Lots of very passionate internal conversations around this, and we're still a little worried about the "everyone's got red armor" case (we may eventually require a little more damage to go from purple to red), but feedback was super clear here. I'm actually really glad we tried this. The way to keep a game fresh is to not be scared about experimental changes.
Not trying to go off topic, as I'm very grateful for these shield changes, but I noticed that under audio, the footsteps haven't been addressed, which is also a big problem this season. Is this still being looked at internally?
We are aware of and have people dedicated to solving the issue. Unfortunately, it's not a simple problem and we're trying very hard to track down the cause. To complicate things, it's never been an issue in our internal playtests when we can actually debug the issue, so having a live game issue with no debugging capability makes it difficult to track down. Just wanted to comment here that we are aware and working on it.
Genuine question, why not just remove red armor instead of lowering all armor by 25? I mean keep it so its all evo armors, keep the armors 50/75/100 but just get rid of red armor.
That's a good question and we definitely talked about it! In the end it came down to us believing that it's good for the game you have a chase, an incentive to try and go out to do damage, even if you land and find a purple right away. Red should be rare, but it's good to have something to try and go for.
why not make it so that you have to do 1800 damage TOTAL ingame for you to get a red evo. so maybe you do 1000 damage while you have white (not evo) armor but when you pick up any evo shield (white or red) it restarts but it levels up to the 1000 damage you have done all game. so maybe it would be at purple. and needing 1800 damage to get red evo seems fair cus it rewards skilled players. or maybe 1500 damage all game. but something that based on YOUR damage that game. could that work maybe?
Yeah like I said, we're definitely thinking about requiring more damage, but that isn't a thing we just randomly decide to do. We'll have to do some testing (and for a hilarious reason that I won't go into right now, there's a little bit of a technical challenge there as well).
As a day 1 player thank you. I played the first couple days of season 6 and hadn’t picked it up since. The higher TTK is what sucked me in to this game and with that gone I felt like I had lost my favorite game. It is good to try things, but I am most appreciative that you guys really monitor and hear the feedback.
Yeah we looked at a lot of data to back this up as well, and there's still a chance that we're wrong and that in the combination of all evo and high TTK, red armors will be way too prevalent, but the feedback from you all was super clear. We wanna keep making experimental changes, and I hope you'll be along for the ride knowing that when we do f*ck up, we're not too proud to admit it and roll it back.
Maybe make red only attainable through KP? You can get to purple through damage but it takes like 2 kills or 1 kill and 2 assists for red.
Hm, that seems a little hard to learn and I'm not exactly sure what benefit we'd get from that. There might even be edge cases where that change would make it EASIER to get a red. I think the damage model is fine, we probably just need to put more of a damage buffer between purple and red.
Thanks for doing the right thing and reverting the values back to how they were. In future, it would be better to experiment and try things in LTMs not on season launch. You guys already test things in LTMs anyway, but the launch values for bodysheilds were never tested inside an LTM.
We actually don't get the greatest feedback from LTMs. People go in there with an entirely different set of expectations. It's much less try hard, the population tends to fall off after a few days etc. I think if we had a public test server or sth like that, that might help, but it's not very easy to set that up.
Now, it’s important to note that we playtested this for months internally. From those playtests, feedback was positive. But, we are a small group of people compared to the millions that play Apex Legends every day. The skill levels in our team are varied, and big balance changes are really only going to be vetted when we get feedback from all of you.
Have you guys ever considered implementing a public test server?
Seems like that could solve a lot of issues if you're able to get feedback on potential changes before they go live, not to mention finding the various bugs that show up on the public servers but not on your internal test ones.
It's definitely a conversation we've had, but it's not my area of expertise so I'm not going to speak to it here. All I can say it's not quite as easy as you may think.
Maybe throw red into the care package? Itll go with the other red heirloom colored items?
I think it's good the red gives players a reason to keep doing damage even if they have purple already. Crating it would remove that. Gold's in care package potentially though, and I think that's the right place for it.
aside from the QQ on reddit, what do the numbers in game say about the changes? im honestly pretty sad to see the revert as i was having more fun shredding people and being rewarded for better positioning
That was the reason we put it in, yeah; position should matter in a BR.
I can't share the data we got in detail, but it was consistent with better players having a worse time (I swear I'm not calling you bad!)
Appreciate the transparency! What are people’s thoughts on doing away with red altogether and just doing the old white, blue, purple progression? Perhaps gold shields’ new perk can be that they start with 100 HP and they and they alone can be evolved to red?
Answered this in a bunch of places already but TLDR: it's good for the game to give players something to chase even when they land and find a purple.
