Injustice 2 will possibly receive more patches than MKX

[Colest]

The constant patching also hurts the fair weather fans who go to tournaments, as they can no longer keep up with the game.

This is a myth. Street Fighter 4 was patched 5 times in 2014, every patch generally touching most, if not all, of the cast. Between EVO last year to now, MKX has been patch 6 times, 2 of those patches have been comprised mostly of bug fixes and 1 solely targeted KP2 characters. SF4 had one of its best years in tournament attendance and viewers in 2014. There is definitely something that is sucking the vitality from the MKX scene but overpatching causing mass dropoff is just not substantiated in the slightest outside of a few anecdotal examples from people on twitter, Ultra David I think is someone who mentioned this.

 

[Eddy Wang]

Come on guys, make up your minds already. Do you want patches or not?

 

[Rude]

Because they patch too quickly too often.

They need to spread their patches out, and give the game a chance to breath.

The constant patching also hurts the fair weather fans who go to tournaments, as they can no longer keep up with the game.

They patch too often, eh? Well, I guess if people wanted a year of Raiden jailing characters in the corner indefinitely, along with other pseudo-block infinites in Vanilla MKX.

Sounds super healthy for tournaments.

 

[Rude]

As someone that plays offline locally and is in preparation to travel to my second offline major for MKX, I like the patch cycle.

It's not hard to keep up with. I take notes and read up on characters, so when a patch drops I simply bookmark the notes and refer to it when necessary.

Takes all of five seconds to do. This nonsense about, "not being able to keep up" is utter horseshit. If you don't want to put in a minimal amount of effort and expect the game to change at your personal convenience instead of what's best for the game, of course you're going to struggle?

Also, can we stop bashing MKX's balance issues? There are no "broken" characters. To be broken, you would need 100% resets, block infinites, or some other game-breaking glitches. As in what you are doing in the match circumvents or outright breaks the game engine.

This is definitely the most balanced version of the game, where talented players can overcome less than favorable match ups.

Or you can stay casual, I guess and bitch behind your fucking keyboards. Whatever.

 

[Eldriken]

The impression is that it's the Diablo loot system. So let's say Supergirl has an [Anal Bead Necklace]. I think it'll have a property range, so anywhere from +4 to +18 Strength and anywhere from +2% to +8% Interactable Damage. What the gear has is just random within that property range.

Balancing is simply a matter of tweaking those ranges; from a programmer's perspective, it's as easy as changing a +4 to a +6.

When they say "thousands of different pieces of gear", what that actually means is one [Anal Bead Necklace] with +4 Strength & +2% Interactable Damage, and another [Anal Bead Necklace] with +12 Strength & +6% Interactable Damage. They're technically different versions of the same gear item.

What that means is they don't have to rebalance thousands of gear items manually. Probably just a handful of pieces per character.

I know how Diablo's loot system works, but thanks. =D

But I don't think it will be that simple to simply change a stat range because certain pieces of gear may offer a set bonus, so it may require specific attention, same with any other set pieces there may be.

That's where my concern is. However, as I stated before, if they have a system in place (much like you mentioned with stat ranges), it may be far more simple to do.

 

[just_2swift]

Hope there is a tournament mode online for ppl who don't want to play with the gear buffs but keep the look of them.

Also this gear stuff reminds me of tekken 6 campaign mode where items gives your character buffs and passive abilities.
But online vs. Mode and ranked they were disabled.
@Eddy Wang

 

[vegeta]

Not again -_-

 

[The PantyChrist]

It's not the quantity but the quality of patches

 

[THTB]

Honestly, the amount of patches and the frequency isn't the issue. It's 2 things.

1. They quit patching shortly after the GOTY release is out. Whatever comes with the new characters released then, or with the older characters that never got fixed, we have to deal with forever.

2. What they're patching. A lot of the changes in the patches from Injustice onward tended to be bugfixes, which is fine. Sometimes it hurt characters because players were developing strats around the bugs, but most of the time, they were just doing general clean-up. There were some actual changes, but not really too many. The issue, though, is that they get to the big patches, and don't address actual problems at times in balancing, and make some uneducated changes. Which sucks.

 

[RNLDRGN]

I don't see gear patches as really affecting the competitive community much. Sure there may be a handful of gear items that are OP in the online (or local) gear vs modes, but other than that.... how can patching gear really be that serious when gear stats won't be used for competitive play?

 

[Tweedy]

Let's stop the patch hysteria.

Overwatch was just patched, a couple weeks after release. Life went on, absolutely no one complained, everyone just hopped back into the game, adjusted and went at it.

