Anyone here missing the dev update blogposts?
Its been a while since BHVR has stopped making frequent blogposts and honestly I miss them and prefer them over the current approach of the streams. It really sucks not knowing what changed from the PTB to live as the dev updates would inform us of what has changed from PTB to live, and this was specially a problem with the second anti-tunnel and anti-slug update as unlike the previous iteration, they waited until the dev stream to announce it wasn't coming. Now I think the dev streams are great for announcing upcoming features and giving a general idea. A big issue I have is that a lot of what is said on the streams can be more easily summed up in a blogpost. But that's just me I suppose what do you guys think?
Comments
-
They'd have to be working on something to be able to update us about it, but they've already confirmed that they've tabled MMR rework, along with everything else promised in the twilight phase of Operation Health. The only concern at the moment is selling overpriced anniversary merch.
0 -
I mean I am more so talking about balance patches like the upcoming Trickster rework like is anything changing or not?
5 -
iirc Mandy said they moved away from them because it meant they had to lock in changes earlier so they could prepare and translate the dev update. And also because ptb to live changes are something that is already in the live patch notes and something they can bring attention to with the streams.
For that reason, i think it's better that way. I'd much rather the balancing for live being more refined than knowing earlier.
I feel like an example of how the ptb to live dev updates may impact a release has to be doomed course. Houndmaster barely got any tweaks from ptb to live, but got a massive amount of tweaks in the hotfixes. They also had to delay any of the other killer tweaks to hotfixes too, and this lead to the nasty surprise of chucky getting hit with a massive nerf.0 -
Yeah I usually like when they are transparent, it really helps stay on the same page which direction the game is going. I know they mainly do that with the community streams but it's also nice for those of us who like to read about it too!
4 -
Ideally, we'd get both. But if I had to pick one or the other, I'd say I prefer the stream format. They're asy to listen to in the background while multitasking and I feel like we get more "news" from them than we did with the blog posts.
1 -
Was actually having a conversation with my team about this very topic today and looking about what we can do differently.
The problem with the old system of dev updates, was they were a massive time sync, the writing process, review process and then the translation process (we have to allow 7 days on average for that), meant it was unsustainable for a PTB, as often things change from a PTB so things were then out of date. It's partly why we use the stream format which is a snappier pace and you learn the information directly from the Designers (in regard to live balance changes etc). We did the same with Discord Staging events with Designers etc as we were able to share more information and answer questions directly on it.
This is not to say we won't do anything like that going forwards, but we're looking at different formats and maybe not quite so detailed for a PTB….then potentially putting out something prior to content being live.
What I really want to do, is give more context to why things are changed, why something is nerfed, why something is buffed - that might help players understand why particular changes are made. Sometimes that will be data related, if we're seeing something problematic in the data, we often will need to make a change that might not be popular for example, on the other side, it could be based around the feedback we've had or the gameplay that we've seen. So many different reasonings go into a design change and I think it's more important to explain that information than do a dev update about what's coming a week from now for example.
(all this to say, we will be doing something but it will likely be in a different format from what we have done before)
5 -
Since it's only like a week away from the launch I'm sure the changes and tweaks are set in stone by now can't you guys just give a really short and rough summary or just a Dev comment on the main stuff people are focused on the Ptb like just Trickster and for example
"We are aware Trickster was a bit under tuned in the ptb therefore were buffing him look for the number changes on the live stream"
That way you can just save the minor stuff like bug fixes and number tweaks for the live stream.
3
