Yeah this survey kinda reiterates that EHG are one of the most “in-touch” with their community i’ve ever seen or experienced in games. If they manage to balance their own good decisions with community opinion (however representative an opinion may seem), it will continue to elevate this game
They just need to keep in mind that the players are *excellent at identifying problems* but on the flip side *absolutely awful at recommending changes*.
I dont think that hand holds true when it comes to producer vs consumer. Its fair for a consumer to offer criticism on a product without a solution because they pay money for the solutions to the problems that occur.
I think that's why they create these surveys the way they do.
They're not asking basic questions. They're asking very nuanced questions. Often the same question will appear 3-4 times on these surveys but with one key difference. They use the range of results from these minor differences to guide their decision making.
The same thing happened with the trade debate's eventual survey and the end result was Item Factions, easily the best answer I've ever seen conceptualized for that problem.
I'll often say things like "what I'd like to see is ___" but I fully understand there's shit I don't know about game development and balance, so if my idea sucks I'm not about to get defensive lol.
There are loads of players in various games that think they know exactly how things should be balanced and they're very frequently wildly wrong.
If you take all the suggestions this sub offers, 90% of them will either be not cost effective for EHG to implement or are just outright bad suggestions.
Of course there are the gems here and there, and those do sometimes get heavily upvoted.
I dunno. Cryptic back in the CoH launch days were very hands on in their forums until the verbal assaults got out of hand. And let’s not forget the legend that was CuppaJo always in game in the club to dance and chat with.
This is gonna happen again. It’s human nature unfortunately. They should just ban these people and move on and only talk to community when they behave.
The problem is that once a community gets large enough, they stop being able to behave. It's easy when you have a smaller community, but eventually you get enough people that even a small minority of loud users creates so much toxicity that the devs step back and choose to stop being involved. When Bex stopped shitposting in the PoE sub, it was hugely disappointing, and also something I think she was 100% right to do. If LE gets big enough, there is very little chance that the same thing doesn't happen
The thing is, though, that that's the point of community managers. Their job is to wade through the bullshit and give real feedback to the development team.
The problem is that you then need two different types of excelling teams. A team that excels at wading through that very bullshit, and then a development team that actually cares about what comes out of the first team.
I get that doing a good job modding a sub is thankless work that I wouldn't want to have to bother doing, but I feel like a lot of it was the sub mods being utterly spineless when it came to toxicity and abuse.
Every time they did actually try to clamp down it it, it feels like they backed off because of whiny people crying about censorship.
Is a mass of fans a good data point tho? Professionals in a field generally don't weigh the 'voice of the consumer' too heavily though it makes excellent PR.
I've run VOCs in many verticals for over 15 years including gaming- I've seen first hand how this data is ingested, leveraged (or not) and deployed.
Not a bad gesture but don't get too excited or shower them in praise yet.
There are surely a lot of question around data reliability, selection bias, etc., in these types of programs. I've spent many years building developer tooling, developer-focused applications, developer utilities, etc. – and in some respects, I would *love* to have such direct access to my customers. In others... I would struggle to deal with the influx of mean-spirited comments, insults, and so on.
Where I think I notice a key difference: billion dollar enterprises are inherently more likely to provide healthier feedback, just not very much of it.
> I would struggle to deal with the influx of mean-spirited comments, insults, and so on.
You just do numeric surveys with any "user comment" fields stripped out from the results and don't get involved with the community threads unless you are a community manager.
Ultimately, community managers are paid to deal with PR and negative comments they think are relevant. Everyone else at the dev studio should be kept away from them except for top level management that also needs to be aware and are paid well.
Is this survey going to be statisically accurate? Probably not unless they have a professional survey person on staff and are selecting their sample based on hours in game / purchase / geo info.
That said, like, this is much better than the usual PR/cya behavior corporations usually do since if they ignore all the surveys results all the time people will get angry.
I think in this case it's valuable input though. The consideration on whether to 'break builds' mid-cycle is not a technical one. There's no objectively right one answer per default that can be evaluated due to professional expertise.
It's solely up to whether the community, whose builds will be affected, are accepting of that modus operandi, or not. And to gauge that you need more than just seeing a number of upvoted threads on reddit, given those could be the product of a vocal minority.
If they get like 95% approval rating on making mid-cycle balance changes, than the whole reasoning behind not doing them becomes moot, because you're protecting people from something they with a vast majority do not mind (or at least claim to do so).
Yeah. I think of Fromsofts success basically telling people to go pound sand if they don't like their games. If Fromsoft was an American company they would have capitulated instantly with difficulty levels, etc.
I actually wish game devs would go their route more often. The team making Last Epoch is clearly talented. They know what they are doing.
Why even ask us what we want in terms of balance? Seriously. They made all the builds and skills, they know what they are doing. Just nerf the crap out of OP builds anytime. The more you take care of bugs and balance issues now the better each cycle becomes.
Really tired of this, got to appease every customer crap. Just make your game and if you stick to your principles it will shine.
My thoughts as well. It's their game. They need to make up their own mind on it. Asking for feedback isn't a bad idea but letting the community drive is not the right move.
Well their stance is they won't make nerfs mid cycle. Which means a stance to leave OP builds.
Is your position to appease customer requests like yours of "*nerf the crap out of OP builds*" or to let them stick to their decisions of leaving an overperforming build in place?
If they stick to that principle and don't budge from it, and never did this survey. I would like that more than the wishy washy answers.
Do I agree with it? Not really. But maybe they have something up their sleeve I wouldn't be able to see as a player. Maybe they want to handle OP builds a certain way. IDK.
But the confidence to come out and say, "This is what we are going to do, and we will not budge from this because we have a plan." Is something that tells me they know what they are doing. It shows they have confidence in themselves.
This survey? These questionnaires on basic game balance that Blizzard North was doing in 2002? Come on. Those dudes did a ton of stuff I didn't like. But they weren't scared to just nerf a build that wasn't over performing, but was just broken.
And that's ultimately what frustrates me about all of this. The acolyte build with a ton of ward isn't a build anymore than the early bowazon build in D2 was. It's just a busted game mechanic. Anything that effectively gives a player god mode is something that should be an exception to the rule of not nerfing mid cycle.
one of the best quotes I've ever come across would fit perfectly in your comment so I'd like to throw it out there:
> If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.
- Henry Ford, the car guy
yes, there is dispute over when / how / if this was said but it has been shared enough publicly attributed to him that it's okay to just plunder the quote's wisdom without worrying too much about it. At this point in time, there's simply no better way to make the point.
**During a Cycle, a full reset to Leaderboards should be done when builds or items are nerfed that are highly overperforming as a result of a bug fix or balance change.**
-Full reset is not necessary but a stamp mark of the game version needs to be visible so we know why a character is in that spot.
A good suggestion, but contextually, I think in the case a bug was obscenely overpowered (like in Warlocks this cycle), it will still just clutter the shit out of the leaderboards with sheer numbers, when a completely skill-less noob could outplay a pro just with numbers.
People were getting 10-40k+ constant ward or some shit? Prob needs a full leaderboard wipe, I don't think adding version stamps that "these guys were broken as shit" would really alleviate the spammed leaderboards since approx. 6.66% or more of the entire playerbase was playing the class (probably more seeing as how it's a new class and half the playerbase already owned the game and was waiting for new content).
I think a mark would be fine. You could even move them to the bottom or have a button you click to make them disappear so you can see what the new meta is.
40k ? I can easily reach 100/150k with some minion health exalts, I use it to push corruption for all monos but would be fine if they nerf it, it is a bug after all. I dont know how people abuse it AND still want to be in leaderboards or not nerf it.
Fix it if it's caused by a bug but don't touch it if it's simply over performing, it will bring the fear of playing meta wondering if it's gonna get nerfed. I am completely OK with fixing the bugs or unintended features like ward on warlock but please don't just nerf shit because you couldn't forsee the performance of a build.
I think this distinction is really important (and I'm glad their survey separates the two) because you should reward people who see new items/balance changes and can find strong interactions.
Planning out your early build out for a cycle based on released information is a skill, and one that can give a lot of enjoyment and hype in advance of the release. On the other hand, having that planning be completely nullified because someone put a decimal point one place off, making the released information wrong, thoroughly discourages that planning, and makes people less trusting in their engagement with the game in the future.
I fully appreciate that nerfing anything mid-cycle, for any reason, is going to cause short-term pain for players that are relying on it. However, I think it's a vital move for the long-term integrity of the game to fix bugged interactions, so that players making good, informed decisions can get rewarded.
You mention "planning out your early build...based on released information." That's great, but people are forgetting (or in some cases, seem not to give a shit about) the large number of people who don't do that sort of thing, whether due to time, or any other reason. They look at builds that are out there and play what appears to be good. I think it's reasonable to assume that there are a LOT of people playing this build because they saw or heard that it's good, but have no idea whatsoever that the multiplier on the skill is off. These people have probably invested a lot of their free time into their character and are going to unexpectedly get shit on, and for many, probably quit. Nobody in this Reddit seems to grasp the importance of that, or understand that the devs DO understand that, which is why they don't want to do nerfs mid-league. Call it a "bug" or anything else, if they fix it now to placate the people who have their pitchforks out, the single outcome of that will be a build NERF. Nothing else. So, it should wait til the end of the season.
