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

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

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!

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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...

Nah, she's fine.

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.

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 k...

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.

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

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.

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.

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 m...

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.

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.

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Yes we are working on Loss Forgiveness for Arenas

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 jetpac...

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 ...