175 réponses à ce sujet

[sandboxgod]

nicethugbert wrote...

The specific changes and the motive is what bothers me more than the frequency. The game is loaded with cheapness which seems to be sacrosanct. It took forever for Drell to get much needed attention and what they did get was a day late, dollar short. This game needs a lot of work and the balance changes thus far have been relatively minimal.

Correct. There are still many classes that many hosts will instakick. For instance, try bringing a Quarian Female Infiltrator to fighting something else besides Geth. You will see an X by your name in a Gold match. Shouldn't Sabotage get some sort of buff to make it more viable against other races? Why did the DLC not add synthetic units to each race to address this issue?

This is what bothers me. Instead of making things 'viable' they rather nerf the popular choices. Does this make the less popular choices more viable? Maybe. But not in the case of the Quarian Female Infiltrator. Instead of fixing her we get a new DLC which adds a lot more problems.

New content is exciting sure. But we really should have focused on making things more viable and fixed the game we had in some areas

edit- And btw, sticky grenades still kinda of suck. They dont need more damage. We need them to hit our targets. It's still too hard to utilize them. This is what I mean we needed for our base game to get fixes

Modifié par sandboxgod, 24 octobre 2012 - 09:45 .

[Hiero Glyph]

Chris Schanche wrote...

We do that of course, but we're a small team and on a time limit.  We make a massive number of balance changes internally to all this new content, and some of our balance changes to non-Retaliation content before Retaliation came out were in anticipation of its existance.  But as I mentioned earlier in this thread, there will always be things we don't catch.  We're only human, and there are a lot of changes that 10 or so people wont see that will really blow up in visiblity when the new content goes out to our sizeable playerbase.

Again, without a foundation to build this balance upon the entire structure is unstable though.  While I understand that you just added a new faction and classes to two of the three existing factions, balance should have been strengthened with these changes, not weakened.  As it stands now your team ruined Bronze and Silver difficulties and are now attempting to rebalance the factions.  Mind you, the factions are what the player classes are balanced against so in essence you have undone the previous seven months of balance changes entirely.  Don't believe me?  Go play the demo; it was more balanced than the current version of multiplayer.

[Kristen Schanche]

Drayce333 wrote...

The only reason the devs are trying to be such a open book with multiplayer is because its the only way they can save face after the series destroying ending, DA2 disaster and the TORtanic. They know they have screwed up to much at this point and need better PR to attempt to redeem themselves.

Don't fall for it people, and make sure never to preorder another bioware game or buy them at release if you can't return for a full refund. As you can see they still love to screw over the players every now and then.

While we acknowledge that the ending did not resonate with all players in the way that we hoped it would, none of us feel that we have anything to 'save face' from.  I'm here open and honest on the forum because I genuinely love the product we put out in ever way, and I want to make sure anyone who has questions has a place where they feel like they could potentially get some answers.

I spend a lot of time playing this game at home too, and I've been a fan of many other games where it's been difficult or impossible to get dev responses.  Us staying open and available for comment like this helps make our community a better place.

That said, this comment was pretty off topic from the main thrust of this post, there is a place for this conversation, but it's not in this thread.

[Tristam25]

You know that divisions of a game company work on different things, right? Part of Bioware is working on ME3 MP, and part of it is working on ME4. MP division might work on ME4 as well. Learn how companies work.

[najzere]

Eckswhyzed wrote...

najzere wrote...
Imagine if all the time this team put into weekly balance changes had been devoted to investigating and fixing bugs. Maybe the latest patch wouldn't have taken months to drop.

Imagine if design and programming were two separate teams?

Imagine if bugifxing wasn't just a matter of throwing more people at a problem?

....oh wait.

If there were no "balancing" team the resources to employ them could have gone to the programming team. As a bug fixer myself, more people is definitely helpful. Especially when you consider that there was always more than one bug.

[sandboxgod]

Also I am curious what was Bioware thinking in regards to Proximity Mine vs Sticky Grenades. On one hand you have an awesome power that regens (edit- not a consumable). It does 20% damage for entire team if specced. It actually hits your targets. It's awesome

On other hand we have Sticky Grenades. It's a consumable. It doesnt hit crap unless you get lucky. Sure it does great dmg if it actually hits something.

Where is the balance??? No wonder the human infiltrators are pretty reviled. It's a tight race between them and the quarian female infiltrator

Lets focus on buffing these weak classes. I'd like to use them more. But inspite of my nice manifest and decent N7 Rank I will get an X by name (vote kick)

This is not balance.

