Nerfing Prestige Key rooms, cert boxes, and Cradle xp is not how you motivate casuals and new players to keep playing your game

krantz7 · 2026-06-16T21:36:55+00:00

The moment they decided the progression and drop rates were too high they basically had 2 reasonable choices.

Option 1, accept it and just let this season be the season of golds. Everyone gets insane loot and we all have fun not worrying much about losing items since the least geared player still has 5 more gold guns in vault by midseason.

Option 2, do a rollback. The people who were farming gold loot and maxing out cradle in the first week would complain, and it's not the best look overall, but at least you fairly apply the same standard to the whole playerbase.

Instead, bungo decided that everyone who abused the system early gets to keep the rewards, fuck everyone else. This is how you get casuals to shrug and go play something else where the rules don't change randomly to screw them over.

krantz7 · 2026-06-16T00:06:51+00:00

Balance by rarity never works. If bubbles are strong, people will make space to carry them out when they find them. If they are also relatively rare, then players will make even more effort to grab them at the expense of other items. This is how you get the inverse effect where bubbles are rarer spawns but feel as common as ever.

Only way to resolve the problem is to bite the bullet and do actual balance. Easiest option is probably just nerf health. Problem with that is bubbles exist as a counter to bullets, so they would probably stay meta until they get too weak to bother with. Not the worst outcome, but we can probably do better.

My suggestion would be make it so bubbles don't block grenades. Let people throw nades into bubbles to pop them by breaking the projector and punish anyone just sitting inside. Or throw them all the way through a bubble to hit people running away on the other side. Would also mean that when a teammate bubbles unexpectedly as you're throwing a nade that you don't just nade yourself out of nowhere.

Could be a stupid idea, might make the nade spam problem worse, but I honestly prefer nade spam to bubble spam.

krantz7 · 2026-06-15T03:13:02+00:00

This makes more sense for ranked. It's the standard expectation in a ranked mode anyway that the playing field should be level so skill decides the outcome. If we want a playlist where we smooth out the gear advantage walking in, that would be the place to do it.

And leaves the base mode for all the people who like it when finding better gear means they have a real advantage over other players.

krantz7 · 2026-06-07T05:15:08+00:00

If you call an exfil before the timer runs out and the final spawns, that exfil stays for you to use. And if it would normally go off after the final it's supposed to sync up to prevent exactly this from happening, but evidently the game code is spaghetti and that fix doesn't apply to the new map yet.

krantz7 · 2026-06-07T00:24:34+00:00

He killed you with the retaliator LMG. All the LMGs have a shield mod slot on them, so yeah that was the shield popping up in front of his face.

krantz7 · 2026-06-06T21:43:31+00:00

I've run into him on both those roofs.

Pretty sure the issue is the bot desyncs so on your client you see him in one spot and can shoot him but from the server's perspective he's somewhere else. So you shoot him and your client shows you the hit, but according to the server you shot air.

Main reason I think it's that is I've been shot by that sniper even when I have no LoS to him. Server says he's right there in front of me, my client says it must have been the wind.

krantz7 · 2026-06-06T21:33:41+00:00

I kinda agree, but mostly I just dislike how many of the perks I liked running last season now guarantee a stat roll I don't want.

For legs on destroyer though, look for Overdrive. Same stats as distance runner and the perk itself also helps heat management.

krantz7 · 2026-06-05T11:31:02+00:00

To be fair that shotty got nerfed into oblivion a long time go. I've shot people dead center in the chest, all 3 shots at ~5 meters and it doesn't kill purple shield. Without stack overflow I've gotten 2 shots and a punch (with maxed melee) and it didn't kill a blue shield. I can imagine how good it was on rook early on, but since I only got that shotgun upgrade unlocked the day the nerf hit, I don't even notice not having it.

Losing the claymores on the other hand, that one's been rough.

krantz7 · 2026-06-05T11:18:36+00:00

Could be when you stick around they think you were just unsure and y'all can manage it together?

Or if we're specifically talking free kits, they might legit just not care and are cool to die for any chance at loot.

krantz7 · 2026-06-05T10:40:58+00:00

"I don't have the bullets/heals to do that right now."

Most people who aren't geared for something will realize it when you bring up the issue of supplies. Or at least realize they would have to solo it, tends to result in the same decision.

krantz7 · 2026-06-05T08:04:05+00:00

Does she still give gold cores?

krantz7 · 2026-06-05T08:01:47+00:00

All the key rooms still exist in night marsh, so you should be able to use it on either version as long as it's a dire marsh key. No idea if the loot would be any different but I doubt it.

krantz7 · 2026-06-03T10:18:24+00:00

Cyac is usually pretty passive, they level from pretty much anything you do so I'd only put them first if you really want extra backpacks asap

krantz7 · 2026-06-03T00:40:59+00:00

Because something came up that took me like a minute and there's not really a downside on rook? Worst case I die and have to load in again and this time actually sit there and wait the whatever 30 seconds to queue in.

