July 2019 - last edited July 2019
I think the dust has settled enough to give first impressions. The things I say here should be viewed through a lens which appreciates that I play on xbox in a fairly low populated region, relatively speaking. I play a lot of hours, particularly through daytime when most people with a 9-5 job wouldn't be able to play.
Servers/Game Stability
A lot more codeleaf crashes and even though the datacenter option isnt hidden (good move) - it still randomly changes, especially after crashes. The only way you know is when you drop into a game and all three members have icons displaying their poor connection and rubberbanding is horrendous. I've also been getting crashed back to home screen from character selection which is something I believe Respawn think is fixed. The server stability AFTER the first 12 hours seemed to improve slightly but not to the same standard of pre-S2.
I wouldn't want a regionlock as I have friends who on some days get a better ping/packetloss situation from Singapore than they do from Sydney - but allowing players to lock/unlock their own region through their EA account might be a good thing to do. I'm not sure how this would differ to the current menu system but this is one of the most frustrating things currently : especially if the match is ranked and has taken a while to queue for. It might be simpler if we had a way to make it so the game isn't deciding which region we play in at all.
Items
Overall this has been a soaring success in my opinion. I always wanted to be able to use the Flatline more (Just like the gun and sound etc) but until this patch it wasn't viable for anything other than the fight immediately after a hotdrop. I have friends who felt the same way about the tripletake, even though it was more viable than the flatline. They're loving the TT changes but have said 8 shots feels slightly OP with max mag. I've not used it enough personally to have an opinion on that.
Something that I think needs to be adjusted slightly are the hopped up pistol class weapons. I love that they're a viable way to play but currently there isn't enough in the "CON" column for the disruptor rounds especially. For the damage they do to armor I think they ought to do less damage to health forcing someone to at least switch to their secondary and increasing the TTK that way, otherwise you're looking at the new meta which will persist until something is changed. Lowering the amplification afforded by the hopups is another way to go.
RE-45 and Alternator being the most used guns isn't something that would bother me, all guns are still viable : but the TTK on these weapons currently is disproportionately punishing in the hands of a good player. As Pathfinder main this might be because of the 5% increased damage taken passive but I doubt it, so if anyone wants to suggest the dmg is fine : I'd say play a LowProfile legend for a few days to see if your mind isn't changed. Let me know if it makes any difference.
People have been saying all sorts of things about which loot is easier/harder to find but so far other than the skullpiecer and obvious addition of extra hopups into the pool it feels like most of what I hear is placebo/nocebo. It would be nice for Respawn to confirm whether they have or haven't changed the drop rates of anything or re-arranged any loot tables by area to at least put some of this speculative whinging to bed. Revealing a chart of the drop %es etc by loot tier area would be even better, but this is just icing on the cake. It would at least cut down on the 'gut feeling' complaints which these forums are plagued with.
Legends
Wattson:
Incredibly popular, which is to be expected. A lot of players have taken to camping in buildings etc and creating little fortresses, especially in the tower at the former bridges location but I've not met many who can do it in a way which is UTTERLY impregnable. Thankfully her tactical is harder to use well than the trailers and pre-S2 information suggested, as well as having slightly less dmg than I thought was going to be the case.
Everything I think about Wattson is swept under the rug by 1 element she brings to the game though. I like her being in the game purely because of her ultimate. When you kill a squad, if a Wattson ultimate has been dropped in the area : you have a reprieve from being 3rd partied by nadespammers and the small shield regeneration helps your team get back up to speed quicker even if you don't have batteries, only cells. This small addition has been enough to give my team (even when we didn't have a Wattson) more of a chance against the 3rd, 4th and 5th parties that have shown up for the noise. For this unexpected benefit alone, the addition of Wattson has been a good thing for me. I haven't minded having to work harder for the 3Ps and I've appreciated the reprieve, however small when it comes to getting ready for a ratty attack after a fight.
If I was to change anything about her abilities - I would create a mechanism so that her forcefields do increased damage to your shields the more times you contact them in a short space of time. So the first fence you hit - its the current amount of shield damage - but this starts a 5 second debuff, if you hit another barrier in that time : the damage inflicted is 2x the last amount etc etc. I don't think this would make her OP, but would mean that people charging through multiple barriers or dipping in and out of them would face more of a consequence for doing it. I could be totally off on this as it is still early days, but her walls aren't as devastating as I thought they'd be. This is a good thing as I thought they would be OP but I'm not biased enough against those who enjoy the camp game to say that currently they feel a bit limp.
