Bill Warnecke, Why Hotfix Balance Patching took till Dec 12

Because that allows them to change the balance of the game without even taking the servers down.

The player just finishes they game they were in. Gets an error that they need to log out then log back in. And then boom, you got balance updates.

Yeah, I can sympathize with them for needing more time to fix the game…

Also, it’s bad luck for them that the Halloween event had to be launched first. (I understand why you can’t exactly delay a Halloween event until November, but it’s HELLA tone deaf to launch a greedy monetization event whlle the rest of the game remains busted.)

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And I’m saying that’s not how they should balance → it’s predatory.
Why would they update stuff without disclosing it in patch notes?

We don’t want near-real-time update cycles, we want the usual days/week between changes. That lets people settle into things and explore the new metas etc. There is absolutely no need for modifying in-game params, unless to rig.

And in your example on rollback – how does game balance relate to netcode?

Of course both client/server need updates for new parameters. But those parameters aren’t supposed to change mid-match or mid-session, ever. That upsets balance and muscle memory and is a kind of rigging. The client/server know what kind of damage sym turrets will do and what kind of modifyers can be applied to them. Injecting changes to those specifications mid-session, is again a patented form of rigging.

What? I’m saying they can publish balance patch notes. They make the update. And they don’t need to take the servers down.

Which is nice for PC players, but HUGE for console players where it otherwise would take 2 weeks to get EXE file changes allowed by Nintendo/Xbox/Sony.

And also big for PC players too kinda, since that means we don’t need to wait that 2 weeks either, because the devs insist on having console and PC get the balance updates at the same time.

Like check this, and search for the word “certification”.

Kaplan: When we make balance changes, they have to go to the PTR [Public Test Region]. While they’re on the PTR, we’re also going through the console certification process for Sony, Microsoft, and now Nintendo. On average, that takes a week—and that doesn’t include testing or deploying, so it can be a long process. To change the damage of McCree’s gun by one point takes longer than players think.

Then, from a balancing standpoint, we also want to live with those changes for a while before making our next round. So, it ended up putting us on an almost bi-monthly balance schedule, just by the nature of the process.

If you asked any designer on the Overwatch team, “what are the top 10 features you want?” one of the things they’d say would be, “The ability to immediately change things and be much more responsive to balance requests.”

I must have misunderstood what these ‘tools for patching’ are actually doing.

Are they near-real-time modification of in-game parameters like changing how much dmg sym turrets do, or the aoe radius of junkrat splash, or the hitbox size of aerial pharah, based on the skill differences in the lobby?

Because that’s what DDA does. It’s the final boss form of rigging.
And this ‘tool’ enables that:

NO - to real-time stealth/shadow updates/patches/hotfixes/in-game param changes.

YES - to well-published balance updates that arrive at reasonable schedule like every few days or within a 2 week timeframe. NO - to game balance that is just always in flux as it adapts to some live data stream.

Nah, it’s just trying to express how it used to take them 2-4 weeks just to make a simple numbers-only balance change to a hero, by having to make a whole new EXE file. Test that on the PTR for stability for a week or two. Then send it console companies to certify it as safe on their machines. Then finally publish “Soldier pulse rifle damage reduced by -1”.

Where as with this new process, they can do that in 5 minutes.

But it’s not something that’s custom per match, or per player or anything. It’s just a dramatically faster way to do balance patch updates.

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The tech in patents suggests they can do that 100% live, i.e. mid-match and have been doing so for several years now. It’s part of the dynamic_difficulty_adjustment (DDA) rigging. They want full control over what the players experience and will push parameter updates to tailor whatever is necessary: engagement, churn, retention, etc.
Can they pull off the same fine-grained DDA on console? Probably not. Although they can scale the aim assist/resist.

So I’m extremely weary of these capabilities.

Well, if you can find evidence of them doing that in-game. I’d totally agree that that would be a bad thing.

But as the resident “More forum posts than anybody else in the world” guy. I haven’t seen anything they would lead me to believe that exists in Overwatch.

While theoretically you could devise a system that dynamically adjusts damage/radius/etc. on a per match per player basis such a system would be way too complex to administer for any benefit gained, and ultimately rejected by players. This is not happening right now in Overwatch.

Good if you play those heroes, get your free SR while you can!

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It is what it is. The programming mechanism they used to do fast simple balance changes got broken in the upgrade to OW2. And they are gonna fix it.

And yeah, it sucks to wait. But it’s nice to know that shouldn’t be a problem going forward.

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Blizzard???Communicating??? Is this opposite day or something?

Looks like the guy who replaced Geoff Goodman, Alec Dawson, is starting off doing a lot of in-depth communication, as of…this last Friday.

https://twitter.com/i/spaces/1dRJZMpwDDrGB

https://youtu.be/1UXXXTTPtJA

Let’s hope he keeps it up.



Also looks like they hired a guy to keep the team on track, and to cut through the upper management nonsense from ActiBliz Corporate.

Shock of shocks!

If only it was from an official post and not from a forum-regular!

Probably already have one implemented and ready to go, but schedule for Season 2 in December rather than in November.

Again, they have these patches planned out weeks in advance.

Perhaps only in extreme circumstances.

Well… it’d be nice if they learned from the Fighting Game Community and Developers on how to balance things and when to balance them.

Rollback Netcode isn’t new.

It’s been around since the late 90s early 2000s.

This is correct. Believe it or not; Blizzard is already aware of what the changes do to the balance of the game and have been already working on putting in a new changes… that’ll still take weeks to arrive.

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Well,

  1. This was a quote from Jeff Kaplan.
  2. I literally spammed them to add this feature months before they added it.

Bleh, and for some reason these links are getting a 404 error, but if you refresh, it works. Weird.

Well yeah, but it’s the new big trend for Fighting Games in the last year or so.

Mostly because the few games that had it during pre-vaccine COVID did extremely well because it.

Nerfing Zarya’s bubble duration, and making buffs/nerfs related to damage output can easily be done server-side in the Custom Matches.

Are you saying they can’t for regular modes? :thinking: :thinking: :thinking:

The game’s not that serious, calm down, champ. Friends like to play together.

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Their Lead Software Engineer, (i.e. Highest ranking programmer guy for Overwatch), is basically saying the system they set up to do that in OW1, got broken in the transition to OW2. They are gonna fix it. And it shouldn’t be a problem going forward.

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Based on what the design team said on Twitter we can guess what the Season 2 Sojourn nerf will be though: she will lose her headshot damage modifier and they might slightly increase rail gun damage to compensate.

For context what they said was that Sojourn is actually slightly underpowered in the metal ranks but overpowered in the higher ranks. To that end they are looking at adjusting how her one shot works in Season 2. That is why I predict that change.

Meanwhile it is amazing that Blizzard have continually made the same mistake: overload a hero’s kit. They did it with Brigg, Sigma, Sojourn, and Junkerqueen, just to name a few.

all this is is they have some part of the game logic in their scripting language (notably abilities)

quake 1 had scripting like this, so nothing new there

originally it was only bundled with the game executable, and updates to that require approval by MS, sony, nintento… all of them, at the same time

in 2018? they added the ability to push these compiled scripts into the client from the game server at connection time

this is also how the workshop works, the editor maps onto their scripting language, it’s compiled by the server and is pushed into your client at connection time

crossplay wouldn’t have been doable without this, because even the smallest changes are slowed down to the point of the slowest console company because they ALL need to approve and be ready to push a change, else it breaks crossplay

them screwing this up and being unable to balance for weeks when the product is new is probably a 4/5 on the “incident” scale

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