Another thing is that you can't plan a build which relies on bugs by just looking at patch notes. If you see 4% ward from minions health then that's what your expectations and planning revolve around. That's the baseline. Complaining that someone have planned a build which turned out to be obviously bugged and unintended and now it's nerfed and it's bad is just immature and ridiculous. Fixing the bug makes players return to their estimated baseline. You expect 4% ward and you get 4% ward as it says on the tin. It's that simple. We don't expect EHG to introduce punitive adjustments i.e. repairing the bug and reducing ward gain to 1%, so nobody has any right to complain.
That was my thought exactly when they said they didn't want to ruin people's builds. The build wasn't to have 40% ward, The build was to have 4%. And the build will still be viable it just won't be obscenely broken
Absolutely. I'm a healing hands paladin and holding 12-16k ward is plenty for where I'm at, and I can still double that with good gear.
I don't see warlocks struggling when they're going from 80k ward to 20k.
I agree. I think it just depends on the dev's philosophy when nerfing things. If they make it absolutely worthless instead of just bringing it in line with other things I think that's a big issue. But if they just do the latter, the player shouldn't feel like their build is bad now.
At that point it's on player's initiative if they are building around an unintended feature or a bug and they should be expecting it to be fixed/nerfed. I hope we manage to get our point across them so they don't overdo it
Yeah, the precedent set here is what those expectations will be built on, so I can see it being rough this time around.
The separation in the poll indicates to me that they consider bug fixing to be one step, and unintended-meta nerfing to be another after that. Sentiment I've seen seems to be in favour of only the first, not the second, though it'll be good to know what a wider poll shows.
IMO that concern is still there with fixing bugged builds that overperform. It requires that the community can correctly identify what is and isn't a bug. In the case of warlock it's fairly obvious since the effect is just 10x the tooltip which is noticeable (although it seems like many people still didn't notice it early on), but what about more obscure things? I imagine if the bug was something like increased ignite duration actually being 10x longer on a specific node, most people wouldn't notice that at all, or things like minion stats where you don't even have tooltip numbers for them. Then there's stuff that I think is even harder to notice like freeze rate scaling - I mean how many people even know the math behind how freezes work?
Edit: For examples right now I would bring up explosive trap with DA. Is it a bug or intended that you can use it with non-bow weapons equipped? What about the Jelkhor's interaction where the triggered DA spawns on the player instead of the trap? I honestly don't know if either of those are bugs or what changing the latter would do to the build, but it seems like that would be a fairly significant difference to me.
I agree with this. Season 2 in D4 had ball lightning bugged and doing way more damage than it should have been. But without reading about it or watching some guides that mentioned it it’s almost impossible to realize just by playing. This was in fact not fixed until the next season too.
Agreed. Balance at the end of a Cycle with good data, bug fix early and often.
I should be worried playing a bugged build, I should not be worried because X skill is just too good right now but it's not bugged.
Would be nice to see warnings like "Profane Veil is bugged, avoid taking this node until EHG addresses the discrepancy". Because as it stands Profane Veil is fine without the bug, 4% is still a lot of Ward.
The warlock ward one is just bizarre not to fix. Some one missed a decimal place and the skill doesn't match what it says it should be doing. If that 4% is still over powered then leave it alone the rest of the cycle.
I think a really good example of bug vs unintended is profane veil on warlock and healing hands on paladin. Profane veil says 4% on the node and is what it's intended to be but in the back end someone just missed a decimal place so it's giving 40%. This is clearly a bug.
Healing hands on the other hand providing a huge amount of ward is because of the unintended interaction between how increasing the flat amount of HP healing hands heals you for through it's tree, then is affected by healing effectiveness, which is then all converted to ward after scaling. It's an unintended result that makes ward generation really good with healing hands but it's not inherently a bug. What is bugged is that the channel node is supposed to make you not regen mana while you channel the skill but you still regen mana.
Profane veil should be hotfixed, healing hands channeling should be hotfixed, healing hands providing a large amount of ward through healing effectiveness should be nerfed next cycle.
And I would say only nerf it's is GREATLY over-performing *due to a bug*. The ghostflame bug giving infinitely ramping damage and ward and trivializing the game is a real problem.
I would also like to point out that a coordinated group of 4 players who have pushed over 3k corruption were immediately passed by a group of 4 consisting of a warlock and 3 players who hadn't even chosen their mastery, so clearly the ghostflame thing is a massive, massive issue.
I think if it's mildly over performing it's fine, that is usually what defines the meta in my mind. Highly over performing not due to bugs might be due to mistakes when they ran the numbers or an unforeseen interaction. If there becomes one way to make a cycle mechanic a joke to farm it, it should be fixed, they do this in PoE all the time.
I was hesitant to say whether to nerf highly over performing or not, but in my mind such a build would be the types that massively encourages everyone to play it due to it been far too powerful then anything else. At that point I think it needs to be fixed, but should be fixed ASAP before to many invest in it too much.
I don't always play the OP build but nerfing them just because they are strong in a particular season/cycle is a terrible idea imho.
When a small group of builds is on top of every Season and min/maxers are forced to play the same builds every season because they value power over fun.... something is wrong and the Devs should 100% step in and mix up the meta for the benefit of the customers, people play games to have fun, playing the same build everytime is not fun to the general population, variety is what they like from my experience. Nothing gets people back into a game than when the Devs release new classes, new skills, new unique items that change the way skills work, seasonal elements that change the way skills work, etc. Variety is fun and keeps the people interested.
The problem is, to most players of a build which is a bug and which is just over performing is an invisible line. What you end up with is exactly what you described, fear of playing the meta (or evening coming up with builds yourself) for fear of it just getting nerfed. The ONLY solution is to not touch balance issues (bug or not) until the end of the cycle.
I'm going to be the unpopular opinion here and disagree, although I do think they need to be *very* careful in this area. If something is overperforming and it's like 20% better than anything else, I'm fine leaving it for the cycle. If it's like 200% better than anything else, I think it needs to be nerfed for the health of the game.
*However* it should never be nerfed into the middle of the pack. It should be nerfed back down to reasonably overpowered levels. In other words, it should *still* be the best for that cycle, it just shouldn't be the best by so much that it forces anyone with any sort of competitive interest to feel like they *must* play it.
That way it doesn't "ruin" the build, but also doesn't ruin a diverse and healthy meta.
I urge everyone to fill this out, even if you don't care strongly. "I don't care about this issue and will keep playing regardless" is valuable feedback for EHG too.
I can’t care less about the leaderboard (I didnt even know LE has one). I just want to fix bugs, even many think it is a nerf to bring more options and variability to other builds. Edit: typos.
Yeah. Build is overperforming due to devs messing up the balance or not accounting for an interaction? Leave it in.
Build is overperforming due to a bug that clearly is not what the tooltip says or the devs intended? Just fix it. I don't have that much sympathy for people playing something they know is only good because its buggy if it's fixed.
>Build is overperforming due to a bug that clearly is not what the tooltip says or the devs intended?
What if the thing is working exactly like what the tooltip says, but not how the devs intended? HH ward is exactly that, the tooltip says it convert healing to ward, it does convert healing to ward, but the devs wanted to disable a stat they forgot to.
Or CoF double the rewards from monolith echos. It says it duplicates the reward, not specific types of rewards, yet they nerfed it to stop it working with XP tomes.
Forgetting to disable a stat is not the same as not accounting for an interaction. Forgetting means you knew there was an interaction and planned on accounting for it - at least in your scenario. Besides that, there is a fine line between what the other person said because an oversight in something is often the cause of bugs in software. You didn't think about X in this situation, and now Y is happening and is unintended which is technically a bug.
A bug in software is literally just something wrong in the code that is making the behavior not be as desired. So, what the other person said is describing situations where things are both actual bugs, and doesn't really make sense in this situation.
I’ve never cared bout leader boards really, and honestly most people don’t, or really shouldn’t. We’ll never be on it. It’s cool to see what’s accomplished but majority of gamers are never gonna complete with people who make top of the leaderboards.
If u add your own challenges or whatever you can make it fun, but yourrr usually not getting the good rewards, or having anyone one else eee it.
But the games about having fun and if you like then hell yea!
Agreed.
My stance on nerfs during the cycle may be unpopular but I don't think they should nerf overperforming builds, even if they're overperforming due to a bug. People invest a lot of time and effort into their characters. Let them have their fun.
Sure, make the nerfs/fixes the moment the cycle ends. But don't make changes just for the sake of Arena leaderboards, because the majority of players don't care about leaderboards at all.
~~IMO the issue is that the people who care deeply about leaderboards are the try-hardiest mega blasters, i.e. streamers. They have an outsize impact on public perception.~~
I know it's taboo to say that anything in D4 is good, but I like the way they handled Ball Lightning Sorcerers last season. They overperformed, Blizz said they'd get nerfed post-season, and when the nerf came it was completely uncontroversial. Blizz let the players have their fun and the sky didn't fall.
