@Riot Why Are Some Balance Changes Not Tested On PBE?
Like Yasuo's passive nerf. The very small shield buff was tested on PBE, but the more important early game nerf wasn't. What's the thought process behind this?
32 Comments
Riot doesn't listen to PBE feedback anyways, so it doesn't matter. If they did, patch 4.13 would've never have reached Live.
The reduction to how quickly Yasuo generates Flow early/mid game went onto the PBE at the same time the buff to the shield strength was put there. The goal of those two changes was to make Yasuo's shield a bit more powerful (early game particularly) when it's up, with larger windows of downtime in exchange. Trying to just burn through the shield's more costly, so Yasuo's got more capability to make aggressive plays while it's ready. At the same time his enemies have more time with it down to try and attack him, increasing the importance of playing around his passive for both sides.
A few of you mentioned this, but the PBE isn't great for robust balance testing. We just don't get the participation that we do on live. Players may try out changes and your feedback and predictions on how things will work is still really valuable, but we just don't even get a fraction of the quality games we will get when a change goes live.
We do a lot of internal testing and we do listen to PBE concerns but we also just try to react quickly when a change goes live that is dramatically overtuned or undertuned. I'm also skeptical that we could come up with some kind of motivation or reward to get players to take PBE balance seriously that wouldn't incentivize weird behavior. PBE is great for functional testing, finding bugs and the like. It's great for first impressions, look and feel feedback, and exposing early concerns.
PBE is to make sure things are stable for release. They have an internal balance team, testers
PBE is mainly for last-minute bug-finding. For balance, Riot generally relies on internal testing.
because ballance is not tested on pbe
Why not just balance more intelligently in general?
You guys push some ludicrous balance changes to live, even despite major critiques during the PBE step.
You guys treat the PBE testers like garbage for the most part, like they have no value.
Chances are that those changes were on the PBE, but not discovered by the dataminers...
They mainly use it for bug-testing and "refining" ideas.
Some of the stuff that you see on PBE never makes it to live anyways, or it takes forever for it to.
They do listen to the feedback, Soul Sickle is proof of that. It's just that many don't give feedback...
I'm just curious why the balance team does this. Simplicity? Are certain changes not worth testing on PBE, or...?
PBE is to make sure changes don't crash the severs.