Marvel Rivals is HURTING, Supports Need NERFS and PLS FIX Ironfist FT Samito

Coach Mills, CaptainCoach and Samito group up to debate Marvel Rivals balance and the fundamental balance problems that are holding the game back! Also, we dig into Rivals vs Overwatch 

What is Clear Comms Podcast?

A Marvel Rivals Podcast hosted by Coach Mills and CaptainCoach, two creator and educators for Marvel Rivals. We discuss all things Rivals including META, balance and the future of development. We will often debate controversial topics that surround the game and plan to bring on many exciting guests from pros to devs!!!

Coach Mills:
Right, guys, welcome to Clearcombs episode three. Today we're joined by our special guest, Samito. Hey, Samito, how you doing?

Samito:
What's up, gentlemen? Thank you guys for having me. I think this will be a good one. I mean, anybody who's used to having me on a show is there's a lot of gas, not a lot of breaks. So this will be a fun one for sure.

Coach Mills:
Yeah, and and yeah, we're coming together here to talk about primarily the state of rivals the state of balance the state of hero shooters Rivals versus overwatch. I think a lot of like myself. I'm pretty I'm a pretty positive sentiment about rivals right now but Samito represents a much different opinion that I'm gonna let him articulate in a second and Captain coach somewhere in the middle. So yeah, let's let's kind of just jump right in I know you played 4.5. What?

CaptainCoach:
Ha ha ha.

Coach Mills:
I know you

Samito:
Look, I think there's no excuse for the game to not be in a better spot than what it is. I know everybody's talking about Daredevil and he is cool. Like, the one thing I'll give Rivals credit for is like the character animations and stuff they have on the melee characters. It's insane. It's awesome. It's the best I've ever played. But to my issue is that they've had a year and a half to address the sustain and stalling and ult cycles. And frankly, they've done a terrible job of doing what needs to be done.

Samito:
I don't think that it's in the best interest of the game to make excuses for the balance team who want praise for nerfing Luna for two seconds if it's not a much bigger picture issue than that. When there's not enough neutral in the game. There's too much just spam and trading and stalling forever that if they got rid of that because they have so many characters that...

Samito:
Do all kinds of amazing things like Iron Fist, Daredevil, like that stuff could not, I mean you could say Genji, right, in Overwatch, stuff like that, sure, right, but the way that Rivals does it with like the character animations, they have so many awesome characters that could shine so much more with individual playmaking that their gameplay loop with all the stall and aggressive sustain and ults across the board, I'm not just, and I know, you go on X and say, you got a nerf support alteration, everybody freaks out, I'm saying that

Samito:
All of these ults should have their duration nerf to open up much more of Nuke's Troll in the game. And after a year and a half of watching this, the gameplay loop is stale because of that when it shouldn't be. Map pulls have no reason to be in the game when there's only like eight maps. Again, makes it even more stale. They are adding more, but it's like, you don't have, like it was bad when Overwatch 2 did it and they had...

Samito:
Eight years of maps that they built in the game and people still didn't like it. So, you know, I think that they're dropping the ball on very easy things and they haven't made a meaningful changes to the gameplay loop other than saying, here's the Nemours, Nemours fifth team up in a year and a half that makes them good. we're going to pick and choose the characters that get heal mitigation instead of addressing the problem. That is a lot of the sustained install duration. So the content's cool. They're telling the story. It's great.

Samito:
But they've dropped the ball when it comes to the gameplay loop and really doing what needs to be done to cut the low hanging fruit down for the game.

Coach Mills:
Cause that's like, I know like in Overwatch, depending on, I know we've had tons of ultimate nerf changes throughout Overwatch's history, but it's typically like two or three whole fights before ultimates come online for most characters. But Rivals, it's like half a fight, maybe. All the ultimates are online. So is that like the big, your big fix is like, you just need like nerf ultimate charge, or is it like the power of the ults?

Samito:
It's not even charged. listen, I think nerfing ultimate charge across the board could help. think it could help, but it's the duration of how long the ults last too. Like in Overwatch, like they're, need to actually let you be able to kite support ults and re-engage without your team dying. If your team, if they get a support ult off on point and your team doesn't or your supports are like,

Samito:
What am I allowed to say on this show? What am I allowed to... If they're huffing glue in the back line and I've got a Luna Snow on a controller that's never played a hero shoot before and I'm trying to climb up and I'm watching her troll while nightmares go straight down mid on Thor with 10 deaths, pretend I can't win the game because my Luna will not ult. The game's over because there's 15 seconds for their team to regroup because there's a cloak and dagger ult. And if I see one more cloak and dagger player on Twitter, sit there and tell me,

Coach Mills:
Whatever you want bro, whatever you want.

CaptainCoach:
Hehehehehe

Coach Mills:
Yeah

Samito:
Actually, Samino, the Cloak and Dagger ult lasts for 8 seconds, yet you lay down 4 of them and the animation lasts 4. It's a 12 to 15 second ultimate. Support ults in Overwatch last for 6 seconds, 6 at the most. And if it's Kitsune, you can kill through Kitsune. Even Juna ult moves slow and you can kill through it. There is no play to make, none, on support ults in Marvel Rivals unless you are playing 3 or 4 DPS in the game.

Samito:
And if you don't realize, and I don't even want to say DPS, could be 10, this is why Mag has been the best tank in the game since the game came out, because he always can kill through a support ult. They last too long. And I don't want the game to become, support ults last six seconds and now Punisher ult is eight seconds and so like the DPS ult wins, nerf Punisher ult duration down to that same length too. But it's, there's not enough window for actual skilled players in the ranked mode to recognize that a support ult is on point.

Samito:
If you don't have one, can kite it out and re-engage. It makes the game so much more interesting. And so that's what I'm saying. I'm saying you probably should nerf the build rate too. Make it harder to build ults across the board. You could do that if you want. But really, man, especially for defenders advantage in this game, if you get a support off on point, nobody's going to die. And if, your whole team is going to regroup and it lasts forever. Even if you've gotten picks to win a fight in a game that has

Samito:
A ton of rocket beacons and I will say to give them credit I think the rocket raccoon ult rework was one of the best ones they did because guess what you don't have to be on a specific hero to counter it if it's bad everybody can shoot it no matter what character you're on maybe they're not in cloak and dagger you can't break it right but you guys get what I mean like 90 % of the cast can be smart and make a play against it that's not true for cloak ult I mean again there are like maybe six or seven characters that can pull cloak out or one shot or do whatever but it's definitely not true for Luna ult

Samito:
So, I mean, a lot of them need to get reined in and they just, they beat around the bush and then want praise with some silly joke in their packs. I'm like, I get their sense of humor, but that really rubbed me the wrong.

CaptainCoach:
I got a question for you. was recently watching Flats just the other day posted a of a rant on the state of the game and he was a bit more positive about it, but he made a good point, which is that the game has now been out for almost a year and obviously there's been a pretty steep player drop off. I think it's like 80, 90%. And he said that most of the casual people are all playing whatever Battlefield 6 right now.

CaptainCoach:
The casual Marvel Rivals fans and that the true player base is now the people who have stuck with the game and now it's kind of where it's bottomed out. You make a point that the support alts are obviously like too strong. Do you think that is Nettie's maybe catering to casual players too much or like more of an emphasis on like team fight and teamwork because or big playmaking you could say because like Magneto Walt, right?

Samito:
Yeah. I think they've misunderstood playmaking because you've seen them make a lot of, we're going to remember what kind of company is that is. They're a mobile game company, right? So for their first hero shooter to come out and have it do this is very successful. And they should be very proud of that from where, cause let's not forget when they first tweeted out the screenshot of characters you saw on an unknown, they were going to sell characters, but they saw how bad the reception was when Overwatch hit it and they pulled it. they've, they, to their credit, they've been flexible.

Samito:
I think that they think, one, they aren't wrong when they say that Marvel Rivals is gonna do a better job of grabbing those casual players than any other game in the genre will because it's the Marvel IP. If they came out and said Deadpool's in the game tomorrow, you're gonna have a ton of North American comic book fans who love Deadpool getting on and like, I'm gonna try out your Deadpool in this game.

Samito:
Because that's what people want to do. Daredevil is the same way. The trailers, the cinematics, you're tapping into such a massive fan base of people that already exist that are going to come try this game because of these characters that other games don't have. So they are right that it's going to get more casuals. Where they're wrong is they think that the ults have to last that long to feel super powerful. And they can do both, right? Because the casuals just want to get on and try out their character. If Cloak Ult is lasting...

Samito:
Six seconds, and so, like, I think that Ult needs to get reworked altogether, for one. I think it should just be, if this is you have to do to make it, like, a reasonable duration, maybe you can control where the character actually goes. It's not just straight lines, but it only lasts for eight seconds. Like, one big, like, rush movement. Yeah. Something like that. Because you can't, you can't have it last eight seconds total and have it be, like, the locked in place thing. Like, why are we locking it in place? Like, it lets them have more counterplay to actually dodge incoming damage, too.

Coach Mills:
Like a paintbrush, right? Or yeah, you can. Yeah, yeah.

CaptainCoach:
Hmm.

Samito:
I don't mind that if you rein it into seven, eight seconds duration and maybe up the healing of the pal- I don't know, I don't care what you do. It just can't be 12, 14 seconds, right? Because you still get the hero fantasy. What they don't want to destroy is the hero fantasy, and they're right. You can't do that. But if the ult's lasting for 14 seconds and you're adding more and more characters in the game, where's my hero fantasy on Iron Fist when I'm tickling them in an ult for 14 seconds and can't get anything to happen?

CaptainCoach:
Yeah.

Samito:
It's not there, right? And I'm not saying I should be able to kill through it, but I'm saying there should be reasonable decisions and abilities so it's not tic-tac-toe, but a game of chess instead. Because you can keep that floor low and keep these people in and coming to the game, but also reward smart players in the ceiling, where I'm like looking at the fight now and I'm saying, there's no way I can outplay this. I can't go in, and they're adding so many more characters too. This problem's only gonna get worse, right? If you aren't the character that gets the heal, if they say, you know what, if you're

Samito:
You get to be in Nemora and Venom this season where we're going to add these Giga heal sustain. Okay, well what if those characters are like, it's not a healthy solution where you open up playmaking to the entire cast a lot by bringing those ults specifically in so that every, it's not about what character has the heal mint, right? And you can nerf the DPS ults. take, I would trade Iron Fist ult, which is like a 12 second duration, down to eight or nine seconds if they took the support ults down. Because if they support ult early and my teammate like,

Samito:
Has three seconds of life left, right? I can stall those three seconds, stall his life, and instead of waiting, you know, nine seconds for that ult to come up when all of their neutral cooldowns will be back if they misuse them, it's six seconds, right? So I can go in with my Iron Fist ult at the three second mark of that ult being down, draw more CDs to me, and they don't have time to full reset everything. Like, there's a way for me to go in there, be smart, and turn that fight. That's not taking away from that casual player's experience. That's giving me a veteran player a chance to come in and make a play happen.

Samito:
But there's no room for that, especially when attacking. Casuals don't like permanent stall either, right? And in fact, it might actually affect them more when they're, especially the abilities are easier to use in this game. So, so that was a very long answer, but go ahead.

Coach Mills:
Yeah, and the thing is like they've proven that they can make supports that can get value in the neutral too. Characters like Adam, characters like Mantis, even Jeff. So why is there four We Can't dials in the game already? Like I don't understand because those actually, it makes it so all of these play, the neutral playmaking, they have to keep it like nerfed or else it's triple support. Why is that even exists? I don't understand why just invisible, there should be like one.

Coach Mills:
Like maybe one immortal ult and then come up with some creative, more creative ults like in Overwatch. We have a lot of creative ults, lot of creative, even like nano or whatever. Yeah.

Samito:
Yeah, with like kitsune, stuff like that, to add on to that. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And to add on to that as well, you know, the only answer to it can't be just combo into it, right? Because you're relying on team synergy and that drives a lot of casual players away. Cause I've seen the guys in my rank would try to climb up and they're clueless. And that's not necessarily a bad thing. Cause this game has brought a lot more people into the genre. But if you reduce the duration, right? Of these ults, then it's, you're not forcing people to combo.

Samito:
To get the stall off or you're not forcing it. I had some guy on Twitter tell me, just pick Jean. It's like, that's the problem. Dude, Jean's one character and I don't want to get on this game just to play Jean. Like, I should be able to have the choice of some flexibility. And so what your point is, you're right. Like, it's actually okay if they have a couple different types of quote unquote unkillable support ults, but they last so long right now. It's like a guaranteed fight win if you can't match it or do it properly. But if they last less time,

Samito:
People get caught out more, there's more neutral mistakes, there's more like on the player rather than doing everything for you. And ultimately that's why we play a game. Nettie's gonna have to learn, know, obviously you want those casual players taking on, but that's where Flats is right to come back to your court. We made it full circle. We did a bit of a weave there, but we did get a full circle where you're right, where like they need to just peel back and the game would feel so much better, dude. It would feel so much better to play if they did that. But for me, that's where my burnout's coming from.

CaptainCoach:
Hehehe.

Coach Mills:
And what would you say to... because we actually have a lot of support players that watched this pod. They got pissed off at us last time for talking shit about support. But what would you say to them that are afraid that you just want to gut their role? That's what they're afraid of. What would you say?

Samito:
Yeah.

Samito:
I'm telling you, I'm saying you shouldn't be, because I'm saying to nerf all the DPS duration too. Nerf all of them. would nerf nerf Starlord ult down to six seconds, nerf Iron Fist ult down to eight seconds, nerf Punisher ult a couple seconds of duration. Every duration based ult should, for the DPS, should get nerfed in tandem with those support ults too. So it's not just them and like every ult, so like when I, when I'm saying this, I'm saying it's all of them. And if you increase the support ult duration, increase the DPS ult duration, like to get, sorry, the build rate.

Samito:
For the support ults, increase the DPS by the exact same amount. So like the build time would not be faster on DPS than support. It would be the exact same. It still be about how you play. It's just all of those ults would not last as long collectively. It's a universal pullback. And by the way, Overwatch did this too numerous times over the years. They did it in Goats meta. They did it, I think in Rollock once as well. When the game first came out, like...

Samito:
The Overwatch went through the exact same thing. And it's not about one role versus another. The support ults are obviously a more outlandish example. But again, it's like, it's about individual playmaking. And that actually, if those support ults are ending in less time and they're adding more offensive supports to the game, like with different ult types, it would give you...

Samito:
More chance to win if you were making the correct play if they add a kitsune or if they add a rocket ult, right? A big reason why rocket ult is so bad is because if you cloak ult on point, it gives them 14 seconds to walk up and break it. But if they only have it for eight, right? That's a much more, where do I place the ult? Do they have the time to actually do this? Can we actually walk forward into this damage as much if we don't have as much time to sustain? The game becomes, the game gains like two to three times more depth in these fights rather than just.

Samito:
Fighter game button mash at each other and I'm not talking high skill ceiling fighter game I'm talking like the noobs when you first start playing a button mash right so it's not just yeah it's not just targeting support players this is this is a thing across the game for each role

Coach Mills:
Noob sidebar, right? Yeah.

CaptainCoach:
Like what you said about power fantasy where you pop your iron fist salt and then you just hit a cloak and you can't do anything. Do you think that the support alts being as long and as strong as they are is a result of just them trying to future proof all the power creep that's kind of being introduced to the game? Or do you think power creep is even an issue? Because I like with Phoenix and Emma, those are probably two S tier characters just released. And I think Daredevil is right there with it. I feel like the game is just moving towards a way where if

CaptainCoach:
You have this equalizer in a support alt, like you said, the checkers rather than chess where it kind of makes it easier for them to balance while making the character still BOP. That's me trying to give goodwill to netties and their, you get what I'm saying?

Samito:
Yeah. Yeah, but I'd argue that if the support ults were... I don't, for one, I don't think it's Power Creep, I think it's all hero fantasy. They've made it really clear they want everyone to feel like a superhero and they want to nail the hero fantasy of game. And I think that's great. I think that's one of the things that makes Nettys and, or makes Rivals such a fun game is like, dude, like you really do feel like you're playing a superhero. And that won't go away. Like, like that, like...

Samito:
Giving people more opportunity to make plays as their superhero actually lets them live more characters live true to their hero fantasy because every character will have greater windows of opportunity to take advantage of their hero fantasy. When it's a giant stall or you hit the Iron Man alt which ends up getting held hostage by Mag or whatever it might be, you know, for cloak players for example where I said they should change cloak alt to eight seconds but give her one big beam.

Samito:
You actually have the, you'll have the ability to control your character, right? You, as a player, will be able to control your hero fantasy more than you can right now. And everybody would win in my mind. So I don't think it's power creep. think if ults lasted less time, think heroes like Emma would be even better, actually. Because again, you could, they wouldn't be able to stall out those support ults so long for all of their cooldowns to be back. Like for example, say Luna ult lasted six and a half seconds, right?

Samito:
You burst down the mag shield and the bubble on the first cycle and then the Luna ults to bail them out. You could ult with three seconds left on that Luna ult and that mag shield and bubble won't be back yet. So then the Luna ults ending as the mag is there. So stuff like that. Like I'd argue you almost have more playmaking potential. To answer your question though. No, I don't think it's about power creep. I think it really is about hero fantasy for them with a Marvel game that is very important, but I don't think it actually takes away from it. I think it lets more characters on the cast live up to their fantasy rather than one out.

Coach Mills:
Yeah, that's interesting about thinking about Power Creep. think... Let's see their track record. think Blade was released fairly balanced if not underpowered. Gene was definitely released extremely overpowered. Like, completely overpowered. Emma overpowered thing? Probably fine. Underpowered, maybe. Ultron? Ultron was probably underpowered on release, I think.

