I'll tell you right now that when I spammed our director-level monetization guy about attending this, he was pretty hesitant (which is fair, given how spicy that topic can get on Reddit).

However, he has agreed to respond to a few questions so long as I team up with him and have his back, so if you post those questions in reply to this comment here I can pass on his thoughts through my account.

You're definitely gonna get upvoted for formatting alone if nothing else lol. We DON'T have an audio expert in this AMA but I'm going to talk to the team to get the best answer we can. Will update this comment.

EDIT: okay yeah so Chad the game director posted a very detailed response: https://www.reddit.com/r/apexlegends/comments/nfpbzb/official_apex_legends_legacy_update_ama_with_the/gymup0e/

Arenas LTMs are definitely on the table, but they take time to develop so we'd have to weigh that against other features

Much like you, we hate when people leave early so we are definitely looking into leaver penalties and loss forgiveness for Arenas

He's actually wanted to talk about this for a while. Here's what he said:

Recolors/Rethemes we do for skins take up the same creative resource, which we have a fixed resource of. They definitely take a lot less time to make, but the problem with that is developing more recolors directly takes resource away from developing brand new skins. At a high level, the trade off we have to make is making 10 recolors or one net new Legendary skin.

Our net new skins take a LOT of time to develop because there's a lot of care put into concepting to make sure they feel right for each Legend. We're still trying to get the operations and balance right between these items and it's difficult to keep up with demand.

Yeah definitely. I'm working on a balance pass that I'd like to push live sooner rather than later. We'll continue balancing as we go and of course update with new seasons as new content comes out and along with our usual weapon and legend meta changes.

TLDR: yes we're fixing it
But also funny story:

When we added Starter Kits this season, we increased the number of "blanks" in the loot pool.
Now, the way our loot system works is that it tries to put all the "blanks" in the ground first. This is done to make sure that bins are always "full" (don't wanna open a bin to only 1 piece of loot) ANYWAY, the logic for this was somewhat flawed and adding more "blanks" had a weird side effect of putting certain types of loot into bins (backpacks!). It took a while to track down the reason, but it's all fixed now!

Well, thank you, I guess, for that opening? Many people on our team also don't like going on Reddit. I wonder why that is!

As for your question, you've seen Starter Kits in Legacy, right? They massively reduced the spawn rate of white chests and removed white incap shields and helmets from ground loot altogether. There might be more work we can do here, but it's not as easy as just saying "hey let's just delete all white loot." Here's how I'd like you to think about it: why is white loot bad? Clearly because it's the worst in the game. Well, what happens if you remove white loot? Now blue loot is the worst in the game. Give it a few months for everything to settle and suddenly you'll see calls for blue loot to be removed.

Looting is an important pillar of the BR: it contributes to RNG, which when applied to the correct degree is very healthy to the game, it drives people to move to different POIs and contributes to overall movement across the map, and gives you partial success states. These are all good things that we don't just want to throw out completely. We do think in some cases there's too many steps; like maybe it doesn't make sense for there to be a white, blue, and purple stock when their impact is barely even felt? We do want to be careful about just deleting things that feel underwhelming; it's important that you feel "white loot sucks" so that you're driven to go out and look for blue loot.

A little too well? Not sure yet! Let's talk about numbers vs experiences!

Numerically, she's too strong. She wins too often, both across the game as a whole and in every single skill bucket we look at, and she's picked very often (particularly in Arenas). Does that mean we must nerf her right away? No.

Experientially, she's so much better. No longer having the res shield means it's feasible to thirst a downed enemy being revived; but that also gives Lifeline an option to engage you while you're otherwise occupied or when your gun's running dry. Good play on both sides.

Not sure what, if anything, we'll do to her, but I think the changes landed very well. It feels better, IMO, both to play as and against her. It's possible gold backpack is just too cheap in arenas as well, if you're playing that. Maybe we need to nerf her numerically a little bit (like drone heal speed / ult cooldown), maybe we can look at her hitboxes and see where they're too small, but right now? No plans to speak of.

