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SEASON 3 PASS ROYALE REWARDS
Note to new visitors - we changed the Executioner's stats from the previously announced ones. Seth will have some more info on that decision later!
Coming with Season 3: Be Legendary on September 2nd
Executioner - REWORK
The Executioner has lagged behind in win/use rates for a while in competitive play. The issue with buffing him has been his general toughness and lack of counterplay. Due to high health, long range, and spatial control, a buff would make him powerful with only Rocket to defeat him on defense.
We wanted a solid ranged attacker that could counter Fireball-bait type strategies, especially squads of Barbarians. This change will kill Barbs with one axe swing, and leave Musketeers with just a sliver of health. Executioner will be less well-rounded – now he is extremely powerfu...
Read more External link →when the opponent rages ebarbs at the bridge
They do test them. They wrote a whole post about it. Go search the post history. The specifically cite the problems with play testing and how they brought in a new company to do it cause pros wouldn’t. Problem is no amount of play testing will account for all the possibilities millions of player can find with a card.
Your last line is really the crux of it and its something that has been echoed by every balance team of every live game of every genre - when you have enough players, its impossible to playtest perfectly. We can playtest things into the ground and players will have more battles with it in 5 minutes than we could in months, even with a big team. Ultimately there is always going to be room for error and that's part of the job. PEKKA fell into that margin of error (we did have discussions above Medium vs Long range during testing) and when that happens it's incumbent upon us to fix it quickly. Overall I think we get more right than wrong and if we can keep up a positive %, the game will march towards a better state each month.
I agree. I fundamentally disagree with the premise that cards should have "healthy" use rates, which they have previously defined as "in the same general magnitude as the use rates of other cards." If all cards cost the same elixir and there were substitutes then this would make sense but the whole point is that most cards are relatively unique and don't have perfect substitutes. Then use rates should always vary as various metas gel around the state of the cards. Then use rates would not be even. But as a meta gels, an anti-meta forms and use rates naturally shift again. It seems very unlikely to me that in a stable game we would have both uniform use rates and a stable meta.
If anything, frequent changes cause a subset of players to focus on one or two decks that seem safe even if not optimal in several kinds of metas, which makes use rate statistics an artifact of balance changes rather than a meaningful statistic. Then trying to balance around this artifact leads to wi...
I don't think our goal is to get every card in the 4-13% use rate range. Some cards like Spells or Mega Minion will ALWAYS be above that range regardless of how bad they are - Wizard is proof of that. But we do care about win rates. Even if the use rate is low, the win rate needs to be competitive so players of niche strategies still feel like they can keep up.
Cards like Skeleton Barrel and Three Musketeers are not a high priority because they maintain a decent win rate despite low usage. Cards like Bowler (mentioned above) are perfect candidates for buffs because their win rate is bad even with only Bowler fans playing him.
Bowler needs that rework more than executioner does IMO. It needs a rock speed increase/damage increase.
Bowler may have a rework this year too :) Hard to predict any timeline, but there are many Epics that could use some love to make them feel truly Epic and big bowlie boi is certainly not as cool as he could be.
if i print this and stick it over seth's whiteboard do you think he'll notice?
happy cake day!
no joke, this is among the best/most professional suggestions I've ever seen on reddit. It's easy to lulz over the handwritten text (omg dude why did you not just type this out) but it effectively analyzes problems and proposes well thought out solutions to them. Even the color coding helps convey the information effectively
if i print this and stick it over seth's whiteboard do you think he'll notice?
happy cake day!
devtrackers.gg
