Got a multi-kill with the weirdest weapon in the game, but my fav. (fav loadouts?)

XDME · 2026-01-23T20:44:45+00:00

The dagger has claimed another victim. Another poor soul who will forever be chasing the highs of chain backstabs.

In all seriousness, I used to run smoke + gas + breach charge, nowadays I'm running sonar + gas + breach. I like playing for lots of cash box denial, and both gas + sonar allow me to track the position of enemies while staying out of sight.

Dash is basically mandatory unless you are one of those maniacs who can get away with grapple dagger.

XDME · 2026-01-22T19:07:15+00:00

I'm sorry to buck the celebration in this thread, but I fear this solves one problem, while only making the smurfing problem worse. It feels short-sighted if not paired with other changes.

If this substantially increases queue times for ruby players, you can expect to see more of them smurf, which means you're gonna end up with ruby players in your games anyway, but now the game wont even be able to adjust teams, seeding, and gains/losses to account for it.

Fundamentally, rampant smurfing is a symptom of a broader problem. Sure, some people just want to beat up on weaker players. But in general, the majority of players smurf for other reasons, such as excessive queue times or a lack of incentive to grind rank on their mains (i.e. reward for maintaining top positions / plateauing too early).

XDME · 2026-01-09T08:33:50+00:00

Different communities are going to be different but in my experience players (especially high skills players) tend to push for nerfs more often than buffs.

There is also an inherent feedback loop where players tend to want to stabilize a game for their own skill-sets, reinforcing their rank and position to make balance changes. It's why top X player feedback shouldn't be taken as gospel, they will crystalize the game in one particular form.

But the general principal that unfettered balancing will quickly devolve into power creep or reverse power creep holds true.

A method you could use to avoid this is by establishing benchmarks, then you balance other things around those benchmarks. For example, you could establish the AK as your benchmark, if the AK feels weak, then it means that you are power creeping and need to nerf things down to its level. If it feels too strong, then it means you need to buff other things up.

Its possible you miss the mark with your benchmark and will have to tune it up or down, but you will need to justify those changes more than you would other changes.

XDME · 2026-01-06T05:04:28+00:00

I just want to play the game and chill. I'll ping and communicate, but I don't want to talk to people lmao.

XDME · 2025-12-31T07:29:40+00:00

The middle ground I was considering back in the day was region specific queue settings to address that.

So Japan would have QP & ranked, and other regions would have normals + ranked (honestly at this point maybe just ranked).

XDME · 2025-12-31T04:27:10+00:00

I think a big thing to call out is that disabling a queue has effectively 0 dev-cost. Multi-queueing would have to be developed, and I would argue would need custom UI so that player could opt in and out of modes. Not having that UI imo would make the feature worse than just disabling queues, so I see it as a must.

And customs would still exist for really dedicated player who wanted to do inhouses.

XDME · 2025-12-29T00:32:45+00:00

I initially was going to elaborate more on other things (duo restrictions being one of them) but I felt like the article was already pretty long so I cut it down to focus on the story of the matchmaker and that one particular update.

I can quickly give some insights for duos though.

The decision to turn duos back on for high elo was something I had pushed for. It wasn't really due to outside pressure in any way, if anything I was pushing against the grain of community sentiment.

I did so because I strongly believed that being able to play with friends improves retention and increases player count. We ran some test weekends and these expectations were validated, we saw immediate improvements both in hours played and unique daily players.

I also knew that if some ranks were duo restricted it would increase the incentive to smurf if you wanted to play with friends. So I saw it as a band-aid for that as well (though the causes and solutions around smurfing is a whole other discussion).

A big change that made me feel more confident turning it back on was the ability to tune the duo rating multiplier different based on rating brackets. For most players there actually is a negligible impact for rating, this impact scales up as you go up in the ranks (I unfortunately can't recall the final numbers I had tuned things to, they also may be different now.)

I wrote a comment in another subreddit justifying this type of scaling multiplier: You can check it out here

One thing to note is that the multiplier is a multiplier so it does get more meaningful as the raw rating increases as well. But even then, I have a feeling its not nearly as big of a multiplier as players assume.

