The problem with not applying buffs/nerfs to skills mid cycle is when you get skills that are simply not tested well enough, there are instances of a cycle being a balance disaster because once things are “set in stone” that’s it. EHG can end up making a very unbalanced game for a long period of time (PoE has this same problem).
The other issue with meddling in skill balance mid cycle is EHG can end up gutting players builds because they don’t know how to balance the game without player feedback (it seems).
And then of course, bug fixes can also make or break a build. So does that mean EHG shouldn’t bug fix mid cycle? Does that mean Ghost Flames dodge > armour conversion is going to remain non-functional until next cycle? Lmao…
And not to mention EHG has already broken their own philosophy of not interfering with balance by nerfing tome and arena keys.
In my opinion there needs to be a middle ground of balance changes mid cycle. Something like the first week (or even two) into a cycle can/should see balance changes. This would give players a heads up that anything can be changed for the sake of balance.
As for bugs, I think anything that seems like an obvious bug should be fixed regardless of when they are in the works of being fixed.
GGG isn’t god, and this “no-nerfs-mid-league-stance” can be as harmful for the game in some cases as an uncontrolled nerffiesta in the middle of a league/cycle.
From a practical POV i think OP’s suggestion is excellent, to have a “nerfs-are-possible-timeframe” of two weeks or so at the beginning of the league. Thats something everybody can understand. And you could simply run no leaderboards during that timeframe, or reset them afterwards, so that issue also would be adressed.
(On a sidenote: I believe that the distinction nerf-bugfix isn’t very useful for cases like the current Ward fiasko. Many players don’t understand the difference anyway, and when something is very broken it is broken, no matter if it was caused by a bug or a miscalculation or an unexpected interaction or whatever. And a “nerftime” would deal with all those problems nicely.)
Because its good, to give the playerbase some security when choosing their builds. That was the reason GGG introduced that policy some years ago. But, as we see atm, that comes with its own set of problems. Having a “nerfperiod” (i’m still searching for a good term) seems like a nice middleground.
Because players know they can safely invest in builds, even if they seem a bit over-tuned. However, I’m not in favor of this kind of policy protecting players from abusing (obviously) broken mechanics. As I’ve stated before, most games would ban players who partake in such actions, not reward and protect them.
not nerfing things mid cycle is dumb. what happens when something else pops up next cycle? the cycle after that? are we doomed to never have a balanced cycle cuz the devs are afraid of nerfing bug abusers and broken builds? why is this even a discussion
i’ve played guild wars 2 for a long time (haven’t for a while now) and they foolishly don’t release balance patches very often. its destroyed the game over time. not only does it make the meta stale and rigid, things that are way too strong don’t get addressed and when ppl have to deal with them over time they eventually decide not to at some point and log off
the same thing will happen with ppl who are using a balanced build and into last epoch endgame, the leaderboards, and want to push high corruption. if they are trying to find a group they probably won’t be able to if they aren’t playing a broken build, or if they are solo they will get discouraged by looking at the leaderboards and having their efforts invalidated. you are going to lose more ppl by catering to the few amount of ppl who are abusing bugs and broken builds, then the i would think obvious majority who aren’t using those builds.
when stuff like this pops up, the best course of action is to take care of it immediately before it festers and more ppl start abusing these builds. that preserves the majorities efforts as well as saves the build abusers time by making sure not as many ppl have to re roll. before taking action, letting ppl know that you are going to nerf these builds would go a long way and save even more ppls time since they will hear about the upcoming nerfs and not make these broken builds in the first place. i hope ehg realizes the mistake they are making
Why would you ban players from using stuff the game gives them? They’re not cheating, they’re just combining what the game gives them in a way the devs didn’t expect. Both PoE and D3 had this happen to them and what they did was fix the issue (in the first few weeks) and delete the leaderboard results from those builds.
I remember that Scourge introduced a mechanic none were expecting which allowed players to become immortal. The players weren’t cheating, they were just using a busted mechanic the game provided for them. GGG fixed that, erased those builds from the leaderboard and the players simply had to make another build.
Bans should be for players that cheat or break ToS. If someone is duping items, yes, they should be banned. If someone is trading for real money, they should be banned. If they’re simply getting thousands of ward for something the game gave them, they shouldn’t get banned. It just should be fixed and the players left with either a reasonable build or one that doesn’t work anymore.
And, as a disclaimer, I haven’t even used the skills that were fixed. I just feel that banning for using game mechanics, even if they are broken, isn’t a fair system.
