Mattos Rants: Power Budgets and the Whole Shebang

This is a WIP

And it doesn't seem like it'll end soon >.<

I have lots to rewrite, and I have yet to actually get out of the glossary. Writing is hard, yo.

Any comment, suggestion or anything like that will be properly acknowledged and answered - I like feedback :3

An Introdution to this Rant

Recently, I've become quite engrossed with M:AA. That is to say, a large part of my day is entirely dedicated to thinking about this game and how it could be improved - something that, while time consuming, is fun and instructive nonetheless. And while reflecting about the current state of the game and the (limited) experience I've been able to gather, I've come to two particularly unsettling conclusions.

1. The Power Disparities in this game are quite large; and
2. Heroes' Power Budgets are completely ilogic.

Obviously, one could argue that this leads to a third conclusion, "Developers have a Dark Plot or some Missing Screws" or something like that, but I won't go that far.

There are some obvious consequences in these conclusions, some not so obvious and some definitively a product of my criative and kinda loose mind, and my goal with this post is to share them with you all (whoever comes here, after all).

A Short Glossary

Game Design is a wondrous thing. And by "wondrous", I mean terribly chaotic and amusingly confusing. This section serves to create a common vocabulary, so I won't need to explain what I mean with some specific things every time they appear.

• Power Budget: My perception of Power Budget is, very simply, what a hero can do with their resources. This is, in my opinion, quite hard to measure - different heroes have different ways to achieve the same objectives, and some measurements are very, very contextual, since some particular team compositions may enhance a hero's ability to do things in a way that at first glance aren't obvious. This being recognized, my analysis uses three arbitrary factors which I perceive as most adequate to the task. They are Attributes, Utility and Synergy, and they'll be properly explained below.
  • Attributes: Attributes are, bluntly, the ammounts by which the base stats are calculated for each hero. My research has shown that M:AA uses a percentage based attribute system - your hero level set the base, and each champion will multiply these base attribute by their unique percentage. As anything else, Attributes can't be measured without context, but they determine both boundaries and opportunities for the characters. They give both limits to their development and create comfort zones to experiment. They are the bases in which Hero Roles first develop themselves.
  • Utility: Oh, boy. Utility is, in a very simplistic analysis, what a hero's abilities can do beyond damage. Of course, this is a very broad definition, but defining utility would probably need an entire post for itself, and as soon as I have someone to link at or a post done 'bout this, I'll link it here.
  • Synergy: In my opinion, the most important factor of all, Synergy is how well this champion abilities work with themself and with partners. There are Heroes that alone are powerful - they have great Internal Synergy - and Heroes who are only powerful alongside a favorable setting - they have great Contextual Synergy. A Hero who don't synergise with themselves and can't enable other Heroes abilities is a poor Hero.
• Power Disparities: It's really, really, really hard to compare two individual Heroes without any form of Context - unless were talking about Heroic Battles (and these are rigged, anyway), there are no possibilities of a Hero fighting completely alone. This means that, with the proper setting, every single Hero can be "strong", or, as I prefer, Powerful. But there are circunstances that absolutely no ammount of setting can redeem a champion - She-Hulk comes to mind here (she has limited Utility and Synergy, and unless you can completely incapacitate the enemy team so she can attack alone and unimpeded, she won't be doing a lot for you) - and circunstances that simply no ammount of preparation can reduce a Hero's power - Havok is, without a doubt, one of the most powerful Heroes in this game, given the ammount of Utility and Synergy he has; not only that, but his deficiencies can be very easily mitigated by a proper team setting. When the Power Budgets of two Heroes is so completely unequal so to completely make one of the inviable, we have a Power Disparity (Power Creep is a category of this). Some Power Disparity are obvious and actually desired - the difference in Power Budget between Modern Cyclops and P5 Cyclops are a reflexion of the difference of their costs; going even further, the Power Budget of Uncanny Cyclops is higher since the investment that should be made to acquire him is higher as well - and some are, well... I really can't explain why Modern Cyclops and She-Hulk have such absurd Disparity, since they're both 15CP and all that, but I'll try to blame the fact that She-Hulk is less important to Marvel Universe and try to convince myself of that (if it's not clear enough, She-Hulk is my current pet peeve).
  • Power Creep: As said earlier, Power Creep is a Power Disparity, but a very particular one: It comes into existence when new tech is introduced in game. For example, Doc Voodoo's Voodoo Incantation, simply by using the Multifunction tech, gives him an incredible ammount of power by allowing him to enable not one, but four new skills in his 6th level, and even if they were completely undertuned, the sheer flexibility of it allows him to easily become a very powerful Hero by both Utility and Synergy - and, damn, they really aren't undertuned: he has two new debuffs, one of them subtle, ethereal form, stealthy summon area DOT attack and psychic area stamina-damaging energizing attack. While he isn't overpowered or overwhelming (yet), he has a power budget definitively higher than the ones who came before him - that without even factoring the new Synergies that he brings with him, and the fact that for the first two months he'll be mostly unknown by people, which will increase the perception of his power... Yup.
• Power Progression: 'k, this one isn't a exactly institutionalised term, but is something that I believe is a mark of good design: when having multiple avaliable characters, every new tier of cost should bring more complexity to the characters, without invalidating the Utility of the cheaper ones. Now, this is really important here - more expensive characters should be more complex, not outright more powerful; while there is no problem for them to be so (since more investment should bring better Power Budgets), this should be balanced in a way that their power should have costs. For example, Hawkeye is a good example of a Beginner Tier character: he has straightfoward Internal Synergy, and a very defined role; his alts increase the effectiveness of his initial role by giving him more Utility and enabling more Contextual Synergy. He has defined strengths and weaknesses, and while requiring little setup to work, he's able to give a pleasurable experience to his player and to the ones who fight against him. Emma Frost, on the other side, is just nasty: while she does have defined strengths and weaknesses, a player who finds her in PVP can't know that - her attacks are straightfoward, have little cost and absolutely no window of opportunity is given for counter attack; moreover, when in her P5 alt, her passive is simply stupid, since when it procs, it gives the perception of being injust. Fighting with Emma Frost may be amazing, but fighting against her, specially when a begginer, is simply frustrating. Another example of poor Power balancing is the Synthetic Cube: while it did need a great ammount of effort to acquire, the item is simply inbalanced, and in a way that makes fighting against it completely frustrating. It's good for the user, but only for him.
• Power Balancing: This folk is another conundrum. When I use Power Balance, I refer to the idea that an effect must be proportional to its cost. So power must be tied with responsability a group of actions and/or circunstances that allow your enemy to properly react - obviously, with our undertuned AI this is really hard to properly put into effect, but I swear I have suggestions to make this viable - while guaranteeing that no one comes out feeling frustrated because the effort wasn't worth the result. There are many ways to make this work - Attributes, and things like Stamina Cost, Cooldown, Warm-up (also called Initial Cooldown) and Buffs/Debuffs first come to mind, but there are more levers that can be used to make the system tighter or looser, as you will.