[2020] Gassy Chonkman just doing some pooping.

That's an old clip from before the Caustic buff (you can tell because damage ticks start at 4, not 6)

https://imgur.com/1ap5X7T

It was a ~0.1% buff (which is meaningful if you remember we're talking about a spread of +/- 0.7% from mean in TOTAL). Put another way, Caustic went from 4th lowest to 6th lowest. It's not a HUGE buff, but it's very clearly a buff.

Our data would disagree with you on that! Overall, Caustics win more games and more engagements now than they did before. I absolutely agree that the removal of blurred vision in isolation is a nerf, but the damage increase more than made up for it.

Yup we do! Intuitively what you say makes sense, but we don't see a huge difference in data between maps. He seems to perform roughly the same on both WE and Olympus with the Season 7 changes.

Okay but you gotta understand that we can't balance for anecdotes, right? Like even if I spent 12 hours a day playing the game and mained all characters equally, I couldn't make good or healthy balancing decisions based on that. If you're trying to make a game that is fair and balanced for millions of players, you have to use data.

Rampart isn't on this chart because she's so far below everyone else :( (alongside our edgy boy Revenant; they're the basement squad in our win rate data). That brown jumpy line you see is Loba. The ammo buff was REALLY impactful until it wasn't. Fun! I guess that's the game as a whole adjusting to the new reality that Loba squads just don't run out of ammo? f*cked if I know!

We get these questions whenever we show anything from our data! In short, assume that most "but did you control for XYZ" questions will be answered in the affirmative; we have a very smart data science team. There was some amount of pick rate decline, but surely not enough to where we'd see meaningful survivor bias I don't think. But anyway we can control for that by looking at Caustic players with X previous games on Caustic.

We don't have a super clean breakdown; I'm looking at data before and after WE re-entered the rotation. Her win rate's pretty flat across that change; if anything she went up a little bit? But that's probably noise.

Nope! Removing the blur wasn't about "get everyone's win rate to 5%" balance, it was about removing something that was clearly excessively frustrating compared to the actual impact on the game it had. There was nothing in the game that felt as frustrating and bad as fighting a Caustic when the gas blurred your vision to the point that you couldn't even clearly see your gun's sights anymore. That's not coming back.

You're literally the first person to've made this observation! (You're also wrong ;P)

sh*t I feel like an idiot for not even bringing this up. You're of course 1000% correct: as much as it is a nerf in the playing against case, it's a buff in the playing with case. Plausible that the two cancel each other out and then we're just left with the slight damage increase, which could explain the winrate increase.

A whole bunch of guns you couldn't ADS with iron sights because they got so blurry they overlapped your target. It was just straight up not a good time.

Yeah this is difficult to talk about because it really isn't entirely one thing or the other thing. In very rare cases we'll overrule data with our understanding of the game; Caustic gas was such a case. Everything in the data told us we shouldn't have removed the blur or at least didn't tell us one way or the other.

You know what I miss the most, data-wise, from working on League of Legends? We had a pick and BAN system, and bans were hugely useful data as a proxy for player frustration. We do not have a good way of quantifying frustration in Apex, so we have to rely on our own understanding of what type of frustration is and what type isn't okay. (Sidebar: all competitive multiplayer games are built on frustration: you're trying to do one thing, an opponent, well, opposes you and keeps you from doing the thing you're trying to do.)

In the end, we used our judgment in the case of Caustic's gas:the blur breaks a fundamental interface in the game, making it so you struggle to see in a way you can't compensate for.

So this is the type of subtlety that doesn't lend itself to online conversations; most of the time, it's a balance between data and subjective designer judgment that decides changes; rarely it's just data, and very rarely it's designer judgment even when it goes against the data. There's no hard and fast rule here.

I think it'd be way more impressive if someone put this much follow up work into a boxed product! An f2p game continues earning us money, right, so that justifies continued expenditures like a data analysis teams (them brains don't come cheap); a boxed product makes the fast majority of its profit in the first two weeks or so, so outside of hoping to engender brand loyalty there isn't much of a financial incentive to hire people to do continued development.

