That heavily depends on the organization and type of change. Engine related things are generaly risky, and have a quite long cycle for updates. But finetuning and localization are often relatively easy changes as they often are just part of a referenced file and not the core itself.
An engine change would be changing how the banelings and talents work (a double spawn of a baneling might require some coding in the hero itself and be risky on that part). And in the major case a new game mechanic, it could even require a PTR test. However, altering numbers, talent orders etc should generaly use easy to adjust formats.
A change like this should not require disabling a hero when a game was properly designed. Balance changes should be part of the normal cycle and therefor have the option for quick adjustments. In tf2 for example its realy as simple as just changing a single value. And that was already the case in the 2007 release!
That this game doesnt support it shows how bad it was managed. Even for starcraft 2 this should have already been made a standard feature in the engine. And even if it wasnt, they could have added that when they were working on hots as both use a very similar engine.
Lacking this support shows a clear case of ignorance. And sadly the current developers cant act against this as changing it now is going to be a major change.
Not surprisingly, this was after the merge with activision. So i can already guess why this was done this way (sc2 was probably already in development at that time though, so i wont blame that game for lacking on this part).
Note that google can relatively fast push out a fix for quite significant issues. Which is a magnitude larger in company scale compared to activision. And even there decent fixes can be applied within a week. And that is not just for major programs either.
There is a reason why google has a 90 day benchmark for severe issues. As when having a proper development environment 90 days is a lot. Its only that microsoft faces a lot of deprecation and backward compatibility issues that they sometimes cant obey that rule. And yet even microsoft considers the 90 days a fair treshold.
The only reason for slow updates is that activision doesnt want to spend any money on this game. So they are even pushing that in the update speed for this game.
Have you played any other live games before? Things being too strong or too weak is common in pretty much every online game that gets regularly updated.
Trust me, I get it. I’ve made simple changes that introduce bugs that end up requiring weeks of code refactoring to fix. I completely understand.
However, this change is a different case. The engineers have given the designers drag and drop tools that let them easily and modularly make changes. Changing damage numbers is as simple as editing values in a text file. In addition, they can very easily add or remove functionality from talents.
Sometimes they need to completely program new functionality, as was the case for Junkrat’s grenade bounce, but this change to Zagara does not require this. It really is the same as changing numbers in a spreadsheet (more likely a JSON file or whatever format they use).
This is likely a staffing issue, not a technical issue.
Again, they’ve hot fixed numbers passes in the past. Given what I know of the engine, how Blizzard has operated in the past, my knowledge of software development (Again, just because I don’t work on Vidya Gaemz professionally doesn’t mean I know nothing, the core process is the same), and what I’ve found in the CASC, this should be something easily doable before the 2 weeks or whatever when she was broken.
Blizzard is in shambles right now with the lawsuit, this is likely due to staffing, not a technical obstacle.
This, Zagara is not bugged like Stukov was, just overtuned.
why why why… .nerf the heros that can one shot you zagara is not, i mean really Qhira is broken hero Kael’thas fireball utill that you can’t avoid or get away from… but no you need to nerf Zagara
I get why her bannelings were buffed, and reworked, mainly because they didn’t do enough before, but nerfing zag into the ground doesn’t fix her character, or i should say only temporarily. Yeah zag does crap dmg now, but it doesn’t stop the fact she has to be on creep to run away from most characters and that she’s really weak to ganks. Instead of curb stomping her because a few crybabies can’t deal with her maybe make an actual rework? Look i’m not saying zag does not have the advantage with her safer styled DPS, but me personally i don’t have an issue fighting zag. I didn’t prepatch and i don’t now. Her bannelings are easy as hell to dodge unless you are in tight corridors, even more so now that they doubled her cast time. I agree with the mana increase on the bannelings, but the nerf you just gave her made her even more dog**** than she was before. The only difference now is that azmodan got nerfed so she’ll have an easier time laning against him
Its not like it became more difficult to get up on zagara, but rather that there are more dmging consequences for doing so. Even if zag is bursting me with bannelings Imp and almost every other bruiser can beat the piss out of her. Most dps units can deal with her too, its just they need to play safer. Playing recklessly and charging straight first at her and then complaining you got messed up is the logic of an eight year old. Even if her mana cost is still relatively low, she has CDs just like every other character that can be exploited to whittle her down and kill her
Once again, this has nothing to do with how easy it is to fix in the code. Coding is just the first step in a long process. Since you haven’t worked in a commercial development environment, you may not realize exactly what is involved in releasing an update to live servers. Just compiling and generating the build files for all supported platforms can take a while. And that is completely ignoring the QA/documentation/localization cycles.
Anyway, it appears I am just talking past you, so consider this sub-topic done.
This is how i see it> Devs make a okay hero op then they make op hero po. hero ,so they creat the problem that doesn’t exist in the first place and now don’t have the proper solution for it, how about just bring her back before that patch or think something better if possible. One more thing if you get lv 7 Q talant you get a total of 24 sec cd for 8 banes that do baby dmg lol this is an overkill!
I currently work in a commercial development environment, Hoku. Lol.
Also, there’s no localization required for a numbers change. I understand the QA process, one of our products takes a full 7 days to regression test and even a minor change can delay launch. I get it.
What I’m saying is THIS change is not that. Changing the numbers does not require localization, full regression testing, or anything like that. She’s not bugged, just overtuned.
May I ask the size of the company and type of software? Your comments do not reflect the reality of what it takes to release products, especially in a subscription or server/client environment.
I won’t state the company I work for, but I work for the largest non-profit Healthcare company in the southwestern US. I am a full stack developer mainly working on one of our largest projects. We develop and host mainly in Azure, interfacing with a wide array of 3rd party vendors.
Trust me, I get what you’re saying. You’re not wrong. I’m just saying THIS change isn’t what you’re describing based on what I know of Blizzard’s internal tools from various conversations with developers across their products.
Normally, yes, if you’re adding new functionality it will require localization, full regression testing, et cetera. But in this instance, they’re just removing a talent and tweaking numbers. They could have at the very least put her in an intentionally weakened state rather than disabling her.
Like I said, I get it. Our flagship requires 7 days to regression test and we’re currently having an issue with a 3rd party vendor that’s delayed our next release by 2 months. I understand how the process goes. I’m just saying based on my knowledge in THIS case it could simply be hot fixed in the interim.
Disabling zagara was a really good choice. Those against it do not care about the game balance anyway. How can they support a hero who can deal damage from fog of war? Or unavoidable % damage from 3 or 4 sources per second?
Give me a break. The most broken hero this year. Even more than falstad who can be dealth with with 1 Varian Q R before nerf.
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