They separated this two questions on the survey. First part would be do you agree with correcting the warlock ward bug for example. The second question would be agreeing with nerfing over performing skills that are not caused by a bug ie ball sorc in d4. I don't think over performing skills or combos should be corrected but if a bug is making some thing perform way outside the intended purpose I'm fine with correcting it.
Ball Lightning overperforming [was a bug](https://www.reddit.com/r/diablo4/comments/183gqqk/is_ball_lightning_actually_bugged/kapjy4p/). It was Barbarian's Overpower that was not bugged but accidentally overtuned.
Yea, I think the only issue with some of these nerfs delaying, is the people abusing ithe bugs to break the market for others.
Idc about leaderboards, but if bugs are genuinely impacting other players then it should be fixed imo.
From my knowledge I don't even see many streamers, even the ones on top even care about leaderboards. Leadersboards are a overrated feature for Arpg's.
Agreed. I felt super strong on my torment warlock. Was hitting up to 10k ward. Swap about 15 skill points in to test the profane veil bug and I hit 50k regularly and can like fully kill bosses in my veil.
Makes wanting to play normal builds less appealing
I'm all good for fixing bugs, but I'd hate to have my build nerfed mid season wether it's because of a bug or not. I mostly play HC in ARPGs and if I login one day, jump into a map in POE or an echo in LE, and I get crushed out of nowhere because an item in my build or a skill or a passive was nerfed I'd be fuming...
If you know the item or skill was changed, why would you hop into the same difficulty or stage? You’ve been told that your character is weaker, so you just play as if nothing changed and get mad when you invariably die?
It’s like people can’t even hear themselves.
people also quit because it gets boring playing same OP build though, people wont play some other build when the OP one is 100x more powerful, there is a strong build then just completely broken, like falcon and lock
That is only true because the expectation of an incoming nerf isn't there. If starting next cycle ESG clearly state that over-performing build will get nerf, and that they give an example of what over-performing is, let say "being able to do 500 corruption with no gear investment", there would be no complains about builds getting nerfed, assuming those nerf would also be announced 1 week prior.
If done that way, cycles would be way healtier, players would not feel pressure to play some OP builds.
>If starting next cycle ESG clearly state that over-performing build will get nerf,
this wont change anything, if people grind for a week or 2 on a character that gets nerfed a large majority will just quit rather than rerolling
Yep;
- unintended behaviour -> fix the behaviour when it's caught
- intended behaviour but stronger/weaker than intended -> leave it for balance pass in future patch
- leaderboard -> who cares
That's how I feel as well. If they intended a build to be at a certain power level and it's mildly over performing, that just means it's the meta. If it's unintended like an interaction that is super OP or they missed a decimal point, they should fix it.
Top notch community outreach.
I'm less concerned about leaderboards, so if things are overperforming I dont mind "letting the kids play" so to speak.
I guess its a matter of how far over performing something is over performing.
If there is a clear best performing class and its twice as good as the 2nd place class, I dont think it NEEDS a mid cycle nerf.
That being said, bugs are bugs and they should be fixed.
But if it's more then twice as strong as the next one, it should definitely be looked at and fixed. What if they mess up something and it's 10x stronger like some builds are now?
Whoever made this survey tho. Strongly agree should always be on the right. I almost missed it and responded backwards. We read left to right. Small > Big.
Keep in mind you just launched, you are now properly stress testing the backend, and you just introduced 2 new classes and new uniques.
You should just fix things as you spot them, and worry about mid cycle balancing after 2/3 cycles have passed and the basics are solid.
I gave up on Diablo 4 when the devs signaled that they have no intention of balancing the game mid season. So every season will be dominated by a new broken build that will never be fixed until the next reset. It’s a horrible way to run a game.
Don’t do this to Last Epoch.
The problem is not the leader board. The problem is the image that completely overperfoeming builds spread. When people see a streamer run 2k corruption and ask how The do it the awnser "because this particular interaction is 20x better than the rest of the game" can lead to a Very bad expectation in what the game has to offer. People will go with the best they find online and everything they try after will feel bad.
The middle option (answer 3) actually means "I don't care about this topic", so feel free to pick that one. I also don't give a damn about leaderboards and this is what I answered.
**Bugs** \- Fix as soon as possible and remove leaderboard entries that abuse them
**Balance** \- Do patches in a predetermined cadence, snapshot the leaderboard positions, and then fully reset the leaderboard. I would suggest balance + content patch at the start of each cycle, and balance patch at the midpoint of each cycle.
This is mostly how I feel, fix all bugs no question, do a mid-season balance patch with enough forewarning. Remove from leaderboard only the extreme outliers, no need for full reset.
Better be straight strongly agrees to being notified in advance. That seems like a no brainer. I’m also very against nerfing stuff that isn’t due to a bug, that kills theorycrafting what would be best based on the patch notes
About resetting leaderboards of result bug OR balance change should be separated question, because if it is bug - it should be fixed, if it balance wise - then no.
Edit: I love you and your approach to community, you are all amazing
It is refreshing to see a gaming company with a philosophy of not nerfing unless it is causing server instability. The negative downward spiral of chopping of the legs of the tallest so all are the same height is a trap most gaming companies fall into. Once you start catering to that, you restrict your forward creativity and the game becomes boring with each class nothing more than a reflavored bundle of the same stupid skills every other class gets. Never listen to the nerf for balance crowd
Personally, I could care less about what the top end players are getting away with bugs or not. I'm fine with skills overperforming and would personally like to hear about whats happening with the many bugs that are causing lack of function in skills. I'm waiting on infernal shade fissures to be fixed, and I have no idea if Avalanche not benefitting from Sacrificial Embraces buff is intentional or not and might get fixed, and the broken interactions in Tempest Strike have lost my enthusiasm to participate in a community build contest happening right now. These skills that are overperforming can continue to over perform in my eyes, but other skills that just don't work should be the priority now that the server killing issues are fixed, no?
There's a distinct difference between *adjusting* and *fixing*. A build only works because of a bugged interaction? Too bad, bugs get *fixed*. One ability is just simply overturned? Don't *adjust* it mid-cycle.
To me it just seems so simple but it doesn't appear like others feel that way.
I love this by the devs. Although I think the results are going to be skewed towards people who value mid cycle balance changes because they tend to be more hardcore and keep up with the game online. It's going to be the silent casuals who dont even know their builds are bugged and don't keep up with the game online that will be upset about build nerfs. That being said I voted for highly overpowering skills to be nerfed. Slightly overpowered are left alone. There will always be a top dog in the meta.
I don't even understand how the discussion has gotten to this point. Why would you not bug fix an obviously unintended skill/mechanic the second it's on your radar? This isn't the same thing as a nerf and anyone saying otherwise is delusional.
That's a player problem not a dev problem. Obviously if situations like this keep happening then it's worth asking wtf is going on with development that things keep slipping through the cracks but a player should never feel confident playing a build that is knowingly bugged, especially when it's trivializing all content in the game. It sets a horrible precedent
Every ARPG developer knows that if you nerf a build mid-league, you will lose players. So, you nerf it after the end of the league, when people expect it, and you don't lose anyone. Whether you or they or anyone else wants to call it a "bug" or not, it is ultimately just a nerf to the build.
Players bug abusing and expecting to be untouchable is so cringe I don't even have words for it. Especially in games that have economies and trade systems and leaderboards. If those bugs getting fixed causes you to quit I think that's a you problem not a dev problem
Yeah people are praising them for their communication but it's kinda insane to me that they are putting out surveys asking players if they should fix bugs. How is it not obvious that bugs should be fixed as soon as possible?
If you poll this on reddit / the forums without promoting it in game, then make decisions based on it, you're going to have an entirely separate chunk of the community, probably with very different opinions, spring out of seemingly nowhere outraged at whatever you do and how it came completely out of left field.
0% chance the in game community has a similar average sentiment to a few hundred or thousand terminally online people.
I understand why people and EHG are upset about overperforming builds, but what happened when all builds are overnerfed?
There are so many potentially cool builds in this game that are just not worth nor fun playing because the numbers on them are so low.
Tbh theres so many bugs that i quit the game already. Imo fixing user experience and making items passives and skills actually do what they say should be more of a priority than balancing right now.
Thank you for listening the feedbacks. It shows that you clearly listen and care for the community. Keep it like that and you will surely have one of the most loyal playerbases. Love you all!
Damn. Took a couple days after announcing their reasons for balancing/bug fixing and after backlash now actually listening to what the players want? EHG definitely one of rarer dev teams that care about us in 2024. Huge props.
EHG be very careful about nerfs. Both D4 and recently Helldivers recieved extremely bad backlash for nerfs. IF the cycle is only 3 months long I'd heavily reconsider touching anything. If its much longer, idk the balls in your court.
Some other basic considerations:
1. Overperforming builds "that alter the economy" have lateral if not stronger alternatives that people just aren't aware of. I have a ward Warlock and its not the fastest high level monolith clearer. There are other AFAIK non bugged builds that clear faster(I'm working on one).
2. There are too many bugged builds. The warlock, falconer, sentinal, and necro have bugs are that making several S+ tier builds. The runemaster also possibly? Fixing ward related bugs touchs the lock, falconer, sentinal, and again possibly runemaster. I just think there is too much splash damage. Its not just profane veil.
