I loved jet and power adaptor when i used them in the "CBM" mod, glad to see them in vanilla with interesting graphic aditions and quirks!! Can't wait to try them!

Ikaruga

what do i see a new sprites for pirate man

This stuff just keeps getting better and better!

Hey all you Mega Fans! We're back again with another V6C Newsletter!

In case it wasn't obvious by me not being Freems, today's update is going to be a little different. Normally we'd show off some content hot off the presses to gladly feed your ever-hungering desire for shiny new playthings, but this time around we're going to zoom out a bit and talk about the bigger picture of the game's design and balance. I hope you like text, because I don't have very many pictures for you. I'll intersperse some big green text here and there to help ease your eyes and give you the gist of my ramblings. Let's begin!

To start things off, I'm here to announce to you that we have removed the Energy Balancer pickup and made it an innate passive that is always active. This is a change that's been pretty heavily requested over the years, and we felt like it was finally time to implement it into the core game. There was always an amount of skill required to manually fill the weapons you wanted to regain the ammo for, but when looking the game over we decided this wasn't an area we felt strongly about as an exciting expression of skill in our game.

Plenty of our players are familiar with how this feels given it's been quite a few mods for years, but if you're not I can most certainly tell you that after playtesting V6C it's quite difficult to go back to an Energy Balancer-less state when playing on servers running older versions!

On the subject of ammo, however, this is as good a time as any to mention a global nerf we've been testing internally and are pretty positive on. Since we changed how our ammo pickups function 9 years ago in V5A, they've restored pretty arbitrary amounts of ammo based roughly on what percentage of ammo the individual pickups previously restored on a weapon with the typical 28 max ammo. Unifying ammo gains like this was ultimately healthy for the game, but the values we've had them set at for nearly a decade are frankly too high.

As it currently stands, ammo is a non-issue in most cases and you can shovel two pickups into your gun to restore a whopping 60% of your clip. Because of how common ammo pickups are on maps, ammo may as well not be a mechanic in the game as it stands.



To make ammo matter, we've made the percentage an individual pickup match the same numbers as our health pickups. Specifically, a small Weapon Energy used to restore 30% of your ammo, and a large one used to restore 72%. They now restore 20% and 55% respectively. We chose this path for a couple reasons - primarily, not having to remember how much percentage each of the four different energy pickups used in core maps restores reduces mindshare.

In addition, tackling ammo rates on a global level like this is going to be considerably easier than reducing the amount of pickups on every single map in the game - not to mention the effect that would have on custom map balance.

To really hammer the point regarding ammo home, it's worth mentioning as well that we'll be reducing the maximum ammo on a small handful of weapons. This isn't a global thing and we're not trying to starve everyone of ammo, we just feel that some weapons have a higher magazine than they really should. For example, we've halved Search Snake's ammo capacity. It has had it too good for too long. These changes are part of a shift in balance philosophy the core game has been pushing since V6A and further refined in V6B.



For most of the game's life, damage was the primary lever used to balance the game. There were changes here and there targeting other things, but mostly we saw a gradual decrease in damage across the entire weapon set all the way up until V6A where everything got cranked back up to get our Time to Kill to a place where we were happy with. V6B toned some of those changes back down and instead focused on buffing other aspects of weapons to further help accentuate what makes each weapon in our game special.

The weapons in our game should feel powerful and fun to use, but most importantly they should feel meaningfully different. When you lower a weapon's strengths and shore up its weaknesses, the choice between weapons becomes less meaningful and our arsenal becomes homogenized.

In general, we would greatly prefer when a weapon's highs are high as long as it pays for it with adequate lows. In practice, this means taking power from areas that aren't exciting for a given weapon and letting it exist elsewhere. As the amount of weapons in our game grows, it becomes more and more important to ensure these differences can be felt.

Balance is an ongoing process and we haven't always hit the mark. For example, power weapons as a class are always going to be tricky to keep sane; their core defining characteristic is that they hit like trucks and reducing that too much is going to feel bad no matter how you slice it. However, power weapons have been in a pretty unacceptable state for a long while now. Where we can, we'll be looking to lower the general effectiveness of the more egregious of these weapons, push their unique traits, or "buy" power for them by taking it from elsewhere.

I do also want to thank our players who've been discussing the balance of the game in the MM8BDM Discord. Keeping an ear to the wall for balance problems in the game is fairly difficult with how many different locations there are for discussion nowadays, and it's very easy to miss with the impermanence of in-game chat and Discord messages being buried under mountains of stream-of-consciousness live chat. In V6C, you'll see some changes to the game directly inspired or contributed by members of our community, including one to Pharaoh Shot by Pr. Fly!



If you have issues with a weapon, item, or the game's balance, please consider posting about it in the MM8BDM Discord or right here on the forums so we can keep track of it! We want to make our game the best that it can be, and knowing what our players have problems with is an important part of that goal.

And as always, thank you so much for playing our game!














Oh, you're still here?
Well, I suppose I can announce one new thing. I wasn't telling the whole truth when I said we removed Energy Balancer's pickup from the game. It's more accurate to say we just changed what it is.



I'm sure at least one person saw this coming, but we're adding Energy Balancer Neo to Megaman 8-Bit Deathmatch!

In addition to the ammo normally restored when picking up a capsule, this powerup additionally restores a reduced amount of ammo to ALL of your other held weapons!

This item comes from Megaman 11 and we were always going to add it when we got around to making the content for that expansion. We elected to add it early because we were committed to giving players an innate Energy Balancer in V6C! Rather than an acquirable quality-of-life change, Energy Balancer Neo is indisputably a strong upgrade that conveniently helps to offset the global ammo nerf!

And that's all for today's newsletter! We'll see you next time, back to your regularly scheduled programming. See you then!