It's time for new balance devs. Again.

[TashaFoxx.7862]

To make a mistake is a perfectly human thing. It happens to the best of us, for many reasons.

But it's a whole another story when you make that mistake a month after announcing your plan, despite hundreds of people telling you it's a braindead idea that will only make things worse.

A person who makes a mistake needs help. A person who, despite feedback, pursues bad ideas at expense of customers satisfaction needs either a proper training, or just a different job. Sorry.

There is a reason why great soldiers don't always make for great commanders..

[Echostorm.9143]

Agreed.  This isn't working and it hasn't been working for years.  New leadership and new, drastic changes are needed, we're stuck in a loop of upsetting nearly everyone and leaving the rest worried their fate will be worse next time. 

[TashaFoxx.7862]

5 minutes ago, Echostorm.9143 said:

Agreed.  This isn't working and it hasn't been working for years.  New leadership and new, drastic changes are needed, we're stuck in a loop of upsetting nearly everyone and leaving the rest worried their fate will be worse next time. 

Exactly. What even is the point of art, coding, creative and other teams doing their best if balance team will turn all of their effort to dust by making stuff unenjoyable?

[Xzygy.1452]

When you guys met and talked about this, there was someone in the meeting saying that the feedback was wrong.  That person is the problem.

[Ghos.1326]

What's the issue in reference? Need context.

[TashaFoxx.7862]

Just now, Ghos.1326 said:

What's the issue in reference? Need context.

How balance devs published patch notes preview, got a ton of responses explaining how and why these changes are dumb (some even offering alternative solutions). Then, in final patchnotes they acknowledged the feedback.. only to push the dumb changes into the game anyway.

[Ghos.1326]

Just now, GetFoxxed.9478 said:

How balance devs published patch notes preview, got a ton of responses explaining how and why these changes are dumb (some even offering alternative solutions). Then, in final patchnotes they acknowledged the feedback.. only to push the dumb changes into the game anyway.

What changes in particular? That's what I mean, we need the missing context.

[nutri.1385]

It's not spite from our end.

We're trying to be understanding, at least some of us are. But kitten, even my patience is limited. Since the last flop of a balance update and the discord leaks I completely lost my trust that the persons behind the balance decisions have the good of the game at hearts. And yet again, they didn't really bother to acknowledge the player feedback and released another tragic update. 

I can imagine there are some reasons behind the decisions the designers make, maybe there is even a long term vision (which I doubt), but I'm certain the good of the game is not one of them.

As a long term veteran player I really hate having to be effin scared of every stupid balance update. This is pointless. 

Of course you have a right to break your own game. Maybe the vocal criticising group is a small minority with the playerbase growing and growing. Maybe it's just this phase of the game, that we don't have anything good to expect from the balances anymore, just bad design. I struggle to sill have hope it's not the case. 

Edited June 28, 2023 by nutri.1385
.

[loregnum.3619]

The problem is those balance devs you want to replace surely had to get the approval from someone or some people above them so what about that person or those people that said "yup, let's go with this!" Do you replace them as well or do they somehow get a pass even though they had final say with this and knew full well some of the community was ticked off but didn't care?  

Then if you do replace these balance devs, do you just replace them with in house people or do you get some outside fresh blood? I think replacing in house will show zero change. Outside you have the chance something may change but it's also likely anet would specifically hire people that think exactly like them so you'd not see any difference. I just highly doubt this is a company that actually wants people that may share differing views, and philosophies than they do. Most companies are like that so it's not just an Anet thing. most companies  basically want people to share in a hive mind as it is no doubt smoother to operate if everyone has the same view of how things are and should be.

I started playing in April 2022 and I remember last year when they changed the balance head after a mea culpa post that people were raving about how good it would be yet here we are with that new balance head and it's the same type of thing people were upset about a year ago before the change. See what I mean? Nothing actually changed and it's so similar to the June 2022 debacle. It reminds me a lot of people that waste their lives on following politics and think that replacing psychopathic politician A with psychopathic politician B in country C will magically make country C a utopia and what ends up happening is nothing of true importance ever changes and these people don't learn and keep following the dog and pony show thinking that next time will be different.

