FallGuysJoe

Lots of good discussion/conversation here. I think you make very good points about the skill ceiling at a super high level meaning that wins can come down to minute moments of luck like spawns and ragdoll. It might be that we've got the top skill bracket dialled in too tightly- what you're explaining definitely isn't the intention of the system.
We're going to keep monitoring the situation and likely make some tweaks as we go. I mentioned on discord yesterday that really the system is mostly meant to keep new players from being stomped as they learn the game. We don't really benefit from turning the game into a dice-roll at a really high level as you've explained!

I think these are all great points really. We're looking into ways to promote more team rounds within squads to get the balance a bit better, and so that ideally it doesn't have to just be the top few Squads that get to play them.
Crashes on PS4 are one of our top priorities at the moment. It's not my field unfortunately so I can't speak much more to it other than that.

Main Show variety is definitely something will be keeping an eye on. Our gut feeling is that we have enough Rounds in Main Show now to balance out the loss of variety, and that we get a net win to the Show's overall enjoyment by avoiding players getting stuck in team games with players they don't like, etc.
I'll have a look at throwing something into an upcoming vibe check to get the community's read on it though.

Hoping to share more stats long term, but incredibly the data we got for the first 24 hours was Thieves 51% - 49% Guardians! I expect this to shift a bit as a meta develops a bit more, but it's certainly a promising start.

Yeah, it's been a tricky one that. If Guardians can't press the button the best strategy is definitely to just stand on it, which makes it almost impossible for Thieves to press it. Because Fall Guys doesn't have 'removal' mechanics in the same way shooters do, it's much harder for us to stop camping like this in a way that doesn't also make it harder for thieves to press the button too (like putting a swinging hammer above it, for example.
We're discussing it internally though! I'm sure there's a solution.

Lots of great feedback here, thanks all! Keep it coming.

Yeah, it's an interesting idea! One thing we try and avoid is having too many objects in the game that feel arbitrary or need explaining. We're already doing quite a lot of weird stuff in Sweet Thieves to keep it balanced- for example, having Guardians not be allowed to pick up sweets. Team specific barriers would be another thing on top of that in an already quite complex mode.

We did talk about this a bit during development!
Ultimately we felt like Sweet Thieves is already mechanically quite complex, and it has been quite a challenge to get to a releasable state as it does so many new things (invisibility, teleporting, jailbreaking, asymmetrical teams, etc.) Ultimately we felt like for now we'd keep it simple within the jail, but I could totally see us throwing in a few variations down the line.

I'm glad you're enjoying it! It was definitely a risk to make as we're trying a LOT of new things simultaneously but the team has really enjoyed trying to break the mould of what Fall Guys can be.
We're going to be monitoring win rates over the next few days, and have the ability to tweak things like time limit, sweet counts etc. to course correct as we go. The current setup had pretty close to 50% in our closed betas though.

yeah, hit a last minute snag in testing I'm afraid- we're looking into it!

yeah, it's been a tricky one to balance this! We felt like this approach forces Guardians to 'orbit' the button, giving Thieves a chance to break through and jailbreak. We'll keep an eye on griefing reports though!

Hey! yeah we felt like this was the fairest approach - being 'bumped into' triggering visibility gives Guardians a chance to discover hidden beans.

I think the round has too many rules to learn for it to live in Main Show, where we try to keep things as simple as possible.

this!

that's the plan!

yeah, it's definitely got some Renegade Roundup DNA in it!

Sweet Thieves doesn't really fit into our standard 'show' formula and is a completely standalone round, so for now it's going into our Limited Time Mode rotation (as Squads did at the time of release). How often it returns will depend very much on how much players like it!

I've played Sweet Thieves a lot AMA

Agreed with all of these! Let me chase up the fans in Pegwin Pursuit - they're definitely supposed to be on a timer.

Lots of good stuff in here to go in the backlog for us to fix!

A note on the 'unfairness' of certain rounds - it's definitely something we're learning that we have to be more careful with. Things like Fall Mountain being 'uneven', for example- we really didn't have any idea how competitive people would be on that level when we made it way way back during development. It's something we're trying to recalibrate for a bit, but I do feel like Fall Guys is always going to be a bit more chaotic than other games. I think we can still strive for fairness, though!