Fatshark seems to be stuck on ‘every two weeks we release minor warmed-over fixes to hide our cosmetics update’ as their primary means of updating this game.
They have a way to make the community happier, though!
Literally just make tiny weapon tweaks. It’s literally just changing some numbers in the correct files. Give tiny damage boosts, or tweak certain blessings, or mess with draw speed, according to what the community wants.
So many weapons are hurting for more effective damage, or just plain missing a niche. And Fatshark has no QA department, as is abundantly clear from many of their changes.
Instead of shipping out massive overlapping nerfs that irretrievably break weapons, just have an intern, every couple weeks, tweak some of the underperformers or under-picked weapons to hit more breakpoints or do something else more effectively. That’s it. That’s all you have to do to keep engagement high, cosmetic sales flowing, and the salt to a minimum.
It would help the community feel like better attention is being paid to problems. It would help address under/over performing weapons much better and allow for much more rapid balance iteration.
Having a weapon get changed, see it’s a bad change (over or under powered) after having it ride for a couple weeks, and then having the option to update it again, would be tremendously positive for the state of the game. As is, when a bad change goes through and it may take 8 months to address, or just never gets addressed, that painfully undercuts player investment in the game.
I was convinced that biweekly meant twice every week instead of every two weeks. Strangely enough it can mean both. I don’t understand.
Ngl I would still be worried that balance changes every 2 weeks might be too fast. I still prefer once per month. Just too make sure there’s time to put a little more thought into it with breakpoints and different interactions etc.
However the sentiment is the same. Adding a few balance changes outside of major patches would help the game feel more alive and interesting.
Especially since the last meaningful weapon balance changes (not including for the Mk4 chaxe) was last October.
There were some changes in both Traitor Curse updates, but neither of them really changed the meta up or helped under preforming weapons much as far as I can remember.
They even ruined the Ironhelm for a bit by making the push attack chain into the overhead heavy.
Bro, Fatshark still hasn’t fixed Brettonian Sword & Shield’s push attack. It’s been almost 4 years since it’s been reported. I’m very skeptical they’re able make consistent weapon & balancing tweaks.
I genuinely don’t understand what their devs work on all day. I would say they don’t care, but the art direction people clearly do. These are simple, easy-to-implement fixes. We’re talking Creative Assembly circa 2022-2023 levels of failure if they go unaddressed.
I think Fatshark needs to change its mindset and direction in order to actually make good games. What I propose is the tiniest step forwards.
Don’t forget the UI bug (idk if it counts as bug more than simply issue) where certain buffs don’t display is still in the game.
And for keystones where keeping track of stacks is important, such as Disrupt Destiny, it makes the experience feel awful id mot downeight unplayable. Doubly so if you are trying to get penances.
I’m not sure how easy of a fix it is. But it really should’ve been a priority and fixes by now.
Please don’t. Given their catastrophic versioning they’d break EVERYTHING. Things would work one week and be completely broken the other. I simply don’t have any confidence in their ability to pull it off. Their code & project management simply isn’t up to it, if the current state of Darktide and the past of VT2 is any indication.
Every two weeks is a pretty fast clip and likely not enough time for a large amount of players to really give feedback and then devs to implement on something that would be ever changing, so proposed changes would keep backlogging on each other.
I see something more sustainable as tweaked changes once a month (or even once a quarter), and a state of the game rebalance once a year.
I think the secret here is some expected cadence throughout the year; no matter that time period.
This is true and you definitely have more experience than I do - the changes are small but it might take more time to gather feedback.
That being said, changes can definitely happen at a faster clip even for a similarly sized studio, and Fatshark has thousands of ‘playtesters’ who’ll gravitate to whatever gets put up on the board in an update, just to try it out.
Honestly, I agree. I want to see weapon balance take place but I want to see small adjustments, not outlandish “blizzard-esq” buffs and nerfs that completely decimate entire gameplay styles.
There are some things that are just horrible outliers, bring back the bolter to relevance!
So many weapons are in bad places right now, the lawbringer, half of the infantry autoguns, the auto pistol fell from grace and hasn’t recovered. I’d like to see the plasma gun get addressed, that thing is just dirty at this point.
Instead of infrequent very heavy-handed nerfs and buffs, we should see some slight adjustments more quickly. It’s so bad now that balance patches either crush or overtune weapons half the time without any (much needed) follow-up for quite a while, leading to op and (near) useless weapons rotating reducing the available “usable” weaponry/builds.
It would also be great to get more “thoughts” from the balance team on state of weapons and reasoning behind changes. I know there are sometimes reasoning behind changes, but often intentions are clearly missing where there should be.
I think the lack of followup is what feels the worst. Okay, alter something drastically if needed, but come back and find out if the entire community has abandoned the weapon entirely because it is no longer viable and readjust as needed.