Samito:
Insane. Insane. She was crazy.

Samito:
He was fine. Torch was underpowered, I would say.

CaptainCoach:
He was-

CaptainCoach:
I disagree on Torch being underpowered. I thought he was good. I think it just took people a little time to learn the tech. That's fair.

Samito:
I think he was clunky too, you're right. But I do think he was clunky and Spider-Man was also pretty good that season I think and he didn't have his like crazy stuff before. I think it's a bit of both. I think it's a bit of both. But I will say Torch was good. He was solid regardless. I think he was solid.

Coach Mills:
It's definitely interesting because I think a lot of people are gonna be afraid of power creep especially when they're releasing a hero a month Which is by the way insane I think like regardless of what Nettie's does right or wrong balance wise just the fact that they're releasing a character a month is just like something unheard of I think that that's actually wild

Samito:
Yeah.

Samito:
Yeah.

CaptainCoach:
League used to do that in its infancy. They actually had every patch they'd introduced two or three at a time, but they couldn't keep that up. again, balance became a huge issue. And over time, they eventually slowed it down to about five or six a year. And I think that probably the same is going to happen to this game eventually. I mean, it just kind of goes back to what we were talking about with team captain last week, which is how much do they already have planned out versus what they're making up kind as they go.

Coach Mills:
Daft daft.

Samito:
Yeah.

CaptainCoach:
I kind of wanted to talk a bit about the hero changes, specifically your hero. That's actually how I found out about you was I was playing Iron Fist and I was looking for, I wanted to learn how to play him because I hadn't even started making content yet. And I'm like, this guy looks amazing. I saw you and Necro's playing him. How do you feel like the balance has gone? Because he's your favorite hero, right? Because he's gone in a strange direction. Yeah.

Samito:
Yeah.

Samito:
Yeah.

Coach Mills:
Yeah, what is going on with him?

Samito:
Ruined him. Ruined him. Ruined him. Let's keep doubling down on the same concept that took away all of the depth of his gameplay. There were very few Iron Fist players in Season 0, and he was hard to play, but he was so dynamic, right? Like, you had numerous playstyle options that you could have. Like, you weren't a big damage threat, but it was just enough on Squishies to where if you went backline and they misused a cooldown,

CaptainCoach:
Okay.

Samito:
You had a choice to kick and get the finish and try to get out or kick back into the tank while splitting the two teams. It was a lot like DPS Doomfist, which I'm not sure. Are you familiar with how DPS Doomfist played in Overwatch, Captain Coach?

CaptainCoach:
I didn't play- I played Overwatch for about a month. I didn't stick around too long.

Samito:
Okay. So DPS, I know, I know coach Mills knows that he was, he was a menace and he was one of my best characters in the game. I hit rank one playing. I'm like, he was, and he was, listen, I acknowledge completely. was corny.

Samito:
But if you knew how to play him, my god, you would make people hate their existence. What he was so good at was initiating a backline and making a choice to either finish the kill on the backline or punch back into a tank, splitting teams and essentially, like, I would compare the enemy team to being the Red Sea and you were Moses walking through it. And you could split and choose whatever side and create a pinch from inside their team and creating a kill box.

Samito:
Just from hitting backline, right? Iron Fist was the same way in Season 0, where you had enough, just enough damage to threaten the Luna Mantis and either force an ult, create a kill, or force them to heal each other to where the tanks weren't getting healed. So the tank exchange was happening and you could kick back into a low HP tank, stabilize on your tanks and pounce on that target and finish them. They then, the problem with him in that season why he was bad is that his kick and it was a 15 second cooldown and his block started at 12.

Samito:
So you have a melee based character that has insane downtime and fights. so despite that still had like a 53, 54 % win rate at a really low pick rate in GM plus before Celestial. So he was viable. I liked it because I can choose to punch on a tank or I can choose to punch on a back line. But I said this in season zero and I hit like one above all. was like, I was one of like two or three iron fist ranked in top a hundred that season. I said, if they, if they nerf his damage against squishies at all from this point, he's horrible immediately.

Samito:
Then what they did is they tried to rework his damage to be percentage based damage, which net nerfed his damage in squishies by like 15%. But gave him better cooldowns, way too good cooldowns. They then reverted the cooldown buff and left him with this HP percentage damage, which is worse against 80%. You can't have a DPS that has horrible matchups against all other squishies in the game. You can't. So how they kind of force his play style is to just literally be a

Samito:
I hate, I hated this term for Doomfist so much because it really undersold his loop and what you could do. That everybody called him a punch bot. And I was like, that is such a lame way to describe this character. However, they made Iron Fist a punch the tank bot where your only option really is to farm off their tanks. So what happens if they go triple DPS? What happens if they don't run two tanks? What happens if they run tanks that you can't really brawl? Right. And look, I'm not saying the character's bad necessarily.

Samito:
I'm saying he's not fun because he used to be so versatile and the more they hone in on the HP percentage damage on enemy max HP, the less fun it's gonna be for tank players and the less versatile one of the coolest characters I've ever seen in the hero shooter can be. This is the complete wrong direction to go for the character. And it's really disappointing for me to see them continue to do this for him because...

Samito:
It makes him so one dimensional when he's really not a one dimensional character. His mobility, his wall climb, the ability to absorb damage, the pressure cooldowns. It's just, he's not a threat. You have no chance of killing anything. Like in season zero, you couldn't kill through a cloak bubble. You still can't kill through a cloak bubble. There's plenty of answers for this guy, even if his damage isn't horrendous against squishies. But you know,

Samito:
It's alarming to me to see them double down. Not even double, they're like quadrupling down on this budget Wolverine direction for a guy that's the coolest brawler I've ever seen in a game. It's wasted potential, man. I just rambled, so if you have questions, let me know.

Coach Mills:
Well, one of the things that's, it's definitely weird. I think there's, Rivals is doing this weird thing where Rivals is definitely like the place to go if you're into melee characters. Cause like, there's no DPS Doomfist anymore. They have so many varieties of melee characters, just tons of them. But at the same time, I feel like Rivals has consistently catered to people, especially in Loilo. I don't want to call too many specific groups out, but people in Loilo complaining about dive and mobility heavy characters.

Samito:
yeah.

CaptainCoach:
100 percent.

Coach Mills:
Like Iron Fist, BP, Spider-Man, every mobility heavy character has gotten complaints from the community and then they've gotten nerfed or changed. Even Iron Fist's identity, feels like who cares what tanks care? Who cares about things that bully tanks? Support players, we can't have anything that bullies support players. We gotta change it.

Samito:
Well, he didn't bully, so here's my argument to those people. He was the only one who didn't bully them. BP can instantly one frame one shot you. Spider-Man can pull you across the map and combo you. Like, he was the most telegraphed one of them all. He was, his time to kill was not insane. He's in your face. He has to slowly cross the map. His escape ability is tied to his lethality. So he has to choose between killing you with the kick or getting out.

Coach Mills:
I agree, Slow.

Samito:
And if you don't shoot his block, he doesn't get the shields he needs. He had more counterplay out of any of those characters. Captain America, Black Panther, Spider-Man, Venom. He had the most counterplay out of them all. But because a couple game journalists ranked him as the number one most broken character in the game at launch, which is crazy! It's crazy, like what, like my god!

CaptainCoach:
What I'm telling you, man, it goes back to what I was saying. Like I hadn't even touched shrank yet. I was just learning the game and watching some Sumito streams and videos and I was playing iron fist and I, I probably won 20 games in a row and quick plays cause he stomps, he stomps new players cause he gets the shield after a kill. And then, and that's why, again, why I say, think they, they're really trying to cater to casuals, like way more than people think. I think that's the big issue, but I'm curious to hear your, like you, think that's what it is too then.

Samito:
Snoop Stomper. Yeah.

Samito:
They are. You're right.

Samito:
It is 100 % what it is, right? It's an entry level game, but again, it's like, ultimately you have to invest in your learning curve.

Coach Mills:
Do we need to cater? Do we need to cater to casuals at all? I don't understand. Because casuals will come, they'll play the game regardless. We got a new character every month. Yeah, exactly. So who cares what it's balanced? Why are we getting some random people on Reddit and they complain about Iron Fist when they have only put 10 hours into the game? They don't understand cycles. Yeah.

CaptainCoach:
It's the biggest mistake I think all...

Samito:
They're playing for the IP. They're playing for the IP.

Samito:
It's silly because he's telegraphed and it's like listen like you have to learn to not like it's simple Don't shoot block and I'm not saying you should walk in and one shot you but it's crazy to complain about iron fist because like listen if you're gonna have a character that doesn't require aim, right? Does it have other drop-offs? He had a bad time to kill

Samito:
He doesn't have instantaneous mobility across the map and his lethality, his real kill ability is his kick, is his only escape option from the fight. So there's real decision making there that you have to sacrifice. In the same way that Winston is a high skill ceiling hero that doesn't require aim in Overwatch, like Iron Fist is like the Winston of DPS for the melee based characters. Like he doesn't have that. So I honestly don't understand their thinking at all, Captain Coach, when it comes to Iron Fist. It doesn't make sense to me at all.

Coach Mills:
No, and yeah. And also like compare the changes, because I've been playing in Maiden Bucky and the DPS roles since season zero, I hit eternity on Bucky, like only. Bucky is so power crept from zero. Like if you compare Iron Fist and Bucky side by side since season zero, it's like Iron Fist went down and Bucky went extremely high. It's like they only want characters good, or good, for like casual players that

Coach Mills:
Don't actually threaten you, but just deny things. If your job is just standing there to deny things, then they're okay with it being good.

CaptainCoach:
Okay, then how do you ex-

CaptainCoach:
How do you explain Hela then right now? Like the current state of Hela? Cause that's...

Coach Mills:
Casual players can't No casual player can aim. So they're okay with that character being infinitely, infinitely busted. can, as long as, as long as it's not destroying, you know, quick play lobbies or bronze lobbies, they're okay with it being busted. That's, that's the, that's.

CaptainCoach:
Right. Sure.

Samito:
Yeah. Same with Gene.

CaptainCoach:
Okay, follow up, then why do think they're pushing the competitive scene so much? Because in their defense, it does keep most competitive games very close when the skill level is pretty easy to obtain by all teams, you know what I mean? It's all just cool down usage, pretty much.

Coach Mills:
Yeah,

Samito:
I think...

Samito:
I think they just miss under, think Iron Fist is an outlier. I think they genuinely just don't understand that character. Like he truly is a character that like, I'll be blunt, there are very few people that actually fundamentally understand what that character is capable of.

CaptainCoach:
He's genuinely, or was genuinely very difficult. A lot of decisions.

Coach Mills:
it

Samito:
Yeah, yeah, he was

Coach Mills:
I mean for a while I felt like they had no idea what they were doing with Thor 2 for a long time I think Thor is in an okay place now But it felt like they did like five changes in a row on Thor that made no sense from like a Thor mains point of view

Samito:
Yeah.

Samito:
And this is where I agree with you, Captain Coach, where like, think eventually their hero release schedule is going to have to slow down and they're going to need to go into a lot of these characters. And I saw a vast tweet about this. He's like, this will never be a problem. Like, out of sarcasm, he'd be like, you know, like, Hey, like this is, he was right. Like it's going to be an issue at some point. Right. Um.

Coach Mills:
you

CaptainCoach:
Yeah.

Samito:
I don't want to hone in too much on Iron Fist and act like they've messed up the whole game in terms of design. Like some of the designs are super sick, man. I think that's just one... I think Iron Fist, they've dropped the ball on the most because I think they're trying to make some of these characters be too unique. But the reality is the way his kit functions already was unique in its own way, right? You just...

Samito:
It was so different from Panther. He's all about occupying space for long durations of time. You didn't have to reinvent the wheel with him. Go back to his Season Zero values and just make his cooldown not be 15 seconds on a melee character, right? You know, keep it at 12, 10.

Samito:
And he's fine, right? Make players have to figure it out. but as for Gene and Hello, I think you guys are right when you talk about like, it's not OP for super casual players. We'll never understand that. But again, you don't have to sacrifice competitive integrity to make casuals happy. If you want to make casuals happy, come out with engaging new content, skins, modes, heroes, right? That are from the IP that they like.

Samito:
I think that you should always cater your game to a competitive audience, mainly because those are the people that you retain. That's how you keep it around. Those swing players are going to come in whenever you do something interesting, but you've got to make the game skill to reward curve engaging and fun. And that's the big reason why I also want those ults durations nerf because my skill doesn't matter when the ults outweigh any decision making that I as a player can make to understand how to kite ults. If that's not even an option for me.

Samito:
I can't make plays because bronze Andy over there, the plot support player presses Q on point. And all of sudden now one above all player can't carry a low game because my supports aren't matching their oath properly. And now there's literally zero opportunity for me to win. So, you know, it's, it's, it's, it's a lot. Sorry to the support players out there and the, I'm not trying to single-handedly come for you guys. How I've always explained it is like supports and fights are like the P and PEM DOS, right? If you're in a math class, those, you know, PEM DOS it's like, I forget what it says parentheses, like whatever.

Coach Mills:
Ex- yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Samito:
Yeah, the whole thing it's order of operations to get the, to get the right answer in math. If your supports are trolling or not using their old property, they're just the PM PEM DOS. That's why so many people come for you because it's essential that that that's the first step. And if that first step goes wrong, the next steps of the equation can't function and I play DPS. So.

Coach Mills:
And it's probably I think it's also just like a frustrating gameplay loop for support players because I just remember in overwatch it was never that big of a deal to like always calm perfectly all in a perfect way like maybe at the highest elos of play but like If you saw an opportunity with Nana, you just threw it you saw you saw like a Baptiste amp you just threw like you did not have to Okay. Okay Luna all ending in five four three two. Okay. Okay you won't now like no one added we didn't have to do this whole

Samito:
Yeah.

Samito:
Yeah.

Coach Mills:
This whole really formulaic like, do this, then do this, like which-

CaptainCoach:
Mm. See, that's interesting to me, because I never, I always wished League of Legends had voice chats. The community's still clamoring for it. They're always asking for it. so League is, League without voice is still somehow more toxic than Marvel Rivals, believe it or not. But so when I came to this game, most people, I'm very vocal in my games and sometimes not.

Coach Mills:
That would be the most toxic voice chat of all time.

Coach Mills:
So

CaptainCoach:
For the best, but I love the fact that it's so important. And for me, I view that as like a way that I can have an advantage. But I see how a lot of people, it is definitely more, I never thought of that point of view where it's like actually more casual friendly to not have to do that. I never really considered that because yeah, I mean, when you're able to just kind of kill stuff on your own,

Coach Mills:
You just get a lot of free. I feel like you get freedom I feel like mantis players get freedom right now like cuz man you can kind of just whatever you want on mantis and you can like Position aggressively. Yeah, you want to you want to engage? But that's this like supports just have to just do things in a very specific way that it's just not fun Like I can't imagine it's fun I know a lot of support players probably have never experienced anything else if you never played overwatch, but it doesn't have to be that way It could be better

Samito:
Speed engage.

Samito:
It's so fun and to give Blizzard credit. Yeah, it's valid value. You you would hate playing against super Diva. It's in five E five. It's, it's a big reason why rivals exists right now. Coach Mills and I know all about arguing for 66, man. Jesus. Um,

CaptainCoach:
I quit Overwatch because of D.

Va.

Coach Mills:
Yeah, That that that that that's that's why That's

CaptainCoach:
I also quit because I was trash at Tracer and I wanted to, like, I played exclusively backline Tracer. I don't know if that's a thing, but that's what I did. it is a thing. Is it good? Okay, then I was just trash because I tried to make it work and it never, never did. Hulk can backline. That's why I play Hulk.

Samito:
It's a thing. Yes. It's broken now. It's broken now, but yeah.

Samito:
Yeah. And Hulkin backline, like, again, like they need to create neutral. I'll let you guys take the more, more of the subject from here, but like it's, it's too telegraphed because there's no windows. If you don't do it this way and get your ults on point at this time, you are at such a massive disadvantage because it lasts for so long. There is not enough reasonable time for you to kite out and stabilize. It's not an option. They just got to open it up more.

Coach Mills:
One of the I sorry sorry sorry or you go on okay? know what I was gonna say is is I've been seeing you play a lot of overwatch now Samita because I know you're frustrated with rivals And I understand a lot of the frustrations. I agree with a lot of them, and I understand it I'm still enjoying rivals, but but but why overwatch because I think there's a I think there's an argument to play other games But I don't know about overwatch. What was it? It's driving you the perk system. You think that that's a

CaptainCoach:
No, go ahead, go ahead.

Samito:
Yeah.

Samito:
I like the perks bro, they're fun. The perks were fun. they were really to be honest with you, it was solely the Reaper perks. The Reaper perks were the most fun I've had playing Overwatch in years. And then they just removed them or nerfed them today. So that was, that was just so bad.

Coach Mills:
Okay, okay, okay, So Battlefield 6 win. When's the Battlefield 6?

Samito:
So I might need I'm waiting for my buddies. my buddy Trevor is a Trevor and Tyler. Tyler's a picture for the Mets. His season's over. He just got a TJ. Trevor is in the playoffs playing the Dodgers right now. Um, when they get, when he's done with his season, we're all going to hop on BF six together and we're going to run it because he's been, he's been trying to get us on the battlefield train for years. So we're going to let him go. Hey, listen, I never thought I'd say this, but let's go Brewers. All right, brew crew. I'm I'm Trev and the boys can get a, get a ring. That would be awesome. Listen, I'm

Coach Mills:
yeah, yeah, yeah.

Coach Mills:
shit.

Coach Mills:
nice, nice.