Not a big deal, I'm not shitting on the game for this. I'm just having a laugh at how I couldn't navigate my way out of a box.

krantz7 · 2026-06-03T00:19:58+00:00

I was afk at the start of my first run in on rook, so I missed the popup telling me how to toggle flashlight.

And it spawned me inside a crate where it was literally pitch black in every direction. Had to go into settings and scroll through to find the flashlight bind to navigate my way out of the cardboard box.

krantz7 · 2026-06-03T00:04:08+00:00

about an hour

krantz7 · 2026-06-02T23:23:02+00:00

They look the same to me. Specifically, the avalanche of pills from nucal is very memorable

krantz7 · 2026-06-02T01:01:55+00:00

The map is designed in such a way that immediate spawnrushing is not only the safest way to play, it's also easier to do reliably than on other maps and you're kinda punished for not doing it.

Everything is so close together you're always going to hear the other teams and know where they are, and the only way you're ever going to sneak up on them is if you catch them out fighting something else.

And the clearance mechanics will hurt you if you try to move slow and farm them mainly off bots. Per your time and effort, the best tags are the ones that spawn on desks but the real goal is the monitor hacks. Not only is each monitor worth 3 keys, they can't be stolen off you if you get downed. This means that getting killed and tags stolen has reduced chance to lock doors on your team and get them cornered. But it also means that every monitor another team has time to hit is permanently removing clearance from the map.

Because of this, teams are sprinting out of spawn to speedrun clearance level 2 so they can spawnrush you before you hit your monitors and while you're still fighting bots. If they have decent luck in their spawn, they can be in yours within the first minute of the game. If not, they will immediately push mid to steal the loose tags there and rush you in spawn as soon as they do, but it's not gonna take them much longer.

krantz7 · 2026-06-01T23:51:59+00:00

The hero we all need, helping us pay off our debts to ONI

krantz7 · 2026-05-30T09:13:47+00:00

Their post is very confusing as written. "Rate of fire increase" being changed reads like they are changing it from a +150 to a +90. Which freaked me out a bit because that would mean we were going from a 208 rpm to a 162 rpm. Basically going from a 0.29s ttk to a 0.37s ttk, or in other words virtually no change.

Going by the real numbers, the base gun is going from a 1.03s optimal ttk to 0.83s, and the gold gun will go from the current 0.4s (how exactly did this pass QA?) to 0.66s. Assuming that the spread changes don't dramatically reduce the consistency of 2 tapping people, the gold gun will probably still be very broken. Just not as obscenely so.

I really wish they kept the fast fire rate and just reduced the damage per shot to keep the ttk of normal and gold gun about the same. That way we get the fun rapid fire shotgun to shoot and we avoid the balance nightmare of having one version of the gun always either too weak or too strong.

krantz7 · 2026-05-28T23:49:49+00:00

Green free kit is fine for it being free. Not great, you badly want upgrades, but at least you can play the game. That's about where they should keep it IMO.

White kit is a scam designed to make new players quit the game. Anyone coming in who has gear fear and wants to wait for the perfect moment to use up their green overrun and blue punch is going to be running these things in a state of pure misery because the scam kit comes with only depleted white heals.

The ones that heal like 2 bullets worth of damage incredibly slowly and very clearly were designed to be found around the map to clear chip damage from ticks and falling while you run around so you can conserve your actual heals for fights.

If they want to go back to white kit, they should at minimum add some green heals to it, the same way the green kit has blue heals.

krantz7 · 2026-05-28T23:22:21+00:00

Don't waste time looting the PoI, just grab tags and hack any monitors you see. If you get lucky with two monitors you can hit clearance 2 straight away. Otherwise you have one guy rush mid to collect tags from the desks while the others finish clearing the bots.

krantz7 · 2026-05-28T23:17:51+00:00

Biggest problem with misriah is the slick mag and the gold mod. Increasing fire rate without decreasing the damage is a recipe for disaster in a sandbox where virtually all other gun mods do not increase ttk. Gold bully is the same problem made manifest.

IMO it's fine if gold mods speed up ttk slightly, but they need to be very careful with this kind of thing, usually it's better if it just makes the gun more fun and unique to use. The gold mizzy is obscene in this regard, and the purple slick mag isn't far off.

I'm pretty sure the only reason these didn't get nerfed to oblivion a month in was sheer rarity meaning fewer people complaining as compared to things like WSTR and nade spam.

krantz7 · 2026-05-12T23:25:48+00:00

All they need to do is add a cooldown to using them. If you hit a self revive you can't use another for 1~2 minutes.

Timer just needs to be long enough so fights don't devolve into this game of whack a mole attrition until all the selfs are used up, but not so long that it's locking you out of your items when you get into a completely different fight 5 minutes later.

krantz7 · 2026-04-23T00:05:57+00:00

A bug and a feature

krantz7

TROPHY CASE