Fliers' re-positioning

[OldBloke]

The fliers were heavily nerfed in the 256 patch. The natives went ape. Wildcard have responded ...

Hey there friends!

So, there's been a lot of controversy over this flier nerf, and we're glad to see that as always, our community is loud and engaging us in every way they know how-- including sending us image macros of a guy pooping on our names!

Let's get down to brass tacks on this one so I don't waste your time:

The big broad nerf hammer has been swung, and as the Senior Gameplay Designer on the project, it's my job to try and communicate as much and well as I can about what's going on with changes like these. I also have to make it a priority to iterate with you, the community, on stuff that impacts you, even if I'm not great at it all the time. That's part of our whole philosophy.

I think the discussion of "why did you do it" needs a moment to talk about, because there is a lot of assumptions about why we did it, and the posts I have made elsewhere haven't traveled everywhere they probably should have. So, let's start there.

We very much see fliers as needing to have distinct roles, and we feel this way about every dino, but each day only has so many hours in it, and there are a huge number of priorities that we have before we do a lot of balance stuff. In their state before this nerf bat, fliers were largely non-distinct, and speed was a critical issue across the board. The game had become largely "get a flier, rule the world", and this started as early as a Pteranadon.

There were many PvP implications in flier speed, not only did it make snatching, C4 bombing, and Quetz Grenading huge, easy issues, but it had underlying repercussions in the overall pvp gameplay space with regards to trivializing the land dinos which we actually want to see in battle, and giving people the option to remain endlessly airborne with giant mobile chaingun/gatling/rocket platforms high above the world and out of range of any threats.

There were also PvE implications. The ground game was essentially trivialized. You could live on the back of a Quetz perpetually after getting one, never even having to land... ever, really. 80% of the game was easily ignored because the air is safer, more straightforward, etc.

Without taking forever to deep-dive into this stuff, the one thing that I think everyone can agree with, or that most people seem to agree with, is that "it had to happen", and "you guys should have just done it less".

Both of these statements are true, but in the long run, the way we choose to make these changes are with broad strokes, followed by incremental buffs. That's how we work. There are other companies that do it differently, and that's good. For an in-development product, however, this is how we chose to do it. The end result will be the same, the only difference is where the outrage is felt. Either you guys get furious at us over several weeks as we nerf your fliers again and again, making them weaker and weaker, and you hate us for that, or we do it all at once and buff them, and you hate us all at once and then things get better.

These are just two different design approaches. If this was a finished game, where right now we felt that creatures needed small incremental tweaks to get them to a place where we like them, we would probably have taken the Blizzard/Starcraft approach of little steps at a time.

Now, let me take a moment out to address all of you on a very serious note:

Don't ever let anyone tell you not to express yourself.

If you have a feeling, if something we did made you feel a certain way, express it. You are not wrong to feel that way. It is your own feeling, and you have every right to express it. I've seen a LOT of people telling each other what is and is not okay to express, and I don't really like that. We have to have thick skin to be developers. We know sometimes you just need to say a string of expletives at us. That's fine. It's not CONSTRUCTIVE, but it's fine.

Would we prefer constructive dialogue? Yes. We've used constructive feedback to shape the next balance pass on the fliers. But even just raw anger and frustration are fine to express, and we want you to. It lets us know what the general feeling and climate is, even if it doesn't help us move towards a solution for the problem.

With that out of the way, the meat.

Our overall goal with this re-balance is to define roles specific to each of the fliers. This is a monumental task for land dinos, and that is why we didn't do that now. There are like a hundred land dinos, and not many fliers, comparatively.

The roles look something like this:

Ptero - Fast, sprinting scout, with low hp/stamina, but quicker stamina recovery. Fastest flier in the game (except for wild wyverns).
Argent - Tanky fighter, can scrap well and take some hits, high stamina/carry weight compared to all other fliers (except Quetz), while still maintaining some agility.
Moth - "beginner" mount, lowest stats across the board for explicit travel or fighting, but a powerful special attack for specialized use.
Pelagornis - Versatility flier with generally low stats, but unique functionality, and other special abilities to offset its lack of direct stat power.
Quetz - Sky Bronto. Slow, extreme stamina, extreme weight capacity, good for prolonged sieges or for moving massive quantities of things to and fro. High health pool, but extremely poor maneuverability and very vulnerable.
Tapejara - Tactical flier. Between the Argent and Ptero for overall stats, but with multi-mount support and latching abilities, it can carry well armed players in and out of the battlefield or to remote locations.
Wyvern - Lord of the skies. Low stamina, moderate move speed, poor agility, but extreme power and versatility.
This is how we see them conceptually, and the overall "feel" we want to aim for when we finally say "yeah, these are in a good spot".

In the spirit of that:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1hVE4Ub5ufePdkun4IYQf1oADPcvcfLx9IRpEbZVPLdc/edit#gid=160180008

This is a good look at the current values, the new values, and the deltas associated with the changes. Most of it is straightforward, but there are a few silly or convoluted variables in here:

Rider Extra Max Speed Multiplier is the most important one, it effectively gives the associated dino a change in its movement speed when it has someone riding it. You can see we've increased these values across the board for almost all of the fliers, making them simply faster when ridden.

So, all of the values shown here are essentially up for modification. This is a slightly trimmed version of the spreadsheet I use to calculate balance changes and overall impact and % deltas when making changes like these, I thought it would be cool to share it.

The "New Values" will be in your patch tomorrow*. Afterwards, we will be watching for a few more days, and seeing how these changes play out in my own gameplay, in the live game, in overall metrics on the back-end, etc. Then we will do another pass with the rest of the team, and we'll continue to iterate until we feel everything is in a good place.

Feedback us! If you have some thoughts on where these are going and want to take your own shot at proposing some values, go for it. I'm glad to look over anything that gets proposed, as long as you've got some reasoning behind it.

This is not the final pass! We're going to be iterating on this internally and want your input as we go forwards. I'll try to do more of this stuff when we bring out large balance changes in the future, and do them beforehand, not after. It's a process, so it doesn't just end here.

- The Right Hand

[SithAfrikaan]

Wow as if!
I was just musing last week about how just squashing flying in general made me enjoy the game so much more, so I'm only to happy they've let the hammer drop
Thanks for posting here Oldie, I'd not have seen it otherwise.

[Penfold]

Yeah, it's an interesting read for sure.