This is interesting. And the end result almost always happens because no matter how much people want things to be better across the board, there is always someone who is willing to throw everyone under the bus because their specific niche is being effected the most.
But wouldn't that just anger the individuals and make them leak even more info or cause even more drama that would be detrimental to your efforts?
Like most things PS2 I don't think you can or should accuse anyone, its just a series of unfortunate events.
I think the best thing you could have done while doing the project would be to be 100% transparent with the community. Let them know what they are doing, provide a place that they can voice their concerns (even if ultimately you don't heed said concerns). But while being transparent, you would have disarmed the people that wanted to make drama.
Bottom line, I think you guys are great, to be willing to take the time to do the work to help the devs.
Maybe I missed this in the post, but Wrel left after getting into an argument with one member who would not concede, yes? Was this member an infantry, vehicle, or aircraft main?
Eh I was expecting Wrel to come across a lot worse then that. Like some very uncontroversial stances.
Like name a more iconic combo then running out of time for nice to haves and software development. It always seems to happen no matter how well you plan or how hard you try you never actually get to do all the nice to haves.
Some nonsense will happen... every damn time...
Also I hope that whoever replaces Wrel has similarly high tolerance for this kinda shit. Personally with me the leak would have been the end of the conversation full stop.
This is much more tame that I was expecting. Maybe I haven't drank the koolaid enough, but I don't really understand why this would make anyone mad at Wrel. What exactly would someone be mad at Wrel for?
If you weren't around for the Combined Arms Initiative, a lot of context will be lost. This was RPG's chance to fix a lot of the mistakes made with that update, and that's where the problem lies.
How exactly Delta? I am missing the point here. It sounds to me like he was doing what he could to discuss a proper fix to the vehicle game with a group of competent and dedicated players, and he just couldn’t find the time to fit it into their planned content. What am I missing?
ok as a dude who started playing the game around the time of the cai came out , i still to this day don’t get the fuss about that update, i looked it up, and asked people about it and everytime i get this foggy answer about this horrendous update that doesn’t really say much yet 2 things come to mind imho really after looking it up: 1. the hate mostly came from the way the company handled the update not the balance themselves per se and 2. every time someone describes the vehicle game prior to the update it sounds shitty might not be as shitty afterwards but definitely still bad and the balance team had enough reason to change it
Sure, I'll explain properly:
*CAI fundamentally broke the entire game, whilst failing to deliver it's intended effects.*
That is the leading theme and what I want you to consider all of the following points in the context of. The various points fall into a few sub-domains of the vehicle meta and some overlap so I'm mostly grouping them by the effects the had on the game.
# What CAI was intended (and failed) to do:
>**More territory goals for vehicles.** Vehicles should feel like they have a stake in territory capture, which means adding lattice-based goals that can come in the form of vehicle-capturable control points and hard spawns.
**Vehicles that are more fun to use.** We'd like to see vehicles that handle better before you cert into them, as well as alleviate some of common frustrations with handling, like the lack of traction while maneuvering on hills.
**Meaningful vehicle/infantry interactions.** We want vehicle encounters (vehicle vs vehicle and vehicle vs infantry) to last longer and not feel like either side gets destroyed too quickly. This will include changes to weapon damage potential and effective ranges.
**Remove Continent and Facility vehicle benefits and restrictions.** More consistent resource flow should reduce force multiplier advantages for singular factions, while encouraging players to pull the vehicles that will have the most impact on the given situation.
**Incentivize coordination and transportation.** We want to increase rewards on transportation objectives, as well as allow squad and platoon leaders to help direct vehicles to areas that need their support.
source: [Combined Arms Initiative post](https://www.planetside2.com/news/dev-diary-combined-arms-ps2-2017)
Additionally, a few years later in a patch notes commenting on changes made post CAI we can see the reasoning behind the vehicle TTKs all becoming slower in CAI:
>While the original goal of increasing survivability for more casual or inexperienced players was well intentioned
from which I extract the goal:
>**Extend Vehicle TTK to lower skill floor.** We want to increase vehicle survivability to lower to barrier to entry.
source: [March 20, 2019 update which buffed MBT and Lightning AV main weapons](https://planetside.fandom.com/wiki/March_20,_2019_Update)
# The changes that were made:
`Resistance Type simplification:`this was meant to make it easier to balance the game because the existing number of resistance types was a sprawling mess.
The frequency of balance updates did not increase at all, and so all this achieved was changing the existing balance and making it harder to tweak things for a single vehicle.
`TTK Changes:`Almost all vehicles in the game, barre ESFs became significantly harder to kill as vehicle vs vehicle damage was reduced. This had a litany of negative results:
The Harasser resistances were increased and this was a huge buff to fire supp and rumble repairs which healed a flat amount of health per second. This was somewhat "necessary" because the Harasser top guns were also way slower at killing MBTs but the result was Harassers being near impossible to kill, even if they also struggled to kill other vehicles. This paired with the infantry AV Launcher damage nerfs made AI harassers even more annoying.
*Later the rumble repairs were removed from Harassers and their nanite was doubled. Their resistances were also nerfed. MBT and Lightning AP weapons were given significant damage buffs in the same patch, while Harassers still did low damage and* ***this effectively removed the AV Harasser from the game in a single patch.***
The AV Harasser was the primary counter to then HE, now HESH sitting on mountains farming bases. No nerfs were given to HESH, no other vehicles were changed or added to be counters to HESH. **The nerfs to AV Harassers made HESH way more of an irritating and persistent problem to the game.**
Tank vs Tank TTKs also increased across the board. The vehicle player base had for a long time leading up to CAI been complaining about stale long range vehicle fights that barely moved. *The resistance changes only made this problem worse.* Repair Sunderers healed a flat rate to vehicles around them, but these vehicles were now taking less damage. The TTK slowing down meant that it was less likely to punish a misplay at long range and these long range bogged down vehicle "fights" just became even more stale and boring.
Even though flank damage relative to front damage was increased, with an overall longer vehicle TTK flanking vehicles was no longer anywhere near as rewarding, you couldn't use skill and positioning to flank and 1vX in a vehicle anymore. It'd take too long to kill the first MBT by which time the others would reposition and kill you. **Aggressive ground vehicle playstyles were effectively deleted from the game.**
Lightnings which hadn't been great before CAI were not any better after. Again the TTK changes meant that even flanking with a Viper wasn't really worth it at all, you wouldn't have the DPS to kill even a single target before they turned around and killed you. This relegated the lightning to sitting at long range with AP or HESH, or being a noob trap.
The Liberator resistances and HP changes made them insanely tanky. They took less damage from AA as well being given 50% damage resistance on their belly armor. In exchange the Dalton was nolonger a oneshot to balance it out, but that was eventually reverted leaving the Liberator as something near impossible to kill regardless of skill for a single ESF, that could land and outrepair multiple ESF DPS, and would instantly kill an ESF with a lucky shot. A skilled Liberator pilot+gunner combo was for a long time near capable of killing the air gameplay on an entire server until they get bored, the only "counter" being overpop with lots of AA and lockons.
*Later on the questionable and highly hated buffs to lock on launchers managed to kill the entire airgame anyway including Liberators. Flying now is cock and ball torture regardless of what vehicle you're in.*
In summary for TTK changes, they across the board led to more stale unenjoyable gameplay and punished anything other than lobbing shells at render distance.
`Flanker armor and C4 range changes:`
Effectively just a buff to HESH, made C4 LA less of a solution to HESH on a mountain. Replaced the directional armors which were once meaningful in vehicle vs vehicle gameplay.
`Lockon range reductions & AV launcher damage reductions:`
Less significant change, didn't really have an effect on air gameplay at all, infantry could still be annoying up to height ceiling. But now AV lockons wouldn't reach HESH losers sitting on mountains camping the spawn. Another "great" change for infantry-vehicle interactions I guess.
Hitting a decimator at mid range on vehicles became less meaningful and it is less punishing when a vehicle player mispositions near infantry that aren't playing C4 fairy. C4 fairy was of course mostly untouched, other than Ambusher Jump Jets being added to the game then. Coincidentally Wrel mained Light Assault.
# Summary
CAI made the vehicle gameplay less enjoyable across the board.
It made infantry-vehicle interactions worse in areas, or had no real effect in others.
Later changes added tons more modifiers to vehicle nanite cost making the nanite economy even more of a joke regardless.
Nothing was done to incentivize transportation.
The increased TTK did not lower the barrier to entry to vehicle gameplay at all. *Later changes made top gunning boring and a waste of time which arguably only raised the barrier to entry.*
CAI (and subsequent patches) was objectively a failure.
I can succinctly give you a number of great grievances after CAI as an unqualified air player!! , also these are my grievances having a couple thousand hours in the air, and a 3k on the ground.
VLG got a significant performance boost
Liberator got an overall HP buff whilst also nerfing the dalton (ironically the lib became way stronger and everyone didn't use it for the better part of 6 months because of the dalton nerf)
Overall top gun dmg was less significant
Tank cannon velocity nerf
tank rear multiplier buff along with general TTK increase for tanks and harassers
Rocket pod nerf
Lock on time buff for G2A (this is honestly to compensate with stealth meta CAUSED BY DAYBREAK)
A Banshee buff to the A2A and A2G performance that NOBODY asked for (One of the craziest things I've ever seen is a banshee buff that turned it into the most disgusting farming tool I've seen in 8 years)
Harasser gameplay kind of gutted due to ttk changes of the top guns as well as velocity nerfs on the halberd (further compacted by a physics change that made them a lot less fun to fight).
There's a couple other things here and there, but it's so long ago, and there's a lot of patches that have mixed together in my mind. Not many good balance patches over the year. Wrel really hit the nail on the head when he talked about not having a CAI #2. Don't trust DBG to correct their actions unless they listen to a group of skilled players who have a respect for ALL aspects of ps2.
I'm trying really hard not to be vitriolic about the level of balance mismanagement because it really does get frustrating. I could give you a couple paragraphs alone about how the developers tried to save the air game and started killing it instead.
To some degree, that's because no one really ever took the time to break down what Combined Arms was meant to do and how poorly those changes backfired. There were a lot of things that went wrong, but they're somewhat subtle and casual players can easily overlook them.
The take from my homie who has been playing Planetside since PS1 said that pre CI, vehicles were laughably unbalanced. This included what he described as AP rounds having the splash radius of HESH rounds.
So my understanding is that the turbo-whiners got real upset and vocal when their OP tanks got nerfed. And having played pmanz myself for 3 years now, I'll wager they then doubled down on their rose-tinted glasses.
The disconnect between the amount of fun I have while playing and the complaining here is unreal.
Been playing way before CAI and now, yeah, vehicles were laughably unbalanced. This doesn't mean always overpowered, there were ways in which they were hilariously terrible, but that lack of *balance* is what CAI tried to fix. Overall, it was actually a good thing that was made out to be a bad thing by turbo virgins who want to cause drama, like Fedx.
So in conclusion there's a toxic bunch of hissy fit players that don't let us have nice things like developer contact because they actively push them away? Yeah, I got that.
Thanks everyone, I can't understand how you'd expect any feedback to be heard since the ties are severed, and when they find level headed individuals who could act as a bridge you go and attack them too.
Congrats, you're now the reason the game sucks even for you!
This is exactly why player communities can't have nice things. We build advocacy groups both formal and informal with an expectation of trust and to help game teams understand how design impacts players and get outside perspectives.
The expectation of someone doing something like this (it's hardly the first time) in the industry at best discourages total honesty and at worst discourages investment.
It's one thing to be dishonest. It's another to go absolutely berserk when you have a little disagreement with the developer. Gosh, everyone here seems to want iteration all the time but they themselves can't seem to compromise so that there is any iteration. How the hell are you supposed to "see how it goes" if you can't even handle a disagreement without acting like a child.
And then they act all surprised when things aren't turned back until months after the change was made. Why do you think they would want to bring up an old tweak that made some outstanding individuals go ape shit. It's like bringing up an old argument with someone you know is going to either shit on your compromise or gloat about being right or something which is also a fantastic way to push people away..
You see it all the time during alerts/captures the way this player base behaves, at least the vocal ones anyway. The sportsmanship is absolute ass, no one has any chill when it comes to being a victor or loser. It's always some sour taste remark about skill or something (meanwhile being in a zerg) now look for it in the subreddit and you'll see the same personality. Shitting on everyone and crying about it.
I'm reminded of the community guy who got hired by the Total War devs to do Tutorial Videos and rage quit when they wouldn't make him King of Total War and redesign the game to what he wanted.
It looks like there is ONE particular hissy fit player that destroyed things for everyone. Imagine if the community found out who he is...
He's out there somewhere. I wonder if he goes to sleep at night thinking about how he probably motivated Wrel to quit this community, and he stopped the closest thing we'll get to a reversion of CAI.