Coach Mills:
Good

Samito:
is saying if Trev gets a ring some Mido viewers one World Series ring reddit zero all right so that's all I could say all right fuck reddit sorry my fault

Coach Mills:
I'm wondering how you feel about the evolution of hero shooters. Right now we have two major options, which is new. Do you think that there's going be another game that will come and compete, or is it just going to be rivals and Overwatch for the rest of time?

CaptainCoach:
Mm-hmm.

Samito:
It's awesome.

Samito:
No, no, there won't be another game soon. Rivals was a one in decade game, a one in 10 years game. and the main reason it worked was because ironically they took overwatches formula, you know, that's, that's why it worked. And I don't know if you saw this, but overwatches Halloween mode, they're testing today, they're testing something similar to team ups and the format is six v six. So we'll see if they wake up because that, listen, that's realistically, that's rivals timeline. Like, look, this game rivals is never going to go away.

Coach Mills:
Hahaha

Samito:
It's going to keep its crown because its formatting was better than Overwatch 2's. It just was. Like the super tank has destroyed the core of what Overwatch was and Marvel rivals captured that with Marvel IP better than any game. Better than Concord, better than Lawbreakers, better than Gundam Evolution. You remember that game everyone was talking about that? Yeah.

CaptainCoach:
What do mean by super tank? What do you mean by super tank?

Coach Mills:
I- I love that game, it was sick, it was sick, XO. So- so, yeah.

Samito:
So, so in Overwatch 2 to make, they went from 6v6 to 5v5 with one tank and to make the tank more appealing, they gigabuffed every tank in the game. So like insane cooldowns, like quadruple the health pool. Like imagine if they put the power of two tanks into one to where like Zarya, do you remember Zarya? You remember how her bubble cooldowns were separate? Now it's a single charge. She's...

CaptainCoach:
Okay.

Coach Mills:
Yeah

CaptainCoach:
Yep. Yeah.

Samito:
600 HP with the same if not better damage than she used to had so she's got 50 % more HP her bubbles can all go to herself if you were to 1v1 a tank in overwatch as a DPS you would lose that 10 times out of 10 you would never win it one time

CaptainCoach:
You know what's funny, that's like Overwatch and Blizzard IP. I played another Blizzard game in WoW and they did the exact same thing in that to get people to play tanks. And tanks were the best 1v1 class. You couldn't beat them in PvP so much that they actually had to lower their values just so people would never play them. But they were gods in any other. So it's like a way to get people to play stuff that you need.

Coach Mills:
Yeah, like imagine if they took

Samito:
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Coach Mills:
Yeah, like, Hulk would have to be like,

Samito:
Exactly. And that's what they did because their queue times were tight. Like in order for roll lock, cause they're in roll lock now, they're not in open queue, which is another big reason I think rivals has actually taken the win is that if a single role was not getting queued, it inflated queue times for every role significantly. So in order to get people to play the tank, they made the role so good and coach Mills is working on my channel at time. And he'd tell you, we had some banger videos come out where it's just like us reacting to buffing the best characters in the game. It's like, what the f**k? Like what? And so.

Coach Mills:
18 minutes, 20 minutes, DPS queue, yeah, nonsense.

CaptainCoach:
Yeah.

Coach Mills:
Yeah.

Samito:
Now I forget how we got onto the super tank conversation. you had the format of rivals and like the, two hero shooters. you know, it.

Samito:
Rivals has a big advantage in that because again, that's what was so fun about Iron Fist. I had so many gameplay options to express myself as a DPS, right? And that's what makes Rivals fun. I'm not forced to ignore the tank and go for a support first. If a Strange feeds, I can light him up as Punisher and there's a chance that he dies, right? There's a chance that I grab somebody's Wolf and like any role can make a play on any role. And that dynamic makes the gameplay loop so much more interesting, right?

Samito:
But to answer your question, because I'm going to go off the rails here, I don't think another hero shooter is going to come out anytime soon that competes with these two.

Samito:
I think if anything, it'll be like a deadlock, like this is like in genre, like an arena hero shooter or team-based hero shooter. They're once in a decade type of games. I don't see another, I think Rivals was successful because of that formatting and the Marvel IP is really cool. They're telling the story and all of those things are still amazing for the game. Like I'm not off the Rivals train. I'm not sitting here saying I will never play this game again. It's terrible. I still love the game. They just didn't make the changes that I wanted them to make to make it more enjoyable for me. And you

Samito:
I'm just taking a break and playing the other one for now. I think the competition is actually really healthy I think both of them have very fun drops and overwatches engine feels amazing It's significantly better than rivals engine But rivals has a much more interesting gameplay loop and if they would just nerf alteration I'd be grinding it 24 7 so yeah, I don't see another one come in these two are both Great games and different they're different They're similar, but they are different, and I think it's important to know that they're they're trying to do two similar, but slightly different things

Coach Mills:
Yeah, like, Captain Coach, like, like, imagine if Hulk just had a shield and he could like, had like CC resistance. You were just the only tank. Yeah, headshot mitigation.

Samito:
Headshot mitigation. He had 50 per he fed you 50 % less ult charge if you shot him instead of any other character.

CaptainCoach:
Hmm

Coach Mills:
And the whole game you're just running around getting shot and like CC'd and booped but you're not dying It's just like impossible to kill you

CaptainCoach:
Mmmmm

CaptainCoach:
So, so lore accurate.

Samito:
Yes, yes, Laura Ockuret.

Coach Mills:
Ha ha, he he he

CaptainCoach:
Cause Hulk is, he's a little bitch. mean, he dies instantly. He dies faster than iron fist. He dies faster than a lot of

Samito:
Yeah.

Coach Mills:
Yeah, you think it's kind of fun, but when you're the only tank to do the core tanking jobs, it becomes extremely tedious for a tank as well. It does become extremely frustrating.

Samito:
You guys, because you end up stalemating with the other tank and just trading meaningless damage on each other. So like you'll have double the damage of your DPS just trading with each other because if you move, it exposes your backline. And if he moves, it exposes his. So you're, you're kind of in like this stalemate of who can hold the corner better.

Coach Mills:
And yeah, the other thing...

CaptainCoach:
Right.

Coach Mills:
Not to mention there's tanks like Orisa that are just like, neither tank gets to play the game. We're just gonna make it so neither tank does anything.

CaptainCoach:
Yeah.

Samito:
Yeah.

CaptainCoach:
Who do you think I'd like if I played Overwatch? Like, I'm gonna try it eventually. Doomfist?

Samito:
You might play Doomfist, bro. You might play Doomfist, honestly.

Coach Mills:
Doofus, Tank Doofus,

CaptainCoach:
Because, yeah, I you hit the nail on That's the reason I fell in love with Marvel Rivals, because the melee is just better than any game I've ever played. Yeah.

Samito:
Dude, you would love Doomfist. You would love him. Yeah, you would love him. He's very similar in gank style to Hulk, except his punch is so much more lethal than Hulk's. And his ult's way better too!

CaptainCoach:
Future Doomfist, mate.

Coach Mills:
Yeah, yeah, yeah, well, yeah, my Ze, Zebra is like a known Doomfist player and when he came to Rivals, he played Hulk, like per, yeah, per my Hulk, so yeah.

CaptainCoach:
Hmm.

Samito:
Yeah, you better hawk, yeah.

CaptainCoach:
Zero is who I watched to kinda made me wanna play him. Cause I guess I was a little late to the party. You mentioned Reddit.

Coach Mills:
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah,

Samito:
They love me on Reddit.

CaptainCoach:
Yeah.

Samito:
Reddit are contraindicators. If they hate you, you're doing something right.

Samito:
I could go give, I, I, I do a charity stream for Kentucky children's hospital where we were, we raised like $5,000 and it paid for the X-boxes and with kids with cancer. And if I posted about that on Reddit and get downvoted.

CaptainCoach:
Damn. Really.

Coach Mills:
You

Samito:
That's what we're talking about. That's how, that's, that's how delusional these people are. But hey, listen, all good, man. All, all in the name, all good fun. Right. Take away their keyboards. What do they have? They got to have something, right?

Coach Mills:
Hey

CaptainCoach:
Well, I was going to say, well, that's maybe we can ask. Do you think Reddit represents more of the casual community? Do you think they're listening to? No, you don't think so? No, not at all.

Samito:
You

Samito:
Reddit, this isn't just like a Reddit specific thing. This is like Yelp reviews and all that. Like people generally don't go and out of their way to talk about something unless they're angry. Right? You're like, if people are like happy with something, they don't care. They're not going to go out and say, Hey, I was so happy with this. You're gonna be like, huh, that was good. And, you know, leave it at that. I think it's a vocal minority.

Samito:
Generally speaking, people, mean granted, there's probably some dedicated people there, but you know, I don't think that they should go to Reddit as a credible source for anything.

CaptainCoach:
I feel like this game's future is just like, I don't know, like Dallas Cowboys fans or something. Just like constantly complaining about it, but still just never stopping, like watching it.

Samito:
Yeah. Well, I, and to be fair, like, I think that there are a lot of people who are happy with the game and consume the content, know, like I see people saying that there's a lot of doomer content about rivals and that's all that's left in the game. That's just not true. I don't think like, are there people who have moved on and done stuff and are there, are narratives going to change always? Yeah. But there's always going to be people consuming this stuff, man. And, know, for me, like I'm, I'm not thrilled with the state of it. And I've talked about that, but you know, the problems I have.

Samito:
It really is one thing. it, granted, it would be a big change if they did it.

Samito:
But like, if they reigned that in, the game would be much more approachable for me. But, you know, I'm just going to go play Overwatch for a month and then I'll probably pop back in. And that's the best thing you can ask for if you're a hero shooter fan. So I'm not trying to sit here and doom content the game. I just don't think there's any, you got to be real about it. There's, there's no excuse for the cycle to be as bad as it is for as long as it has. They've beat around the bush and then they want praise for a two second Luna Ult nerf. It's, it's, it's so much bigger of a problem. That's my only issue. So I think, it's a doubt.

Samito:
Cowboys fans, but you know they're gonna release Deadpool and that's gonna have massive pull in America. They're gonna release Thanos. It's gonna bring everybody in and they can do alternate modes to you know I what I think they should do that would be sick is I've always wanted blizzard to do this But it would fit better in Marvel you guys ever play like the Star Wars battlefront games back when we were kids I'm not sure got the coach remember what year were you born in? 89 okay, so you

Coach Mills:
Thanos.

CaptainCoach:
Thanos.

CaptainCoach:
Yeah.

Coach Mills:
yeah.

CaptainCoach:
Mm-hmm. 89. I'm a old man.

Samito:
So, I mean, listen, I'm about to be 29 this season. I mean, we're close. I mean, I'm 96, but you get it too, where it's like, do remember the old PS2 Star Wars Battlefront games where you could, dude, you could play as like stormtroopers or you could like occasionally get a Jedi and there was a big ground war. Like they could do, yeah, exactly. It was peak. They could easily do something formatted like that and around and maybe Thanos comes in and he is an Overwatch super tank, right? Like there's so many different things they could do with this game in the IP.

CaptainCoach:
yeah.

CaptainCoach:
That's one of the best games ever made,

Coach Mills:
yeah, it peak.

CaptainCoach:
I've seen a lot of people wanting PvE mode. I personally would love some form of an arena mode where it's more just kind of close quarters, smaller map, and it's just like a 3v3. And I think that mode would probably expose some more of the balance issues because in a mode where it's people just fighting, you just fight to the death basically, and then once you die, you're dead. No response.

Coach Mills:
Man.

Samito:
yeah.

Samito:
Yeah, something like that would be great. And that definitely would expose balance. I would definitely lean more towards like the Star Wars battle. PVE is a scary thing for Overwatch players, right? Because we had a lot, a lot of that dangle and everything. If they did it right. Yeah. Well, I mean, but they're tough. They're already telling the story in the game better than Overwatch ever did, which is, well, I shouldn't say that because the original Overwatch days when they were telling the stories with the archives events, that was, those were fire. They were fire. And then they just.

Coach Mills:
Man, imagine if Rival's got a freaking amazing story mode, man.

Coach Mills:
That's true.

Coach Mills:
Those videos were amazing, yeah. Why did they stop doing them? I don't understand.

Samito:
The internal issues. mean, the whole reason the company imploded, I would say.

Coach Mills:
The whole everything, right?

CaptainCoach:
You know what I really liked bro was the TFT mode they had. I thought they did a great job with that. I very impressed. I mean, it wasn't perfect.

Samito:
Yeah. Yeah. Was it Heroes of the Storm? Was that what it is? What was it called? Rivals! Yeah, yeah, that was cool. Yeah. Yeah.

CaptainCoach:
No, I'm talking about the Marvel Rivalous game mode. The Ultron battle protocol matrix, some craze. I thought they did a great job. It was impressive. Like, I mean, it had the same issue that any autobattler has and it's like why the autobattlers always switch their meta every month or two. Cause like once you figure out what the best stuff is, cause autobattlers are meant to be imbalanced. That's the fun of them. You try to find out what the most broken shit is and then you just, there's usually three or four comps. There's the best comp and the comp that counters it.

Coach Mills:
No though.

Coach Mills:
It shows that they could do more things. They could take it to different places.

Samito:
Yeah.

CaptainCoach:
And basically, lo and behold, since all the heroes in the auto battle are essentially mimic how they are in the game, the best comp was like three or four supports. And maybe one tank and like two DPS or some cheesy stuff like six tank, it was mostly just, but it showed that they're capable of doing other stuff at a pretty high level. I I'm really into auto battle and more.

CaptainCoach:
More of the strategy side, so maybe that's why I'm not as negative about the meta. I'm curious to see, you play Overwatch, do you have any other competitive games that you have experienced and that you've dabbled in or played?

Samito:
I mean, yeah. I mean, I played a lot. You'd say war zone. guess. I mean, I played a lot of war zone when it was out. played, you know, back original Minecraft PVP when it was at its peak with a lot, a lot of people came from that. was super competitive back in the day. I'd have to think on it though. think more so recently, not, not really, not like, you know, the, not like Overwatch, right? Where it was like Overwatch is kind of my main game for, you know, almost 10 years now. Right.

CaptainCoach:
Okay.

CaptainCoach:
Yeah.

Samito:
So yeah, it's not necessarily, but some of some on the side, but that's, that's pretty much it. would say.

Coach Mills:
How do you feel about Rival's rank system? Because I feel like there's a lot of problems with the rank system that are...

CaptainCoach:
See, that's where I got a lot of stuff I would... Is Iam

Samito:
It's not real. No, I mean, it's just the nature of the game. It's just like, are you getting a freshmen who doesn't know how to play? When I say freshmen, I mean a rookie because they make rookie mistakes and that costs you games all the time. happens. it depends on what hero they climbed on. Depends on the meta depends on like what they're flexing to. think, I think there are a lot of flaws with it, but I think that it's a, it's always going to be flawed because human beings are flawed and you got human beings with human beings and how human beings synergize with each other in a team-based game. But.

CaptainCoach:
Okay, is it the game balance that's the issue or more like the players? Are the players the blame for the low quality of the games? Or how much blame do you put on them? No? I like that answer, I like that answer a lot.

Coach Mills:
So this this no

Samito:
No, no, not, no, I think a lot of the way the game's design creates more problems in that again, like if a support alts not used on point, if your supports don't use the old font point and you could be the best DPS on 80 % of the DPS roster games over, there's no window for you. That's why I'm saying you need to expose the neutral, right? Because the alts are so powerful. They want to fill the hero fantasy in the game that.

CaptainCoach:
No, I heart agree with that.

Coach Mills:
Ahem.

Samito:
It's you can't outskill a lot of them. And that's a big part of why this game is so fun for so many people. Right. Is that, yo, what's a, what's an insane ultimate. Right. I mean, compare a whole goal to like, I don't know. Luna old, right. It's like, you could have, you could give a gorilla a banana and have him press his Q key and the Luna old is going to get value on point. Right. But if you're playing.

CaptainCoach:
Hehehe

CaptainCoach:
There is a 0 % chance a Hulk can ever kill a Luna in her ult 1v1. And it will never happen. It's not possible.

Samito:
Never, never. It will never happen. Exactly. And that's exactly why they need to open up more of the neutral in the game. And I think if they open up more of the neutral in the game and allow for more skill expression to win out over the insane, like insanely powerful abilities, like the hero design in this game is so volatile. That's a part of why it's so fun, but it's also super volatile. And it's not even across these characters. It's nowhere close. Like to be frank, and this is where I am in the single support players out.

CaptainCoach:
Yeah.

Samito:
The supports in this game get so much easy value compared to any other game I've ever played. Rocket res beaking being a free res to start the fight in an unbreakable spot on a lot of defenses is crazy. I'm not saying things like Black Panther aren't broken. They are, and he should get reworked. like these top of the list of characters should get reworked in my opinion. but. Rock like heroes like rocket. It's just like, you can just have players who if they actually had to use their inputs.

Samito:
Would be three skill tiers below where they are. They don't need any, like, this is just facts. Like, I'm sorry, it's facts.

Coach Mills:
We're getting a support person on the podcast next week. Next week. Don't worry. Don't worry. What support person?

CaptainCoach:
Coach Mills is one third offended. He's a fill player.

Samito:
And you can. No, but it's true. It's true. like, listen, I like playing these characters. Like, I'm not gonna deny, but like, dude, I could pop an edible and play Rocket off my rocker. Like, it's not hard. It's not... Yeah. And I'm not saying that you aren't skilled for climbing. That's not what I'm saying. I'm not saying it takes no skill to climb at all, but it's such a massive crutch compared to playing fucking Iron Fist, right? Like, it's... Or...

CaptainCoach:
Hey, now you're speaking my language, sir. We call those Gamma Gummies.

