Hidden patch notes to prevent refunds

No. The intention was to avoid backlash to changes that would have been controversial due to bow drastic they are. Its also how insane the nerfs were right as a beta ends when they hadnt been as transformative prior.

They could have rolled these changes out a week ago and had player testing to confirm overadjustments but they just shoved them in without warning when they legitimately just ruined multiple careers and traits due to people who had no experience in champion difficulty, which has shown to be drastically different to recruit and vet in terms of balance.

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Then you’ve never worked customer service, marketing, or tech support.

That’s one of many intentions. Players knee jerk react to changes they do not understand and view emotionally because they are biased and do not get the ramifications of changes. People judging balance changes is about like weather forecasting. Even the most knowledgeable are often wrong about it. But everyone thinks their own opinion on it is the word of Zod or something. Furthermore just reading the patch notes gives people pre-conceived ideas in their head as to what balance is now, ideas that are wrong lol. The entire game got rebalanced from difficulty to damage calcs to classes. Reality is nobody has any clue is to where your class fits into the game again without testing.

Other reasons include things like community involvedment as the community bands together again to figure out the new game/puzzle of what is best and what works and what doesn’t. Typically the front runners feel very clever for figuring it out and share that information with other people. It brings the community closer together.

People get ingrained ideas in their head like “elf is OP” and such and they tend to stick to their comfort classes and pre-established ideas. But if suddenly everything is an unknown value again than the situation changes and now they don’t know if X class is best anymore because the landscape changed enough that it challenges their pre-existing ideas.

Lastly with heavy nerfs to classes like Elf in the middle of this landscape people automagically get this idea that suddenly that class is bad, even though literally the entire game changed. So people start testing out different classes again due to the perception it’s not good anymore. This helps people stop relying on crutches they relied on and gaining skill again and it helps even out the playerbase amongst the classes.

Combine all these things together and you also get better testing and metrics as to how the various classes perform on the different difficulties because you’ve encouraged a more random distribution again until things have been “figured out”.

Don’t get me wrong, I certainly wouldn’t want this to be the de facto standard, but it makes perfect sense for a release game especially in context of Vermintide 2.

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Yes, i would rather kill myself than work at tech support.

Post the patch notes, your average consumer that you deal with it on customer service or tech support wont read it, those who want will read it. is that simple.

And like i said, Your point of view is indeed, patronizing.

This is just a transparent attempt at poisoning the well. In common parlance the word “patronizing” or "condescending"is just used to try an undermine a point you disagree with. Specifically if that point brings in good logic or is backed with information you cannot counter.

This is incredibly incorrect. They will indeed read it and they will quote it back to you misremembered, cherry picked, out of context, or without understanding it. I’ve years of experience working tech support and also years working QA. While I won’t claim to be an expert, I can solidly say this claim you just made is completely bogus. Customers will dig to find the deepest most hidden recesses of your documentation to put together some pretty outlandish and ludicrous arguments lol.

Though, to be fair, like 5% of the time they are right in those cases even if they were reaching :).

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Not really, Patronizing or Condescending is used as it should, since you are pretty much telling me that the game community in general dont understand the game and will hurt it more than help. Which is a lie since game developers themselves usually understand their own game less than your hardcore players.

If we gonna use common parlance, we are basically saying that people are stupid and that consumers dont know better.

Which is indeed, Patronizing. But to be fair, i can be wrong. English is not my first language and not even really my second. I may be misusing some word or expression.

Unfortunately this is correct. This is just how the natural distribution of skill levels work. You can see this most clearly in ladder based games like MOBAs, Starcraft, and FPS games and such. The people with the actual levels of skill and understanding of the game (Diamond/Master) are the people who actually have a pretty good understanding of the game. But these people only make up like 10% - 15% of the community.

This means that 85% - 90% of the community literally does not understand the game to a high level. As you get further from high level understanding the flaws in your reasoning and understanding grow exponentially. This is why in these competitive games that illustrate this well that it feels MISERABLE to play with other people until you hit the highest levels. That concept of ELO Hell is born from this.

And the ironic thing is that people have no idea exactly how much knowledge they lack and overestimate how much they know because of the Dunning–Kruger effect.