Modifié par sandboxgod, 24 octobre 2012 - 09:52 .

[Lord Rosario]

Chris Schanche wrote...

Zero132132 wrote...

Chris Schanche wrote...

Most console game right now don't have the ability to iterate balance as fast as we do, which is why it hasn't been seen much. The first one that started doing the thing that we're doing now was, I believe, Monday Night Combat, and it was a really innovative way to push data in a way that let them make balance changes without a certification process.

I think we'll probably start seeing this kind of heavy balance tweaking more frequently now though as more and more games pick up that it can be done this way. As for the PvP vs PvE argument, we still think that a balance environment is the most fun environment to play in, even if you're not playing against other players. Seeing every player play the same kit with the same gun in every game isn't fun for most people.

And we never nerf based solely on 'this kit is getting played too much' but that is a nice indication that maybe there's something out of balance with it that we should assess. If that happens then we spend some time having a serious look at that kit, assessing the numbers, testing against other kits, and deciding if some of those numbers are a bit higher then we should have initially set them. All our nerfs are in the interest in making sure the game is fun for more then just the people using the strongest kits.

And as a final point, I can assure you that the weekly balance changes have no impact on any future projects.

One thing I don't get, though... has anyone posted an explanation of why the Devastator mode clip nerf was made? I think most in the community are just baffled by it, although if you provide a concrete reason you might get more pissed off people trying to explain why it's wrong.

Honestly, though, I think a lot of us would be a bit less angry if we had some idea of why something that out-of-the-blue was done.

A big part of it was the fact that the ammo buff on the Destroyer was just too strong.  One of the levers we can pull when designing and balancing a gun is clip size.  While we already have to plan around the assault rifle capacity mod, the Destroyer was a whole extra layer.  Whenever a new gun was being blanced, or an old one reassessed, we have to balance it both against the Destroyer's potential massive clip size, as well as against every other kit.

This could easily lead to making a gun either too good on him, or not good enough on a lot of others.  We have plenty of other balance levers to pull on guns, but we weren't happy with how strongly the Destroyer forced our hands on this one.  We still like the unique flavor of massive clips on him, and in internal playtesting, he still feels pretty great with the lower total mag bonuses.  But this change brings him a bit more in line, as well as allowing us to be more free with our weapon design.

The most annoying thing about this change is that two shot weapons can no longer be increased to 3 shot and 3 shot weapons need all the clip size evolutions to be 4 shot. Perhaps the clip increase was too great for guns with a ton of ammo, but those were not hit nearly as hard as the ones with less.

The Destroyer is/was unique because of his clip size bonus and now there is a big hole left where that niche used to be. Just highly disapointing to be given something new and build something around it and have it pulled out from under you. It may be still partially there, but at least for me, my favorite gun, the Raider, was quite heavily shafted by this.

[Cheezzhead]

It's a fair point of discussion, and at the base of it lies that fact that you can't please everybody. No matter what you do, change, or add, there will always be a group of upset people. I assume the devs here kind of ignore most of the complaints and 'petitions' on this forum for that reason. You see one guy complaining about a new balance change, and the next 10 replies agreeing with it, it gives you the impression that that's what the community wants. But it's not. It's just what 11 people want. And then you see another player complaining about the opposite, and people agreeing with him, and then you think the community is contradicting itself. But it's just 2 groups disagreeing with each other. There is, in fact, no such thing as a 'community' in the sense that everybody agrees with everybody, and that's a mistake alot of people tend to make.

So what's left to do is to find out what the majority wants. And then there's the minority that complains again. So why not perform weekly balances? Because 10 people are whining on this forum? Because you, as an individual, don't agree with it? You can complain that the devs are listening to the minority rather then the majority, or that the balances are being carried out incorrectly, but it seems illogical to ask them to stop performing updates altogether because of this vocal minority.

[Drummernate]

I have too much fun with the Geth Infiltrator and Krogan Sentinel...

Nerf my fun please.

I want to be able to play as something else.

Oh, and please buff the Human Infiltrator to have like 9,001 shields since nobody really plays as them these days.

Think of the children... without Human Infiltrators...

Do the right thing!

[XgOperative]

Chris Schanche wrote...

nicethugbert wrote...

The specific changes and the motive is what bothers me more than the frequency. The game is loaded with cheapness which seems to be sacrosanct. It took forever for Drell to get much needed attention and what they did get was a day late, dollar short. This game needs a lot of work and the balance changes thus far have been relatively minimal.

