone games nor expert, but I have seen enough games of this nature go “Belly up” in my short lifetime to say that profits will dictate continued existence of these games and if E&P stops bringing in a sufficient amount of revenue on net the support from Zynga will unfortunately go elsewhere.

Good points. The game’s capitalism simulator is demonstrating how destructive an ideology it is. Every bad thing in this game is because they’re trying to drive spending by making you anxious and depressed.

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Nope.

You enter beta with your current roster. In addition, they give you the new or altered heroes in that beta build. All are at 4/80 with no emblems. If you want to test them with emblems, you’d either have to have them on hand or reallocate the ones you already have on your account.

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Good Lord! How much truth between these words! As a matter of fact, they already started to milk a cheap copy of E&P.

There isn’t any regret in all this Velluriagate, they were two of the most wanted / chased HOTM in months, and SGG’s bank accounts are proof of that. Later they tried to cool things down by releasing crappy HOTMs (Raphaele, Noor) and all this “rebalancing”. But the damage (to us) was already done.

surely I’m not the only one readin this bs rollin my eyes and saying “who gives a ■■■■” out loud…

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No you are not the only one. There are a few threads currently that I feel the same about

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Perfect Summary 20 Char

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They should, but remorse seems an unlikely part of their makeup to me.