I know you're probably busy and I'm sorry if you've been asked this often but was loba no longer being able to throw her bracelet through windows Intentional?
Nope! My understanding is it depended on the window as well. There's a special invisible thing that level designers can put there to tell the game "hey this is a window which players can't go through, but you can through grenades and Loba's bracelet through it". I think this was the issue with some windows, but don't quote me on it. I'm not a level designer!
You could give red a desirable perk instead of the additional armour if that's what's throwing things off. Like red shields leech a small amount of health when you damage enemies or something like that
Yeah that's not a bad idea, but finding the right effect isn't easy. I don't think life leech is appropriate. We could always try fast heal, that's never had any problems! ;P
Coming from many competitive games that almost never made balance/design changes throughout it's lifespan, I seriously love how daring you guys are.
What surprized me was a major change like this was not "tested" in a LTM like yall normally do.
LTMs have very limited usefulness for testing. They're just not played like the normal game, unfortunately.
What are the metrics used to determine a players enjoyment? Genuinely curious about that one.
The easiest to look at is session length delta. Churn's the more brutal version of that.
Were meidum players balancing out the good-time-had if better players were having a worse time?
edit:also, ty for your response
It was really really hard to tell, but that basically meant the data told us we could go either way and your feedback very clearly and loudly pointed in one direction only.
Please keep communicating your intentions with whatever experimental changes you're pushing.
Absolutely!
How about reverting the shield change untill you fix the audio issue? Having less enemy awareness while also having a shorter TTK seems kinda cheaty.
?? Did you see the patch notes this morning?
Nope haha. That means it was a good idea huh? I base my knowledge of the game purely off of this Reddit sub and haven't seen anything about a new update.
Edit: nevermind I'm an idiot. Didn't see that it was a link.
TLDR we reverted the armor values and fixed some bugs
I don't know if it helps your testers, but the problem seems much worse in locations where the area is large and there's significant environmental noise. The biggest offender I can think of is Geyser in Worlds Edge. I have a video I can share where my squad literally is bumping right into an enemy team at full sprint, and neither of us had any footsteps, and you can hear it right on the video.
Sure send over a link, thanks.
One more thing, I keep seeing fake beacons marked on the map. When arrive at them there is no beacon to scan with. Is this a known issue?
Not sure, but I'll pass it along and make sure it gets into our bug database. Thank you.
It's not happening in internal testing you said. Could this be because you're playing on extremely low-latency and it could be due to a latency issue between the users? I would venture to bet that it's because there's a desync between the locations of the users.
Perhaps host a dev server further away on a foreign server and log functions that get called when footsteps should be rendered? (software dev not game dev don't know if that's possible)
We have testers all over the world that play together in playtests and we use the same servers we use in retail, so we do get real world testing scenarios. I don't want to get in the weeds about this bug here on Reddit, please trust that we a highly skilled team of developers working on Apex that know their stuff so we just need to give those rock stars some time to do their magic. Appreciate everyone for chiming in!
Yall should have waited till after this Labor Day weekend. I think you would have seen an increase in playing time and player retention.
Maybe! Data analysis is really hard, there's so many variables. It's also back to school time in many places, and many of the Covid lockdowns have started being relaxed, which also affects things like session length. Like I said, it's hard, but in this case feedback was very clear.
we may eventually require a little more damage to go from purple to red
Counterpoint, regular players not achieving red will feel bad.
Look, I'm BAD at this game (because I'm old ;P) and the other day I landed at Artillery, found a purple, third partied two other teams that had landed and were fighting each other, and left my first POI with a red armor. Like, it's definitely rare, but RNG plays a big role in BRs and so you will sometimes get lucky like this. (Nevermind pulling it from the deathboxes of better players who got caught out)
Any official word on Crypto's weapon lockout after initiating EMP from outside the drone?
If you park your drone somewhere, go back to Crypto controls and EMP - you can't draw a weapon for about 5 sec.
Initiating EMP from drone view works as normal.This isn't mentioned in any patch notes. Is it intentional?
I looked and it doesn't look like anything there changed? I can confirm the behavior you described happens and I do agree it's a bug; I've logged it in our system and will take a look at it when I have time.
Have you guys considered removing shields from the map completely, and just offering a better path to upgrade through replicators? Personally its really frustrating when someone lands and gets a purple shield, cause no matter how well I play that first fight, I probably lose.
If replicators had a better upgrade path (the current method takes way too long to upgrade to a higher color), then more passive players could still loot for materials and upgrade at replicators, but I don't get wrecked by a lucky purple shield in the first bin the enemy opened when dropping.