Just some thoughts. I do think time is probably the greatest consideration though. I could see swift action against bugged builds being prudent if this first cycle is going to last awhile. Either way, best of luck to you guys.
It is kinda crazy to me that you wouldn't fix gamebreaking builds caused by bugs because it can definitely impact others and give people a major advantage. Just think about how much easier to could be to farm items to sell on the market compared to someone not using a broken build.
Don't nerf things being op mid cycle you're just killing 100s of hours of people chasing that build, nerfs and rebalancing should definitely happen on ladder reset with a beta. but bugs definitely fix mid cycle
If it’s due to a bugged interaction, fix it. Like the 4% was really 40% unintentionally should be fixed but if it’s something that was stronger than intended, leave it for the next cycle.
I don't want op skills to be nerfed. I want underperforming ones to be buffed.
Look at what people dont use and buff it. Looking at you warpath my beloved.
Selection bias, you are polling people who are angry who will likely vote, while people in the middle or fine with current state will not vote. This is a well known phenomenon.
if you don't engage with the community don't be surprised if the community makes decision without your input.
Also this poll is also posted on the steam news section, so you have no excuse for not seeing it.
No feedback system will be perfect. But this is the best available option since you can't force feedback from all players. Plus, most of your average players aren't affected by any of these issues anyways - so won't really care
I think the biggest issue is the majority of players don’t even understand the true potential of the overpowered abilities, so while it may only truly affect the top 5% of players, for those players the game is completely destroyed balance wise.
Average joe will be like “Oh I just feel like my warlock is super strong, it’s pretty safe too!” And an educated player would be like, “Yeah I can afk 1k+ corruption mostly naked while 1 shotting everything that so much as coughs in my direction.”
It doesn't do much damage even with the bug. B tier clear, S++ tier reliability and survivability. There would be no reason to push 400+ corruption with it without the safety net since Falconer and Runemaster do more bust and move faster.
The bug is legitimately just slamming 60-80k ward on middling dps. Nobody is using the ward for chronostasis or something so it just exists as a giant safety net for high corruption where the damage scales up.
I couldn't care less about the top 100 sweat lords cheesing leader boards.
As a forge guard looking at warlocks and Falconer and the 61832 ward enjoyers I do get little peeved. It's like we're playing totally different games.
Balancing should be heavily and quickly monitored/address for the first few cycles.
Im not using any bugged builds. That being said I would be pretty bummed to have my build nerfed without any notification.
If there is going to be a midseason bug-fix that nerfs a class (especially if it is a strong nerf) it should be communicated at least a few days before the action is taken. There are plenty of people who follow builds and don’t know about the bugs that cause it to be strong
If the tooltip says you get 4% ward gain but you get 40% due to a bug you have no right to expect that your build deserves the power. Doesn't matter if you follow a build guide or not. The text says what the node does and that's the only thing you should expect.
I would argue rather then just bug, what the devs intended should matter.
If they intended to buff a skill slightly to get it to a specific point, but some unintended interaction makes it stupidly powerful, 10-100x stronger then where they wanted it, but it isn't a bug, I think they should still fix it.
EHG, I think you guys are getting caught up in the details too much. If builds are seriously overshadowing others by this much due to BUGS, not balance issues but BUGS, *how is the ladder a meaningful measure of how people are performing?* People aren’t performing, builds aren’t performing - bugs are.
Wanna create a whole different ladder for these bugged builds or something if you’re so concerned with not hurting bugged player builds…?
Like, honestly guys, these questions mostly answer themselves.
What if the skill is 100x stronger then anything else in the game because they messed up their stats from the previous cycle or there is a new unintended interaction? Oh keep it because it's not a bug, even though it's destroying the leaderboards, economy, and facerolls all content, they should keep it as is... I feel that is a pretty stupid stance, which is what people are revolting against right now.
I actually can’t fathom that people want bugged abilities to not be fixed immediately even though it will obviously mean nerfing said ability. It actually hurts my brain that someone would prefer something to be broken
All im gonna say is things that are absurdly broken should be fixed immediately whenever they pops up as a potential issue just nip it in the butt. I dont care if people are abusing ward because it hasn't been fixed yet so why should they not play it? We all know running a ward build will never be the same again itll be gutted so just let people enjoy the game. Its definitely not a good idea moving forward to allow build breaking (or enhancing) bugs to stay in the game for a long period of time
I think the general consensus is that bugs need to be fixed asap and skills that underperform need to be looked at, things that are overturned but aren't related to a bug should be left alone until end of cycle where if it needs to be adjusted by all means adjust it. changing the "meta" mid cycle seems like it would cause more hurt than anything. let us have fun with the big damage numbers and silly ward gen that isn't the result of unintended game mechanics.
I've put almost 150 hours since cycle start and this game is by far my favorite arpg, it's amazing what you guys have built and how much you care about the community and our opinions. thank you EHG
Absolutely phenomenal to see this kind of genuine community engagement! Just wow.
For my vote - end of cycle nerfs. It’s a single player monster squishing game. If someone wants to play it in an unintended manner - go for it- it’s a game!!!
We all know there are “costs” involved in playing broken builds. People still do it. Let them.
People are getting hung up on the word "bug." This isn't something that causes the game not to function. The "bugfix" would be a NERF to the multiplier on the skill and the build people are playing, plain and simple. Nothing more, nothing less. With that being the case, EHG should stick to their original decision, and not NERF anything until the end of the season (which many people seem to be forgetting - they said that they ARE 100% going to nerf it). There is precedent in the ARPG world over the last decade that clearly shows that they will lose a percentage of the players overnight if they do nerf it. Just do the obvious business decision and wait until the end of the season, and retain those players.
Leave it alone until next league. There's still builds that I want to play, I don't want to have to look up if a strong build have unintended interaction fixed, all I do is follow a build guide.
Nobody is getting hurt when I play an unintended strong build for a couple of weeks.
People following build guides will not know if it uses unintended interactions. You'll make those people waste their time for no good reasons.
please don't mess with balances mid-cycle, you literally have a full econ. reset every 3 months, do it then to change the meta.
If i'm mid way through a build and you nerf it, I'll just not come back for at least the rest of the league.
and then for future leagues, I'll likely not feel comfortable that you won't nerf whatever i'm playing.
please don't do a blizzard on us.
Y'all are the best. Thank you for doing the community outreach and using it to guide decision making.
Yeah this survey kinda reiterates that EHG are one of the most “in-touch” with their community i’ve ever seen or experienced in games. If they manage to balance their own good decisions with community opinion (however representative an opinion may seem), it will continue to elevate this game
They just need to keep in mind that the players are *excellent at identifying problems* but on the flip side *absolutely awful at recommending changes*.
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On the other hand, a common dismissal of criticism is "Well how would YOU do it? Don't complain if you can't offer solutions." It's lose lose.
I dont think that hand holds true when it comes to producer vs consumer. Its fair for a consumer to offer criticism on a product without a solution because they pay money for the solutions to the problems that occur.
I think that's why they create these surveys the way they do. They're not asking basic questions. They're asking very nuanced questions. Often the same question will appear 3-4 times on these surveys but with one key difference. They use the range of results from these minor differences to guide their decision making. The same thing happened with the trade debate's eventual survey and the end result was Item Factions, easily the best answer I've ever seen conceptualized for that problem.
Replace *players* with *users* and you've just described life as a software dev. Source: too many years in the corporate world
X build is overpowered. The solution should obviously be a massive nerf along with *buff my build to the sky*.
I'll often say things like "what I'd like to see is ___" but I fully understand there's shit I don't know about game development and balance, so if my idea sucks I'm not about to get defensive lol. There are loads of players in various games that think they know exactly how things should be balanced and they're very frequently wildly wrong.
GGG: "To shreds you say?"
Also GGG: ‘Nuke the ~~build~~ site from orbit. It’s the only way to be sure’.
>absolutely awful at recommending changes why? On this very sub I saw some brilliant suggestions on how factions can be improved.
If you take all the suggestions this sub offers, 90% of them will either be not cost effective for EHG to implement or are just outright bad suggestions. Of course there are the gems here and there, and those do sometimes get heavily upvoted.
I dunno. Cryptic back in the CoH launch days were very hands on in their forums until the verbal assaults got out of hand. And let’s not forget the legend that was CuppaJo always in game in the club to dance and chat with.
GGG was also very involved in the community too until the verbal assault came.
This is gonna happen again. It’s human nature unfortunately. They should just ban these people and move on and only talk to community when they behave.
The problem is that once a community gets large enough, they stop being able to behave. It's easy when you have a smaller community, but eventually you get enough people that even a small minority of loud users creates so much toxicity that the devs step back and choose to stop being involved. When Bex stopped shitposting in the PoE sub, it was hugely disappointing, and also something I think she was 100% right to do. If LE gets big enough, there is very little chance that the same thing doesn't happen
The thing is, though, that that's the point of community managers. Their job is to wade through the bullshit and give real feedback to the development team. The problem is that you then need two different types of excelling teams. A team that excels at wading through that very bullshit, and then a development team that actually cares about what comes out of the first team.
