“During a Cycle, you would like us to nerf skills or items that are highly overperforming, even if it is not caused by a bug.”
34% of responses indicated they strongly disagree.
100% of people currently benefiting from broken builds and imbalanced interactions that are VERY likely to be hit by mid-cycle nerfs responded that they strongly disagreed.
Seriously this is like when a corporation investigates itself.
We investigated and found we did nothing wrong.
Of course these people are going to vote to keep their broken builds untouched.
The 20% that disagreed instead of strongly disagreed are probably people who are less reliant on the broken interactions but still benefiting from them.
This survey is basically “Self-report if you’re currently playing an overpowered bugged build, an overpowered but not bugged build, or you already got nerfed”.
Overperforming is overperforming.
Fix it or don’t fix it. The reason for it overperforming is ultimately irrelevant. The whole server stability thing was a one-off and unlikely to ever be the reason something needs to be changed mid-cycle again.
Who cares if something does 100m DPS because of a bug, or because of a poorly thought out and poorly tested skill/item interaction? If it’s imbalanced and overpowered just fix it.
Why are you asking people for permission when so many people are benefiting from and abusing stuff that’s either a bug or just really badly designed? They’re just going to vote in their own self interest.
I propose leaning into ladder resets for bug fixes instead of shying away from it. This can be beneficial for both sides.
Early in this first cycle, with so many bugs yet to fix, I suggest a ladder reset every 2-3 weeks, giving EHG time to develop a suite of fixes to deploy and giving players enough time to develop a character and compete. Ladder winners could get a single cosmetic item reward. The notice for incoming fixes could be posted 3-5 days before the reset so people can perform their final pushes.
As the game gets more stable in terms of bugs, move the reset to monthly and make it a staple of the endgame, but up the reward to a pack or set of cosmetic items. This gives people more time to min-max for ladder but not so long people get bored and stop playing.
More ladder resets are not necessarily a bad thing, as players get more opportunities to compete and prove their skills and theorycrafting. Builds that get changed due to patches get reworked or new ones get discovered and more creativity can occur. With a monthly ladder we’ll get 3-4 chances to compete per cycle. More winners, more playing, more interesting builds, and more bugs fixed.
Ideally there is a historical record of each ladder with the winners/prize shown in a tab on the ladder panel in game, or at least a page on the website/forums.
Exp tomes being doubled as echo rewards for Circle of Fortune players was very consistent with the tooltip and description. Going by all the information players had, access to, that was working as intended.
This means there will be cases in which we create builds that will end up going against an intent we didn’t know about until an upcoming fix is announced.
You probably can’t eliminate all such incidents, but giving players time to find the META/Bugs after a big patch before jumping right to the new cycle could minimize it.
Thanks for the Recap, nice to see a Team really listen, and not just saying it look good.
iam quite happy with the results, its what i hoped / expected.
The reason we felt both questions were answered by the one system change was that we feel that having the information with the entries works in both situations. While it is correct that the majority of responses indicated that they wanted a partial reset, we felt that with the system of being able to track when an entry occurred, that would not be the case. So the results are different, the system change / extra information carries over as it supports groups from both questions. I apologize that it felt like we were saying the distribution of responses was the same.
We both know we will end up in exactly that situation though.
Balance is a mess and lack of mid-cycle balancing is just going to create heavy player FOMO for the overperforming builds and drive people towards the “abuse early abuse often” mindset with anything new the community finds for broken builds.
I also really hate the idea that you’ll never know if whatever makes a certain build or interaction great is a “bug” or “working as intended” or “working as coded” and so you’ll never know if it’s going to be subjected to a nerf or fix later, or if it’s safe. (Which is just going to lead people to more FOMO and more chasing and more FOTMoment build chasing rather than just … playing what’s actually fun or interesting to them)
So the actual response is: ‘while people are showing they want partial resets, it’s not currently in the scope of what we can do during 1.0, and we’ll be looking to act on that feedback in 1.1’?
This is actually exactly why I personally feel that the power of the build shouldn’t really be considered in this case at all, as it’s difficult to find the right cut-off about how much a build is overperforming, when should it warrant a bug fix and when it shouldn’t. I’d say that bugs should all be fixed as fast as possible, whether they result in a highly overperforming build, only a slightly overperforming one or even an underperforming one. Of course significantly overperforming bugs should have priority, but all of them need fixing if they have any impact on the player experience.
One of the most frustrating experiences for me in the game so far have been when trying out a new skill upgrade or passive and noticing it simply doesn’t work as stated in the tooltip. And I don’t think these bugs should only be fixed quickly if the result makes it to the top of the leaderboard.
Whatever the case, it’s good that you’ll at least consider making these fixes from now on. I’m not too fussed with leaderboards personally, but it certainly makes a bad impression for potential players when so many videos and streams are filled with bugged interactions like these.
Somewhat - The information will be there for anyone to ignore entries they want to ignore. We aren’t able to scope in to 1.1 filter and backend service coding for changing what results get returned to the leaderboards for a better supported UX for those players.
I appreciate the effort to communicate on this matter, don’t misunderstand me. But rather than try to forum lawyer every build option and decide if it’s subject to a balance change or not, I would just assume all things are subject to change and collect items for several backup options.
I mean druids can become literally invincible right now with extreme cooldown recovery and two specific nodes, but everything is working exactly as it says on the tin.
As it does what it says it’s supposed to, even being overpowered, it’s then not a bug and something we would look to change at the start of a cycle rather than mid-cycle.
Currently of the 50 runs shown on 1 player softcore for the cycle, 46 are bugged. Sorry, but this doesn’t help anyone. Seeing that 46 of those 50 runs were using bugged interactions isn’t going to do anything for the leaderboard, except render it a joke. If you go to specific classes, it gets worse for classes that had the bugs, and better for ones that didn’t.
Sorry, but it’s kind of a joke to say ‘you can just ignore them’ when only 50 runs are shown, and 46 of those are from a bug.
Without as strong of words, I don’t really disagree. If we didn’t agree to at least some extent, there would be no reason for us to look at filters in the future!
Except there was an official stance on the issue, then people complained, so they changed that stance. Not sure I would call that consistent or reliable.
As someone who played a … euhm … modest amount of beta, I saw a lot of bugs being fixed that I didn’t really noticed being there through gameplay. A majority of those bugs were at a 2x level. So at worst, they were equal to something I could get from a +4 Level or similar, basically a ‘perfect roll’ T7 affix extra.
Meh, that’s not far off from being lucky on some drops/crafts. But it sure won’t be something I focus my entire build around
