Decision to forgo balancing in killer content releases
As has been made aware previously (in a comment to a forum post, which is rather poor on a communication front to the community), during updates that release a new killer starting with Stranger Things 2 and as seen recently with Jason, zero balancing changes are been made. Instead, they are being relegated to mid-chapter patches. Understandably, this has some concerns; the game will become very stale if we are left in a meta for twice as long. While I understand and appreciate this is to focus on polishing that new content specifically and also allow for the much larger bug fixes that have been made over the past few updates, the game desperately needs some method of even minor balancing changes during these big updates.
What makes it even more shocking to me is that in today's bugfix patch, we were told that when Shane arrives on Thursday his perk Cross-Examination will remain the same as on PTB but will be changed to disable when in chase in 2 more weeks. Why on earth are we being subjected to less balance changes to focus on this new content when the changes decided upon won't even come to live right away? If the reason is that the focus was on Jason first and Shane second, you had more time to fix this than anything with Jason, and Creel came with 2 survivors on the same release date.
So not only can we see any content from PTBs may not be addressed despite no competition in other content to manage, we get reminded that during bugfix patches there is a chance for adjustments to be made to content. Why can't we see small minor changes to killers or add-ons, or perks during these releases? It doesn't even have to be major enough that it warrants testing like a lot of the past mid-chapter's killer changes were (Doctor getting the most miniscule time saved on his power or Ghostface getting a 2 second reduction to power cooldown are absolutely not enough to warrant waiting as long for changes as we did). These small changes could have been made today and no one would complain, and had more testing done for somewhat big changes like Blight's speed change and pallet breaking costing tokens; I would also argue something like what Demogorgon received could have been implemented without testing or at least the add-ons maybe.)
After seeing such promising changes coming sometimes next year during the anniversary stream, it is very frustrating to see that until then any change will feel absolutely barren or not enough to sustain my enjoyment of the game. Even then, once the overhaul does come we may not even see a return to form with how much gets changed per update.
Comments