Has BHVR ever done anticipatory game balancing?
What I mean by that:
- Lets say you finally make maps smaller, widely regarded as the correct solution to make a lot of irrelevant killers relevant
- Anyone with a cookie-cutout sized brain is going to assume several things will happen
- The Intended: Weak pressure killers feel much better to play
- The Unintended: Nurse range addons and any other addons or powers that thrive in small map environments will become oppressive
- Clearly, certain things should be nerfed simultaneously - you can contend degrees but the need remains obvious
So how often does BHVR demonstrate this kind of foresight?
In my limited experience I only recall reactionary changes. If there's another term for that feel free to correct me on that as well.
Comments
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It’s rare, but it happens. One of Wesker’s perks was weakened during PTB because it had the potential for abusable synchronization with Nurse.
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Except that was discovered during the PTB. I agree that it follows the logic, but I'm looking for events where they released both simultaneously, as a package and not necessarily coming off of a PTB discovery.
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In other words, something that one might infer that a test play would have been able to notice before the PTB?
For example, that Victor did not have an answer to the locker?
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Many recent killers have built in counter measures to hook proximity
Artist and Dredge are the main ones that comes to mind. I find it really interesting they actually block lockers near hooks for Dredge, it's a weird interaction that's not mentioned in the power description. There's some other notable examples:
- Survivors unhooked are immune to being chained for a few seconds by Cenobite
- Wesker's bound doesn't cause a grab on unhookers, it turns into a regular hit instead (I think)
Another thing worth examining is the sheer amount of changes deep wound as a status effect has went through.
- First it used to straight up never pause.
- Then it would only pause in chase (Aka the inception of moonwalk legion)
- Then it would only pause in the TR or while mending
- And finally the version we have now where it only ticks down if you're doing anything other than mending or running.
The final version we have now came as a result of the addition of the oblivious status effect; Freddy or Legion with oblivious perks could force survivors to bleed out with no real counterplay.
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They "nerfed" DH and buffed killers' basic attack cooldown/sprint burst given to survivors at the same time, so we don't really get to see how the new DH affects survivors' survivability by itself, because killers also got buffs. Not saying that we can't say if it's strong or not, we just can't make a straight comparison between new and old DH on match outcomes.
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Thrill of the hunt having its notification removed seemed like an unnecessary nerf until artist was released soon after
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Yes! I believe so.
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It would depend on what you consider anticipatory, but we often do. Going back to 6.1.0 for example, we would not remove the bloodpoints from BBQ or WGLF without making base kit progression changes first since that would have made the grind worse in the short term. Those changes were released as a package to avoid makings things worse.
Other times, we'll err on the side of caution and release something with safer numbers (a little weaker than it could be) to make sure it doesn't get out of hand. It's way better to buff something that's weak later on than release something in an overpowered state that makes the game frustrating to play until it's nerfed. Something like Any Means Necessary is a great example of this. At first, it had a very long cooldown because there were concerns that it could be too strong, something that we heard a lot about when it was first revealed. Many people expected that picking up pallets would be a game changer and would be very overpowered, but over time it proved to be less effective than anticipated since Killers would often break pallets anyway. It's been buffed a few times since, but I would also class this as anticipatory.
PTBs are also somewhat involved here. We can put something on the PTB and see how it plays out before it goes live, then make adjustments as needed. I'd call this anticipatory since the PTB isn't a perfect recreation of how things would play out on live servers and the change has not yet been released.
But probably the biggest example of this is the stuff you never see. Anticipating how something could be abused and get out of hand is something that happens from the very beginning of the design process, and there's been a lot of ideas over the years that have never seen the light of day (or at least without being changed) due to those anticipated issues.
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The reason you don't see them doing anticipatory balance changes is because they happen before PTB, and you don't hear about it. It gets weeded out way before we even know what the next update is (most of the time)
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