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Multiplayer Design Team Plans
Hey everyone! We’re approaching the end of the year, and there’s a lot going on in Legacy of the Void. So we first want to talk in detail about our multiplayer team’s plans due to the Balance Test Map, additional tournaments, and holiday seasons that are all coming up.
- We are preparing a Balance Test Map right now for release next week.
- We will be looking very closely at the two big events going on this week and this weekend, and make adjustments as needed.
- We originally planned on having design team presence at Homestory Cup this weekend, but due to short time remaining before the holidays, we really had to focus our efforts on getting the balance test map out early next week. We’re sad to say that we can’t make it to HSC, but we are sure TaKe and his crew will run an amazing event as always! And of course, we will absolutely be watching the tournament from Irvine.
- We will be on holiday break for 1-2 weeks starting next week
- There won’t be weekly updates during these 2 weeks, but the multiplayer team will remain fully engaged in keeping up with the state of the game during this time.
- We will also be playtesting the Balance Test Map that will go up next week, as well as checking with pro players on the status of their testing.
- There won’t be weekly updates during these 2 weeks, but the multiplayer team will remain fully engaged in keeping up with the state of the game during this time.
- If the need to do a patch ASAP arises, we will be aiming for the first week of January to patch some or all of the changes from the test map into the game.
- We really need to see the upcoming events and how testing goes in order to know the answer to this, but currently it’s looking like we will want to make a couple adjustments early next year before the major tournament season begins.
That’s the current plan on our team. We’re also really looking forward to the pro matches this weekend… We recently learned that "precision beats power and timing beats speed”, so we’re interested to know if this statement also applies to professional SC2 games!
Balance Test Map
We want to review the list of changes we’ll be testing in the Balance Test Map. There could definitely be further changes to this list next week depending on how the upcoming tournaments go, but here’s where we are currently at.
Disruptor: Remove +shield damage
We originally were discussing reducing their effective damage only against other Disruptors, but we are currently thinking if it’ll be better if Disruptors 2-shot majority of the Protoss ground units that they currently 1-shot. The main reason for this is that we agree with the feedback that PvP could become a bit stale to watch if we continue seeing players just shooting Disruptor shots over and over without engagements really happening. What we’re seeing in our internal playtests currently is that the pace of Disruptor combat is a bit more interesting with 2 shots. We can see the possibility of maybe playing a bit more aggressive against Disruptors, perfect Disruptor hits will be more skill based due to needing 2 hits, or unit weapon attacks in combination with 1 Disruptor shot to finish off key units. We also hope to see a bit more unit composition diversity with this change.
Zergling attack speed upgrade bonus decreased from 40% to 30%
We agree with your feedback that maybe we went a bit too far with this change. We definitely want to see more Zergling usage in the late game, but we do also agree with your feedback that the damage bump may have been too much. We want to test going back on this change a little to see if we can tune this upgrade a bit better.
Viper spell damage reduced from 90 to 60
We explored potential design changes as well as numbers tuning in this area, and for now we wonder if tuning the damage down to give more time for opposing players to micro against the ability is better. After this, we will be able to gauge where the ability is, and go from there.
Thor AA damage to flat 12
We are looking at ways to get a little more mech play in Terran matchups. Our first attempt at this will be to buff one of the more underused units. While this is effectively a double-damage buff against armored air units, we were noticing in our internal playtests that it doesn’t feel super overpowered. This is probably due to the fact that their damage against armored units was pretty low to begin with, and Thors attack multiple times per hit, making armor also be a big factor as well. However, we also know that internal playtesting doesn’t provide the full picture of a change, so we’d like to test this one out with everyone in order to see if this is in fact the best move for the Thor.
Photon Overcharge
- Energy cost increased from 25 to 50
- Duration increased from 15 to 20
- Damage increased from 30 to 45
The current version of Photon Overcharge makes it a little too hard to threaten a Protoss player in the early game, so we’d like to take a little power out of it. We first tried doubling the duration and energy cost. What we quickly found was that it was a much bigger nerf than we expected. The reasons were that the DPS output for energy cost was halved, and it was two times easier to just kill the Pylon per energy cost used. Therefore, we decided to go less on the duration but also increase the damage so that while we do still have an overall nerf, it’s a smaller nerf compared to what we initially talked about. Let’s see how this plays out in actual games, and continue to tune further if necessary.