I agree with this, but there are a few cases where we feel that we may have gone too far all at once.  The original Falcon change comes to mind, even if we're happy with the 'caster gun' role it has settled into now.  We've burned ourselves and our fans a few times with changes that were too big all at once and our goal is to be more iterative now.  In cases where a change doesn't go far enough, we'll keep reevaluating and tweaking till it gets to the right place.

Lets see how those Drell changes shake out over the next few weeks first.  We wanted to change them before but some of their bonuses were directly tied to another races, we needed to unhook that with the patch before we were finally able to give them these buffs we've been wanting to.

Personally, i think you should have thrown in accuracy increases as well, but either way this does make the drell much more depedant on passive(for the uniquely high bonuses, Orginal turians as well) and fitness (for the bonus move speed which is half of what makes drell, drell) than the other races. I feel the drell adept is the glass cannon you want him to be, just not so much the drell vanguard.

[sizzlinpapaya]

Go play me3 and shut up.

[Eckswhyzed]

Chris Schanche wrote...

Okay guys, I have to drop out of the thread to go let the rest of the balance team know that Eckswhyzed is having too much fun with the Geth Infiltrator.

Hiero Glyph wrote...

Go play the demo; it was more balanced than the current version of multiplayer.

Maybe it was. But slightly more imbalance is the price you pay for the large array of content.

Modifié par Eckswhyzed, 24 octobre 2012 - 10:10 .

[Evo_9]

Chris Schanche wrote...

Drayce333 wrote...

The only reason the devs are trying to be such a open book with multiplayer is because its the only way they can save face after the series destroying ending, DA2 disaster and the TORtanic. They know they have screwed up to much at this point and need better PR to attempt to redeem themselves.

Don't fall for it people, and make sure never to preorder another bioware game or buy them at release if you can't return for a full refund. As you can see they still love to screw over the players every now and then.

While we acknowledge that the ending did not resonate with all players in the way that we hoped it would, none of us feel that we have anything to 'save face' from.  I'm here open and honest on the forum because I genuinely love the product we put out in ever way, and I want to make sure anyone who has questions has a place where they feel like they could potentially get some answers.

I spend a lot of time playing this game at home too, and I've been a fan of many other games where it's been difficult or impossible to get dev responses.  Us staying open and available for comment like this helps make our community a better place.

That said, this comment was pretty off topic from the main thrust of this post, there is a place for this conversation, but it's not in this thread.

you sir have the patience of a saint.

I tip my hat to you.

Modifié par Evo_9, 24 octobre 2012 - 10:12 .

[mackfactor]

Go play ME3 and quit complaining about this game.

See what I did there? Seriously though, ENOUGH with the whining threads! We've already heard it a million times, and we don't care.

[najzere]

If no one cared they wouldn't make these threads so...

[T04stm4n]

I doubt the new posters of this thread will take the time to read the lengthy discussion that Chris himself commended as an interesting debate, sans the off-topic posts.

Please don't litter it with "go play" remarks.

[Moonstryder]

Question.. The data The Dev's looked at, could it of been "Skewed" as being immensely popular due to the missile glitching? The destroyer is an Outlier in this situation because it's the primary class used to glitch.

Also Dev's, I like how your commenting actively on your logic regarding changes, would you be willing to create a sticky thread on your thoughts where your are Unhappy/Happy with the condition of the current multiplayer (Like what you did with the Piranha/Carnifax but expanded) that is open for all the devs to comment with Map/Gameplay/Balance currently in concern?

[Tonymac]

Chris Schanche wrote...

whateverman7 wrote...

Chris Schanche wrote...

Most console game right now don't have the ability to iterate balance as fast as we do, which is why it hasn't been seen much. The first one that started doing the thing that we're doing now was, I believe, Monday Night Combat, and it was a really innovative way to push data in a way that let them make balance changes without a certification process.

I think we'll probably start seeing this kind of heavy balance tweaking more frequently now though as more and more games pick up that it can be done this way. As for the PvP vs PvE argument, we still think that a balance environment is the most fun environment to play in, even if you're not playing against other players. Seeing every player play the same kit with the same gun in every game isn't fun for most people.

And we never nerf based solely on 'this kit is getting played too much' but that is a nice indication that maybe there's something out of balance with it that we should assess. If that happens then we spend some time having a serious look at that kit, assessing the numbers, testing against other kits, and deciding if some of those numbers are a bit higher then we should have initially set them. All our nerfs are in the interest in making sure the game is fun for more then just the people using the strongest kits.

