Betrayal exit list

Alright, once again, it's time to summarize my feedback for the league at hand. If there is even a slight chance that anyone from GGG reads through this, I'll break it down to sections: The Good, The Bad and The Ugly.

The Good:

- I like Betrayal as a concept. Really thankfull I did not quit last league as I planned. After stomping Mastermind several times over, I still, to be frank, have no idea about motives of the whole Syndicate (~they ALL got gutted hundred times over and over, did they not ... tire of running hamster wheel hundred times over?), but hell, this is ARPG, lore aside, I like the new content. Conceptually. About execution, please see "The Bad" section

- I really appreciate you (seemingly) listened to the community and managed to avoid "Get very lucky 100x in a row" challenges this time around. I play almost strictly to do challenges, so the recent trend was disheartening. "Use these devices" and "Delve Encounters IV" - nuff said. Two very grindy challenges this time, I will probably not go for 40/40 as the grind no longer feels satisfying, but maybe I'll find second wind. Probably not.

- Enjoying the new single crafting bench and all the surrounding changes to recipes

- Hideouts! I like finally having some sense of permanency in this regard.

- numerous QoL to how map / minimap works, filtering etc.


The Bad:

- Number one concern right now for me is code quality. I work about a second decade as a software developer on various degrees of engagement, and through my eyes, it feels like your pre-release testers are either non-existing, or super overloaded. There are bugs that make very poor impression of your development process, bugs that never should have make it to production in the first place, bugs, that continuous integration tooling should catch automatically, let alone slipping through human testers. It's not like the game is crashing all around the place, no, but on every odd ocasion, things scream "not tested, not polished, no unit tests done, pushed, merged, released". Let me give you some examples:

*when you raid a research bunker and along the Syndicate member there is outside help from lets say Transportation officer, on the text dialog there is clearly stated "will give X Transportation inteligence", but if you decide to interrogate him, in fact he will keep giving Research intel. Automated test level bug. How does something like this get past human testing anyway? Its league content, you should expect bugs in there
*vaaling T15 Shaped Coves map "upgraded" it to T11 for me. Automated test level bug.
*using safehouse benches, even the "pick one item" ones do not count towards respective challenge. So why chest of unique maps count, and chest full of unique items not? Maybe not a bug, but rather clumsy design, but then, this should be stated in the challenge description
*Syndicate members killed on top of each other cannot be interacted with freely, but rather single one is picked. Happens to me many times a day. How does this get past pre-release testing?
*Syndicate encounter altogether unreachable on maps. Some maps are almost guaranteed to behave like this. I know variation of this bug happened many times in the history, but the bigger reason for you to anticipate and squash situations like this before release
*At release, some crafting recipes very actually not obtainable. Too bad those were the item linking ones, so I guess many people noticed. Did noone really tried that before release? Or did you change the code on the last call?
*When doing Zana before finishing Syndicate on present map, you effectively lost one Syndicate encounter. Baffling quirk of a design.

I will not list further, all of these seem to be already reported, this is here to really highlight I am deeply concerned about future content. In my eyes, this is troubling and the worst part is that it only really took a day of mapping for one person to notice all this.

What I think should be considered is if you really are able to develop and polish new content within the 3 months time frame. Either consider a "debug league" next time, don't worry, we will play it. Or do just a smaller content. Something needs to change, I feel.


- Master dailies. For love of whatever deity you prefer, who thought that introducing YET ANOTHER mechanic requiring specific maps, with a twist - now every day is a good idea? Plainly, this is enraging. This is by far the worst part of the game for me, long-standing. Buying specific maps. It sucks. Period. And now I just have to do that, every day. Or really really make sure to run a white map before sleep. Sucky decision, sucky mechanic, not a fan.

=> I beg you, enable us to buy maps we need. We already have the Atlas, there could be a way to produce a "Dream orb" as a vendor recipe, then applying it to the atlas and getting that white map out of it. Or anything similar.
Trading. For. Maps. Daily. Sucks.


The Ugly

- Niko. Why on earth does he have variable node count? The only effect it has feels like "hello, I am your game, I decided it is about time to just randomly kick you in the nuts, so here it comes. Your friends may or may not be next". Why Alva has a fixed count then? Why Eihart always brings one red beast to the table? Consistency please.

- Mastermind. Was it indended we actually stop running the boss after few attempts? Because really, in any way I tried to make it work, it is just better to NOT kill it and work on captains / safehouses instead. I do not want to judge the fight itself (~I had a looooooooooong period of time I frankly had no idea what is going on and why. Zero, nada. I just ran there like a dope and laughed. I do not blame the game, but doing the fight blind really felt super weird). Scratching my head. Maybe the rewards are bland, I don't know. After killing it three times, I just moved on to Safehouse farming instead. This probably was not intended.



Had many more things in mind, but noone probably reads this far anyway. So yeah, thanks for what I think was a good league! And please, consider doing something with the code quality and culture.

May you always find your pants, exiles!

I totally agree with everything you wrote.

The worst thing for me is outstanding amount of major bugs, most of which could be found in few hours of testing. And most of these bugs wasn't fixed even after a month since release.

It's kind of weird how almost everything they did that isn't the league content is awesome and almost everything they did that is the league content is a trainwreck.

So are we voting for Bexit?

Bexit? No way, we are addicted to that voice and we know it.

I vote for a "debug league". I believe they can put it all together, maybe even do some further steps in the balance department, but that takes time. Sometimes, it takes a lot of wrestling with management to approve resources poured to testing and stability. I know that well.

I wish this game success it deserves, and right now, I feel the correct path to success leads through code stabilization.

Couldn't agree more! +1e1

+1, quitting the leage today.

Unengaging, unrewarding, buggy content that is not on par with standard, let alone some of the previous leagues.

Add to this that challenges have been again a massive disappointment.

40 research stashes? Really? When I get exactly 1 hideout stash per (the already rare) research encounters? So that I am at 10/40 stashes and halfway through the grind challenge for syndicate encounters? Can this be more stupid? And its only one example.

Also done with the game and done with feedback. If I play at all, it will be on a very casual level, probably not enough to get even a 6 link. I don't have time for World of Warcraft all over again.

Oh, one important thing I forgot : I hate what happened to /820 channels, primarily because the Pure Breachstones are such a hot sexy stuff right now.

It would be so great if pure (~pun intended) rotation channel would be established, I saw people try, but the habit is too strong now.

In my memory, the chats were never so very bonkers before. I remember sometimes in HC, when someone notable dies, the general channels could become chatty for a while, but right now, the /820 channels are borderline unintelligible to me, mostly evening UTC timeframe.

To be precise, I do not call for nerf (~just for the record, we all can guess how you are going to "balance" them when league ends). I just miss the useful /820 channels, the ones that did not take an autistic mind to fully filtrate.

"

aldorus wrote:

- Mastermind. Was it indended we actually stop running the boss after few attempts? Because really, in any way I tried to make it work, it is just better to NOT kill it and work on captains / safehouses instead. I do not want to judge the fight itself (~I had a looooooooooong period of time I frankly had no idea what is going on and why. Zero, nada. I just ran there like a dope and laughed. I do not blame the game, but doing the fight blind really felt super weird). Scratching my head. Maybe the rewards are bland, I don't know. After killing it three times, I just moved on to Safehouse farming instead. This probably was not intended.

This.

I'll repeat myself because it can't be stressed enough: fire whoever designed the Mastermind fight and make sure they never come into contact with programming tools ever again.

Even the good is bad. Poorly optimized hideouts filled to the brim with poorly optimized crap. Sometimes the game straight up disconnects me when I go to one of those to trade because it cant handle it. I hate the hideouts.