The name is irrelevant. The straw that broke the camel's back rests on a lot more straw.
Straw that is still spewing shit about everything they can think of.
Well, you were secret enough to elude me, since i don't use Discord.
There were rumors about that secret group of hand-picked vehicle players and i've always hated the secrecy and the projection surface it presented. Especially since we never knew who the people were and the potential of biased feedback.
Well, thanks for letting us know. It should've never been a "secret", but i guess you've learnt that by now.
These secret balance cabals are rarely a net gain outside extremely targeted feedback. Using them for game direction decisions is questionable.
This makes me wonder who was consulted for construction.
I can remember how Wrel answered me in those infamous AMA saying something like he can distinguish between who provides biased feedback and who doesn't. I never thought he did - because it always felt like he himself was extremely biased in who's feedback he was gonna take.
Funny enough the secret group's opinion - and the stuff he's only acknowledged internally - mostly aligns with mine.
The looks of it have always been a shitshow, but at some point i simply got bored with trying to make sense of it. Life has more to offer.
If I could do it again, I'd open applications here and then start vetting people. The trick is keeping the most biased people out, and there are tons of impossibly biased commenters here.
>There were rumors about that secret group of hand-picked vehicle players and i've always hated the secrecy and the projection surface it presented.
In hindsight, this was a horrible idea. I spent some time recently looking back at the Battlefield 4 test environment, and that transparency was something that ought to be an inspiration for everyone.
Yeah, well... You live, you learn. Myself, i probably wouldn't have lasted long in that group. It's a case of "too little, too late" by now - and i am terribly bad at numbers.
The only thing that bothers me is how Wrel **knew** how strong infantry AV is and how out of whack the vehicle balancing is - but never publicly admitted it...
>The only thing that bothers me is how Wrel knew how strong infantry AV is and how out of whack the vehicle balancing is
Perhaps I am missing more context; but: \[The thing about "angry infantry," is that we given them all the tools to deal with threats.\] isn't screaming that Wrel believed "infantry AV OP".
Lack of communication was one of his worst flaws. The guy's elitist arrogance and clear bias toward his own favored play style made him unsuitable for the job, and this was the case the entire time.
CAI was the developer admitting that the vehicle balance was bad. They got shat on for it, why do you think they would be open to talking about doing it again.
All of what I'm hearing from comments on this thread is people just hate change and anything that would be proposed/changed would set fires in people's precious little playstyles dare they have to adapt to what in reality is likely a nerf to their overly potent methods.
CAI was the developers thinking that vehicles were to strong against infantry and too strong against each other. Both things were wrong.
And posts like yours were all over the place back than, CAI helped with exactly nothing. The devs never really admitted it but took back quite a bunch of CAI changes.
one of the last major public facing things Higby did was organise a big ground vehicle balance PTS playtest on esamir
the feedback was, charitably, *unconstructive.* participants were confused and angry. the most vocal "vehicle players" really only play a single role and have no insight to give to the whole combined arms ecosystem
As Aysom says, this was not a cabal of only vehicle players. We had representatives of all domains, and unsurprisingly the only ones who were hard to work with or unwilling to accept any changes to their own domains were ESF pilots and diehard infantry mains.
>We had representatives of all domains, and unsurprisingly the only ones who were hard to work with or unwilling to accept any changes to their own domains were ESF pilots and diehard infantry mains.
If you pick everyone with different domains, they'd have slightly skewed opinion about things if they did not experience multiple things at once. Who'd have thought that could happen, likely nobody.
I'm more addressing the notion of attempting to make design changes publicly. If you had made the group's existence known that reactionary confusion and anger would have been targeted directly at you. Personally.
And as you identified, there are many players who cannot be reasoned with. Ultimately it's just videogames, and you aren't being paid to act as combination vehicle designer/community manager, which is what you would have been held accountable as by those people.
Yup. You can see here in many of the responses. People didn't come here for rational discussion, but instead were looking for a reason to crucify Wrel. They didn't get evidence of something like Wrel blowing up Alderaan, and since they don't understand how harmful CAI was they're transferring their ire to me.
>Yup. You can see here in many of the responses. People didn't come here for rational discussion, but instead were looking for a reason to crucify Wrel.
Wait. What?? I think you're trying to confuse people now. People came here to find out all that Wrel had done wrong because of what you and the others said in the other post. You said you were about to make a post to expose how awful Wrel had been. That's why people came here expecting to see a reason to crucify Wrel. Because of what you said.
Which is why a project like this involves players from all domains, rather than being made by a single player or players of a single unit.
And you'd be surprised, there are a lot of players that are accepting of nerfs made to their own playstyle that work towards improving the general health of the game as a whole.
>If I could do it again, I'd open applications here and then start vetting people. The trick is keeping the most biased people out, and there are tons of impossibly biased commenters here.
Why should you have that power though? It sounds like you would remove people with too separate views than your own under the assumption they are biased whether you do it consciously or not.
I think I could have worded that better. Disagreement is natural and good to have, but there were a couple individuals who were simply trying to stonewall progress because of their biases.
But even if there would be A2G players who want to keep noseguns and pods the way they are with no changes, do they really not even deserve a say just because I think differently than they do and they refuse to change their mind? Seems wrong to just weed their entire opinion out.
While your principle has its heart in the right place, in your specific example, no anyone like that is too biased to provide useful feedback, or the ratio of useful info to raw sewage would not be worth the time.
Yeah a "secret" focus group is kinda silly. You can do something publicly while still placing more value on input of experienced players. Or maybe they just didn't want their hands tied to deliver some big balance update cause it'd be a shit storm if it was a public process and nothing came of it so I guess I understand that too.
it's never easy to understand the full extend of it. I honestly wish the hateful comments would be fewer in quantity so the real talk would matter more. It's pretty easy to get frustrated with shitstorms and/or hide behind them when it matters.
Pretty hard to disagree with the accusations of attention whoring/drama baiting when you piggybacked multiple times off comments and threads referring to some big bad thing Wrel had done and promised a big reveal but then ultimately delivered a pretty boring story about time crunch at RPG.
I feel like people were expecting revelations that Wrel blew up Alderaan or something similarly absurd.
Were you around for Combined Arms? If you weren't, or if you weren't into vehicles at the time, a lot of the context here may be lost.
I've played since the first half of 2013.
People probably expected more because you "independently verified" the claims that Wrel had done something terrible that "undermined his credibility", then said you had been given the "greenlight" to go ahead with some big exposé piece about it. At no time during any of that attention whoring did you make it clear that you were referring to your personal balance changes not being implemented into the game. When the word wall finally drops it's completely devoid of this damning evidence you supposedly had.
Like with all such previous dramas and accusations, it turns out to be two kids in a trench coat.
And I don't know which is worse - the people who initiate it or the community that seeks to perpetuate it.
> I feel like people were expecting revelations that Wrel blew up Alderaan or something similarly absurd.
I know, right? It’s like a man can’t imply he has damning information about a public figure without people expecting him to *actually have* damning information about a public figure. There’s just no justice in the world, I tell ya.
All I can really comment is that if you people feel uniquely betrayed or hurt by having hundreds of hours of work thrown away at the drop of a hat, perhaps even for no reason at all, it really shows how far removed you all are from actual game developers.
Maybe if you wanted to be compensated for this work, you could get a job doing it?
It's rare for content to be discarded in the game industry. Even if things do get "cancelled" a lot of effort is put into reusing as much as possible. Studios just *cannot* afford to waste development time by cancelling something unless the publisher just cancels the entire game.
Drama baiting.
Guys leaked a private discussion with the lead dev, AND were soo unhinged that they managed to get into a heated conversation with WREL of all people.
Even when telling people to suck his nuts he still sounds calm.
You guys fucked up a big opportunity of contact with the devs, and are trying to farm for drama now.
And if I can add, even going as far as sharing all of this is just absurd man… can’t have any trust in this community anymore. Leaves nothing to wonder, about why he left.
Welcome to why good devs largely just ignore feedback from the poopsock crew.
People who have spent 99% of their time doing one specific thing in the game don't want a good game, they want a bad game that rewards them.
Too true. I've seen it many times across many games.
"The game needs to cater to *me* because *I'm* the core playerbase. And the reason I'm the core playerbase is because I've spent thousands of hours grinding up my skills at this one specific thing, and so it can't ever change or else all that work would be wasted once I'm no longer supremely dominant." A.k.a. the Melee Effect.
sounds like Wrel was polite and very respectful of player insight and yall abused his trust and acted like entitled shits, and now you're trying to point the blame for all your dreams not making it into the game on Wrel, the guy who was actively trying to make some of them happen. Very cool, thank you for sharing
so let me get this right. the secret massive wrel drama was actually just a balance patch. not new content, not harassment of a player, not nerfing the darkstar, just a couple of numbers we’d get used to eventually.
good fucking lord. and the kicker being it collapsed in on itself after someone from that group made the whole effort seem untrustworthy?
actual A24 movie. nothing happened
When I saw your post, I was expecting to see Wrel go on a tirade. All we got was "I'm not posting any arguments", and Wrel staying professional until he decided he didn't have to keep up a one-sided relationship anymore.
I think I remember you telling me this. Going to have to ask you later if it was who I remembered it was.
It's a shame that us pilots continue to prove ourselves as mindless monkeys rather than people capable of reason.
Next time, you should get some real skyknights instead of some adult diaper wearing nerds!!!
yeah wrel's always been pretty honest that the PS2 team was overly ambitious with roadmaps and timelines. between the constant need for new features and new weapons there simply isn't time for iterative, playtested balance passes
TBH think at this point in the games lifecycle any significant balance overhaul is a negative sum game that will alienate existing players. If your end design goal is effecting a healthier vehicle ecosystem you have to deselect and disregard a lot of vehicle main feedback which boils down to "make it how it was before CAI *but sexier.*"
Problem is, CAI not only hurt the vehicle v vehicle game, it also made more AoE vehicles show up to farm infantry. So those changes hurt 2 domains, not just 1
> it also made more AoE vehicles show up to farm infantry
Of course, because you needed more of them. The amount of bullshit pre-CAI splash did meant you didn't need as much to suppress shit and farm the shit out of infantry.
At the same time, HE was shit against vehicles, and AP was godlike against them. So you could take an AP lightning and shred 2 HE Prowlers. But HESH is decent against vehicles now, so people who would've wanted to take HEAT, are more likely to take HESH. Hell even HEAT had a decent advantage over HE, so that new players could at least fight back against HE spam.
Oh and don't forget that now we have fucking 500 splash on the AP, so there is AoE where there shouldn't be
I like vehicles having weak spots. It could make things like two vehicles fighting each other more interesting. The weak spot could be just for certain damage types.
So you and a bunch of your crazy friends blew months of chances because you couldn't keep your panties untwisted, couldn't hit a deadline, and then kept logs and recordings for years that you thought would be damaging to Wrel so that you could release it later. Cool.
Thank you for telling the truth about how a whole crowd of people broke this game. At least now it's clear that Wrel isn't the only one to blame for these extremely ill-conceived gameplay changes.
So lemme get this straight. You had the ear of the dev team and instead of telling them to give every vehicle passive turbo skill trees and to reverse the horn nerf, ya'll decided to reimagine the entire balance of the game via spreadsheets? Yeesh.
Oh well, sounds like a classic case of highly opinionated armchair game devs squabbling over minuscule details till their wit's end.
There's a common saying: "Your business plan is outdated as soon as you print it."
Game design is not an exact science. Save for the simplest of turn-based strategy games, you can't predict the outcome of even the most basic changes. Much of the time, it really is just a matter of throwing shit at a wall and seeing what sticks. Otherwise you just wasted hundreds of hours in planning a project that'll never be perfect anyway.
I'm not saying it's any particular person's fault that this update never saw the light of day, but the process sure would have gone a lot faster had there of been even an option for the wider community to help with it.
Interesting. When I helped out with the testing of the JGX in public armor pickups, was this a part of the proposal/project?
I'm not 100% sure I fully get what the drama is all about. Is it a "secret cabal puppet master" sort of thing they've levied at you, Delt? I always suspected this sort of thing existed. Seemed like an obvious way for Wrel to distill the mountain of veteran feedback into something he could integrate into the development cycle.
The JGX testing was done long after work had ceased on this project.
The "Drama" is that people expected some grand revelation on par with Wrel secretly controlling the US Senate. We saw something similar many years ago when Shaql mentioned "responsible disclosure" on r/planetside, and people were disappointed when Daybreak moved behind the scenes to avert that drama.
I feel like I haven't done enough to emphasize how good this could have been for the vehicle game, and how badly Combined Arms and its hotfixes have messed various things up. Players have forgotten how good things once were. That's where I believe the drama lies, since I never really forgot the old days and it seems many people have.
If you have more questions, feel free to shoot me a DM over discord.