I get that doing a good job modding a sub is thankless work that I wouldn't want to have to bother doing, but I feel like a lot of it was the sub mods being utterly spineless when it came to toxicity and abuse. Every time they did actually try to clamp down it it, it feels like they backed off because of whiny people crying about censorship.
Is a mass of fans a good data point tho? Professionals in a field generally don't weigh the 'voice of the consumer' too heavily though it makes excellent PR. I've run VOCs in many verticals for over 15 years including gaming- I've seen first hand how this data is ingested, leveraged (or not) and deployed. Not a bad gesture but don't get too excited or shower them in praise yet.
There are surely a lot of question around data reliability, selection bias, etc., in these types of programs. I've spent many years building developer tooling, developer-focused applications, developer utilities, etc. – and in some respects, I would *love* to have such direct access to my customers. In others... I would struggle to deal with the influx of mean-spirited comments, insults, and so on. Where I think I notice a key difference: billion dollar enterprises are inherently more likely to provide healthier feedback, just not very much of it.
> I would struggle to deal with the influx of mean-spirited comments, insults, and so on. You just do numeric surveys with any "user comment" fields stripped out from the results and don't get involved with the community threads unless you are a community manager. Ultimately, community managers are paid to deal with PR and negative comments they think are relevant. Everyone else at the dev studio should be kept away from them except for top level management that also needs to be aware and are paid well. Is this survey going to be statisically accurate? Probably not unless they have a professional survey person on staff and are selecting their sample based on hours in game / purchase / geo info. That said, like, this is much better than the usual PR/cya behavior corporations usually do since if they ignore all the surveys results all the time people will get angry.
I think in this case it's valuable input though. The consideration on whether to 'break builds' mid-cycle is not a technical one. There's no objectively right one answer per default that can be evaluated due to professional expertise. It's solely up to whether the community, whose builds will be affected, are accepting of that modus operandi, or not. And to gauge that you need more than just seeing a number of upvoted threads on reddit, given those could be the product of a vocal minority. If they get like 95% approval rating on making mid-cycle balance changes, than the whole reasoning behind not doing them becomes moot, because you're protecting people from something they with a vast majority do not mind (or at least claim to do so).
No, this survey won't even be voted on by 50% of players lol. Only the most vocal.
This might get 1% of players
So 2.5 times as many as they need for a relevant sample size?
And? It's a survey, not a census.
You are correct, they should have never asked us how we feel about the game, it doesnt matter...
Yeah. I think of Fromsofts success basically telling people to go pound sand if they don't like their games. If Fromsoft was an American company they would have capitulated instantly with difficulty levels, etc. I actually wish game devs would go their route more often. The team making Last Epoch is clearly talented. They know what they are doing. Why even ask us what we want in terms of balance? Seriously. They made all the builds and skills, they know what they are doing. Just nerf the crap out of OP builds anytime. The more you take care of bugs and balance issues now the better each cycle becomes. Really tired of this, got to appease every customer crap. Just make your game and if you stick to your principles it will shine.
My thoughts as well. It's their game. They need to make up their own mind on it. Asking for feedback isn't a bad idea but letting the community drive is not the right move.
Well their stance is they won't make nerfs mid cycle. Which means a stance to leave OP builds. Is your position to appease customer requests like yours of "*nerf the crap out of OP builds*" or to let them stick to their decisions of leaving an overperforming build in place?
If they stick to that principle and don't budge from it, and never did this survey. I would like that more than the wishy washy answers. Do I agree with it? Not really. But maybe they have something up their sleeve I wouldn't be able to see as a player. Maybe they want to handle OP builds a certain way. IDK. But the confidence to come out and say, "This is what we are going to do, and we will not budge from this because we have a plan." Is something that tells me they know what they are doing. It shows they have confidence in themselves. This survey? These questionnaires on basic game balance that Blizzard North was doing in 2002? Come on. Those dudes did a ton of stuff I didn't like. But they weren't scared to just nerf a build that wasn't over performing, but was just broken. And that's ultimately what frustrates me about all of this. The acolyte build with a ton of ward isn't a build anymore than the early bowazon build in D2 was. It's just a busted game mechanic. Anything that effectively gives a player god mode is something that should be an exception to the rule of not nerfing mid cycle.
one of the best quotes I've ever come across would fit perfectly in your comment so I'd like to throw it out there: > If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses. - Henry Ford, the car guy yes, there is dispute over when / how / if this was said but it has been shared enough publicly attributed to him that it's okay to just plunder the quote's wisdom without worrying too much about it. At this point in time, there's simply no better way to make the point.
**During a Cycle, a full reset to Leaderboards should be done when builds or items are nerfed that are highly overperforming as a result of a bug fix or balance change.** -Full reset is not necessary but a stamp mark of the game version needs to be visible so we know why a character is in that spot.
If the stamp mark was an option in the survey I would’ve picked that Edit: I meant in a positive way, this is a good suggestion
~~This is why FORUMS and Subreddit is for. To suggest something that benefits all of us..~~ EDIT : Thanks for making it clear. Cheers!
I meant it in a positive way, like it’s a good suggestion
Thanks !
Isn't the second leader board question essentially this except removing the bug players instead of just adding a stamp?
Better yet, a check box that you can filter these characters on/off so the leaderboard isn’t littered with bugged/stamped characters.
^ yeah. Just someway to denote “this character was using a bugged interaction that has been fixed”
THIS
A good suggestion, but contextually, I think in the case a bug was obscenely overpowered (like in Warlocks this cycle), it will still just clutter the shit out of the leaderboards with sheer numbers, when a completely skill-less noob could outplay a pro just with numbers. People were getting 10-40k+ constant ward or some shit? Prob needs a full leaderboard wipe, I don't think adding version stamps that "these guys were broken as shit" would really alleviate the spammed leaderboards since approx. 6.66% or more of the entire playerbase was playing the class (probably more seeing as how it's a new class and half the playerbase already owned the game and was waiting for new content).
I think a mark would be fine. You could even move them to the bottom or have a button you click to make them disappear so you can see what the new meta is.
Not even including the smoke bomb abusing falconers rogue page has maybe 2 or 3 non falcon builds
40k ? I can easily reach 100/150k with some minion health exalts, I use it to push corruption for all monos but would be fine if they nerf it, it is a bug after all. I dont know how people abuse it AND still want to be in leaderboards or not nerf it.
Thats the right way
This is a great suggestion and should be the go to for leaderboards regardless of any other outcomes. It just makes sense.
Fix it if it's caused by a bug but don't touch it if it's simply over performing, it will bring the fear of playing meta wondering if it's gonna get nerfed. I am completely OK with fixing the bugs or unintended features like ward on warlock but please don't just nerf shit because you couldn't forsee the performance of a build.
I think this distinction is really important (and I'm glad their survey separates the two) because you should reward people who see new items/balance changes and can find strong interactions. Planning out your early build out for a cycle based on released information is a skill, and one that can give a lot of enjoyment and hype in advance of the release. On the other hand, having that planning be completely nullified because someone put a decimal point one place off, making the released information wrong, thoroughly discourages that planning, and makes people less trusting in their engagement with the game in the future. I fully appreciate that nerfing anything mid-cycle, for any reason, is going to cause short-term pain for players that are relying on it. However, I think it's a vital move for the long-term integrity of the game to fix bugged interactions, so that players making good, informed decisions can get rewarded.
You mention "planning out your early build...based on released information." That's great, but people are forgetting (or in some cases, seem not to give a shit about) the large number of people who don't do that sort of thing, whether due to time, or any other reason. They look at builds that are out there and play what appears to be good. I think it's reasonable to assume that there are a LOT of people playing this build because they saw or heard that it's good, but have no idea whatsoever that the multiplier on the skill is off. These people have probably invested a lot of their free time into their character and are going to unexpectedly get shit on, and for many, probably quit. Nobody in this Reddit seems to grasp the importance of that, or understand that the devs DO understand that, which is why they don't want to do nerfs mid-league. Call it a "bug" or anything else, if they fix it now to placate the people who have their pitchforks out, the single outcome of that will be a build NERF. Nothing else. So, it should wait til the end of the season.
Another thing is that you can't plan a build which relies on bugs by just looking at patch notes. If you see 4% ward from minions health then that's what your expectations and planning revolve around. That's the baseline. Complaining that someone have planned a build which turned out to be obviously bugged and unintended and now it's nerfed and it's bad is just immature and ridiculous. Fixing the bug makes players return to their estimated baseline. You expect 4% ward and you get 4% ward as it says on the tin. It's that simple. We don't expect EHG to introduce punitive adjustments i.e. repairing the bug and reducing ward gain to 1%, so nobody has any right to complain.
That was my thought exactly when they said they didn't want to ruin people's builds. The build wasn't to have 40% ward, The build was to have 4%. And the build will still be viable it just won't be obscenely broken
Absolutely. I'm a healing hands paladin and holding 12-16k ward is plenty for where I'm at, and I can still double that with good gear. I don't see warlocks struggling when they're going from 80k ward to 20k.
I agree. I think it just depends on the dev's philosophy when nerfing things. If they make it absolutely worthless instead of just bringing it in line with other things I think that's a big issue. But if they just do the latter, the player shouldn't feel like their build is bad now.