And as a final point, I can assure you that the weekly balance changes have no impact on any future projects.

ok, that's what i dont understand: why does it seem yall are getting upset with the choices people are making in regards to playing the game? by that i mean what characters/weapons are used, what factions they fight against, etc....isnt that the point of choice? wasnt that the reason yall gave us so much variety? to let us decide what we wanted to use and how we used it?....

you say yall dont wanna see the same kits/weapons being used so yall make changes, but that doesnt make sense either...reason being, that isnt happening....i've put a lot of time into public games (95%+ of the time i've played this game has been in public games), and what i've seen is the opposite of that...i've seen many variations of kit/weapon combos....that's another reason i dont understand the changes for 'balancing' purposes

The main thing I was trying to make clear now is that too many people using it is /not/ the reason we balance it.  If everyone is using something, and it turns out the reason is just because it's fun, not because it's too much better then a lot of other kits, we'll leave it the way it is.

But a lot of people playing something does give us a good reason to take another look at a kit and decide if it's so popular because it's just the best option.  The goal is not to leave any kits in a state where someone goes 'I want to be a shooty guy...well, I could play the human soldier because I like their skill set, but accept that I'll be doing less damage then if I played a Destroyer.'

There are a lot of reasons we don't just buff every other class up to that point either.  If we decide something is too good, then make everything else too good to meet it, then the enemies have to go up, and we have essentially done the same thing as nerfing it in the first place but with a lot more time and work.  That and it's really just not feesable to go through and rebalance every kit in the game up all at once.

This is a contradiction, Sir.  (the fisrt two that are bolded).   A class or kit or whatever is fun because of the very fact that it owns all.   Besides that, most  - and I mean the greater majority of your nerfs - are to weapons.  If a weapon is fun to use, you nerf it - plain and simple.   Some classes I feel were destroyed, like the Infiltrator.  Sure - there is the GI, but if you take that one then hardly any snipers will get played.

For the last bolded one, well......  Its almost self explanatory what the issue is there.  Get it right the first time!  How many iterations does it take to get it right?  I have seen stuff nerfed Multiple times.   Then you guys go back later and un-nerf stuff partially.  Its freaking aggravating.  Do it right once, fix it if you have to - and then get off of it.  Not all guns do the same damage.  Its a fact.  Stop killing all of the good stuffs so that nothing (in the end) is good.  You kill the great guns, and make the suck ones a tiny fraction of a percentage better.  Some of us went through a lot to get our good and great guns - only to have them robbed and destroyed. I believe this is why we have lost so much player base.  What new players we get are subject to the same treatment - and leave as well.

Accept the fact that some kits and guns are better than others.  Stop with the raping and pillaging of decent and fun stuff - because all you guys are doing is making every weapon in the game the same output as an M-8 Avenger - just with different looks and sounds.  It sucks and people get fed up with it.

Thats just my little take on it.  One opinion inn  a sea of opinions.   I know that I appreciate the developer interaction.  Other than the nerf-bat I think the Dev team is wonderful.  Sure - we have our differences, and I thought that ME3 was a terrible game pre-EC.   But the gang listened, and made a really good effort.  Hopefully some lessons were learned - I'm not going to harp on it.  I will say though, that the effort the team put into the EC made me stay on.  I might be wary of your products (not pre-ordering anything ever again) - but I will look at each and every one of them.

In the end, I do enjoy the MP immensely.  Nerf what you want - you're not going to hold me back from owning face.

[ValorOfArms777]

Chris Schanche wrote...

I think the Hawk missle launcher shield thing is the most "weird" balance change it's very painful it's just too big

Snip!  This one is a buff, not a nerf.  The changes from 25% at 40% at Evolve 1 means previously, when you purchased evolve 1, the shield penalty was 25% normal then base.  Now it means evolve 1 makes the penalty 40% lower then base.  Taking this evolution means that the Hawk is even less harmful to your shields then it was before.

Also thanks Volkai7, I had cheesecake at lunch though, I don't think I should have a chocolate bar right now!

thanks you then for that now the thing on the destroyer is you took away a ton of ammo from it hopefully this wont over effect the weapons that he specializes in if you do that could you at least raise the shields a tad in the future? as a big part of his offensive area went down quite a few notches

and the demolisher debuff on the grenade production was kinda scary...as ppl do not share well demolisher if they are grenade focused

[ctr2yellowbird]

Chris Schanche wrote...

nicethugbert wrote...

The specific changes and the motive is what bothers me more than the frequency. The game is loaded with cheapness which seems to be sacrosanct. It took forever for Drell to get much needed attention and what they did get was a day late, dollar short. This game needs a lot of work and the balance changes thus far have been relatively minimal.