There are a couple issues you're speaking to here, but the short answer is yes. We are always looking for and fixing issues related to our matchmaking, and players being put onto a team that isn't full is definately something we care a lot about fixing. As we introduced Arenas and No-Fill Matchmaking we did see some issues arise and have solved many of those issues already, but will continue to make backend improvements as quickly as we can. Sometime you could end up with a missing teammate because that teammate crashed out of the game or lost internet connection. These issues can be difficult to solve because we have to identify why the user was put onto a team and then disappeared. We do track crash reports and look at them frequently, but other times it could not be the fault of the game itself. Overall, we want to do everything we can to make sure you have a full team and have even talked about potentially replacing those teammates that drop out very early (like at character select).

We like to dodge questions that are rude or derogatory, and we gravitate towards healthier exchanges. Other than that, we're always happy to answer even the toughest of questions.

We kind of did this. When we realized the no-fill matchmaking had some issues we made some adjustments on the backend that would greatly reduce the number of issues related to the bug. We didn't feel like we needed to completely turn the feature off and could get a 'good enough' temporary fix without taking the feature away completely. We feel like the feature is in a better place now, but continue to make additional improvements to the quality and reliability of our matchmaking system.

It's largely based on what the team is fired up to make next. A lot of ideas float around and usually one idea gains more momentum and excitement than the others and gets scheduled out. There are a lot of different aspects to think about when creating an heirloom, such as how it ties to the character and lore, it's visual design, the animation and easter eggs. Given how creative they can get, it's really what the team is excited to make next.

He had so many feelings about this one lol. Here's what he wrote:

We hear you and we're not happy with the rotation either, but we're also trying to manage quality of life for the team. The store was in a rough shop, but we have folks working HARD to pay off technical debt. Let's talk rotations specifically:

• Operations - We manually photoshop every image and input every offer in the store. Because of this, it's a huge operational effort for the team to put more offers in the game and rotate faster. We're working on in improving our operations to make this better, but for now it's a brutal process.

• Player Preferences - All players play different Legends and because of the operations challenges, it's difficult to make it relevant to everyone at the same time. For example, if you're a Bangalore player, our store rotates weekly, and it is possible you go 2-3 weeks without seeing a Bangalore offer. We know this is not a good experience and we're trying to fix this with tech.

• Priorities - For the two challenges above, we are working on technical solutions, but tech takes time to build and get right. With this being a live service game, the first priority we have is gameplay and getting players into matches. A lot of resource goes there first because we want people to be able to play and have fun. We're trying to balance the roadmap the best we can, but there's gameplay expectations we need to meet.

For more uses on Legend tokens, agreed and we're 100% looking into it.

First off, thank you for asking about this respectfully. We hear a lot of player frustration with audio bugs, and we are just as frustrated, if not more, that these types of issues still exist in our game. As I've said before, these audio bugs are very conditional, and hard to reproduce in a way that allows us to quickly fix them, but we are working diligently to improve our audio reliability.

You asked for updates, so I can also give you some updates as to what's happened in the last couple of seasons as you've mentioned. We don't believe there is one bug causing audio bugs, we feel there are several things that can make a sound not play as intended.

• We have greatly increased the overall number of sound channels we're using. We believe that at times, we were running out of channels which was causing some aliases to cut out as the limit was reached
• We have decreased the overall number of layers in many of the frequently occurring sounds in the game. This makes playing audio less demanding on the PC or game console, which can then mean fewer hiccups when trying to play a high volume of audio files.
• We have gone through weapon, legend, and environment sounds and reprioritized them against each other to ensure that we're prioritizing the more important audio like footsteps and weapons over less critical sound queus like chirping bird in the environement
• We now preload many of our common sound effects into memory instead of streaming it in. In some cases, we were seeing some sounds not play because of hard drive IO bottlenecks in trying to load the sounds to play on time. This should not happen as often now for common game sounds as they now remain in memory and ready to play
• Probably our biggest change so far is we rolled out a tool to the live game that lets all of our developers and some additional content creators to 'tag' audio issues in the live game. This way of tagging a live game audio issue sends our engineering team a bunch of data that allows them to debug the issue. This is great news because it means we no longer have to rely just on finding a reproduction of an audio bug, we can just flag it when we hear it and our engineering team will get a bunch of data back to help debug the issue. This is going to be critical for us. It's fairly new but we're already collected a lot of useful data from it.

Obviously, we have a lot more work to do, and we'll continue to stay on it until both the players and the devs feel like we're in a great spot. It's nice to give you all an update as to what we've done so far though, and current initiatives.

🤔

Can't tell you when it's coming out but we want to get it out as soon as we can. I can also tell you it's not going to use the same system as the BR.

