There are a lot of threads discussing the relative power of Heroes, each with their own bit of feedback. Everything from “Sarge is useless with his M60, why play him?” to “Sarge is so over powered with his rockets why would you play any other Hero?”. So what do we do about this? How do we even approach balancing ANY hero? There are several sources of feedback that help us to decide, and more accurately understand where our balance lies.
The first stop is the message boards. There is often a lot of hyperbole surrounding any message board, but general sentiment is a good place to start. Often it is “OP killed me, so nerf OP” without understanding the reasons themselves. They rarely take into account the skill level of all the players involved, or they are quoting the perfect storm where OP should be great. This does not mean the feedback is invalid, but that it needs to be vetted very carefully and as a whole is the best place to get what people's perception of weak/powerful game elements are. That in itself is worth a lot.
The second stop is game data from play sessions. We track data on every little thing in Block N Load. Every death, sword swing, every tick of damage and where/when it happened. Data does not lie, it also however does not take into account the very things message boards do not either, player skill, and specific situations. It is just cold, hard facts. These are great to point out problem areas, power spikes or lulls, but gives no real information on the cause. We use data to confirm or disprove message board sentiment. “Tony is very weak in the game”, check the data and Tony is the top of the K/D/A table, so it’s not the case. Doesn't change the perception (by definition it cannot be wrong) but we are facing a different problem that will require a different solution in that case.
Last stop is our own experience, both in playing and as game makers. This is where we take the raw feedback, match it with data and then figure out what we need to do about it. We have to take into account the entire game design, the desired gameplay and rules we have imposed as well. Balancing a Hero does not happen in vacuum and we have to consider other Heroes, present and future. We also have to balance the fun of both playing the Hero, and being the victim of the him/her too.
So lets take OP as an example. Even though the game is fundamentally NOT about Kills, Deaths and Assists (it's about taking down objectives and building) K/D/A is a very visible and a very visceral display of Hero power.
Early on we had feedback that OP was weak and had little killing power (this was back at the start of the beta). After watching newer players play, we discovered that they were missing with the Katana. That is, they were not actually making contact. After some more feedback and play we discovered that all melee tools/weapons were ranged at 3 blocks, but Katana was 2. People THOUGHT they should be hitting and were not. They were used to melee ranges of all the tools, and when Nigel was swinging at them with his machete, and you could not respond with your primary weapon...it seemed wrong. We decided that all melee ranges should be normalised and the Katana was brought up to a range of 3. Why did we not reduce other tools range? Build range has been tweaked and tweaked and we are happy with the feel of building. Making a skybridge or a defensive tower with 1 block less range would be painful and we are not going to hurt 50% of gameplay for this.
After this change, many players felt that OP was just too powerful. So we let it play out for a week and collated the K/D/A for all the heroes:
As you can see, OP is at the top of the kills section, but wait, he is also at the top of the deaths as well. OP’s concept is that he is a high damage, high risk and high reward damage dealer. With him falling into the middle of the pack of K/D/A he is nearly exactly where he should be. So where does this perception come from? Who is experiencing this? Is this even true?
After seeing that OP is the highest chosen Hero, by quite a bit, and looking at how many new players are coming into the game every day we can see that a lot of “newbs” are probably playing him, and most likely poorly.
We then watched a bunch of streams, YouTube videos, and of course played a ton ourselves to see what was up. We found that a good OP player was a death machine, and that all the new players were propping up his death numbers to even out his K/D/A overall, but realistically OP was a monster.
So did the Katana range have anything to do with this? Did we make a mistake? We needed more info. We watched the top OP players play, and what their strategies were.
We discovered changing his Katana range had very little to do with it, it lowered the bar for competent OP use for newer players, but experienced players were not any more lethal with the change. What was really making him crazy powerful was the fact he could use his Shuriken alt fire (and fire 3 at once) swap back to his Katana with almost no DPS loss (damage per second). This means He would start at range.. fire…swap.. swing and if the enemy managed to get out of range for any reason, he could nearly insta-swap back to shuriken and finish them off. This was never intended to be this powerful. Although we want some weapon “juggling” there needs to be some balance.
So next update we are doing several things to address OP weapon balance:
1) Ninja Shuriken equip time increased to 0.5s from 0.25s.
2) Ninja Shuriken triple throw pre-attack time increased to 0.5s from 0.3s, post-attack time reduced to 0.5s from 0.7s.
3) Ninja Katana swing time and damage per hit lowered by 25%, sword DPS is same as before. Bleed damage is unchanged.
So he will swing a bit faster (again to help newbs), but his ability to weapon juggle will be nerfed so he has to commit to a fight range a bit more. We will review data after these changes and players get to play it for a week, talk to the community and look at further nerfs (or buffs) to katana damage itself or other elements if need be. The reason we did not nerf the actual katana damage yet is that weapon DPS is right in line with other Hero weapons (including his bleed) and the swap seemed to be the much bigger problem.
By using community feedback, game stats and understanding the role of OP and intended gameplay we have made the next round of balance change decisions. We WILL be updating constantly and this by no means the end of the process and we look forward to buffing and nerfing all your favourite Heroes for years to come!
P.S if you looked at the K/D/A chart... yes, we buffed Sarge Stones M60 by nearly 20% and early stats now show he back into "killing" form again =)
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Ben Smedstad (Can8dnBen)
Creative/Design Director