This is Operation Health, addressing Tech Debt
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What.
Shoddy coding to get things out the door that take too long to address to satisfy customers/product in a timely manner that piles up and sits and simmers in a backlog.
Addressing it usually means putting more flashy features to the side, and convincing product that it's a necessary thing.
It is absolutely not, but excellent gaslighting attempt.
The hell does Operation Health mean to you?
To me it means code optimization that allows for greater flexibility in the future, not necessarily balance changes.
Taking the time to put out bug fix patches is good. Nurse has been in the game for literally 5 years with some of these bug never being addressed, so it's nice that they're finally getting around to fixing them. It's also nice that they're KIND OF trying to fix the false info validated hit bug (though it would've been a lot nicer if they had done that when it first appeared instead of putting the same broken code into Dead Hard).
That being said, they chose a terrible time for it. With the most recent slew of changes, the game's a pretty poor state; from broken MMR, unfun killer gameplay, a slew of arbitrary killer nerfs, wildly overpowered survivor perks, and diminishing player counts... well it would've been a good idea to staunch the bleeding a little bit before spending all their time on the technical side of things.
But hey, I'll say this much: There is ONE nice thing about the PTB -
Haddonfield has been disabled.
What a blessing. If only that were in the Patch Notes instead of the Known Bugs section.
To be honest, the ######### Nemesis release really soured the game for me. I don't want that happening again.
They would've been well advised to hold Nemesis back until they got the zombie code working. Until they got ALL the code working, in fact. That chapter had SO MANY BUGS. Like, delay release for a month and take the time! Maybe if they'd spent more time and manpower working on him, they could've gotten the "more than 2 zombies" code to actually work instead of crashing the game with memory leaks.
How great would Nemesis be if they'd kept his implied original power: every time you T3, you spawn a new zombie and go back down to T2? SO GREAT
Welcome to them taking their time. Still wish they did do some teasers for any upcoming Killer changes.
Well. Turns out people didn’t actually want them to address technical debts after all. It was just an excuse to talk the devs down and there is always something those people will focus on to continue this.
They fixed a suite of nurse bugs. Maybe. This is not game health, it's one killer. An operation health would encompass sweeping changes to optimize netcode, hitboxes and fix bugs that affect *every* killer. They'd have to devote a chapter to it. Quit trying to deceive yourself and others. It's gross.
If they had spent the mid-chapter after Pinhead released doing this, it would've been fine. They got themselves into the sinking ship problem with Boon Totems and a series of wildly ill-advised, knee-jerk killer nerfs + survivor buffs.
But, after all, bad decisions cascade. They released Resident Evil chapter broken and half finished, with the game crashing, the zombies not working, the T3 power patched to be lame and ineffectual, the stage broken and poorly designed, and so forth. They they had the whole NFT issue with Pinhead and his voice lines getting pulled on top of his main power being laughable. Then you got boons being released broken (literally, crashed the game) and way too powerful on top of nerfing the one thing killers had to counter them. Then a fresh slew of killer nerfs that cut down Pinhead's one useful play strategy, gutted Deathslinger, took back the good will built up from Wraith's buff, and so on. There was a comparative calm when they released the Artist with relatively few bugs, but then they leaked the next killer identity way too early, killing all the suspense of the lead-up. And, of course, a fun winter event that was neat for survivors and incredibly frustrating for killers.
And now, months later, still nothing to address gameplay disparities beyond future plans to buff Solo Survivors (AGAIN) with not even a faint whiff of how they're going to help killers deal with all this noise. Take the time to address technical debts when your game is on an even keel, not when it's in the middle of a storm.
Dude Nurse is a suite of race condition bugs that are likely almost entirely due to their switch from Killer host to dedicated servers. I never did take a course in networking, but I assume it's related to concurrent computing.
So basically, they can’t do anything right at the moment. (Which I kinda agree with don’t get me wrong but I still don’t see the need to ignore the stuff they are doing right, even if it’s baby steps)
"Oh no! The consequences of my actions! I never saw YOU coming!"