I agree with this, but there are a few cases where we feel that we may have gone too far all at once.  The original Falcon change comes to mind, even if we're happy with the 'caster gun' role it has settled into now.  We've burned ourselves and our fans a few times with changes that were too big all at once and our goal is to be more iterative now.  In cases where a change doesn't go far enough, we'll keep reevaluating and tweaking till it gets to the right place.

Lets see how those Drell changes shake out over the next few weeks first.  We wanted to change them before but some of their bonuses were directly tied to another races, we needed to unhook that with the patch before we were finally able to give them these buffs we've been wanting to.

+10 for humility and honesty.

[Rahg]

Are u ****ing stupid?! Mass Effect-plot-reapers! REAPERS ARE DEAD! DEAD! DEAD! END OF SERIES! what part of that do people like you not understand?

[T04stm4n]

Rahg wrote...

Are u ****ing stupid?! Mass Effect-plot-reapers! REAPERS ARE DEAD! DEAD! DEAD! END OF SERIES! what part of that do people like you not understand?

Haha.  Yes there isnt any story that could possibly be harnessed from one of the most complex, albiet young, scifi universes of this generation.

Darth Vader is dead so stop writing Star Wars folks.  No more content for that series....

[nicethugbert]

Chris Schanche wrote...

nicethugbert wrote...

The specific changes and the motive is what bothers me more than the frequency. The game is loaded with cheapness which seems to be sacrosanct. It took forever for Drell to get much needed attention and what they did get was a day late, dollar short. This game needs a lot of work and the balance changes thus far have been relatively minimal.

I agree with this, but there are a few cases where we feel that we may have gone too far all at once.  The original Falcon change comes to mind, even if we're happy with the 'caster gun' role it has settled into now.  We've burned ourselves and our fans a few times with changes that were too big all at once and our goal is to be more iterative now.  In cases where a change doesn't go far enough, we'll keep reevaluating and tweaking till it gets to the right place.

Lets see how those Drell changes shake out over the next few weeks first.  We wanted to change them before but some of their bonuses were directly tied to another races, we needed to unhook that with the patch before we were finally able to give them these buffs we've been wanting to.

Now that the coding issues with Drell are resolved, I don't know why it takes weeks to figure out what to do with Drell, for instance.  Drell are obviously speedy and squishy.  So, Drell, which have a measly 20% max speed bonus and less than 500 shields max, did not get a meaningful increase to their speed bonus.  This would not imbalance them in the slightest when you consider the insane accuracy and fire power that enemies have, including homing rounds.  Or, in exchange for less shields, they could have faster shield regen/shorter shield regen delay, in accordance with their less shields more speed theme.

One of the common occurances with balance changes is that things are not made to live upto their claims, or implications.

Reeger, short range, high damage, gets a weight increase instead of a range decrease.

Kroguard. judging from their weight capacity, are somehow the little Krogans.  I guess they are Krogan rug rats.  Well, now that I mention Krogan, ...........................................

Disciple, forever relegated to a long forgotten lame joke, when just making the stagger significant and reliable with each shot would fix it perfectly.  If it ever gets adjusted, it'll probably get a weight decrease or increased max ammo, not magazine capacity, um because.

[nanotm]

Chris Schanche wrote...

Drayce333 wrote...

The only reason the devs are trying to be such a open book with multiplayer is because its the only way they can save face after the series destroying ending, DA2 disaster and the TORtanic. They know they have screwed up to much at this point and need better PR to attempt to redeem themselves.

Don't fall for it people, and make sure never to preorder another bioware game or buy them at release if you can't return for a full refund. As you can see they still love to screw over the players every now and then.

While we acknowledge that the ending did not resonate with all players in the way that we hoped it would, none of us feel that we have anything to 'save face' from.  I'm here open and honest on the forum because I genuinely love the product we put out in ever way, and I want to make sure anyone who has questions has a place where they feel like they could potentially get some answers.

I spend a lot of time playing this game at home too, and I've been a fan of many other games where it's been difficult or impossible to get dev responses.  Us staying open and available for comment like this helps make our community a better place.

That said, this comment was pretty off topic from the main thrust of this post, there is a place for this conversation, but it's not in this thread.

so long as you dont go all cuckoo like the auran team did with fury then i'm sure things will remain pretty good

there game was also nice untill they "redid everything" then completly screwed over the playerbase wiht some really strange ideas

[LoboFH]

sizzlinpapaya wrote...

Go play me3 and shut up.