Rollback of Friday’s Bonds of Weakness Change

CG_TopHat

I wanted to let you know that we are going to be reverting the Bonds of Weakness change from last Friday today. I also wanted to explain why we’re doing it and reveal a little more insight into our decision to make the change at that time in the first place. But first I’ll underline that it was the wrong call. What we should have done is announced that a change was forthcoming and spent a few days designing and testing the change. We should have then announced to you, the community, what the change was before we implemented it. It can be easy, in the face of the wrong call, to dig in and try to defend your rationale in the first place – but it would be the wrong thing for the game, and we are, like you, first and foremost fans of this game – so I am asking for your faith that, even though we may make the wrong decisions from time to time, if they really are wrong, we will correct it.

We are rolling back the Bonds of Weakness change because the battle system has a bug in it which prevents us from recalculating Max Health as it changes and, consequently, throttling the health percentage correctly (Dev Note: This sort of calculation is not being done elsewhere in the game and only affects this updated version of Bonds of Weakness). This is a client bug that will require an update to the client, which is some ways out. More importantly, beyond the length of time it would take to get the fix out, it also is probably not the right fix. Let me explain.

As a general rule, when we discover an infinite loop that allows players to trivialize end game content, we try to act as swiftly as possible. One of our internal goals is to try to avoid changing character kits in a negative way if at all possible. This doesn’t always work out that way, but it’s a guiding principle. In this instance, the key element that was enabling the loop is Asajj Ventress (and by extension, her synergies with the Nightsisters). Darth Traya is a part of that loop (with her Health Steal Up), but we’ve reproduced a similar team using Qi’ra – so really the problem is Asajj (and Nightsisters) with Health Steal Up mechanics.

In triaging the problem, rather than change Asajj and potentially alter the entire Nightsister faction, we wanted to see if we could change the context where they were facilitating an infinite loop and still leave them really good in the raid (and leave them unchanged everywhere else). This is where we fell down. Our definition of “really good”, especially on the back of a break neck change, is not the same as your definition. On top of it the fix didn’t work. Double whammy.

Rather than scramble and try to add another layer and double down on a bad fix, we’re going to roll back the change and go back to the drawing board. We are still going to be making a change to the raid or to the characters that enable the Critolyte team. However, whatever that change is we will test in house more rigorously and announce to you with more lead time, what change is coming. If we have to make a change to a character we’ll have an open conversation about how we preserve the investment made by people that are significantly, negatively affected by that change.

Thank you for being understanding in this situation and working with us to build a better solution.

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