Upper Echelon Community Notes
Agents, welcome back for some community notes as we discuss the hot topics around the Upper Echelon update. We’ve received a lot of feedback in a short period of time and we wanted to tell you a bit about what we will be doing in the short term and where our focus is right now. Let's get to it:
Echelon Issues
We are aware of issues with inconsistent behaviors between players regarding echelons. Some players seem to have had an XP overflow, making them skip many ranks while others did not. We are currently investigating the situation and will have clearer news as we get a better understanding of the issues surrounding this. We are deeply sorry that this occurred and we are actively looking for the best path forward for everyone affected.
Balancing
Let’s not beat around the bush: The reaction to the lack of Yu-Mi changes and the spyglass change has been very strong. We wanted to talk a little bit about why it happened, and what we are doing on that front.
Let’s start with Yu-Mi.
Yu-Mi has been our worst performing character for every single update for a very long time. While she was perceived as strong since Catalog 2, we wanted to let her breathe a bit and not be too reactive with a character that suffered for as long as she did on the power scale. Another major aspect that leads to this is the timeframe on which we work on updates. We’ve been working on upper echelons for a while at this point and while finishing up updates, we can sometimes lose track of more recent development in the meta. This can lead to a situation where decisions we made many weeks ago are no longer the right call in light of current information. Because of all this, we simply did not weight the frustration of the community on Yu-Mi correctly for this update.
We will be tweaking Yu-Mi in the very short term to make her less oppressive and we will also bring a major fix for her healing bubble that did not make it in the initial update. We will look at how to better avoid situations like this in future updates and we thank you for bringing it to our attention.
And now for the spyglass. We knew this change would be controversial: The spyglass is the most picked gadget by an extremely wide margin in the game. Our original thinking was this: The Spyglass is a big contributor to speeding up games. You not only hack safely, you save travel time in between intel. We wanted to introduce a balancing factor to this equation and we were confident that time saved by moving between intel would still make the spyglass extremely useful while slowing down game speed.
It’s very clear at this point that this was the wrong call. We will restore the spyglass to its past glory in an incoming hotfix. We value the place of the spyglass in the meta as a stealthy tool and a good entry point for newcomers to avoid risks and do not want to remove this from the game. We will focus our future efforts on making other gadgets more appealing rather than nerfing the Spyglass.
While these two items have been a few notches above the rest, there are other items we are looking at including the still overbearing presence of umbrella shield quick drop strats and expected fixes of long standing agent related bugs. We are looking into those and will review priorities on agent bugs that are more disruptive to overall gameplay to make sure they get looked at.
As always, we thank you for your continued feedback .
Health UI
This one is going to be very simple: The reaction to the updated health UI has been strongly negative and we will be tweaking it in the upcoming hotfix. We are bringing back the notches and the bigger numbers to make it easier to read at a glance.
We will keep you updated on our next steps on all fronts as soon as we have more news to share. Please keep your feedback coming and we will do our best to look into addressing the biggest issues around Upper Echelon as soon as we can.