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[Mindlog]

Were you wrong about balance changes?

Did any changes surprise you?

More of the same for ME4?

Your general thoughts.

 

Looking back how do you feel ME3 MP handled the big balance issues? At certain points my own dissatisfaction led to some colorful posts. I never got the Typhoon before it was re-balanced. In truth my biggest complaint with that one was never getting to try it. Took me forever to unlock that weapon. It's still good, but I'll never know how good it used to be. My loudest complaints were about the cloak change. I wanted so many other changes instead of the complete hammering base duration took.

 

I was really wrong about that one.

 

Adjusting cloak was completely necessary. The power simply had and still has too much utility. I'm thankful that others fought for those changes and the developers took that feedback to heart. It was the best that could be done in those circumstances.

 

The most surprising change?

EASY

The Piranha buff. Who saw that one coming?

 

I'm certain there are still dozens of balance changes some of us would like to see that would drive others crazy. I would hit a pair of Cerberus weapons with an adjustment even though I used them very frequently.

 

In concert with communication (dev blogs and forums) I really like what balance changes bring to the table. Even superficial changes help stimulate the user base. How many times did you rush to try out a weapon just because it was on the list? These changes go a long way in tweaking strategy and keeping the game fresh months or years after release.

 

What prompted this was reading another gaming outlet. I found a comment that went something along the lines of, 'Those guys nerfed everything and ruined the game.' It made me chuckle. To me that couldn't be further from the truth. I don't envy the developers that have to face these massive discrepancies in feedback from disparate player groups that probably also disagree with internal telemetry. It's really rare to get everything perfect, but the continuous effort to make it better is greatly appreciated.

 

How do balance changes influence your strategy? Were regular balance changes and the associated communication an important part of ME3 MP's success to you?

[Kristen Schanche]

It's great to see these discussions still going on.  Overall I'm really happy with almost all of the balance changes we made, but of course we know we didn't always hit the mark.  

 

Our most difficult and disappointing times were letting a new piece of gear into the wild overtuned and the Typhoon really stands out for that.  It's pretty tough to see our players having a great deal of fun with something, but know that we needed to bring it down.

 

I think we mostly made the right choices, and it was a real passion project doing weekly tuning on a game we loved for an amazing community.

 

I uh, sure loved the Falcon before we brought it in line though.

[Kristen Schanche]

I have to ask.

 

What was the philosophy behind the grenade buffs?

 

I did some small stat taking on the balance changes a while back, and out of over 50 weapons, almost 40 of them received damage buffs. Some very minor damage buffs, albeit, but damage buffs nonetheless, with only a handful receiving direct nerfs which weren't later undone (the vindicator was nerfed initially then buffed to be stronger than it was before IIRC).

 

And if you're playing ball, besides the falcon nerf, which other balance changes did you not agree with or thought could have been implemented differently?

 

So the grenade buffs, particularly to things like lift grenade mostly came about because many of the utility grenades never ended up working out the way we had planed them to.  Lift in particular really stands out as a problem, as the game evolved it became pretty clear that it was more and more a game about busting armor and breaking shields.  Even on the highest difficulties, an enemy with no remaining defenses was mostly trivial to get through, health was always our lowest gate.

 

Powers like lift grenade were very reliant on an enemy with no remaining defenses, so the utility of it never really got a chance to shine, by the time an enemy could be lifted, they were basically already dead.  A lot of utility powers got this same kind of treatment, late in the balance changes for example pull had a pretty large amount of damage added to it, and I think everyone remembers the pretty big singularity overhaul that let it shine as a power again.

 

Regarding weapon buffing, a lot of it came from tracking weapon useage data.  Almost every week we'd give at least a little love to the weapons that saw the least use to see if we could bring them into a more broadly viable range.  Many of these never ended up entering normal rotation, but we're still happy that as we went on more and more guns had a niche that people could find for them.  In general we preferred to do buffs to bring up weaker weapons, and we saved nerfs for big balance risks like the Typhoon and Krysae.

 

I didn't disagree with the falcon nerf, I just sure had fun with it the way it was.  We held weekly balance changes with the gameplay team, I represented QA, and we included all of the gameplay guys.  We talked out everything we wanted to do, and usually didn't put a balance change through until we had come to an agreement on it as a group, so there aren't really any that went through that I wasn't happy with.

 

One thing I'd like to have done that I see done very well in games like League of Legends, and that we did only a little of, was having a small writeup with the balance changes that addresses what we meant to do with them, to better help our players understand why we made the changes we did.  I know I remember reading posts after our changes each week that made it clear we didn't always show the community why we did what we did.

 

Hopefully that answers some of your questions!