Hero Balance FAQ - Discussion

Darn it… A voice of reason :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:!

Some of the latest initiatives such as designing costumes for already OP heroes like Finley & Killhare, to me seem absolutely ludicrous… Certainly nothing to do with hero balancing :sweat:.

7 Likes

Bob Ross auto-rec!

20 happy little trees.

2 Likes

Logic would say buff or costume the weakest and least used heroes to provide balance. But since commonwealth sense doesn’t exist there, you want to make the strongest, most used heroes even stronger.

Makes zero sense.

I can see what you’re doing a mile away. You’re going to put the costumes on these strongest, most used heroes and surprisingly find out that they are overpowered and nerf the original hero when it’s something that nobody asked for. In fact everyone was against it.

But you guys don’t listen to your player base.

4 Likes

Thank you. Exactly. I’m not ready to light my torch and grab my pitchfork yet. :grin:

A little civility goes a long way.

But I do think if a change to the game makes a player unhappy, it’s not wrong for them to ask for an explanation, or state “I don’t like this.”

9 Likes

I do think we’ve reached a point where a Hero Reset token should be made.

It would be nice to level the newer things a bit quicker and one of the things that holds me back on occasion is when a portal has heroes featured that are in a colour I can’t really ascend.

So from both a QoL perspective and a profit perspective this makes sense now.

7 Likes

100%. Just appealing to folks to do so in a thoughtful, logical way, not just “This sucks; change it,” or “You’re only doing this because you are greedy.” Make the devs understand where you are coming from.

1 Like

Agreed. Let’s be civil. But I am waiting to see if this is truely a start to increase communications, or the FAQ is their quick fix solution so they can say “hey we communicated… live with it”

People are frustrated because of a build up of poor corporate comms strategy. And many lost trust with the brand due to that.

But let’s be realistic … that is EVERY brand’s responsibility to build trust and loyalty with their consumer base.

Being reluctant to communicate doesn’t make sense… they are getting paid as a business so they cannot be reluctant. Growing brand communities is literally one of the most important business priorities for ANY business.

And let’s be real here… SGG is supposed to be a service business. WHY? No goods are exchanged with a purchase. Our player base doesn’t OWN anything… we basically pay money to gamble at a chance to improve our game playing experience!! They can kick us off their platform anytime, De-power any heroes in your roster, etc…

Since we are expected to spend money to enjoy our time on THEIR platform… technically their business model services a user base and part of servicing is communication.

I am a loyalist when it comes to brands… and frequently msg other brands on their forums or social accounts. SGG is the only business I ever “interacted” who has never responded on a forum question when I tagged one of them. LOL. I often see people tagging petri for example and never see a response. He must be busy doing other jobs I guess … maybe SGG needs to hire more people. or pay the moderators LOL.

4 Likes

That faq maybe a temporary “salve”… I am waiting to see how this plays out.

Either it’s a step in the right direction and SGG increases communications … or it’s their typical pattern of “This is it, suck it up people and accept it orGo vent in forums in the meantime .” LOL

It’s become obvious they don’t have a solid framework for nerfing and buffing heroes. Which is fine with me to take a work In progress POV. But it’s the lack of communications and community engagement that exacerbates the situation.

Why do you nerf Heroes?

Whenever possible, we try to avoid making Heroes weaker. However, if we notice that some Hero is clearly stronger than all the other heroes of the same rarity, we are sometimes forced to “nerf” it instead of boosting all the other Heroes.

note:: there are obviously other solutions. But the quick easier fix seems to be nerfing a few heroes … instead of addressing deeper rooted balance problems. I guess it’s just more feasible to do quick fixes until they start losing enough players to prioritize deeper fixes

Do you ever buff old Heroes?

From time to time, we do buff older Heroes to keep them viable and fun to play with. We review player feedback on existing Heroes routinely, so the best way to get your opinion heard is to share your ideas on our Community Forum, under the Ideas & Feature Requests category.

note: I have rarely seen anyone from SGG even reply to any posts addressed to them, never mind actually participate in the thread conversation with questions. Definitely never seen someone from SGG communicate on “a Buff a hero” post LOL. So I know SGG buffs some heroes, but engage players on this forum? Not enough to encourage people to share your ideas here.

Exactly!!! They should wotk on some useless heros and buff thrm and try to make rebalancing there are so many usless HOTM everyone have in their roster but they not even looking at them

2 Likes

If nerfing is necessary, OK, go for it.

However, if you nerf a hero, don’t disrespect us as much as you do by not even allowing us to reset the nerfed hero and get our ascension mats and resources back.

That’s the very least you should do when you nerf a hero. Maybe for a week, we should be able to reset those heroes and get everything back. Do this retroactively to the heroes that were nerf in the last year and show us some respect.

Also, s4 heroes still have massive stats if I hadn’t missed anything (only Villains were balanced down if I recall correctly). Listen to the beta feedback and fix them before release instead of nerfing them afterwards.

