Patch 0.19.2.11 Reflection

We made some changes with our latest patch that didn't quite land as we intended. We feel a lot of this comes down to not communicating clearly with our players about our intent. That's on us, and we're not going to let it happen again. Promises to better ourselves can often feel empty without an actionable plan in place, so we want to talk about not only the problems we had but how we're addressing them moving forward. 

What went wrong:

Patch 0.19.2.11 was primarily a bug fix patch, but after seeing the meta settle, we wanted to include a few balance changes late into the patch cycle.  While we feel some balance changes in this patch landed well, we completely whiffed on others. The nerf to Vampire Historian was, quite frankly, not up to par. Additionally, we chose not to make changes to Yellow/Green because we wanted to take more time to consider how to approach that deck's current power level. Doing so left the deck in a spot that we feel was too oppressive for too long, and that was a mistake.

Changes made to "start of turn" and "end of turn” triggers needed to be communicated more clearly in the patch notes or even with a blog post beforehand in which we previewed the change, as we did with the combat damage-focused keywords a few months ago. We may revisit the Sunrise/Sundown change specifically in another dev blog in the future to share with you the thoughts and insight that led to this change specifically.

The bulk of communication about these changes came via messages in the general chat on Discord and, as such, lacked permanence. These things need to be communicated in ways that are more accessible to our community as a whole.

What we're doing about it:

Moving forward, the midseason update will continue to be the target for the bulk of large-scale balance changes. We'll allow more time in smaller patch cycles for focused change to more immediately apparent outliers. We will be revisiting both Vampire Historian and the Yellow/Green deck soon but feel that using the live change system at this time provides too much instability for the upcoming Mythgard Open.

For larger systemic changes like the Sunrise/Sundown change, we will be including some context in the patch notes, similar to how we approach balance changes.  Additionally, we may do preview blog posts or teasers when time allows.

As for communication between our community and us, we are adding a section to our internal meetings in which we discuss what upcoming changes we can better explain to the community. We'll use these points to better inform our communication in patch notes and help us know the right times to give more in-depth communication.

Conclusion

We got crunched for time and closed ourselves off to push as many features as we could get into this patch, and that came at the cost of clear communication with our players. In an ideal world, this does not happen, and we have time to both push changes we feel make our game better and also be as clear and open with you as possible. Unfortunately, we strayed too far to one end of that spectrum this time and are thankful that our players care enough about our game to check us on this and hold us to a higher standard.