The FGC has some growing up to do

Fighting games are way different. On a shooting game anyone can pick up a new gun, anyone can pick up a new character on a MOBA. Characters on fighting games take time to learn, they take time to properly execute with.

 

[QUAN-FUSION]

Let's stop the patch hysteria.

Overwatch was just patched, a couple weeks after release. Life went on, absolutely no one complained, everyone just hopped back into the game, adjusted and went at it.

The FGC has some growing up to do

The Overwatch patch was tiny and needed.

 

[KiD INsAnitY]

I wouldnt worry, the people who would do the character balances would probably not be involved in the item balancing.

Why wouldn't they? I mean I would think they go hand and hand. Who else would better know how much gear effects the characters, then those who test/play the characters?

 

[Dizzy]

The Overwatch patch was tiny and needed.

Never heard of a sizable damage nerf to 2 out of 21 chars being considered tiny. McCree went from destroying many chars and melting tanks to having trouble with them now. Basically has to be played completed differently now and fits a different role on comps.

To be fair though, blizzard realized he was really OP, was a "must pick hero" in their words, and needed to be nerfed.

I think Crimson was alluding to changes that are made for the good of the game, even if it's a balance change should be welcomed and arbitrary rules regarding patches are outdated.

Of course the climate for fighting games is different due to people usually using one or only a few chars and attempting to master them, as opposed to the flavor of the month style in MOBAS
However, reasonably nerfing an S+ tier character is something hard to argue against IMO.

 

[Skedar70]

http://www.gamespot.com/articles/ed-boon-explains-why-injustice-2s-gear-wont-ruin-t/1100-6440948/?ftag=GSS-05-10aaa0a Interview with Boon addressing competitive scene for injustice 2

This is all that was said:

We're certainly not doing gems. We're definitely not going to do that. We will absolutely have some kind of a mode, whether we call it Tournament Mode or something like that we haven't decided. That'll provide the level playing field version. We're definitely not going to have people strolling into tournaments with level 50 Batman and kicking everybody's ass. We're not crazy.

 

[Slymind]

Many of those patches might be to address gear only, which most likely won't even be the tournamets standart, League of Legends has other modes different than 5v5 on summmoner's rift(which is the go to for the pro scene), and yet the other modes gets many balance changes.

 

[Hini]

Why wouldn't they? I mean I would think they go hand and hand. Who else would better know how much gear effects the characters, then those who test/play the characters?

Because its one of the things where I actually think its better to look at the items in vacuum since it wouldnt be linked to the health of the balance in competetive play (ergo play without gear), they would be balanced independently of character balance.

As such I assume they have statistics that can show which items are making the charcters overperform relative to their worth/rarity and adjust accordingly.

Edit; This is of course just pure speculation on my part, dont know enough about the gear system for me to even make an educated guess.

 

[haketh]

Just forthe love of God release the game with nothing on the level of what we've had to deal with in MK9, IGAU, or MKX please. Cool they have a system to make it easier to patch if problems arise, but don'e ship the game where it has to be touched a bunch of times in it's first months.

 

[WiseM0nkey]

I feel like there will be 50 good items, and 300 useless one... like every rpg stats based game, there will be one best build that everyone would use for each character depending on their playstyle.

i dont think we should worry too much about the "amount of patches needed"

 

[SylverRye]

"Thousands and thousands of gear" MOST LIKELY was a big exaggeration, there is going to be a separate mode for people who dont want all the gear stuff. Also, lets see what they choose to do about patching. Too early to really say now. If they fuck it up i wouldnt care since im going to be playing the tournament mode 100%

 

[Solomon Gorondy]

We're definitely not going to have people strolling into tournaments with level 50 Batman and kicking everybody's ass. We're not crazy.

Well I'm going to main Batman on day 1 just to be safe.

 

[Invincible Salads]

That would be great if it's the case. Let's hope so.

it would probably be best of those 2 teams communicate frequently though.

 

[Sutter Pain]

I just think they need to work at better releasing a balanced game from the start negating the need to patch as early/frequently.

 

[trufenix]

It is crazy that at the same time this discussion is going on, 2000 guys are packing bags to fly out to vegas and play a game that never saw a single patch, needs half its features and 90% of its stages turned off to play competitively, and even then only a quarter of the cast is worth picking.

 

[CrimsonShadow]

The Overwatch patch was tiny and needed.

The "tiny" patch significantly nerfed two of the best characters in the game, 3 weeks after release; which would cause rampant complaining and crying were it to happen in an Injustice or MK game (like it usually does)

The OW community recognized that it was a positive change and moved on.

You don't see people saying things like "they shouldn't have patched the game for a year".

That's why imo we have have some room to grow here when it comes to accepting generally positive change.