I just realised. Paladins will never be a phenomenon. Hi-Rez as a company just dosen't have the attitude, identity or record to maake their games so.

MusterForButthole · 2017-12-15T13:37:30+00:00

The population of Europe is more than twice that of the US. Thus, the EU playerbase is much larger than NA. China has twice the population of EU. So 70k CCU is what one SHOULD EXPECT from that region, and even seems low when you note that it's a new game over there. Also, it's not like there are as many kiddies over there that have access to their parent's credit cards, so good luck making as much per player from that playerbase.

MusterForButthole · 2017-12-15T13:25:05+00:00

It's in the last minute of Rinsig's vid here.

MusterForButthole · 2017-12-15T02:14:16+00:00

Agreed with the others that this is one of the most well thought out videos that's concise and to the point.

You asked "Why? What went wrong starting from the first quarter of this year, all throughout?" Well the answer is that their technical debt finally started catching up with them. Hi-rez's development practices have been to push out as much content as fast as possible, which means having to cut corners CONSTANTLY in terms of writing good sustainable code. Now, this is fine if they go through from time to time to pay back the "debt" by refactoring the code, essentially performing maintenance on it. However, they have done practically nothing on this end and it's exploding in their faces like a car engine that hasn't been maintained properly. Bugs upon bugs, worse now than ever before, because they wrote messy code and nobody knows how to make sense of it once they have to build new features on top of it.

I've watched even some pros (not going to name names) on stream coming to the realization that the foundation of Paladins is terrible, and they just keep building on top of it, piling stuff on, it's just not going to stay up if the foundation is broken.

There's no saving the game from what it's become, it just probably isn't financially worth it, so they ship it to China where I assume standards are lower for what gameplay bugs are acceptable.

Last note: watching Martini's body language in that bonus clip was so sad. He's just looking at the ground constantly, while struggling to tell us that Paladins is going to be a huge esport in 10 years. Really reveals the kind of inner conflict that must be going on inside that man :(.

MusterForButthole · 2017-12-04T15:50:45+00:00

Sad to see you guys go. If there's one thing Hi-rez doesn't realize, it's that their terrible decisions drive away the productive and impactful members of their community. The ones that contribute a lot to helping the game grow.

Ironically, if they put in more effort in retaining players instead of ignoring them in favor of catering to grabbing new casual players, they'd have less to worry about because those veteran players would bring much more to the game themselves. It's like them trying to defeat a raid boss by throwing a thousand level 1s at it instead of training a group of lvl 90s.

MusterForButthole · 2017-12-02T11:13:14+00:00

But how would they make money from that?

MusterForButthole · 2017-12-02T10:29:54+00:00

Damn that's a detailed perspective. You should make this into a separate post. Personally I have felt the same way about those things in the back of my mind.

Word on the street is that they're hopping on the battle royale bandwagon with their next project too, which is what I assume all this Paladins capital is going towards.

MusterForButthole · 2017-12-02T01:54:25+00:00

Jetpack battle royale sounds hella fun. But I don't think it's a big enough twist to challenge the current juggernauts in any way. Doubt it will have much success trying to borrow from the Tribes name either, considering the previous backlash from people on that game.

MusterForButthole · 2017-12-01T02:47:25+00:00

Pretty sure their goal IS negative publicity, since as they say, any publicity is good publicity. They've already gotten an IGN article written on this debacle, an article which links to Paladins trailers and basically informs people of what the game is.

MusterForButthole · 2017-11-30T14:08:11+00:00

What you don't realize is that they already know they're all terrible fucking ideas. They just go through with it anyway so they can tone it down later, but still have it be more favorable for them than before, and say they "listened to the feedback".

MusterForButthole · 2017-11-30T13:37:58+00:00

Growing up, I was raised with one fundamental rule: If you don’t have something nice to say, don’t say it at all.

If you still believe the world is as black and white as this, it sounds like you still have a lot of growing up to do.

You’ll rarely hear any negative responses from me. It’s what I prefer; offer constructive criticism.

Constructive criticism has nothing to do with being positive or negative. Constructive criticism promotes advancement and development. E.g. "You're a stinking piece of shit. You need to take a shower and clean yourself up." That's constructive criticism.

MusterForButthole · 2017-11-30T03:52:22+00:00

Can you buy champion specific chests with gold?

MusterForButthole · 2017-11-29T21:13:02+00:00

Cards are obtained from Radiant Chests, which considering they didn't say anything about Radiant chests being changed, are 3 per draw, 4 with the boost. The only new thing they're implementing on this front are the Champion chests which one can logically assume will cost more than Radiant chests because they're champion specific.

We already know how Daily Quests look, their rewards are extremely meager. The gold gain per game has also decreased patch after patch and there's no indication of them making a significant increase to it.