I think sentinel and primalist need buffs or more spell/synergy mechanics inorder to be anywhere close to the other 3 masteries. Look at warlock in comparison. Sentinel lacks damage and so does primalist unless you are playing one of 2 meta builds which are still not that good to begin with.
The difference between Last Epoch and PoE is in the ease of respeccing. EHG need not fear balancing mid cycle because respect a few overturned nodes in a skill tree or simply swapping to a different skill is cheap and fast. In PoE, a character will be able to play 1 build unless they farm for days to acquire orbs of regret. These are two entirely different games and we needn’t be saddled with bugs and overturned abilities for months on end.
I haven’t either. I’m not saying they should ban them. I’m just saying other games have done that, not simply turned a blind eye, and said “we don’t want to hurt their feelings, so we’re not fixing the broken stuff”. This isn’t a simple matter of slightly over-balanced. This is a clear broken interaction, that the people using it have even admitted to.
This also isn’t using a mechanic in a manner not expected. It’s seeing something should be value A, but instead is rewarding value A*10, and saying “WOW, THIS IS OP! LET’S SEE HOW HIGH I CAN PUSH ABUSING IT!”.
You can use whatever word salad you want, it doesn’t change the fact(s).
I undertstand your point of view. But if you ban players for, for example, using profane veil with bone curse to generate thousands of ward, what you’re effectively doing is making players afraid of trying out things.
Players will stick to approved guides, because if you make your own build and you’re doing well in the game and reach high corruption, you might get banned because that skill interaction wasn’t “approved”.
And yes, some interactions are clearly not as designed. But where do you draw the line? If you make a build that generates thousands of ward you get banned, but if you only generate 19999 ward you don’t? That just makes players afraid of losing their account by playing the game.
You rather mean ‘giving the community the chance to abuse a broken mechanic for 3 months straight’ there.
If something’s broken it needs to be fixed, simple as that.
You can’t expect your faulty 60k ward bugged build to stay this way, if you chose it and did that it’s on you as a player.
It utterly demolishes competition in the first place because you can’t know which bugged stuff is implemented at the start of a cycle anyway, and the lucky pickers are the winners then simply.
So no, fixing that stuff ASAP is actually the better option.
GGG lost their competition community more and more over the years for a reason, they failed to properly keep them engaged and their stance has too many issues.
Sure… if the builds get ‘in line with others’ then wouldn’t that still be a safe choice though? You don’t need to curbstomp them into oblivion, but fixing things is a reasonable thing to do at every and any time.
Which is the outcome though, limiting yourself to non-interference automatically causes that to happen. Why? Because the company said ‘we won’t interfere’ and hence when they actually do it causes an outcry.
Why put yourself into that position in the first place? It’s damaging yourself!
Exactly that! Since the downsides are miniscule it doesn’t matter.
Adjust a few nodes and your build still works perfectly fine, you can still use the gear after all as well, it’ll just be ‘normal’ rather then some utterly broken stuff.
I agree with EHG. They shouldn’t be nerfing things mid cycle. It wouldn’t be fun if you logged in one day to find that the build you put hours into was suddenly way weaker or maybe even unplayable. It would make me a lot less likely to want to get invested in more builds because I’d worry it could happen again. That pretty directly ruins someone’s fun. On the other hand, someone else’s build being stronger than yours doesn’t directly affect you. This isn’t a PvP game. There is no meta. You’re not going to be unable to succeed and have fun because your build is fair and some other build isn’t. If you do care that’s a you problem. Realistically, if the existence of OP builds ruins your ability to enjoy your own builds, then you’d probably complain whether it was 10x off or 1% off. As soon as one thing got nerfed, people would be on to complaining about the next thing.
Also before anyone says anything, I’m not actually playing any of the builds people are asking for nerfs of. I’m currently happily playing a build from before release, not caring that other people might be having more fun than me.
I don’t think they should have released before they added the last batch of content. (Masteries and factions). As we saw, there are already enough unforeseen problems that can occur on launch for an online game. They shouldn’t have added more untested variables to have to deal with at the same time. What the hell was the point of early access if they were going to release some stuff untested anyway? It’s like what happened with BG3. They spent a long time in early access polishing act 1 to perfection, but then released the rest of the game without that same rigorous testing and act 3 was a buggy mess. Even then, that was a bit more justified since you might not want to give away the whole story for a game like that before launch. But here, what’s the excuse? Why was every other mastery tested over the course of 4 years but they thought it was cool to drop 2 whole new ones in the release patch? Given all the annoying marketing they did around launch, I assume it was just to generate more hype around new stuff. 1.0 for an early access game should just be a formality to let people know the game is in an acceptable state to buy if they don’t want to be paying to beta test the game. They should NOT be adding new untested content or systems alongside it, especially since there is this seasonal component to the game where it really matters how things go within a certain time frame.