Join me in sending tweets to @MonsterclipRSPN about this :)

Arenas and BR have separate trackers, since the amount of combat in those two modes are very different

But we are making a change so that the character-specific trackers will also update in Arenas

Revenant's still weak and not particularly popular. We have a set of changes we're trying out internally at the moment and they feel fun and fine, but they'll probably not move the needle on power a lot. That may be fine! So long as people playing as him / against him have fun, numbers are fake anyway. And while I can't give you any details on the buffs we're trying out, I can tell you he'll certainly climb to the top.

You can place Sheila on a Crypto drone and fly it around the map!

Just kidding. It's a bit too early to talk about her spicy buff because we don't yet know if it'll work and if so when we can ship it. Right now, IF EVERYTHING GOES WELL (which it never does), you can expect it halfway through Season 10. Game dev is hard and takes a long time!

How's Valk performing?

Well so far! She came in at around the 5th spot overall winrate-wise and has been sitting there steadily. Experientially, there's some cheese plays we're looking to fix (like you can ult to a high piece of the level in the last circle and then use the passive+tactical combo to hover out of range while the circle closes), but there's no numerical adjustments we're planning right now. She seems fine! It's fine. It's all fine.

Are you still planning on buffing Rampart and Fuse?

Yup.

Would you consider adding fortified to Revenant?

Nope.

How is Lifeline doing after her change?

Answered this elsewhere: https://www.reddit.com/r/apexlegends/comments/nfpbzb/official_apex_legends_legacy_update_ama_with_the/gymtyak/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x&context=3

With Horizon taking a hit who is #1 in win and pick rate?

It's tough to answer holistically. Depending on the day, it's either Lifeline or Wattson, but there's a sh*t ton more Lifeline players than there are Wattson players, so should they really count the same? Anyway, numbers are made up. Tell a friend.

How is Octane performing right now?

Unchanged :X Someone explain this to me ;P His pick rate took a small hit (very small) when Legacy released, but that is entirely explainable with Valk coming in. Whenever a new Legend is released, all other legends take a hit in pick rate, and the most popular legends tend to take the biggest hit. But power wise he seems to have stayed roughly the same. Maybe the tiniest drop? Hard to tell if it's real or noise.

We want you thinking about how to spend your crafting materials and weighing all your options when deciding how to tackle the round. Anything that stands out as a must buy or a never buy, I see as a problem. That means increasing or decreasing prices to make similar options more or less attractive.

We look at everything you might expect for weapons, engagement ranges, general power level, ammo, base weapon price and upgrade prices. You hit different breaking points as well that spike value, like getting turbocharger on a Havoc or Devotion or going 1 size up on mags making it much easier to one clip, etc. For Legends, aside from using cost to balance the value of abilities, we also consider the number of free starting tactical charges and the round cooldown on ultimates.

Fences will be fixed soon! I think her shield regen is fine. It's a lot of power, and she's very powerful. I'd rather not keep pushing more power into her into until she becomes overbearing. Until we push her power, how do you say, beyond capacity.

I assume you mean the local charge up without a beam and then single fire shot, so I'll respond based on that assumption! I'm not the original designer on the Charge Rifle, so I can't comment with 100% certainty on the decision, but the main answer is counterplay and victim frustration.

One of the major axes of power for an Apex weapon is something I personally call "burstiness" (it's a technical term). While TTK and DPS refer to how quickly a weapon can kill someone, "burstiness" is how much damage is done in one short moment, or how _spikey_ it is. Most snipers have quite poor TTK, i.e. they don't down players as quickly as any of the other guns, because they have very slow fire rates comparatively. But, the tradeoff for this is that they do lots of damage in one shot, which has advantages in certain situations like catching someone by surprise, or engaging in peeking poke battles where players will hide back in cover as soon as they start taking damage (and you can hide in cover to protect yourself during the long time between shots). In general, those advantages are more meaningful at longer ranges where you are more likely to be hidden and players can't push on you from your poking position as easily. So what do players do when they are being shot by snipers, what's the counterplay? We try to provide this by utilizing Apex's exaggerated projectile ballistics -- projectiles are pretty slow and drop pretty significantly at range. Victims of snipers can jump, move erratically, use legend abilities, etc. to make it tough for the shooter to hit their target, especially while moving. There's also an element of trying to preserve some competitive integrity. When we make a sniper more bursty, say Kraber one shot headshots, we make the ballistics more difficult for the shooter -- the Kraber has very slow projectiles that drop very hard for a sniper. The hope is that if you get headshot by a Kraber from long range while running, there's at least the thought of "well that was a nice shot", knowing that hitting those shots is tough (this isn't perfect, and we are looking at potential Kraber counterplay improvements for the future).