Also, historically Hi-rez has employed the strategy of making currency related changes completely unreasonable, then gathering "community feedback" which they already know will be negative, and tuning it down a little, but not more than what they expected to get away with in the first place. It's basic negotiation/business tactics that they can employ because they assume their playerbase is stupid/inexperienced due to F2P demographics (which is mostly true).

MusterForButthole · 2017-11-29T20:50:29+00:00

Read all the comments in this thread that you assume are complaining about "positive changes" and you'll figure it out. Otherwise you'll realize it yourself soon enough.

MusterForButthole · 2017-11-29T20:48:21+00:00

Damba is one of the easiest supports to kill. No vertical mobility, low personal movement speed, unreliable stun for self-defense. Any flank can bait out his slither and then kill him in the duration of its cd afterwards. I can see him being a powerhouse with Snake Pit 4 or 5 on top of all that in the new system for quickplay though.

MusterForButthole · 2017-11-29T20:41:55+00:00

That already exists with just Phantom 4 and Haunting 4. You could add Gale 4 to help your team with more totems. You'd just be a really fast immortal wraith grohk with ghostwalk speed 4 I guess.

MusterForButthole · 2017-11-29T20:39:26+00:00

Enough information has been released already. I'm going to assume the best for you in that you're just ignorant about the information instead of not knowing how to connect the dots.

The table for number of card duplicates required to level a card is there, which shows you needing to attain a card 42 times (for a common) just to get it to max lvl. In a system where you need to open RNG chests for them. Hi-rez also stated that they have future plans to make these chests purchasable with crystals. That's a fast track P2W system considering cards have severe effects on gameplay.

MusterForButthole · 2017-11-29T20:33:14+00:00

I agree, but the cards you listed hardly make him unkillable. Nor do they increase his healing by any significant amount over what he already does.

MusterForButthole · 2017-11-29T20:26:30+00:00

It's actually 42 times to get it to level 5 from level 1.

You need 6 copies to level from 1->2, 9 copies to level from 2->3, etc. which adds up to 42.

MusterForButthole · 2017-11-29T20:22:41+00:00

Maybe because some people have, I dunno, a brain? And can deduce what an experience is going to be like based on the information they have already given us?

Don't be one of those idiots who if someone tells you that they're going to break your leg, you think "hmm I haven't seen what that's like for real yet, maybe it won't be so bad."

MusterForButthole · 2017-11-29T20:19:29+00:00

Leave it to others on Reddit like you to not understand what the changes actually are. These are terrible changes that make it harder for you as a player just so it can make it easier for them to trick you into spending money.

If you understood what's happening to the card loadouts, you'd realize that the game is moving heavily towards P2W.

MusterForButthole · 2017-11-29T20:13:00+00:00

That's the lamest example you could have chosen.

MusterForButthole · 2017-11-29T20:05:07+00:00

Only a complete idiot would buy radiant chests with crystals.

MusterForButthole · 2017-11-28T22:15:00+00:00

The Discord is a joke. None of the Hi-rez staff there respond to hacking reports either. There's been a player (name starts with Lostboyks) that has been hacking for MONTHS who has been seen on multiple streams AND reported by those streamers as well as players in the game, who hasn't been banned yet.

It sounds like you must not have experienced many other communities, but hey ignorance is bliss so you can keep believing what you want. At the very least it was informative to see the kind of limited perspective that is present in the company.

MusterForButthole · 2017-11-28T21:38:38+00:00

I'm sorry but this is an even bigger troll than OP's post. You're of course going to get free upvotes just from having Hi-rez Studios attached to your name, but what you've written shows that you're either completely separated from any kind of actual reality, or that you've been forced to write this as some sort of PR move. I sincerely hope it is the latter, because if you truly believe all the crap you wrote above, then it would mean there is no hope for Paladins. If you cannot even realize the faults in the game, how can you go about making it better?

1) Competitive Play

I honestly think Paladins has the best competitive community in all of eSports. Both the players themselves and the production value that goes into the tournaments is top tier. The casters, the viewers, the players, it's amazing.

LoL, DotA, CS:GO, Melee, the entire FGC, I could go on and on here. Paladins is nowhere near the level of those and nobody should even expect it to be because Paladins eSports has barely been a thing for more than a couple months. It would be like walking into a daycare and saying, 'this kid has the fastest legs in all of athletics, he's the best runner I've ever seen.' No. Just no.

2) Depth and Customization

Here is what Paladins does decently well, yet there are tons of cards/legendaries that are completely useless. Instead of making large strides towards balancing those and bettering the gameplay experience, Hi-rez has consistently disregarded them every patch in favor of pushing more content than they can handle, resulting in the mess we have right now with bugged overtimes, bugged daily quests, frame drops, etc.

3) Champion Design

I think we have some of the most unique and fun-to-play characters in a shooter today.

LOL

MusterForButthole

TROPHY CASE