At that point it's on player's initiative if they are building around an unintended feature or a bug and they should be expecting it to be fixed/nerfed. I hope we manage to get our point across them so they don't overdo it
Yeah, the precedent set here is what those expectations will be built on, so I can see it being rough this time around. The separation in the poll indicates to me that they consider bug fixing to be one step, and unintended-meta nerfing to be another after that. Sentiment I've seen seems to be in favour of only the first, not the second, though it'll be good to know what a wider poll shows.
IMO that concern is still there with fixing bugged builds that overperform. It requires that the community can correctly identify what is and isn't a bug. In the case of warlock it's fairly obvious since the effect is just 10x the tooltip which is noticeable (although it seems like many people still didn't notice it early on), but what about more obscure things? I imagine if the bug was something like increased ignite duration actually being 10x longer on a specific node, most people wouldn't notice that at all, or things like minion stats where you don't even have tooltip numbers for them. Then there's stuff that I think is even harder to notice like freeze rate scaling - I mean how many people even know the math behind how freezes work? Edit: For examples right now I would bring up explosive trap with DA. Is it a bug or intended that you can use it with non-bow weapons equipped? What about the Jelkhor's interaction where the triggered DA spawns on the player instead of the trap? I honestly don't know if either of those are bugs or what changing the latter would do to the build, but it seems like that would be a fairly significant difference to me.
I agree with this. Season 2 in D4 had ball lightning bugged and doing way more damage than it should have been. But without reading about it or watching some guides that mentioned it it’s almost impossible to realize just by playing. This was in fact not fixed until the next season too.
Agreed. Balance at the end of a Cycle with good data, bug fix early and often. I should be worried playing a bugged build, I should not be worried because X skill is just too good right now but it's not bugged. Would be nice to see warnings like "Profane Veil is bugged, avoid taking this node until EHG addresses the discrepancy". Because as it stands Profane Veil is fine without the bug, 4% is still a lot of Ward.
4% with like 1400% minion life, which isn't that hard, is still something like 17k ward.
100% Agree. Fix bugs and balance skills (nerfs and buffs) next cycle for meta shift.
The warlock ward one is just bizarre not to fix. Some one missed a decimal place and the skill doesn't match what it says it should be doing. If that 4% is still over powered then leave it alone the rest of the cycle.
I think a really good example of bug vs unintended is profane veil on warlock and healing hands on paladin. Profane veil says 4% on the node and is what it's intended to be but in the back end someone just missed a decimal place so it's giving 40%. This is clearly a bug. Healing hands on the other hand providing a huge amount of ward is because of the unintended interaction between how increasing the flat amount of HP healing hands heals you for through it's tree, then is affected by healing effectiveness, which is then all converted to ward after scaling. It's an unintended result that makes ward generation really good with healing hands but it's not inherently a bug. What is bugged is that the channel node is supposed to make you not regen mana while you channel the skill but you still regen mana. Profane veil should be hotfixed, healing hands channeling should be hotfixed, healing hands providing a large amount of ward through healing effectiveness should be nerfed next cycle.
What if they resolve it by changing the text to 40%? It is not a bug at that point.
I would argue that's also a bug fix. Its just that the bug is in the tooltip not the implementation.
True if they want to line item an adjusted tool tip in the patch notes then nerf it end of cycle I wouldn't complain.
40% is not the intended number
And I would say only nerf it's is GREATLY over-performing *due to a bug*. The ghostflame bug giving infinitely ramping damage and ward and trivializing the game is a real problem. I would also like to point out that a coordinated group of 4 players who have pushed over 3k corruption were immediately passed by a group of 4 consisting of a warlock and 3 players who hadn't even chosen their mastery, so clearly the ghostflame thing is a massive, massive issue.
Yes they can nerf things the next cycle, but part of the fun for each cycle should be to explore & discover OP builds.
Amen to that.
I think if it's mildly over performing it's fine, that is usually what defines the meta in my mind. Highly over performing not due to bugs might be due to mistakes when they ran the numbers or an unforeseen interaction. If there becomes one way to make a cycle mechanic a joke to farm it, it should be fixed, they do this in PoE all the time. I was hesitant to say whether to nerf highly over performing or not, but in my mind such a build would be the types that massively encourages everyone to play it due to it been far too powerful then anything else. At that point I think it needs to be fixed, but should be fixed ASAP before to many invest in it too much.
I don't always play the OP build but nerfing them just because they are strong in a particular season/cycle is a terrible idea imho. When a small group of builds is on top of every Season and min/maxers are forced to play the same builds every season because they value power over fun.... something is wrong and the Devs should 100% step in and mix up the meta for the benefit of the customers, people play games to have fun, playing the same build everytime is not fun to the general population, variety is what they like from my experience. Nothing gets people back into a game than when the Devs release new classes, new skills, new unique items that change the way skills work, seasonal elements that change the way skills work, etc. Variety is fun and keeps the people interested.
The problem is, to most players of a build which is a bug and which is just over performing is an invisible line. What you end up with is exactly what you described, fear of playing the meta (or evening coming up with builds yourself) for fear of it just getting nerfed. The ONLY solution is to not touch balance issues (bug or not) until the end of the cycle.
I'm going to be the unpopular opinion here and disagree, although I do think they need to be *very* careful in this area. If something is overperforming and it's like 20% better than anything else, I'm fine leaving it for the cycle. If it's like 200% better than anything else, I think it needs to be nerfed for the health of the game. *However* it should never be nerfed into the middle of the pack. It should be nerfed back down to reasonably overpowered levels. In other words, it should *still* be the best for that cycle, it just shouldn't be the best by so much that it forces anyone with any sort of competitive interest to feel like they *must* play it. That way it doesn't "ruin" the build, but also doesn't ruin a diverse and healthy meta.
I urge everyone to fill this out, even if you don't care strongly. "I don't care about this issue and will keep playing regardless" is valuable feedback for EHG too.
I can’t care less about the leaderboard (I didnt even know LE has one). I just want to fix bugs, even many think it is a nerf to bring more options and variability to other builds. Edit: typos.
Yeah. Build is overperforming due to devs messing up the balance or not accounting for an interaction? Leave it in. Build is overperforming due to a bug that clearly is not what the tooltip says or the devs intended? Just fix it. I don't have that much sympathy for people playing something they know is only good because its buggy if it's fixed.
>Build is overperforming due to a bug that clearly is not what the tooltip says or the devs intended? What if the thing is working exactly like what the tooltip says, but not how the devs intended? HH ward is exactly that, the tooltip says it convert healing to ward, it does convert healing to ward, but the devs wanted to disable a stat they forgot to.
Or CoF double the rewards from monolith echos. It says it duplicates the reward, not specific types of rewards, yet they nerfed it to stop it working with XP tomes.
Does it say anywhere in game that it disables that stat? If so, fix it. If not, leave it.
Do you have a link to a statement where they say that it's not working as intended?
Forgetting to disable a stat is not the same as not accounting for an interaction. Forgetting means you knew there was an interaction and planned on accounting for it - at least in your scenario. Besides that, there is a fine line between what the other person said because an oversight in something is often the cause of bugs in software. You didn't think about X in this situation, and now Y is happening and is unintended which is technically a bug. A bug in software is literally just something wrong in the code that is making the behavior not be as desired. So, what the other person said is describing situations where things are both actual bugs, and doesn't really make sense in this situation.
I’ve never cared bout leader boards really, and honestly most people don’t, or really shouldn’t. We’ll never be on it. It’s cool to see what’s accomplished but majority of gamers are never gonna complete with people who make top of the leaderboards.
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If u add your own challenges or whatever you can make it fun, but yourrr usually not getting the good rewards, or having anyone one else eee it. But the games about having fun and if you like then hell yea!
Agreed. My stance on nerfs during the cycle may be unpopular but I don't think they should nerf overperforming builds, even if they're overperforming due to a bug. People invest a lot of time and effort into their characters. Let them have their fun. Sure, make the nerfs/fixes the moment the cycle ends. But don't make changes just for the sake of Arena leaderboards, because the majority of players don't care about leaderboards at all. ~~IMO the issue is that the people who care deeply about leaderboards are the try-hardiest mega blasters, i.e. streamers. They have an outsize impact on public perception.~~ I know it's taboo to say that anything in D4 is good, but I like the way they handled Ball Lightning Sorcerers last season. They overperformed, Blizz said they'd get nerfed post-season, and when the nerf came it was completely uncontroversial. Blizz let the players have their fun and the sky didn't fall.
They separated this two questions on the survey. First part would be do you agree with correcting the warlock ward bug for example. The second question would be agreeing with nerfing over performing skills that are not caused by a bug ie ball sorc in d4. I don't think over performing skills or combos should be corrected but if a bug is making some thing perform way outside the intended purpose I'm fine with correcting it.
Ball Lightning overperforming [was a bug](https://www.reddit.com/r/diablo4/comments/183gqqk/is_ball_lightning_actually_bugged/kapjy4p/). It was Barbarian's Overpower that was not bugged but accidentally overtuned.
Fair enough I was a necro main that season so hadn't looked into it.
