Some Thoughts On Juicing

I wanted to offer some design-focused thoughts on the issue of Juice, an issue which seems to generate quite a bit of passion amongst the (vocal) MNC player base. Game balancing is a very difficult process which I think many players sometimes forget when they glue their caps-lock down and demand that a specific feature of a game they have spent time on be changed to their satisfaction RIGHT NOW. I think that players of games also forget that development and patches take time not only to conceptualize (which requires balancing the game-play and technical ramifications of potential solutions), but to implement, and in the case of XBLA, to run through the clogged Microsoft approval pipe.

With all that in mind, and with a great deal of respect and appreciation for a game that provides several times its price in entertainment, I have a few constructive thoughts on Juice.

First, what is the problem? Different people seem to see it differently. Here are a few takes:

1) Juice is too powerful when used - this criticism claims that when a player juices, at any time, the advantage unbalances the game.
2) Juice is powerful enough, but the frequency with which players can obtain it is too great
3) There is nothing wrong with the juice system and players complaining about it are simply failing to use it correctly - ie. everyone's advantage is no-one's advantage.

Personally, and I think rationally, 2) is the closest to the truth. Juice is a neat idea that can be a lot of fun. A feeling of temporary power is exciting, and even the panic caused by a juiced player attacking can be challenging and help break stalemates or give a losing team a shot at redemption.
A team which coordinates well and waits to use several players' juice at once is engaging in admirable tactics. However, it seems from my personal experience and from the reported experience of many forum posters that many matches end in what feels like an unbreakable series of non-stop juicings, where the winning team uses its advantage to continually obtain ad use juice, making it almost impossible for the losing team to make it out of their base. This takes a feature intended to add excitement and a little bit of unpredictability and turns it into a winning, but degenerate strategy that leaves the losing team feeling helpless and frustrated. Frustrated because the back and forth of the rest of the match suddenly feels as if it were for nothing. Perhaps I am mischaracterizing the frustration of many players, but I think I have fairly described a real issue.
If we take that as granted, the question becomes:

"what sorts of changes could fix the problem, and of those which could fix it, which introduces the fewest problems of its own?"

Here are a few thoughts with the pros and cons of each:

1) Reduce the bonuses granted by juice.
Pros: There are many variables to play with, so the balance could be fine tuned. Damage to the moneyball could be reduced to be no greater than normal damage, while leaving the big anti-pro and anti-bot boosts intact. This would keep juice effective as a "path-clearing" power, but reduce the instance of juiced players single-handedly ending games within small spans of time.
Cons: Reducing the power of juice makes it less special and less exciting. If you "nerf" it too much, it stops being a feature worth having.

2) Make juice harder for players to obtain.
The fix here really depends on whether chain-juicing is more often the result of classes with over-generous juice gaining modifiers or of winning players constantly purchasing juice from dispensers. If the former, then adjusting the rate of juice gain (already listed as one of the upcoming patch fixes) is the answer. If the latter, then either the number of dispensers per level, the price, or the cooldown of dispensers could be adjusted. An extreme solution is to eliminate dispensers entirely, although this seems a waste of already-programmed game assets when upping the price can achieve almost the same effect.
Pros: Makes juicing less frequent and makes it harder for an entire team (or a large portion thereof) to be juiced simultaneously. This reduces the incidence of teams being trapped in their base under a near constant steam of juiced opposing pros.
Cons: The variables could be tricky. A fix that stops determined min-maxers might make juice almost unobtainable by more casual or less focused players. It is possible that there is no correct balance.

3) Add a cooldown timer to pros ability to activate juice. After using juice, the player must wait for his ability to activate juice to recharge, much the same as skills. This need not stop the player from refilling his or her juice bar, but simply places a mandatory wait between juicings.
Pros: Limits the frequency of juicing and prevents non-stop juicing by the same player. Makes saving and coordinating a teams juices more important and thus rewards teamwork. Saves devs the hassle of adjusting all the many variables in suggestions 1 and 2 above.
Cons: Players who are adept at obtaining juice and whose play style centers on obtaining and using it as fast as possible may feel that they have been constrained or punished for success. There is never a satisfying answer in game balance. Someone will always be upset if a game is rebalanced after players have played it for a while. This is because imbalances by their nature mean that some players are benefiting from the imbalance and more likely than not do not see it as an imbalance.
The best argument I can offer to counter this is that we should consider what qualities we want the game to have. The qualities that attract me to MNC are specifically those which distinguish it from many other shooter based games. Namely, teamwork not only matters but is essential to victory (ie. Lone wolf players cannot win without the support of a team, unlike in say Halo); the objective is not simply to kill other players; and finally, there is a real sense of give and take that makes a match feel hard fought. Even if juice rushing and locking down another team is fun for a while (or forever if you have a different view of life than I do), it cannot be denied that it makes the game more prone to rapid and hard to reverse swings. I consider these counter to the qualities that make the game unique and fun, so I offer the above as a starting point for discussion.

