wow…that is an interesting little tidbit of information.
Hi. Is your day going well?
That’s all I wanted to ask.
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“Among the few that can proudly say he scored gold on Saboteur 5man before it’s first nerf!”
My God. was that a pain!
Still incredibly proud of that. Even though I had forgotten just how hard it actually was.
Oh man,I’ll sure never forget.
The last def was the real pain.
You needed to watch for every. single. freakin. varelsi. scaven.
A defiler popped? You better hurry your ass to ■■■■ him if you want to keep your core alive.
And if one man made the mistake to stay in/to close to the core,two grenades from a random Thrall and it was probably over.
I remember being a bit disappointed when they nerfed it,but I’m very proud still.
Ah,the good times of the 25% plasmite transducer… I wish they balanced PVE and PVP separately when I remember that now.
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All my team used oath of the sustain to heal nova 
it was rly good
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Most of us have been avoiding playing Galilea because we know how rediculous she can be and we don’t want to put people in public through that. If you really want to see how bad she is still get @RedX to play her against pretty much any public team and just watch the slaughter. Those who KNOW how to play her become practically unstoppable and I’ve seen this with Boldurs and Beatrix’s on the enemy team. Also, Gali is almost always honor banned in the PC ten mans and definitely the PC league matches so your sample can’t be anywhere near as large as it used to be to determine that. It would be nice if you could actually release Dev builds to certain higher tier players to help run balance tests for you. It might make things easier on your part as we could just record our gameplay and send it to you with notes as to what we noticed or observed throughout. Many games that have had players help in balance testing before updates usually have better overall PVP balance and the playerbase is more inclined to stay because they feel like they’re truly taking a part in the development.
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The team broke Mellka out of nowhere and then failed to bring any kind of cohesive repair. I don’t understand the comparison with Galilea at all.
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Are we still getting hotfixes every week? If not, you can’t really call it a weekly hotfix. I’m sorry because you have probably been asked this before but are you able to elaborate upon what can and can’t be done in a hotfix? I understand that big changes like adding a character or changing map terrain would require a more substantial update but I’m still a little hazy on where the boundary is. Bolas target finder for example, is it possible to nerf the damage amp in a hotfix?
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It’s possible but they won’t do it “because of the time required to implement, test, deploy, monitor a hotfix we’ll have to revert with the bigger update.” Where we’re at currently is that if it isn’t their long term solution, they aren’t going to do anything to mitigate the issue in the short term.
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I’m obviously not an expert but from what Joe said once, I think they can change the numbers of Bola’s in a hotfix e.g. 12.6% down to 5%, but to change the effect of what it does will take a patch!
But since a patch is coming out, it’s likely they don’t want to do hotfixes and just do everything in the patch (which I think is more cost-effective).
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Cost effective? Maybe. Effective at balancing and keeping players around? Not so much.
Will there ever be hotfixes on a weekly basis again? I doubt it.
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You don’t have to even have a microphone, or listen to other people with microphones to be on or use discord.
The situation you’re describing is literally what the battleborn discord is for- finding people to play with.
There was a full 5 man doing story last night plus a full 3 doing ops, and another 5 man doing bots.
we have several very active members who never talk. (kitru & pandacat off the top of my head- i know we have more, and even deaf players as well) and those are just the people i saw sitting in the vc. and i just spoke with kitru and they didnt use mics last night in the bots chat even though they were in the vc.
The vc doesnt get used much because people feel like theyre obligated to actually talk there. but if you sit in vc it shows youre online and searching and someone can ping you and not just have to send out a general query.
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I like that we have a genuine statement from a Developer stating that the changes to Mellka didn’t work. I’m hoping for Mellka to be in a good place with the next patch.
There’s always a risk, though, with any balance. It’s very possible to make a character balanced, but not fun. They are fair numerically, but they lack anything that makes them enjoyable to play. Much of the internal discussion over Galilea has been the discussion of exactly that…how does she stay interesting in her role while becoming more fair in gameplay.
I can definitely see this being a real issue. Most characters “overlap” in roles and even in skills/helix choices. The generic “Increase damage by x amount” and “apply this CC for x time” are a part of a huge amount of characters. I honestly think that Galilea should have been a character that works solely within the range of her corruption bubble. A shield toss that ricochets from long distance, lasers shooting out of her sword (???), A vortex that pulls you in, all that contradicts what Gali should have been. As a Territorial character people should fear being within her field (Corruption AoE), not being on the same game-map as her. I’ve always hated that she was never a territorial character but instead a territory-invader. She’ll chase you down and kill you OR pull you in and kill you. It was never a matter of contesting her on her turf, but a matter of staying about 300 yards away from the giant purple bubble of doom.
By the way - it’s been a long time since we’ve seen overly high win rates on Galilea. We’re certainly aware she’s still strong, but she is no where near the dangerous outlier she was in the first few months after launch.
That’s probably because Veterans and High-Level players ban her during drafts, have grown bored of her OPness, don’t feel like “tryharding” in Public matches, or feel really really dirty and cheap when using her (so they don’t). Gali being available from the get-go also makes low-level newbies able to use her from the gate, and boy are they awful with her! 0-20 Galileas all day since they don’t know how to use her properly. Gali’s strengths comes from knowing how to use all her CC’s properly to completely dismantle a team. Good Gali’s will also be heavily supported so they can go wild.
