Hey guys,
I found this very interesting… apparently they WILL be tweaking phantom a little bit in the upcoming patch but not changing his functionality (personally, I’m happy they arent changing him too much)
Check out the rest of the post here:
For those who don’t want to click, I’ll copy/paste but I do not claim ANY credit for putting this together
Took notes while watching the weekly Splash Damage stream and thought I’d share. Sorry for terrible grammar, they talked fast. Stream was hosted by Community Manager shoe. and Lead Designer Exedore. Link to the broadcast
On Phantom: They knew he’d be a polarizing character given his unique ability but they have no plans on changing his fuctionality at this moment.
They DO have QA and internal testing, but what testing they do can’t compare to that of the 6000- 10,000 people playing at any given time.
Exedore believes that the question “Is Phantom balanced” can’t be a yes or no question. Balancing is an ongoing process that will never be complete. A game will never achieve perfect balance in his opinion. Every character will get tweaked one way or another in the lifetime of the game, the question is who will be tweaked before others and how soon.
Exedore says there are no plans to revert aim punch.
They will not be adding more parkour or “Brink” elements to the game. Brink was made on a different engine and they do not have the resources to implement such a system to get it done in a timely manner.
Exedore does not know when ranked will be added to South America.
No plans on buffing Aura, but he said he would look into it.
No plans on adding melee headshots back into the game. They had them before and they sucked according to Exedore.
No new Stopwatch and Objective maps are coming out anytime soon. It’s a large and difficult process to make massive maps that are actually good.
On the subject of private servers: You’ll be able to set up a lobby and it will be able to reserve you one of their servers that give you more control of the game. Running your own server that you control every aspect of is not a near term goal of theirs. They don’t want to give away their server code as it would kill any chance they have at getting rid of cheaters.
On the subject of rerolling or breaking down cards: They can’t give specifics but they have ideas on what they want to do with cards. They want to change how Trading Up works in general making it more intuitive.
Exedore was unpleasantly surprised that Phantom can run through gas tunnels. He’s not supposed to do that. Will be changed.
On Phantom’s shield: they don’t think they have the tuning right. It was meant to be a support thing to coincide with the new human shield exp implemented in the new patch. It’s supposed to be used as a selfless thing but obviously isn’t working. They have ideas on how to fix it.
Next update will have Phantom tweaks
They won’t be in such a rush to bring out a new Merc this time.
In game reporting is being worked on now. They are working on their back end.
On why there is often only one good loadout card for each Merc: Exedore mentions the Competitive vs. Pub argument in how some cards/characters are better in pubs than they are in competitive and vice versa. They want to strive to balance things out. It’s an ongoing process.
Plans soon to release a “series 2 edition” of loadout cards. Plans to add new cards or remove cards entirely (not removed from your inventory).
Exedore as lead designer is the person that chooses which Mercs are placed in free rotation.
Exedore takes decisions behind keeping the game from being p2win very seriously.
They plan on adding more melee weapons to the game
There are concept designs for an actual bonesaw melee weapon for Sawbonez
Main focus is to make the game as best as possible for PC. Not working too hard on console version at the moment.
They want to implement a solo gym or shooting range. Putting staff resources on a new tutorial would take away from resources for making new maps and things so there is no plans on making a new tutorial.
“Maybe” plans on adding purchasable cosmetic items.
Discussions on Dirty Bomb merch, nothing concrete.
It’s low priority, but Exedore would love to add a sliding mechanic. (Would not knock people over like in Brink)
VAC does not work well in F2P games, but they are in testing for something else.
They are not reworking the leveling system. Might change threshold as to what you get at certain levels.
You’ll never get obsidian cards again, but there will be more exclusive sets of cards like seasonal ones.
The way cards like the Alienware ones work: SD takes a series of bronze loadout cards and gives them different cosmetic character changes and then they get a new weapon skin indicative of the style of the manufacturer or season. Alienware one is blue with hexagons on them. You CANNOT TRADE SPECIAL CARDS UP.
Would like to create a new version of founders cards like a version 2 but will never ever release the originals.
Wants to create a healthy ecosystem for players who play a ton but most effort is being put towards rewarding new players and getting them “caught up”.
User map creation is an inevitability. It needs to be in the game for Dirty Bomb to thrive however, it’s currently just another feature on their huge to-do list
No plans on adding a pause feature for competitive games
They want to add more primary weapons to the game but didn’t want to reveal too much
Currently debugging the HuD to fix the FPS stuttering issue. Thanks the community for helping them narrowing it down to the mini map
Wants to bring clans and banners into the game eventually
There’s a lot of functionality that they can add to the mini map but Exedore doesn’t want people relying too hard on the map.
Probably won’t have ADS sensitivity slider. Makes things much harder to balance. High potential for abuse.
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