I think there is simply a company wide mentality at work here and unless that got changed, nothing else will change. This is the same company that has put divisive stuff directly in the game (which is getting worse with each new piece of content), and have also shared their support for divisive stuff on social media. This is divisive stuff (and I won't specifically mention what it all is) that I think AT BEST, maybe only half or so, though probably quite a bit lower,  of the world population may actually support while the rest do not support it or get outright offended at it. So if you have a company that blatantly knows a bunch of their player base is going to be annoyed or outright offended by it and doesn't care and that they will be divisive instead of keeping their views and ideology outside of their video game, why would they care about some feedback for a balance change? It's the same mentality at work. 

If you want to actually see any change with how these guys go about future balance updates and the like then a good percentage of the player base has to effectively boycott the game, meaning not playing and especially not buying anything. That's the only way you may ever see any type of change because outside of that, they simply won't care and will just keep doing what they want to do, regardless of their customers. It's pretty much the same with any other company not caring about how things will be received by heir customers with many examples proving this. The most recent is probably the Bud Light debacle where they did something they knew the majority of their customers would not approve of but they didn't care, probably thinking nothing would happen. Boy were they wrong and they have lost billions of dollars because of that hubris. 

Oh, and if/when we get the inevitable "we hear you and will do better" mea culpa post like we got last year which was a load of bunk as proven right now, don't fall for it and start thanking the person for writing it. It's at the point where they need to EARN your trust by proving they mean it so make them earn it.

[Acheron.1580]

I'm going to be contrarian but hear me out. I'd rather they hire on more people with unique viewpoints and different fields of expertise than just constantly rotate out the 1 guy every year. Rather than replace the current team they should expand it. Imagine if there were a variety of people on the team who had passion for different classes in the same way CMC clearly has love for elementalist.

The more people you can get together to engage in discussion, and the more hands you have to go through forums and read feedback the better. You end up having multiple ideas, opinions and points of view, as well as the possibility for greater understanding across not just one section or class of the game but hopefully across all. Plus when you constantly change up employees you limit growth and learned lessons.

Do I agree this patch was awful, and that the people involved really should have been more actively listening to the community? Absolutely. But the current problem is more likely too small a team and too big a workload.

[Ruisenior.6342]

2 hours ago, Echostorm.9143 said:

Agreed.  This isn't working and it hasn't been working for years.  New leadership and new, drastic changes are needed, we're stuck in a loop of upsetting nearly everyone and leaving the rest worried their fate will be worse next time. 

I have to agree that balance changes made specially since 2022 are ruining the game (and that's why i dont play anymore) but maybe the balance team are just following the steps Anet (and game director) tells them and from there they try to make whatever they can.

Whatever, some changes are a must, and they should stop messing around and trashing player builds every 6 months.

[Echostorm.9143]

1 hour ago, Acheron.1580 said:

The more people you can get together to engage in discussion, and the more hands you have to go through forums and read feedback the better. You end up having multiple ideas, opinions and points of view, as well as the possibility for greater understanding across not just one section or class of the game but hopefully across all. Plus when you constantly change up employees you limit growth and learned lessons.

Do I agree this patch was awful, and that the people involved really should have been more actively listening to the community? Absolutely. But the current problem is more likely too small a team and too big a workload.

There are literally hundreds of pages of people talking about classes and balance here spanning years utterly devoid of anet engagement.  It's astonishing CMC is still even involved after the leaks. 

[Alcatraznc.3869]

A new balance dev team and then what ? They could very well improve the overall game but they could also do even worse than what we have right now.

[Mewsha.3561]

For many of us that have had our builds that we invested time into wiped out as well as had our elite specs made worse to play or just straight up irrelevant, it can't get worse. This is the worst for us.

I don't think it's just the balance team's problem though. I would be fine with where we are right now if they addressed the concerns of the community. This patch was met with overwhelming negativity, and that calls for a response sooner rather than later. Right now we're all just guessing and speculating over what changes were intended, and which ones were not and how they're going to fix them and how long that will take.

This is something they should have updated us on before the patch dropped since it went through virtually unchanged, but at the very least they could have posted an update today explaining what's going to happen.

The silence is what is truly irritating here and the feeling that we don't know what to do with our builds. Massive changes that completely alter class identity and elite specs that people have been playing for years should not be treated this way especially when it's causing this much chaos and confusion.

[steezy.5238]

Some people just hate change, as far as I see it, they are making changes to try and improve the game and shift the meta, make some builds viable that weren't, and allow you to play your favourite class to fill any role, so you don't have to multiclass if you don't want to.