So, on to the Charge Rifle. It has a low fire rate and high damage, so it has those "burstiness" advantages mentioned above. However, because it's a hitscan weapon, it circumvents a lot of those other weaknesses. It hits moving targets reliably, and it gets the reputation that it's much easier to use and hit people than other snipers. So, we needed to inject some unique weaknesses for the gun to make up for its unique strengths. The initial charge up beam helps with a lot of these issues! If you are in a peek battle, the victim knows when the big damage is about to come out and can take cover, reducing the peeking power. The initial beam helps victims time when the shot is going to come out, so they can try to do movements at the right time to dodge some of the damage. Also, by moving half of the damage to a sustained beam, we could do the swaying pattern, otherwise the Charge Rifle gets really quite strong in hipfire which was a bad time in playtests. With the titanfall charge rifle, the charge up waiting time is really only visible to the user, but not the victim. Being suddenly beamed with a huge damage spike that you can't really expect the timing of or dodge or see is pretty frustrating. When you can respawn 5 seconds later and folks are never that far away, it's not so bad, but in a BR it just feels bad.

The elephant in the room: the Charge Rifle was (and debatably is) still really frustrating on launch. I don't want to go too into it, but I'll give some high level thoughts on that. It wasn't super strong in terms of people getting kills with it, but it did restrict victims in a really harsh way that felt awful. Because of the strong ability to track moving targets, and because of the much wider more spread out cover in Worlds Edge (new map at the time), players could get "locked down" by Charge Rifle players. You could peek fight them to some degree, and you could beat them up close, but if you were stuck in a POI 100m away, the time it would take to run to another defensive point was just too long and they could reliably down you or do tons of damage. The weapon is very "sharp", it has impactful weaknesses and strengths, and it comes out relatively balanced in aggregate numbers; however, with how Apex plays, the "tracking moving targets" strength was too restrictive and frustrating to play against! This was in a time where we were trying to add more depth and viability to long range fighting in Apex, but sometimes things don't work out how we would like. Lessons learned, and it's always worth taking those risks to find the good stuff!

We're always looking at our weapon balance through data, frustrations on reddit, streams, etc. You name it we've probably already seen it and talked about it. What this means is that we're always looking to make Apex gunplay a balanced and fun experience for everyone and give each weapon room to breath within their design space.

With that in mind and without giving away any of our plans you can expect that if a gun, such as the Spitfire, is an outlier in performance, even after a round of nerfs, we'll continue to iterate. There is a very fine line between nudging a weapon into balance and accidentally nerfing it into the ground. To achieve this we need to make bets and playtest, playtest, playtest which tends to take time- sometimes more time than we'd like but it's a necessary evil when it comes to maintaining a large roster of weapons.

I can't provide you any update other than we want to do it, and we're working on it. Once I have more information about a release date, we certainly won't hold the information back because we know how important it is to our community.

Yes, if you don't have a full team then you won't be punished

EDIT - unless you leave too early. There is a point in time where it's still possible for the game to add a player into the match, gotta wait until the first round starts!

Yeah, I mean... maybe? Ults are supposed to be the kind of ability where you think to yourself "is this the fight where i'm supposed to use this?" (unless of course they are on the weaker end) so I would hesitate to make more powerful ones available every round.

TLDR: yes

Unfortunately, probably not. It wouldn't be good for a cosmetic item to give in game power, definitely want to avoid that when possible. It would be pretty sweet flavor though!

It's very hard to comment on any specifics. As you mentioned, for every innocent post there are people who we do have proof have cheated. For anyone who was innocently banned because their account was hacked and got a shoulder shrug from EA support to me that is not acceptable until some further information is gathered and determined to be justified. We have been recently trying to improve our relationship with the EA support team, as well as giving them more tools to help support issues like this in a better way. It's something that we're certainly trying to get a better handle on, as we as a dev team obviously cannot handle every player individually ourselves. In the short term, as we continue to give our support team a better toolset and information on how to handle these issues, I recommend that everyone turn on 2FA on their accounts.