Samito:
Any of the, or any tank, like it's so it's not, I think a big part of it is the hero design. The hero design allows for players to be boosted to ranks that if you had to rely on actual decision making, they would be nowhere near. And a lot of that is ult duration. A lot of that is how easy it is to heal. And a lot of that is free value ults, even in the DPS role too. Like some of them are there, right? They've nerfed squirrel girl, right? They nerf stuff like that where it's like, you know, Hey, so I think some of it's the system.

Samito:
A lot of its hero design, part of it's on the player, like, it's not the player's fault the game is gonna elo slingshot them for doing the bare minimum. So I actually, thinking about it, would say it's more of the game than the players.

Coach Mills:
One thing I kind of wanted to shout out my boy, Deft, this was his theory about some of the problems with the ranked system. I don't hear what y'all have to say about it. So because we have resets every single month or every two months, no placements, the problem is lobbies are not actually balanced because someone could be in a certain rank, they played the whole season and they're at that rank. Or someone could be someone new, they took a break, they're picking up the game, it says they're in Diamond, but they're really like a peak eternity player.

Samito:
Those are bad too, by the way. Those are bad too.

CaptainCoach:
They do too much.

Samito:
Yeah.

Coach Mills:
And like the lobbies are just super unbalanced and they will perpetually get less balanced because of all the resets.

Samito:
They need placements. They need placements and the way they've, like, the ranks, yeah, the system is the problem. Straight up. The system is like, they gotta improve it, placements have gotta come in. And again, this is Nettie's first, this is the most mobile game rank system ever. I play a lot of Raid Shadow Legends. That's the main game I play outside of all these shooters and shit, right?

CaptainCoach:
100%.

Samito:
How that game works is like you rank up by playing over time. It's play to win. And so you can see that a lot of the system where it starts everyone and brought it's the it's a mobile game company. They've never done this before. Right.

CaptainCoach:
Yeah.

CaptainCoach:
That's kind of why I asked about if you played other ranked games, because I knew we were going to ask about this, is the ranked curve in Marvel Rivals is, it is a curve, which it shouldn't be. Most EOM systems, or EOM system, what am I talking about? E-LO systems. I'm like a conspiracy theorist. Like a flat earther, so I'm like, kids, I'm thinking about it. It's supposed to be a linear.

Samito:
hahahaha

Samito:
Yeah. Yeah, yeah.

Coach Mills:
I like that.

Samito:
Yeah.

CaptainCoach:
It's supposed to be linear. You gain a certain amount. If anyone back in like the old school league days, maybe you play chess on like chess.com or something, that's more what it will look like. You win roughly the same amount as you lose. there's none of this progression based off of time played. It's purely based off of skill. it's so odd, right? you like, they basically design their system.

CaptainCoach:
To, you can lose your way up to what, like celestial? Right? Pretty close, I mean, and.

Samito:
Something. mean, yeah.

Coach Mills:
Negative win rates can climb because of performance.

Samito:
Dude, their performance system measures things so bad. This, this, this sent me through a roof. I was pissed. was pissed. Okay. I get a freshman, a hard freshman. Okay. In I'm trying to push to my eternity game. Right. And you guys know how ranked works. Do you want to climb in these games? It's not about making plays. It's about not making mistakes. That's the best players do. They know how to not make mistakes. So I have a, a GM one player.

Coach Mills:
Makes no sense.

Samito:
I am Celestial One, okay? And the lobby is GM One to Celestial One. I'm about to hit my eternity game, right? And my GM One is a nice guy, calming, trying to win, but is openly admitting that he's clueless, right? He's playing tank. He's frontlining every fight, taking so much pre-fight, just feeding before the cart gets around the corner on Arako. We're pushing second point Arako. He's up on height, rounding into the corner while the payload is not up and around in the corner. So I'm playing support trying to bail him out. I'm my brother.

Samito:
You just need to not take damage until the cart gets up to this point. Maybe I was playing Skorogh, I forget what I was playing, right? But he's taking so much damage, he's dying 50 % of the time before the fight. I have the best DPS stat line in the game. We win the game, I get 19 and he gets 25 after taking enormous amounts of damage. And I'm like, dude, this guy is almost losing us every fight and he's putting us in a deficit every fight?

Samito:
And he's getting rewarded for more elo for winning the game than I am for carrying the game and the system thinks that he's ha- like, if I'm not on this team microing this guy, we're losing this game. And, like, he is losing on his own without me. And I'm getting less than he is because the lobby average is lower. The whole thing is fucked. The whole thing is fucked.

CaptainCoach:
If you're a higher rank, get less. The higher you go, you get less. The performance...

Samito:
Yeah.

Coach Mills:
Do you want like flat gains past a certain rank? Like no performance? It's like something like plus.

Samito:
If they could measure it right, maybe you could do performance, but they don't, their, their stats don't measure things correctly. Taking damage, damage blocked is a bad stat. It's a bad stat. That's all that's like, like if you're, well, you're on Hulk, you're different. You're different. Like it depends on when, right? And there's no way a scoreboard can tell you when it's valuable and when it's not. Right. The whole thing about being a good DPS player is trying to do the most with the least.

Coach Mills:
It's terrible.

CaptainCoach:
I disagree with that, but I'm curious to hear what you- yeah.

Samito:
Because you want to put as much resource into your tank as possible, right? So I'm trying to do as much as I can, whilst requiring the least amount from

Transcribe the entire thing
Here is the full transcript of the clip:

Coach Mills:
Right, guys, welcome to Clearcombs episode three. Today we're joined by our special guest, Samito. Hey, Samito, how you doing?

Samito:
What's up, gentlemen? Thank you guys for having me. I think this will be a good one. I mean, anybody who's used to having me on a show is there's a lot of gas, not a lot of breaks. So this will be a fun one for sure.

Coach Mills:
Yeah, and and yeah, we're coming together here to talk about primarily the state of rivals the state of balance the state of hero shooters Rivals versus overwatch. I think a lot of like myself. I'm pretty I'm a pretty positive sentiment about rivals right now but Samito represents a much different opinion that I'm gonna let him articulate in a second and Captain coach somewhere in the middle. So yeah, let's let's kind of just jump right in I know you played 4.5. What?

CaptainCoach:
Ha ha ha.

Coach Mills:
I know you

Samito:
Look, I think there's no excuse for the game to not be in a better spot than what it is. I know everybody's talking about Daredevil and he is cool. Like, the one thing I'll give Rivals credit for is like the character animations and stuff they have on the melee characters. It's insane. It's awesome. It's the best I've ever played. But to my issue is that they've had a year and a half to address the sustain and stalling and ult cycles. And frankly, they've done a terrible job of doing what needs to be done.

Samito:
I don't think that it's in the best interest of the game to make excuses for the balance team who want praise for nerfing Luna for two seconds if it's not a much bigger picture issue than that. When there's not enough neutral in the game. There's too much just spam and trading and stalling forever that if they got rid of that because they have so many characters that...

Samito:
Do all kinds of amazing things like Iron Fist, Daredevil, like that stuff could not, I mean you could say Genji, right, in Overwatch, stuff like that, sure, right, but the way that Rivals does it with like the character animations, they have so many awesome characters that could shine so much more with individual playmaking that their gameplay loop with all the stall and aggressive sustain and ults across the board, I'm not just, and I know, you go on X and say, you got a nerf support alteration, everybody freaks out, I'm saying that

Samito:
All of these ults should have their duration nerf to open up much more of Nuke's Troll in the game. And after a year and a half of watching this, the gameplay loop is stale because of that when it shouldn't be. Map pulls have no reason to be in the game when there's only like eight maps. Again, makes it even more stale. They are adding more, but it's like, you don't have, like it was bad when Overwatch 2 did it and they had...

Samito:
Eight years of maps that they built in the game and people still didn't like it. So, you know, I think that they're dropping the ball on very easy things and they haven't made a meaningful changes to the gameplay loop other than saying, here's the Nemours, Nemours fifth team up in a year and a half that makes them good. we're going to pick and choose the characters that get heal mitigation instead of addressing the problem. That is a lot of the sustained install duration. So the content's cool. They're telling the story. It's great.

Samito:
But they've dropped the ball when it comes to the gameplay loop and really doing what needs to be done to cut the low hanging fruit down for the game.

Coach Mills:
Cause that's like, I know like in Overwatch, depending on, I know we've had tons of ultimate nerf changes throughout Overwatch's history, but it's typically like two or three whole fights before ultimates come online for most characters. But Rivals, it's like half a fight, maybe. All the ultimates are online. So is that like the big, your big fix is like, you just need like nerf ultimate charge, or is it like the power of the ults?

Samito:
It's not even charged. listen, I think nerfing ultimate charge across the board could help. think it could help, but it's the duration of how long the ults last too. Like in Overwatch, like they're, need to actually let you be able to kite support ults and re-engage without your team dying. If your team, if they get a support ult off on point and your team doesn't or your supports are like,

Samito:
What am I allowed to say on this show? What am I allowed to... If they're huffing glue in the back line and I've got a Luna Snow on a controller that's never played a hero shoot before and I'm trying to climb up and I'm watching her troll while nightmares go straight down mid on Thor with 10 deaths, pretend I can't win the game because my Luna will not ult. The game's over because there's 15 seconds for their team to regroup because there's a cloak and dagger ult. And if I see one more cloak and dagger player on Twitter, sit there and tell me,

Coach Mills:
Whatever you want bro, whatever you want.

CaptainCoach:
Hehehehehe

Coach Mills:
Yeah

Samito:
Actually, Samino, the Cloak and Dagger ult lasts for 8 seconds, yet you lay down 4 of them and the animation lasts 4. It's a 12 to 15 second ultimate. Support ults in Overwatch last for 6 seconds, 6 at the most. And if it's Kitsune, you can kill through Kitsune. Even Juna ult moves slow and you can kill through it. There is no play to make, none, on support ults in Marvel Rivals unless you are playing 3 or 4 DPS in the game.

Samito:
And if you don't realize, and I don't even want to say DPS, could be 10, this is why Mag has been the best tank in the game since the game came out, because he always can kill through a support ult. They last too long. And I don't want the game to become, support ults last six seconds and now Punisher ult is eight seconds and so like the DPS ult wins, nerf Punisher ult duration down to that same length too. But it's, there's not enough window for actual skilled players in the ranked mode to recognize that a support ult is on point.

Samito:
If you don't have one, can kite it out and re-engage. It makes the game so much more interesting. And so that's what I'm saying. I'm saying you probably should nerf the build rate too. Make it harder to build ults across the board. You could do that if you want. But really, man, especially for defenders advantage in this game, if you get a support off on point, nobody's going to die. And if, your whole team is going to regroup and it lasts forever. Even if you've gotten picks to win a fight in a game that has

Samito:
A ton of rocket beacons and I will say to give them credit I think the rocket raccoon ult rework was one of the best ones they did because guess what you don't have to be on a specific hero to counter it if it's bad everybody can shoot it no matter what character you're on maybe they're not in cloak and dagger you can't break it right but you guys get what I mean like 90 % of the cast can be smart and make a play against it that's not true for cloak ult I mean again there are like maybe six or seven characters that can pull cloak out or one shot or do whatever but it's definitely not true for Luna ult

Samito:
So, I mean, a lot of them need to get reined in and they just, they beat around the bush and then want praise with some silly joke in their packs. I'm like, I get their sense of humor, but that really rubbed me the wrong.

CaptainCoach:
I got a question for you. was recently watching Flats just the other day posted a of a rant on the state of the game and he was a bit more positive about it, but he made a good point, which is that the game has now been out for almost a year and obviously there's been a pretty steep player drop off. I think it's like 80, 90%. And he said that most of the casual people are all playing whatever Battlefield 6 right now.

CaptainCoach:
The casual Marvel Rivals fans and that the true player base is now the people who have stuck with the game and now it's kind of where it's bottomed out. You make a point that the support alts are obviously like too strong. Do you think that is Nettie's maybe catering to casual players too much or like more of an emphasis on like team fight and teamwork because or big playmaking you could say because like Magneto Walt, right?

Samito:
Yeah. I think they've misunderstood playmaking because you've seen them make a lot of, we're going to remember what kind of company is that is. They're a mobile game company, right? So for their first hero shooter to come out and have it do this is very successful. And they should be very proud of that from where, cause let's not forget when they first tweeted out the screenshot of characters you saw on an unknown, they were going to sell characters, but they saw how bad the reception was when Overwatch hit it and they pulled it. they've, they, to their credit, they've been flexible.

Samito:
I think that they think, one, they aren't wrong when they say that Marvel Rivals is gonna do a better job of grabbing those casual players than any other game in the genre will because it's the Marvel IP. If they came out and said Deadpool's in the game tomorrow, you're gonna have a ton of North American comic book fans who love Deadpool getting on and like, I'm gonna try out your Deadpool in this game.

Samito:
Because that's what people want to do. Daredevil is the same way. The trailers, the cinematics, you're tapping into such a massive fan base of people that already exist that are going to come try this game because of these characters that other games don't have. So they are right that it's going to get more casuals. Where they're wrong is they think that the ults have to last that long to feel super powerful. And they can do both, right? Because the casuals just want to get on and try out their character. If Cloak Ult is lasting...

Samito:
Six seconds, and so, like, I think that Ult needs to get reworked altogether, for one. I think it should just be, if this is you have to do to make it, like, a reasonable duration, maybe you can control where the character actually goes. It's not just straight lines, but it only lasts for eight seconds. Like, one big, like, rush movement. Yeah. Something like that. Because you can't, you can't have it last eight seconds total and have it be, like, the locked in place thing. Like, why are we locking it in place? Like, it lets them have more counterplay to actually dodge incoming damage, too.

Coach Mills:
Like a paintbrush, right? Or yeah, you can. Yeah, yeah.

CaptainCoach:
Hmm.

Samito:
I don't mind that if you rein it into seven, eight seconds duration and maybe up the healing of the pal- I don't know, I don't care what you do. It just can't be 12, 14 seconds, right? Because you still get the hero fantasy. What they don't want to destroy is the hero fantasy, and they're right. You can't do that. But if the ult's lasting for 14 seconds and you're adding more and more characters in the game, where's my hero fantasy on Iron Fist when I'm tickling them in an ult for 14 seconds and can't get anything to happen?

CaptainCoach:
Yeah.

Samito:
It's not there, right? And I'm not saying I should be able to kill through it, but I'm saying there should be reasonable decisions and abilities so it's not tic-tac-toe, but a game of chess instead. Because you can keep that floor low and keep these people in and coming to the game, but also reward smart players in the ceiling, where I'm like looking at the fight now and I'm saying, there's no way I can outplay this. I can't go in, and they're adding so many more characters too. This problem's only gonna get worse, right? If you aren't the character that gets the heal, if they say, you know what, if you're

Samito:
You get to be in Nemora and Venom this season where we're going to add these Giga heal sustain. Okay, well what if those characters are like, it's not a healthy solution where you open up playmaking to the entire cast a lot by bringing those ults specifically in so that every, it's not about what character has the heal mint, right? And you can nerf the DPS ults. take, I would trade Iron Fist ult, which is like a 12 second duration, down to eight or nine seconds if they took the support ults down. Because if they support ult early and my teammate like,

Samito:
Has three seconds of life left, right? I can stall those three seconds, stall his life, and instead of waiting, you know, nine seconds for that ult to come up when all of their neutral cooldowns will be back if they misuse them, it's six seconds, right? So I can go in with my Iron Fist ult at the three second mark of that ult being down, draw more CDs to me, and they don't have time to full reset everything. Like, there's a way for me to go in there, be smart, and turn that fight. That's not taking away from that casual player's experience. That's giving me a veteran player a chance to come in and make a play happen.

Samito:
But there's no room for that, especially when attacking. Casuals don't like permanent stall either, right? And in fact, it might actually affect them more when they're, especially the abilities are easier to use in this game. So, so that was a very long answer, but go ahead.

Coach Mills:
Yeah, and the thing is like they've proven that they can make supports that can get value in the neutral too. Characters like Adam, characters like Mantis, even Jeff. So why is there four We Can't dials in the game already? Like I don't understand because those actually, it makes it so all of these play, the neutral playmaking, they have to keep it like nerfed or else it's triple support. Why is that even exists? I don't understand why just invisible, there should be like one.

Coach Mills:
Like maybe one immortal ult and then come up with some creative, more creative ults like in Overwatch. We have a lot of creative ults, lot of creative, even like nano or whatever. Yeah.

Samito:
Yeah, with like kitsune, stuff like that, to add on to that. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And to add on to that as well, you know, the only answer to it can't be just combo into it, right? Because you're relying on team synergy and that drives a lot of casual players away. Cause I've seen the guys in my rank would try to climb up and they're clueless. And that's not necessarily a bad thing. Cause this game has brought a lot more people into the genre. But if you reduce the duration, right? Of these ults, then it's, you're not forcing people to combo.

Samito:
To get the stall off or you're not forcing it. I had some guy on Twitter tell me, just pick Jean. It's like, that's the problem. Dude, Jean's one character and I don't want to get on this game just to play Jean. Like, I should be able to have the choice of some flexibility. And so what your point is, you're right. Like, it's actually okay if they have a couple different types of quote unquote unkillable support ults, but they last so long right now. It's like a guaranteed fight win if you can't match it or do it properly. But if they last less time,

Samito:
People get caught out more, there's more neutral mistakes, there's more like on the player rather than doing everything for you. And ultimately that's why we play a game. Nettie's gonna have to learn, know, obviously you want those casual players taking on, but that's where Flats is right to come back to your court. We made it full circle. We did a bit of a weave there, but we did get a full circle where you're right, where like they need to just peel back and the game would feel so much better, dude. It would feel so much better to play if they did that. But for me, that's where my burnout's coming from.

CaptainCoach:
Hehehe.

