Altombre

Fragile makes the target take double damage from all sources while applied. It’s a pretty significant debuff!

When Viper uses either wall or smoke, she has to be within a certain radius of them, giving up her position in most cases.

This is actually isn't quite correct - obviously she has to be close by to throw them, but she can turn her smokes on and off globally. In fact, this is only really true for Omen and Brimstone, who can only place their smokes within a certain distance of their models (Omen's is pretty damn far, Brimstone is actually fairly close).

Yup, that's super fair and I'll try to be more cognizant of that. I appreciate the feedback!!

The maps are currently looking pretty healthy balance-wise; we're going to do another sentiment gathering pass to see how the playerbase is feeling about them now that the game is live but as far as I know we don't have any split-mid level map changes in the pipe. If something starts looking weird though, we're always willing to make some changes to improve the experience.

Regarding agent balance - we have lots of views. We view winrates across a bunch of different percentile buckets, so we can see if agents become problematic only in certain MMR ranges or if they're just problematic holistically. Currently Breach isn't looking too problematic anywhere; honestly, if anything he's too weak. The metrics we primarily use are match winrate and round-side winrate for both attack and defense (your chance to win any given round on attack/defense) so we can understand an agent's general power as well as how that manifests by side, so Breach's more utility-oriented kit wouldn't intr...

We have lots of ideas for maps as a product that we're currently fleshing out. I know that sounds vague as hell, but I just don't have any specifics I can share outside of that; but we're thinking through the same spaces as you here.

Regarding Breach, he hasn't come up as an outlier in terms of data, no - winrate wise, he's been on the lower end fairly consistently actually (he's actually been one of the weakest agents data-wise for awhile). There's a confound here though in that our current queue is unrated; when players are playing a bit more competitively, we may see Breach's value get a bit higher and see his winrate bump up a bit.

We have three major sentiment questions we measure for Agents consistently - % of players who believe they're OP (and why), % of players who believe they're UP (and why), and % of players who find the agent confusing or frustrating to play against (and why). Breach has shown up on the higher end of confusing and frustrating before, bu...

This is a game systems thing (so not my area), but we're aware of this pain. Right now, all the maps are weighed evenly, so you getting Bind 7 times in a row is incredibly bad luck, but it definitely does happen. Building a system to detect previous maps played for all players in a group, etc. to avoid repeats isn't free though, and I can't speak to that team's priorities so it's hard for me to say anything super helpful here aside from "we know getting the same map 3+ times in a row sucks even if it's unlikely"

Right now that team is tackling stuff like competitive queue, matchmaking, etc. so even if changes don't get made right now, that doesn't mean they're not listening or don't care; there are just always tradeoffs to consider when talking about investing in a feature like that vs. doing other things.

Once again, I don't work on this team, I have no idea what they've prioritized or are working towards, just trying to convey what I can. We feel you on the repeat...

Thanks so much! I'll keep doing my best.

Yup, vipers been on our buff list for awhile now but the changes we were working on took a bit more time so we couldn’t fit them into launch. Expect to see a Viper buff in the next 1-2 patches!

All I know is that people on the team want this too and have wanted it for awhile. I just don't have the insight on our engineering bandwidth/prioritization on features like this, so I can't say anything definitively. We feel your pain though, I have several coworkers who change their keybindings at the beginning of every match based on the agent they're playing.

Oh yeah, we monitor weapon balance all the time. There are a couple things we're looking at, but nothing definitive yet; most of the heavier balance topics have been agents and maps thus far. Weapons are something we review the data for all the time and we're committed to maintaining enough healthy choice competition to drive interesting decisions there.

We're still here, I referenced this in another thread as well but a lot of it is just that a lot of the issues that are getting talked about are worked on by a small subset of very specific people. The vast majority of us don't work in skin pricing, for example - same goes for specific bugs like hit registration. Other things, like the release of our competitive queue, we just weren't talking about publicly until Ziegler's tweet this morning, so we can't really hop in and drop dates when things are still a bit nebulous.

