I've seen a lot of comments talking about contradictions between what we have changed and what we haven't and you guys are absolutely correct, I cannot deny that.
I hope I can shed a little more light on the discussions we've had internally even if it won't really make the players who are unhappy suddenly happy about it, maybe they can understand where we're coming from and why we've made some of the decisions we have made.
So I kind of touched on it in this blog but let's break down some of the things we first changed and why and have a look at community reactions to them. I also want to stress that this is all my own personal perspective on all of this and it doesn't represent everyone on the team even if all of the decisions made below were made as a team.
Fluid strikes adjustment so that the damage reduction happens after determining if you die or not. This one was pretty much just an unforeseen bug that allowed players to never die against some bosses special attacks if they had I think it was around 8hp or less. Clearly abusable, we had to fix this immediately through a hotfix when we found out. We then later did the correct fix to it once we had the time to investigate it more thoroughly and more important issues had been found. The community complained about this one but mostly because from what I can tell they didn't understand the severity of the bug but it seems that everything is ok now and I believe it's been appreciated that we took the time to re-address it.
Double Cast being nerfed (originally) so that the ice spells no longer had 100% accuracy. This one was a clear bug, it wasn't in the relic description and it wasn't intended behaviour. Unfortunately we caught it really late when people had already built around it and shared the information to others resulting in lots and lots of players being really annoyed that we ruined their build. Only because we caught it really late and that it was really significant to specific builds (combat styles are a HUGE part of this league) we decided to proceed with a soft-nerf instead. I still generally disagree with this choice personally (we have lots of opinions on the team) but the community seems to have received this rather positively stating that it was fun and leagues are supposed to be fun so let's keep it.
And lastly, let's talk about clue scrolls. The idea behind the change to clue scrolls was not to make a balancing change to make US better late-game or to try and buff TS. It was to make a piece of content which was really not fun and quite tedious to do more enjoyable for everyone generally. Again, this does hurt peoples relic choices and players who picked TS generally felt like they lost their late-game advantage.
So when we're making sweeping changes like these and "making exceptions" it can be really hard for players to understand why we won't do really minor changes like Burning amulet being affected by Eternal Jeweller or glass making being affected by Production master or adding box traps to the Wilderness.
The honest answer is that we still stick by what we originally said, we don't want to make any changes where possible to anything unless we absolutely have to.
And well... That's where the issue is right? Everyone has a different perception of what we have to change and what we don't have to change. Even internally we are slightly conflicted over this and have to go with the majority. This is something which I deeply regret considering that we have previously mentioned that we won't change anything once it's live.
I'd honestly quite like to go with "whatever is in the relic descriptions is law" but then we have cases like with double cast which I described above in which we were praised for going against that so perhaps there is a line with what is acceptable to change and not.
I can at the very least promise you all that this is something we are going to take more seriously going forward. We are going to discuss this in review of the League and try to decide what our stance should be going forward and then come back to you all before the next League so that you guys are all aware where we stand about changes made post-league launch.
None of these changes are easy and we don't make them lightly, we're just trying to ensure that you all have a great time playing the League but whether we make changes or not, we'll never make everyone happy. Make the changes and upset people who want no changes, don't make the changes and upset people asking for them. It's a very tough line to walk and one we definitely want to get better at.
Anyway, if you've read my long-winded answer.. thanks! I know some people are going to disagree with me and I know others are still going to be annoyed at me but that's fine. All I can do is try to promise to get better at this moving forward and to try and be as transparent as I can with you all in an attempt to reach a mutual understanding.