Coach Mills:
And what would you say to... because we actually have a lot of support players that watched this pod. They got pissed off at us last time for talking shit about support. But what would you say to them that are afraid that you just want to gut their role? That's what they're afraid of. What would you say?

Samito:
Yeah.

Samito:
I'm telling you, I'm saying you shouldn't be, because I'm saying to nerf all the DPS duration too. Nerf all of them. would nerf nerf Starlord ult down to six seconds, nerf Iron Fist ult down to eight seconds, nerf Punisher ult a couple seconds of duration. Every duration based ult should, for the DPS, should get nerfed in tandem with those support ults too. So it's not just them and like every ult, so like when I, when I'm saying this, I'm saying it's all of them. And if you increase the support ult duration, increase the DPS ult duration, like to get, sorry, the build rate.

Samito:
For the support ults, increase the DPS by the exact same amount. So like the build time would not be faster on DPS than support. It would be the exact same. It still be about how you play. It's just all of those ults would not last as long collectively. It's a universal pullback. And by the way, Overwatch did this too numerous times over the years. They did it in Goats meta. They did it, I think in Rollock once as well. When the game first came out, like...

Samito:
The Overwatch went through the exact same thing. And it's not about one role versus another. The support ults are obviously a more outlandish example. But again, it's like, it's about individual playmaking. And that actually, if those support ults are ending in less time and they're adding more offensive supports to the game, like with different ult types, it would give you...

Samito:
More chance to win if you were making the correct play if they add a kitsune or if they add a rocket ult, right? A big reason why rocket ult is so bad is because if you cloak ult on point, it gives them 14 seconds to walk up and break it. But if they only have it for eight, right? That's a much more, where do I place the ult? Do they have the time to actually do this? Can we actually walk forward into this damage as much if we don't have as much time to sustain? The game becomes, the game gains like two to three times more depth in these fights rather than just.

Samito:
Fighter game button mash at each other and I'm not talking high skill ceiling fighter game I'm talking like the noobs when you first start playing a button mash right so it's not just yeah it's not just targeting support players this is this is a thing across the game for each role

Coach Mills:
Noob sidebar, right? Yeah.

CaptainCoach:
Like what you said about power fantasy where you pop your iron fist salt and then you just hit a cloak and you can't do anything. Do you think that the support alts being as long and as strong as they are is a result of just them trying to future proof all the power creep that's kind of being introduced to the game? Or do you think power creep is even an issue? Because I like with Phoenix and Emma, those are probably two S tier characters just released. And I think Daredevil is right there with it. I feel like the game is just moving towards a way where if

CaptainCoach:
You have this equalizer in a support alt, like you said, the checkers rather than chess where it kind of makes it easier for them to balance while making the character still BOP. That's me trying to give goodwill to netties and their, you get what I'm saying?

Samito:
Yeah. Yeah, but I'd argue that if the support ults were... I don't, for one, I don't think it's Power Creep, I think it's all hero fantasy. They've made it really clear they want everyone to feel like a superhero and they want to nail the hero fantasy of game. And I think that's great. I think that's one of the things that makes Nettys and, or makes Rivals such a fun game is like, dude, like you really do feel like you're playing a superhero. And that won't go away. Like, like that, like...

Samito:
Giving people more opportunity to make plays as their superhero actually lets them live more characters live true to their hero fantasy because every character will have greater windows of opportunity to take advantage of their hero fantasy. When it's a giant stall or you hit the Iron Man alt which ends up getting held hostage by Mag or whatever it might be, you know, for cloak players for example where I said they should change cloak alt to eight seconds but give her one big beam.

Samito:
You actually have the, you'll have the ability to control your character, right? You, as a player, will be able to control your hero fantasy more than you can right now. And everybody would win in my mind. So I don't think it's power creep. think if ults lasted less time, think heroes like Emma would be even better, actually. Because again, you could, they wouldn't be able to stall out those support ults so long for all of their cooldowns to be back. Like for example, say Luna ult lasted six and a half seconds, right?

Samito:
You burst down the mag shield and the bubble on the first cycle and then the Luna ults to bail them out. You could ult with three seconds left on that Luna ult and that mag shield and bubble won't be back yet. So then the Luna ults ending as the mag is there. So stuff like that. Like I'd argue you almost have more playmaking potential. To answer your question though. No, I don't think it's about power creep. I think it really is about hero fantasy for them with a Marvel game that is very important, but I don't think it actually takes away from it. I think it lets more characters on the cast live up to their fantasy rather than one out.

Coach Mills:
Yeah, that's interesting about thinking about Power Creep. think... Let's see their track record. think Blade was released fairly balanced if not underpowered. Gene was definitely released extremely overpowered. Like, completely overpowered. Emma overpowered thing? Probably fine. Underpowered, maybe. Ultron? Ultron was probably underpowered on release, I think.

Samito:
Insane. Insane. She was crazy.

Samito:
He was fine. Torch was underpowered, I would say.

CaptainCoach:
He was-

CaptainCoach:
I disagree on Torch being underpowered. I thought he was good. I think it just took people a little time to learn the tech. That's fair.

Samito:
I think he was clunky too, you're right. But I do think he was clunky and Spider-Man was also pretty good that season I think and he didn't have his like crazy stuff before. I think it's a bit of both. I think it's a bit of both. But I will say Torch was good. He was solid regardless. I think he was solid.

Coach Mills:
It's definitely interesting because I think a lot of people are gonna be afraid of power creep especially when they're releasing a hero a month Which is by the way insane I think like regardless of what Nettie's does right or wrong balance wise just the fact that they're releasing a character a month is just like something unheard of I think that that's actually wild

Samito:
Yeah.

Samito:
Yeah.

CaptainCoach:
League used to do that in its infancy. They actually had every patch they'd introduced two or three at a time, but they couldn't keep that up. again, balance became a huge issue. And over time, they eventually slowed it down to about five or six a year. And I think that probably the same is going to happen to this game eventually. I mean, it just kind of goes back to what we were talking about with team captain last week, which is how much do they already have planned out versus what they're making up kind as they go.

Coach Mills:
Daft daft.

Samito:
Yeah.

CaptainCoach:
I kind of wanted to talk a bit about the hero changes, specifically your hero. That's actually how I found out about you was I was playing Iron Fist and I was looking for, I wanted to learn how to play him because I hadn't even started making content yet. And I'm like, this guy looks amazing. I saw you and Necro's playing him. How do you feel like the balance has gone? Because he's your favorite hero, right? Because he's gone in a strange direction. Yeah.

Samito:
Yeah.

Samito:
Yeah.

Coach Mills:
Yeah, what is going on with him?

Samito:
Ruined him. Ruined him. Ruined him. Let's keep doubling down on the same concept that took away all of the depth of his gameplay. There were very few Iron Fist players in Season 0, and he was hard to play, but he was so dynamic, right? Like, you had numerous playstyle options that you could have. Like, you weren't a big damage threat, but it was just enough on Squishies to where if you went backline and they misused a cooldown,

CaptainCoach:
Okay.

Samito:
You had a choice to kick and get the finish and try to get out or kick back into the tank while splitting the two teams. It was a lot like DPS Doomfist, which I'm not sure. Are you familiar with how DPS Doomfist played in Overwatch, Captain Coach?

CaptainCoach:
I didn't play- I played Overwatch for about a month. I didn't stick around too long.

Samito:
Okay. So DPS, I know, I know coach Mills knows that he was, he was a menace and he was one of my best characters in the game. I hit rank one playing. I'm like, he was, and he was, listen, I acknowledge completely. was corny.

Samito:
But if you knew how to play him, my god, you would make people hate their existence. What he was so good at was initiating a backline and making a choice to either finish the kill on the backline or punch back into a tank, splitting teams and essentially, like, I would compare the enemy team to being the Red Sea and you were Moses walking through it. And you could split and choose whatever side and create a pinch from inside their team and creating a kill box.

Samito:
Just from hitting backline, right? Iron Fist was the same way in Season 0, where you had enough, just enough damage to threaten the Luna Mantis and either force an ult, create a kill, or force them to heal each other to where the tanks weren't getting healed. So the tank exchange was happening and you could kick back into a low HP tank, stabilize on your tanks and pounce on that target and finish them. They then, the problem with him in that season why he was bad is that his kick and it was a 15 second cooldown and his block started at 12.

Samito:
So you have a melee based character that has insane downtime and fights. so despite that still had like a 53, 54 % win rate at a really low pick rate in GM plus before Celestial. So he was viable. I liked it because I can choose to punch on a tank or I can choose to punch on a back line. But I said this in season zero and I hit like one above all. was like, I was one of like two or three iron fist ranked in top a hundred that season. I said, if they, if they nerf his damage against squishies at all from this point, he's horrible immediately.

Samito:
Then what they did is they tried to rework his damage to be percentage based damage, which net nerfed his damage in squishies by like 15%. But gave him better cooldowns, way too good cooldowns. They then reverted the cooldown buff and left him with this HP percentage damage, which is worse against 80%. You can't have a DPS that has horrible matchups against all other squishies in the game. You can't. So how they kind of force his play style is to just literally be a

Samito:
I hate, I hated this term for Doomfist so much because it really undersold his loop and what you could do. That everybody called him a punch bot. And I was like, that is such a lame way to describe this character. However, they made Iron Fist a punch the tank bot where your only option really is to farm off their tanks. So what happens if they go triple DPS? What happens if they don't run two tanks? What happens if they run tanks that you can't really brawl? Right. And look, I'm not saying the character's bad necessarily.

Samito:
I'm saying he's not fun because he used to be so versatile and the more they hone in on the HP percentage damage on enemy max HP, the less fun it's gonna be for tank players and the less versatile one of the coolest characters I've ever seen in the hero shooter can be. This is the complete wrong direction to go for the character. And it's really disappointing for me to see them continue to do this for him because...

Samito:
It makes him so one dimensional when he's really not a one dimensional character. His mobility, his wall climb, the ability to absorb damage, the pressure cooldowns. It's just, he's not a threat. You have no chance of killing anything. Like in season zero, you couldn't kill through a cloak bubble. You still can't kill through a cloak bubble. There's plenty of answers for this guy, even if his damage isn't horrendous against squishies. But you know,

Samito:
It's alarming to me to see them double down. Not even double, they're like quadrupling down on this budget Wolverine direction for a guy that's the coolest brawler I've ever seen in a game. It's wasted potential, man. I just rambled, so if you have questions, let me know.

Coach Mills:
Well, one of the things that's, it's definitely weird. I think there's, Rivals is doing this weird thing where Rivals is definitely like the place to go if you're into melee characters. Cause like, there's no DPS Doomfist anymore. They have so many varieties of melee characters, just tons of them. But at the same time, I feel like Rivals has consistently catered to people, especially in Loilo. I don't want to call too many specific groups out, but people in Loilo complaining about dive and mobility heavy characters.

Samito:
yeah.

CaptainCoach:
100 percent.

Coach Mills:
Like Iron Fist, BP, Spider-Man, every mobility heavy character has gotten complaints from the community and then they've gotten nerfed or changed. Even Iron Fist's identity, feels like who cares what tanks care? Who cares about things that bully tanks? Support players, we can't have anything that bullies support players. We gotta change it.

Samito:
Well, he didn't bully, so here's my argument to those people. He was the only one who didn't bully them. BP can instantly one frame one shot you. Spider-Man can pull you across the map and combo you. Like, he was the most telegraphed one of them all. He was, his time to kill was not insane. He's in your face. He has to slowly cross the map. His escape ability is tied to his lethality. So he has to choose between killing you with the kick or getting out.

Coach Mills:
I agree, Slow.

Samito:
And if you don't shoot his block, he doesn't get the shields he needs. He had more counterplay out of any of those characters. Captain America, Black Panther, Spider-Man, Venom. He had the most counterplay out of them all. But because a couple game journalists ranked him as the number one most broken character in the game at launch, which is crazy! It's crazy, like what, like my god!

CaptainCoach:
What I'm telling you, man, it goes back to what I was saying. Like I hadn't even touched shrank yet. I was just learning the game and watching some Sumito streams and videos and I was playing iron fist and I, I probably won 20 games in a row and quick plays cause he stomps, he stomps new players cause he gets the shield after a kill. And then, and that's why, again, why I say, think they, they're really trying to cater to casuals, like way more than people think. I think that's the big issue, but I'm curious to hear your, like you, think that's what it is too then.

Samito:
Snoop Stomper. Yeah.

Samito:
They are. You're right.

Samito:
It is 100 % what it is, right? It's an entry level game, but again, it's like, ultimately you have to invest in your learning curve.

Coach Mills:
Do we need to cater? Do we need to cater to casuals at all? I don't understand. Because casuals will come, they'll play the game regardless. We got a new character every month. Yeah, exactly. So who cares what it's balanced? Why are we getting some random people on Reddit and they complain about Iron Fist when they have only put 10 hours into the game? They don't understand cycles. Yeah.

CaptainCoach:
It's the biggest mistake I think all...

Samito:
They're playing for the IP. They're playing for the IP.

Samito:
It's silly because he's telegraphed and it's like listen like you have to learn to not like it's simple Don't shoot block and I'm not saying you should walk in and one shot you but it's crazy to complain about iron fist because like listen if you're gonna have a character that doesn't require aim, right? Does it have other drop-offs? He had a bad time to kill

Samito:
He doesn't have instantaneous mobility across the map and his lethality, his real kill ability is his kick, is his only escape option from the fight. So there's real decision making there that you have to sacrifice. In the same way that Winston is a high skill ceiling hero that doesn't require aim in Overwatch, like Iron Fist is like the Winston of DPS for the melee based characters. Like he doesn't have that. So I honestly don't understand their thinking at all, Captain Coach, when it comes to Iron Fist. It doesn't make sense to me at all.

Coach Mills:
No, and yeah. And also like compare the changes, because I've been playing in Maiden Bucky and the DPS roles since season zero, I hit eternity on Bucky, like only. Bucky is so power crept from zero. Like if you compare Iron Fist and Bucky side by side since season zero, it's like Iron Fist went down and Bucky went extremely high. It's like they only want characters good, or good, for like casual players that

Coach Mills:
Don't actually threaten you, but just deny things. If your job is just standing there to deny things, then they're okay with it being good.

CaptainCoach:
Okay, then how do you ex-

CaptainCoach:
How do you explain Hela then right now? Like the current state of Hela? Cause that's...

Coach Mills:
Casual players can't No casual player can aim. So they're okay with that character being infinitely, infinitely busted. can, as long as, as long as it's not destroying, you know, quick play lobbies or bronze lobbies, they're okay with it being busted. That's, that's the, that's.

CaptainCoach:
Right. Sure.

Samito:
Yeah. Same with Gene.

CaptainCoach:
Okay, follow up, then why do think they're pushing the competitive scene so much? Because in their defense, it does keep most competitive games very close when the skill level is pretty easy to obtain by all teams, you know what I mean? It's all just cool down usage, pretty much.

Coach Mills:
Yeah,

Samito:
I think...

Samito:
I think they just miss under, think Iron Fist is an outlier. I think they genuinely just don't understand that character. Like he truly is a character that like, I'll be blunt, there are very few people that actually fundamentally understand what that character is capable of.

CaptainCoach:
He's genuinely, or was genuinely very difficult. A lot of decisions.

Coach Mills:
it

Samito:
Yeah, yeah, he was

Coach Mills:
I mean for a while I felt like they had no idea what they were doing with Thor 2 for a long time I think Thor is in an okay place now But it felt like they did like five changes in a row on Thor that made no sense from like a Thor mains point of view

Samito:
Yeah.

Samito:
And this is where I agree with you, Captain Coach, where like, think eventually their hero release schedule is going to have to slow down and they're going to need to go into a lot of these characters. And I saw a vast tweet about this. He's like, this will never be a problem. Like, out of sarcasm, he'd be like, you know, like, Hey, like this is, he was right. Like it's going to be an issue at some point. Right. Um.

Coach Mills:
you

CaptainCoach:
Yeah.

Samito:
I don't want to hone in too much on Iron Fist and act like they've messed up the whole game in terms of design. Like some of the designs are super sick, man. I think that's just one... I think Iron Fist, they've dropped the ball on the most because I think they're trying to make some of these characters be too unique. But the reality is the way his kit functions already was unique in its own way, right? You just...

Samito:
It was so different from Panther. He's all about occupying space for long durations of time. You didn't have to reinvent the wheel with him. Go back to his Season Zero values and just make his cooldown not be 15 seconds on a melee character, right? You know, keep it at 12, 10.

Samito:
And he's fine, right? Make players have to figure it out. but as for Gene and Hello, I think you guys are right when you talk about like, it's not OP for super casual players. We'll never understand that. But again, you don't have to sacrifice competitive integrity to make casuals happy. If you want to make casuals happy, come out with engaging new content, skins, modes, heroes, right? That are from the IP that they like.

Samito:
I think that you should always cater your game to a competitive audience, mainly because those are the people that you retain. That's how you keep it around. Those swing players are going to come in whenever you do something interesting, but you've got to make the game skill to reward curve engaging and fun. And that's the big reason why I also want those ults durations nerf because my skill doesn't matter when the ults outweigh any decision making that I as a player can make to understand how to kite ults. If that's not even an option for me.

Samito:
I can't make plays because bronze Andy over there, the plot support player presses Q on point. And all of sudden now one above all player can't carry a low game because my supports aren't matching their oath properly. And now there's literally zero opportunity for me to win. So, you know, it's, it's, it's, it's a lot. Sorry to the support players out there and the, I'm not trying to single-handedly come for you guys. How I've always explained it is like supports and fights are like the P and PEM DOS, right? If you're in a math class, those, you know, PEM DOS it's like, I forget what it says parentheses, like whatever.