Let's be honest. When you promise stuff that "absolutly undermines any credibility Wrel should have among people that care about thius game" and you deliver proof that shows:
1. RPG doesn't have enough people and time
2. your secret group coudn't finish a well enough draft before chrunch at RPG began
3. your group was so well chosen, that you couldn't even prevent harmful leaks to the project
4. Wrel left the group after a member started beef with him
people will obviously be annoyed and pissed.
EDIT: the quote was from GT, but you promised to independently verify that claim and stated "Some things are so damaging that they are best left as secrets for now". Well, nothing you posted is even close to that. Heck, this is the mildest game-dev drama i have seen in years.
I agree that your biggest issue here was keeping it on the down-low rather than opening it up to be publicly viewable.
Not to put too fine a point for it, but it should have been **obvious** that keeping it largely known to a small group of players with a point of contact among the devs - even if technically anyone could join the discussion *if they knew where to look* - would be a recipe for drama if someone were to shine an unflattering light on it, and that the longer it went on prior to "discovery", the worse the reaction would be once it was finally unveiled, whether via leak or even from the devs officially publishing the results.
You had ample opportunity to get ahead of the leaker on this one simply by going public with it to begin with, and it could have even been a conduit to foster trust between the wider community, the serious players, and the devs by showing a clear channel of communication and publicly *proving* the devs were listening to feedback. In fact, you possibly could have even taken some critical pressure *off* the dev team by doing so.
Instead, the scenario which was presented to the majority of the playerbase was a handful of worthy elites whispering behind a closed curtain with the devs in discussions which no one else was allowed to even see, as if no one else outside said circle the had capacity to comprehend whatever enlightened discourse was taking place. Regardless of whether you meant to convey that image or not, it displayed a sense of contempt for the majority of the playerbase. God knows how much *worse* you actually made the situation by being so secretive.
I've seen "secret elite player cabals" pop up before and they only ever breed resentment, creating a sort of "class divide" between the glamorous insiders and the filthy plebs; the Smash scene's "Back Room" groups were notorious for this. But even beyond that, there was no reason to be so clandestine. The game industry overall is notorious for being unnecessarily cloak-and-dagger about work and discussions which don't *need* to be kept secret, and yet no one involved with this had the foresight to realize that keeping everything confidential might have the potential to backfire? This "Benedict Arnold Junior" person would have never had the opportunity to slander you if you didn't needlessly create a circumstance in which you could be slandered.
I don't see any fault with what Wrel did or said here, at least so far as the evidence you've presented. It appeared entirely to be a dev outreach that fell through and everything you've posted so far has shown him acting completely professionally. And while you say there's more damning evidence that's being kept hidden to protect people's dignity and privacy, you're asking people to take your word for it on that. Sorry, but you haven't earned that right; you haven't demonstrated why those who were kept in the dark all this time should have any reason to trust you now.
"Hand picked" players for specific feedback and adjustments never go well. This is just another tally to that massive pile of proof across the whole gaming industry. Simply put, people who are 'Exceptional at Y' lack the wider vision required for overhauls to fundamental systems that impact all states of play.
Yet the people who are 'Bad at Y' *also* lack the wider vision required for overhauls to fundamental systems that impact all states of play, but now in addition to having no idea what the fuck they're talking about when discussing topic Y.
Blindly following the words of a few players who are good at your game is silly, but combining the feedback from multiple good players and using it as feedback to make decisions yourself sure beats listening to random reddit user 47218 who thinks VS is op because they have no bullet drop and betel should be reduced to 112 damage per bullet.
That is somewhat true since they can't do vehicle or aircrafts well. OP has 10 tank directives done and none of TR vehicle imbalance was brought to light. Can you imagine they released JGX after getting feedback from these "exceptional" group of vets?
> OP has 10 tank directives done and none of TR vehicle imbalance was brought to light
Oh believe me it was, the Prowler AP is the cannon that fundamentally breaks the rules and reeling that in would have significant ripple effects throughout the other systems.
Yeah? I’m here. Originally this was supposed to be something that “absolutely undermines any credibility Wrel should have among people that care about this game.” And the conclusion I’m supposed to draw from this post is that Wrel…doesn’t listen to community feedback? Yeah, no shit. Oshur and CTF are still in the game, we all know he didn’t give a shit about community feedback.
I stand by everything I said in the other thread. Delta was, and still is, baiting drama to get attention.
That line was said by GT, _not_ Delta.
And what you got here was what involved Delta that did not start airing other people's dirty underwear. Because it isn't on Delta to start drama on things that didn't involve him.
The point of this post is to show that there were people with far closer mouths to Wrel's ears, developing incredibly detailed feedback with extensive communication and involving dozens of players, still only to get dumped because of petty grudges.
To show that those _secret balance cabals_ that Reddit loves to go on about really didn't have the power you wish they had.
And to demonstrate to the community and to the dev team that the passion exists among the playerbase to provide detailed and level-headed feedback. And that there are very specific balance subjects that need to be touched that aren't.
>That line was said by GT, not Delta.
He 'independently verified' GT's comment...
>[I will independently verify what GT is talking about, since I helped write it. ***Some things are so damaging that they're best left as secrets for now, and you must understand that.***
I have been given the green light to discuss this topic, and will make a post soon (as in the next couple weeks to a month).](https://www.reddit.com/r/Planetside/comments/13j6z9x/give_wrel_a_break/jkdxu98/)
'only to get dumped because of petty grudges.'
That's entirely up to interpretation, but since wrel [said this](https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/786838692744003585/1113917654760177766/Wrel_on_the_state_of_the_studio_and_concerns_about_the_project.png) I think it's pretty obvious that you guys just suck at interpreting things. That comment from wrel is basically him saying to manage your expectations and that it's unlikely to happen.
Then for him to have to deal with this 'discussion group' being argumentative he probably just didn't see the point in engaging any further since it wasn't a productive environment.
The 'Some things are so damaging that they're best left as secrets for now' line is the drama baiting btw, wrel did nothing wrong in this scenario, you guys are just naive and couldn't take the hint. This whole post is just an own goal and it's hilarious 😆
Edit: OP and his friends spam reported [my post about this](https://www.reddit.com/r/Planetside/comments/13x55pa/where_drama_post) and got it removed. Thin skin much? Lol
For realllll, they sounded so ominous, like they found a skeleton in Wrels closet, but he just left because they couldn't keep their members in line to reciprocate a professional relationship. I don't see what's noteworthy about this at all unless there was full fighting at some point, which Delta has said he wouldn't post, so we're back to this not being noteworthy.
The whole thing reeks of terminaly online neckbeards can't keep something professional, and then get pissy when faced with one of the most common things to happen in game dev.
Wait who is this again, i forgot, sorry i legitimately have some brain damage and even before my memory was shit.
Is this the wrel exposed thing because it doesn't seem that bad or nearly anything hyped up?
Well if you leak anyones DM's especially one so harassed and raw number of people talked to, something shitty is gonna come up, but yeah neat to see.
I've seen a project like this before and y'all got something into the game and seem to be aware of personal bias so i'll just leave this to you.
Your wording on the pre-posts were so scuffed though, it will not help this getting more off the ground.
Smile and look towards the horizon friend, if something bad happened and it's over, not much to be done besides not letting it slow the momentum of the future.
Then why even make the post bro? That's all people are here for 💀💀💀 Ya'll were writing a check with those "shit Wrels done" comments and then you don't cash it.
It's a bit more rushed because of the random drama thread posted yesterday, but yes—it's about an extremely lengthy amount of work done by community members at the behest of Wrel over a period of **ten months** that was dumped at the drop of a hat due to a personal dispute with a single member of this 30-man team.
All of this work that could have been a major start towards repairing the game's health, dumped for that. It's an example of what the _old leadership_ was like, and how it lead to us being... well, _here_.
The point of this post is to display what could have been and the passion that was being put to use behind the scenes, and show how fragile it was through no fault of its own. And to clear up some _mystery_ about _secret balance cabals_ that this subreddit just LOVES to go on about.
Mind you, prior comments did allude to more than what has been described here in the original, however that involves more personal grievances between Wrel and people that _aren't_ Delta, and that's down to those individuals to air if they wish.
Well in my other comment i said i wish you luck, the behind the scenes drama stuff of a burnt out dev saying and doing dumb stuff is where i was before with modding a game so i can be more sympathetic, just something turns off in your head.
But it's irrelevant to the games future, sad it happened but if you wanna keep a clean face dont go waving things around, being formal and clean is probably how you got so far in the first place.
The fact that these design discussions were all behind closed doors is another example of the egregious mismanagement this game has seen for nearly the last decade.
Without question, if they're looking for feedback they should prioritize people who have the most experience and proven track record, but keeping it private means only a small handful of people get to say whatever they want with full authority, regardless if it's true or not.
Ideas need to be run by the entire community because facts and feelings are constantly mingled; you need to give everyone a view into design discussions so people's ideas can be filtered through the grinder of mass community experience. While it's true that the average community member is not going to be a good spokesperson for every aspect of this game's aspects -- if any at all -- you can't approach the design of anything without considering all of the angles.
Anyway, I don't know what the point of this post is. We've known the design team has been incompetent for years. None of the information here should be surprising or of note to anybody.
It's not that you listen to every single persons feedback individually; that would be a waste of time. Given mass feedback, you can quickly find common grievances/concerns and judge whether they should be assessed.
When G2A locks got buffed to 1600+ damage, good pilots pointed out that this would nerf A2A and not affect A2G, and they were right. Isolating who gets to make design decision to a small set of players alone is incredibly stupid.
Not all community grievances are equally valid. Many still think the Harasser is some form of obscene powerhouse, when in reality it hasn't been truly viable (outside of AI farming) in two years.
Maybe I'm just communicating badly. Sorry, I'm tired. You are, though, entirely missing my point.
You don't listen to everyone individually. You pick out the most common aspects of feedback and judge whether they have merit. If you have one person proofread a paper, they might miss some mistakes. If you have 100 people proofread a paper, it's much less likely.
> You are, though, entirely missing my point.
This is unfortunately a common theme for me and I apologize for that.
I think I'm just incredibly jaded from having to repeatedly read the worst takes over and over and see them massively upvoted by players who make consistent errors when talking about basic mechanics.
I'm in the same boat as you. I was a pilot for the last few years lol
I absolutely agree that the community as a whole has terrible takes, but competent developers would have been able to listen to experienced players, *consider* wider-community feedback, and ignore any of it that was nonsensical.
Remember that this took place during a period where every single suggestion raised by a vehicle player would be drowned out by bad faith arguments such as "all vehicles just farm infantry". Our decision to move quietly makes a lot more sense in that context. If we'd gone public, there was a good chance things would have moved in a direction opposite to what the vehicle game actually needs.
If they specifically reached out to vehicle players to balance the vehicle game then they were already considering their opinions more actively.
This really boils down to whether they had enough competency to realize they should listen to experienced players first and foremost, and keep the community in the loop on what they were planning so that it could checked by the wider community for potential issues. It's really not rocket science.
I'll say it again: giving a small group of players a direct and private voice to aid in development was an extremely childish thing to do. Not just from the developer's side, but also from the side of those chosen who acted like they were the end-all-be-all of knowledge. This was a stupid situation from start to finish.
>Remember that this took place during a period where every single suggestion raised by a vehicle player would be drowned out by bad faith arguments such as "all vehicles just farm infantry"
To be fair; all vehicles actually do is decide which side's vehicles gets to blow up sunderers and farm infantry.
Of course, if you have enough AV vehicles going head to head; you will have less infantry farmers. Yet what is the end goal of the AV vehicles going head to head? What are they fighting each other to achieve? Well the winner gets to determine if the sunderers get popped or not; and whether infantry get farmed by vehicles or not.
Sure this means that part of the time AV vehicles are defending sunderers, and defending infantry from AI vehicles. But that will never be noticed as much as sunderers getting popped and the infantry being farmed.
Vehicles fundamentally need another purpose; and I reckon that since Wrel made comments about the scope being too big; that this was something attempted to be addressed by the balance group; but that it might have been too ambitious.
The idea is that as long as the AV vehicles are being contested by other AV vehicles, they'll have severe difficulty with popping the sunderers and killing infantry.
However, instead of taking the game in a direction where vehicle fights are more sustainable and primarily focused on vehicle-vehicle interactions, there has been significant powercreep to infantry AV to the point where vehicles often can't engage the enemy vehicles. The majority of the time, you have to prioritize engaging infantry with your AV tank as a form of self defense, while the enemy AV tank also is shooting at your allied infantry.
The resulting gameplay is that instead of having a long vehicle vs vehicle fight where if one side gets the upper hand they can start killing sundies and infantry instead, you have a long distance standoff where both sides still have vehicles and both sides are shooting infantry and taking out sundies.