I think at this point you're talking about a different game. Battle Royale games do have RNG loot and it's an important part of the genre. It makes it so worse players sometimes have a chance to win fights against better players because they got lucky, and it has a whole bunch of other positive effects that make BRs more fun for a longer time. You may THINK you want a sweaty game where everyone's exactly at the same level, but I feel that may get old soon. Anyway, the choice to have RNG loot in Apex isn't really something we can revisit at this point. The risk of ruining the game completely for so many players would be really high.
I like the evo feature, glad that’s sticking around, and I approve of these changes, not that you need my permission
Updating internal task tracker: task approved by medicmarch
(omg a dev said f**k on a public forum i don't think I've ever personally seen that before kinda funny)
As a day 3-4 player, thanks for reverting the shields. I liked the fact that AL let me react to things when I got into a fight I couldn't immediately see with the higher TTK, but with the changes this season, as a low-Gold solo player (could prob hit at least Plat w/ friends) I was just getting melted before I had a chance to react, and I know that's been the case for others.
Thank you so much for listening to your player base. This is why I keep coming back.
You'd be surprised how much our internal conversations sound just like you and your friends on voice chat ;P There definitely is a lot of salty language. <3
Hey hey, as a Cryoto main I am loving the changes that came to him. Quick question. Are you aware of the bug that happens frequently where the drone gets stuck when Crypto is trying to deploy the drone? This can kill a good crypto player who knows they have just enough time to get their drone in a good position.
Thank you for all your work!
Oh sh*t, no I don't know about that one. Do you have a clip?
Good'ol clip brushes not using the right tool textures I guess :P
(Or at least if it still works like it did in the original source)
That's probably exactly what it is.
How was the feedback from the Winter Express ltm and the Revenant infected one? Those were my personal favorites and imo were a lot more unique than the other ones gameplay wise
Oh no we get good feedback on the modes themselves; what I meant is that it's not always a clean 1:1 between "I liked X in an LTM" and "X would be good in the base game"
Contact your scrum master and inform him of my desires! All legends get body jewelry similar to weapon charms starting next season.
/u/lowkeydbjosh consider yourself informed
I hope you guys are aware that Crypto's infinite EMP is still not fixed in season 6... That thing is nightmare material alright....
A clip for proof
Ok so funny (sad) story, I thought I had it fixed and just saw the new videos :(
There's a delicate balance with surgical fixes, will err on the side of being very super thorough this time!
One more thing, I keep seeing fake beacons marked on the map. When arrive at them there is no beacon to scan with. Is this a known issue?
If this is for survey beacons, should be fixed internally, hopefully makes it out for next update!
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Hell yeah, it's a BR. Third partying is part of the game.
Do you have people working on the issue where you do not see a single team when dropping on an area but when you land all of a sudden there is a team right on your area? Because coming from a Plat solo player every season since Season 1, it’s pretty damn frustrating that I’m still dealing with this shit and it honestly seems like the dev team doesn’t care about this issue at all.
I’m not aware of that issue, I can check if the team is aware. Do you have any additional info on it? Video? What platform and settings, happens every time or sometimes? Ranked or non ranked, etc.
So its been one month since season 6, has there been any progression on the issue?
Lots of progress and work being done internally to fix audio issues. 7.0 will contain a handful of fixes, as well as additional debugging to help with some of the harder to catch issues. Several other improvements being worked on now that will come just after 7.0.
Regarding the bp, now that you decreased the days left to complete it, can we at least get a double xp week or something? And please for next seasons can you try to make it easier to complete? Right now its too grindy, a lot of people struggle to complete it including me. People have jobs, school, hobbies, etc. Having double xp events every weekend during the last month of every season would help a lot.
We are planning double XP for end of season due to us reducing the time by a few days, and also you can expect a slight season 7 retune
I gotta say, the communication around the season end date change was horribly bungled. I had just finished boosting TWO battle passes to levels I thought I could finish, only to have this happen.
Wasted money feels bad. It's a bait-and-switch, regardless of the intention.
Agree the communication was bad. We are discussing internally and will be better going forward. We hope to make up the gap with increased XP at the end of the season.
You guys could've tweeted it and put in the game's news tab saying that S7 is coming earlier than planned and the double XP event is planned.
I thought it was a bug when I saw people talking about the date changes but I was hoping so much that it was true but only this confirmed to me that it's in fact true that S7 is coming in 2 weeks.
We could have, yes. Sorry we missed the communication piece it was a bit of a misstep on our part while trying to sort out some things with Fight or Fright and Season 7.
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