The number one change I think she needs is her model/hitbox relationship. Her hitbox only covers her body and not her backpack/shoulder tesla coils. This seems fine on paper but when you realise how much of what you can see of her is the backpack/coils : it becomes a problem. Once she starts moving around/crouching, and especially on some of the more monotonous skins where most of her is the same dark colour : it's almost impossible to know what you're aiming at. This is fine for weapons where you can spray and adjust but for Longbow/Wingman/G7 it's a real problem. This may get better for those who take the time to consciously learn about it, like with Pathfinder : but it seems like a really pointless bit of homework to inflict on your playerbase when it has been the most whined about thing in the game so far on another character.
Her actual hitbox seems to be the exact same size as lifeline and yet she doesn't have the LowProfile dmg taken debuff, which seems odd. As I wish that debuff wasn't on ANY of the characters I don't want to campaign for its introduction elsewhere (why spread the misery) but it's an odd decision to take the worst elements of pathfinders design and put them on a character that's much smaller than him, when complaints about it have been overwhelming. Time will tell if this becomes something people consistently complain about with Wattson as time goes on.
LowProfile / Fortified generally.
This I simply do not understand. I feel as though you're going to be chasing your tails forever with an attempt to balance different sized models - when you could just deal with the root cause of it by making the characters pretty much the same size. The fact that you're attempting to balance these characters with an additional passive means you've already accepted that their size isn't balanced effectively by their abilities or that it's the abilities themselves that require balancing, so you're adding more complexity to the problem and pulling a nasty knot even tighter by including more variables. The issue is a LACK of uniformity. It isn't that the legends aren't different enough - it's that they're TOO different. More disparity won't solve it or stop any of the complaints. Your models not resembling the hitboxes is the issue on Pathfinder, and the size is the thing that adds difficulty to hitting wraith/lifeline (admittedly more wraith for some reason). The size wasn't balanced by the abilities.
The decreased TTK is REALLY noticeable when you're playing against good players. Ranked is affording me the chance to play against more and more consistent players and while the dmg debuff might have given players worse than me more of a chance to squeeze out a kill : it's giving equal/better players an unfair advantage. Lifeline/Wraith mains I know are also complaining about this. The fights I've had and lost to Gibraltar players recently seriously call into question the intention of Respawn to make a balanced, competitive FPS game :S
I understand the flavour in having different sized legends - but it is obviously a failed experiment when you have to start engaging in this sort of balancing act for what is essentially a fluff/aesthetic decision. We play these types of games mainly for the gameplay, graphics etc and fluff are 100% secondary or tertiary considerations for most multiplayer FPS gamers.
Pathinder
I've tested the slender hitboxes in Training and noted that the small holes in the legs as per my previous posts with pictures have been filled - but a VERY small chunk missing on the FRONT of the legs in roughly the same place is still there. The aesthetic artefacts that people used to complain about missing are still present (box/jets on hips, hydraulic cannister on arm and shoulder pylons), and still don't feature in the hitbox - meaning that people will have almost exactly the same 'hitbox' complaints as most of them were about things not IN your hitbox frame. These things shouldn't be in the hitbox, but because of that they really shouldn't be on the model either. Having things you can see but not hit is a TERRIBLE design decision for a multiplayer FPS game. TLDR - I think the increased dmg taken is an attempt to bribe players with more kills instead of addressing the actual issue, and I don't think it will work : it will only annoy Pathfinders who get into higher tiers of ranked where players are better at aiming and more aware of which parts of the model you can't hit.
I've not yet had a look at if anything has changed with the larger models. My feeling from gameplay is that the larger models still suffer from exactly the same issue - that being that they use the same hitbox as the slender models. This has been sort-of confirmed in your post where you said that you were looking into a fix to make the fatter hitboxes more closely alligned with the hitbox. At least we know Respawn are aware of this as an issue though a clear communication on whether or not Pathfinder will have 2+ hitboxes depending on your model later would be a good confirmation to have.
LowProfile on Pathfinder - I'm at a loss :S This is exactly the kind of lazy workaround to fixing the model/hitbox relationship that I was dreading, though I wasn't imaginative to have come up with the prediction that you would give a character this size increased damage taken. You've applied it to a character which stands much wider and practically twice as tall as the other two legends who have it. Whilst I disagree that it should exist at all : adding it to the larger character makes even less sense when you've all but plugged the hitbox issues. The work should go into CHANGING the models. Just remove the elements causing the issues. 99% of the playerbase wont care if the grappling hook just comes from the model instead of a module mounted on his arm if it is the price they pay for being able to hit what they can actually see. No one will give a toss if the cable spools on the shoulders just disappear.