Loba's above the middle point still, even after her falloff! She peaked at 52%; rarefied air rarely breathed by anyone not called Lifeline, Wraith, Pathfinder, or Horizon.

Rampart's all the way in the bottom, then it's Revenant, then Bloodhound (go figure). Data is really weird, but it has no obligation to conform to any of our expectations. It just is what it is.

Yeah there's more coming for Rampart. I wanted to just increase her rotation angle on Sheila right away but it turns out that requires animation work, and I don't like just dropping a task like this on an animator's desk who has other stuff to work on. So that's not coming until Season 8 at the earliest. I've got a small CD buff to walls slated for her for next patch, but that's it until S8.

I'm hesitant on wall HP. I think there's a correct way of doing it, but it would probably require new Mirage decoy rules: they have HP, but bullets pass through. Reason we need to have that is because imagine you're about to snipe Rampart with a Kraber and she just point blank throws down a wall that eats the full shot. (Right now it would blow up the wall and hit Rampart). I think it'll be hard to visually communicate what's going on with a physical prop; how come it has HP but bullets still go through? If we'd settled on this balance while she was still in production, we could have asked for, I don't know, a full size amped shield that is slowly reinforced with a half-height wall, but that kind of stuff is a lot of work for a lot of people so we don't do it after a character has shipped unless we absolutely have to.

I'm just so happy Horizon came in appropriately strong; she'll be the first Legend in a long while that we won't have to do a lot of follow up work for. Let's see if we can keep that trend going.

Nah, it dropped very slightly. Don't have my work desktop booted up anymore but I think it was like from 8.3% to 7.8% or something like that? It's a healthy pick rate, but nowhere near the top. Wraith is like 17% or something like that. (And yeah, it's always Wraith/Bloodhound/Pathfinder at the top, as you probably guessed. It looks like Horizon released into that high pick rate area as well, but we'll know more in a month or two when she settles)

Note Wattson is something like 2%, and I just absolutely don't know what to do about her.

Yeah that's what I gambled on. Glad it didn't blow up in my face this time!

I think the highlight is still a very powerful passive.

That's a tempting explanation because it makes sense in our minds, but I don't think Legend abilities are a strong enough signal for that to realistically be true.

By this I mean the influence individual abilities have on win/loss is pretty small compared to guns, and I'd expect something that requires crossplayer coordination to be even rarer and thus even less decisive on game power.

This is a fun thing I like to talk about to other designers: beware the human brain that sees a tiger hiding in every motion in the deep grass. We evolved to benefit from seeing patterns in everything, even where there aren't any. We've got to control for that very human tendency when we analyze data.

It's more than alright, actually. She's one of the strongest legends in the game and has been since release. She's at 5.2% win rate, 50% encounter win rate; that's top 4 in both cases.

She's a classic case of win rate doesn't drive pick rate, and you could even make an argument for survivor bias driving her win rate up (with a pick rate as low as hers, only absolute Wattson enthusiasts play her. I don't have that data handy, but I wouldn't be surprised if the average amount of previous games on Wattson her mains have played is higher than for other Legends.)

This is one case where I'd be careful not to warp pro play further. Wattson is obviously a must pick in pro play; almost every squad has a Wattson in it and we already get a massive amount of fence spam. I wouldn't want to increase that any further.

Yeah he gets a green scan outline for enemies affected by his gas. That's a lot of power.

Pathfinder has always had an incredibly high pick rate. When I started in January it was very much the Wraith/Pathfinder game; no one else came close to their pick rate. It's getting a lot more even now.

That's a capitalism

It also made it so your own team mates are no longer blinded by the gas, which is a buff just as big as the removal of gas is a nerf; add to that the higher damage and it explains why his winrate went up after this buff.

We're talking WIN rates here, not pick rates. Bloodhound does have one of the highest pick rates, but their win rate and encounter win rate are incredibly low. Why? Here's my theory: ... I don't have a f*cking clue.

Ah, game design.

I don't understand. Can you show me a screenshot or a video? Your teammates should ALWAYS be outline for you, regardless of whether or not they're in the gas.