The new DLC is due *this month (so wed, right?) and will address #2 for supports by reducing juice gained from healing turrets and #3 by adding a universal cool down timer to the juice stands.

scroll down to "unmasking part IV" Dev Blog/pending updates list

Dlc aside, this post is awesome.

umm, #2 is the problem, and the other #2 and #3 is the solution.

its that simple, there is no difficulty in being juiced more time ingame than unjuiced. you play 3 minutes doing nothing but building juice safely as possible, then you juice for 10 seconds, go buy juice in 8, juice again. the entire team does that, then there is never less than 2 juiced enemies at any time.

would you think its balanced when the enemy can always have 1 juiced enemy that can kill 12 pros (all of them, and then again off of respawn), and/or all the turrets. if you got pushed to your base, how is YOUR team supposed to juice that much?

once they have 1 juiced enemy in your base every 10 seconds, in an endless loop, then you have officially 0% chance of winning. thats what broken means. it means that as soon as it happens, there isnt a counter to it.

im sure juice wasnt intended to be so spammable. else, they would have made it a skill on all the classes, with a few seconds cooldown timer. its supposed to be a reward for doing good long-term, not doing good for the last 20 seconds so you get more juice.

I've never been against juice chaining because in order to be able to juice chain, you must have supremacy over a large majority of the map, at which point the enemy will not defeat you unless they rely on juice as a sort of equalizer. The thing is, juice is not intended to be an equalizer. It can be used as such, but that is not its express purpose.

Given MNC's status as a sort of analogue to sports, I think of juice as a sort of "Make it, Take it" sort of mechanic. Spending money in the service of making money, as it were. You have juice, you use it wisely, it becomes easier to get more juice. The game is rewarding skill. See, in competitive sports, and in lots of competitive 1v1 and team-based games, unless both teams are evenly matched and performing on the same plane, you should always be able to tell who is winning, barring upset comebacks and final-minute rallying. Using juice as an equalizer (i.e. increasing juice rates for the team who has less map control, or is perceived as "losing") can take away knowledge of which team is in control, which is a game design problem in that it provides those who are playing with no feedback as to their performance (weaker players are rewarded for things they didn't do, and stronger players receive no in-game notification via incentivization that they are playing the game correctly). In this sense, I would argue that juice IS being used correctly by players who utilize it, and by developers who see it as a game mechanic.

With that in mind, while I agree with number 2, I would argue that number 3 is closest to the truth while incorporating the second part of number 2. Juice is not always accrued too quickly, though it CAN be. The system isn't unfair at all, hence the constant fighting over the juice machines, which is a completely feasible part of the game. As you said: everyone's advantage is no-one's advantage. All have the ability to earn juice at the same rate, aside from class limitations, and everybody must fight equally for control of the area with the juice machines. As a system that rewards skill with the ability to wreak havoc on those who failed to either utilize juice properly or play the game properly, I find the juice system to be a game mechanic without peer. It may seem unfair, but the feedback from performing poorly is brutal enough to promote tighter team play and convince players that they'll need to formulate better strategies so that next time, they'll be the ones with juice privileges.

Personally, i think juice caters to the winning team, and offers an advantage to the team that doesn't need it.

I think if juice was offered to a team that is behind and being pushed back, they would be able to use it to level the playing field. If a team is getting spawn camped then why should the team that is spawn camping be rewarded with a skill that can make them almost invincible?

If a team gets pushed all the way back, it is their fault, but that doesn't mean they should be steamrolled into the end of a match/spawn killing to make them leave. If a team got pushed back, and then got juice it would help them push back the lanes and even the field again.

