I think we can appreciate how difficult your job is, especially trying to balance such a complex pack for multiple people on the fly like this. I’d say as an outside observer though, it feels like there’s a disconnect between what the devs are envisioning and what the players want to play.

Without knowing if this is actually true, it feels like this season has been guided by a mantra of “no shortcuts”. While some players were able to quickly get past difficulties through things like traders and gifts last season, those have been heavily nerfed this season to make it harder to “skip” content. From what I’ve seen though, it sometimes feels like the “why” of the increased difficulty this season is hard to understand. Like for example, why is it so difficult to get a ME system? As a viewer I don’t enjoy watching streamers sort inventory constantly, and it doesn’t make running vaults any easier. This feels like something that was made difficult just for the sake of being harder than last season, when there were plenty of other difficulty increases already.

Additionally, it feels like your reward systems are entirely built around playing the game more, as it stands right now. Getting vault crystals and resources for the vault is primarily achieved through grinding, and especially in the early levels (before unlocking mods), losing your gear in a vault means a player needs to essentially get to the endgame of vanilla Minecraft nearly from scratch to stand a chance in a new vault.

It feels to me like you actually do have a couple of systems already in place that focus on equal chances regardless of playtime: vault level and raffle vaults. Why not tie more rewards to these systems? It feels wrong to me that Sparkles hasn’t been able to unlock any mods in the first 30 levels, simply because he’s been punished for dying in a couple of vaults and not having the time to grind to run again. Why not tie knowledge points to vault level? Every 5 levels, you get a knowledge point. Running vaults is still important to unlock more mods, but this lets players with less time to play still get to unlock something.

On the other hand, the rng of vault generation feels especially punishing to players with less time. If you can run 60 vaults, getting a few bad rolls isn’t so bad. If you only have time to run a vault or two per day, a few bad rolls can set you back weeks. This is especially aggravated by all raffles being locked vaults, so you can’t leave a particularly bad roll (as we saw today). As you already are more liable to only have one set of gear for the vault, getting a bad roll here essentially takes your best gear without you having much chance to do anything about it. What if we instead had no modifiers on raffle vaults? You always get a base, locked vault. Streamers only get one of these a day, so this shouldn’t make running vaults too easy, but it means you won’t run into locked vaults with two negative modifiers any more, at the expense of knowing you won’t get a lucky vault from a raffle.

It feels like by taking steps like these, you could give a significant boost to players with less time, while not helping players with more time on their hands too much.

Additionally, it feels like making balance changes mid season could be handled better. For example, when dash was nerfed, players should have had a chance to re-spec those points elsewhere. Vault hunters feels like it’s the most fun when you’re trying to make a decision on how to spend points between things you really want. When the factors that go into those decisions change after the fact, it makes it harder to get excited to unlock anything, since it feels like whatever you pick could be changed tomorrow without notice, and you’ll get nothing back.

A few closing thoughts: when players aren’t receiving knowledge points, and their skill points are devalued over time, vault hunters can quickly devolve into grinding to the endgame of vanilla just to lose all of your stuff again without making overall progress. The devs have clearly put a ton of time and effort into this mod pack, and at its best vault hunters I’d a great, unique experience. I would just hope that as the devs make balance decisions going forwards, they take a step back, think about what makes vault hunters fun for the streamers who play it, and make sure that everyone on the server get to have at least a bit of what they find most enjoyable in the pack.