I definitely think things like the alac druid change are straight up silly, but the vitriol in here is obscene and just over the top.

Maybe write your thoughts out in a clear and concise manner as to what exactly you expect and how they can improve?

Comments like:

7 hours ago, GetFoxxed.9478 said:

A person who, despite feedback, pursues bad ideas at expense of customers satisfaction needs either a proper training, or just a different job. Sorry.

Do nothing but display anger, how about being constructive?

If you give me this feedback, what do I do with it? I just think "OK, this person wants me to change something, but which of my ideas exactly was bad? They also want me to lose my job, or are at least telling me I'm bad at it, that seems mean, why would I want to help them?"

Overall, 1/10

[Jski.6180]

I mean was there an view that was dominant over all in the feed back even as far as i can tell its just "i am angry at any thing done at this point" seems to be the main push for most of these feed back of things.

[XenesisII.1540]

Scourges didn't want any of those changes, it's just as simple as the scrappers not wanting the gyro well changes.

Unsurprisingly the white knights don't seem to be listening to the concerns either.

Now class make sure you write out the perfect essay about your concerns, dot your i's and cross your t's and we'll be sure to have a look at it in 6 months after we've pushed it all through and you've forgotten about it, oh, please buy the next expansion, thank you.

🤷‍♂️

Edited June 29, 2023 by XenesisII.1540

[Zephire.8049]

2 hours ago, Garrick.3150 said:

The silence is what is truly irritating here and the feeling that we don't know what to do with our builds.

This is the crux of it, in my opinion and from my experience. It's an MMO so what you play will change and a lot of people are fine with that if there's a reason given and it's not needlessly put six feet under. There will always be people who complain about change but there's a degree of change you have to accept could happen if you play an MMO. But this was not that.

The released an advanced preview of what was in the pipeline and explicitly asked for feedback and didn't respond to any of it. Yes there was complaining for the sake of complaining but there were also people who immediately caught issues and had serious questions and concerns, both with how a class would perform and how it would feel to do so. There was an expectation that Anet would respond—an expectation Anet set up—and it never happened.

Now we're being told to wait until July 18th to maybe see a change and trust them to do it. Or wait until SotO. Or wait until the next balance patch. If they're destroying builds in preparation for SotO, they need to communicate that. It doesn't excuse destroying said builds so far ahead of time but players deserve to know the reasoning behind why certain changes went through despite overwhelming negative feedback. It wouldn't change the in-game results but letting players in on something so they understand it would have gone a long way in making said players feel included and that there is a long-term plan in place and it's not a case in having something you loved made unplayable and not knowing if there's a plan or if a dev took issue with that build in particular or wanted to force people to play a different one.

It's the difference of being blindfolded and having your hand slapped and told you were going to touch something painful and having your hand slapped and not being told why. Your hand hurts just the same but the first one you know why, the second you have no idea what happened or if it will happen again.

The balance team vastly missed the mark this patch but so did the community manager and anyone who's allowed to communicate with players. Or, if no one is allowed to talk, the person who made the decision to muzzle developers and enforce a code of silence.

[Zarathustra.1458]

There is a saying, to do the same thing, the same way, and expect different results is the definition of insanity. I propose that Anet stop being insane, and sack their balance team as they obviously do not know what the kitten they are kitten doing...

[otto.5684]

As someone who was very well a tuned to game balance, and now is nothing more than a casual pve player, I like most of the changes (less 6/27/23 patch).

Most old weapons got fixed. All elites have 1-3 viable pve builds. The damage differences are within closer range of each other. Having said that, I wish we would go back with classes having more uniqueness. I think the unique buffs, limited classes with access to quickness and alacrity, and unique auras, is better than having every class doing the same thing. I get it was harder to balance, but it was also far more interesting. And IMO, is the primary reason behind the growing backlash.

As for sPvP, CmC might be a good designer. Maybe well tuned to pve balance. He has no idea how to balance pvp. At all. SPvP has went from fun to dumpster fire. Example, in which century will FB become playable in spvp??

 

[Acheron.1580]

Well thank you devs for making me feel like a clown lol.

I still really think they should add more people to the development team, but after this follow up patch notes I can concede there could be better quality along with the quantity.

[oscuro.9720]

I mean, over the year they’ve been in place they’ve had more hits than misses and balance has generally been better than under the previous teams. Not to mention actual communication, goal posting, etc. and actual balance patches more than once a year. 

