3.2.0 Hotfix 5

Much love for owning the error and fixing it!

-O

"

Marochias wrote:

Or just get rid of the stun and make it a slow so there's no need to worry about stun abuse.

Yeah, an 80% slow would be fine, too.

Heck, I wouldn't even care about the .2 sec stun as long as I still had 3 sec to capture.

I'm not going to sit here and white knight, like a lot of other people here.
I'm not going to sit here and say "Oh, it's okay, you're doing great!"

I'm instead going to ask a question: Will you be taking steps to reduce these sorts of oversights in future?

Because this sort of thing is becoming more and more common with each League. Too much focus on the extra details, not enough focus on the actual gameplay.

A pretty sizeable amount of people have sat here and on reddit and tried to get it through to you guys that the net mechanic didn't need to be anything complex. Infact, it being complex is just silly for the exact reason we're now having problems with it: It's getting in the WAY of gameplay.

Netting doesn't need a stun. It doesn't need tiers. It doesn't even need to be a consumable (a gem would have served the purpose better, and allowed people to build for the system if they wanted to improve the experience.) It doesn't need to be used at low-life and screw over an entire ascendancy class. It doesn't need to heal the target if used at the wrong time against certain targets.

All it needed to do, was be the first thing you slap on a special enemy, be quite fluid in how it plays rather than a super clunky and ridiculously timing based mechanic. Then it would have a several second window to catch it by killing it. Nice, simple, effective.

All of the complexity of the league needed to be in the Menagerie, which a lot of it is. But do you know why this feels good? Because it's use doesn't interfere with gameplay on the field. Instead it's more like going to town, and with the ability to make leveling items, it might just be very worth doing on your first character each league if your luck is bad. No movement speed boots by the time you take down Oozeback? Have some. You want to race faster? Catch Faun and get a Quicksilver with extra move speed.

Like with many leagues, these mechanics have become "Good idea, bad execution."
This is the norm, and has been the norm for quite a long time now.
For this league, this bad execution has been part of the nets.
Better QA could tell you these things don't feel good.

Am I a game developer? No. I want to be.
But like many no-lifes, I spend my life playing video games.
I've been in betas and alphas, even one or two betas back in the day when it actually meant something rather than mostly being a stress test on servers, and testing was the goal.

Surely you guys didn't just throw nets at test enemies, and at least played through a chunk of the campaign once just to see how the mechanic felt overall...
Someone had to, right?
Because if someone had, they would have brought up a lot of potential issues as to how it played out that could have been dealt with before release.

Was this message harsh? Maybe.
But I'm hoping it turns out to be a harsh dose of reality, because it still feels like you guys are coasting on luck, and I really don't want the day to come when the bubble bursts and the game goes away. I WANT you guys to keep doing well, so please: What steps will you take to do better next time?