Well, they fixed some parts in the 1.3 patch (my previous comment was about the 1.2 patch), but it was still a mess playing with my build and I just sucked it up and started a new build. I had rebirth but still, that's one hell of a way to get $50 from a player, just alter the mechanics to ensure that your build goes from fine to unplayable 30 or so games in (I play every game on the calendar).
Basically, the devs have decided that to nerf how ridiculously effective perimeter defense rating became in the last patch, which made it possible to contest 3s almost effortless even from afar but also made playing perimeter-oriented offenses impossible since even terrible perimeter defenders can shut an offense down, now height of the defender seems to matter more in relations to the perimeter offense rating. This makes sense except the playbooks and hence, playcalling doesn't take into account this change, so a lot of plays being called that works at release are not going to actually work in practice. Once you complete one of the quests you can call plays which ameliorates this but breaks immersion because how often does a rookie SG/SF end up the playcaller of a team, even a rebuilding team, 15-20 games into a season?
It's a work in progress for sure. It's probably smart to wait until season starting for a more complete product - final products shouldn't be tweaked in such significant ways every 10 days, and if this was a product in any other field and it's not for the sake of patching 0days that by definition are exploits that couldn't be known until exploited in the wild or disclosed, it wouldn't happen. The thing is it's hard to tell if they'll actually end up by the start of the season a working, more or less balanced game or an even bigger mess. I think that they certainly have enough players to be able to offer some sort of incentive for a small subset of players to playtest in a serious way for balance and testing out different in-game situations that can easily fall into blind spots for devs, and the platforms the game is on certainly allows for it. Instead the patches feel hurried and a step behind and that's worrying because if you end up in a patching-the-patches loop you're in trouble. This last patch is certainly patching the last patch in part and patching for gameplay balance/bugs.
09-14-2023, 11:49 PM
