DanielZKlein

I could not be trusted with a ? ping in Apex.

Ok!

What I really wanna add tho is a question mark ping

Instead of 2 grenades it now takes 5-6 (depending on grenade type and how close to walls frag lands)

Like we said, we'll monitor and adjust as necessary. If this totally kills him, we're not just going to leave him like that.

Unfortunately we do not have a crystal ball that will show us the future. If you have one, let us know!

Rampart

Explosives damage Amped Cover normally, instead of inflicting 200 damage. Explosives damage Sheila normally, instead of inflicting 175 damage.

I'm usually extremely careful not to promise any dates (because gamedev is unpredictable). I'm hopeful we'll have stuff for both of those for S9, but again, no promises.

We're working on arm shield stuff, but there were some nasty bugs that cropped up that stopped us from shipping the nerf we're aiming at (currently looking at letting excess damage bleed through to Gibby). It's coming.

We are... considering. Carefully. No conclusion has been reached yet. I'm personally a little worried about shortening the loot loop by removing grey loot... other than that tho it seems like all upside

Your math is wrong! Why would you assume that the winrates of all legends would add up to 100?

There are 20 teams in each match. 1 team wins. That means each team has a 1/20 chance of winning: 5%.

5%. 4.8 isn't too weak; it's fine! There aren't hard and fast rules here, but I like to compare win rates to the rest of the field. If most legends are grouped in the +/- 0.2% band and then you have an outlier at say 5.6% (hello Horizon) then that's a problem, not because we arbitrarily decided that I don't know 5.4 or 5.5 is the cutoff, but because looking at the field as a whole, they're extreme outliers.

So with the obvious caveat that I don't work at Riot anymore and haven't in over two years now and so cannot speak to their thinking: stat APIs are a Pandora's Box: once you've opened them, there is no putting the genie back in. (That's what happened, right? She opened the box and a genie came out the gave her three wishes? And she wished for a monkey paw? I may be mixing up my analogies here)

They absolutely shape player perception and discourse; what's worse, they can eat their own tail and become self fulfilling prophecies: when a character has a low win rate shown on an aggregator website, that can lead to good players migrating away from the character, further depressing their win rate.

Finally, players who want to be upset about something will find ways to cherry pick data. I should barely be allowed to look at data and I've been doing this for a decade or so now. Online games are incredibly complex beasts and it's so easy to get hung up on this or that piece ...

There are 20 teams. The average win rate is 5%. Not sure how you arrive at 6.25%?

Nah that's not a good answer either. For one, we want the competitive game to look as much as possible like the game you all play; for another, there are legit Caustic mains out there who'd like to go pro playing their character. It would really suck if we said "sorry, the character you invested thousands of hours into won't be available in competitive play because we can't figure out how to make him fair."

Nah, the counterplay to a broadly available mechanic (any enemy squad could have a Caustic) cannot be an RNG based low frequency item drop.

Hey to be clear: I've only said "those ideas sound cool". That's many many steps from "we're going to do either of them". At this point I'm still not 100% convinced that we need to break pattern on Caustic at all.

Thank you for your kind words! I will say that Overwatch is a different game and Blizzard did do the work to make counterpicking at least viable--you CAN change your character mid-round and if you're not at high ult charge you're not super punished for it, but that's only the logistics necessary to make counterpicking a viable tool; it still leaves you feeling bad about not being able to play, say, Reaper, because we need someone to counterpick their Pharah and you hate both Soldier 76 and Widowmaker (these observations are based on 2 years ago, when I last actively played Overwatch).

I'm not saying one is necessarily better! Blizzard are very smart and know what they're doing! I just don't like hyper-reactive character based games where too much other than preference drives your character selection.

Dec 1st Caustic was at 4.8% trios winrate (across all skills and across casual and ranked); with the mid-December patch he went up to 5.0/5.1% (it's noisy) which was decent. I hadn't seen that climb yet when I made a comment early Jan that he was weak (I had the 4.8% winrate in mind + he also had the lowest encounter win rate at that time). Since then, he's been climbing steadily. Current data is very noisy (not sure what's going on, all the legends are oscillating a lot in the data from the last couple days), but let's say he's at an average 5.3/5.4% winrate now, which is high. His pick rate had always been a solid middle of the pack one, but with the introduction of Fuse and the Wraith nerf shaking pick rates up a bit (Wraith went from highest, where she'd been for pretty much all of Apex's existence, to fourth highest!), Caustic now sports the 5th highest pick rate as well.

He's not suddenly super strong. He's been building steadily from the middle of December last year ...

Shouldn't be able to. Walls are walls from either side, even when they're invisible.