What happened to balance patches?#408

I don’t want to come off as aggressive, or unappreciative. I love rivals 2 and want to see it succeed.

But truly, where did the character balance patches go? The Mecha update brought gouie changes but that’s it.
The gouie update had some, but most were small tweaks that ultimately didn’t change any characters viablity or options they chose.
And then the last one that was, in my opinion, meaningful was may 19th.

So even if we count the gouie update for meaningful changes, that’s 2 updates in close to 5 months.

Sophilo recently made a tweet where one of their most desired changes for r2 is for the devs to clearly define their character/balance goals. I couldn’t agree more!

What’s your vision for lox? Zetter? Clairen? Orcane? What do you want them to be and how closely aligned is their current playstyle?

The characters are perfect as-is, so is the game, stop whining.

@Lark_gg Usually the balance changes happen bi-monthly or even later if there is a major tournament happening within that period.

I’m a lowly gold player, but I think that balance is pretty stinking good right now. I think a lot of the current complaints (recoveries are too strong, some characters require too much work compared to others, etc.) can be addressed simply by reducing the weight of much of the cast.

We really serious about the Gouie patch not changing a lot? Most grab ranges got shortened, OoS and out-of-floorhug buffer changes the dynamics of them in very many scenarios (giving most characters better pressure than before, and making counterplay vs shieldgrab and floorhug-reversals stronger), tech ranges getting shortened makes tech chasing more accessible to slower characters (and is also a nerf to most fastfallers). Most characters also got a change to at least one core tool. You should def be feeling the changes this patch tbh.

May 19th was actually less than 3 and 2/3 months ago, not 5 months. So that’d give us 2 cast-wide balancing patches in less than 4 months. If we’re going five months, May actually had two cast-wide balance patches + engine changes in the same month, so that’d give us 3 in 5. That’s a fair bit, considering Summer needed to have a more stable meta to account for it being the busiest tournament season.

Keep in mind that the team had already committed more towards larger, sweeping changes, due to the amount of players who voiced negative reactions to the most constant, step-ladder direction patches used to go in. We’re basically getting the average of what people have wanted.