Yeah I did mention it in a stream, but we have only started cursory testing internally for it, so I’m not sure it’s going to be THE fix, but it’s something we’re trying.
I watch the entire spectrum of content for Exiles, and believe it or not PvP is my personal favorite aspect of any game. Ever since highschool I’ve played games against people online at a high level in countless games that have come and gone - mastery is where I usually find the most fun in games and mastery is only ever truly tested against other people.
On that same stream I spoke up because I was criticized for not knowing how to open my inventory on the official Exiles stream (Andy uses different key bindings than me, and playing on streams for me is more about talking and showing than performing in combat!) - there’s a narrative that we don’t play the game. Exiles made up 40% of my play time in the Steam recap this year, that’s on my personal account, and it doesn’t account for the hours I work and test in our editor. This is getting long winded, but the point is - yes I care.
The most difficult aspects of PvP and Exiles are:
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Exiles is not purely a PvP game. Because of that, we can’t make changes that ONLY benefit PvP all the time. We can pick and choose, but we (the design team) have to be considerate that there are other types of player in the game, so not every PvP solution will gel with the rest of the community.
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Everybody has a different opinion of what the “right fix” is for any given situation. Even if we were to “listen to everyone” today to take the steps that would “fix the game”, revert stamina to the old system, change rotation to be pre-AoW or match Chapter 2, there would be another thing that comes up that everyone agrees makes it imperfect.
I don’t mean to be dismissive. I monitor discussions in various places, but I usually don’t reply to these threads because they start counterproductive arguments about who’s right and what’s a braindead take rather than leading to constructive discourse about the changes. The most important thing everyone can do is to keep telling us when you’re not happy. Through dialogue, we should usually be able to agree on the problem, and the outpouring of feedback we got from this update was invaluable in signaling that something had come up that needed our immediate attention. That type of feedback is extremely important for us, thanks to everyone who has taken the time to post about it!
There are some changes in this chapter that should have been tested more before going live, both by myself and by the community, and since Exiles is a live service game, we have the luxury of correcting those mistakes. I’m auditing all of the changes that took place between Chapter 2 and Chapter 3, and will let you know once we have more information about the fixes. I’m sorry to anyone who was inconvenienced by these changes, it’s never our intention to upset anyone.