If anyone wants to talk about agent balance or maps or something, I'm in there - but realistically, only a small portion of the team works on the big hot-button issues right now, which can make it hard to feel like my engagement will provide a ton of value right now. But we're always around; most of us come from League, and this is just what feedback tends to look like for a live development game. We're used to it.

For sure, happy to provide any clarity. I understand the fear of Rioters "leaving the sub" because it's gotten too negative or something, but that's really not the case. Obviously I encourage folks to remember that we're people too on the other side of the screen etc. but as far as I'm concerned, hearing and responding to player feedback, however passionate and frustrated it may be, is part of our job so I'm going to be around here regardless.

Basically, I feel it's valuable for me to comment if we release a new piece of content (like an agent or map) that you all are upset about or you feel balance team isn't doing it's job. When that's not really the case, all I can really say is "sorry I don't work on that, here's a bit of info or a person who might be able to help you better" which just isn't super helpful a lot of the time, ya know?

Honestly, I can't speak for everyone, but for myself this definitely isn't it. I was pretty vocal in a lot of the "Raze is OP / Raze doesn't belong in the game" threads back in beta. For myself personally, I just work on gameplay content and live balance, and none of the big topics seem to be super focused on that right now so I'm not sure what to say. I didn't work on skin pricing, I don't interface with hit reg/bugs, I don't work on game systems for when competitive queue comes out, etc.

In general, we like to engage but we also don't want to speak on behalf of other teams or when we feel we lack information, which is why I'm not hopping into all of these threads. My guess would be that there are tons of other team members like me, just absorbing the feedback and hopping in on stuff that's relevant to what we specifically work on.

TL;DR: All of us have probably been here at some point. Don't get discouraged! There's so much to this game outside of aim, aim is just easy to notice and reflect on (and get discouraged by). You will get substantially better, just keep focusing and building on your fundamentals and you will absolutely get there.

This was me when I joined the team. I'd played a ton of shooters growing up, but the one shooter I had never really gotten into was CS (I'm a big exception from most folks on the team in that regard). The biggest thing I can say is that it's easy to focus on aim as an area of improvement because it's so salient, but every time I felt like I hit a wall where "I just can't aim as well as these players", there was actually something else holding me back. My game sense, my utility usage, my movement and peeking, my general strategy and approach, my crosshair placement, etc.

As I've learned more and more about the game, the more I've come to app...

There are enough, yeah! We also filter by MMR ranges, so we have an understanding of her relative power across the player skill spectrum - it's quite high. But also, Sentinels are intended to be more powerful at holding ground, not taking it - Sage's wall was often being cast as a sort of super-smoke or site blocker to enable aggressive plays, which not only contributes to her outsized power but also doesn't quite fit within her role. So we're looking to shave off some power there and try to get her kit's output to be a bit more appropriate.

Oh, I don't mean to imply we just do pure data analysis, that's definitely not the case. We also field recurring surveys to understand how players feel about the state of balance by patch, what they find frustrating, etc. and also have a set of design principles and goals that we adhere to. There's a lot that goes into the process that isn't just raw numbers.

But, when it comes to raw numbers, we also have that covered. Just wanted to reinforce that Sage is getting nerfed again because she remains the strongest agent in the game and we're trying to bring her power in line with the rest of our lineup.

We make balance changes based off of actual game data; every time we've nerfed Sage, it's because her power is too far above other agents in terms of actual game outcomes (match winrate, round winrate, etc.)

Sage's winrate is substantially higher than Reyna's, believe it or not! Obviously we're keeping an eye on everyone, just wanted to reinforce that we do use a lot of data analysis to understand our game state at any point in time in order to make specific balance changes.

It was 40% actually! But we've dialed it back down so now all the maps are evenly weighted (which was always the plan). This is something we're still experimenting with, so keep letting us know what feels appropriate or not here.

It’s known! But I personally don’t know anything more outside of that since I don’t interface with bugs at all

Long term we'd like to communicate that kind of stuff for sure - right now, we're just still working on building our framework for what constitutes OP/UP in our game, building expectations, etc. Since the game's just been in beta we don't want to get too comfortable with the metrics we've been using; once we're confident it's pretty accurate for the long haul though, we'll probably share our philosophy with the playerbase so you all know how we're making decisions as well.