Twitchy Questioning 2: Twitchier and Questionier

Just watched the feed. If they are doing what is being communicated, it should be a good one. If their interpretation of improvements parallels the last patch... Prey may be a good game to hold me over until they get it right.

Agreed. Respected them when they openly stated early in the stream that combo damage not scaling with difficulty was a bug/mistake on their part. Looking forward to the patch and (hopefully) more frequent discussions like this.

Okay, a few thoughts about the stream.

1. This is the best stream and communication they've done, bar none. There are real things to be optimistic about here. Had they been engaging in this kind of thoughtful, and even humorous at times, communication from day one everyone would be a lot less salty. Also, the fact that it appears that the community is discovering bugs that they were not aware of makes communication between the players and devs even more important. We aren't just whining, shit's broke yo.

2. Hopefully this puts to bed the fanboys defense of "Oh, they can't talk about anything because of laws and corporations and stuff". That was always a cya defense, and always will be.

3. I still have some criticisms though. It's disheartening that combo damage scaling being broken wasn't discovered far earlier. It's a core mechanic. It's the kind of thing that in house testing should have caught a long time ago. It's not even particularly hidden, we've all known it was off since the first few days of launch, but didn't know why.

4. "There are 3 kinds of lies. Lies, Damned Lies and Statistics." The Bronze/Silver/Gold breakdown is pretty meaningless. There's not context to that 1/7 matches are Gold to know if it is meaningful or not. And there's good reason to think that the Bronze number is artificially inflated for two big ass reasons. Each kit has to be leveled up individually, so lots of players are going to start with a Bronze match or two to level them up. They might far prefer to be doing Silvers or Golds, but feel obligated to do Bronze with a low level kit. And Bronze/Silver APEX missions likely draw in some players that would prefer to be running Golds, but because they want to play that modifier, level up a kit, or knock out an APEX mission without sending a team, so run a Bronze. Now, I'm sure that more people do play Bronze than Silver, and more play Silver than Gold. But some context to understanding why people are playing different levels matter, and given some of the other things that have gone on with AMP, I'm not all that confident that that kind of context is considered.

5. And the reason that 4 matters at all is their continued use of bottom up balancing, which is something that bugs me a whole bunch. Everything should wreck shop on Bronze once it's leveled up. Everything. Bronze is easy mode. Sure, it should be challenging when you're starting off with level 1 common weapons/kits. But once you're running leveled up kits and some Uncommon/Rare/UR weapons, there's no balance. You run around and murder things because it's fun. The insistence on maintaining a particular feel for Bronze just doesn't make sense to me. Are people playing Bronze because they want to feel challenged by it? The continued insistence of bottom up balancing is just perplexing to me, because it doesn't make sense to me as a way to deliver the best experience to any difficulty. Half the weapons already lolstomp Bronze, where is the balance that is being maintained there by not just having all the weapons and powers lolstomp it?

But, like I said, overall positive, but some of the things still leave me with some of the same deep seated concerns I've had about both their in house ability to test, and their overall philosophy.

Thanks on my behalf too, JRandall. Couldn't be online during the stream

Thank you for the effort.

Still bummed out that the one thing I care the most about is still a "maybe and soon".