More so Sojourn hypocrisy when they said they wanted to fix her for high elo, and keep her the same at low elo, then did the opposite.
More so Genji was nerfed and the reason they gave was because of the DPS passive, which doesn’t exist anymore, but they didn’t buff him since the reason they nerfed him literally doesn’t exist anymore.
As for matchmaking, he didn’t suggest any solutions except maybe going back to OW1’s matchmaker, but he also mentioned that the matchmaker might not work for OW2 since it uses a new engine or something I can’t remember.
Knowing what we know about Samito, how do you think he would interpret “Buff the Support role in a way to attract more DPS/Tank players into the role between the ELOs of Silver and Plat”.
Yeah this argument is getting a little old at this point.
I’ll admit, I expected the 2.2.1.1 patch this week but it looks like it’ll be next week instead.
But there have been 2 balance patches so far this season with a third next week - and that’s with all (or at least most) of Team 4 taking a 2 week break for the holidays.
It’s actually bad for the game to balance too dramatically, too quickly. It doesn’t let players actually learn the game.
I think you’re grossly simplifying a lot of stuff in your head.
A server admin experimenting with a config file for a handful of people ad-hoc, yes you can do that at any rate you want.
An employee of a company pushing through a hotfix changes to millions of active users using a pipeline that is absolutely without a doubt far more complex than “editing a number in a spreadsheet and clicking save”… no.
At bare minimum you’re going to require things like manager approval - they’re not going to let some random dev just arbitrarily go make hotfix patches willy nilly. On top of that, what they need to do to push through a fix is undoubtably more complex than what you seem to imagine. There is going to be an entire ecosystem built around the system. They’re not just opening a spreadsheet, changing a value, and clicking save.
I really need you to understand that whatever setting tweaks you were making to tribes servers isn’t even remotely close to what’s happening here.
Well then as someone who’s worked on both the client and server (game servers and infrastructure backends) sides of various online games working as an engineer in gamedev for nearly a decade let me tell you how this sort of thing actually shakes down.
A designer actually figures out what they want to change. Possibly a few designers, after a meeting hashing their overall goals out.
Said designer playtests the changes, uploads them to some kind of dev portal targeting their internal environment.
Said designer playtests those changes with the rest of their team, possibly the whole company depending on the scope of the changes, not just to make sure that they’re “balanced”, but that the changes work at all (you’d be surprised how many gameplay variables just aren’t hooked up to the backend in games), that there are no typos or anything stupid like that. And of course to get feedback that the changes actually feel good, and to get a wide range of test scenarios than just the one in their head.
Designer (more specifically a design lead) either okays it or decides to iterate further based on that feedback.
If, by some christmas miracle, the changes are “perfect”, producers take back over and compile patch notes so the public can actually see them. That may or may not go to a proofreader depending on the size of the company, and then it has to go off for localization, which can take a couple days.
After all that, the producer either by themselves or using an engineer as a proxy, pushes the changes to the live environments for the different major regions, one at a time. It’s not uncommon for this step to take a couple hours as it has to migrate to tens of thousands of game servers without interrupting gameplay.
K then. Then just make it so that there’s a “Revert” flag on the serverside.
And yeah identifying the problem, and approval to do something about it does take time. But “Just revert to the previous value” simplifies a lot of that.
Well if we’re being more complicated about it, here’s the design approach I think they should go with, which yes, isn’t a 2 week process, but would feel like things are changing from a player perspective more often.
Week 1: Figure out what to balance, gut-check ballpark it if there’s not enough data.
Week 2: Experimental Card, with feedback:
Reddit MegaThreads in r/CompetitiveOverwatch, r/Overwatch
Dedicated Forum section for Experimental Card feedback. (Locked in Week1 & Week4)
I can accep that the hero balance was a trash on seasson 1 because hotfix system was with errors. But right now they can put some smalls hotfix and make the gameplay experience a Lot better. BUT THEY DONT HAVE ANY IDEA HOW TO BALANCE THE GAME. I’m aire that the team balance don’t play ow and they don’t care about the feedback.
WE NEEDS A FULL NEW TEAM TO BALANCE OW2.
And what we can say about the new rank system? Almost everything is worse than ow1.
Firstly, server-side changes dont patch/fix issues that need patched on the client.
Secondly, I think you’re just misunderstanding the level of bureaucracy, decision making, validation, etc involved in rollback decisions like this. I’d wager that in an emergency scenario, reverting a hotfix even just server side is going to be at least a good 30+ minutes after the point where the issue is discovered. Pushing or reverting a hotfix to clients will take significantly longer with a much more rigorous approval process.
Right, but if you have the previous value already stored on the clientside, then you can probably just use a serverside flag for it.
And while “new value” would run into a ton of “bureaucracy, decision making, validation, etc”. The alternative of “This current value is obviously not working, undo it” is relatively easy.
It’s not just how often the game gets patched, but the content and breadth of the patches. Personally, I feel the last patch was very anemic. Many were looking forward to Roadhog changes but they were delayed, as an example.
Essentially we’re looking at substatial balance changes every season, but otherwise very minor changes. That feels slow to me.
Lol. The problem is not how often they launch a balance patch. The true problem is that each patch don’t touch the true problems…
Look how they buffed nade and orisa to counter hog insteads just nerf hog and kiriko xd
Look how they tried to nerf sourjun but also put some buff compensations on him. Why did they don’t launched other hotfix when they saw that sourjun become broken with mercy pocket?
My point isn’t about how quickly it can be applied (also ignoring the fact that we do not know whether something like this is even possible - you’re kinda of "what-if-ing " right now.)
It’s about the amount fo time it takes an engineer to discover the issue, act on it, and roll it out. I get the imrpession that you still seem to think that this process is going to be like what you described working on tribes servers. The process for these types of tasks is far far more complex than what you’re likely imagining. They have huge backend software pipelines for managing this type of stuff. We’re not talking about tweaking some server vars on an early 2000’s dedicated server. Whatever you did while administrating or managing such servers doesn’t really apply in this type of scenario. It’s like comparing managing an enterprise network with saying you forwarded a port on your home router.
Well I’ll admit, I’m drastically simplifying it down to the point of when they have the approval, and staff readiness to do the change.
And while “a few minutes” is a big simplification, the idea that it takes them any more than 10 business days to do a revert on an integer value through an API is bizarre to me.
On top of that, they don’t even mention anything close to specifics of what the changes might to be ahead of time. Some of these patches you just read the release notes and can tell it has done nothing to fix a certain issue or completely works around it as if they intentionally ignored it.
Yes I agree that 10 business days for such a thing would be beyond absurd. I think hours would be a more reasonable estimate of how quickly it can occur. 5 minutes is an absurdly low estimate, though.
I do think they should do much more rapid changes, though. I tend to feel like they’re trying to be way too conservative in some cases. Like I’d rather see them do nearly negligible changes and tweaks to heroes instead of just leaving them be for weeks at a time.
The important thing to remember is that we’ve seen failed hotfixes in the past. This isn’t a hypothetical. They happened in the last few months of Overwatch 1 - the most notorious one was the Experimental mode that was only up for about an hour and never reappeared.
you say this as if the patches ACTUALLY balance the game. when i have played against hog orisa and sojourn almost every single game for the last month its fair to think that the patches should come sooner