She's been hit hard in terms of pick rate which is understandable: she just straight up got hit with a pretty big nerf and another high-mobility Legend was released. Winrate-wise she went from the strongest by far to like 6th? 7th? Out of 16, that's still in the upper half of power. It's super harsh in contrast to where she was before, but that's because she was a really strong outlier in terms of power before. I think if she released at this current state, she'd be just fine. She's roughly where Valk is now (ever so slightly below Valk). It's just that if you were used to her incredibly powerful state before, she'll probably feel like ass right now. Give it a few months for things to shake out and we'll see if she needs follow-up work.

It's really early days and I'm probably jinxing myself right now, but she seems to have landed very well? Like she's clearly powerful at 5th in win rate rankings, but not overbearingly so; she came in as popular as most new legends but seems to be stabilizing now in the top pick slot. From playing a lot of Apex since Legacy came out it doesn't seem like she's particularly frustrating to fight either? I don't know, tell me if I'm wrong, but she seems... fine?

Yes! We do plan to reward our level 500 players and give them more to earn. We've got a couple different cool things in the works but can't share any information yet, but yes we absolutely plan to reward our most dedicated players.

u/RoboB0b answered this in a previous post

As for the future of Arenas, the first thing on the table is Ranked Arenas. Can't talk about when that's coming out but know that it's a top priority for us.

Funny story about bomb mode:

We definitely playtested a bomb mode early in Arenas development! It was... not as good as you think it would be... it creates a weird situation where you start looking at characters in context of the objective and it really exposes how many of the characters aren't built for a bomb mode. At the end of the day, it was really important for Arenas that character abilities feel valuable. Now I get that not EVERY ability is valuable in Arenas, but 90% is way better than 25%

God

No current plans for crosshair customization unfortunately. Apex's crosshairs are actually quite complex and technical. They don't just grow and shrink in size due to hipfire spread! They move based on aim point movement due to animation and such, change color and add elements sometimes due to character abilities (pathfinder grapple), fade in and out based on sprinting and ammo, go transparent on and off with ADS and menus, and all sorts of stuff. Building a system such that we can present options for players, preview the results, and hook all that data deep into our crosshair UI script would be a really massive undertaking, and it would make future changes and new crosshair additions way more difficult. It's just not high on the priority list in terms of bang for the buck sadly.

It would be nice, and maybe we can get some smaller scope stuff in like color adjustments, but no promises for now, sorry!

A pricing question! One of the scariest of all! Our monetization guy's answer below:

Pricing is tricky and something we think about constantly. A couple of things I want to talk about here for more context:

• Respawn is gameplay first - Because of that, the first goal we tried to adhere to is that gameplay isn't locked in anyway around monetization and that it doesn't feel pay-to-win. That's why Legends are grindable and Legend Tokens are generally easier to get to unlock Legends (yes, we know that has led to other challenges we have to fix...math is harder than people think and when your assumptions are wrong, it's hard to adjust). With that goal accomplished and the game not feeling pay-to-win, the other half of the equation we have to think about is how to keep the business healthy so we can keep making more Apex!

• Content creation costs - As much as people think we can turn cosmetics out easily because our competition outputs content at a high rate, our team is much smaller and spends more time on our skins. The part of the equation people miss is the expense side of the people we have working on these things and the fact that we can't work 24/7. It's more expensive than people think in terms of number of people and hours because people don't factor in tons of back and forth on concept, QA, ideation, creation, etc.

• Pricing - As mentioned, we think about this constantly and it's tough because we want Apex to be around for a loooooong time. Us being able to continue to make the game depends on operating a healthy business. We're hoping players understand this is something we're working hard to balance, but when you consider the full picture, it's a tough challenge. There's a lot players want from the Apex Universe, there's a lot we want to give, but we can't do that unless we're a healthy business at the end of the day. New Game Modes, Maps, Features all come at a cost we're trying to support.

• Rewards - Knowing not everyone can pay these prices, that's why the Prize track system was created so that we can give away pretty high value rewards for just playing and that's why we have a free track in the Battle Pass as well.

We want to try and serve as many players as we can for sure so we're going to try things to learn what works. Going back to an earlier post, some tech debt we're paying off impacts this too (in a positive way) and we're trying to get there.

