Season 6 State of Balance Follow-Up | Forums

[FredEx919]

Hello, warriors! We’ve recently posted our Season 6 State of Balance blog post, and have noticed quite the response to it! We want to address a few points that have been brought up, since we think there is currently a perceived divide between what we think and what you think we think.


1. How is this data used?
Let’s be very clear on this: as stated in the “What does the Data mean” section of the blog, the Win Rate and Pick Rate matrices are not at all the sole determinants of balance within the game, nor are they even a primary driver. They are best used to find the trends – especially after a patch. Such as, what are the effects of a buff, or a nerf, or a bug fix, etc - who is going up or down, how far do they move in relation to where they were before, etc. Often, it’s most useful to know if there’s something we need to investigate further - but our balancing decisions are not solely determined by the heroes’ positions within these matrices.
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Also, note that this post has come in rather far from Season 6 (we’re now almost in Season 8!) and the data in it only represents the data from Season 6, not the current state of the game.
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2. What relevance does the top 2.5% of players have?
The data set used for Duel was “the top 2.5% of For Honor players in Duel on PC and Console combined, according to our skill rating”. This means that this data presented in the blog does NOT include new players who just picked up the game. (It should be noted, though, that the team does also look at the data across all skill levels.)

We take the top 2.5% because we need a large enough sample size to see trends - but yes this sample size is larger than, for example, the set of tournament-level players would be, and therefore the data will be less representative of tournament-level balance.

The question of “is this top 2.5% useful” has been brought up internally, and by some of you, for Season 4, 5, and now 6’s State of Balance blog posts. We hear you on this – and our intention for the future is to pull from the top players in Ranked Duel instead.
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3. Centurion/Lawbringer/Shugoki?
There has been an uproar about this sentence in particular from the Season 6 State of Balance blog post:

“The suspicion is that the other top characters (especially Centurion, Lawbringer, Shugoki) would beat Conquerors by countering, and not by initiating combat”. --(Season 6 State of Balance)

What is important to remember is that this really means:

“The suspicion is that the other characters listed at the top placements within the Top 2.5% win rate matrix – such as Centurion (3rd), Lawbringer (6th), and Shugoki (7th) - are only able to beat Conqueror by counter-attacking. We believe their weak openers aren’t allowing them to win, and only the strength of counter-attacking options nets them wins against Conqueror.”

We have no illusion that these characters are “top tier”, or that they have good enough openers to beat the actual top tier characters. We wrote “top characters” to mean “the characters who have the highest Win Rate among the top 2.5% of players, as noted in the graphic of the matrix above”. And we specifically called out Centurion, Lawbringer, and Shugoki, because it is unexpected to see them at the top of the 1v1 Win Rate. It would have been weird not to mention them.

It seems the wording of our sentence caused this confusion about a massive gap between player perception and dev perception, and that’s our mistake for the bad wording. However, we want you to understand that the Fight Team doesn’t consider any of those 3 as top tier characters, and we believe they all require improvements to their initiation moves.
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4. Next steps?
That said, on the Fight Team, we feel the more immediate balancing problems are such topics as:

• dodge roll (which allows opponents to avoid many heroes' mix ups in 1v1 and 4v4, and should see some improvement in Season 8)
• Wu Lin buffs based on Open Test feedback (We’ll share what exactly these buffs are soon, but we want to let you know that our goal is making combat exciting and competitive, and that direction represents the global intentions of the Fight Team.)
• the general ineffectiveness of offense (in 1v1 and 4v4)

In terms of the “ineffectiveness of offense", generally it's a topic that applies to the entire roster. While defense is still extremely good, the ability to successfully initiate combat or sustain combat is still globally weak - it’s better than it was, but it still has improvements to go. This is in addition to character-specific inability to initiate combat (such as Shugoki’s difficulties for instance).

Merci!

-The Fight Team

[Soldier_of_Dawn]

So what is the developers' current take on light spam for both PC and console?

[iAGA_Jeshi]

So what is the developers' current take on light spam for both PC and console?

Watch Meges video on light spam. It makes a lot of since. Light spam is here to stay at least for those who can’t counter it yet.

His video is on youtube.

[EvoX.]

It seems the wording of our sentence caused this confusion about a massive gap between player perception and dev perception, and that’s our mistake for the bad wording. However, we want you to understand that the Fight Team doesn’t consider any of those 3 as top tier characters, and we believe they all require improvements to their initiation moves.

Well, holy hell - here's the long awaited glimpse of a hint of a Centurion rework, at long last.

I await the day patiently, Ubisoft.

• the general ineffectiveness of offense (in 1v1 and 4v4)

In terms of the “ineffectiveness of offense", generally it's a topic that applies to the entire roster. While defense is still extremely good, the ability to successfully initiate combat or sustain combat is still globally weak - it’s better than it was, but it still has improvements to go. This is in addition to character-specific inability to initiate combat (such as Shugoki’s difficulties for instance).

This particular part is the most interesting thing. I wasn't aware global changes to offense were still being thought of, so hopefully this is something meaningful.

[The_B0G_]

About number 3, the win rates of Cent/Shugo/LB against Conq are all under 40%, closer to 30% for a couple of them. How is that even worth mentioning? Do they have actual stats that tell them that they won by counter attacking or are they assuming because those heroes are all trash tier? I just don't understand why they would bring up what these 3 did when all 3 have terrible win rates against conq.

It just seems like they're trying to justify such terrible heroes being so high in the stats, because it makes no sense and makes the statistics look like BS. The top 2.5% with such weak characters in the top rankings doesn't make sense, you can shut out any of the 3 just by blocking and CGB'ing, I'm surprised they were being picked at all.

[Knight_Raime]

I like some of what was said here. But I still don't buy into point 1. Maybe they're just bad at wording themselves. But if they don't base their changes/lack of changes mostly around win rates then they need to explain why they noted the tourney players opinion about aramusha but defer to his win rate for why he's not being looked at. I don't doubt that they look at/listen to tourney/competitive players. But it doesn't seem like their feedback is ever really impactful.

EDIT: Also. Their skill based ranking is based around win rate. Which is flawed. So how can these stats even be taken seriously?

[RexXZ347]

I don't buy it too. If they thought that it's only a word misunderstanding, then why would they want to buff the conqueror? Really, when they posted this conqueror controversy they mean what they said. Then when people got angry they make excuses. Only a child woukd buy it.

[FinnOfTheHorde]

Just say: WE WILL BUFF/REWORK LAWBRINGER AND SHUGOKI.
Simple fix.
If devs cant fix thier own game maybe players can.
Why you are adding cool armors for unplayable heroes...

[dedric_branford]

the community got riled up bcos of some uncanny and unfounded reasons. i think now the devs made it clear to us their intentions . great job guys

[Illyrian_King]

I am looking forward a lot to Marching Fire, but you really need to fix LB, Shrek and Legendary. They are unplaybale.

It took you 5 seasons to fix parry. You are too slow with balancing. The whole community would appreciate it much more, if you brought more frequent balancing patches, even if you mess things up ... as long as you fix it again.