Coach Mills:
Ex- yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Samito:
Yeah, the whole thing it's order of operations to get the, to get the right answer in math. If your supports are trolling or not using their old property, they're just the PM PEM DOS. That's why so many people come for you because it's essential that that that's the first step. And if that first step goes wrong, the next steps of the equation can't function and I play DPS. So.

Coach Mills:
And it's probably I think it's also just like a frustrating gameplay loop for support players because I just remember in overwatch it was never that big of a deal to like always calm perfectly all in a perfect way like maybe at the highest elos of play but like If you saw an opportunity with Nana, you just threw it you saw you saw like a Baptiste amp you just threw like you did not have to Okay. Okay Luna all ending in five four three two. Okay. Okay you won't now like no one added we didn't have to do this whole

Samito:
Yeah.

Samito:
Yeah.

Coach Mills:
This whole really formulaic like, do this, then do this, like which-

CaptainCoach:
Mm. See, that's interesting to me, because I never, I always wished League of Legends had voice chats. The community's still clamoring for it. They're always asking for it. so League is, League without voice is still somehow more toxic than Marvel Rivals, believe it or not. But so when I came to this game, most people, I'm very vocal in my games and sometimes not.

Coach Mills:
That would be the most toxic voice chat of all time.

Coach Mills:
So

CaptainCoach:
For the best, but I love the fact that it's so important. And for me, I view that as like a way that I can have an advantage. But I see how a lot of people, it is definitely more, I never thought of that point of view where it's like actually more casual friendly to not have to do that. I never really considered that because yeah, I mean, when you're able to just kind of kill stuff on your own,

Coach Mills:
You just get a lot of free. I feel like you get freedom I feel like mantis players get freedom right now like cuz man you can kind of just whatever you want on mantis and you can like Position aggressively. Yeah, you want to you want to engage? But that's this like supports just have to just do things in a very specific way that it's just not fun Like I can't imagine it's fun I know a lot of support players probably have never experienced anything else if you never played overwatch, but it doesn't have to be that way It could be better

Samito:
Speed engage.

Samito:
It's so fun and to give Blizzard credit. Yeah, it's valid value. You you would hate playing against super Diva. It's in five E five. It's, it's a big reason why rivals exists right now. Coach Mills and I know all about arguing for 66, man. Jesus. Um,

CaptainCoach:
I quit Overwatch because of D.

Va.

Coach Mills:
Yeah, That that that that that's that's why That's

CaptainCoach:
I also quit because I was trash at Tracer and I wanted to, like, I played exclusively backline Tracer. I don't know if that's a thing, but that's what I did. it is a thing. Is it good? Okay, then I was just trash because I tried to make it work and it never, never did. Hulk can backline. That's why I play Hulk.

Samito:
It's a thing. Yes. It's broken now. It's broken now, but yeah.

Samito:
Yeah. And Hulkin backline, like, again, like they need to create neutral. I'll let you guys take the more, more of the subject from here, but like it's, it's too telegraphed because there's no windows. If you don't do it this way and get your ults on point at this time, you are at such a massive disadvantage because it lasts for so long. There is not enough reasonable time for you to kite out and stabilize. It's not an option. They just got to open it up more.

Coach Mills:
One of the I sorry sorry sorry or you go on okay? know what I was gonna say is is I've been seeing you play a lot of overwatch now Samita because I know you're frustrated with rivals And I understand a lot of the frustrations. I agree with a lot of them, and I understand it I'm still enjoying rivals, but but but why overwatch because I think there's a I think there's an argument to play other games But I don't know about overwatch. What was it? It's driving you the perk system. You think that that's a

CaptainCoach:
No, go ahead, go ahead.

Samito:
Yeah.

Samito:
I like the perks bro, they're fun. The perks were fun. they were really to be honest with you, it was solely the Reaper perks. The Reaper perks were the most fun I've had playing Overwatch in years. And then they just removed them or nerfed them today. So that was, that was just so bad.

Coach Mills:
Okay, okay, okay, So Battlefield 6 win. When's the Battlefield 6?

Samito:
So I might need I'm waiting for my buddies. my buddy Trevor is a Trevor and Tyler. Tyler's a picture for the Mets. His season's over. He just got a TJ. Trevor is in the playoffs playing the Dodgers right now. Um, when they get, when he's done with his season, we're all going to hop on BF six together and we're going to run it because he's been, he's been trying to get us on the battlefield train for years. So we're going to let him go. Hey, listen, I never thought I'd say this, but let's go Brewers. All right, brew crew. I'm I'm Trev and the boys can get a, get a ring. That would be awesome. Listen, I'm

Coach Mills:
yeah, yeah, yeah.

Coach Mills:
shit.

Coach Mills:
nice, nice.

Coach Mills:
Good

Samito:
is saying if Trev gets a ring some Mido viewers one World Series ring reddit zero all right so that's all I could say all right fuck reddit sorry my fault

Coach Mills:
I'm wondering how you feel about the evolution of hero shooters. Right now we have two major options, which is new. Do you think that there's going be another game that will come and compete, or is it just going to be rivals and Overwatch for the rest of time?

CaptainCoach:
Mm-hmm.

Samito:
It's awesome.

Samito:
No, no, there won't be another game soon. Rivals was a one in decade game, a one in 10 years game. and the main reason it worked was because ironically they took overwatches formula, you know, that's, that's why it worked. And I don't know if you saw this, but overwatches Halloween mode, they're testing today, they're testing something similar to team ups and the format is six v six. So we'll see if they wake up because that, listen, that's realistically, that's rivals timeline. Like, look, this game rivals is never going to go away.

Coach Mills:
Hahaha

Samito:
It's going to keep its crown because its formatting was better than Overwatch 2's. It just was. Like the super tank has destroyed the core of what Overwatch was and Marvel rivals captured that with Marvel IP better than any game. Better than Concord, better than Lawbreakers, better than Gundam Evolution. You remember that game everyone was talking about that? Yeah.

CaptainCoach:
What do mean by super tank? What do you mean by super tank?

Coach Mills:
I- I love that game, it was sick, it was sick, XO. So- so, yeah.

Samito:
So, so in Overwatch 2 to make, they went from 6v6 to 5v5 with one tank and to make the tank more appealing, they gigabuffed every tank in the game. So like insane cooldowns, like quadruple the health pool. Like imagine if they put the power of two tanks into one to where like Zarya, do you remember Zarya? You remember how her bubble cooldowns were separate? Now it's a single charge. She's...

CaptainCoach:
Okay.

Coach Mills:
Yeah

CaptainCoach:
Yep. Yeah.

Samito:
600 HP with the same if not better damage than she used to had so she's got 50 % more HP her bubbles can all go to herself if you were to 1v1 a tank in overwatch as a DPS you would lose that 10 times out of 10 you would never win it one time

CaptainCoach:
You know what's funny, that's like Overwatch and Blizzard IP. I played another Blizzard game in WoW and they did the exact same thing in that to get people to play tanks. And tanks were the best 1v1 class. You couldn't beat them in PvP so much that they actually had to lower their values just so people would never play them. But they were gods in any other. So it's like a way to get people to play stuff that you need.

Coach Mills:
Yeah, like imagine if they took

Samito:
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Coach Mills:
Yeah, like, Hulk would have to be like,

Samito:
Exactly. And that's what they did because their queue times were tight. Like in order for roll lock, cause they're in roll lock now, they're not in open queue, which is another big reason I think rivals has actually taken the win is that if a single role was not getting queued, it inflated queue times for every role significantly. So in order to get people to play the tank, they made the role so good and coach Mills is working on my channel at time. And he'd tell you, we had some banger videos come out where it's just like us reacting to buffing the best characters in the game. It's like, what the f**k? Like what? And so.

Coach Mills:
18 minutes, 20 minutes, DPS queue, yeah, nonsense.

CaptainCoach:
Yeah.

Coach Mills:
Yeah.

Samito:
Now I forget how we got onto the super tank conversation. you had the format of rivals and like the, two hero shooters. you know, it.

Samito:
Rivals has a big advantage in that because again, that's what was so fun about Iron Fist. I had so many gameplay options to express myself as a DPS, right? And that's what makes Rivals fun. I'm not forced to ignore the tank and go for a support first. If a Strange feeds, I can light him up as Punisher and there's a chance that he dies, right? There's a chance that I grab somebody's Wolf and like any role can make a play on any role. And that dynamic makes the gameplay loop so much more interesting, right?

Samito:
But to answer your question, because I'm going to go off the rails here, I don't think another hero shooter is going to come out anytime soon that competes with these two.

Samito:
I think if anything, it'll be like a deadlock, like this is like in genre, like an arena hero shooter or team-based hero shooter. They're once in a decade type of games. I don't see another, I think Rivals was successful because of that formatting and the Marvel IP is really cool. They're telling the story and all of those things are still amazing for the game. Like I'm not off the Rivals train. I'm not sitting here saying I will never play this game again. It's terrible. I still love the game. They just didn't make the changes that I wanted them to make to make it more enjoyable for me. And you

Samito:
I'm just taking a break and playing the other one for now. I think the competition is actually really healthy I think both of them have very fun drops and overwatches engine feels amazing It's significantly better than rivals engine But rivals has a much more interesting gameplay loop and if they would just nerf alteration I'd be grinding it 24 7 so yeah, I don't see another one come in these two are both Great games and different they're different They're similar, but they are different, and I think it's important to know that they're they're trying to do two similar, but slightly different things

Coach Mills:
Yeah, like, Captain Coach, like, like, imagine if Hulk just had a shield and he could like, had like CC resistance. You were just the only tank. Yeah, headshot mitigation.

Samito:
Headshot mitigation. He had 50 per he fed you 50 % less ult charge if you shot him instead of any other character.

CaptainCoach:
Hmm

Coach Mills:
And the whole game you're just running around getting shot and like CC'd and booped but you're not dying It's just like impossible to kill you

CaptainCoach:
Mmmmm

CaptainCoach:
So, so lore accurate.

Samito:
Yes, yes, Laura Ockuret.

Coach Mills:
Ha ha, he he he

CaptainCoach:
Cause Hulk is, he's a little bitch. mean, he dies instantly. He dies faster than iron fist. He dies faster than a lot of

Samito:
Yeah.

Coach Mills:
Yeah, you think it's kind of fun, but when you're the only tank to do the core tanking jobs, it becomes extremely tedious for a tank as well. It does become extremely frustrating.

Samito:
You guys, because you end up stalemating with the other tank and just trading meaningless damage on each other. So like you'll have double the damage of your DPS just trading with each other because if you move, it exposes your backline. And if he moves, it exposes his. So you're, you're kind of in like this stalemate of who can hold the corner better.

Coach Mills:
And yeah, the other thing...

CaptainCoach:
Right.

Coach Mills:
Not to mention there's tanks like Orisa that are just like, neither tank gets to play the game. We're just gonna make it so neither tank does anything.

CaptainCoach:
Yeah.

Samito:
Yeah.

CaptainCoach:
Who do you think I'd like if I played Overwatch? Like, I'm gonna try it eventually. Doomfist?

Samito:
You might play Doomfist, bro. You might play Doomfist, honestly.

Coach Mills:
Doofus, Tank Doofus,

CaptainCoach:
Because, yeah, I you hit the nail on That's the reason I fell in love with Marvel Rivals, because the melee is just better than any game I've ever played. Yeah.

Samito:
Dude, you would love Doomfist. You would love him. Yeah, you would love him. He's very similar in gank style to Hulk, except his punch is so much more lethal than Hulk's. And his ult's way better too!

CaptainCoach:
Future Doomfist, mate.

Coach Mills:
Yeah, yeah, yeah, well, yeah, my Ze, Zebra is like a known Doomfist player and when he came to Rivals, he played Hulk, like per, yeah, per my Hulk, so yeah.

CaptainCoach:
Hmm.

Samito:
Yeah, you better hawk, yeah.

CaptainCoach:
Zero is who I watched to kinda made me wanna play him. Cause I guess I was a little late to the party. You mentioned Reddit.

Coach Mills:
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah,

Samito:
They love me on Reddit.

CaptainCoach:
Yeah.

Samito:
Reddit are contraindicators. If they hate you, you're doing something right.

Samito:
I could go give, I, I, I do a charity stream for Kentucky children's hospital where we were, we raised like $5,000 and it paid for the X-boxes and with kids with cancer. And if I posted about that on Reddit and get downvoted.

CaptainCoach:
Damn. Really.

Coach Mills:
You

Samito:
That's what we're talking about. That's how, that's, that's how delusional these people are. But hey, listen, all good, man. All, all in the name, all good fun. Right. Take away their keyboards. What do they have? They got to have something, right?

Coach Mills:
Hey

CaptainCoach:
Well, I was going to say, well, that's maybe we can ask. Do you think Reddit represents more of the casual community? Do you think they're listening to? No, you don't think so? No, not at all.

Samito:
You

Samito:
Reddit, this isn't just like a Reddit specific thing. This is like Yelp reviews and all that. Like people generally don't go and out of their way to talk about something unless they're angry. Right? You're like, if people are like happy with something, they don't care. They're not going to go out and say, Hey, I was so happy with this. You're gonna be like, huh, that was good. And, you know, leave it at that. I think it's a vocal minority.

Samito:
Generally speaking, people, mean granted, there's probably some dedicated people there, but you know, I don't think that they should go to Reddit as a credible source for anything.

CaptainCoach:
I feel like this game's future is just like, I don't know, like Dallas Cowboys fans or something. Just like constantly complaining about it, but still just never stopping, like watching it.

Samito:
Yeah. Well, I, and to be fair, like, I think that there are a lot of people who are happy with the game and consume the content, know, like I see people saying that there's a lot of doomer content about rivals and that's all that's left in the game. That's just not true. I don't think like, are there people who have moved on and done stuff and are there, are narratives going to change always? Yeah. But there's always going to be people consuming this stuff, man. And, know, for me, like I'm, I'm not thrilled with the state of it. And I've talked about that, but you know, the problems I have.

Samito:
It really is one thing. it, granted, it would be a big change if they did it.

Samito:
But like, if they reigned that in, the game would be much more approachable for me. But, you know, I'm just going to go play Overwatch for a month and then I'll probably pop back in. And that's the best thing you can ask for if you're a hero shooter fan. So I'm not trying to sit here and doom content the game. I just don't think there's any, you got to be real about it. There's, there's no excuse for the cycle to be as bad as it is for as long as it has. They've beat around the bush and then they want praise for a two second Luna Ult nerf. It's, it's, it's so much bigger of a problem. That's my only issue. So I think, it's a doubt.

Samito:
Cowboys fans, but you know they're gonna release Deadpool and that's gonna have massive pull in America. They're gonna release Thanos. It's gonna bring everybody in and they can do alternate modes to you know I what I think they should do that would be sick is I've always wanted blizzard to do this But it would fit better in Marvel you guys ever play like the Star Wars battlefront games back when we were kids I'm not sure got the coach remember what year were you born in? 89 okay, so you

Coach Mills:
Thanos.

CaptainCoach:
Thanos.

CaptainCoach:
Yeah.

Coach Mills:
yeah.

CaptainCoach:
Mm-hmm. 89. I'm a old man.

Samito:
So, I mean, listen, I'm about to be 29 this season. I mean, we're close. I mean, I'm 96, but you get it too, where it's like, do remember the old PS2 Star Wars Battlefront games where you could, dude, you could play as like stormtroopers or you could like occasionally get a Jedi and there was a big ground war. Like they could do, yeah, exactly. It was peak. They could easily do something formatted like that and around and maybe Thanos comes in and he is an Overwatch super tank, right? Like there's so many different things they could do with this game in the IP.

CaptainCoach:
yeah.

CaptainCoach:
That's one of the best games ever made,

Coach Mills:
yeah, it peak.

CaptainCoach:
I've seen a lot of people wanting PvE mode. I personally would love some form of an arena mode where it's more just kind of close quarters, smaller map, and it's just like a 3v3. And I think that mode would probably expose some more of the balance issues because in a mode where it's people just fighting, you just fight to the death basically, and then once you die, you're dead. No response.

Coach Mills:
Man.

Samito:
yeah.

Samito:
Yeah, something like that would be great. And that definitely would expose balance. I would definitely lean more towards like the Star Wars battle. PVE is a scary thing for Overwatch players, right? Because we had a lot, a lot of that dangle and everything. If they did it right. Yeah. Well, I mean, but they're tough. They're already telling the story in the game better than Overwatch ever did, which is, well, I shouldn't say that because the original Overwatch days when they were telling the stories with the archives events, that was, those were fire. They were fire. And then they just.

Coach Mills:
Man, imagine if Rival's got a freaking amazing story mode, man.

Coach Mills:
That's true.

Coach Mills:
Those videos were amazing, yeah. Why did they stop doing them? I don't understand.

Samito:
The internal issues. mean, the whole reason the company imploded, I would say.

Coach Mills:
The whole everything, right?

CaptainCoach:
You know what I really liked bro was the TFT mode they had. I thought they did a great job with that. I very impressed. I mean, it wasn't perfect.

Samito:
Yeah. Yeah. Was it Heroes of the Storm? Was that what it is? What was it called? Rivals! Yeah, yeah, that was cool. Yeah. Yeah.

CaptainCoach:
No, I'm talking about the Marvel Rivalous game mode. The Ultron battle protocol matrix, some craze. I thought they did a great job. It was impressive. Like, I mean, it had the same issue that any autobattler has and it's like why the autobattlers always switch their meta every month or two. Cause like once you figure out what the best stuff is, cause autobattlers are meant to be imbalanced. That's the fun of them. You try to find out what the most broken shit is and then you just, there's usually three or four comps. There's the best comp and the comp that counters it.

Coach Mills:
No though.

Coach Mills:
It shows that they could do more things. They could take it to different places.

