A Discussion on Devs, Patches, Balance, etc.

When I first entered this community approximately one week to the day before Horizon Zero Dawn came out, I instantly loved it. I loved watching the streams, I never missed a tournament, and I practiced constantly and mastered my class so that I could compete as well. I have a history of competitive and sponsored play in games ranging back to Vanilla WoW, CoD MW2 and MW3, and then it was stagnant for a while because nothing interesting was coming out until I discovered the Souls series of games.

For Honor, even now despite its issues and I agree there are quite a few, has become the most fun that I've had in my time of doing competitive PVP. That being said, the issues that are in the game are being blown so far out of proportion that this community has taken the level complaining straight out of the observable universe. Sadly, I'm only exaggerating a little bit here.

I understand that there are frustrations, imbalances, slight connection issues (as far as I'm concerned, they really are slight and quite forgivable, far better than CoD-a much bigger game- has ever been). One thing that the people of this community need to understand is that these things are always going to be present within this game, as well as any other competitive game you will ever play.

Take World of Warcraft for example; in the beginning every class in the game had three unique specs, but each class could really only play one of those specs in order to be competitive and/or relevant in both the PVP and PVE scenes. Towards the end of Vanilla in preparation for The Burning Crusade, they released some new stuff so that other specs could be viable, but that came almost a year after game's release. From the beginning until patch 2.0 came out there were a multitude of nerfs/buffs all around, but the huge changes didn't take place until much later.

Keep in mind, Blizzard is a much bigger company than Ubisoft with many, many more people working on these things, and at the time I believe WoW was sitting at 7 million subscribers or so. That's 7 million people playing a game that not only cost $60, but also $15 per month just to play with little to no recompense for when things went wrong such as servers being down.

You may wonder why I'm bringing up WoW and Blizzard, there are several reasons. The first being the funding that they have. Blizzard, because of one game, gained a nearly inexhaustible amount of funding to do whatever they wanted. Keep in mind, they didn't have all that many projects going at one time either. Neither Ubisoft nor nearly any other video game company for that matter has that kind of size or financial backing. That's one reason Ubisoft uses P2P, as well as Micro Transactions. Funding has to come from somewhere to keep the team on this one game, and Server Farms are incredibly expensive. Not to mention that would require 24-hour, around the clock support which is another cost. With a game like this one, the first of its kind, that's still in its infancy the higher ups in the company, meaning the guys that actually call the shots, are not going to invest in that.

I don't know how many people here understand how a corporate hierarchy works, or how decisions are made using a simple Risk vs. Reward model. I'm not going to go too far into it, but a lot of the things that are complained about are a direct result from how the fellas in corporate decided it should go. Then they also decided that the game should be released on Valentine's Day, most likely believing that it would boost sales because a lot of guys would probably want the game judging from the hype. This happens all the time around holidays. Remember E.T?

Unfortunately, because they had a bigger interest in profits and getting it out the door, the corporate guys over at Ubisoft made the decision to release it then and not when more things had been ironed out. I guarantee you that Roman didn't want to release the game when they did, keep in mind this is his baby and he wants this to go as far as it possibly can. Unlike WoW where it was announced when WC3: Frozen Throne came out, it wasn't actually released until years later.

Now, I know in a way I'm comparing apples to oranges by using Blizzard and WoW as examples but as far as pvp goes they're basically the same and my points remain valid for both. I'm just trying to do a little compare and contrast as far as the size of teams, game world, and budget go, and also to do a comparison as far as balance is concerned.

Anyways, there have been a new round of complaints since the new patch was released yesterday, and these are some of the most ridiculous yet. The entire world is up in arms and again cursing the Devs, all because the Warden got a small nerf to the time they have to cancel a SB into GB, and because it costs more stam to use. Such a ridiculously small thing but now he's "unplayable". Come on guys. On top of that there are people complain about the Shinobi nerfs, and talking about how Shinobi is officially S*** tier and unplayable. Guys, guys, hold on a second. Neither of these are unplayable, you just have to adapt your play style to the changes. We all do. I main a Nobushi and my play style has to change every time something in the game changes around her, because the first bit of help that she's received was the stance change that was implemented yesterday. That's just how the competitive scene works. There will always be, now and forever, imbalances and meta tweaks in every single competitive that will ever be released. There will never be a time when everyone has the same chances of beating someone else. It's completely unrealistic.

So maybe, instead of demanding the Dev's heads on a platter because they aren't doing what you personally want, or they aren't working fast enough maybe you could show a little bit of support. Maybe appreciate what they actually have done. This game has been out for 4 months and in that time we have gotten more updates and fixes than most games get in a year. Does that not say something? I think it does, personally. Not to mention, if you don't know anything, as in you've never received any formal education, about video game design, development, coding, testing, etc. you have absolutely no right to complain about people going slow in these processes. You have no idea what actually goes into it.

No matter what though, this game is dying as quickly as it is because of this community. Not because of anything the devs did or didn't do. This community is turning toxic and people feel the need to be on the front-line of complaints so that they can feel special. It's a mob mentality, it's ridiculous, and equates to nothing more than an online temper tantrum. Much more would get done if you'd stop saying that you can't play the game in its current state and how bad everyone and everything is, and just come up with some sort of a coherent statement on your concerns. Not just crying and repeating what everyone else has already said.

I've said my peace though, I hope I don't get down voted too much and I hope that I don't have to talk about this again. Though I'm sure I will because someone will point out some kind of flaw in my logic, or call me a dumb dumb or something.

Be kind, I'm only a zygote.