Dearest Kaeltos: on patching

[Broodwich]

Let me preface this with my appreciation of you and all contributors' dedication. As a past "balancer" I know it takes a lot of free time for everybody; not just hours in front of the computer doing, but hours doing other stuff thinking about what you can do. I did donate a modest sum when you were having problems because i felt i should pay someone something for all the fun i was having at no cost.

That being said, my complaint is about the latest patch release, and the way it was released. It took a very long time of "internal testing" to produce something that still was released with bugs and balance issues. I understand why you want to do things behind closed doors, but have a little faith in the community. We all realize this is a constant work in progress, and can understand if there are problems as long as they are addressed within a reasonable time frame. As a project manager, I don't want you burned out after months of working on something and unavailable to fix some outstanding issues on release. Why can't you do changes in increments and just release them as regular updates? I feel there were internal builds that had less issues than this "final" patch and its following hotfix. The community is the best tester you have available to you; combined we play way the hell more hours and scenarios than whoever you play with internally does, so why not leverage us? You don't have to release your latest build every week, but a little more often than 7 months may be helpful. I feel it used to be this way when i first found elite.

My specific problems with the latest patch I will not detail here, as in addition to the frequent crashing of games, other threads have detailed the balance problems and bugs that people widely agree with. When a race is basically banned from playing PUGs, when units are banned from attacking generators in a tourney, you know there's a problem.

Regards,
SA

[Broodwich]

By the way, I had forgotten to say thank you for the audio changes in this latest build, specifically the on sync kill lines for sm. I had request this long ago, and thought it was forgotten. It is by far my favorite part of this patch

[Swift]

You must remember Caeltos was also busy with other things at the time such as moving, so it wasn't all sitting down being lazy.

[Torpid]

Blessed is the mind too small for doubt.

[Caeltos]

I think alot of balance assessments are done very pre-maturely and very hastily by the community. It's the nature of a game when a new balance patch is released. GK has always been getting flak ever since they were first introduced, and it's not going to stop. Much like how Tyranid was the new-kid on the block as a faction that was introduced in the game, and they got kicked around. It's always easy to kick around the new kid on the block and give him crap. Considering we tweaked around with this patch for so long, I'd even say people will get more accustomed to to the global changes over the course of the same period time. That's when I'd say the meta is really settled in, not what people are percieving as of now.

It happends in EVERY game. People jump the bandwagon on the "lol dis is the meta", then all of a sudden - over a period of time. A counterplay measure is discovered, or strategies that can beat the existing. Or, people just improve to play against the X/Y composition better. I know it might be an irrelevant comparison, but let's do it for the sake of something that was so incredibly percieved as "broken as fuk" in the meta;

CS:GO introduced a patch that heavily buffed the SMG's in the game, which resulted in monsterous 2nd rounds, which people thought were guaranteed wins because the guns were so god damn amazing. However, over the course of several months. People have gotten around to actually force-buying into the 2nd round with heavier-pistols. (If they're CT, they go five-seven/deagle) because they both present the 1-shot 1-kill potential, besides also having good ARP. And now, losing 2nd round as T from a win on first round is totally possible. You have to be careful with your purchases, and hell it's still evolving as it stands now. Even the positional counterplays and such, and this patch was AGES ago.

I'm going to semi-"quote" a few developers, as well as what Day[9] said once, and I honestly believe this is true when it comes to general balance;
- Babystep patches are "okay", but they don't do enough to shake the current existing meta, or the gameplay. Large patches that shake the meta, and really opens up the game are far more interesting, because it becomes a new learning experience. Everyone gets thrown off the hook, and has to relearn some of the stuff. It becomes a matter of adapting. It's almost as if you're playing the game again, for the very first time. And those moments are often the ones, people find interesting and fun.

DOW2 had a kazillion billion stupid babystep patches. It didn't do shit for the game. This game is way past those implementations, and have been for a long time. So you need larger patches, and those patches will take more time. Specifically 2.4 took longer, because we had higher goals, and really wanted to try to get as much content out as possible into this. Coupled that with new design approach into Eldar, and make iterations and re-iterations upon that.

Furthermore on balance. I don't really find that it was even necccassary to ban certain actions that you could do in the game. It's not as big of a deal as people make it out to be. The game used to be in such a worse state, with Tyranids in particular, but they were not banned in prior existing tournaments. Ripper spam into Carnifex was not bad either. Infact, I still remember the EMS finals in germany when a Space Marine (apo) vs Tyranid (RA) and the Space Marines triumphed. AND THIS MATCHUP WAS CONSIDERED IMPOSSIBLE FOR SM FOREVER. We're talking no-bleed ripper builds, carnifex T2 bullshit stuff here. Nothing in the game atm tops that. Of course, the game is not the same as it once was, but it's in the context of general gameplay- and they're still remarkably similliar in that regard still.