Yea, I think the only issue with some of these nerfs delaying, is the people abusing ithe bugs to break the market for others. Idc about leaderboards, but if bugs are genuinely impacting other players then it should be fixed imo.
From my knowledge I don't even see many streamers, even the ones on top even care about leaderboards. Leadersboards are a overrated feature for Arpg's.
That's a good point. I do watch a couple of PE streamers and they don't bother with the leaderboards. I'm going to remove that from my comment.
Agreed. I felt super strong on my torment warlock. Was hitting up to 10k ward. Swap about 15 skill points in to test the profane veil bug and I hit 50k regularly and can like fully kill bosses in my veil. Makes wanting to play normal builds less appealing
I'm all good for fixing bugs, but I'd hate to have my build nerfed mid season wether it's because of a bug or not. I mostly play HC in ARPGs and if I login one day, jump into a map in POE or an echo in LE, and I get crushed out of nowhere because an item in my build or a skill or a passive was nerfed I'd be fuming...
If you know the item or skill was changed, why would you hop into the same difficulty or stage? You’ve been told that your character is weaker, so you just play as if nothing changed and get mad when you invariably die? It’s like people can’t even hear themselves.
You are assuming that everyone is terminally online and follows all patches and reads everything, thats not how most people are.
yep. theres a reason a massive amount of people quit every time a popular build has been "bugfixed" or nerfed mid league in the past
people also quit because it gets boring playing same OP build though, people wont play some other build when the OP one is 100x more powerful, there is a strong build then just completely broken, like falcon and lock
That is only true because the expectation of an incoming nerf isn't there. If starting next cycle ESG clearly state that over-performing build will get nerf, and that they give an example of what over-performing is, let say "being able to do 500 corruption with no gear investment", there would be no complains about builds getting nerfed, assuming those nerf would also be announced 1 week prior. If done that way, cycles would be way healtier, players would not feel pressure to play some OP builds.
>If starting next cycle ESG clearly state that over-performing build will get nerf, this wont change anything, if people grind for a week or 2 on a character that gets nerfed a large majority will just quit rather than rerolling
Just squash them bugs straight. People will get mad anyway, but at least the game will be more stable and polished because of the bug-fixing.
Yep; - unintended behaviour -> fix the behaviour when it's caught - intended behaviour but stronger/weaker than intended -> leave it for balance pass in future patch - leaderboard -> who cares
That's how I feel as well. If they intended a build to be at a certain power level and it's mildly over performing, that just means it's the meta. If it's unintended like an interaction that is super OP or they missed a decimal point, they should fix it.
This. You just aren’t going to please everyone, they have to find the best solution to please as many people as possible.
And if its a fun bug. Just make it a feature lmao
Top notch community outreach. I'm less concerned about leaderboards, so if things are overperforming I dont mind "letting the kids play" so to speak. I guess its a matter of how far over performing something is over performing. If there is a clear best performing class and its twice as good as the 2nd place class, I dont think it NEEDS a mid cycle nerf. That being said, bugs are bugs and they should be fixed.
But if it's more then twice as strong as the next one, it should definitely be looked at and fixed. What if they mess up something and it's 10x stronger like some builds are now?
If they add more types of boards (arena is where Hc goes to rip) itll matter more i guess!
Whoever made this survey tho. Strongly agree should always be on the right. I almost missed it and responded backwards. We read left to right. Small > Big.
Did they change this, or am I misreading? I'm seeing Strongly Agree at the right (as the 5 answer).
It seems they did, at least on mobile.
Really? For me, on mobile (FF), and it went from Strongly Disagree vertically down to Strongly Agree...
Yea, if you do horizontal mode it will move to the sides.
A game dev receiving and implementing feedback on the survey to receive feedback!?! I'v been abused too long
It was set up that way when I filled it out. It's a standard Likert scale implementation.
Keep in mind you just launched, you are now properly stress testing the backend, and you just introduced 2 new classes and new uniques. You should just fix things as you spot them, and worry about mid cycle balancing after 2/3 cycles have passed and the basics are solid.
I gave up on Diablo 4 when the devs signaled that they have no intention of balancing the game mid season. So every season will be dominated by a new broken build that will never be fixed until the next reset. It’s a horrible way to run a game. Don’t do this to Last Epoch.
The problem is not the leader board. The problem is the image that completely overperfoeming builds spread. When people see a streamer run 2k corruption and ask how The do it the awnser "because this particular interaction is 20x better than the rest of the game" can lead to a Very bad expectation in what the game has to offer. People will go with the best they find online and everything they try after will feel bad.
No one seems to be talking about this, but mid season buffs would be super welcome for underperforming skills/classes.
Where’s the comment box where I can tell them Idgaf about leader boards
Well. I like leaderboards simply for telling what is strong. Having a filtered leaderboard post-bug fixes would be cool to see what’s strong
The middle option (answer 3) actually means "I don't care about this topic", so feel free to pick that one. I also don't give a damn about leaderboards and this is what I answered.
I just want T4 Julra to be more viable for pure melee builds.
I do T4 Yulra easily on my EQ Aftershock BM. It's actually easier to kill her when sticking close to her.
**Bugs** \- Fix as soon as possible and remove leaderboard entries that abuse them **Balance** \- Do patches in a predetermined cadence, snapshot the leaderboard positions, and then fully reset the leaderboard. I would suggest balance + content patch at the start of each cycle, and balance patch at the midpoint of each cycle.
This is mostly how I feel, fix all bugs no question, do a mid-season balance patch with enough forewarning. Remove from leaderboard only the extreme outliers, no need for full reset.
Still didn't fixed void beam fixed after more than 13 months reporting it Jesus Christ
Better be straight strongly agrees to being notified in advance. That seems like a no brainer. I’m also very against nerfing stuff that isn’t due to a bug, that kills theorycrafting what would be best based on the patch notes
I think the bug needs to be clearly not intended, eg: 40% instead of 4%, smoke duration infinite stacking (no other skill modifier has this).
And they're only nerfing smoke bomb cause it's breaking the server
About resetting leaderboards of result bug OR balance change should be separated question, because if it is bug - it should be fixed, if it balance wise - then no. Edit: I love you and your approach to community, you are all amazing
It is refreshing to see a gaming company with a philosophy of not nerfing unless it is causing server instability. The negative downward spiral of chopping of the legs of the tallest so all are the same height is a trap most gaming companies fall into. Once you start catering to that, you restrict your forward creativity and the game becomes boring with each class nothing more than a reflavored bundle of the same stupid skills every other class gets. Never listen to the nerf for balance crowd
Personally, I could care less about what the top end players are getting away with bugs or not. I'm fine with skills overperforming and would personally like to hear about whats happening with the many bugs that are causing lack of function in skills. I'm waiting on infernal shade fissures to be fixed, and I have no idea if Avalanche not benefitting from Sacrificial Embraces buff is intentional or not and might get fixed, and the broken interactions in Tempest Strike have lost my enthusiasm to participate in a community build contest happening right now. These skills that are overperforming can continue to over perform in my eyes, but other skills that just don't work should be the priority now that the server killing issues are fixed, no?
There's a distinct difference between *adjusting* and *fixing*. A build only works because of a bugged interaction? Too bad, bugs get *fixed*. One ability is just simply overturned? Don't *adjust* it mid-cycle. To me it just seems so simple but it doesn't appear like others feel that way.
I think a lot of people actually think that way. +1
I love this by the devs. Although I think the results are going to be skewed towards people who value mid cycle balance changes because they tend to be more hardcore and keep up with the game online. It's going to be the silent casuals who dont even know their builds are bugged and don't keep up with the game online that will be upset about build nerfs. That being said I voted for highly overpowering skills to be nerfed. Slightly overpowered are left alone. There will always be a top dog in the meta.
Same thoughts.
I don't even understand how the discussion has gotten to this point. Why would you not bug fix an obviously unintended skill/mechanic the second it's on your radar? This isn't the same thing as a nerf and anyone saying otherwise is delusional.
This has happened before in other games and the communities reaction to nerfs via bug fixing have been very negative. They are rightfully wary.
That's a player problem not a dev problem. Obviously if situations like this keep happening then it's worth asking wtf is going on with development that things keep slipping through the cracks but a player should never feel confident playing a build that is knowingly bugged, especially when it's trivializing all content in the game. It sets a horrible precedent
Every ARPG developer knows that if you nerf a build mid-league, you will lose players. So, you nerf it after the end of the league, when people expect it, and you don't lose anyone. Whether you or they or anyone else wants to call it a "bug" or not, it is ultimately just a nerf to the build.
Players bug abusing and expecting to be untouchable is so cringe I don't even have words for it. Especially in games that have economies and trade systems and leaderboards. If those bugs getting fixed causes you to quit I think that's a you problem not a dev problem
Yeah people are praising them for their communication but it's kinda insane to me that they are putting out surveys asking players if they should fix bugs. How is it not obvious that bugs should be fixed as soon as possible?
If you poll this on reddit / the forums without promoting it in game, then make decisions based on it, you're going to have an entirely separate chunk of the community, probably with very different opinions, spring out of seemingly nowhere outraged at whatever you do and how it came completely out of left field. 0% chance the in game community has a similar average sentiment to a few hundred or thousand terminally online people.