We look at legends as a whole and not necessarily just the passive or tactical in a vacuum. Pathfinder does well in Arenas despite there being no survey beacons. I have my eye on Crypto and considering some changes for how to help him out a little.

lol i f*ckin' will, ty

Oh yes, the XP thing is actually a bug and we're working on a fix!

I'm personally bummed about this issue because I think our ambition is to serve players no matter where they are in the world, but the market realities and infrastructure limitations in Africa are making us fall short of our ambitions there.

It's something we're pushing to improve but we don't have imminent solutions.

Hey! Thanks for asking! We've got a ton of ideas for future maps and the team is working hard on new custom maps as we speak.

In terms of POI usage for Arenas, we have a plan to use new ones every season. Estates has been highly requested along with a few others (Skulltown) but I’m tightlipped on which POIs we choose to use in Arenas. :)

We’re VERY open to experimenting with different style of Arena maps. We’re trying wacky ideas and some spicy locations; some not even POIs but open fields in BR maps. However, when it comes to the size of Arena maps, we want to be careful that Arenas doesn't turn into TDM. We carefully choose locations or create custom maps that allow teams to breathe, strategize and create pacing that starts off slow and ramps up in intensity over a period of time. We tried some smaller maps internally, and it gave rise to reactive combat that rewarded twitch shooting and that doesn’t give time for teams to strategize while on the move. Plus, some of our more mobile characters ended up moving through the spaces too fast. Arenas’ goal is to blend BR tactics in a smaller space. However, we’re still learning what makes a great Arena map and while it’s only been two weeks, we’ve learned a TON from you all. I can’t guarantee that Estates is coming up next, but it’s definitely being discussed alongside Fragment and many, many others! Stay tuned!

Spideraxe! Buddy! Good to see you over here! It's been forever. For those who don't know: Spideraxe is League of Legends' Frozenfroh. He's everywhere and knows everything ;)

Fun story about Valkyrie: when I got hired at Respawn in December 2019, I immediately got terrified that I wouldn't know how to make characters in this game, so I sat down and sketched out like 9 paper kits for Legends before I knew anything about how this team makes characters and thinks about gameplay. Looking back at them now I'm like, oh boy, did I have a lot to learn. But! One of the characters I sketched out on paper was a jetpack user who could take to the sky to reposition her entire team. Then I came to the office for the first time in early January 2020, booted up the internal build, and saw Steven DeRose's prototype for Valk, and I immediately knew what I had to do.

There aren't many spells that got left on the cutting room floor; when I took her prototype over, she already had jetpack on jump and the big reposition ult. The ult used to be very janky: it just grabbed whatever allies were in a circle around you and go to the sky with them. You could literally kidnap teammates. It was awesome. I had a couple of versions of the tactical as I was figuring out what I wanted to do with the button, but once we had "Missile Swarm" it was impossible to move away from it. It just looks so cool and calls back to the Northstar Titan in a great way.

Your other question is super juicy. Allow me to get carried away a little bit, because I've been thinking about this a lot. So! The big difference is how much of the gameplay moment to moment is dictated by the kit you create for a character. Champions in League of Legends are nearly 100% of the moment to moment gameplay; outside of activatable items and summoner spells, everything you do in League is dictated by your kit. Not so in Apex! We've got guns! As a matter of fact, guns are way way more important than Legend kits. Apex is a gun game where abilities alter the context in which the gun game happens. This has really hard implications on character design: there's certain things you can't do with Legend kits (such as giving them lethal damage) that really limit you. Particularly when the fantasy (say explosives experts) asks for one thing (kill you with big booms) while the game can't deliver on those things. But it also has lots of upside: as long as you stay within those limits, Legend kits tend to not completely warp gameplay, which means that at a baseline every character is viable because you can always just shoot the other guy.

It also helps to only have 16 existing characters to design around rather than, what's League at now? 152? Something ludicrous like that. And somehow they keep coming up with more great designs. It's really hard.

Anyway! Good to hear from you! Hope everything's great over in League land.

Yes we are working on Loss Forgiveness for Arenas

... [Redacted]

I think variety is good! It's currently setup in a way to allow you to react to the previous round and pick a weapon for how you want to approach the current round. Enemy team is sniping? Maybe you counter with range or maybe you rush. The other team is going through a similar thought process at the same time. This can often lead to going with your favorite weapon every round, which I see as good and bad. I'd like to encourage you to branch out but also want you to have the option available for the current situation. We've explored some solves around this but it's much too early to really talk about.

