AUGUST PLAYTEST THOUGHT DUMP

[silent orbit]

BALANCE: Spawns and looting felt incredibly feast or famine, only 3 locations felt viable enough to drop at. Crit/atk speed and mitigation/HP were very good synergies, movement speed and thorns items felt underwhelming in comparison to the other two new stats. Some pins felt useless while some felt very impactful, only a few felt like a middle-ground, pure stat pins (HP/thorns) felt out of place. Pins appear in shop too much compared to other items, but cheaper rerolls offset it somewhat. Supply drops were way too rare compared to the other endgame objectives and the drops that I did get seemed to only contain pins. I still prefer pins to h4x for consistency purposes but I get the other side of the argument, decreased variance leads to boring endgames, esp in high ranks and in duos.

GAMEMODES/MATCHMAKING: MMR rollover from last playtest was incredibly unfun as a mainly day 3 player, I was playing against 1st page teams after 1 game and it made climbing low ranks very slow. There were quite a few new players this patch and not including a normal queue feels bad for the people wanting to learn the game, especially when going months without tests. FFA was fun and pretty well-balanced.

DUOS: Quite possibly the least fun meta I've experienced in bapbap so far, felt similar to the duos meta of summer 2023 except this was even more melee favored. HP was WAY too good, mobile melees taking 1 HP item + HP pin are unkillable in a ranged spell rotation while still one shotting non-HP stacking characters. I understand that teevee in particular is a balancing nightmare so I should not expect them to feel good on every patch, but many other players agreed that it felt near impossible to play ranged characters in duos this test. I have multiple clips of me playing fights almost perfectly with above average loot and still not doing enough damage to down a skinny with 1 HP item and HP pin.

TRIOS: Map is way too big for 15 player lobbies, zook and crit/lightning overtuned but balance felt decent otherwise, HP not as much of an issue in trios.

Overall, this test felt significantly less enjoyable than the July one. I am still excited about the new items and the pin system, but the balancing (among other issues) was pretty disappointing.

[lucid breach]

regarding mmr rollover, did u ever think how poor newbies would feel if they had to play against you? also, good mmr means better teammates, so in a game that does put quite some emphasis on teamwork, that should benefit you as well

[silent orbit]

does not benefit me when I'm against mary/tannzu hight/pyn kenneth/phenom gwynn/gaming every game while I'm bronze 3

I get that it would be kinda frustrating for the other people but if it was easier to climb then I would only be in their lobbies for like 3 games

[lucid breach]

when ur bronze 3 u climb considerably even by getting 5th place or sth. which u should easily be able to if what ur describing is correct

at low elos u have barely any entry fee, so you climb as long as you just dont die in the first minute of the game, getting you a not bottom rank

i guess you probably went to spawn near other teams to fight immediately, oftentimes dying instantly thus being unable to climb

an easy solution would be to not go fight instantly but farm early.

[silent orbit]

not an issue of dying early, the problem is how slow the climb is, obviously I'm still climbing but its harder for me than it was for the players already at the top

feels way harder to catch up than before bc there was never mmr rollover previously

encourages smurfing

hard rank reset but keeping mmr makes 0 sense for a competitive ladder

[lucid breach]

u know u get mmr adjustment in rp calculation?

[silent orbit]

I saw that like 2 times

even still

I would prefer just making a new account to playing in those lobbies

gains would be similar but games would be easier

honestly though it was probably more of a player population issue than anything

[lucid breach]

also bronze 3 is not that low actually - ppl didnt reach too high this time around, since there were only 2 days for each mode

[silent orbit]

sure but when the rest of the lobby is platinum

idk about that

[lucid breach]

well just saying, me too played duo mostly on the 3rd day only, and i had no problem reaching the threshold of gold (at which point, lag became an issue)

[silent orbit]

I'm not saying I wouldn't have ended up in those lobbies eventually or that ranking up was impossible, I just think that mechanic is really bad for the game

since I was high rank last test I'm always in the same game as the first page players but I'm so much lower than them on day 3 that I have basically no hope of catching them before the test ends

mmr adjustment would be good if it worked properly but I hardly ever saw it and when I did it was only +40 or something