Samito:
Yeah.

CaptainCoach:
And basically, lo and behold, since all the heroes in the auto battle are essentially mimic how they are in the game, the best comp was like three or four supports. And maybe one tank and like two DPS or some cheesy stuff like six tank, it was mostly just, but it showed that they're capable of doing other stuff at a pretty high level. I I'm really into auto battle and more.

CaptainCoach:
More of the strategy side, so maybe that's why I'm not as negative about the meta. I'm curious to see, you play Overwatch, do you have any other competitive games that you have experienced and that you've dabbled in or played?

Samito:
I mean, yeah. I mean, I played a lot. You'd say war zone. guess. I mean, I played a lot of war zone when it was out. played, you know, back original Minecraft PVP when it was at its peak with a lot, a lot of people came from that. was super competitive back in the day. I'd have to think on it though. think more so recently, not, not really, not like, you know, the, not like Overwatch, right? Where it was like Overwatch is kind of my main game for, you know, almost 10 years now. Right.

CaptainCoach:
Okay.

CaptainCoach:
Yeah.

Samito:
So yeah, it's not necessarily, but some of some on the side, but that's, that's pretty much it. would say.

Coach Mills:
How do you feel about Rival's rank system? Because I feel like there's a lot of problems with the rank system that are...

CaptainCoach:
See, that's where I got a lot of stuff I would... Is Iam

Samito:
It's not real. No, I mean, it's just the nature of the game. It's just like, are you getting a freshmen who doesn't know how to play? When I say freshmen, I mean a rookie because they make rookie mistakes and that costs you games all the time. happens. it depends on what hero they climbed on. Depends on the meta depends on like what they're flexing to. think, I think there are a lot of flaws with it, but I think that it's a, it's always going to be flawed because human beings are flawed and you got human beings with human beings and how human beings synergize with each other in a team-based game. But.

CaptainCoach:
Okay, is it the game balance that's the issue or more like the players? Are the players the blame for the low quality of the games? Or how much blame do you put on them? No? I like that answer, I like that answer a lot.

Coach Mills:
So this this no

Samito:
No, no, not, no, I think a lot of the way the game's design creates more problems in that again, like if a support alts not used on point, if your supports don't use the old font point and you could be the best DPS on 80 % of the DPS roster games over, there's no window for you. That's why I'm saying you need to expose the neutral, right? Because the alts are so powerful. They want to fill the hero fantasy in the game that.

CaptainCoach:
No, I heart agree with that.

Coach Mills:
Ahem.

Samito:
It's you can't outskill a lot of them. And that's a big part of why this game is so fun for so many people. Right. Is that, yo, what's a, what's an insane ultimate. Right. I mean, compare a whole goal to like, I don't know. Luna old, right. It's like, you could have, you could give a gorilla a banana and have him press his Q key and the Luna old is going to get value on point. Right. But if you're playing.

CaptainCoach:
Hehehe

CaptainCoach:
There is a 0 % chance a Hulk can ever kill a Luna in her ult 1v1. And it will never happen. It's not possible.

Samito:
Never, never. It will never happen. Exactly. And that's exactly why they need to open up more of the neutral in the game. And I think if they open up more of the neutral in the game and allow for more skill expression to win out over the insane, like insanely powerful abilities, like the hero design in this game is so volatile. That's a part of why it's so fun, but it's also super volatile. And it's not even across these characters. It's nowhere close. Like to be frank, and this is where I am in the single support players out.

CaptainCoach:
Yeah.

Samito:
The supports in this game get so much easy value compared to any other game I've ever played. Rocket res beaking being a free res to start the fight in an unbreakable spot on a lot of defenses is crazy. I'm not saying things like Black Panther aren't broken. They are, and he should get reworked. like these top of the list of characters should get reworked in my opinion. but. Rock like heroes like rocket. It's just like, you can just have players who if they actually had to use their inputs.

Samito:
Would be three skill tiers below where they are. They don't need any, like, this is just facts. Like, I'm sorry, it's facts.

Coach Mills:
We're getting a support person on the podcast next week. Next week. Don't worry. Don't worry. What support person?

CaptainCoach:
Coach Mills is one third offended. He's a fill player.

Samito:
And you can. No, but it's true. It's true. like, listen, I like playing these characters. Like, I'm not gonna deny, but like, dude, I could pop an edible and play Rocket off my rocker. Like, it's not hard. It's not... Yeah. And I'm not saying that you aren't skilled for climbing. That's not what I'm saying. I'm not saying it takes no skill to climb at all, but it's such a massive crutch compared to playing fucking Iron Fist, right? Like, it's... Or...

CaptainCoach:
Hey, now you're speaking my language, sir. We call those Gamma Gummies.

Samito:
Any of the, or any tank, like it's so it's not, I think a big part of it is the hero design. The hero design allows for players to be boosted to ranks that if you had to rely on actual decision making, they would be nowhere near. And a lot of that is ult duration. A lot of that is how easy it is to heal. And a lot of that is free value ults, even in the DPS role too. Like some of them are there, right? They've nerfed squirrel girl, right? They nerf stuff like that where it's like, you know, Hey, so I think some of it's the system.

Samito:
A lot of its hero design, part of it's on the player, like, it's not the player's fault the game is gonna elo slingshot them for doing the bare minimum. So I actually, thinking about it, would say it's more of the game than the players.

Coach Mills:
One thing I kind of wanted to shout out my boy, Deft, this was his theory about some of the problems with the ranked system. I don't hear what y'all have to say about it. So because we have resets every single month or every two months, no placements, the problem is lobbies are not actually balanced because someone could be in a certain rank, they played the whole season and they're at that rank. Or someone could be someone new, they took a break, they're picking up the game, it says they're in Diamond, but they're really like a peak eternity player.

Samito:
Those are bad too, by the way. Those are bad too.

CaptainCoach:
They do too much.

Samito:
Yeah.

Coach Mills:
And like the lobbies are just super unbalanced and they will perpetually get less balanced because of all the resets.

Samito:
They need placements. They need placements and the way they've, like, the ranks, yeah, the system is the problem. Straight up. The system is like, they gotta improve it, placements have gotta come in. And again, this is Nettie's first, this is the most mobile game rank system ever. I play a lot of Raid Shadow Legends. That's the main game I play outside of all these shooters and shit, right?

CaptainCoach:
100%.

Samito:
How that game works is like you rank up by playing over time. It's play to win. And so you can see that a lot of the system where it starts everyone and brought it's the it's a mobile game company. They've never done this before. Right.

CaptainCoach:
Yeah.

CaptainCoach:
That's kind of why I asked about if you played other ranked games, because I knew we were going to ask about this, is the ranked curve in Marvel Rivals is, it is a curve, which it shouldn't be. Most EOM systems, or EOM system, what am I talking about? E-LO systems. I'm like a conspiracy theorist. Like a flat earther, so I'm like, kids, I'm thinking about it. It's supposed to be a linear.

Samito:
hahahaha

Samito:
Yeah. Yeah, yeah.

Coach Mills:
I like that.

Samito:
Yeah.

CaptainCoach:
It's supposed to be linear. You gain a certain amount. If anyone back in like the old school league days, maybe you play chess on like chess.com or something, that's more what it will look like. You win roughly the same amount as you lose. there's none of this progression based off of time played. It's purely based off of skill. it's so odd, right? you like, they basically design their system.

CaptainCoach:
To, you can lose your way up to what, like celestial? Right? Pretty close, I mean, and.

Samito:
Something. mean, yeah.

Coach Mills:
Negative win rates can climb because of performance.

Samito:
Dude, their performance system measures things so bad. This, this, this sent me through a roof. I was pissed. was pissed. Okay. I get a freshman, a hard freshman. Okay. In I'm trying to push to my eternity game. Right. And you guys know how ranked works. Do you want to climb in these games? It's not about making plays. It's about not making mistakes. That's the best players do. They know how to not make mistakes. So I have a, a GM one player.

Coach Mills:
Makes no sense.

Samito:
I am Celestial One, okay? And the lobby is GM One to Celestial One. I'm about to hit my eternity game, right? And my GM One is a nice guy, calming, trying to win, but is openly admitting that he's clueless, right? He's playing tank. He's frontlining every fight, taking so much pre-fight, just feeding before the cart gets around the corner on Arako. We're pushing second point Arako. He's up on height, rounding into the corner while the payload is not up and around in the corner. So I'm playing support trying to bail him out. I'm my brother.

Samito:
You just need to not take damage until the cart gets up to this point. Maybe I was playing Skorogh, I forget what I was playing, right? But he's taking so much damage, he's dying 50 % of the time before the fight. I have the best DPS stat line in the game. We win the game, I get 19 and he gets 25 after taking enormous amounts of damage. And I'm like, dude, this guy is almost losing us every fight and he's putting us in a deficit every fight?

Samito:
And he's getting rewarded for more elo for winning the game than I am for carrying the game and the system thinks that he's ha- like, if I'm not on this team microing this guy, we're losing this game. And, like, he is losing on his own without me. And I'm getting less than he is because the lobby average is lower. The whole thing is fucked. The whole thing is fucked.

CaptainCoach:
If you're a higher rank, get less. The higher you go, you get less. The performance...

Samito:
Yeah.

Coach Mills:
Do you want like flat gains past a certain rank? Like no performance? It's like something like plus.

Samito:
If they could measure it right, maybe you could do performance, but they don't, their, their stats don't measure things correctly. Taking damage, damage blocked is a bad stat. It's a bad stat. That's all that's like, like if you're, well, you're on Hulk, you're different. You're different. Like it depends on when, right? And there's no way a scoreboard can tell you when it's valuable and when it's not. Right. The whole thing about being a good DPS player is trying to do the most with the least.

Coach Mills:
It's terrible.

CaptainCoach:
I disagree with that, but I'm curious to hear what you- yeah.

Samito:
Because you want to put as much resource into your tank as possible, right? So I'm trying to do as much as I can, whilst requiring the least amount from my supports

finish transcribing
Certainly! Here's the continuation of the transcript:

Samito:
...my supports who are gonna be like Rival Support players. I'm sorry for how much grief you guys get, but if you can't at least acknowledge that your role is bell-curved so much more than any other game out there. It's true, I'm sorry you get hate, a lot of the times it's from clueless DPS players who are wrong.

Coach Mills:
Sorry chat.

CaptainCoach:
Just be honest, bro. It's all good.

Samito:
No, it's true though, it's true, because the problem is there are DPS players who complain who are clueless and also wrong. And so like I see that happen all the time, but if you can't acknowledge that Rivals supports are gigabell curve compared to other games, like you cannot do what Rocket Raccoon can do in any other game ever, in any other shooter game ever. You can't, you just can't.

Coach Mills:
I'm I'm So I saw I'll hate I'll hate on supports, but I do want to say that the dumbest players I've ever met are punished remains I'm sorry, but punish just just aim heads that don't use their brain. I'm sorry the dumbest players I've ever seen in my life, but but I do you know I'm saying

CaptainCoach:
As a rocket.

Samito:
Sure, true.

Samito:
And they're bad in this game.

Samito:
And low-ranked DPS players, blame supports a lot and they're wrong. Top three? Go ahead.

CaptainCoach:
So we give her top three for each character. Punisher, I think is one. think Cloak is number two. Or no, Rocket's number two. I Cloak's number three. All right, there I said it.

Samito:
Yeah, probably. Probably. We're-

Coach Mills:
Of those are the three top three braindeads top pop three braindeads. I mean, I mean, I don't know I mean, I don't know like pennies or like either geniuses or or I don't know what they're doing like Well, I'm talking about I mean that's true. Yeah, maybe they're all geniuses they just

CaptainCoach:
It's 100 % Punisher. Punisher 100%.

Samito:
Well the character, Penny's just such a situational character, like they just can't do what their character needs to do.

Samito:
Yeah, so I'm sorry support players, I'm not trying to dog on you guys, but like there is a bell curve. Like if you tried to play in Overwatch support the way you play a rival support, like doing the same thing, you would get a quarter of the value in Overwatch because they actually force you to be aggressive and duelist. Well, these characters are more about like surviving giga sustain heal. Um, I honestly forgot what I was saying before, but it did, my top three, no, I agree with that top three. That's about what mine would be. I think it's about damage taken. was what I was talking about. like, I think it needs to be flat because until they can,

CaptainCoach:
What are your top three?

CaptainCoach:
Yeah? Okay.

Samito:
They need to do a couple of things. The system is at fault. The system is bad. They've got to reevaluate the whole thing. They're working on placements. That's good. They're going to do placements. That will be fine. It needs to be flat until they can actually depict what is value in the game from a scoreboard. And they do not do it right now. They do not understand what value is.

CaptainCoach:
Here's I want to bring it all the way back to where this conversation started. You don't think Iyam is real fine. I do because I think it's built into the matchmaking and Mills and I were talking about that Mills and I duo'd yesterday and he was him and I have both been Mills if you've pretty much like been in top 500 so far right or

Samito:
It's not, yeah.

Coach Mills:
Yeah, yeah, just out of top 500 most of time. Top 1000 consistent this season, yeah.

CaptainCoach:
Yeah, like we've both been like right there, just playing by ourselves, playing with our whatever. We start duo-ing and we can't win a game. We drop all the way down from C2 to GM1 and I don't think we were playing bad and, right, and I think the system is heavily weighted in favor of solo queue versus duo, just like...

Samito:
You probably weren't.

CaptainCoach:
A higher ranked player would get less for winning than a lower ranked player and they heavily, heavily punish people. Through some invisible system that we can't see whether it's invisible rating, you know what that is, right? Where it's like you have your true rating, okay good. Well just for people watching, invisible rating is what your true rating is versus like what the numbers on the screen tell you.

Samito:
Yeah, yeah, MMR and SR, yeah.

Samito:
It's like, have a matchmaking rating that like, it's not your actual display rating. It's how you get match made. And then you have your skill rating, which is like what your rank is like GM one plus 57 is your.

Coach Mills:
Which I don't think they've ever actually publicly differentiated the two. Like I know we know of these from other games, but they have never publicly said that they actually do that.

CaptainCoach:
Do you, yeah. Do you think they have an invisible rating? Sameito? Okay, well then that is, I mean, that is like the first step, right? So then, I mean, I'd be curious, maybe leave it in the comments for anyone watching. What do your DuoQ games feel like? I'm sure there's people who Duo, and so I feel like it is impossible. Unless you play with a healer. Unless you play with like a healer.

Samito:
Yeah, for sure, yeah, 100 % video.

Coach Mills:
Almost every MMR system does.

Samito:
They're impossible. I mean, it's total coin flip. the main, think, exactly, but that's a design problem. That's a hero design problem. Because again, this is my, where my issue comes in. There are so many games where if support ults at the right time did not completely dictate the game, if you can't match it or you don't have, or you're Magneto, if you're Mag, and this is why the meta has been the meta for so long. If your Magneto does not hit his ults on their support ults, the game is not in your hands. It's just not.

Samito:
So again, this is a big reason why I think if they reign all ults in, especially duration, it gives way more individual impact to you two and your duo. Because if you are not on those characters that can make those plays, you cannot affect the outcome and it doesn't matter how well you play, especially if you're on attack. If you're attacking a second checkpoint and they are stalling with their ults, the spawn advantage is enormous.

Samito:
And the gap is so hard. one of your teammates makes a mistake and dies and you have a, realistically, you have a 10 second window to get a kill. But if they're support ulting, it's like a five, right? Because again, those cool downs always come back and they can stall indefinitely when you can't. There's you don't have individual impact on that. If your team is throwing an X point because everything lasts for so long. So.

Coach Mills:
That's actually, yeah. I agree.

Coach Mills:
Cause that's the interesting thing, like, sorry to cut you off just cause you're revealing something to me. Cause Captain Coach, we never set up kills on supports through support ults because one of the things is the primary catalyst to kill support ults is actually supports. Mantis damage boost, rocket damage boost, Luna damage boost, like cloak blind. If you want to duo and succeed and overcome the power of supports as you need supports.

Samito:
Go ahead. No, I'm done. That was it.

Samito:
Yes.

CaptainCoach:
Yeah, that's a good point.

Samito:
You need a support.

CaptainCoach:
Yeah.

Coach Mills:
You have to, that's why I think any duo that doesn't have a support player in them, like unless we're doing something really weird like doing the Unc group Moon Knight, like we ran that one game, Sumito randomly, that's the only way you're gonna overcome.

Samito:
Trolling.

Samito:
Yeah.

Samito:
You can't pierce them. They're unpierceable unless you're playing three characters in the game. And so if your random is on Mag and he doesn't hit the ult, you lose the fight. Because it lasts for so long. Because you have no option to kite. Because it lasts for 14 seconds. You can't win. It doesn't matter what you do. That's then the best part of going back to Overwatch. And like, listen, you're not going to win every game, right? You're not. But this is the problem with Rivals. The kits carry the players. They just do. And so when there's so much power on the kits...

CaptainCoach:
Yeah.

Samito:
The individual skill, like, skill making or play making plays, the individual skill of the player means way less. But again, this is why rocket ult rework was much better because everybody in the lobby can break a bad rocket ult. Everybody in the game can, right? Or if you make a play against a rocket, oh, it's a rez before the fight. Okay. So that, that fight winning play doesn't matter. In Overwatch, I get that kill and it's Right? That's a big advantage that I've created. That's immediate value.

Samito:
But there's so much denial that lasts for so long in rivals that even if you're making those plays, this, the kits themselves gives the, gives the player a first chance, a second chance, a third chance, a fourth chance. They can't troll. They can't get punished for trolling because the bailouts are so powerful and last for so long. So that's what it is for you guys. The game's just not in your hands. Even if you're dueled, it doesn't matter unless you're cue it. Why do you think the best players in the game are permanently queuing as combos that piece pierce and breaks support alts?