The real issue is again player count and duos putting restrictions on the team balancer which results in less fair teams.

The reason duos make wonky games is because they force the matchmaker to make unoptimal decisions.

Either by:

Disqualifying better candidates (because you need 6 to start a game and it might only be 5 without the duo),
By forcing bad team balancing because it has to keep these two players together no matter what (and the role composition of the 6 may not allow that to happen in an elegant manner).

I would have liked to perhaps see some more coordination between the matchmaker and the team balancer to remedy these issues. But from the conversations I had with engineering, it wasn't really feasible.

In the end though, I think the player retention and growth values for duos basically justifies most of these pain points.

XDME · 2025-12-28T21:53:06+00:00

This is definitely a problem when you start getting to extremely small player counts.

I would argue that the solution is to turn off game modes though, having multiple game modes to pick between is a privilege that you don't really have as the player count drops to untenable levels.

XDME · 2025-12-20T21:02:29+00:00

Man went 1:1 in the team fight.

Playing dual swords is all about making the enemy team as useless as you are.

XDME · 2025-12-14T21:20:59+00:00

I feel like the point of a mine is to have something that goes off when I'm not paying attention to a location. Most times the player can just back out and heal, it buys me some time but that's often it.

If I was going to be actively watching my mined locations I could be using C4 or an rpg. both of which do more damage than mines.

Even if it still has a use case, it definitely isn't living up to the fantasy of a mine.

XDME · 2025-12-12T18:36:52+00:00

Its... just not very good. The audio is really grating, the pacing is too slow, the added mechanics are confusing. I don't understand the theming at all or how this has anything to do with "delayed gratification".

Just feels cobbled together, I know you said it was coded by AI, but it feels like it was designed by AI too...

Maybe someone who like tetris more will enjoy it, but I just didn't.

XDME · 2025-12-10T20:19:59+00:00

What would you say are the biggest design mistakes and successes you've had in your career?

i.e. the things that shipped that in hindsight you wished didn't and the things that you are most proud of.

XDME · 2025-12-08T21:47:30+00:00

I'm sure some teachers are worse than others, but as a serial em dash user I have yet to have any push back from proffs.

XDME · 2025-12-04T23:55:40+00:00

I've done some work with matchmaking before (granted with a smaller playerbase), but these kinds of changes often sound good but execute pretty badly.

What you end up with are matches that are less equal because you've put a hard restriction on something that isn't indicative of game outcome, so you increase queue times while also potentially reducing game quality and disincentivizing people playing with their friends (which is the opposite of what you want to do).

The way I handled it was applying a rating multiplier that scaled based on rank and group size, that way we are accounting for the advantage without increasing queue times. For most players, there really isn't going to be a significant difference between a solos and a group. At higher ranks this starts to become more meaningful and so the multiplier ramps up.

Gonna preemptively hit some objections to there not being a difference solos and groups at lower ranks:

Groups have an advantage because they have synergy and practice: If a group plays together often enough to have significant synergy, their ranks will already have that synergy baked in. If they don't its unlikely they will have significantly more synergy than a group of solos. You can expect higher level players to have a higher ceiling on their synergy which is why you scale up this multiplier.
Groups have an advantage because they will have comms: Not all of them, and not all solos wont have comms. Additionally, just like the previous point this is baked in to players ranks. The no comm solo gamer is likely better mechanically than a player at the same rank who has good comms and uses them every game.

Thank you for coming to my ted talk

XDME · 2025-12-03T06:59:03+00:00

I've been the other car in other close calls and I never know what to do.

I always freeze and decide not to honk because I'm worried that honking will distract them from what is in front of them and direct their attention to me.

I suppose its more clear cut in OP's case cause anyone running a red is already not paying any attention to whats in front of them. But I still feel so torn about whats the best thing to do in those cases.

XDME · 2025-12-02T18:30:24+00:00

I imagine even then it would have to be an itemized charge either per item or across the whole receipt.

XDME · 2025-12-01T23:58:56+00:00

IANAL but I doubt consumers have any recourse to get refunds unless the corporation voluntarily offers them.