Meanwhile, my new #nospend goes on for me.

4 Likes

Good (or relatively fair) balancing of all heroes is possible, but that will never happen.

Because it make player who had many old heroes not willing to spend much money to pull new hero, it’s a very bad move from business point of view. That’s why there are many suggestions from players (and beta testers too) in the past but their voices were basically all ignored.

IMHO, this hero balance discussion is a bit meaningless, yes they welcome us to leave comment and suggestion, but devs will keep adjusting balance with their own way.

If need change, that should already changed long time ago.

One should not forget, that we as players only have limited access to information. We see raid defences, war teams and judge heroes on our personal opinion.

Game Balance should be based on Data (Game Metrics) that we don’t have. This is why it may be unclear for us why e.g. Thoth does not get love and why Frigg/Odin get nerfed.

I’ve found that one can make use of every 5* hero in the game, some maybe overall A others just a C. But in general there is no hero unusable. There is a Gap between S1 and S3 yes and if you compare Odin and Justice damage-wise this gap is huge. However that does not mean you cannot use Justice as a multihitter.

Most concerning for me is the spiral of growing stats combined with diferent skillsets. It should be either Stats growing or skillsets getting better - both together is what causes imbalance on live servers which they need to fix after release.

So my suggestion would be: tone down Stats and create unique and desirable Heroes through skillsets.

3 Likes

Everything you wrote in original post contradicts what you do in real life.

What did you buff? Ones, two heroes? Long time ago?
What did you nerf? Great heroes people chased with their money? Yep.

Whom you listened to? Definitely not your community.

Congratulations, you played yourself

3 Likes

“Why do we balance heroes”
So you can spend more gems on newer broken heroes until the nerf hammer happen lolz

3 Likes

You and me both. The inconsistent communication is maddening. We get a nice, in-depth AMA one month, and then nothing for over a year. Then we get this FAQ that kinda sorta addresses our concerns, but not really. Like you said, is this the start of a larger conversation with the staff, or just another random blip, followed by a long silence? No one knows. But my point is, if the response to this attempt at communication - ineffective as it may be - is just to stir up the angry mob with pitchforks, then what incentive does SGG have to keep doing it?

Although I have no formal business training, this makes sense to me. But if it were hurting the bottom line that much, they would change it. I’m F2P (or if you consider the free Google Play credit I get from taking surveys, vC2P), so I can’t do much to the bottom line anyway. But if you consider this game to be thinly veiled gambling for those who spend, then it’s not really a surprise that the staff doesn’t communicate. Do you see casino owners on the floor explaining the abysmal odds to their patrons? No; the pull of the gambling “high” is incentive enough for a significant part of the customer base.

Now, casinos do try to keep their customers comfortable and happy, and that seems to be missing a bit here. QoL improvements are few and far between. But Zynga is a very profitable company - and I say Zynga because most of the really egregious stuff seems to have come since they took over - and you’d better believe they’ve done some kind of cost-benefit analysis of more communication and decided it’s not worth it.

This is also very frustrating. When the answer to every complaint is “tell us about it in the forums”, and then massively unpopular ideas like non-S1 costumes roll out anyway AND staff don’t respond to the specific concerns raised in the forum, then the player base is left to wonder why they are posting their concerns in the forum. They may as well be screaming at the sky, for all the good it seems to do.

The mods here are top-notch, and I appreciate them, but why they do a job for free that SGG should be paying someone to do is beyond me. If the mods can find time to communicate as well as they do in their free time, and without getting paid, one or two dudes or dudettes at SGG could shed a ton of light on things if they’d engage the community the way the mods do. If that’s what SGG wanted…

6 Likes

This summedd it up perfectly. While I do understand that no player - especially not me :wink: - represents “the player base”, this is exactly why I myself see no point in commenting these threads.
Does not make very much sense in my book to encourage a discussion and then ignore it completely, as happened more than once in the past.

6 Likes

I mean, I understand your sentiment and they deserve credit for trying, but how much assumption of good faith can we be expected to garner when their words & actions often don’t align?

Valid point, credit where it’s due, I do appreciate the attempt :+1:

4 Likes

It’s tough, I agree, but if communication is going to improve, it’s gonna take effort from both players and SGG… maybe effort above and beyond what might be considered reasonable. We can’t ask for that kind of effort from SGG unless we make it ourselves. At least, that’s how I tend to think about it. I will grant you that, as the company who is making money from the players, SGG should be the one making the extraordinary efforts here, but let’s not let that absolve us of our responsibility to try. Only then will we see if SGG’s desire to communicate better with the player base is genuine.

2 Likes

Ninjas, Odin, Frigg and it seems S4 heros needs an urgent nerf

First, stop planning a new costume release and adjust the hero balance. What the players want is simple.

1 Like