Changes Coming In Season XIII

Hi, all,

Will here from Demiurge to talk about some changes you can expect in Season XIII.

Here’s the quick summary; more details below:

• Higher chances of drawing 3-stars from packs.
• Changes to Versus matchmaking. We’re fixing some bugs where certain players can see matches much harder or easier than intended, making some changes to soften the “wall” where all of a sudden you start being matchmade with teams that are much harder, and addressing cases where players new to Versus get attacked an extremely high number of times.
• The maximum number of times that +AP boosts can be stacked changes from 3 to 2. We still think that there’s interesting gameplay that comes from +AP boosts, and don’t want to get rid of them, but we’ve come to the conclusion that it’s impossible to balance characters in such a way that they’re fairly matched both when players start with 6 AP in a color and when they don’t.
• Changes to Versus progression rewards. The 2-star and 3-star characters and the first 1000 Iso-8 award become easier to get. An additional event pack token has been added to the rewards.

Higher Chances of 3-stars
Most packs have a higher chance of a 3-star, and a lower chance of drawing a 2-star. The exact amount of the change depends on the pack. The magnitude of the change is similar to what it will be in the 1x Heroic pack, where the odds of a 3-star increase by about 66% (they used to make up about 14% of the pack, and now make up about 23% of the pack).

The Deadpool Daily Quest and Standard (500 Iso-8) packs aren’t affected by this change. The Heroic pack and all event packs are affected.

This change will take effect with a patch late in the day Eastern time on 4/2.

Matchmaking Changes
We’re shifting matchmaking calculations to achieve the following aims:

• We used to use a persistent, hidden Versus rating to help with matchmaking. There were a number of ways where that could cause some quirkiness where people’s hidden rating gets far off from what we expect, and their matches are much harder or easier than they should be. That hidden rating no longer figures into matchmaking, fixing these issues.
• The removal of hidden rating makes it so that purposely losing to get easier fights stops being effective.
• Newcomers to PvP stop getting pounded on quite so badly, and retaliation fights are more likely to be within reach.
• The flipside to that is that higher-level players see less super-easy targets. You’ll generally see opponents with a minimum difficulty of roughly one star level below you. (Players with maxed 3-star teams will see maxed 2-star teams and stronger, for example.) If there's a shortage of opponents worth a meaningful number of points in this band, you can be matched with easier teams than that. And if you climb high enough in the event, anyone can see you as an opponent, even if they’re much higher level.
• The experience of suddenly hitting a wall and seeing much harder teams is reduced. The upper bound on how difficult a team we match you with gradually increases as it becomes harder to find good matches for you, so you can still expect matches to get harder as you climb higher in an event.

This change will be a part of the Versus event starting on the evening of 4/2 and all Versus events that follow. Balance of Power will be unaffected by these changes.

Boost Stacking Change
The Team-Up +AP boost, all-color +AP boost, and 2-color +AP boosts used to be stackable up to 3 times. They can now be stacked up to 2 times.

We’ve come to the conclusion that it’s not possible to balance the game for cases where people are using as much +AP as was available before and cases when they’re not. We still think that +AP boosts are an interesting piece of the game, and we want to keep them available, just reduce their maximum power.

For some of the most highly competitive players, this will have an effect on the speed of matches in Versus. We’re keeping an eye on how this affects Versus scores and, as with all changes that could have an effect on Versus scores, we’ll adjust progression rewards if that proves necessary.

This change will take effect with a patch late in the day Eastern time on 4/2.

Changes to Progression Rewards
The following progression rewards change in Versus:

Old:
200: 250 Iso-8
500: 2-star
650: 1000 Iso-8
800: Event token
900: 3-star

New:
200: 2-star
500: 1000 Iso-8
650: Event token
800: 3-star
900: Event token

This change will be a part of the Versus event starting on the evening of 4/2 and all Versus events that follow.