[2021] Dev response on the recent update

Are more changes coming?

More tweaks are coming over the next few weeks, but we're taking a careful, measured approach and evaluating each change before doing more--a lot is working well and we don't want to overturn the apple cart.

Why didn't they start with the TIE/D and B-Wing?

Short answer is that we usually want to tackle broader issues before skill-specific ones. For instance currently the B-W is good at low skill but useless at high, the T/D is good at low and mid skill but a little too good at high, but the A-W is too good at ALL skills levels.

I know [the TIE Defender] is regarded [as being too powerful], but telemetry doesn’t really support it. It’s definitely something I‘d like to look at, but currently the A-W seems to have a much bigger impact on balance across all skill lvls than the T/D (whose impact is both smaller and limited to high skill).

It feels like matchmaking was tweaked to give slightly longer queues in order to get better matches.

You're correct, we're in the midst of evaluating some targeted MM tweaks.

External link →

Originally posted by Daemunx1

That “data” might be a month old. Every day I play I see more competant defender pilots and with all the youtube videos on how to take advantage of them the use of the ship is only going to increase.

Fear not, our telemetry is always available up through the previous day, and we check it regularly. :)

Don’t get me wrong, the defender is gradually gaining more of an edge in survivability (a bit at mid tiers, more so at high tiers) as more pilots figure out how to squeeze max performance out of it, and I’m not saying we’re going to ignore that. It’s just not priority one.

Top priority for us is faction-to-faction balance and any skill-agnostic balance issues. At the moment we’re seeing a New Republic edge in both modes (only a tiny one at high skill tiers, largely thanks to the defender, but a bit bigger at low tiers).

Once we’re confident things are back to ~50/50 across all skill levels then I’d like to look at tweaks to more skill-level-specific problems, like making the B-wing more viable at higher skill levels (currently telemetry shows it being quite good at low tiers, but losing value at mid and mostly gone by high) and/or making the defender less “the obvious choice of ship” at the top end.

The good news is that looking at the telemetry since this change went live, things on the faction balance front are already looking significantly better than last week. We’ll observe the data from this weekend and see how it looks, then decide next steps from there.

Have a great weekend, folks!

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