[Development] Overall Feedback / Questions to the Process

Hey Notorious and players,

first of all I want to state that I am in no position to tell you what and how to do and that I am fully aware of that. I simply want to get an understanding of why you chose this type of development process. If you do not want or can not answer my questions it is also completely fine.

I have a fair share of product development experience over the last 10 years and have a hard time to understand why you guys work the way you do.

1 Release Cycles

Currently all over the world companies are going more and more for a “continuous delivery” approach to push out changes very independent from each other and to be able to adapt quickly. I have the feeling that you guys as a team chose to go for the completely contrary approach to release once a month (if even) and push out all the changes that you got at once.

In my knowing this comes with several problems. Releasing a lot of changes together and not testing them continuously on PTR (and by QA) until they hit “Live” makes it more or less “untrackable” which of the develloped things could cause issues. Additionally the players are waiting for patches for a long time and feel like nothing is addressed and the dev team seems “careless” about pushing out changes to the game for the current playerbase.

Nevertheless I am aware that for bigger changes like engine updates and big structural changes you can not release on the get go and need proper release management.

In my opinion, if you want to go for the approach that you push out a lot of changes at once, I would stick to a 2 weeks release cycle with PTR testing before that just so that you have at least a more “frequent” output.
To add to that, you get no benefit from witholding a fix/implementation from going to PTR/LIVE that is developed already. I mean you did the change already, why you let it rot in you repository for weeks to push it out with other stuff together? There is simply no benefit.

2 Bug Fixes / Hot Fixes

In addition to your “normal Release Cycles” usually there is a process of defining the severity of a bug / unintended functionality and then depending on the severity you react with either a bug fix that goes with the next release or with a hot fix that goes out asap because it is gamebreaking.

I have the feeling that the team is missing the ability to “read” their game and see what is currently game breaking / frustrating for the players. I am not sure if you guys classify things in order to react on it but in my opinion you should start to do that and try to hotfix bugs/problems of similar severity, like I will mention below, in the future:

• Everfrost Shoulders Root

• Everfrost Shoulders Root not breaking on damage

• Cast Time of Dragonsbreath (fixed by now)

• Double registration of Pyroblast / Meteor (fixed by now)

• Campaigns (overall)

• Phantom Dagger (still overloaded as hell)

• Scorpion Tail (“endless airtime” via weaponswap)

• Warrior is completely buggy overall and a pain to play rn

• VFX lingering on the map

3 Testing and PTR

In my opinion currently it seems like that there is no QA done for most of the things that you guys push out and it very much feels like that the releases are more focusing on quantity rather than quality. I am aware that you guys are currently working on an EA game and that players didnt pay for a polished game. Nevertheless I have the feeling that you guys sometimes rush to push out some things that are not really completely read for the playerbase. For example:

Season 2 was ended way earlier because you noticed that player count is decreasing and you have no changes to push until the engine update is done just to push out Season 3 changes that have been half backed and not tested on PTR thoroughly which lead to the state of the game that we have right now. More or less 2 items are dominating the game:

• Evefrost Shoulders

• Scorpion Tail

In my opinion it would make a lot of sense to make PTR available all the time for all the people that are left. The live servers sometimes anyway feel like a PTR to me with all the problems that are there and not addressed in time so I really do not see a reason to not frequently push things to the PTR and make players that are interested test the changes for you.

For example in my opinion I would have actually kept Season 3 release what it was supposed to be and push all the players that still played Season 2 (around 100ish) to the PTR to test your changes until Season 3 arrives OR you could have at least made PTR available for all the players that had been left.

4 Balancing

I know that balancing in a game with several game modes is not an easy task to do and it probably will never be. Nevertheless I want to give my few thoughts to the balancing.

Currently as you guys stated a lot of times, balancing strongly evolves around VIPs that play one class a lot or are multi classing. While I think that some part of that approach is good, I dislike the fact that with that approach you mainly “listen to one person”. Dont get me wrong, gathering ideas with “Class specific VIPs” (if they play the game actively still) makes a lot of sense in my opinion but I think that after that there maybe should be a discussion with a more generalized group of people (probably VIPs from all classes) before this goes to the dev team itself and then a decision is made.

Overall I started this post to get more understanding on the development process of the game as some things seem a bit “off” to me. If you read until here and feel the same way, please give it a thumbs up and see you in the game.