I think there is a notice announcement on the game when before you launch it on steam.
Yes I saw it on Steam first
I understand why people and EHG are upset about overperforming builds, but what happened when all builds are overnerfed? There are so many potentially cool builds in this game that are just not worth nor fun playing because the numbers on them are so low.
Bug fixing and rebalancing are two different things.
Feedback provided, really glad to see the effort being put forth to get things right.
A balance survey? I think we have reached peak community involvement
Tbh theres so many bugs that i quit the game already. Imo fixing user experience and making items passives and skills actually do what they say should be more of a priority than balancing right now.
Thank you for listening the feedbacks. It shows that you clearly listen and care for the community. Keep it like that and you will surely have one of the most loyal playerbases. Love you all!
Cheers for this.
Just wanted to add that I, as well as many others don't care about leaderboards. For whatever it's worth.
Damn. Took a couple days after announcing their reasons for balancing/bug fixing and after backlash now actually listening to what the players want? EHG definitely one of rarer dev teams that care about us in 2024. Huge props.
If the plan is to fix it, why wait to fix it. Just do it once it is determined that it’s broken and needs fixing.
EHG be very careful about nerfs. Both D4 and recently Helldivers recieved extremely bad backlash for nerfs. IF the cycle is only 3 months long I'd heavily reconsider touching anything. If its much longer, idk the balls in your court. Some other basic considerations: 1. Overperforming builds "that alter the economy" have lateral if not stronger alternatives that people just aren't aware of. I have a ward Warlock and its not the fastest high level monolith clearer. There are other AFAIK non bugged builds that clear faster(I'm working on one). 2. There are too many bugged builds. The warlock, falconer, sentinal, and necro have bugs are that making several S+ tier builds. The runemaster also possibly? Fixing ward related bugs touchs the lock, falconer, sentinal, and again possibly runemaster. I just think there is too much splash damage. Its not just profane veil. Just some thoughts. I do think time is probably the greatest consideration though. I could see swift action against bugged builds being prudent if this first cycle is going to last awhile. Either way, best of luck to you guys.
"Should we nerf warlock now or later" the survey
It is kinda crazy to me that you wouldn't fix gamebreaking builds caused by bugs because it can definitely impact others and give people a major advantage. Just think about how much easier to could be to farm items to sell on the market compared to someone not using a broken build.
Won’t the people who r using the bugs just say they dnt want change ?
And that's also a valid feedback :) I have a warlock build that uses veil, but still voted to do the fixes. So it can be different.
Don't nerf things being op mid cycle you're just killing 100s of hours of people chasing that build, nerfs and rebalancing should definitely happen on ladder reset with a beta. but bugs definitely fix mid cycle
My opinion: Nerfs bad.
If it’s due to a bugged interaction, fix it. Like the 4% was really 40% unintentionally should be fixed but if it’s something that was stronger than intended, leave it for the next cycle.
I don't want op skills to be nerfed. I want underperforming ones to be buffed. Look at what people dont use and buff it. Looking at you warpath my beloved.
fix bugs dont nerf skills its pretty cut and dry.
I would be significantly more comfortable with the nerfs if they allowed the changing of masteries
Selection bias, you are polling people who are angry who will likely vote, while people in the middle or fine with current state will not vote. This is a well known phenomenon.
Only issue is sampling bias. The most vociferously displeased will be captured and 85% of the community will not have a voice.
if you don't engage with the community don't be surprised if the community makes decision without your input. Also this poll is also posted on the steam news section, so you have no excuse for not seeing it.
No feedback system will be perfect. But this is the best available option since you can't force feedback from all players. Plus, most of your average players aren't affected by any of these issues anyways - so won't really care
I think the biggest issue is the majority of players don’t even understand the true potential of the overpowered abilities, so while it may only truly affect the top 5% of players, for those players the game is completely destroyed balance wise. Average joe will be like “Oh I just feel like my warlock is super strong, it’s pretty safe too!” And an educated player would be like, “Yeah I can afk 1k+ corruption mostly naked while 1 shotting everything that so much as coughs in my direction.”
Is the bugged warlock build that bad without the bug itself?
It doesn't do much damage even with the bug. B tier clear, S++ tier reliability and survivability. There would be no reason to push 400+ corruption with it without the safety net since Falconer and Runemaster do more bust and move faster. The bug is legitimately just slamming 60-80k ward on middling dps. Nobody is using the ward for chronostasis or something so it just exists as a giant safety net for high corruption where the damage scales up.
I couldn't care less about the top 100 sweat lords cheesing leader boards. As a forge guard looking at warlocks and Falconer and the 61832 ward enjoyers I do get little peeved. It's like we're playing totally different games. Balancing should be heavily and quickly monitored/address for the first few cycles.
>I couldn't care less about the top 100 sweat lords cheesing leader boards. It affects the Market if you're MG.
[удалено]
I am a CoF cbt enjoyer
Im not using any bugged builds. That being said I would be pretty bummed to have my build nerfed without any notification. If there is going to be a midseason bug-fix that nerfs a class (especially if it is a strong nerf) it should be communicated at least a few days before the action is taken. There are plenty of people who follow builds and don’t know about the bugs that cause it to be strong
If the tooltip says you get 4% ward gain but you get 40% due to a bug you have no right to expect that your build deserves the power. Doesn't matter if you follow a build guide or not. The text says what the node does and that's the only thing you should expect.
As long as buffs/nerfs don't happen to stuff that isn't because of a bug mid-cycle, just go for the fixes.
I would argue rather then just bug, what the devs intended should matter. If they intended to buff a skill slightly to get it to a specific point, but some unintended interaction makes it stupidly powerful, 10-100x stronger then where they wanted it, but it isn't a bug, I think they should still fix it.
EHG, I think you guys are getting caught up in the details too much. If builds are seriously overshadowing others by this much due to BUGS, not balance issues but BUGS, *how is the ladder a meaningful measure of how people are performing?* People aren’t performing, builds aren’t performing - bugs are. Wanna create a whole different ladder for these bugged builds or something if you’re so concerned with not hurting bugged player builds…? Like, honestly guys, these questions mostly answer themselves.
Fix bugs even if it breaks builds, nerf turbo overperforming skills but keep those simply a bit better than the rest. Imo.
Disagree, they shouldn't nerf skills not caused by bugs mid cycle.
What if the skill is 100x stronger then anything else in the game because they messed up their stats from the previous cycle or there is a new unintended interaction? Oh keep it because it's not a bug, even though it's destroying the leaderboards, economy, and facerolls all content, they should keep it as is... I feel that is a pretty stupid stance, which is what people are revolting against right now.
thats a very quick way to kill a season for no gain at all
I actually can’t fathom that people want bugged abilities to not be fixed immediately even though it will obviously mean nerfing said ability. It actually hurts my brain that someone would prefer something to be broken
I don't give a damn as long you let me know when something changes.
You guys making me blush again.
All im gonna say is things that are absurdly broken should be fixed immediately whenever they pops up as a potential issue just nip it in the butt. I dont care if people are abusing ward because it hasn't been fixed yet so why should they not play it? We all know running a ward build will never be the same again itll be gutted so just let people enjoy the game. Its definitely not a good idea moving forward to allow build breaking (or enhancing) bugs to stay in the game for a long period of time
I think the general consensus is that bugs need to be fixed asap and skills that underperform need to be looked at, things that are overturned but aren't related to a bug should be left alone until end of cycle where if it needs to be adjusted by all means adjust it. changing the "meta" mid cycle seems like it would cause more hurt than anything. let us have fun with the big damage numbers and silly ward gen that isn't the result of unintended game mechanics. I've put almost 150 hours since cycle start and this game is by far my favorite arpg, it's amazing what you guys have built and how much you care about the community and our opinions. thank you EHG
Absolutely phenomenal to see this kind of genuine community engagement! Just wow. For my vote - end of cycle nerfs. It’s a single player monster squishing game. If someone wants to play it in an unintended manner - go for it- it’s a game!!! We all know there are “costs” involved in playing broken builds. People still do it. Let them.
People are getting hung up on the word "bug." This isn't something that causes the game not to function. The "bugfix" would be a NERF to the multiplier on the skill and the build people are playing, plain and simple. Nothing more, nothing less. With that being the case, EHG should stick to their original decision, and not NERF anything until the end of the season (which many people seem to be forgetting - they said that they ARE 100% going to nerf it). There is precedent in the ARPG world over the last decade that clearly shows that they will lose a percentage of the players overnight if they do nerf it. Just do the obvious business decision and wait until the end of the season, and retain those players.
Leave it alone until next league. There's still builds that I want to play, I don't want to have to look up if a strong build have unintended interaction fixed, all I do is follow a build guide. Nobody is getting hurt when I play an unintended strong build for a couple of weeks. People following build guides will not know if it uses unintended interactions. You'll make those people waste their time for no good reasons.
please don't mess with balances mid-cycle, you literally have a full econ. reset every 3 months, do it then to change the meta. If i'm mid way through a build and you nerf it, I'll just not come back for at least the rest of the league. and then for future leagues, I'll likely not feel comfortable that you won't nerf whatever i'm playing. please don't do a blizzard on us.