Absolutely. One has to look no further than JC Penny or Dark Coffee Testing for that. JC Penny almost destroyed themselves for delivering fair and honest pricing. Dark Coffee testing people actively stated different opinions than their own actual buying habits when asked what they wanted. These are not isolated events. This is how people are.

JC Penny Effect: (you can do alot more research on it too, it’s legit)

A “Rich Dark Roast”:

I’ll stop assuming that customers fight on ignorance, pride, and a complete lack of understanding about they things they deal with when customers stop proving this in quantifiable ways with long track histories and track records of research proving it.

I hope that’s a joke… because pointy ears was most certainly OP.

Depends on the difficulty. She was OP on recruit, once you got to vet and above and started having traits and better weapons for all classes though the other classes closed the gap. I’d even say that Pyromancer was straight up better in pre-order beta 4 and now is alot better. Ironbreaker was also much better at all times.

Elf, however, was easier to play. She WAS OP in like Beta 3 though before the first round of heavy nerfs. But the stigma stuck. That being said, Elf is middle of the pack right now but she’s got alot of useless traits and talents now. The 15 traits are now near useless an the passive is useless in higher difficulties, where her horde smashing bows also fall off somewhat as well while dwarf and Wizard range only get stronger.

I don’t agree with lack of patch notes/nerfs as justification for refund (though I think about it because of RNG loot grind, but that’s off topic)- However I fully agree there should have been patch notes. Especially that most changes were totally opposed/different than our feedback from Beta, so what was the point of beta?

I think if so many people played beta and liked their chars, they should have access on beta forum to patch notes for full release. It’s just fair to be honest.

My opinion

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Disagree. She was most certainly still OP in Vet. I can not say beyond that, but I did hear she became less OP at the very end. Thing is - it should be balanced the whole way through. I would play games, on vet and elf would come out in top for just about everything, constantly. Sometimes you’d play a level and a elf would just about clear everything before you could get to it. Whole level of this… is kinda meh.

And right now her passive is useless on highest difficulty. So they went opposite way- from OP in lower diffs and ok on higher diffs to ok on lower diffs and useless (passive) on higher diffs.

You mentioned MOBA, There is one ARTS game that is pretty much the only online videogame updated today that still to some effect, nerfs, buffs and balancing in general makes sense and its not made on cycles (Yesterday Huntsman was good, today was trash next year they will overhaul the class because no one uses it and will be broken again). DOTA2 has pretty rich patch notes and has the same kind of players that you talked about.

You have the lower levels, that wont understand the game design even if their lives depend on it and you have a high tier level of gaming. That are listened by the dev on necessary balance changes. It works because they dont treat no one was stupid, If they changed something on the game, they post it. Thats what a Patch note is supposed to do. not telling the players “we change stuff, go guess what is it”.

We are not getting “1.0” patch notes, they made this clear, they made a bad execuse for it, but i will keep ask to change their habits. Hidden updates and balancing have been done before during beta and alpha. i dont want to check all weapons and characters every single update to see if there is something different

PS:I wont even discuss youtube videos.

Meanwhile I beat her numbers on every other DPS based class except Shade. I beat her on Unchained even a good amount, with no push BS, albeit Unchained is hands down riskier.

Then maybe it’s the case shes to easy to pick up straight away, and the others are harder to master.

I would play games, on vet and elf would come out in top for just about everything, constantly

That is false, unless you played with half brain people. HM and BH could easy out score her in dmg by 2-5k difference every game, and always had more than half more range kills than WS. Good sienna with crit-vent spam could also out DPS her. I played with a lot of skilled players in beta and could be out scored easly on WS.

Guess you didn’t play champ with skilled people.

I agree that on lower diffs WS would mostly outscore noobs.

She’s absolutely easier to play, even now. Spamming was rewarded when it was often punished on other classes. Similarly all those little rat pokes in the butt just got healed up so she was resistant to alot of the attrition damage caused by the player’s lack of playing correctly.

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top kek…

Calm down OP.

Its a half priced game (10 percent off further if you preorder)

They let you play the beta for days without reset on progress even though people could abuse huntsman.

You had fun using OP characters during the beta, got some good memories. Isn’t that enough.

Now its a different game, so play it differently.

BH was simply too powerful. With falchion and volley, I wrecked everything.
Huntsman melted bosses.

Other posts disagree, like the one you already trolled on.

As I said, doesn’t affect me, I can only try to understand the perspective of others.