I'm really hoping that you normalise the character sizes approximately and take the aesthetic garbage out of the models then get rid of the damage debuff/buff passives. They're a bad idea and just add to imbalance rather than resolve it. I appreciate that this would be a lot of work to do, and that it's unexpected so would interrupt other work already planned : but as your (to my mind, failed) attempts to balance show - it's a priority.
Until now I've not used the legendary fat skins but given this daft dmg debuff I'm seriously tempted to start using my old twitch prime skin to offset the effect.
Map
Whilst it's nice to have a change - some of the areas feel less fun to play in, particularly cascades. It feels as though the map was altered to give Wattson/Caustic players more locations/buildings to create fortresses in. A lot more buildings with only two or 3 entrances, and lots of unbreakable windows to try and balance the fact a little bit. What this has done in my experience is make the attacking party far more vulnerable to 3ps and the 'defending' (I'd say camping) team far less vulnerable to it. I have far fewer fights on the move in a variety of areas now and far more fights laying siege to temporary castles (whether well constructed or not). This was a stated aim of Respawn to slow the game down but I don't feel like it's changed the game for the better so far. IF you can displace a team containing a Wattson quick enough, her persistant ultimate helps re: grenade spam from 3Ps, but this is a small consolation if it is a team who have burrowed into the cascades mountain underground like ticks. These fights are more frustrating than fun, easy or hard versions, win or lose. Some players love building little bases to defend, but honestly I would suggest that Fortnite services them better and Apex should be celebrating this particular former difference with Fortnite rather than trying to lessen it. My $0.02. A lot of players who play Fortnite and apex probably don't feel this difference as acutely as me, if at all.
Ranked
I feel that 'ranked' is a bit of a misnomer as it amounts more to soft matchmaking so far than leagues: but the effect of it has been absolutely revelatory for me. The games I've had in ranked have been far more challenging and I've seen a LOT less of the hide'n'seek scrubbery than in elite, presumably because of the absence of a top5 streak badge. I do prefer the formally flat-out aggressive games and I think the killcap of 5points goes some way to influencing teams in this regard, but Wattsons addition combined with Caustics pre-season 2 buff have also had an effect.
Speaking of the cap on points rewarded for killing : as we're already seeing in the forums, there is a lot of acrimony generated by people feeling as though their kills were 'stolen'. This would be improved if the reward for kills was either uncapped (especially in the higher tiers where kills are harder to come away with) or if the RP for kills was divided as equally as possibly with team mates at the end, with odd kill numbers awarding the excess 1 RP to whoever had the most damage overall.
If less than 3 kills were earned, we have to decide on whichever system seems least unfair : I reckon the last-hit system works for this particular situation. Nomatter what anyone says there is no guarantee logically speaking that a kill was going to happen unless that person got that last shot. The only way to know this is if you got hitmarkers by hitting a dead player's corpse. I know in reality there are lots of situations where 2 spray an enemy and 1 gets the last hit over the other, but having the odd situation where only 1 kill is earned resulting in bad feeling between players for 'kill stealing' is better than in all of them.
A friend of mine hit gold yesterday and in our region (Australia/NZ) it means that through the day he hasn't been able to get his ranked queue to pop at all. As I understood it the game was supposed to populate your ranked queue with players from the bracket below if you couldn't get games, but this doesn't appear to have happened. It would be nice if we could come up with a way for players to get constant ranked matches, as this waiting time will only get worse as more players graduate higher than gold for somewhere with a relatively small playerbase like aus/nz. Cross platform with PS4 would UNDOUBTEDLY help and should be prioritised if ranked play is to be fully appreciated and enjoyed by all ranks. You run the risk of screwing shiftworkers/service people or anyone who works weekends if a solution to this isn't found, and there are enough of them that the noise would bring a bad smell to Apex.
Ring Changes
The zone damage isn't a total disaster. What it has done is stop my teams taking fights that would mean we end up in the zone, even at level1. This has meant far fewer early game fights, but I'm prepared to accept some benefits to this. More teams alive in the mid-game meaning it's not quite as slow if the surviving teams are aggressive, but most of the pace reduction around midgame comes from players being aware that most teams they'll meet will have proper armor and weapons by now. The mid-game is still a bit sluggish. This change also means that we aren't 3rd partying as many fights early game : which means more of our early game fights aren't BEING 3rd partied. This might be good to most people but personally I just found 3p to be part of the game, and I preferred things the way they were. I'm prepared to accept though that enough people prefer less 3ping to be a majority based on what I've heard, even most of the people complaining about ring dmg will probably agree with this, even if they haven't yet connected lack of early game 3rd parties to the number of fights THEY'RE not pressing because of zone-paranoia.
