BREACH TESTING GROUNDS: Results
Hello Warriors!
We would like to thank you for participating in our Testing Grounds – Breach! To be able to gather your feedback in order to improve our content is extremely valuable to us and we are very happy with the responses to our Breach update. It was better received than Regular Breach which shows that we are going in the right direction.
We’d like to go back to our actual objectives with this Breach update, and give you more details on what we learned during this testing phase:
Making Breach more fair
One of the most important things we wanted to do is alleviate some feelings of unfairness that can occur on both sides when playing Breach: having two failures conditions for Attackers, and, having a feeling that your progress is denied as a Defender when Attackers’ Ram health and tickets are replenished.
To that extent, the changes that we made to make the Ram the only objective for Phase 1 and 2 were a success. When looking at your feedback, the game felt fairer overall, and the removal of tickets allowed for a more focused way to play – even if some of you expressed concerns that the Ram health might feel a bit too low.
Making Breach more dynamic
To make that happen, we played on two different aspects.
Firstly, on the actual length of the game, by speeding up the Ram, the Ramparts capture speed, and changing the respawn timer to a flat 20s.
Secondly, we wanted to make the Guardian a way more important part of Phase 2, by giving it a bigger impact when defeated.
The data shows that Breach games in Testing Grounds were shorter than Regular Breach (3 minutes on average)– most of you appreciated that more intense pace. The Guardian finally feels like it can turn the tide. Also, even if we can not keep the Red Eyes as is (it was temporary feedback we put only for this Testing Phase) we heard you, and we hope you’ll like the final version of the effect 😊
Ramparts capture speed and Guardian buff have been mentioned as being a bit too much by some of you – as the overall balance hasn’t changed between the regular and the updated Breach, we decided not to modify anything for now, and monitor how things go once the update is live.
Side note: Single Pick
Overall, the reception of Single Pick was mixed. Some of you liked the absence of 4-stack and the effect on balance, while some of you disliked the impact it could have on their Mains’ leveling.
The benefits exist for sure, but the impact it can have on character progression and orders completion is too big of a friction point right now.
As a result, we won’t be moving forward with Single Pick in Breach.
Overall, we are very pleased with the results of this phase of Testing Grounds!
As a result, we decided to ship this Breach update, all picks, all maps, in our next Title Update on March 12th. We will be monitoring data once this mode is live in order to see what would need to be updated in the long run.
Once again, thank you for your participation and for helping us make a better For Honor 😊
See you on the battlefield!
- FH Team