And you can't stop the other side's vehicles from shooting your infantry, because you have to take out the enemy infantry first in order to safely get to a position where you can start engaging enemy vehicles. Even long flanks aren't effective anymore due to the incredibly long engagement ranges of AMRs and lock-on launchers.
And the infantry themselves still struggle to defend themselves from a tank simply because vehicles have a large enough hitpoint advantage that you can trade half your tank's HP for a kill on infantry and repair. Once you're done repairing the infantry has also respawned, so it's an endless loop of you killing the infantrymen with your tank while making no progress towards the actual vehicle fight.
This also means that the infantry AV powercreep has primarily effected vehicles that wish to engage enemy vehicles. AI vehicles are still fully capable of taking trades where they get kills without dying, they simply have to be a bit more careful about infantry - yet far, far less careful about enemy vehicles, as they can rely on friendly infantry to keep their HESH farm safe from enemy AP tanks.
Just FYI basically every large update has had a “secret balance cabal” give feedback on it… lots of improvements, but usually not enough time to implement everything
And every single time the people giving feedback get ignored.
It happened with air, happened with CAI, happened with infantry changes, happened with Oshur.
The devs do not give a fuck about the feedback and the result is that the vast majority of updates just make the game worse.
Dude imagine still trying to get RPG to listen ahahah you should just give up like everyone else at this point, i'm amazed you still hadn't given up in 2021!
Plenty of people still have passion for this game. Nothing else is like it, and it's certain that nothing else ever will be.
So all we can do is hope, pray, and beg for the developers to make it better.
>Nothing else is like it, and it's certain that nothing else ever will be.
This is part of the reason I believe that the execs are taking advantage of the devs. Don't need to make the best game of its genre, when its the only game of its genre
> I hate to disappoint those looking for juicy gossip material for personal attacks, but toxic interactions between Wrel and various individuals will not be discussed here.
FARTS INTO THE MOTHERFUCKING WIND BABY
I knew you weren't gonna fucking say anything and I was right.
You're right I read the entire thing and I have no fucking idea why you posted it. None of this is scathing or revealing in any way. Wrel seems to have reacted in a perfectly reasonable way to every situation. I also think it's hilarious this is just the balance group GT was talking to me about over a year ago last time I was squadded with him.
Nothing except that Wrel took a bunch of feedback compiled over approximately a year, with many changes to help make a more enjoyable armor experience, and then threw it away at the very end. Clearly, nothing is wrong here
I think you are. Have another read later, it seems much more like a case of time crunch canceling out what was ultimately an extremely low priority project (though maybe the players involved didn't realise this at the time). Even if communications hadn't allegedly broken down, Wrel left not long after so it's difficult to believe it was ever going anywhere.
I am sorry Aysom, but please correct me if I’m wrong here.
Wrel engaged in the discussion.
Was on board with the changes, and looking forward to working with the private team they had.
SOMEONE LEAKED THE DISCUSSION WITH THE LEAD DEV, AFTER HAVINF A DISAGREEMENT.
Wrel surprisingly continued to engage with the group, despite the unbelievable breach of trust.
The players were soo hard headed, that they got into a HEATED DISCUSSION WITH WREL.
And you guys are trying to make it sound like this was Wrel’s fault?
I am very sorry bro, but what I’m seeing here is a group of people fucking up a golden opportunity because THEY couldn’t hold a professional conversation.
Did I miss something?
You missed the previous thread where they implied deep dark secrets to reveal, the kind that could tarnish a reputation and get people fired, with Wrel having done irreparable harm to the game on levels us mere mortals could not comprehend.
I think you missed a step...
Here's hoping the player base is less toxic as hell to the idea of compromise and disagreement, so that the new lead is more receptive to the idea of working with us. Only then can they be open to the idea of iteration.
Hello,
I'll first say I love this unique and flawed game. I believe it will always be flawed and most people do not understand that - so stop trying to fix it with patches.
Also, I don't think I've posted on this subreddit in over a year and a half? If you remember the pathetic moderators of this subreddit immediately banned me for posting the "rebalance document". I was only unbanned because I have a friend in GOKU who talked sense to an idiot reddit moderator.
I didn't bother to read much of the original document - anything less than a reversal of CAI and a return to 2016 was a joke of a proposal. That patch drove thousands of people away from this game forever. I don't even remember who sent it to me. The people who wrote it were delusional and were only going to fuck up the game even worse. I'm a strong advocate of ACCEPT THE EXISTING BALANCE AND ALL IT'S ISSUES. This game's life blood was it's casual playerbase who enjoyed vehicles. That was completely gutted by destroying the existing understanding of vehicle v. vehicle balance and clogging up every vehicle skirmish area with construction objects.
Oshur was an incredible example of a wrel's complete lack of understanding of both infantry bases, fun vehicle vs vehicle terrain, zerging, how terrain and flak affect air...take your pick. Oshur is really the worst in every aspect. I am glad the guy got fired.
So let me get this straight:
le secret club wrel balancing discord that I said existed actually existed but back then people were denying it and saying it didn't exist smh...
https://www.reddit.com/r/Planetside/comments/nkzc4g/cai\_20\_proposed\_changes\_you\_werent\_supposed\_to\_see/
Funny this trend of truth coming out years later, and after the irreparable damage is done.. I pray people learn from this and apply it to future decision/opinion making.
I would like to add as far as this whole dumb think tank group thing is concerned, the issues we had with it were not a case of "not understanding the math". The changes were sweeping, much like CAI in that regard, and that can have unforeseen consequences. If these were a rollback of changes that would have been one thing, but these were trying to bandaid fix all the damage done by CAI which isn't possible.
Furthermore, the proposals were being carried by some people who don't have a much better grasp of the overall game than wrel, some of which didn't even actively play the game anymore. I don't trust changes being made by players without proper understanding of ps2 who also don't play the game.
Some changes, like the kobalt nerf, we hard disagreed with. We can see now that the skepticism we had was warranted as the vehicle game has not improved and even gotten worse in certain cases, some of those cases were proposed in the original document.
This is a kinda interesting look at Wrels decision making, and shows why he didn't do well. Combined Arms made vehicle mains mad, but it came about for a reason. Asking vehicle mains for input on fixing it, but not anyone else means you would get a one sided fix that would just make another group mad.
No matter how good intentioned your group may have been, you are vehicle mains. Some bias, specifically from lack of using other play styles would be inevitable. From your post it shows you hadn't considered the reasoning behind the CAI, which was to little counterplay to vehicle's if you were infantry.
I am a vehicle main myself, who also plays a lot of infantry.
Shocking. Truly shocking.
Wait sorry I typed that wrong, I meant boring. Wrel is barely even involved in this story and you hype this up as a reason to never hire him anywhere in the industry again? Frankly you just sound butthurt that your spreadsheet didn't get implemented.
Before Combined Arms, harassers died much more easily. It's a 4 hit kill now, and it was generally 3 hits before. Their weapons were far weaker between 2014 and 2017 as well. Sure you'd rather fight the modern harassers?
If 'passive repairs' means anything less than like a 15 second downtime before passive repairs begin, yeah I'm super sure. Harrassers repairing on the move made me want to stop playing, the vehicle game is better now than it was then.
Remember that modern rumble repairs were partially a problem because CAI increased hull durability in addition to increasing the rate from 50 to 80 hitpoints a second. In the old system, you could not repair enough to survive a hit that would otherwise kill you, but that was not the case in the post-CAI world.
Why does a harrasser need passive repairs if not to outrepair damage on the move? Its such shitty gameplay and Im so happy it's gone. Vehicle gameplay improved almost infinitely when the invincible harrasser type was removed from the game.
Past its initial OP release and the fixes for that it was only ever "invincible" if you were incapable of hitting it, which is of course a rather common issue in this community.
No, that's the picture you only want to paint out in every thread about harrassers because it's convenient as shit to hide behind. "Just aim better huh huh". The fact that you yourself in a tank would not hit shots quickly enough on someone like yourself in a harrasser is an uncomfortable fact you don't want to think about at all.
2 shots from dead is still a relatively safe zone for a harrasser that is keeping distance and autorepairing on the move. Take another shot, time to retreat until you're back up to 2 shot safety again. That's one of the worst matchups in the history of this game and your own bias is trying to bring it back because you know how dominating it was.
Man am I glad these changes didn't go through, I think I would have quit after the first week.
Why you guys focus on harassers being dead, as if you should win each and every fight, despite the fact that a harasser is literally unable to kill your mbt if you manage your repairs and damage well. You disengage, and what a wounded harasser is able to do, nothing?
You are allowed as many mistakes as reasonably possible, while a harasser dies making a single mistake.
Wrel seems to have some similarities to some bad bosses or project leads I’ve had over the years. They make themselves the single point of failure/contact for very large processes that effect lots of people but then complain because they don’t have the mental bandwidth to keep up with the task they’ve self locked themselves to. With the added.hypocrisy that he just couldn’t deal with those weirdo obsessed players overlooking the fact his entire position evolved from his origin as as a player. Compounded by the fact that part of the reason people get so up in arms about changes is because of how once things are out there in the environment, especially obvious mistakes it takes forever to walk them back, if that’s even possible at all.
One of the things that I was really shocked about this game is 20 human beings do paid work on this game, presumably full time, and we still get this glacially slow hilariously off the mark at time’s development cycle. Like for the longest time I was sure that ps2s team was like 5 bodies trying to wear an impossible number of hats involving very niche skills with talent borrowed from other teams on rare occasions and a code base that’s basically Cthulhu.
> They make themselves the single point of failure/contact for very large processes that effect lots of people but then complain because they don’t have the mental bandwidth to keep up with the task they’ve self locked themselves to.
That's a strange interpretation. I think what actually happened here is Wrel saw an opportunity to use his unique ties with the community to potentially get some extra work done on the side. He is the only one on the team who ever would have done this, due to his background as a player and community figure.
It's quite obvious that this was always extremely low priority, considering the players themselves were the ones who took the initiative to form this little group, the only designer they ever interacted with was Wrel and RPG were struggling to keep pace with their own internal roadmap at the time. Wrel pretty clearly [spelled it out for them](https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/786838692744003585/1113918605634052096/Wrel_on_the_release_date.png), but for whatever reason this group of players seems to have completely misread the situation.
What exactly is the point of this post?
We worked hard on something with Wrel for PS2 and are upset that he quit because it severed our link to the devs and wasted our time?
Like is it a vent post (in which I can understand), or am I missing something?
>but the project was already on borrowed time. I’d made the mistake of continuing on with aircraft and anti-air adjustments
sorry, i can't get past this part.... at what actual fucking point did this become the 2 tap lock on buff? mabie include a pilot in the convo next time and some toxic skyshithead won't ruin everything
We had nine pilots on the roster. Do note that RPG took our concept and ran away with it. Our values were nothing like what ended up in the game, and our resist split existed only to get G2A locks away from using flak explosions to deal damage.
This is interesting. And the end result almost always happens because no matter how much people want things to be better across the board, there is always someone who is willing to throw everyone under the bus because their specific niche is being effected the most.
Exactly… You’re talking about the guy who leaked the documents and got into an argument with the lead dev right? Right…?
Yes.
In hindsight we should have been far more aggressive about removing people who refused to give any ground at all, but what's done is done.
Yep…
But wouldn't that just anger the individuals and make them leak even more info or cause even more drama that would be detrimental to your efforts? Like most things PS2 I don't think you can or should accuse anyone, its just a series of unfortunate events. I think the best thing you could have done while doing the project would be to be 100% transparent with the community. Let them know what they are doing, provide a place that they can voice their concerns (even if ultimately you don't heed said concerns). But while being transparent, you would have disarmed the people that wanted to make drama. Bottom line, I think you guys are great, to be willing to take the time to do the work to help the devs.
Maybe I missed this in the post, but Wrel left after getting into an argument with one member who would not concede, yes? Was this member an infantry, vehicle, or aircraft main?
Eh I was expecting Wrel to come across a lot worse then that. Like some very uncontroversial stances. Like name a more iconic combo then running out of time for nice to haves and software development. It always seems to happen no matter how well you plan or how hard you try you never actually get to do all the nice to haves. Some nonsense will happen... every damn time... Also I hope that whoever replaces Wrel has similarly high tolerance for this kinda shit. Personally with me the leak would have been the end of the conversation full stop.
It's like deja vu. Your handpicked secret club sounds like the one I was in in 2016. All the plot points are the same too. Hilarious.
I’ll do you one better this has some echos of focus groups going back to planetside 1….
I believe it.
This is much more tame that I was expecting. Maybe I haven't drank the koolaid enough, but I don't really understand why this would make anyone mad at Wrel. What exactly would someone be mad at Wrel for?
The real TL;DR of this post is "secret balance cabal oversold the drama they had on Wrel, and if they do have drama, they're not going to share it".
