Were meidum players balancing out the good-time-had if better players were having a worse time?
edit:also, ty for your response
It was really really hard to tell, but that basically meant the data told us we could go either way and your feedback very clearly and loudly pointed in one direction only.
What are the metrics used to determine a players enjoyment? Genuinely curious about that one.
The easiest to look at is session length delta. Churn's the more brutal version of that.
Coming from many competitive games that almost never made balance/design changes throughout it's lifespan, I seriously love how daring you guys are.
What surprized me was a major change like this was not "tested" in a LTM like yall normally do.
LTMs have very limited usefulness for testing. They're just not played like the normal game, unfortunately.
You could give red a desirable perk instead of the additional armour if that's what's throwing things off. Like red shields leech a small amount of health when you damage enemies or something like that
Yeah that's not a bad idea, but finding the right effect isn't easy. I don't think life leech is appropriate. We could always try fast heal, that's never had any problems! ;P
I know you're probably busy and I'm sorry if you've been asked this often but was loba no longer being able to throw her bracelet through windows Intentional?
Nope! My understanding is it depended on the window as well. There's a special invisible thing that level designers can put there to tell the game "hey this is a window which players can't go through, but you can through grenades and Loba's bracelet through it". I think this was the issue with some windows, but don't quote me on it. I'm not a level designer!
Appreciate the transparency! What are people’s thoughts on doing away with red altogether and just doing the old white, blue, purple progression? Perhaps gold shields’ new perk can be that they start with 100 HP and they and they alone can be evolved to red?
Answered this in a bunch of places already but TLDR: it's good for the game to give players something to chase even when they land and find a purple.
aside from the QQ on reddit, what do the numbers in game say about the changes? im honestly pretty sad to see the revert as i was having more fun shredding people and being rewarded for better positioning
That was the reason we put it in, yeah; position should matter in a BR.
I can't share the data we got in detail, but it was consistent with better players having a worse time (I swear I'm not calling you bad!)
Maybe throw red into the care package? Itll go with the other red heirloom colored items?
I think it's good the red gives players a reason to keep doing damage even if they have purple already. Crating it would remove that. Gold's in care package potentially though, and I think that's the right place for it.
Now, it’s important to note that we playtested this for months internally. From those playtests, feedback was positive. But, we are a small group of people compared to the millions that play Apex Legends every day. The skill levels in our team are varied, and big balance changes are really only going to be vetted when we get feedback from all of you.
Have you guys ever considered implementing a public test server?
Seems like that could solve a lot of issues if you're able to get feedback on potential changes before they go live, not to mention finding the various bugs that show up on the public servers but not on your internal test ones.
It's definitely a conversation we've had, but it's not my area of expertise so I'm not going to speak to it here. All I can say it's not quite as easy as you may think.
Thanks for doing the right thing and reverting the values back to how they were. In future, it would be better to experiment and try things in LTMs not on season launch. You guys already test things in LTMs anyway, but the launch values for bodysheilds were never tested inside an LTM.
We actually don't get the greatest feedback from LTMs. People go in there with an entirely different set of expectations. It's much less try hard, the population tends to fall off after a few days etc. I think if we had a public test server or sth like that, that might help, but it's not very easy to set that up.
Maybe make red only attainable through KP? You can get to purple through damage but it takes like 2 kills or 1 kill and 2 assists for red.
Hm, that seems a little hard to learn and I'm not exactly sure what benefit we'd get from that. There might even be edge cases where that change would make it EASIER to get a red. I think the damage model is fine, we probably just need to put more of a damage buffer between purple and red.
As a day 1 player thank you. I played the first couple days of season 6 and hadn’t picked it up since. The higher TTK is what sucked me in to this game and with that gone I felt like I had lost my favorite game. It is good to try things, but I am most appreciative that you guys really monitor and hear the feedback.
Yeah we looked at a lot of data to back this up as well, and there's still a chance that we're wrong and that in the combination of all evo and high TTK, red armors will be way too prevalent, but the feedback from you all was super clear. We wanna keep making experimental changes, and I hope you'll be along for the ride knowing that when we do f*ck up, we're not too proud to admit it and roll it back.
why not make it so that you have to do 1800 damage TOTAL ingame for you to get a red evo. so maybe you do 1000 damage while you have white (not evo) armor but when you pick up any evo shield (white or red) it restarts but it levels up to the 1000 damage you have done all game. so maybe it would be at purple. and needing 1800 damage to get red evo seems fair cus it rewards skilled players. or maybe 1500 damage all game. but something that based on YOUR damage that game. could that work maybe?
Yeah like I said, we're definitely thinking about requiring more damage, but that isn't a thing we just randomly decide to do. We'll have to do some testing (and for a hilarious reason that I won't go into right now, there's a little bit of a technical challenge there as well).
Genuine question, why not just remove red armor instead of lowering all armor by 25? I mean keep it so its all evo armors, keep the armors 50/75/100 but just get rid of red armor.
That's a good question and we definitely talked about it! In the end it came down to us believing that it's good for the game you have a chase, an incentive to try and go out to do damage, even if you land and find a purple right away. Red should be rare, but it's good to have something to try and go for.
Lots of very passionate internal conversations around this, and we're still a little worried about the "everyone's got red armor" case (we may eventually require a little more damage to go from purple to red), but feedback was super clear here. I'm actually really glad we tried this. The way to keep a game fresh is to not be scared about experimental changes.
Im curious because one of the devs said (might have been you actually) that gibby and caustic have the same large hitbox?
Is this true as gibby looks considerably bigger than caustic?
That is correct! We generally only use three hitboxes (Pathfinder is an exception to this): small (basically anyone that has low profile), large (anyone that has fortified), and medium (everyone else). Pathfinder has a long and skinny hitbox.
Do note that animations very much affect the hittability of characters, even characters with the same hitbox. For instance, Wraith tucks her head in a lot during her sprint animation, making her harder to hit.
Uh, I might be wrong, but I think it's happening again
Edit: no, I'm definitely right. It IS back
That clip is season 6
Damn! Thank you, I'll look at it tomorrow.
u/DanielZKlein is BH sensitivity/FOV changing when in his ult on purpose ? Wasn't that fixed a few seasons back ?
I don't know if this was touched a few seasons back; I can ask next week! I do know that there's definitely a FOV change that happens on purpose, and I wouldn't be surprised if that affects sensitivity. We often do FOV changes to sell speed-ups (see also Octane's tactical).
These are all meaningful buffs! They're not bad ideas, but they're definitely not just QoL. QoL would be something like "made it more clear where the bracelet will land" or "changed the sorting order in black market".
I am really cautious to touch her tactical even though i understand we'll likely need to do it eventually because I remember what it was like in earlier testing when it was faster and less well telegraphed. For next patch I'm trying to tackle the problem that usually by the time you get your first use of her ultimate, your team has already looted their first PoI and doesn't really need the ult anymore.
You provided amazing points to solidify the pathfinder nerf. One thing I don't understand is why does he still have low profile? He's much less mobile and has a huge hitbox
I spoke to some of the people who were here when his hitbox was changed. This is what I found out: originally, Pathfinder was on the big hitbox (Gibraltar, Caustic), but this made no sense for his skinny limbs. Bullets would clearly whiz by him and still do damage. So we gave him a hitbox that much more closely follows his actual model size. That bumped his winrate up like crazy, so going with the precedent that Legends who have an advantage due to their hitbox also have Low Profile to make up for this, we gave him low profile.
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