I guess I'll go ahead and address some balance issues here as well. With the recently released 1014 patch we made several changes to the games weapons in the name of balance. This included:
Sharpshooter:
- Raised price of the Crossbow
- Reduce the number of magazines carried for the M14
- Increased the weight of the M14 and Crossbow so both cannot be carried at once
Commando
- Reduced the damage for the SCAR
Demolition
- Moved the LAW to the Demolition perk
- Increased the damage radius of the LAW
- LAW gets perk bonuses for the Demolition perk
Now to address these:
The job of the Sharpshooter class has always been to deal with the bigger zeds. For that reason the changes for this class focused on making him less useful against weaker zeds to make the class focus more on the harder ones. Now there have been many gut reactions to the news on this (too much, too little), but it has played out fairly well in our testing. We will see how it plays out in the public space.
The Commando -The unexpected nerf(herder)
The commando has the opposite job of the Sharpshooter. His job is to take care of the crawlies and other various things that can swamp a team. The SCAR was super effective, at taking on Scrakes and Fleshpounds. It really didn't scale with the rest of the commando weapon line up, now it has been brought more in line with that scale.
The Demolitions Perk - But the LAW still sucks?
Really? Have you even played with it? I soloed Hard with lvl 4 demo with a LAW
It might not one shot a fleshpound/Scrake all the time but it will kill everything around it and with a few extra rounds your team can take care of the raging bloody mess that is left.
Now was this the end all of balance patches? No. Did we fix everything? No. I have the Medic/Zerker and Demo balance changes that we are still discussing. But I would also like to see how these changes that we've made play out in the public space. Gut reactions and "I'm Uninstalling" doesn't tell me anything. I'll be playing and observing.
Ahh something else I would like to add. I believe Ramm mentioned this in an interview at PAX, but I don't know if it ever saw the light of day. So I will bring it up here. Originally this patch was also going to introduce a new game type. There has been a strong call from the community for a new game type (either Mission or PVP). We looked at what the community had already done in this area (BlackCheatas vs mode and the various mission map makers), and decided the community was doing well enough in the mission map department.
On that note, if you haven't tried the various mission maps, go do so. They are really awesome, and I've had a chance to check out some unreleased stuff that takes it to a whole new level.
Back on topic. Many of you know that we announced we were working on something big. This new game type was that something. Various members of the community have over time found supporting material that was for this mode (such as a unused weapon/device and some left over code that didn't get properly removed). I am sad to say that this game type is also no more.
At one point we never understood how different game companies could just can a project that they had worked on for months if not years. Now we do. What we had implemented was not fun. And the amount of work it would take to correct this somewhat fatal flaw was unknown. So we made the very hard decision to cut the game type. It wasn't easy for us to come to this decision, but we feel we've made the right one.