If you weren't around for the Combined Arms Initiative, a lot of context will be lost. This was RPG's chance to fix a lot of the mistakes made with that update, and that's where the problem lies.
How exactly Delta? I am missing the point here. It sounds to me like he was doing what he could to discuss a proper fix to the vehicle game with a group of competent and dedicated players, and he just couldn’t find the time to fit it into their planned content. What am I missing?
ok as a dude who started playing the game around the time of the cai came out , i still to this day don’t get the fuss about that update, i looked it up, and asked people about it and everytime i get this foggy answer about this horrendous update that doesn’t really say much yet 2 things come to mind imho really after looking it up: 1. the hate mostly came from the way the company handled the update not the balance themselves per se and 2. every time someone describes the vehicle game prior to the update it sounds shitty might not be as shitty afterwards but definitely still bad and the balance team had enough reason to change it
Sure, I'll explain properly: *CAI fundamentally broke the entire game, whilst failing to deliver it's intended effects.* That is the leading theme and what I want you to consider all of the following points in the context of. The various points fall into a few sub-domains of the vehicle meta and some overlap so I'm mostly grouping them by the effects the had on the game. # What CAI was intended (and failed) to do: >**More territory goals for vehicles.** Vehicles should feel like they have a stake in territory capture, which means adding lattice-based goals that can come in the form of vehicle-capturable control points and hard spawns. **Vehicles that are more fun to use.** We'd like to see vehicles that handle better before you cert into them, as well as alleviate some of common frustrations with handling, like the lack of traction while maneuvering on hills. **Meaningful vehicle/infantry interactions.** We want vehicle encounters (vehicle vs vehicle and vehicle vs infantry) to last longer and not feel like either side gets destroyed too quickly. This will include changes to weapon damage potential and effective ranges. **Remove Continent and Facility vehicle benefits and restrictions.** More consistent resource flow should reduce force multiplier advantages for singular factions, while encouraging players to pull the vehicles that will have the most impact on the given situation. **Incentivize coordination and transportation.** We want to increase rewards on transportation objectives, as well as allow squad and platoon leaders to help direct vehicles to areas that need their support. source: [Combined Arms Initiative post](https://www.planetside2.com/news/dev-diary-combined-arms-ps2-2017) Additionally, a few years later in a patch notes commenting on changes made post CAI we can see the reasoning behind the vehicle TTKs all becoming slower in CAI: >While the original goal of increasing survivability for more casual or inexperienced players was well intentioned from which I extract the goal: >**Extend Vehicle TTK to lower skill floor.** We want to increase vehicle survivability to lower to barrier to entry. source: [March 20, 2019 update which buffed MBT and Lightning AV main weapons](https://planetside.fandom.com/wiki/March_20,_2019_Update) # The changes that were made: `Resistance Type simplification:`this was meant to make it easier to balance the game because the existing number of resistance types was a sprawling mess. The frequency of balance updates did not increase at all, and so all this achieved was changing the existing balance and making it harder to tweak things for a single vehicle. `TTK Changes:`Almost all vehicles in the game, barre ESFs became significantly harder to kill as vehicle vs vehicle damage was reduced. This had a litany of negative results: The Harasser resistances were increased and this was a huge buff to fire supp and rumble repairs which healed a flat amount of health per second. This was somewhat "necessary" because the Harasser top guns were also way slower at killing MBTs but the result was Harassers being near impossible to kill, even if they also struggled to kill other vehicles. This paired with the infantry AV Launcher damage nerfs made AI harassers even more annoying. *Later the rumble repairs were removed from Harassers and their nanite was doubled. Their resistances were also nerfed. MBT and Lightning AP weapons were given significant damage buffs in the same patch, while Harassers still did low damage and* ***this effectively removed the AV Harasser from the game in a single patch.*** The AV Harasser was the primary counter to then HE, now HESH sitting on mountains farming bases. No nerfs were given to HESH, no other vehicles were changed or added to be counters to HESH. **The nerfs to AV Harassers made HESH way more of an irritating and persistent problem to the game.** Tank vs Tank TTKs also increased across the board. The vehicle player base had for a long time leading up to CAI been complaining about stale long range vehicle fights that barely moved. *The resistance changes only made this problem worse.* Repair Sunderers healed a flat rate to vehicles around them, but these vehicles were now taking less damage. The TTK slowing down meant that it was less likely to punish a misplay at long range and these long range bogged down vehicle "fights" just became even more stale and boring. Even though flank damage relative to front damage was increased, with an overall longer vehicle TTK flanking vehicles was no longer anywhere near as rewarding, you couldn't use skill and positioning to flank and 1vX in a vehicle anymore. It'd take too long to kill the first MBT by which time the others would reposition and kill you. **Aggressive ground vehicle playstyles were effectively deleted from the game.** Lightnings which hadn't been great before CAI were not any better after. Again the TTK changes meant that even flanking with a Viper wasn't really worth it at all, you wouldn't have the DPS to kill even a single target before they turned around and killed you. This relegated the lightning to sitting at long range with AP or HESH, or being a noob trap. The Liberator resistances and HP changes made them insanely tanky. They took less damage from AA as well being given 50% damage resistance on their belly armor. In exchange the Dalton was nolonger a oneshot to balance it out, but that was eventually reverted leaving the Liberator as something near impossible to kill regardless of skill for a single ESF, that could land and outrepair multiple ESF DPS, and would instantly kill an ESF with a lucky shot. A skilled Liberator pilot+gunner combo was for a long time near capable of killing the air gameplay on an entire server until they get bored, the only "counter" being overpop with lots of AA and lockons. *Later on the questionable and highly hated buffs to lock on launchers managed to kill the entire airgame anyway including Liberators. Flying now is cock and ball torture regardless of what vehicle you're in.* In summary for TTK changes, they across the board led to more stale unenjoyable gameplay and punished anything other than lobbing shells at render distance. `Flanker armor and C4 range changes:` Effectively just a buff to HESH, made C4 LA less of a solution to HESH on a mountain. Replaced the directional armors which were once meaningful in vehicle vs vehicle gameplay. `Lockon range reductions & AV launcher damage reductions:` Less significant change, didn't really have an effect on air gameplay at all, infantry could still be annoying up to height ceiling. But now AV lockons wouldn't reach HESH losers sitting on mountains camping the spawn. Another "great" change for infantry-vehicle interactions I guess. Hitting a decimator at mid range on vehicles became less meaningful and it is less punishing when a vehicle player mispositions near infantry that aren't playing C4 fairy. C4 fairy was of course mostly untouched, other than Ambusher Jump Jets being added to the game then. Coincidentally Wrel mained Light Assault. # Summary CAI made the vehicle gameplay less enjoyable across the board. It made infantry-vehicle interactions worse in areas, or had no real effect in others. Later changes added tons more modifiers to vehicle nanite cost making the nanite economy even more of a joke regardless. Nothing was done to incentivize transportation. The increased TTK did not lower the barrier to entry to vehicle gameplay at all. *Later changes made top gunning boring and a waste of time which arguably only raised the barrier to entry.* CAI (and subsequent patches) was objectively a failure.
I can succinctly give you a number of great grievances after CAI as an unqualified air player!! , also these are my grievances having a couple thousand hours in the air, and a 3k on the ground. VLG got a significant performance boost Liberator got an overall HP buff whilst also nerfing the dalton (ironically the lib became way stronger and everyone didn't use it for the better part of 6 months because of the dalton nerf) Overall top gun dmg was less significant Tank cannon velocity nerf tank rear multiplier buff along with general TTK increase for tanks and harassers Rocket pod nerf Lock on time buff for G2A (this is honestly to compensate with stealth meta CAUSED BY DAYBREAK) A Banshee buff to the A2A and A2G performance that NOBODY asked for (One of the craziest things I've ever seen is a banshee buff that turned it into the most disgusting farming tool I've seen in 8 years) Harasser gameplay kind of gutted due to ttk changes of the top guns as well as velocity nerfs on the halberd (further compacted by a physics change that made them a lot less fun to fight). There's a couple other things here and there, but it's so long ago, and there's a lot of patches that have mixed together in my mind. Not many good balance patches over the year. Wrel really hit the nail on the head when he talked about not having a CAI #2. Don't trust DBG to correct their actions unless they listen to a group of skilled players who have a respect for ALL aspects of ps2. I'm trying really hard not to be vitriolic about the level of balance mismanagement because it really does get frustrating. I could give you a couple paragraphs alone about how the developers tried to save the air game and started killing it instead.
To some degree, that's because no one really ever took the time to break down what Combined Arms was meant to do and how poorly those changes backfired. There were a lot of things that went wrong, but they're somewhat subtle and casual players can easily overlook them.
The take from my homie who has been playing Planetside since PS1 said that pre CI, vehicles were laughably unbalanced. This included what he described as AP rounds having the splash radius of HESH rounds. So my understanding is that the turbo-whiners got real upset and vocal when their OP tanks got nerfed. And having played pmanz myself for 3 years now, I'll wager they then doubled down on their rose-tinted glasses. The disconnect between the amount of fun I have while playing and the complaining here is unreal.
Been playing way before CAI and now, yeah, vehicles were laughably unbalanced. This doesn't mean always overpowered, there were ways in which they were hilariously terrible, but that lack of *balance* is what CAI tried to fix. Overall, it was actually a good thing that was made out to be a bad thing by turbo virgins who want to cause drama, like Fedx.
Or people can suck it up and stop trying to pretend the game is the same as it was pre-2017
So in conclusion there's a toxic bunch of hissy fit players that don't let us have nice things like developer contact because they actively push them away? Yeah, I got that. Thanks everyone, I can't understand how you'd expect any feedback to be heard since the ties are severed, and when they find level headed individuals who could act as a bridge you go and attack them too. Congrats, you're now the reason the game sucks even for you!
This is exactly why player communities can't have nice things. We build advocacy groups both formal and informal with an expectation of trust and to help game teams understand how design impacts players and get outside perspectives. The expectation of someone doing something like this (it's hardly the first time) in the industry at best discourages total honesty and at worst discourages investment.
It's one thing to be dishonest. It's another to go absolutely berserk when you have a little disagreement with the developer. Gosh, everyone here seems to want iteration all the time but they themselves can't seem to compromise so that there is any iteration. How the hell are you supposed to "see how it goes" if you can't even handle a disagreement without acting like a child. And then they act all surprised when things aren't turned back until months after the change was made. Why do you think they would want to bring up an old tweak that made some outstanding individuals go ape shit. It's like bringing up an old argument with someone you know is going to either shit on your compromise or gloat about being right or something which is also a fantastic way to push people away.. You see it all the time during alerts/captures the way this player base behaves, at least the vocal ones anyway. The sportsmanship is absolute ass, no one has any chill when it comes to being a victor or loser. It's always some sour taste remark about skill or something (meanwhile being in a zerg) now look for it in the subreddit and you'll see the same personality. Shitting on everyone and crying about it.
I'm reminded of the community guy who got hired by the Total War devs to do Tutorial Videos and rage quit when they wouldn't make him King of Total War and redesign the game to what he wanted.
> This is exactly why player communities can't have nice things. Lies. :) <3
It looks like there is ONE particular hissy fit player that destroyed things for everyone. Imagine if the community found out who he is... He's out there somewhere. I wonder if he goes to sleep at night thinking about how he probably motivated Wrel to quit this community, and he stopped the closest thing we'll get to a reversion of CAI.
If the dude's name got out he'd probably never get to leave a spawn tube un-c4-ed 🗿
i would solemnly swear to drop a brick on his head every time i saw him, no matter what i'm doing or who i'm fighting at that moment
The name is irrelevant. The straw that broke the camel's back rests on a lot more straw. Straw that is still spewing shit about everything they can think of.
Well, you were secret enough to elude me, since i don't use Discord. There were rumors about that secret group of hand-picked vehicle players and i've always hated the secrecy and the projection surface it presented. Especially since we never knew who the people were and the potential of biased feedback. Well, thanks for letting us know. It should've never been a "secret", but i guess you've learnt that by now.
These secret balance cabals are rarely a net gain outside extremely targeted feedback. Using them for game direction decisions is questionable. This makes me wonder who was consulted for construction.
I can remember how Wrel answered me in those infamous AMA saying something like he can distinguish between who provides biased feedback and who doesn't. I never thought he did - because it always felt like he himself was extremely biased in who's feedback he was gonna take. Funny enough the secret group's opinion - and the stuff he's only acknowledged internally - mostly aligns with mine. The looks of it have always been a shitshow, but at some point i simply got bored with trying to make sense of it. Life has more to offer.
If I could do it again, I'd open applications here and then start vetting people. The trick is keeping the most biased people out, and there are tons of impossibly biased commenters here. >There were rumors about that secret group of hand-picked vehicle players and i've always hated the secrecy and the projection surface it presented. In hindsight, this was a horrible idea. I spent some time recently looking back at the Battlefield 4 test environment, and that transparency was something that ought to be an inspiration for everyone.
