DanielZKlein

I mean I'm looking at the data. You can argue with me if you want, and it's certainly valid that you have a different experience, but you've gotta remember that millions and millions of people play this game, and you only ever see a tiny slice.

Wattson does fall off as you go up in MMR, but even at the 96th percentile she performs well; solid middle of the pack. Like she's at 11.6% win rate to say Revenant's 9.9%. The highest performer, Lifeline, is at 13.6%.

Her pick rate is absolute lowest tho. What that still tells me is there's value left on the table if all you care about is climbing. Each Fuse, Rampart, or Revenant pick in predator could have been a Wattson and had a much higher chance of winning the game.

Looks like the nerf barely touched his win rate. It's pretty much unchanged. No future work planned right now, but as always this can change when we get new data.

It brought up her win rate even more, which was already very high! She's currently one of the strongest characters in the game--and yet no one plays her. So here's my pro tip: you wanna get some free wins? Learn Wattson.

(And yeah, we're taking low profile off her, but that's just because we're nuking low profile from orbit.)

So why are you here?

Brb nerfing Pathfinder

Get over here, friend!

Rampart's the second lowest in our win rate data across all skill buckets. The only one below her is Fuse :x

We have some plans for him, but nothing's 100% yet. But yeah, he didn't come in super strong like we wanted. It's still very hard to predict how strong a character will be unless they have meaningful mobility (Octane/Horizon). We've gotta be careful not to fall victim to mobility creep as well: the more general mobility there is, the less fun the game becomes for everyone because you just can't hit people. This is why we're removing some of that power from Horizon (we're just reducing how quickly you can wriggle back and forth as you go up her gravity lift to make tracking her a little easier). Octane's pretty trackable IMO, but we need to hit him a little bit. He's become extremely dominant (to no one's surprise) so we'll need to shave a little power off. I think I found a reasonably fun-neutral way of doing so: I'm currently thinking about increasing the health cos...

That's not how gamedev works I'm afraid. This stuff will take time. I don't know that we'll have a fix in Season 9 for instance. So no, no updates right now. Sorry!

Yup, it would! But maybe that's okay because helmets are so plentiful anyway, that was never a real balance point?

I don't have time to go into the weeds now, but we basically had a balance spectrum from 0% gear effect to 100% gear effect that was separated into 1/3rd steps: 0/33/66/100. (I'm not counting gold here) By starting everyone with white we're turning it into 33/66/100. Maybe the correct way would be 0/50/100? Maybe that means white items don't exist, or the absence of an item in a slot is themed as white rather than grey? That's one of the many considerations we need to make here.

We're working generally on having better "player traveling through the air" sounds for all cases where you're in the air. Should fix it for jumppad too!

This is one of those things that may not even be a problem at all, but us game designers tend to get all wrapped up in anticipating it.

Basically, there's a reason loot exists in Apex. There's actually many reasons. Some of those reasons are that the journey from low level loot to high level loot gives you things to do that aren't just "find and kill the enemy", it makes teams organically spread out, it adds RNG to soften skill differentials (sometimes you run into a better player but you have a better loadout, and that's good), etc.

We soften the impact of all of these good things by shortening the journey from low level to high level loot. Now you could say "but it was fine" during the three weeks the takeover was up (and I agree! It was fine!), but we wouldn't expect these negative effects to manifest on that time scale. One way this could manifest is, say we remove a lot of loot tiers, and a year into playing with this new loot game suddenly for no reason anyon...

(it never looked at your speed going into the jumppad)

Nope! It overrides your momentum. The only difference is whether you run into it (higher but shorter) or slide into it (longer but flatter). We didn't want to get into weird situations where like a Pathfinder can grapple onto the jumppad at super high speed and go across the map.

We've settled on a plan to fix (hopefully without reintroducing the performance issues). No time scale though.

Listen, if you JUMPCROUCH, you teleport straight into a Minecraft game.

Computers are f*cking wild. I just tried this locally and... it seems to work? Like we've got some unshipped bugfixes that make bracelet a lot better but they still fail in a few places where clearly it should work, and jumping seems to fix it? Sometimes it's not enough to jump in place but rather you have to jump off a ledge. This is bizarre! Anyway, thank you so much for the research (and for poking me!) I've forwarded this to our engineering team so they can look at what's going on.

We're investigating what happened here. There was a change to the underlying VFX that we made with optimization in mind. The goal was to have it look identical to what was there before, but apparently that's not what happened. We'll let you know when we know more.

(Bang voice lines must be so much fun to write)

"Fallback ping here! Tells you to chill the f*ck out! 90% of war is waiting, soldier."