As far as bugs goes, it's pretty important to understand that no matter what- there will be no patch that will be FLAWLESS and have no bugs. This is true to pretty much any game as well, it's neigh impossible to cover all grounds. And some bugs are just out of reach due to the in-game mechanics, pathing and hard-coded whishawash. Everyone has to be realistic about these type of issues, that we can't really solve all of them. And solving them takes away time from balance and implementations. There's two people currently that does the implementation, and that's Myrdal & Wise Windu.

The reason why I'd prefer a closed-testing, is that people STILL do not understand what work in progress means. Besides, there were so many more amazing glaring issues in the internal testing, that if we had handed that out to the public, it would have been a shitstorm of epic proportion. Espicially if we gave out the ranked client as well as that point. We needed to approach with caution and try to keep it abit limited. There's just no way around it. Even with some of our internal testers, I still recieved some messages that people assumed the changes were final. But I had to continously repeat myself, and this gets abit repetetious and annoying after a time.

We don't have the manpower of a gaming company. Things will slip by the cracks, but we just have to try to do our best to make sure things gets back into shape in the best possible manner we can. Getting messaged by people assuming X and Y, and complaining about stuff that is not set-in-stone gets really frustrating, and it's not really words of encouragement to continue on forwards. But ye gotta keep troopin on. We're not NOT doing anything, because our git is clustered with issues, list of implementations, discussions and forward thinking and future implemenations and everything really. I mean in a non-agressive way, that we're really REALLY REALLY busting our balls, and when people think we don't care, or that we're lazy, is downright disrespecting the hard-work that Wise & Myrdal are putting into getting everything to work.

In short. We're working on one more hotfix still, but it's better we cover as much ground as we can before releasing it. So we don't miss any glaring issues, and we get things sorted. It'll also have some very minor balance stuff, much like the setup team damage modifier to buildings & shockwave/retreat paladin primarily.

TL;DR - Balance complaints were to be expected. It's only natural in the current state of the game, and any other video game. It wouldn't have mattered how big, or small the patch was. Game won't be perfect in terms of balance, or all bugs removed, we just need to adjust the fun-o-meter so it's all good for everyone. New hotfix that adresses some issues is coming, we're working hard on it!

[DarnedDragoon]

Thank you for keeping us informed it is much appreciated.

[Adeptus Noobus]

Level of composure is beyond measure as usual. I just want to add my two cents to this:

1. The way in which some people have written their balance issues was to be expected but still not ok.
2. Some people actually made viable (because constructive) statements about what they felt was not yet fully adjusted to fit in with the gigantic amount of changes that you guys (1000 kudos btw) made. This is a forum after all. Discussions will take place.
3. I totally get what you are saying about thew "new meta" that has yet to be found. If one actually pays attention to the "little" things (cheaper banshees, Operatives, Drop pod ability, etc.) you can already see how it will shift. The initial shock will dissipate and people will adjust.

I think I can talk for the majority of the people here when I say that you guys have done a hell of a job and we are truly enjoying it already.

[crazyman64335]

caeltos soviets are far overperforming, please nerf their call in meta

shit wrong forum.....again

[Toilailee]

caeltos soviets are far overperforming, please nerf their call in meta

shit wrong forum.....again

I'm starting to see a pattern here...

Welcome back! You've been missed. :]

[Hellstar]

@OP... you've had problems with crashes and bugs? Interesting... I haven't had any crashes at all, and while apparently a few bugs slipped through the cracks here and there (paladin shockwave does more damage than intended), I consider them relatively minor in the big scheme of things.

Big game companies with tons of resources regularly release patches that have to be hotfixed, and then hotfixed again. Given that, I'm kind of surprised that there aren't more issues with elite patches.

[Codex]

My 2 cents, since something you mentioned about 3 rippers into T2 fex shit wasn't "that bad"... an interesting point in that yes Apo stood a chance, and the matchup itself was certainly not as imbalanced as the community believed. However, a big part of the problem of earlier iterations of DOW2 was that the meta suffered from a huge amount of staleness- 3 rippers into fex was nasty and boring and generally effective, but people just got used to playing that same way and making no real choices.

At least now there are real choices, and some of them very effective at changing the game in your favour. That's awesome.