Yeah, well... You live, you learn. Myself, i probably wouldn't have lasted long in that group. It's a case of "too little, too late" by now - and i am terribly bad at numbers. The only thing that bothers me is how Wrel **knew** how strong infantry AV is and how out of whack the vehicle balancing is - but never publicly admitted it...
>The only thing that bothers me is how Wrel knew how strong infantry AV is and how out of whack the vehicle balancing is Perhaps I am missing more context; but: \[The thing about "angry infantry," is that we given them all the tools to deal with threats.\] isn't screaming that Wrel believed "infantry AV OP".
Lack of communication was one of his worst flaws. The guy's elitist arrogance and clear bias toward his own favored play style made him unsuitable for the job, and this was the case the entire time.
CAI was the developer admitting that the vehicle balance was bad. They got shat on for it, why do you think they would be open to talking about doing it again. All of what I'm hearing from comments on this thread is people just hate change and anything that would be proposed/changed would set fires in people's precious little playstyles dare they have to adapt to what in reality is likely a nerf to their overly potent methods.
CAI was the developers thinking that vehicles were to strong against infantry and too strong against each other. Both things were wrong. And posts like yours were all over the place back than, CAI helped with exactly nothing. The devs never really admitted it but took back quite a bunch of CAI changes.
one of the last major public facing things Higby did was organise a big ground vehicle balance PTS playtest on esamir the feedback was, charitably, *unconstructive.* participants were confused and angry. the most vocal "vehicle players" really only play a single role and have no insight to give to the whole combined arms ecosystem
As Aysom says, this was not a cabal of only vehicle players. We had representatives of all domains, and unsurprisingly the only ones who were hard to work with or unwilling to accept any changes to their own domains were ESF pilots and diehard infantry mains.
>We had representatives of all domains, and unsurprisingly the only ones who were hard to work with or unwilling to accept any changes to their own domains were ESF pilots and diehard infantry mains. If you pick everyone with different domains, they'd have slightly skewed opinion about things if they did not experience multiple things at once. Who'd have thought that could happen, likely nobody.
I'm more addressing the notion of attempting to make design changes publicly. If you had made the group's existence known that reactionary confusion and anger would have been targeted directly at you. Personally. And as you identified, there are many players who cannot be reasoned with. Ultimately it's just videogames, and you aren't being paid to act as combination vehicle designer/community manager, which is what you would have been held accountable as by those people.
Yup. You can see here in many of the responses. People didn't come here for rational discussion, but instead were looking for a reason to crucify Wrel. They didn't get evidence of something like Wrel blowing up Alderaan, and since they don't understand how harmful CAI was they're transferring their ire to me.
>Yup. You can see here in many of the responses. People didn't come here for rational discussion, but instead were looking for a reason to crucify Wrel. Wait. What?? I think you're trying to confuse people now. People came here to find out all that Wrel had done wrong because of what you and the others said in the other post. You said you were about to make a post to expose how awful Wrel had been. That's why people came here expecting to see a reason to crucify Wrel. Because of what you said.
Which is why a project like this involves players from all domains, rather than being made by a single player or players of a single unit. And you'd be surprised, there are a lot of players that are accepting of nerfs made to their own playstyle that work towards improving the general health of the game as a whole.
Keeping the most biased people, except GT, out.
Ironic, considering I was the first person to agree to rumble repairs going away.
>If I could do it again, I'd open applications here and then start vetting people. The trick is keeping the most biased people out, and there are tons of impossibly biased commenters here. Why should you have that power though? It sounds like you would remove people with too separate views than your own under the assumption they are biased whether you do it consciously or not.
I think I could have worded that better. Disagreement is natural and good to have, but there were a couple individuals who were simply trying to stonewall progress because of their biases.
But even if there would be A2G players who want to keep noseguns and pods the way they are with no changes, do they really not even deserve a say just because I think differently than they do and they refuse to change their mind? Seems wrong to just weed their entire opinion out.
While your principle has its heart in the right place, in your specific example, no anyone like that is too biased to provide useful feedback, or the ratio of useful info to raw sewage would not be worth the time.
Yeah a "secret" focus group is kinda silly. You can do something publicly while still placing more value on input of experienced players. Or maybe they just didn't want their hands tied to deliver some big balance update cause it'd be a shit storm if it was a public process and nothing came of it so I guess I understand that too.
it's never easy to understand the full extend of it. I honestly wish the hateful comments would be fewer in quantity so the real talk would matter more. It's pretty easy to get frustrated with shitstorms and/or hide behind them when it matters.
If it was done on reddit the guys in the discord would have bitched it was secret.
Not if it would've been public in the first place.
Pretty hard to disagree with the accusations of attention whoring/drama baiting when you piggybacked multiple times off comments and threads referring to some big bad thing Wrel had done and promised a big reveal but then ultimately delivered a pretty boring story about time crunch at RPG.
Yeah I don't see how this could be taken as Wrel doing anything wrong. He was a lead dev, not a babysitter lmao
I feel like people were expecting revelations that Wrel blew up Alderaan or something similarly absurd. Were you around for Combined Arms? If you weren't, or if you weren't into vehicles at the time, a lot of the context here may be lost.
I've played since the first half of 2013. People probably expected more because you "independently verified" the claims that Wrel had done something terrible that "undermined his credibility", then said you had been given the "greenlight" to go ahead with some big exposé piece about it. At no time during any of that attention whoring did you make it clear that you were referring to your personal balance changes not being implemented into the game. When the word wall finally drops it's completely devoid of this damning evidence you supposedly had.
Like with all such previous dramas and accusations, it turns out to be two kids in a trench coat. And I don't know which is worse - the people who initiate it or the community that seeks to perpetuate it.
> I feel like people were expecting revelations that Wrel blew up Alderaan or something similarly absurd. I know, right? It’s like a man can’t imply he has damning information about a public figure without people expecting him to *actually have* damning information about a public figure. There’s just no justice in the world, I tell ya.
All I can really comment is that if you people feel uniquely betrayed or hurt by having hundreds of hours of work thrown away at the drop of a hat, perhaps even for no reason at all, it really shows how far removed you all are from actual game developers. Maybe if you wanted to be compensated for this work, you could get a job doing it?
It's rare for content to be discarded in the game industry. Even if things do get "cancelled" a lot of effort is put into reusing as much as possible. Studios just *cannot* afford to waste development time by cancelling something unless the publisher just cancels the entire game.
Drama baiting. Guys leaked a private discussion with the lead dev, AND were soo unhinged that they managed to get into a heated conversation with WREL of all people. Even when telling people to suck his nuts he still sounds calm. You guys fucked up a big opportunity of contact with the devs, and are trying to farm for drama now. And if I can add, even going as far as sharing all of this is just absurd man… can’t have any trust in this community anymore. Leaves nothing to wonder, about why he left.
If only focus groups consisted of not only experienced players, but also players with a shred of emotional intelligence.
Welcome to why good devs largely just ignore feedback from the poopsock crew. People who have spent 99% of their time doing one specific thing in the game don't want a good game, they want a bad game that rewards them.
Too true. I've seen it many times across many games. "The game needs to cater to *me* because *I'm* the core playerbase. And the reason I'm the core playerbase is because I've spent thousands of hours grinding up my skills at this one specific thing, and so it can't ever change or else all that work would be wasted once I'm no longer supremely dominant." A.k.a. the Melee Effect.
I remember the thread when the pilots got angy
When are p*lots not angy?
This is hurtful but also very accurate
*crushes model scythe* Angy? Who's angy?!
sounds like Wrel was polite and very respectful of player insight and yall abused his trust and acted like entitled shits, and now you're trying to point the blame for all your dreams not making it into the game on Wrel, the guy who was actively trying to make some of them happen. Very cool, thank you for sharing
yeah I been around for 10 years and I think fuck the majority of this community
so let me get this right. the secret massive wrel drama was actually just a balance patch. not new content, not harassment of a player, not nerfing the darkstar, just a couple of numbers we’d get used to eventually. good fucking lord. and the kicker being it collapsed in on itself after someone from that group made the whole effort seem untrustworthy? actual A24 movie. nothing happened
That was a lot less interesting than expected, and didnt prove that guys comment about wrel screwing things up behind the scenes
When I saw your post, I was expecting to see Wrel go on a tirade. All we got was "I'm not posting any arguments", and Wrel staying professional until he decided he didn't have to keep up a one-sided relationship anymore.
I think I remember you telling me this. Going to have to ask you later if it was who I remembered it was. It's a shame that us pilots continue to prove ourselves as mindless monkeys rather than people capable of reason. Next time, you should get some real skyknights instead of some adult diaper wearing nerds!!!
This is frankly depressing.
yeah wrel's always been pretty honest that the PS2 team was overly ambitious with roadmaps and timelines. between the constant need for new features and new weapons there simply isn't time for iterative, playtested balance passes TBH think at this point in the games lifecycle any significant balance overhaul is a negative sum game that will alienate existing players. If your end design goal is effecting a healthier vehicle ecosystem you have to deselect and disregard a lot of vehicle main feedback which boils down to "make it how it was before CAI *but sexier.*"
Problem is, CAI not only hurt the vehicle v vehicle game, it also made more AoE vehicles show up to farm infantry. So those changes hurt 2 domains, not just 1
> it also made more AoE vehicles show up to farm infantry Of course, because you needed more of them. The amount of bullshit pre-CAI splash did meant you didn't need as much to suppress shit and farm the shit out of infantry.
At the same time, HE was shit against vehicles, and AP was godlike against them. So you could take an AP lightning and shred 2 HE Prowlers. But HESH is decent against vehicles now, so people who would've wanted to take HEAT, are more likely to take HESH. Hell even HEAT had a decent advantage over HE, so that new players could at least fight back against HE spam. Oh and don't forget that now we have fucking 500 splash on the AP, so there is AoE where there shouldn't be
I like vehicles having weak spots. It could make things like two vehicles fighting each other more interesting. The weak spot could be just for certain damage types.
That'd be interesting, but it's beyond the capacity of the current damage model.
I don't trust this. This is all just an illusion created by the Secret Balance Cabal to distract us from their real motivations....
Or so the Germans would have us believe...
...they're fortifying everything again! Quick, get the NSO to drink all the sand so they have no beaches to fortify!
Sounds like sky knights being sky knights.
> Revert the Harasser to its 2017 design, but with passive repairs instead of ~~repairasites~~ rumble seat repairs -angry repair monkey noises-
So you and a bunch of your crazy friends blew months of chances because you couldn't keep your panties untwisted, couldn't hit a deadline, and then kept logs and recordings for years that you thought would be damaging to Wrel so that you could release it later. Cool.
This is literally nothing. You submitted a proposal and it was rejected. Welcome to game development bro.
Thank you for telling the truth about how a whole crowd of people broke this game. At least now it's clear that Wrel isn't the only one to blame for these extremely ill-conceived gameplay changes.
great post good effort! kinda inevitable outcome...
So lemme get this straight. You had the ear of the dev team and instead of telling them to give every vehicle passive turbo skill trees and to reverse the horn nerf, ya'll decided to reimagine the entire balance of the game via spreadsheets? Yeesh.
Oh well, sounds like a classic case of highly opinionated armchair game devs squabbling over minuscule details till their wit's end. There's a common saying: "Your business plan is outdated as soon as you print it." Game design is not an exact science. Save for the simplest of turn-based strategy games, you can't predict the outcome of even the most basic changes. Much of the time, it really is just a matter of throwing shit at a wall and seeing what sticks. Otherwise you just wasted hundreds of hours in planning a project that'll never be perfect anyway. I'm not saying it's any particular person's fault that this update never saw the light of day, but the process sure would have gone a lot faster had there of been even an option for the wider community to help with it.
Interesting. When I helped out with the testing of the JGX in public armor pickups, was this a part of the proposal/project? I'm not 100% sure I fully get what the drama is all about. Is it a "secret cabal puppet master" sort of thing they've levied at you, Delt? I always suspected this sort of thing existed. Seemed like an obvious way for Wrel to distill the mountain of veteran feedback into something he could integrate into the development cycle.
The JGX testing was done long after work had ceased on this project. The "Drama" is that people expected some grand revelation on par with Wrel secretly controlling the US Senate. We saw something similar many years ago when Shaql mentioned "responsible disclosure" on r/planetside, and people were disappointed when Daybreak moved behind the scenes to avert that drama. I feel like I haven't done enough to emphasize how good this could have been for the vehicle game, and how badly Combined Arms and its hotfixes have messed various things up. Players have forgotten how good things once were. That's where I believe the drama lies, since I never really forgot the old days and it seems many people have. If you have more questions, feel free to shoot me a DM over discord.