The ring being more lethal has created a possibility for players to decide they're going to take you out of the game by engaging even if it practically GUARANTEES they're dead to the ring, and this is one of the things that I really don't like. Less skilled/aware or just plain trolly players that you can clean up in seconds forcing you to spend those seconds fighting and weakening you enough that you then die to the ring. This can be ameliorated by landing somewhere quiet and concentrating almost exclusively on getting to the ring ASAP, but again - I preferred the old way where you could get into lots of fights, with some of the fights having added pressure because you were taking zone dmg which could kill you but only generally while you were fighting. If the ring damage had been increased SLIGHTLY in the later game and lifelines bot destroyed by it : this would have been enough for me. I enjoyed more fights early on and more teams avoiding late fights in zone1 hasn't made the mid-game very much faster or more fun.
I can stand it though : which is more than I hoped for.
Battlepass
I bought this to support the game and personally don't care about any of the content in it. Challenges aren't something I play to consciously do and the skins I've seen so far are thoroughly unimpressive. It feels like the battlepass business model isn't hitting the mark for Apex at all and perhaps a total rethink is needed of what players can spend their money on.
Reducing the price of ALL skins by at least 50% and creating a shop where they can buy absolutely any of them, or crafting materials would probably net more income than the current model. This would require more modelling staff to create skins etc I'm sure : but more little bits of this kind of content would keep a lot of the players happy who enjoy buying things that don't matter. Fewer players as time goes on are willing to buy something they don't want just to show support. I questioned whether or not buying the S2 battlepass was a good idea on my part because I think it's sending a mixed signal to the devs that the BPs have been worth buying for their own sake and the content within. To be clear - they absolutely haven't. They add nothing for me. The game itself is worth supporting and that is 100% of the reason why I bought the BP. If I could have just donated the same amount of money I would have done just to show that for players like me the BP and all the work going into them has been a total waste of your resources so far.
Misc
Legend Tokens - Players NEED more to spend this on. The reason I say need is because even if I don't want to buy anything with them : having 350,000 of them stacked up on my account creates an impression that you are not putting out enough content. It's not good to allow players to generate their own currency and give them next to nothing to spend it on. They feel as though you're not creating enough content, nomatter how much other content not related to the currency you put out for consumption.
It might be an idea for you to allow people to buy crafting materials with them, though at a rate of 20,000 for 20 mats or something so they don't cost you all your livelihood. Players buying a handful of skins with 'free' money might loosen the purse strings of more players when they get into the habit of looking for skins in your shop. This is how gambling websites get players involved in spending real money, and those companies don't do something unless it works.
Last thing to say is - you have my continued thanks for developing this game. I absolutely love it and since Feb2 I've not really played anything other than 3 weeks off for Division2 (Which would get far more of a negative roasting if I could be bothered to give them feedback :P).
General hopes are that you stay true to what the initial HUGE burst of players who stuck around enjoyed - fast-paced gunfights. It's the thing that sets this game apart from other BRs is that it is reminiscent of the gunplay of a lot of the older FPS games, and this is something that the market has under-serviced for a long time.
I would shell out 100 bucks tomorrow for a version of this games mechanics but with TDM/DM/FFA/S&D/DOM etc.
Thanks.
WALL OF TEXT CRITS YOU FOR 99999999999999999999DMG
July 2019
July 2019
July 2019
July 2019
@Koochi-Q wrote:
Screw 20K legend tokens for 20 mats! For that amount I wanna have at least 50 mats! I’ve played hundreds of hours and only got 100K (after buying all characters of course). How many hours did you play to have 350K XD jeebus... that’s some grinding even tony hawk would be proud of XD.
Neglected to answer this before, sorry. I just checked and I've played 1037 hours. To check /played on xbox I brought up a friends profile and compared playtime (its the only way I know how to check) and he has played 1919. I don't know if he's slept since the game was released.
If 20k for mats is excessive then the value could be adjusted : but it needs to be rare otherwise there's no benefit at all to Respawn/EA to allow it in the first place and nothing will change re: these red points.
July 2019
July 2019
What was wrong with the ring before? It's worse than before, please change it back! And please make the weapons work the way they should be! And make them actually hit enemies!