The only issue is that it’s a non-issue. There are no stakes here.
Most people don’t give a damn about any of this, if they even know it’s going on to begin with. The only people riled up about it are people who live on forums and breathe “The Meta”, who constantly forget that they make up a vanishingly small minority of people who actually play the game.
Somebody who just plays the game logging in one day to find out something has been changed that affects them, for to them no apparent reason, is a more important negative experience to avoid than the saltiness of a minority of sweatlords who have a dysfunctional relationship with video games.
To be fair, only a very (VERY) small percentage of players are actually competitive. The vast majority don’t care about leaderboards in the first place and most don’t even care if they don’t kill 100 ubers per league, or even if they don’t kill them once.
Personally, I agree with this, but I also disagree with it. I have no issue with nerfs mid-season if the skills are vastly outperforming what was designed. Especially because those issues are usually found quickly and you’ll nerf it in the first couple of weeks.
On the other hand, many people may have builds that they came up on their own that use the same mechanics but aren’t abusing them. And those people would suddenly find their build nerfed to the ground through no fault of their own.
First, things weren’t untested. They used community testing for these things. Just not global testing.
Second, at some point they would have to release the game. And since it’s a live service, they will still create new systems and mechanics. Everything new they release from now on is just community tested. So if they released masteries and factions into EA, whichever new thing they would come up with for 1.0, you’d be saying the exact same thing. And the game would never leave EA.
They did nerf a rogue build in order to fix a server issue while leaving the other broken builds alone though. Regardless of the reason that they fixed it, it is shows EHG is inconsistent and has favoritism in a lot of players eyes. Perception is everything. If there are multiple glaring issues like this they should addressed together so players don’t feel targeted. Reading chat and the forums shows this sentiment clearly.
Anyone old enough to be playing this game is capable of understanding the difference between keeping a build that happens to be very strong from crashing the servers, and nerfing something that’s very strong because it’s “too strong”.
Any player who thinks that is either inconsistent or favoritism is being obtuse, and their thoughts on it have no value.
How many people are competitive is derived from how forthcoming a game and the company behind it is towards that scene. Also those are the absolute long-term core players which a company needs besides the steadily fluctuating ones.
So they play an important part.
The scene grow to such miniscule amounts because there was no baseline to make balanced competitions for longer and longer times now, it became ever harder to set one up and get it through while GGG did ever more obscure and unbalanced ones personally.
Then there’s no need to fix em in the first place, right? It’s usually specific interactions… or in LE’s case outright wrong tooltips which are a error in the code hence, someone messing up a ‘4’ and instead writing ‘40’ in.
So if they make use in a miniscule way on a mechanic then it’s still empowering them in a ridiculous manner beyond what should happen, so it still needs to be fixed. Also those are the absolute and utter minority, allowing us to ‘take care’ of those few makes the experience of the majority worse. So not a direction anyone would sensibly go when looking a bit deeper into the issue.
Also that.
True, but still, as above stated ‘Perception is everything’.
If something’s broken you fix it, period.
It was obviously a severe error… but non-functional and wrong nodes are also a severe error in need to be addressed.
Slight wrong balancing is not and can wait, but there’s no slight or little to be seen anywhere, it’s magnitudes beyond that.
They play an important part, especially because many competitive players are streamer and bring visibility to the game. However, they’re still a minority. Even if we assume a low number of regular players per season, let’s say 10k, only a small part of those are competitive players. The majority of players that come back regularly are simply veterans that know the game and get geared up fast and can clear all endgame. But they don’t care about the leaderboards.
By the very nature of leaderboards, only a very small percentage will ever get there and thus only a very small percentage will even care about them in the first place. It’s an important part of the community, but its very nature, it’s also a very small part of it.
If you’re using profane veil with bone curse without stacking minion health and are getting 10k ward from it, you’re not abusing the game. But if it gets fixed so that instead of the broken builds getting 100k ward they get 10k ward, then the legit build that got 10k ward now has only 1k ward and is unplayable. It feels bad. There’s no need for that.
The vast majority of players have legit builds. It’s only a small portion of the playerbase that abuse these mechanics. And only the competitive players actually care about this, because they’re the only ones that care about the leaderboards.
The most popular builds in PoE rarely, if ever, are played by more than 15% of the playerbase, even if it’s broken. And out of the remaining 85%, 84% couldn’t care less what the power level of those builds are.
