Loba buff sounded "broken" but in practice it rarely is, it's a very nice utility buff but nothing we'd call gamechanging, and nobody is going to waste their time "stealing all the ammo" to make it that way.
Yeah that's what I gambled on. Glad it didn't blow up in my face this time!
Any chance you want to bring something as dope as nexus blitz to this game? Or even a team death match mode?
Hah! I'm not working on game modes but I sure have my preferences. I really want us to try more non-BR things; I think Winter Express was a wonderful proof of concept that Apex can be super fun in non-BR modes. Don't have anything else to announce on that front right now; I think something Mario Party like like Nexus Blitz would probably be a bit too much for a game like Apex, but there's LOTS of cool things we could do.
Ah Nexus Blitz, my final baby at Riot. I'm still so proud of what the team built. Played the sh*t out of it when it was live earlier this year.
Gonna use this to describe algorithms in my computer science class
I'm sure I stole this from someone, but I can't remember who said it.
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.
So how is caustic's pickrate going? I guess it went up a lot because of this so called buff
Bet he has the third highest pickrate, right? And i say third because we all know which legends are at the top and will ever be there
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)
Read moreDo you have any plans to improve Rampart?
I quite enjoyed playing her in season 6, but still she felt underpowered.
Season 7 buff is nice , but clearly not enough.
I think Sheila needs bigger rotation angle, consider that it's a stationary gun, maybe not 360, but still more than current one.
Wall building speed is decent now, but I feel that walls can be buffed in terms of HP. They normally can't withstand as much as you expect them to withstand. I don't think they need huge HP increase but at lest 50-100 would make them more effective.
I understand that it takes time to develop abilities, but I feel Rampart's passive should be replaced. It's probably the most situational passive in the game, since if you don't find or don't want to use machine-guns, you basically have no passive.
Also I feel making weapon specific passives, may prevent some of weapons needed buffs, since in one legend hands it would turn OP.
Hope you I didn't...
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 a...
Read moreWho'd have thought that Loba is still the worst legend? you guys refused to actually give her a good buff
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.
NGL I'm blown away how much data analysis you guys do for a F2P Video game
The fact that it's Titanfall IP is icing
Protocol 4: DO THE STATS
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.
While I was initially disappointed at the removal of the vision blur, I've come around to it. And generally speaking, I trust the decisions you all have made with this game. Considering that, and your statement that you have a very good data science team crunching the numbers b/c you don't want to rely on anecdotal evidence, I'm curious how they were able to quantify the blur as "clearly excessively frustrating". Not a challenge, just wondering. I mean, it was frustrating, but...
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 st...
Read moreThe blurring was especially bad because you couldn't even see people with a digi threat in the gas. That really ticked me off during caustic fights. Thanks for changing that u/DanielZKlein.
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.
First, thank you for interacting with us
Second, as someone who played an almost entire season pairing with a caustic main. Removing blurred vision feels like a huge buff for caustic teammates
I have died many times because my caustic throws his ult on someone to force them out of cover, and I chase them out the other side and die because I come out of it with blurred vision. It made his ult so much nicer for zoning, the increased damage is just icing on the cake
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.
I'm confused how this is part of any algorithm that you use though. All I can see is "I f**ked" potentially being viewed by an automated check to possibly be followed by something else that could be considered vulgar. And yet people will call each other some of the worst possible things in the game chat, telling each other that they're f**king shit and they should go kill themselves and... The algorithms don't catch that. So what is even the point of this system? It doesn't catch real offenders much of the time and it hands out punishments to people who did nothing wrong.
Yeah it's really not my department but I can't imagine a human being looked at "I f*cked up" and smashed the big HARASSMENT button, but what do I know
Aaah, algorithms: the fastest way to be wrong at scale.
Caustic nerf sir! Nerf!
You're literally the first person to've made this observation! (You're also wrong ;P)
Do you think it would be a reasonable balance to decrease the damage to 5, add back the blur, and slightly increase the movement in gas?
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.
I'm curious - can you say if Horizon does better on Olympus? I always feel like her Q is stronger on the super vertical map.
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.
Is it possible that this is because his pick rate went down (not sure if you included this, imgur isn't loading for me), so his relative winrate went up? As in only the "dedicated" caustics stayed with him.
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.
Who's that brown one who jumped super high and then back to normal-ish? Was it the Rampart bug?
Data is fun.
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!
Your imgur link isn't loading whatever you're supposed to show me. And I don't know how much you even play your own game(let alone maining Caustic) but coming from someone with 28k kills on Caustic with thousands of hours in: I only feel animosity and frustration towards you and your balancing decisions. Had to just get that off my chest. I wish you a dull day. Bye
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.
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