It's something that's come up but there are UX problems to solve (now requiring players to manage double the amount of banners can be annoying for many people!) so it's not as easy as just increasing a number.

Since it's a competitive multiplayer game, I doubt we'd give dev command access stuff in general, as it would be ripe for abuse and cheats! I'm also not sure if even ships with the game like that? As far as viewmodel FoV, I'm actually not entirely sure! There's a lot of math to adjust for main camera FoV changes and all that, so I don't know how much code work it would be to support vm fov as a player facing setting? I also would say that our artists and animators work really hard to present the game in the way they think looks best for the player, and forcing our viewmodel animations to work with lots of different vm fovs seems perhaps too limiting. I will follow up with folks and see how feasible it is and how people feel though!

Random aside just cause I see the sentiment a lot... It's not really a Source game, the engine started as a fork of Source, but it's pretty significantly different in tons of ways. No shade to you at all, thanks for the question! I just want to make sure our amazing engineers get the credit they deserve for what they've made!

We are working on a fix for the leaver problem! I'm hoping to have something out soon.

Join in progress can be nice for big casual modes that keep rolling along but for me personally, I'd be pretty annoyed to queue up for Arenas and get into a losing match then have to requeue.

Haven't looked at Revenant's hitboxes in a while but if memory serves, he's very similar to Pathfinder: tall, but very skinny. We think of hitboxes as the total amount of shootable space exposed to you at one point in time. He clearly has more than Lifeline/Wraith, but not THAT much more.

We wanna avoid modifiers like Fortified and Low Profile going forward; it makes it so much easier to tune weapons when you don't have to take all these multipliers into account. It also feels bad to be reminded that you just take more damage every time you pick the character. I think the way forward is a combination of kit tuning and adjusting hit box sizes. We've got some stuff cooking for your edgelord murderbot (no ETA other than soon-ish) and once that's released if he's still struggling we'll take a look at his hitboxes.

Yeah I could see an argument for lowering some of the ult prices

Can you please explain to me a little bit the impact that the Gas nerf caused on Caustic? How different was his win/loss ratio?

Caustic's win/loss ratio barely changed with the nerf. It went from 5.1% to 5.0%. His PICK rate however dropped a lot, so there's a lot of survivor bias here; the common explanation is that only Caustic mains stuck around after the nerf, so that kind of self selection undid a lot of the impact of the nerf. We're thinking about what to do with him--we could just up the damage again, maybe find an inbetween point where he's okay, but I want us to spend some time thinking of non-damage outputs we could use on the gas. The goal is that people should be terrified of your gas and try to leave ASAP. That's currently not the case, and we will fix it. No ETA, as always.

Yeah! Because hands-off revive is already crazy powerful. There was no need to put even more power into it. The kit suffered from the problem of too much power being concentrated in the passive, and we do not solve that by putting more power into the passive.

The placement of materials and loot bins is to add smaller objectives to a map that players can choose to engage with or not. We placed them in open areas to allow them to be contested and give players something to fight over. It’s very common for mobility characters like Octane to take the lead in grabbing them, which is fair, but all Legends are viable. We will be mixing up how we place these on future maps to bring out new combat styles! We’ve learned A LOT playing and watching Arenas in the wild.

Allowing players to choose their own map has a bunch of issues we want to avoid. The most common is a favorite map getting fast matchmaking while other maps suffer from poor matchmaking. It’s a tricky balance, but I'm sure there is more that we could do to help alleviate the problem of players waiting for their favorite map. We’re always testing new methods, but it takes some time to figure out what we think scales well with a large population. As for now, the rotation times keep things fair for everyone and gets all maps played equally.

Pretty straight forward! We identified that the passive hogging all the power was the big issue, discussed a few options to just slightly power down the passive (hitpoints on the shield, cooldown on the shield etc), rejected all of them as too complicated / confusing / unclear, and settled on "no revive shield but you can revive both of your allies at once". Then that freed us up to put a lot of extra power into the tactical and the ultimate and make them real abilities. It was one of the more straightforward updates we've made.

Nah, she's fine.

Bocek released strong and current state:

We definitely took a hint from the 30-30 and wanted the Bocek to release with a splash, there may have been a slight miscalculation on the size of the splash but we had a plan ready for if that happened. We actioned on it and have seen the Bocek level out in a much healthier state.