@mintycrys:

Your point about juice as a gameplay feedback mechanism is very interesting. However, I am not sure that I entirely agree. Or rather, I agree, but I think that it does not change the need for rebalance. Before I respond though, a side note:

I think only the Developers know what juice was "intended" to be. I am content to take it simply as a feature that is there. My metric for judging whether features are balanced is whether a feature enables "degenerate" strategies, by which I mean "perfectly valid, but very boring - because too simple). Other people might say "broken". The ultimate goal is fun. When rules encourage strategies which create great one sided frustration, a serious look is warranted. </sidenote>

To clarify my position, let me explain that I do not think juice or its use is "unfair". Fairness is a slippery concept at best, but in a game, with rules (and especially in a video game where it is usually pretty obvious what is a bug and what is a feature) I would consider anything that the game lets a player do as "fair". You are given a set of rules and restrictions and a goal. The fun of games is figuring out how to achieve that goal best. Somehow hacking your program or deliberately exploiting what is an obvious bug is "unfair". Using a strategy that works becase of game balance is fair and what I would expect any competitive player to do, but it also helps illuminate a need for rebalance.

That need arises from the snowball effect that chain juicing can create. I would argue that a relatively simple ability to juice with great frequency is not needed to let a winning team know that it is winning. The map shows whose bots are pushing in and who lacks turrets as well as the relative health of the moneyballs. Money also helps incentivize success. Nor do I think that reducing the ease with which players could obtain rapid back to back juicings would turn juice into an "equalizer". I think that properly balanced, juice can serve EITHER as a sports-like rout, adding a little insult to injury when a winning team uses it, OR as a hail-Mary (to use another sports metaphor) giving a team that's behind a shot at (but not a guarantee of) fighting their way back into contention.

Think of the best games you have played, in MNC or any sport, board game, or other competition. I would wager that most people will think of narrow, hard-fought victories more often than the one-sided slaughters.

So what I mean by unbalanced is that the rules themselves need to change a little so that we see more hard fought matches and fewer games where a team that starts winning snowballs their way to inevitable victory. There is a lot of room between "remove juice from the game" and the ease with which coordinated players can currently chain juice.

While it does look like a few of the potential fixes are being implemented in the upcoming patch (namely timers on juice dispensers and fixes to a few of the classes' juice gaining modifiers), I just discovered (certainly well after almost everyone else) that one of the primary means of rapid juicing is melee attacking bots. This apparently generates significantly more juice than other modes of attack. I would guess that the Developers thought of it as a trade off since a melee attack can be risky. But it sounds like many players have no difficulty doing this almost nonstop to help increase their juicing rates. Perhaps this should be examined as well, although let's see how the patch turns out first and then reassess.

All this being said, I should point out that I really like the juice feature in Monday Night Combat. I think it adds a great Oh Sh*! factor and is very fun to use. But for it to feel special, and for it not to enable effective and fair but terribly un-fun strategies, I still believe that changes are needed. I hope the ones in the patch will be sufficient, but we shall see.


@Mike: I agree that winning teams don't need to have their advantage reinforced. However, I also don't think that a losing team needs to be given a "free" advantage to even the playing field for the reasons that mintycrys mentioned above. As long as the winning team is not able to send a juiced player in every 5 seconds, a competent team should be able to fight its way back out of its base. If th attackers are all juiced hoever, there is no hope.

First of all, I think this is a great thread and hope it gets more attention. Syntaxbad seems to have put a lot of time and thought into this thread and it sounds like he is trying to make everyone happy.
I agree that #2 is the problem and solutions #2 and #3 are best.
After rereading the contents of the patch, I think I will be a lot less frustrated. With a cooldown on the juice vendor, matches will hopefully balance out. I still really like Syntax's idea for a juice cooldown time for each individual player. But maybe that is not necessary. More reason to anticipate the arrival of Spunky Cola Special!

I'm leaning more to number 3 myself. My only problem with juice is being addressed: the Sniper's Explosive Shot juice gain. The Assassin and Sniper can gain juice at a much faster rate than the Tank or the Gunner, but the Assassin is the easiest to crowd control, since she has to be at point blank range to really be effective, and the juiced Sniper isn't nearly as effective against bots or turrets as the other classes.

I think the best solution would be to put a limit on the cash you can earn while juiced, say a max of $200. That would stop people from constantly buying juice, and make juice a lot less cost effective.

I was thinking something similar, only maybe get rid of the cash bonuses received while Juiced (via killstreaks, multikills, and the like)? Just like getting the $25 per kill, like normal. That way, even if you get an All-Time Great, it'd still only be worth $150.

Just a thought, of course. Don't want it to seem like Im Hudsoning your idea.

I think the global cooldown on juice will do more to deter juice chaining than a cap on juice cash earned. 1 out of 12 players can buy juice every 1 min post dlc. People can choose to sit on their cash and race to the machine or spend it on bots and turrets. I know what I would pick. Hell, Ill probably just buy juice and taunt just to get others to stop juicing. :d

Yes, this post is awesome. Thank goodness someone on these forums can post intellegently. Let's hope this thread doesn't turn into all the other ones. I'm waiting for someone to say "Make a team, l2p n00b".

