Framing Rework Feedback

[kwok]

EDIT: Added section on better ways to provide feedback

As we get deeper and deeper in the reworks and get feedback from the community, I want to talk about HOW we are making decisions through this rework process. We receive a lot of offline and on-forum feedback and I want to make a couple things clear.

Our key objective through the reworks is to make all doctrines able to stand up in 1v1 scenarios against any other doctrine. Through this we will run into MANY many issues since the changes really go down to the core of the game itself. We have bucketed the issues into two categories to help prioritize the work ahead of us:

1. Structural/conceptual issues of reworks
This has to do with how we alter the actual flow of the game through capability availability. This means making factions and doctrines more well-rounded versus specialized and HOW the game can be played. Enabling 1v1s versus team games only. Updates here guide balance changes but not the other way around. In terms of how we are guiding our changes, we determine if something is an issue based on the question "Assuming all units/abilities work as intended, does a doctrine have every tool capability to handle any situation?" Solutions are usually done by including or excluding things from the entire doctrine NOT whether where something exists or how it performs within a doctrine.

2. Balance issues of reworks
This has to do with how the individual pieces of units/abilities work with how they are intended to work. Normally it comes down to the performance of a specific unit/ability and it EXTREMELY dependent on structural updates. Something can be completely over/underpowered due to indirect results a structural change.We determine if there is an issue with the question "Is this unit/ability working as intended?" Solutions are usually done by adjusting the values of a unit/ability and altering where/when it might be available within the course of a game.

Given the dependent nature of balances to structural reworks, we are likely NOT to focus on balance changes until the majority of structural changes are set and complete. Balance will KEEP shifting drastically as we go through reworks; if we keep balancing at midway points without going through all the necessary structural changes we will never reach our goal of getting a newly updated version of BK into the live version.
So when you provide feedback, keep in mind that we are prioritizing structural changes. Thus, it would be in your interests to also keep in mind that balance will be very volatile through reworks and focus on structural issues over balance issues. This will help us get things done faster.

In terms of providing feedback as players, there are good ways to provide feedback that will let the devs work faster and there are bad ways.


We try to stand as neutral as possible and do not avoid any feedback. That being said we are also allowed to have our own opinions but when the final decision comes around we tend to mostly go towards the community 90% of the time and so personally despise the changes ourselves... I just had this talk over steam yesterday with someone else. If you think we are avoiding, we are not. We probably just aren't keeping up. I'm responding directly to this post point by point but this will probably be my last response here.

FInal notes: stop making these kinds of posts. We literally have THREE of these kind of posts going on now with many overlapping topics:
viewtopic.php?f=27&t=3360
viewtopic.php?f=15&t=3361
viewtopic.php?f=15&t=3335
Again... we are not ignoring we are just not able to keep up. The question you ask is, would you rather have devs spend time actually making changes or writing repetitive unstructured responses? It took me 20 minute to type everything out here and will take me another 20 minutes to write the same things on the other partially identical topics for each topic. That's almost a total of an hour dicking around typing on the forum where in that time we could probably actually take one of your suggestions here and actually implement it. Your choice.


Here are examples of GOOD posts:
viewtopic.php?f=15&t=3344
viewtopic.php?f=15&t=3354
viewtopic.php?f=15&t=3347
viewtopic.php?f=15&t=3330
viewtopic.php?f=15&t=3242
viewtopic.php?f=15&t=3358 (somewhat good)
Thank you all.