[2020] This is a great subreddit being plagued by a bad mindset.

We're still here, I referenced this in another thread as well but a lot of it is just that a lot of the issues that are getting talked about are worked on by a small subset of very specific people. The vast majority of us don't work in skin pricing, for example - same goes for specific bugs like hit registration. Other things, like the release of our competitive queue, we just weren't talking about publicly until Ziegler's tweet this morning, so we can't really hop in and drop dates when things are still a bit nebulous.

If anyone wants to talk about agent balance or maps or something, I'm in there - but realistically, only a small portion of the team works on the big hot-button issues right now, which can make it hard to feel like my engagement will provide a ton of value right now. But we're always around; most of us come from League, and this is just what feedback tends to look like for a live development game. We're used to it.

Yup, vipers been on our buff list for awhile now but the changes we were working on took a bit more time so we couldn’t fit them into launch. Expect to see a Viper buff in the next 1-2 patches!

We have lots of ideas for maps as a product that we're currently fleshing out. I know that sounds vague as hell, but I just don't have any specifics I can share outside of that; but we're thinking through the same spaces as you here.

Regarding Breach, he hasn't come up as an outlier in terms of data, no - winrate wise, he's been on the lower end fairly consistently actually (he's actually been one of the weakest agents data-wise for awhile). There's a confound here though in that our current queue is unrated; when players are playing a bit more competitively, we may see Breach's value get a bit higher and see his winrate bump up a bit.

We have three major sentiment questions we measure for Agents consistently - % of players who believe they're OP (and why), % of players who believe they're UP (and why), and % of players who find the agent confusing or frustrating to play against (and why). Breach has shown up on the higher end of confusing and frustrating before, but that was pretty close to his release in Closed Beta, so it's something we're monitoring over time and expecting to smooth out. His abilities can be a lot to learn how to play against at first, since they come through walls with short telegraph times. If we see his frustration numbers go way up in the future, we'll see if there's anything we can do to improve the experience there, even if he's not numerically overpowered.

So TL;DR on Breach, nothing really yet. We're watching the pulse for our different balance triggers and nothing's tripped it yet, but it's a constant vigil!

The maps are currently looking pretty healthy balance-wise; we're going to do another sentiment gathering pass to see how the playerbase is feeling about them now that the game is live but as far as I know we don't have any split-mid level map changes in the pipe. If something starts looking weird though, we're always willing to make some changes to improve the experience.

Regarding agent balance - we have lots of views. We view winrates across a bunch of different percentile buckets, so we can see if agents become problematic only in certain MMR ranges or if they're just problematic holistically. Currently Breach isn't looking too problematic anywhere; honestly, if anything he's too weak. The metrics we primarily use are match winrate and round-side winrate for both attack and defense (your chance to win any given round on attack/defense) so we can understand an agent's general power as well as how that manifests by side, so Breach's more utility-oriented kit wouldn't introduce any bias into how we view his power compared to a more frag-oriented character like Raze.

We do look at other metrics like ability efficacy and such, but we don't explicitly balance off of them. That's the type of stuff that we use to investigate a balance problem, not the other way around (for example, if we see Breach's winrate is super high, we might look into his abilities for clues. But we wouldn't start with his abilities if his winrate looks reasonable and players feel he's in a good state).

Regarding Reyna, we have lots of levers to look at there if she needs a nerf. Leer specifically has lots of levers - travel time, distance of the effect, health of the orb, distance of the nearsight, etc. They're definitely a good entry tool, but we're just giving the community a little time to breathe since the agent is still pretty new. If she's proving to be too strong we'll swing in with a nerf in the appropriate areas - that may be Leer's efficacy or something else, it depends on how we come to that problem statement.