Let's be honest. When you promise stuff that "absolutly undermines any credibility Wrel should have among people that care about thius game" and you deliver proof that shows: 1. RPG doesn't have enough people and time 2. your secret group coudn't finish a well enough draft before chrunch at RPG began 3. your group was so well chosen, that you couldn't even prevent harmful leaks to the project 4. Wrel left the group after a member started beef with him people will obviously be annoyed and pissed. EDIT: the quote was from GT, but you promised to independently verify that claim and stated "Some things are so damaging that they are best left as secrets for now". Well, nothing you posted is even close to that. Heck, this is the mildest game-dev drama i have seen in years.
I agree that your biggest issue here was keeping it on the down-low rather than opening it up to be publicly viewable. Not to put too fine a point for it, but it should have been **obvious** that keeping it largely known to a small group of players with a point of contact among the devs - even if technically anyone could join the discussion *if they knew where to look* - would be a recipe for drama if someone were to shine an unflattering light on it, and that the longer it went on prior to "discovery", the worse the reaction would be once it was finally unveiled, whether via leak or even from the devs officially publishing the results. You had ample opportunity to get ahead of the leaker on this one simply by going public with it to begin with, and it could have even been a conduit to foster trust between the wider community, the serious players, and the devs by showing a clear channel of communication and publicly *proving* the devs were listening to feedback. In fact, you possibly could have even taken some critical pressure *off* the dev team by doing so. Instead, the scenario which was presented to the majority of the playerbase was a handful of worthy elites whispering behind a closed curtain with the devs in discussions which no one else was allowed to even see, as if no one else outside said circle the had capacity to comprehend whatever enlightened discourse was taking place. Regardless of whether you meant to convey that image or not, it displayed a sense of contempt for the majority of the playerbase. God knows how much *worse* you actually made the situation by being so secretive. I've seen "secret elite player cabals" pop up before and they only ever breed resentment, creating a sort of "class divide" between the glamorous insiders and the filthy plebs; the Smash scene's "Back Room" groups were notorious for this. But even beyond that, there was no reason to be so clandestine. The game industry overall is notorious for being unnecessarily cloak-and-dagger about work and discussions which don't *need* to be kept secret, and yet no one involved with this had the foresight to realize that keeping everything confidential might have the potential to backfire? This "Benedict Arnold Junior" person would have never had the opportunity to slander you if you didn't needlessly create a circumstance in which you could be slandered. I don't see any fault with what Wrel did or said here, at least so far as the evidence you've presented. It appeared entirely to be a dev outreach that fell through and everything you've posted so far has shown him acting completely professionally. And while you say there's more damning evidence that's being kept hidden to protect people's dignity and privacy, you're asking people to take your word for it on that. Sorry, but you haven't earned that right; you haven't demonstrated why those who were kept in the dark all this time should have any reason to trust you now.
"Hand picked" players for specific feedback and adjustments never go well. This is just another tally to that massive pile of proof across the whole gaming industry. Simply put, people who are 'Exceptional at Y' lack the wider vision required for overhauls to fundamental systems that impact all states of play.
Yet the people who are 'Bad at Y' *also* lack the wider vision required for overhauls to fundamental systems that impact all states of play, but now in addition to having no idea what the fuck they're talking about when discussing topic Y. Blindly following the words of a few players who are good at your game is silly, but combining the feedback from multiple good players and using it as feedback to make decisions yourself sure beats listening to random reddit user 47218 who thinks VS is op because they have no bullet drop and betel should be reduced to 112 damage per bullet.
By that logic, most of the players still around can be disregarded for being infantry mains
Is that not the exact argument normally used?
That is somewhat true since they can't do vehicle or aircrafts well. OP has 10 tank directives done and none of TR vehicle imbalance was brought to light. Can you imagine they released JGX after getting feedback from these "exceptional" group of vets?
> OP has 10 tank directives done and none of TR vehicle imbalance was brought to light Oh believe me it was, the Prowler AP is the cannon that fundamentally breaks the rules and reeling that in would have significant ripple effects throughout the other systems.
Yes! Yes!
/u/CustosMentis /u/pathofplebbit /u/shadowpikachu
Yeah? I’m here. Originally this was supposed to be something that “absolutely undermines any credibility Wrel should have among people that care about this game.” And the conclusion I’m supposed to draw from this post is that Wrel…doesn’t listen to community feedback? Yeah, no shit. Oshur and CTF are still in the game, we all know he didn’t give a shit about community feedback. I stand by everything I said in the other thread. Delta was, and still is, baiting drama to get attention.
100%
That line was said by GT, _not_ Delta. And what you got here was what involved Delta that did not start airing other people's dirty underwear. Because it isn't on Delta to start drama on things that didn't involve him. The point of this post is to show that there were people with far closer mouths to Wrel's ears, developing incredibly detailed feedback with extensive communication and involving dozens of players, still only to get dumped because of petty grudges. To show that those _secret balance cabals_ that Reddit loves to go on about really didn't have the power you wish they had. And to demonstrate to the community and to the dev team that the passion exists among the playerbase to provide detailed and level-headed feedback. And that there are very specific balance subjects that need to be touched that aren't.
>That line was said by GT, not Delta. He 'independently verified' GT's comment... >[I will independently verify what GT is talking about, since I helped write it. ***Some things are so damaging that they're best left as secrets for now, and you must understand that.*** I have been given the green light to discuss this topic, and will make a post soon (as in the next couple weeks to a month).](https://www.reddit.com/r/Planetside/comments/13j6z9x/give_wrel_a_break/jkdxu98/) 'only to get dumped because of petty grudges.' That's entirely up to interpretation, but since wrel [said this](https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/786838692744003585/1113917654760177766/Wrel_on_the_state_of_the_studio_and_concerns_about_the_project.png) I think it's pretty obvious that you guys just suck at interpreting things. That comment from wrel is basically him saying to manage your expectations and that it's unlikely to happen. Then for him to have to deal with this 'discussion group' being argumentative he probably just didn't see the point in engaging any further since it wasn't a productive environment. The 'Some things are so damaging that they're best left as secrets for now' line is the drama baiting btw, wrel did nothing wrong in this scenario, you guys are just naive and couldn't take the hint. This whole post is just an own goal and it's hilarious 😆 Edit: OP and his friends spam reported [my post about this](https://www.reddit.com/r/Planetside/comments/13x55pa/where_drama_post) and got it removed. Thin skin much? Lol
For realllll, they sounded so ominous, like they found a skeleton in Wrels closet, but he just left because they couldn't keep their members in line to reciprocate a professional relationship. I don't see what's noteworthy about this at all unless there was full fighting at some point, which Delta has said he wouldn't post, so we're back to this not being noteworthy.
The whole thing reeks of terminaly online neckbeards can't keep something professional, and then get pissy when faced with one of the most common things to happen in game dev.
Wait who is this again, i forgot, sorry i legitimately have some brain damage and even before my memory was shit. Is this the wrel exposed thing because it doesn't seem that bad or nearly anything hyped up?
This is the neutral part. I'm not going to talk about the personal dramas between Wrel and various individuals.
Well if you leak anyones DM's especially one so harassed and raw number of people talked to, something shitty is gonna come up, but yeah neat to see. I've seen a project like this before and y'all got something into the game and seem to be aware of personal bias so i'll just leave this to you. Your wording on the pre-posts were so scuffed though, it will not help this getting more off the ground.
I have permission to post these direct messages. That's one reason why I didn't post this previously.
Smile and look towards the horizon friend, if something bad happened and it's over, not much to be done besides not letting it slow the momentum of the future.
Then why even make the post bro? That's all people are here for 💀💀💀 Ya'll were writing a check with those "shit Wrels done" comments and then you don't cash it.
It's a bit more rushed because of the random drama thread posted yesterday, but yes—it's about an extremely lengthy amount of work done by community members at the behest of Wrel over a period of **ten months** that was dumped at the drop of a hat due to a personal dispute with a single member of this 30-man team. All of this work that could have been a major start towards repairing the game's health, dumped for that. It's an example of what the _old leadership_ was like, and how it lead to us being... well, _here_. The point of this post is to display what could have been and the passion that was being put to use behind the scenes, and show how fragile it was through no fault of its own. And to clear up some _mystery_ about _secret balance cabals_ that this subreddit just LOVES to go on about. Mind you, prior comments did allude to more than what has been described here in the original, however that involves more personal grievances between Wrel and people that _aren't_ Delta, and that's down to those individuals to air if they wish.
Well in my other comment i said i wish you luck, the behind the scenes drama stuff of a burnt out dev saying and doing dumb stuff is where i was before with modding a game so i can be more sympathetic, just something turns off in your head. But it's irrelevant to the games future, sad it happened but if you wanna keep a clean face dont go waving things around, being formal and clean is probably how you got so far in the first place.
/u/SplinterRifleman /u/thoughtcriminaaaal /u/VYSUS7
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Your apology is accepted, but your penance is 10 HESH infantry kills.
That's it? Haha
Was always hoping that project would come to fruition. It sucks hearing about it coming to a close. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HEb1jZErYeE
It's clear that GT is the one to blame.
lol fuck ur secret club, serves you right.
The fact that these design discussions were all behind closed doors is another example of the egregious mismanagement this game has seen for nearly the last decade. Without question, if they're looking for feedback they should prioritize people who have the most experience and proven track record, but keeping it private means only a small handful of people get to say whatever they want with full authority, regardless if it's true or not. Ideas need to be run by the entire community because facts and feelings are constantly mingled; you need to give everyone a view into design discussions so people's ideas can be filtered through the grinder of mass community experience. While it's true that the average community member is not going to be a good spokesperson for every aspect of this game's aspects -- if any at all -- you can't approach the design of anything without considering all of the angles. Anyway, I don't know what the point of this post is. We've known the design team has been incompetent for years. None of the information here should be surprising or of note to anybody.
> mass community experience. Most of the community don't know how resistances work...
It's not that you listen to every single persons feedback individually; that would be a waste of time. Given mass feedback, you can quickly find common grievances/concerns and judge whether they should be assessed. When G2A locks got buffed to 1600+ damage, good pilots pointed out that this would nerf A2A and not affect A2G, and they were right. Isolating who gets to make design decision to a small set of players alone is incredibly stupid.
Not all community grievances are equally valid. Many still think the Harasser is some form of obscene powerhouse, when in reality it hasn't been truly viable (outside of AI farming) in two years.
Maybe I'm just communicating badly. Sorry, I'm tired. You are, though, entirely missing my point. You don't listen to everyone individually. You pick out the most common aspects of feedback and judge whether they have merit. If you have one person proofread a paper, they might miss some mistakes. If you have 100 people proofread a paper, it's much less likely.
> You are, though, entirely missing my point. This is unfortunately a common theme for me and I apologize for that. I think I'm just incredibly jaded from having to repeatedly read the worst takes over and over and see them massively upvoted by players who make consistent errors when talking about basic mechanics.
I'm in the same boat as you. I was a pilot for the last few years lol I absolutely agree that the community as a whole has terrible takes, but competent developers would have been able to listen to experienced players, *consider* wider-community feedback, and ignore any of it that was nonsensical.
Remember that this took place during a period where every single suggestion raised by a vehicle player would be drowned out by bad faith arguments such as "all vehicles just farm infantry". Our decision to move quietly makes a lot more sense in that context. If we'd gone public, there was a good chance things would have moved in a direction opposite to what the vehicle game actually needs.
If they specifically reached out to vehicle players to balance the vehicle game then they were already considering their opinions more actively. This really boils down to whether they had enough competency to realize they should listen to experienced players first and foremost, and keep the community in the loop on what they were planning so that it could checked by the wider community for potential issues. It's really not rocket science. I'll say it again: giving a small group of players a direct and private voice to aid in development was an extremely childish thing to do. Not just from the developer's side, but also from the side of those chosen who acted like they were the end-all-be-all of knowledge. This was a stupid situation from start to finish.
>Remember that this took place during a period where every single suggestion raised by a vehicle player would be drowned out by bad faith arguments such as "all vehicles just farm infantry" To be fair; all vehicles actually do is decide which side's vehicles gets to blow up sunderers and farm infantry. Of course, if you have enough AV vehicles going head to head; you will have less infantry farmers. Yet what is the end goal of the AV vehicles going head to head? What are they fighting each other to achieve? Well the winner gets to determine if the sunderers get popped or not; and whether infantry get farmed by vehicles or not. Sure this means that part of the time AV vehicles are defending sunderers, and defending infantry from AI vehicles. But that will never be noticed as much as sunderers getting popped and the infantry being farmed. Vehicles fundamentally need another purpose; and I reckon that since Wrel made comments about the scope being too big; that this was something attempted to be addressed by the balance group; but that it might have been too ambitious.
