[2021] Social distancing with my man Caustic

Once you get to this exact situation, there isn't one, and that f*cking sucks. It's something we're talking about, but we don't exactly have a solution yet. Creating a shootable central thing for the ult, like Horizon, would work but it's such a heavy handed fix (and would probably require us making barrels destructible post-trigger because otherwise they're just better than the ult).

The problem with all that is what do we give him in return? Because we can't just make him an unpickable character either. You may not like them, but Caustic mains exist and deserve to have fun too.

EDITING my comment to answer the most common questions because you all certainly don't check if your question's been asked fourteen times before before you post ;P

This happens very rarely and therefore it's okay.

Yeah it happens rarely and while that may make it okay in the aggregate, when looking at charts and stats and all that, it does NOT make it okay in that situation. It's little consolation to the enemy players in this clip that this happens very rarely. The experience in that moment is unfair and it sucks. We gotta fix it.

Just use XYZ character as a counter

Nope. Apex is not a game with a reactive pick meta where you could say things like "oh I'm against a Caustic, better pick Horizon so I can sit in my tactical over his gas cloud." There's always the chance for a Caustic. Counterpicks are meaningless in Apex. And even in League we had a rule that an individual CHARACTER countering another character didn't make a mechanic okay. Specific character mechanics must be BROADLY counterable. That means there has to be an action anyone in the game can perform that counters them.

Just disable all abilities in the final ring

Ring 5 now exists for a combined 3 minutes (1:30 wait time + 1:40 slow close time). Turning off all abilities (or even just all ults) is a very heavy handed fix that throws out a lot of good gameplay with the bad. Shouldn't Bloodhound be able to ult in the final ring? Shouldn't Wattson be able to place down an ult? Shouldn't Loba be able to throw down her black market when her team runs out of ammo in the final fight?

We don't really care about ALL abilities in the final ring; we care about abilities like Fuse/Horizon/Gibby ult, Caustic tactical and ult, etc. We *COULD* go through and mark individual abilities as "disabled in the final ring", but now we're talking exceptions on top of exceptions. Again, if nothing else works we COULD do this, but it's really ugly and unintuitive and I'd much rather we try other fixes first.

That's a cool idea! I'll have to think about that a little more. Right now his barrel gas only does damage to people that are in direct sightline of the barrel; I'd have to check how the ult handles this and how that would translate to having the gas emanate from his person. I'll dig into the code and think about it.

That's also pretty cool! We'd need to make sure this doesn't look too derpy because Caustic is sort of a serious character. We don't want people to play beachball with evil gas daddy's murder ult. That might not quite be on brand.

I do like that your pitch is better than just making it destructible because Caustic would also get to move it around. I like this one and I like the pitch where the gas comes from his body.

Yeah, there's a lot of interesting things we could do to the final phase of the game; moving the circle around is one option. This would be quite a bit of work to make work properly and so few people ever get to this stage in the game that it's just not our top priority right now.

For what it's worth, I do think both the start and the end (if it ever gets there) of our game could do with improvements.

On average you are correct; if you take the bird's eye view over hundreds or thousands of games, a character who has trouble to get to the final circle but then gets to just win if he makes it there is "balanced", in that he wins the expected number of games or less.

But that's macro balance. Explaining that to a person who also made it to the final circle in that game only to die to Caustic gas with no counterplay doesn't help; that person is correct to feel rage and frustration in that moment, and so we need to find a fix.

Yeah it would solve it for sure, but it's such a brute force heavy handed way of solving it. To be clear it's not off the table, but I'd much rather we try something else first.

Sure it would fix it, but it's such a brutal heavy handed fix. Would rather we try something else first.

There's tons of things like that we could do. I just keep coming back to what's the experience as the Caustic player if we just nerf all aspects of his gas and give him nothing in return.

The way rings pick their final locations is there's certain areas of the map marked off limits for final rings; all locations with more than one floor are included, but if you notice in this clip the building is barely in the circle. The final location is out there. We could always try to increase the exclusion area so circles won't even close near buildings, but I don't know the amount of work or other complications involved with that.

He was weak in November/early December, and then he became strong! That's the reality of a live game. Even if we made no more changes to the game at all, the meta would constantly be shifting with characters becoming weaker and stronger as players find new ways to play them / play against them.