[Helgaley.3619]

On 6/28/2023 at 6:12 PM, Garrick.3150 said:

For many of us that have had our builds that we invested time into wiped out as well as had our elite specs made worse to play or just straight up irrelevant, it can't get worse. This is the worst for us.

I don't think it's just the balance team's problem though. I would be fine with where we are right now if they addressed the concerns of the community. This patch was met with overwhelming negativity, and that calls for a response sooner rather than later. Right now we're all just guessing and speculating over what changes were intended, and which ones were not and how they're going to fix them and how long that will take.

This is something they should have updated us on before the patch dropped since it went through virtually unchanged, but at the very least they could have posted an update today explaining what's going to happen.

The silence is what is truly irritating here and the feeling that we don't know what to do with our builds. Massive changes that completely alter class identity and elite specs that people have been playing for years should not be treated this way especially when it's causing this much chaos and confusion.

I agree with you. This goes beyond the balance team, and I don't think calling for balance devs to be replaced is justified. 

I feel like this is a management problem and possibly related to what they are prioritizing or how they are allocating resources. There's obviously feedback available from the players, and Anet has the quantitative data on their end with the tools to make changes, so there is no good reason for these constant balance disasters. 

But how many of us have been in jobs with crappy leadership that either pushed for bad decisions that didn't make sense or put so much emphasis on messaging and marketing that there weren't enough resources to improve the actual quality of the product or service? You know it's bad because you're the one having to do the work and getting yelled at by angry customers, but you still do it because your livelihood depends on it and jobs don't fall out of trees these days. 

Calling this a balance problem doesn't feel right to me. It's been going on too long, but their messaging has reached a point where it's so far from the simple truth of their actions that it isn't even believable anymore, so who else would even push for it but a manager that 1) doesn't have to deal with the backlash and 2) doesn't care about anything other than metrics that make $$$. 

I'm not convinced that Cal is the person advocating for these changes when he's also the one who presents them during streams and gets targeted by the players in the inevitable backlash. I feel like this is most likely a leadership problem that is above Cal's head - there's been too much of a shift to unrealistic hyped up messaging that just boils down to marketing, and based on basically everything I've seen during my professional life, only someone in upper management could be so disconnected from reality.  

Edited June 30, 2023 by Helgaley.3619

[Serephen.3420]

On 6/29/2023 at 3:48 AM, GetFoxxed.9478 said:

To make a mistake is a perfectly human thing. It happens to the best of us, for many reasons.

But it's a whole another story when you make that mistake a month after announcing your plan, despite hundreds of people telling you it's a braindead idea that will only make things worse.

A person who makes a mistake needs help. A person who, despite feedback, pursues bad ideas at expense of customers satisfaction needs either a proper training, or just a different job. Sorry.

There is a reason why great soldiers don't always make for great commanders..

If you learn to read you'll see they check how it works in live gameplay and are already making changes to ease the issues. It's more common than you think to eithershave tiny bit by tiny bit or start a bit heavy handed and ease off from there.

I think it's pretty messed up asking for people to get fired over something like this which is constant progress. It's different when it's malicious which there is no evidence to prove that it is at this point. I'd rather ask for more devs and resources to be used for it than thinking swapping people around will change anything to your fancy.

Maybe you should get fired from your job everytime you don't do something perfectly or if some customers are not perfectly pleased with your choices.

 

Edited June 30, 2023 by Serephen.3420

[AlPower.2476]

I don't like any of the last balance patches either (As for PvP)

They don't listen feedback; they nerf random things; they still buffing catalyst, etc.

But I don't think this is the worst balance team (At least for PvE and WvW Zerg)

Most of HoT PvE Meta was Chrono/Druid/Tempest/BS; and Half PoF meta was Chrono/Druid/Weaver/BS. And then Renegade/Chrono/Firebrand/Druid/Weaver/Bs. Then for a short time, we had 9 Guardians and 1 Renegade or Chrono (1 Firebrand, the rest DH with Feel my wrath) At the end of PoF we recently had specs diversity along PvE content.

Now, for PvP/WvW Roaming; they have been clearly bad. With no exception. As I said: Random nerfs; nerfing weak classes, buffing already strong ones, reworking things that no one asked for, ruining lots of builds in order to nerf one; cata/tempest huge  buffs, then a slight nerf, then a huge buff, etc. 

 

 

Edited June 30, 2023 by AlPower.2476