On topic, I personally feel that juice is somewhat unbalanced, only because it almost makes turrets obsolete. Yes, there are ways to defend against juice, and yes, a good team shouldn't have too many problems with it. However, you won't always have a good team (on randoms, that's the only point of view I'm going to take on it). And the way things are now, it's really easy to just go buy or earn juice again. Thankfully, the developers have taken note of the problem, and have given us a solution. I'm willing to wait until the DLC to make a new judgement on the juice situation, and I'm hoping things will be fixed then.

When it comes to people killing me with juice, it hasn't been much of a problem for me unless the whole team juices around the same time, which in my opinion is just good team coordination.

Can't wait to see what juice machine cooldown will do to the game dynamics. I'm already suspecting that the people with the most money will be left to guard the center room on AmmoMule, and if it looks like the enemy team is going to blitz the room for control, your team will buy juice to further deny access, then juice and kill them or run away and use it on bots or in their base. Kinda like jumping over Bowser in Super Mario Bros, then waiting for him to scuttle aaaaaaaaall the way across the bridge toward you before going "lol no" and touching the axe.

juice is kinda like that axe :lol:

"lol no" *juices* *denied*

This sums it up for me.

Personally I'd like to see Juice removed totally

You suprise me there Moot - after seeing your sniper & Gunner skills I'd have thought
you'd love juice. As an Assassin I love it - Hipclip shurikens early in the game to drop
two turrents = juice. But to play devils advocate even I have to admit it can be
a bit too easy. At least in the DLC it can be toggled in private matches. I hope the
juice dispensers having a cooldown will make a difference.

I personally can't wait for all the team rage when someone swoops in and buys the juice someone else had been camping out for.

I understand what you mean about being given a free advantage, i suppose it would be too great an advantage and would probably just result in alot of rushing outta base, juicing across the map and attacking. But i mean things like, when the moneyball is down, your bots come out weaker.

It seems that once the table is tipped one way, the game likes to do things to help tip it more, not try to level it out. And i guess thats ok, teams have to work to get back into the game, but when your pinned in, moneyball is down, bots are destroyed by 1 sniper explosive round due to being pre-weakened and the enemy team is outside with juice harvesting kills, thats when people quit.

When you get into that situation, there are very few things that can get you out, and personally i think a juice boost, or some other form of help should start.

Maybe even something as drastic as, when your in the enemies base, your juice drops slowly. Consider it like attrition for being in an enemy location. Of course this wouldn't increase the rate at which juice is dropping for people currently juicing, but it just means that you cant hang around in the enemy base full of juice just waiting. Though im sure many people won't go for this idea lol.

However when it comes down to it, I agree with Moot, I would not complain if juice was completely removed. Overtime would last alot longer thats for sure.

Stop ruining this community with your foolish antics!

:lol: :lol:

As weird as this may sound... my problem with juice comes from the money ball having too much health.

Yes, that's right.

Money Balls have too much health.

This is where I'm coming from on this. Pre-DLC I almost always ran offense as a Tank. My goal was very single minded: Take down the Money Ball. At first it was frustrating. I'd get the ball down maybe 3 minutes in on a good push. Do some damage to it. Lose control of the lane. Repeat until overtime... and often lose to an OT juice rush from a faster class on the other team.

So I rethought my strategy. I started neglecting less critical rank 3 upgrades in favor of saving for buying juice. With well balanced 6v6 teams skill wise, I saw much better results... BUT, 3 sometimes 4 juices over the course of 15 minutes was only enough to win about half the time BEFORE Overtime (again, in a fairly well match skill situation where the other team was not pushing with juice). A hard enough push usually did see a win in OT.

However, the ultimate goal was to win the game BEFORE overtime could happen. The only semi-reliable way to make this happen was to abuse the juice machines. And the reason I had to abuse the juice machines was because of how damn long it takes to drop a money ball before overtime gives super perks.


So back to where I started, if the Money Ball had less health, I wouldn't feel the need to spam juice just to get it down in a reasonable amount of time/effort with a solid push.


Does it need a drastic reduction? No. But two players working together and getting a little face time with the other team's ball before being killed on 3-4 separate occasions in within the 15 minute should probably be enough to take it out.



But I'm just tired and ranting at this point. Everyone's experiences will vary, that's just my point of view on it.