In this patch’s Designer’s Notes, we are looking back at what has been shared earlier. Our Dev team had the pleasure of welcoming Prodigio Pete, Rogue-9 and Get Flanked into our Barcelona office, home of our balancing team. The discussion and data shared during the podcast is available below, as well as the changes that will be implemented in the Y4S3.3 update.

WIN DELTA VS. PRESENCE

Please note that we are using presence to gauge the popularity of an operator. This notion had to be introduced to reflect the implementation of the pick & ban.

Presence definition: “pick rate of an Operator when not banned.”

BAN RATE

Upcoming Changes

Twitch

• F2 magazine capacity reduced from 30 to 25

Twitch is still one of the top performing Operators, and despite a minor recoil nerf in an earlier patch she remains a top attacker. We’re reducing her magazine capacity to lower her fragging ability, but no changes to her gadget as we feel her ability remains crucial to teamplay and is in a good spot now.

Warden

• Changing Warden’s from a 1 speed, 3 armor Operator to 2 speed 2 armor

Warden’s presence is quite low, and we want to address that. By increasing his speed, he will have more opportunities to use his ability effectively. This is a first step into increasing the potential surrounding Warden operator and his gadget. We are also taking larger changes to his kit under consideration for the future.

Glaz

• Rate of fire increased for the OTs-03 by 33% (from 285 to 380 rounds per minute.)

We are still looking to calibrate the Russian sniper to find the right balance. We are quite happy about the previous work done to address the frustration stemming from his gadget but would like to increase his presence as he is the least played attacker now.

Current Status

Blackbeard

Blackbeard’s win delta is currently on the rise. While we did not expect to see such a steep increase, we are following a few leads. We will continue to monitor his performance to see if tweaking is necessary to keep him on par with other attacking Operators.

Nøkk

Nøkk has had a slow start and her pick rate is quite low. To make her a more attractive choice, we are currently reviewing some suggestions to improve her loadout. We feel it is premature to change anything regarding her as an Operator for now, so for the time being, we would like to keep monitoring her performance. The last few weeks of Pro League have shown a few interesting uses of her ability, and we would like to keep an eye on it to see how she can evolve.

Kaid

We are exploring a few options for Kaid as we would like to offer the Moroccan defender more opportunity to use his secondary gadgets. We are not quite ready to give more details, as it is a work in progress.

Jackal

• Added different coloured circles around the targeted footstep for better visual feedback. These circles also have varying pattern lengths to be Colour Blind friendly.

As the most banned attacker, Jackal is a high source of frustration for many players and one of our top balancing priorities.

The primary focus of our design with the Jackal changes were on his tracking ability. Jackal’s tracking ability should require a more active contribution from the player and should be overall less frequent and shorter for defenders. We want to reduce the number of pings, based on the “age” of the footprint. We would also like Jackal mains to decide if scanning footsteps is the correct choice to make, as it will make them disappear.

The new version of Jackal is currently available on the Test Server and our goal is to have his update go live next season.

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