davidvonderhaar

On behalf of the Blackout team... thank you for playing and thank you for the nice sign-off.

These bursts of creativity and the reasons why people do them legitimately refill the motivation meter. On a personal level, I can't tell you how nice it is being linked to Reddit from a co-worker and end up on post full of optimism, positivity, and gratitude.

Fun.

Clever editing. Solid use of camera placement.

I legit laughed out loud when the audio ducked and got filtered during the under-water scene. Those are the best gags. When you don't expect them, but after they happen it seems so obvious that the creator would do that.

Not sure if you are trying to tell a story? I was looking for one based on the title and the relationship between the guys slap fighting and the guys watching that from afar. After that, I just gave in to the fun.

10/10. I would dedicate years of my life making something worthy of more videos.

Congrats! AND THANK YOU. MAKES DOING WHAT WE DO WORTH DOING.

BC designed randomness. Really rare. You should be celebrating how lucky you are.

I don't get many opportunities to do it. Example: I haven't been to a single COD WORLD LEAGUE event this season. That's kinda crazy given my investments in that world! I would go to those events and be immersed in that world (for better and worse.)

I have a new mission now. You could argue it's the greatest design challenge of my career. It's always strange to say out loud --which is why I have to do so until it becomes the new normal.

My mission is to build the design team so as to get it to a place where if I never showed up to work ever again, no one would notice and we roll on with the values that have defined us.

I appreciate those nice words. A lot. Makes it worthwhile for me to fight on.

I've been busting out self-deprecating humor for games. It's not new. Did you see the photo of me struggling to hold a real-life .50 caliber sniper rifle that weighs almost as much as I do? I was turning purple. Or the video of the back of my bald head in a wingsuit being pushed through the halls of Treyarch on an AV cart?

If I start taking myself too seriously --I no longer deserve this post. Have a go at me. I can take it. I am grateful for the opportunity to know so many of you directly.

Perhaps the best kind of monster. I can't seem to edit my original post as I'm a pleb and this shouldn't surprise anyone.

You are a monster.

Mistakes were made.

Perks in MP are color-coded by what Perk slot they occupy. That is a mutually exclusive choice. Perks in WZ are consumables. You can carry as many as you have Inventory room for. They can not be color-coded in the same way because Blackout doesn't have the concept of Create a Class. If you were to try and color code MP perks into some logical way that uses 3 (or even 5) colors you would find yourself hard pressed to find a color scheme that works for everyone equally.

Additionally, the number of, variety of, and game play attributes of each has not allowed them to be categorized by colors. You end up with a a few in a color-coded category that you can explain, but you end up with just as many that can't be and/or end up as only 1 or 2 in a category. It might be "mostly" about stealth or "kinda" about healing and then you have something "largely" about movement, but it also modifies healing mechanics.

In the end, you end up with a rainbow of colors that can make make...

At the time this interview was conducted, which was previous to shipping the game, that's precisely and exactly how it worked. If I went back in time and re-did this interview, I'd have to answer it the same way I did then.

Things change along the way ... and not all of them are design decisions. Other examples of things that changed since that interview we conducted:

• Allowing Specialist to be unlocked to anyone without having to quest (based on inputs that players had Cosmetics they had earned, but couldn't use them in Blackout)
• Add new characters for Season Pass holders (based on inputs to give Season Pass holders more content)

Those two things were not exactly in the design plans at the time. It's a chicken and egg problem. I can tell you what we have done and what we plan on doing, but things change that I can not predict or I didn't know about. Doubly true with the business side of things which have little insight into and even le...

I feel genuinely sad you feel this way. It legit bums me out that your interpretation of an effort to communicate with you transparently on this very hot topic lead you to that place.

You are wrong. That's not what I said. At all. With that out of the way...

We teased League Play at the reveal. That happened. I take accountability for it. I was the one who said it.

I did it because I believed in our plan and our ability to execute our plan. I've stood on stage before and said "we are doing this" and we did it. I've stood on stage before and said "we are doing this" and then something happened where we couldn't.

I truly and completely understand the frustrations around it. All of us do. I'm so sorry that you feel let down here.

Things happen. Tough decisions on priorities have to made. Things change that are not always totally within our control.

We also can't have it both ways. We can either never talk about anything unti...

