There seem to be many upgrade descriptions that never give the precise information you need to know.
For example, you say:
"Faster refresh time for all abilities by earning a critical vanquish."
Faster by how long? -3 seconds? -5 seconds?
"Enemies randomly explode when earning a critical vanquish."
Randomly? What are my chances here? 50%? 35%? Explode and then what? Deal how much damage to surroundings? What is the radius like?
"Briefly reduce incoming damage by earning a critical vanquish. Can stack 3 times."
By what percentage?
I know that you can try it out and see for yourself, but understanding the exact amount is essential in deciding whether an upgrade is worth it or not.
By not including precise information you are doing the following:
- Making people who are in communities who test those things and try them out more powerful than players who aren't exposed to that precise information. (For example, community folks would create spreadsheets with all the precises information which would give people who are curious about things more power over the players who aren't part of the community and have no knowledge of what's going on.)
- When you, PopCap, decide to tune balance those upgrades, it might be difficult for all of us to know how it got balanced. After all, not all people actually read patch notes. And it might affect those who don't.
- It is just inconvenient, for the players, to seek a 3rd party for an information baked into the code that you could've just added a reference to it. For example, you can just change all descriptions to "Reduce the health regeneration delay by $HPdelay %." The $HPdelay would automatically reflect whatever you have baked into the code. Changing it would automatically change the description as well. This would also mean that you won't have to change other translations manually every time you change the value.
- It is difficult to understand what you're up against when you don't know how fast or slow or long things are for heroes you haven't leveled up. (that means I couldn't try those heroes to see for myself how powerful an ability could be.)
- Balance discussions can be "off" when players don't know how "powerful" "weak" upgrades are. People would stop looking at the "bigger picture" of things and have a narrow field. Basically, most discussions in these forums and everywhere revolve around unleveled up heroes and limited experience with certain upgrades, which you, PopCap, might have an entirely different vision of when you designed and balanced the heroes.