Samito:
If you kill their support ult during the ult or deny that ult, you're almost guaranteed to win if you use yours. Every time. That's the game. That's Marvel Rivals. That's the gameplay loop, which is why I don't play as much right now because I'm tired of that. It's been a year and a half of the same thing. So I just want more neutral. And if you add more neutral, you're all skill. If you're better players has more chance to shine than the fresh GM one player who is inting in the game in the frontline. Every fight that I have to micro and put on a literal leash to have a chance to win.

Samito:
And I know that people say, that's toxic, whatever, but it's true. I'm not saying this to sit here and sugarcoat things for people. Like, I'm sorry. It's the truth. I've been, I'm in a veteran coach most. just went back to Overwatch. I was champ this season. Like I know what I'm talking about. When I look at this stuff, it just, it is what it is. You can't play me. So it's not even, it's not EOMM. It's not, if it was EOM, they would have said it at this point. They, like, they came out and outright denied it. Right.

Samito:
So it's not EOMM. You guys, like the kits in the game, literally, if you are not playing those combos, and I encourage you, go play and try those combos. Go play Jeff Storm. Go play like any of these other things. And I could pick out, pick out your codes. I will, I will pick out the moment. Yeah. I will pick out the moments that you guys are losing. And I guarantee you the win condition because they're so powerful. You can't, if your teammate doesn't use their win condition properly, you cannot, unless you're on three or four characters in this game, undo that mistake. Can't do it.

Coach Mills:
Like Luda Neymor, or Luda Neymor, yeah.

Coach Mills:
Yeah. Yeah, I mean, I mean, it makes sense. Like, like when you when you go in, if you if you go in as like whole captain coach and like like Primal and like Forrest and Luna Olt, you're going to die. We're going to bait the Olt, but then our whole team is going to die to the Luna Olt.

Samito:
Sorry, rant.

Samito:
Doesn't matter.

Samito:
But then they stall for 14 seconds. That neutral doesn't, that's not a, that's not a win. That's a neutral, you know?

Coach Mills:
And yeah, and they built a whole bunch of rest of their team built a whole bunch of holes in that fight that they won and.

Samito:
And they'll shoot you as Hulk and then they'll get their next old cycle because the old last so long. if that old lasted half of what it did, you would have five seconds to get a kill and then blow it open. But you just don't have that opportunity. It doesn't matter what you do.

CaptainCoach:
Well, we had the... Did want to ask, like, what could they do to fix the game, but I feel like we kind of already got that. So I think, maybe I'll ask a different question then. Is there a world where the support alts could stay the way they are to appease a certain group and still have the game move towards the direction that you want? Can they coexist? Is there...

Samito:
Yeah, that's your answer. You nerf every ult in the game.

Coach Mills:
Young

Samito:
If you drastically nerf the amount of healing they have, but no, that's even worse in my opinion. think Luna should be massive burst healing. I, and by the way, if they nerf the alteration, they don't have to give venom 30 % heal reduction to pierce through it. There is no answer. You're stuck.

Coach Mills:
Yeah, yeah, yeah, I mean, notice they, they have venom and then the name or team up now.

Samito:
So now Nettie's is picking the heroes that you have to play to have a wincon instead of having it organically be most of the cast. And this is an unsolved, they have to address this. There is no way around it. You can't appease everybody. If you think that it's okay for support ults to last for 14 seconds, 10 to 14 seconds, you are just wrong and you shouldn't be appealed to. And the same goes for DPS ults. Nerf the DPS ults too. I'm not just going to single out the supports. Take Iron Fist ult down to eight or nine seconds to compensate.

Samito:
Take Punisher all down to what is it eight nine seconds take that one down to six seconds take all of them down and Watch how the game opens up. It'll be beautiful. It'll be like watching a sunset over the ocean. It'll be gorgeous Okay, you can get your what do you have a Manhattan? What did you have? What did you rush in something?

CaptainCoach:
You

CaptainCoach:
White Russian, yes, yes. Cheers.

Samito:
A white r- get your white Russian camp out on the chair, dude, and, you know, sit there and enjoy the sunset. But there's no way around this, man. You gotta tackle it head on if you're netties, and that's been my big disappointment. That's the only disappointment I've had with them, because the new characters are sick. Gene is sick. Sure.

CaptainCoach:
Alright, I got a new question. We're gonna change directions here. Who's doing a worse job? Netties or the Cincinnati Bengals? even with Toey B out. Sorry, Joey. Joey, sorry.

Samito:
Bangles.

Samito:
Dude, the Bengals, we're fucked, dude. We're fucked. We're fucked. We're fucked.

CaptainCoach:
I'm a fan of another team in the AFC North and we're also fucked. Can you guess who? No, Browns are always fucked.

Samito:
Oh, you're the Browns The Browns are always fucked. Okay. Well, okay. So you're not perma fucked. You're a ra you're not a Ravens. You got to be a Steelers fan. You were Ravens fan. Oh, you're, oh, you're an O's. Oh, you're okay. So you're a Ravens fan. My cousin lives out there. Yeah. I got a lot of respect for Lamar. He's a good dude. Um, he's a good guy. I want to say he's the goat, but he's a good guy. He's a great player. He's a great player. He's not the goat, bro. He's not the goat. Come on. He's a damn good quarterback, but he's not the goat.

CaptainCoach:
Ravens, Baltimore, yeah. he's the goat, man.

CaptainCoach:
Ooh.

Samito:
You can't say he's the goat. He hasn't done enough in the playoffs. Even Joey B's not the goat.

CaptainCoach:
I mean, listen.

Samito:
Regular season goat maybe? That don't mean shit.

CaptainCoach:
I mean, I can't say you're wrong, but you look at all the quarter, he's my guy, but like you look at all the quarterbacks, right, who have one big, they've all had elite coaches. And I don't think hardball is that guy.

Samito:
But he's your guy. He's your guy.

Samito:
That's fair, but that still doesn't make him the he's gotta be the- he's gotta do it to be the GOAT. He hadn't done it yet.

CaptainCoach:
Dan Marino? No?

Samito:
Didn't he win a super bowl? No, he didn't. Did he? I wouldn't say Marino's to get that either. mean, think Tom Brady's got undisputedly to go. has to be. He's got the most friggin. I listen, I'm not a Tom Brady fan, but he's got the most super bowls, dude. It's got to, it's got to mean something. It's got to mean something. It has to mean something.

CaptainCoach:
Nah.

CaptainCoach:
i think i'm ready is overrated

CaptainCoach:
He did it.

CaptainCoach:
You know, the term game, I was rambling, having a football talk here, but.

Coach Mills:
So LeBron or MJ, that's what we're really here to talk about, okay? I only know basketball, I don't know anything about football. I don't know shit about football, but I know basketball. Hey, new NBA season coming soon, preseason's almost done, we're close.

Samito:
God

CaptainCoach:
I knew you were football fan. I knew at some point I wanted to talk about it a little bit.

Samito:
Yeah.

Samito:
Yeah. Yeah.

CaptainCoach:
You... football your main sport? I just remember because I saw you always had the bangles hat on

Samito:
For me, I honestly, grew up. I became a big Bengals fan when I moved to Cincinnati for three years in 2020. That was like the star job, but I'm my number one team or the Kentucky wildcats. I'm a Lexington kid. So I'm a big university, Kentucky college college football, Love college.

CaptainCoach:
Damn.

CaptainCoach:
I don't watch college at all. Yeah.

Samito:
The college football is so, at least in the sec it's so much fun, but also I was a big UK basketball fan. So, you know, I root for the UK players, man. That's what I, that's what I go for. But, know, definitely a Bengals guy. My mom's side are all Packers fans. So, you know, I was like watching Aaron Rogers and those guys kind of, you know, Randall Cobb came from Kentucky up to the green Bay. And so that was always fun for me. right.

CaptainCoach:
That's sick.

CaptainCoach:
I got this buddy who's, God, he's like 45. He just lives alone. Just super meathead, like redneck, like jacked guy. He recently quit drinking and then he started again because of how the Bengal season is going. I figured I had to ask.

Samito:
Yeah.

Samito:
Yeah.

Samito:
Oh yeah, dude. Yeah. Yeah. It's, it's been tough, bro. You should see our group chat. It's a, our group chat. Yeah. Yeah. It's so sad because Joe Burrow, we just want to help. We just want to see him play. Cause he's like, this is what I love. Why? But we'll get back to more rivals in a minute. But you know, I love, I love watching. I love watching good athletes. I don't really, I'm not one those guys, unless it's university, fuck Tennessee, unless it's Tennessee. I fucking hate Tennessee. God, fuck Tennessee. But you know,

Coach Mills:
Hahahaha

CaptainCoach:
He's de- he's- he's genuinely depressed. He's... I see him... he's-

CaptainCoach:
We don't have to.

Coach Mills:
You

Coach Mills:
You heard it here first.

Samito:
But if it's, you know, if it's, if it's like the Raven, if it's like Lamar, like I love watching good athletes play. Like, guess I like that's so much fun, like watching, you know, cause it's special. Like Lamar is one of those special players too, where you like the dude is a threat everywhere on the field. It's just, you don't see guys. And the same goes for Joe Burrow. He's a beautiful pocket passer that you can escape from. The dude's been put through hell, man. He can, he can do a lot. So I just love watching those athletes, man. It's always a good time for me. I just love sports.

CaptainCoach:
Yeah.

CaptainCoach:
I'm curious, because I feel like you have a really, like you're very analytical about how you approach games. I feel like part of the Bengals problem is once the quarterbacks get out of their rookie deal, you have to invest too much. the progression with these teams is that they just don't invest in their own line. And that's been his problem, right?

Samito:
The browns don't pay shit, dude. They don't.

Samito:
The problem is we've invested in the O-line, they're still trolling. So it's like, because we went and got Orlando Brown, we got a bunch of guys. It doesn't, didn't matter. We're just, I don't know what our, we need Jesus is what we need to do. There's no, there's the, need divine intervention to help us. I mean, Jesus, you need cloak and dagger. you know, we need, we need it. Listen, we need Luna Snow, put a snowflake on Joe Burrow, start hitting the fucking bikini Gooner skins on the Raven's D line. Maybe then they'll start looking, but you know, shit. my goodness.

CaptainCoach:
Yeah.

Coach Mills:
Ha ha ha ha!

CaptainCoach:
You know, you Cloak and Dagger all down the field. 12 seconds. that's funny, man. Yeah. mean that like Jordan's why I started watching basketball as a kid. Just I, I didn't have a team. just like started watching them.

Coach Mills:
Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha!

Coach Mills:
You

Samito:
Yeah.

Samito:
You don't want to know, Bill's guess my favorite basketball team of all time. What year and what team.

Coach Mills:
Shit, I got no war. Year in team? Like NBA?

CaptainCoach:
You're in team.

Samito:
I'll give you a hint. had a NBA, had a university of Kentucky point guard on that team. was an iconic team and it was in between 2000, 2010.

CaptainCoach:
Yeah, I can't get-

Coach Mills:
Was it a Celtics team? It was? It was a Celtics team? I don't know. I don't know.

CaptainCoach:
Snout.

Samito:
08 Celtics baby. Ray Jaan, Ray Allen, uh, Paul Pierce KG. That was my favorite NBA team at all time. They did. They did. think that that was the year they did and they wouldn't beat Kobe and game seven in the finals in LA. So great team. He was on the heat. The heat took down the heat. was, yeah, he took, they took down the heat that year.

CaptainCoach:
Yeah, I remember that. Yeah, they were trying to take down LeBron back then, right? Yeah, they did. Together.

Coach Mills:
Shit.

CaptainCoach:
Was he on the heat then?

Coach Mills:
That's sick.

Samito:
I was not like a super LeBron hate or anything. just, no, I, Ray Jaune, I got to watch him growing up as a kid and he was one of my favorite point guard and he did, could, he could, he was just insane. A ball handling. was so good. So behind the fake, behind the back passes the behind the back to himself off the glass is beautiful player. Beautiful player.

CaptainCoach:
Yeah, he was fun to watch. I always rooted for, I think his name was Steve Blake. He played with Kobe because he was a Maryland guy. But I mean, he was always just like a kind of like a, you know, typical point guard, just distributor kind of thing. yeah. Yeah.

Samito:
Yeah.

Samito:
Yeah. Yeah. Guys like Nash, Marker, what's his name? Not Marker Ruby. What is it? Ricky Rubio. Marker Rubio. Jesus Christ, it's a politician. What the fuck am I talking about? Ricky Rubio, the dude from Minnesota, the dude who could just like throw the ball over the place. Spaniard.

Coach Mills:
We started with my community, we started a fantasy draft, like a fantasy league for the NBA's upcoming season. My name on there is EOM agent, Nico Harrison. It's EOM agent Nico Harrison is the name of the group. No, was a former Mav fan here, former. I mean, I'm still a Mav fan, but it's painful.

Samito:
Yeah?

Samito:
No, bro

CaptainCoach:
Hahahaha

CaptainCoach:
Bye.

CaptainCoach:
Did you you get out too early because then they they won recently and then they won with dirt a couple years like

Coach Mills:
No, yeah, the new updated news, it's all about Luca, but yeah, I don't want to get into it. I'll be pissed off. I'll just be pissed off. I'll just be pissed.

Samito:
Yeah.

CaptainCoach:
New math, new math patch.

CaptainCoach:
I thought it was funny, bad GD player, he had like a bad haircut and he said it was an EOMM haircut. I just thought it was funny, I don't know.

Coach Mills:
But yeah, no, I think that just about wraps up anything unless anyone has any topics they want to bring up, any big.

CaptainCoach:
Anything you want to ask us? Anything you want to talk about, man?

Samito:
Now honestly, I think I got my main gripes with the game out of the way. Like, they've gotta- they've gotta spice up the game, they've got to-

CaptainCoach:
Yeah.

Samito:
They've got to widen the skill floor and skill ceiling. They need to create more opportunities for skill to matter because it just doesn't matter enough. The fact that I can struggle to win in Diamond and it's just, I'm very clearly nowhere near a Diamond player because I'm sitting there watching my team troll their 13 second ultimates and I have no way to make a play through it unless I'm playing three characters in the game. It's just lame. It's just lame. at the end of the day, like

Samito:
This is a video game, a competitive game at that. And again, like they can appeal to casuals, but if I'm killing the ranked mode, there needs to be opportunity for me to show my skills. And there's not enough variety in terms of what characters can actually have good skill expression. And the big problem I think that they could easily alleviate is that alteration across the board. And then, and then you can start looking at sustain. You can start looking at like the heal on bailout abilities being a little bit too good cloak and dagger bubble, stuff like that.

Samito:
And making them more, a little bit more skill oriented and less free value because ultimately like there is a fine line to walk with that. want to see where the game goes with they can address ultimates first and open that up quite a bit for people. But other than that, you know, I think I could definitely see myself coming back to play rivals after they get rid of map pulls too. There is no reason for competitive to have map pulls. They are terrible. They suck. They sucked in Overwatch. They suck in this game. You already have a stale gameplay loop. They had eight years of maps. It didn't work for them. You have

Coach Mills:
Yeah, we didn't even talk about map fools, yeah.

Samito:
Two years of maps and it works even worse for you. Get rid of them and that's all I really got. Great game. I still think the game is great and the IP is not going anywhere, but I just, I'm a little bit bored.

Coach Mills:
That's fair. That's fair.

CaptainCoach:
Any hero you want to see before we let you go?

Samito:
Who, any hero I want to see? That's a good question.

CaptainCoach:
Sugarnaut, Thanos, mentioned Deadpool a couple times.

Coach Mills:
Gambit.

Samito:
I think taskmaster would be lit. He has a photo. He has like a photogenic memory or like a sub memory where he can like copy them. Anybody's moves that he sees. He's a mercenary. He's very cool. He was in the Spiderman games. It's like a side quest and they never invested into him. I take it back. Carnage. I want to see carnage. I want to see carnage, bro. I want to see carnage.

CaptainCoach:
Okay, I haven't heard of that one yet.

CaptainCoach:
NetEase will probably make him a DPS character. Carnage. Okay, yeah. That's dope.

Coach Mills:
Carnage? What would his kit look like? Would he be another tank or would he be... I can't wait to double tank or double venomal.

CaptainCoach:
It's just Woody Harrelson. It's just Woody Harrelson.

Samito:
He'd be a tank for sure. He'd for sure be a tank. He would be way less mobile, way less mobile and more just like in your face, throat brawler like the thing. Like gruesome, a gruesome. Like imagine if his ult was like impale players. Like that would be insane. Straight up fatality. Like, that'd be sick.

Coach Mills:
Fatal like a straight-up fatality. like it. Yeah, that'd be sick

CaptainCoach:
I've been saying, I'm saying they need a true melee anchor tank, because I feel like that's supposed to be the thing, but he sucks, he sucks, I don't know.

Samito:
He, no, he's not, dude. He's I don't know what he's doing. Yeah. Yeah. Just, you mean he's damaged, a damaged taken machine. okay, boys. Listen, thank you guys for having me. That was a lot of fun.

CaptainCoach:
Yep.

Coach Mills:
Yeah, but so let people that I mean most people know you but where could they find you? Where could they find you to support you or hang out?

Samito:
Yeah. you know, X.com slash Samito FPS, youtube.com slash Samito FPS, twitch.tv slash Samito FPS, S-A-M-I-T-O FPS. If you want to see some peak crash outs, you know where to go boys.

Coach Mills:
Yeah, yeah, thank y'all for coming by this awesome awesome podcast episode Subscribe like check out the patreon if you want to support and thank y'all see you next time

CaptainCoach:
Hey, thanks for coming on,

Samito:
Who day?

CaptainCoach:
Jeez.