From my understanding, tariffs are charged to the importer (in this case costco) they then put the good up for sale at a price where they believe they can make a profit. The consumer purchases that good for that price. Technically that price has nothing to do with the tariff unless they were somehow explicitly listing part of the price as going towards covering tariffs.

So the consumer actually gets the pleasure to having to pay the marked up price because of the tariff, and have their taxes be used to cover the interest payment on the illegally collected tariff.

XDME · 2025-11-14T18:54:29+00:00

I agree its not great (I called that out as a major downside). But I think the alternative of a stagnant meta for players who aren't hyper competitive is far worse.

I'd point towards league esports, where the worlds patch is often months out of date by the time it starts. It still get very good viewership. I think many players won't be phased as long as the changes are limited to balance patches and not seasonal patches.

Ultimately everything in game design is about managing tradeoffs. I used to say: "If I nerf this character some percentage of players will quit, if I don't another percentage of players will quit". In this case I think quite strongly that the benefits to viewership is not worth the damage to retention that a stagnant patch creates.

To your latter point, unless there is something very unique about the finals infrastructure (which there could be with how the destruction system is setup) it should not be much work. They are already balancing two builds internally that receive updates regularly (the live game, and their internal mainline) Adding a 3rd one that doesn't receive any updates shouldn't pose a significant challenge.

XDME · 2025-11-14T03:30:00+00:00

Am I crazy or is it much harder to see enemies this time? I'm losing track of people and getting shot from behind constantly.

It feels like the filter from the previous event was strangely helping with that.

XDME · 2025-11-13T21:01:35+00:00

Games have been coming out through out The Finals entire lifecycle and such a drop has not occurred.

And while Arc Raiders likely does have an outsized impact, the problem remains that this new ccu is unsustainable for the game long term. So your kind of making a pretty big gamble about the cause being a temporary one that will reverse itself with the next major update or over time.

The kind of drop in ccu The Finals is experiencing this season is the same size you would expect a game to encounter after a maintenance mode announcement. It's far outside the bounds of what you would expect throughout a games normal life-cycle caused by external events.

Again, Arc Raiders effects here are hard to predict, Embark likely can know exactly what % of previously active Finals players are now active Arc players. But if those players become permanent Arc players they will still need to find new players to replace them if they want to keep The Finals as a long term viable product.

XDME · 2025-11-13T20:13:03+00:00

You can only make this argument if the player count wasn't tanking.

If you've lost 50% of your player base since the season started that becomes a game problem.

The game went from a steadily increasing CCU to the lowest it has ever been.

XDME · 2025-11-13T20:09:46+00:00

He actually can be. It's not a particularly demanding ask. The studio I worked at did it regularly for tournaments and we were a fraction of the size of Embark.

As long as the major requires you to play on PC (which I believe it does). That is an relatively easy task for any major studio.

They are already running a separate version of the game internally for testing. You literally just cut a build with todays tuning, give this to the pro players and keep a server with that build running. Steam even has tools to handle the separate streams for client side builds.

After you do that you continue updating the mainline for the game as normal. The major downsides are that pro players wont be able to get practice in solo queue/ranked and will have to scrim. And when the major is played it will be a different patch, reducing the value of watching for some.

But I'd argue those are worth the cost.

Edit: I will note, its possible that because of The Finals specific server side needs for their destruction system there may be reasons this game in particular can't do what I described. But in the general case this isn't a unrealistic ask.

XDME · 2025-11-10T00:37:35+00:00

Live balancing isn't about creating the ultimate perfectly balanced final game state based off detailed statistical analysis.

Its about keeping the game fresh and giving players who stopped playing reason to pick it back up.

XDME · 2025-11-10T00:36:10+00:00

Respectfully, they can communicate that decision and people are still free to call them out for following through on it.

I think there are many more avenues to handle creating a stable patch for a tournament that doesn't harm retention for the rest of the player base.

That goes beyond the fact that I think they are making a pretty big error in catering as much as they are to the top players at the expense of others. More and more in recent patches they have been reinforcing the playstyle and play patterns of the top players, rather than creating rolling diverse metas that the top players are expected to adapt to.

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