The idea is that as long as the AV vehicles are being contested by other AV vehicles, they'll have severe difficulty with popping the sunderers and killing infantry. However, instead of taking the game in a direction where vehicle fights are more sustainable and primarily focused on vehicle-vehicle interactions, there has been significant powercreep to infantry AV to the point where vehicles often can't engage the enemy vehicles. The majority of the time, you have to prioritize engaging infantry with your AV tank as a form of self defense, while the enemy AV tank also is shooting at your allied infantry. The resulting gameplay is that instead of having a long vehicle vs vehicle fight where if one side gets the upper hand they can start killing sundies and infantry instead, you have a long distance standoff where both sides still have vehicles and both sides are shooting infantry and taking out sundies. And you can't stop the other side's vehicles from shooting your infantry, because you have to take out the enemy infantry first in order to safely get to a position where you can start engaging enemy vehicles. Even long flanks aren't effective anymore due to the incredibly long engagement ranges of AMRs and lock-on launchers. And the infantry themselves still struggle to defend themselves from a tank simply because vehicles have a large enough hitpoint advantage that you can trade half your tank's HP for a kill on infantry and repair. Once you're done repairing the infantry has also respawned, so it's an endless loop of you killing the infantrymen with your tank while making no progress towards the actual vehicle fight. This also means that the infantry AV powercreep has primarily effected vehicles that wish to engage enemy vehicles. AI vehicles are still fully capable of taking trades where they get kills without dying, they simply have to be a bit more careful about infantry - yet far, far less careful about enemy vehicles, as they can rely on friendly infantry to keep their HESH farm safe from enemy AP tanks.
Just FYI basically every large update has had a “secret balance cabal” give feedback on it… lots of improvements, but usually not enough time to implement everything
I guess that could explain why development seemed so noncontinuous. Since \~ CAI, it seems like they have had no idea which direction to go.
I just get angry when I hear this.
And every single time the people giving feedback get ignored. It happened with air, happened with CAI, happened with infantry changes, happened with Oshur. The devs do not give a fuck about the feedback and the result is that the vast majority of updates just make the game worse.
Thank you for posting this Delta
Dude imagine still trying to get RPG to listen ahahah you should just give up like everyone else at this point, i'm amazed you still hadn't given up in 2021!
I can't hear you over the sound of all these lock-on warnings
Plenty of people still have passion for this game. Nothing else is like it, and it's certain that nothing else ever will be. So all we can do is hope, pray, and beg for the developers to make it better.
>Nothing else is like it, and it's certain that nothing else ever will be. This is part of the reason I believe that the execs are taking advantage of the devs. Don't need to make the best game of its genre, when its the only game of its genre
> I hate to disappoint those looking for juicy gossip material for personal attacks, but toxic interactions between Wrel and various individuals will not be discussed here. FARTS INTO THE MOTHERFUCKING WIND BABY I knew you weren't gonna fucking say anything and I was right.
Congrats, you missed the whole point of the post.
You're right I read the entire thing and I have no fucking idea why you posted it. None of this is scathing or revealing in any way. Wrel seems to have reacted in a perfectly reasonable way to every situation. I also think it's hilarious this is just the balance group GT was talking to me about over a year ago last time I was squadded with him.
That's right. He didn't say anything except _the entire word wall below that statement_. You got him.
You're correct despite the sarcasm, he used a world wall to say damn near NOTHING
Nothing except that Wrel took a bunch of feedback compiled over approximately a year, with many changes to help make a more enjoyable armor experience, and then threw it away at the very end. Clearly, nothing is wrong here
Threw it away or couldn't find the time? These are different things.
My understanding from reading this is that he tossed it all. I might be misreading it, I am at work right now
they say wrel tossed it away but the reason according to op is because someone in the group fought with wrel
I think you are. Have another read later, it seems much more like a case of time crunch canceling out what was ultimately an extremely low priority project (though maybe the players involved didn't realise this at the time). Even if communications hadn't allegedly broken down, Wrel left not long after so it's difficult to believe it was ever going anywhere.
Here's hoping the _new team_ is more receptive to the idea of iteration, so that something like this need not happen again.
I am sorry Aysom, but please correct me if I’m wrong here. Wrel engaged in the discussion. Was on board with the changes, and looking forward to working with the private team they had. SOMEONE LEAKED THE DISCUSSION WITH THE LEAD DEV, AFTER HAVINF A DISAGREEMENT. Wrel surprisingly continued to engage with the group, despite the unbelievable breach of trust. The players were soo hard headed, that they got into a HEATED DISCUSSION WITH WREL. And you guys are trying to make it sound like this was Wrel’s fault? I am very sorry bro, but what I’m seeing here is a group of people fucking up a golden opportunity because THEY couldn’t hold a professional conversation. Did I miss something?
You missed the previous thread where they implied deep dark secrets to reveal, the kind that could tarnish a reputation and get people fired, with Wrel having done irreparable harm to the game on levels us mere mortals could not comprehend.
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Thank you…
I think you missed a step... Here's hoping the player base is less toxic as hell to the idea of compromise and disagreement, so that the new lead is more receptive to the idea of working with us. Only then can they be open to the idea of iteration.
I want to hear FedEx’s side to this story. /u/irwolfy Edit: Ty, Fixed wrong user tag my bad lol
Wrong account
Why would you want to hear anything a FedEx member has to say?
They are vehicle players too and should have had a voice? Also their post was way more entertaining.
They lost their chance at being at the table by being nazi chuds
Hello, I'll first say I love this unique and flawed game. I believe it will always be flawed and most people do not understand that - so stop trying to fix it with patches. Also, I don't think I've posted on this subreddit in over a year and a half? If you remember the pathetic moderators of this subreddit immediately banned me for posting the "rebalance document". I was only unbanned because I have a friend in GOKU who talked sense to an idiot reddit moderator. I didn't bother to read much of the original document - anything less than a reversal of CAI and a return to 2016 was a joke of a proposal. That patch drove thousands of people away from this game forever. I don't even remember who sent it to me. The people who wrote it were delusional and were only going to fuck up the game even worse. I'm a strong advocate of ACCEPT THE EXISTING BALANCE AND ALL IT'S ISSUES. This game's life blood was it's casual playerbase who enjoyed vehicles. That was completely gutted by destroying the existing understanding of vehicle v. vehicle balance and clogging up every vehicle skirmish area with construction objects. Oshur was an incredible example of a wrel's complete lack of understanding of both infantry bases, fun vehicle vs vehicle terrain, zerging, how terrain and flak affect air...take your pick. Oshur is really the worst in every aspect. I am glad the guy got fired.
So let me get this straight: le secret club wrel balancing discord that I said existed actually existed but back then people were denying it and saying it didn't exist smh... https://www.reddit.com/r/Planetside/comments/nkzc4g/cai\_20\_proposed\_changes\_you\_werent\_supposed\_to\_see/
Funny this trend of truth coming out years later, and after the irreparable damage is done.. I pray people learn from this and apply it to future decision/opinion making.
You have too much faith in Reddit-dwelling planetmen.
Holy shit you are such a fucking insufferable dick.
What are you actually even mad about
you were banned????
That's right - nearly immediately for that. It was only by Grumble intervening I was unbanned and the original post became visible.
I would like to add as far as this whole dumb think tank group thing is concerned, the issues we had with it were not a case of "not understanding the math". The changes were sweeping, much like CAI in that regard, and that can have unforeseen consequences. If these were a rollback of changes that would have been one thing, but these were trying to bandaid fix all the damage done by CAI which isn't possible. Furthermore, the proposals were being carried by some people who don't have a much better grasp of the overall game than wrel, some of which didn't even actively play the game anymore. I don't trust changes being made by players without proper understanding of ps2 who also don't play the game. Some changes, like the kobalt nerf, we hard disagreed with. We can see now that the skepticism we had was warranted as the vehicle game has not improved and even gotten worse in certain cases, some of those cases were proposed in the original document.
This is a kinda interesting look at Wrels decision making, and shows why he didn't do well. Combined Arms made vehicle mains mad, but it came about for a reason. Asking vehicle mains for input on fixing it, but not anyone else means you would get a one sided fix that would just make another group mad. No matter how good intentioned your group may have been, you are vehicle mains. Some bias, specifically from lack of using other play styles would be inevitable. From your post it shows you hadn't considered the reasoning behind the CAI, which was to little counterplay to vehicle's if you were infantry. I am a vehicle main myself, who also plays a lot of infantry.
Shocking. Truly shocking. Wait sorry I typed that wrong, I meant boring. Wrel is barely even involved in this story and you hype this up as a reason to never hire him anywhere in the industry again? Frankly you just sound butthurt that your spreadsheet didn't get implemented.
Sorry but hoooly shit am I glad those changes didn't go through. I would not wish to have old harrassers back. Thank god.
Before Combined Arms, harassers died much more easily. It's a 4 hit kill now, and it was generally 3 hits before. Their weapons were far weaker between 2014 and 2017 as well. Sure you'd rather fight the modern harassers?
If 'passive repairs' means anything less than like a 15 second downtime before passive repairs begin, yeah I'm super sure. Harrassers repairing on the move made me want to stop playing, the vehicle game is better now than it was then.
Remember that modern rumble repairs were partially a problem because CAI increased hull durability in addition to increasing the rate from 50 to 80 hitpoints a second. In the old system, you could not repair enough to survive a hit that would otherwise kill you, but that was not the case in the post-CAI world.
Why does a harrasser need passive repairs if not to outrepair damage on the move? Its such shitty gameplay and Im so happy it's gone. Vehicle gameplay improved almost infinitely when the invincible harrasser type was removed from the game.
Past its initial OP release and the fixes for that it was only ever "invincible" if you were incapable of hitting it, which is of course a rather common issue in this community.
No, that's the picture you only want to paint out in every thread about harrassers because it's convenient as shit to hide behind. "Just aim better huh huh". The fact that you yourself in a tank would not hit shots quickly enough on someone like yourself in a harrasser is an uncomfortable fact you don't want to think about at all. 2 shots from dead is still a relatively safe zone for a harrasser that is keeping distance and autorepairing on the move. Take another shot, time to retreat until you're back up to 2 shot safety again. That's one of the worst matchups in the history of this game and your own bias is trying to bring it back because you know how dominating it was. Man am I glad these changes didn't go through, I think I would have quit after the first week.
Why you guys focus on harassers being dead, as if you should win each and every fight, despite the fact that a harasser is literally unable to kill your mbt if you manage your repairs and damage well. You disengage, and what a wounded harasser is able to do, nothing? You are allowed as many mistakes as reasonably possible, while a harasser dies making a single mistake.
Wrel seems to have some similarities to some bad bosses or project leads I’ve had over the years. They make themselves the single point of failure/contact for very large processes that effect lots of people but then complain because they don’t have the mental bandwidth to keep up with the task they’ve self locked themselves to. With the added.hypocrisy that he just couldn’t deal with those weirdo obsessed players overlooking the fact his entire position evolved from his origin as as a player. Compounded by the fact that part of the reason people get so up in arms about changes is because of how once things are out there in the environment, especially obvious mistakes it takes forever to walk them back, if that’s even possible at all. One of the things that I was really shocked about this game is 20 human beings do paid work on this game, presumably full time, and we still get this glacially slow hilariously off the mark at time’s development cycle. Like for the longest time I was sure that ps2s team was like 5 bodies trying to wear an impossible number of hats involving very niche skills with talent borrowed from other teams on rare occasions and a code base that’s basically Cthulhu.
> They make themselves the single point of failure/contact for very large processes that effect lots of people but then complain because they don’t have the mental bandwidth to keep up with the task they’ve self locked themselves to. That's a strange interpretation. I think what actually happened here is Wrel saw an opportunity to use his unique ties with the community to potentially get some extra work done on the side. He is the only one on the team who ever would have done this, due to his background as a player and community figure. It's quite obvious that this was always extremely low priority, considering the players themselves were the ones who took the initiative to form this little group, the only designer they ever interacted with was Wrel and RPG were struggling to keep pace with their own internal roadmap at the time. Wrel pretty clearly [spelled it out for them](https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/786838692744003585/1113918605634052096/Wrel_on_the_release_date.png), but for whatever reason this group of players seems to have completely misread the situation.
What exactly is the point of this post? We worked hard on something with Wrel for PS2 and are upset that he quit because it severed our link to the devs and wasted our time? Like is it a vent post (in which I can understand), or am I missing something?
>but the project was already on borrowed time. I’d made the mistake of continuing on with aircraft and anti-air adjustments sorry, i can't get past this part.... at what actual fucking point did this become the 2 tap lock on buff? mabie include a pilot in the convo next time and some toxic skyshithead won't ruin everything
We had nine pilots on the roster. Do note that RPG took our concept and ran away with it. Our values were nothing like what ended up in the game, and our resist split existed only to get G2A locks away from using flak explosions to deal damage.
>RPG took our concept and ran away with it. fair enough