It's a fair point, but I took this clip to be a stand in for the very real frustration people feel when Caustic gets a perfect ult off even in the new slowly closing circle. This PRECISE thing isn't a problem anymore, but Caustic ult in final circle still is. It's got a larger AOE than any grenade, it lingers longer than any grenade, and it blocks vision on top of everything else. The specific example here is invalid but the sentiment is totally valid.

Dec 1st Caustic was at 4.8% trios winrate (across all skills and across casual and ranked); with the mid-December patch he went up to 5.0/5.1% (it's noisy) which was decent. I hadn't seen that climb yet when I made a comment early Jan that he was weak (I had the 4.8% winrate in mind + he also had the lowest encounter win rate at that time). Since then, he's been climbing steadily. Current data is very noisy (not sure what's going on, all the legends are oscillating a lot in the data from the last couple days), but let's say he's at an average 5.3/5.4% winrate now, which is high. His pick rate had always been a solid middle of the pack one, but with the introduction of Fuse and the Wraith nerf shaking pick rates up a bit (Wraith went from highest, where she'd been for pretty much all of Apex's existence, to fourth highest!), Caustic now sports the 5th highest pick rate as well.

He's not suddenly super strong. He's been building steadily from the middle of December last year and has now arrived at super strong. We'll take a swing at nerfing him next patch and see where that puts him.

Thank you for your kind words! I will say that Overwatch is a different game and Blizzard did do the work to make counterpicking at least viable--you CAN change your character mid-round and if you're not at high ult charge you're not super punished for it, but that's only the logistics necessary to make counterpicking a viable tool; it still leaves you feeling bad about not being able to play, say, Reaper, because we need someone to counterpick their Pharah and you hate both Soldier 76 and Widowmaker (these observations are based on 2 years ago, when I last actively played Overwatch).

I'm not saying one is necessarily better! Blizzard are very smart and know what they're doing! I just don't like hyper-reactive character based games where too much other than preference drives your character selection.

Hey to be clear: I've only said "those ideas sound cool". That's many many steps from "we're going to do either of them". At this point I'm still not 100% convinced that we need to break pattern on Caustic at all.

Nah, the counterplay to a broadly available mechanic (any enemy squad could have a Caustic) cannot be an RNG based low frequency item drop.

Nah that's not a good answer either. For one, we want the competitive game to look as much as possible like the game you all play; for another, there are legit Caustic mains out there who'd like to go pro playing their character. It would really suck if we said "sorry, the character you invested thousands of hours into won't be available in competitive play because we can't figure out how to make him fair."

There are 20 teams. The average win rate is 5%. Not sure how you arrive at 6.25%?

So with the obvious caveat that I don't work at Riot anymore and haven't in over two years now and so cannot speak to their thinking: stat APIs are a Pandora's Box: once you've opened them, there is no putting the genie back in. (That's what happened, right? She opened the box and a genie came out the gave her three wishes? And she wished for a monkey paw? I may be mixing up my analogies here)

They absolutely shape player perception and discourse; what's worse, they can eat their own tail and become self fulfilling prophecies: when a character has a low win rate shown on an aggregator website, that can lead to good players migrating away from the character, further depressing their win rate.

Finally, players who want to be upset about something will find ways to cherry pick data. I should barely be allowed to look at data and I've been doing this for a decade or so now. Online games are incredibly complex beasts and it's so easy to get hung up on this or that piece of data.

I'm not the one who'd make this call (that's at least two job titles above me; whether or not we expose data to APIs is at least a game director call) but FWIW I agree with not exposing this data.

5%. 4.8 isn't too weak; it's fine! There aren't hard and fast rules here, but I like to compare win rates to the rest of the field. If most legends are grouped in the +/- 0.2% band and then you have an outlier at say 5.6% (hello Horizon) then that's a problem, not because we arbitrarily decided that I don't know 5.4 or 5.5 is the cutoff, but because looking at the field as a whole, they're extreme outliers.

Your math is wrong! Why would you assume that the winrates of all legends would add up to 100?

There are 20 teams in each match. 1 team wins. That means each team has a 1/20 chance of winning: 5%.