Question for the developers, as well as prompting discussion for the community…
What is stopping fatshark from making temporary buffs/nerfs or whatnot to things which are nigh unusable because their numbers are simply too low?
I fail to see how these things cannot be fixed with a simple variable change, which requires little to no testing and can be bundled with a smaller patch.
Let’s take BH’s special as an example. The secondary “shotgun” part of his special dealing practically no damage to bosses OR armored targets (or far away targets as well), making this essentially useless. You now have a talent which literally downgrades his special.
How can abilities like this, which are obviously completely broken, not get a temporary band-aid fix to at least make them remotely usable until further changes are made?
Completely eludes me, how stuff like this takes years.
Right now, the answer is that the devs have their focus set pretty much completely on WoM, so anything non-critical has been pushed aside. In general, the answer is harder, but is still more than likely a question of where the focus of the devs is.
For some things, band-aid fixes are indeed useful, but they’re things that have a huge impact on gameplay or its variance. It could be argued that the shields’ general condition or Zealot’s strength, together with his weapon options have that kind of impact and should be addressed in some way ASAP, but it doesn’t seem like the devs think so. Game-breaking bugs are also something that could warrant a workaround before a true fix is implemented, but I don’t think there are any that most people would consider as such in the game now.
For anything else, band-aids aren’t a good thing. They’re likely to raise some ire from the players, and create more work later on. While setting some numerical values is indeed (probably) easy, finding the right numbers isn’t, and requires enough fiddling that a more permanent solution can be equal amount of work. It can even be the permanent solution, after some fine-tuning. Also, not everything can be addressed, even temporarily, by simple numerical fiddling.
I agree though in that some of the unbalanced/non-working things (several Talents, including BH’s, Handmaiden’s and others’ lv25 options, for example) should’ve been addressed a long time ago, as they effectively reduce our choices significantly (either through some options being useless, others being too good or both). I sort of understand that manpower and working hours are limited, but these are things that have been complained about since practically the release, so there’s been a lot of time to address them.
… but why? Temporary band aid fixes are how things get broken worse, especially if a lot of such fixes are made. You end up with a duct tape infrastructure that is even more difficult to properly fix.
Better to just fix it right the first time. It’s a game, not some kind of business software.
EDIT to say there’s also the issue of time. These temporary fixes take time to implement. For a studio that is small and already has its hands full, this means either they take too much time away from the important things, or they rush the temporary fixes and they make things worse.
Because in many cases it’s literally a variable change, which takes less than 5 seconds to ‘implement’. At that point, it’s not really about prioritizing or not having the time, because the fix is so incredibly insignificant, while having a big impact gameplay wise.
It would be nice, but we’re not going to see a major patch until WoM. There are things that have been broken since (and were broken before) the weapon balance beta that still haven’t been fixed.
You would think so, but apparently the weapon attack stats are intermeshed so that changing variables on one weapon will affect others as well. I think I remember them saying they would separate each weapon into it’s own section of code at some point but AFAIK it still works like this.
And hotfixes don’t always work right.
There was this hilarious bug in the 1.6 beta that caused bot drakegun attacks to linger in the air.
They fixed that in 1.6.1 but as a result the flames just became invisible for everyone instead.
The pellets are v. effective on a crit hit, on a non-crit they indeed suck, but firing the weapon without the guaranteed crit ability is a waste of resources. Just saying.
But you are right - no sane person is taking the “twice the shotgun” talent because it’s horribly bad.