We playtest for hours a day, honestly, but there's just no way to simulate the absolutely massive amount of data and feedback we get once a weapon goes live. So don't stop posting those sick videos and opinion posts on balance- we may not always agree but I can assure you the weapons team is there reading and watching as much as we can.

Buff considerations:

It's not always about raw power when it comes to making a weapon viable. There may be objectively better weapons when it comes to TTKs or DPS and that's alright. There is so much more to a weapon like recoil patterns, rate of fire, handling, engagement range, the list goes on that dictates feel and allows weapons to exist next to one another without cannibalizing fantasies.

When we choose to buff or nerf a given weapon the reasons can vary (OP, underpowered, low pick rate, etc), and while I can't dive into the specifics on exactly how we choose I can say that we think about and weigh each and every buff or nerf carefully before sending it out into the wild.

More important than trying to make every weapon S tier we want our weapons to have personality and give players the opportunity to choose what they like to use- and not just what's strong this season.

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What are the main issues you find? Is it with specific guns or specific situations more than others? Any info is good! Always willing to take a look at this stuff and make improvements! We try to find a balance between "visible enough to give you the information you need" and "not in the way of what you are trying to see", but it's obviously never perfect! Maybe we could make a specific "high visibility" mode that players could toggle so we could help with those preferences. No promises, but always happy to hear specifics of where you have the issues!

That's a good idea.... :)

No problem! Thanks for the question :)

I love ranting about this stuff haha! I am very fortunate to have a job I care about a lot and have players who love the game so I can get paid to do it :D

A really early artistic and design intention. Kept World's Edge from feeling like KC and gives the map its own identity.

I totally understand and this is a tough one to answer without giving developer insight. A little of column A and column B. We have some big ideas for Olympus. The ship and the outbreak it brings is only the beginning.

I'm kind of upset nobody (that I saw!) asked me this question because I'm getting it like 5 times a day on Twitter, so I'm going to ask myself:

Hey /u/DanielZKlein, any chance we can get the option to bind Valk's jetpack to a key other than jump?

This is something we've talked about and thought through during development and ultimately decided we were not going to do. Come with me on a magical journey as I talk you through just how much game designers overthink everything!

So first of all note that there are a limited number of buttons on a default controller, and we have in fact used all of them! There simply isn't a button left. Now we could use the binding we call "extra character action" (by default bound to d-pad down on controller / H on keyboard), but you'll notice that most of the existing uses of this (for instance, toggling Gibby's arm shield) are infrequent uses (like that toggle). If you've played Valk a bit you'll know by now that you're constantly engaging and disengaging her jetpack; either of those two buttons would be in really awkward spots for that use case.

Okay then how about if we make it purely optional? Surely we could just LET people opt into a binding even if we think it's awkward? Kind of, kind of not. First of all, when you offer too many options, you make the game baseline less accessible. Look at our current options menu; it's already a mess. For you seasoned veterans, sure, you can go in there and tweak you jetpack control scheme, your auto sprint, and your close deathbox menu on damage settings; new players look at this and go "HUH?! Am I supposed to understand all this?"

Second, even if we ignore menu clutter, if we did offer an option to bind elsewhere that's awkward, what if that option turns out to be strictly optimal in terms of power? Maybe it's really uncomfortable and awkward to reach, but if you use it perfectly you get access to full jetpacking and wallbouncing and bunnyhopping and what not. Well, there we run into one of my favorite patterns to talk about for competitive multiplayer games: if you can, you must. If it becomes clearly optimal in terms of power and win rate, eventually if you want to compete at the highest level, you'll have to do it, no matter how uncomfortable it may be. That sucks!

Finally, we already have a button that's always within easy reach while walking around: jump. It was just the best fit for her jetpack. Does this mean she can't do some high end movement tech shenanigans like wall bouncing? Yup, absolutely, but I'm happy with that tradeoff. In return we get a character that can express movement skill equally on PC and console and we get a pretty complicated concept (you can fly!) that's easily and organically discoverable and learnable.

Thanks for your insightful question /u/DanielZKlein

lol glad you like it! Our skybox artist wanted to change it up to show a change in time. When I first saw it, I was stunned we were so close to space, and how pretty it looked with the planets and such. No storm clouds this high up, sorry!

If you want to check out our skybox artists' work, find him on ArtStation - Marcos Shih.

https://mshih.artstation.com/projects/Kr4QGr

LOVE YOU TOO.