In short, I think the numbers are just skewed because of all the newbies using Gali and not realizing how complex she is to use properly, and the lack of usage from the vets who prefer to “honor ban” her from their roster in order to provide a more enjoyable experience for everyone involved.
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They were weekly (or almost weekly) up until March, where we deliberately slowed down a bit to re-focus on the bigger update. Just a habit of mine to call them “weekly”. We’ll just call them “hotfixes” then, and they’ll come when they come.
We’ve talked about Hotfixes versus Patches several times, but I can walk through it again.
Generally, a Hotfix (sometimes also called a ‘micropatch’) is a change to a single number, or a set of numbers. Changing damage on an ability, health on a minion, timers in character select – those are types of things we can change there. Those changes aren’t made to the client, though. They are only applied to the game servers.
Sometimes, if we structured data oddly (it just happens from time to time when you have dozens of people working on a big game) we can’t hotfix something that seems straightforward and simple, at least until we do a bigger patch where we can abstract that variable out to a micropatchable quantity. That’s a lot of tech jargon that sums up as: sometimes, we can’t go as fast as it seems we should.
Hotfixes don’t require us to go through Certification. Because we make the changes to the servers only, we can put them out when we want. We’ve tried to adhere to a normal routine or schedule for these, but at times, we have made emergency fixes outside of the routine.
Patches, on the other hand, are more intrusive changes. They could be anything from new content (skins, taunts, map changes) to changes in how the logic of character abilities work. For example, while changing the stacks of corruption Galilea has to gain to max out might look like a number change, it’s actually a fairly complex re-wiring of abilities because of dependency chain of other skills and abilities. So, we have to wait to change things like that in a Patch, where we are replacing bigger chunks of character logic.
Patches, (sometimes also called “Updates” or “Major Updates”) because they affect the game clients, must go through certification processes. That means, they have to clear testing for Microsoft and Sony on the consoles and by our Publisher for the PC. Patches then (despite our efforts to optimize the process) still have time overhead associated with them and tend to make us want to delay them a bit to group up more changes into a single Patch, to minimize the amount of Certification runs we have to do.
To really mix it all up, we have something between both of those we rarely ever talk about. We have Backend Systems that house all the data for the game and for our players. Your command ranks, which things you own, what queues are available this week - those things are more like “Hotfixes”. But because they are our own servers and code, we have more ability to make changes to those systems than we do with the other two types of changes. They usually affect the ‘core game’ less, though, so don’t get too excited. 
Please note - these are general rules. There are exceptions. But this gives you more of an idea of why we pace changes like we do.
Also, one other note: One of the reasons I don’t elaborate on this a lot is that information like this seems to encourage a lot of “armchair quarterbacking”. Some of that is already going on in this thread. While I really appreciate the feedback and enthusiasm, the work we do is affected by many other factors which we can’t (or won’t) talk about publicly - budget, people, time, contract agreements, etc. Also, sometimes we just disagree with you, but don’t want to argue in public over details.
We want to give the game as much support as possible. Sometimes, that seems very slow or minimal to the community. It rarely means we’re ignorant or inept. It typically means there are other forces at work that are making simple things into complex things or into slow things.
As I said earlier though, we’re still moving! We’re still working towards patches and changes. We’re still listening to your posts and watching the data. As I’ve said since well before launch, Balance is a discipline, not an event. It’s work that never ends. It waxes and wanes. We’ll keep at it, though, as long as enough players are still playing.
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U-Umm… Mr. Jythri…? Sir…? Is there… Is there any news on when my arc-mines won’t affect friendly thralls or elite bots anymore…? It’s REALLY annoying, a-and i think it makes my team hate me…
I’m sorry if bringing this up angers you! PLEASE DON’T HATE ME!! YOU’RE GOD TO ME, MR. CREATOR, JYTHRI, SIR!!
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Because I love you, Toby, here’s a sneak peak from the upcoming patch notes:
Fixed an issue where certain characters could stun friendly Thralls and Minions
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Really?! Oh MAN… This just made my day! Just wait until i tell the others! Wait… A-Am i not supposed to tell the others? Don’t worry, Mr. Jythri, sir; MY BEAK IS SEALED!!
REYNA:
Damn it, Toby, he posted it on a public channel! You can tell whoever the hell you want, fool!
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Yay! On a likely related note - any word on fixing the issue where allied teammates can take Aurox out of the air when Shayne activates Fetch? I’d guessed the bugs might be related, both being allied collision issues and all.
Yes. We did some work on that and fixed 2 or 3 things that should make that better. I’m still not sure we’ve eliminated all of the edge cases there, but it should be much harder to incidentally counter Aurox during a fetch now.
Because, you know, Shayne & Aurox need a buff, right? 
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Thank you!
(For what it’s worth, and I know this isn’t necessarily your department but maybe pass it along if you’d like, even just throwing us these little tidbits once a week as a sneak peek does a lot more for the community than the radio silence on the Battleplans while we wait for the update. It may not be the extent of what we want, but it certainly eases the wait a bit by giving us some positive news to look forward to)
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