Ravager morph time increased from 12 to 20
Like we talked about before, we agree with your feedback regarding the timing and availability of Ravagers. This may be especially important in PvZ where Photon Overcharge is seeing a nerf. We believe a nerf to how quickly Ravagers are morphed from Roaches will definitely help out.
Ladder Revamp
We’ve been discussing the details of our ladder revamp and wanted to give you an update so we can get your feedback on the current direction. A good place to begin is to discuss season duration. With all the things that are changing, this is something we can entirely revisit. In Heart of the Swarm, Ladder Seasons aligned perfectly with the 3 seasons of WCS. However, we’re considering whether Ladder Seasons could be made shorter, allowing you to work towards achieving your maximum potential more frequently. There are definitely pros and cons that we see in each method, but we wanted to hear your thoughts to help decide how we handle Ladder Seasons next year. Please give us your thoughts on this.
We’ve got quite a few other ideas to discuss with you though. Let’s go in-depth and take a look at our current thoughts about the Ladder:
- Bonus pool tuning
- We like how bonus pool is effective as a tool that rewards players for continuing to play.
- The current numbers for bonus pool point accrual don’t seem appropriate for each matchmaking format. We intend to explore our data about how often players/teams play in each format in order to get better numbers per game format.
- We like how bonus pool is effective as a tool that rewards players for continuing to play.
- Showing MMR
- We’re thinking we can show MMR as a tool for players to use so they can accurately tell exactly what someone’s skill is.
- Tier system
- We still believe it’ll be the most fun for players to focus on which tier of which league he or she belongs to.
- We’re leaning towards keeping mid season demotions disabled here. The main reason for this is that your current skill is portrayed by MMR already, so it will be cooler to see your highest rank that season through the League/tier system.
- We still believe it’ll be the most fun for players to focus on which tier of which league he or she belongs to.
- Keep loading screen information simple, but have more transparency on the score screen (for example, showing the MMR of both players on there)
- This is mostly based on your feedback saying that too many details about an opponent before a match might introduce weird factors that could disrupt your ability to play well. We’re thinking we can focus on providing that information after the match has ended.
- We are exploring to see if it’s better to have separate leagues for GM and Master
- The main reason for this is that getting promoted to GM is such an awesome experience. If we were to combine these leagues like we discussed at BlizzCon, we would lose this cool factor.
- The most important issue to solve here is to still have accuracy even if we split the leagues. We definitely don’t want the situation that we currently have, where a player is clearly not at the GM level anymore but he can’t get demoted out of it as long as he’s active.
- The current discussion point here is to update GM at set, specific intervals. This way, players can expect a change will happen at a set point of time that is known to everyone, and play the game with this information.
- The main reason for this is that getting promoted to GM is such an awesome experience. If we were to combine these leagues like we discussed at BlizzCon, we would lose this cool factor.
We’re trying to finalize the design details and we hope to begin implementation next year. With this in mind, there is definitely time for everyone to give their input so let’s get discussions going in this area.
League percentiles/match making
We wanted to let you guys know that the sizes of lower leagues are a bit too big right now, and we will be working towards adjusting the lower league boundaries with the season roll early next year. This will mean that players at lower leagues will be more accurately place into their correct leagues.
We’ve also been receiving feedback from the top-end pro players playing the ladder regarding match quality vs. wait time, and we will also be taking a pass at this at the same time frame as well. This issue exists only at the top-end of the ladder, so the majority of players shouldn’t notice a big change. We expect the fixes on both ends will be strong, but we will definitely take measures to double check once the changes go live in case further adjustments are necessary.
Thanks for all your feedback thus far. Let’s get discussions going on the topics discussed above, and thank you as always for your valuable feedback.
linky