Very clever and interesting thinking to use the ballistics feature to de-tune FMJ. It would even make sense and we have the precedent of Suppressors which do something similar.

However, it doesn't solve all the problems I pointed out. I appreciate your simple, easy to read, inspired, and polite (no name-calling) perspective. That matters to me.

Thanks. We are trying to figure it out. We really are. I meet with the social/digital teams all the time.

Transparently, this is one of the things we are trying. Social/Digital will find interesting things and point them out to us. Then we have a bit of discretion to figure out if I (or others) want to engage.

Someone will be upset that I didn't give any details. The only reason I can even say the above is because I already said we were working on this feature. That's not new information.

Please link me the post/article/place where Treyarch told us at launch that combat records and leaderboards are coming next week?

The only time I've ever commented on leaderboards were to say that at this time we didn't have plans to create global leaderboards but plans are always subject to change. It's somewhere on Reddit. It was a long time ago.

I'm not trying to be snarky here. I don't always see everything Treyarch says and I'm not personally aware of when we said that or where.

We do a lot of things the community asks for. However, asking for it doesn't mean we can, should, or will do it. That would be an unreasonable expectation. Historically, explaining why we won't hasn't improved that relationship. Transparently, I said "no it's not coming". I answered the question that was asked. I don't know how to be transparent with you if you disagree or don't like the answer. It's a catch-22.

-V

Not just considering. It's up and running in the dev. environment. This is one of these features we just can't talk about until we have 100% confidence that it will ship with the next major update.

We have not fully committed to Operator Mods in Blackout just yet. We are making an earnest attempt to get them into the game in the right way. I saw them working in the test map and they are in the production plan. I have not playtested with them.

It's very unlikely that every gun that has an Operator in MP would exist in Blackout. Some of them conflict with other system, features, or even the core combat loop itself.

Real talk right now. This is a good example of something that makes you gun shy to talk about. The whole thing might not work. It might turn out to be a bad idea. The folks working on it may have to put it down for a bit and work on something else.

For anything we make any number of things can go wrong that delay or cut said feature entirely for unexpected reasons that weren't in the design document or production plan. Sometimes, it's also just not good enough or not fun enough.

When this kind of thing happens, people get pretty upset ...

Currently, we are reviewing the viability of LMGs in Blackout. They are trending under the intended design target. I recently had a conversation about giving LMGs more damage to vehicles. Thus, they would have a type of "built-in" FMJ ... but not necessarily the part of FMJ that destroys player armor. I don't think we can improve the usage of LMGs with tuning alone. I know this isn't what you asked, but I am setting up some context about what we ARE thinking about with FMJ.

Summary

I think your idea has merit on the surface. Just adding a new type of Attachment other than Fast or Extended would be swell ... but

... we aren't ready to go to this specific place yet. I don't think we are done dialing in Armor enough to add a variable or bonus modifier

... and, going to that place isn't as simple as it seems on the surface when you start to unpack that downstream impact. You wouldn't feel you had an Attachment at all without incr...

I like that you liked League Play but to say it wasn't broken is inaccurate. I chose to accept the word broken in this context as having things in it that didn't work so well.

It had plenty of design defects and it was this community that gave us feedback on those design decisions that we banked both THEN and then again more recently.

We hope to address this topic head-on in more detail in a video developer update soon.

League Play is taking/took longer than we expected, because we are addressing the community feedback on it in advance of launching it. ...thus when it does come out it will more closely match your expectations of what it is and how you think it should work.

We are doing the very things you gave us feedback on that we agreed made sense for the game we now have versus the game we had when I stood on stage and told you League Play was coming back at the MP reveal event.

It's simply a software development realit...

Cool. We enjoy making it.

We actively encourage and reward constructive criticism ... but it may not be obvious enough when and how we do that.

So, in the spirit of transparency...

We have a guy on the community/social management team and a part of his daily routine is to find constructive and thoughtful criticism posts/commentary. That doesn't mean he doesn't also see or let us know about less than constructive posts/commentary.

He sends this report to key stakeholders and studio managers, myself included. That's how I know about this post. You won't find many developers in a decision making role browsing around Reddit parsing chaff from wheat. It's hard enough on the day to day satisfy the community's appetite to evolving/fixing/improving/add new content to the game while managing a team.

[Some of the] community doesn't do itself any favors by injecting what might be great or valid feedback with venom. I'm not going to read it and...