BULKHEAD: So worried about not having enough content. We overstacked more stuff, more things into season two, get it all in there. And you know what happened? The quality dropped. We had a 340% increase in people wanting to drive because of the tank. I'm actually point blank, we have another conversation about this, so this is raw. Infrared binoculars. Because this caused people just like get out of the game. Can we talk about the new map? You know what? Like good, I like the care. Perfect, perfection. Tanks are already here. It's hard reading this stuff. Hey everybody, so just a quick update. Our next vlog will be dropping later next week, and we'll cover our thoughts on season two and what we're thinking in terms of season three and beyond. Now, obviously, there's so much to discuss from just this week alone, and we want to make sure we get what we're saying right and we stop rushing and our heads have stopped spinning finally. We get our direction for the future and future seasons just crystal clear. In the meantime, we're trialing this new podcast format to discuss the reaction to the wipe and some of the context around the season two changes. As you know, we're not a massive AAA team, but we have released one of the biggest early access shooters of 2026. So what we lack in Polish right now, we want to make up for with communication and context. So let us know what you think of this format and if we should bother doing it again. And Thank you and I hope you enjoy the first episode of The Hot Zone. This is the first one. So we're trying it. Alright, so like for context, people watching then. Lead designer? Hello, I'm Pete, lead designer. I do a bit of everything in design really. Yeah, for all the way from designing systems, fixing bugs and b implementation. The man for building. Building. The champion of building. Tim. Tim Nightingale, creative director on Wardogs, vision holder, kind of From early inception, really. Go on, Mark. Yeah, Mark Tadros. Well, you hanging your head in shame in this one's mad. It's fun. Let me go again. Mark Tadros, technical designer. Again, a bit of everything, but mainly the meta economy, cash, and XP. I'm Joe. And I've done the marketing on this update. So I'm here representing the not design bit, and I am just realizing that in this debate where marketing screwed up or did design screw up, I'm the only one and I'm massively outnumbered in this debate. so we're gonna dig into it. You've got some actual stats for us to go through, but why don't we just wind it back to what actually happened on that release day then? Cause it was a bit of a crazy week. So season two came out in the morning. Was it eight AM? We take everything down at eight and it goes up at nine, an hour time. Yeah, we had about an hour and a half downtime. So you weren't happy that we put out this update here. When we said, That's it, we're gonna r wind stuff back. Well what do you mean by like I didn't leave Yeah. You felt like we jumped the gun by telling people, No, you know, we're fixing it, we made a mistake. Cause your view is one was fine. I think my my problem was the Saturday nine AM one where we're like, We're gonna be bringing back season three. This one was was was pretty what you think is mistake for us to bring it Yeah. Or at least like bringing it back I get it, but like telling people it's gonna bring it. Bring it forward. Yeah, bring it forward, I think was the mistake because it was the only thing people were talking about during the weekend. But we can go over this. Like this was ten hours, twelve hours after the release. One of your main points though is like kind of talking about the next season at all. Yeah. When you've just released the first season or second season. It kind of put that almost like a sour taste in people's So they're just thinking, well, how much do I invest in this season if it's just gonna reset again soon? The sentiment was already negative going into season two because people don't like wipes. And that was the main thing. People are losing progress. Like they're going to be upset. We sped things up for the median player. Like we made some changes to make that less punishing. But at the same time, we fucked a lot of stuff up for the top pen player. And us essentially kind of like jumping the gun and being like, we're going to do this or that. doesn't appeal to any players. Like maybe the top 10 players were like, yes, a reset, but the people that this ex experiment was for are now like, what's the point of even trying to get into this if they're going to reset it again? Yeah, I guess from the marketing side, we worked really hard to like cultivate this image of like, hey, we do listen. I don't know. It was really hard to understand your balancing when we're talking about it and trying to figure out like, well, what is happening here? And you're like, it's not, it's kind of as expected. And when we go over what happened, what side of we think is like fundamentally that People listening though, the issue here as a dev team on a weekend who haven't really seen their families that much for this year are like having to work late at night on Friday, early Saturday all weekend, and going, What are we doing with this? What's going on? So the question is, did we panic and did we react too quick, or did we react to what players were really genuinely feeling? Because I think your view is that they may be feeling this, but The data isn't saying that. So let's why don't you start with blue? Yeah. Okay. yeah, let's start 10 a.m. We launched the game, right? So we had a lone style bonus for XB. I I think you could go even further back because there was a couple of things that we were trying to address. Like before all of this, there was a reason we did the stuff we did for Blue, and there was a reason we did the stuff we did with the balancing. And when you look at those reasons on paper, there was consideration and I would say sound d decisions behind it. Maybe in hindsight not so sound. But like what w there was thought there. Yeah. Yeah. And we'll we'll get into what the numbers are telling us there. But let f let's just, you know, run it through the first ten hours, 'cause that was like the hardest. So Yeah, 'cause the first ten hours was what led to the entire decision. Yeah. So we launched it at ten A. players got in, Lone Star had a two point five percent Extra XP, 2.5. That's you know, less than 500 extra XP. And this was just it was it was minimal, but it was to fix the PR problem they had. Right. Because there was there was a real balancing issue and people kept saying, they've just given them extra XP instead of fixing the problem. Well, well, hang on a minute, we did go and fix the Baccarani Spawn issue, and we'd been testing and seeing, well, it's actually a bit more even now, like So we had fixed it, but we knew that people were still memeing on blue. So we had to kind of go like skew it the other way to then swing back. We had all the data as well. We were looking at Baccarani win rates, Azetti win rates, Aztefona win win rates, and taking everything into consideration when we made those decisions. It wasn't you know there was so many moving parts to that. Trying to work out do we do just the blue XP thing or just the the the spawn moves. Like it it there's a lot of factors and we were trying to measure how we tackle each one and how we get good results from Because people felt like they told us what we should do there. And and I still stand by the like actually people say, you know, you should be rotating spawns and changing. I'm like, I don't know if that's the I kind of like that you're like, I'm on a blue team, I'm going this way and we're playing this way and going green team you play this like. You know, I I kind of like that part of the game that you can kind of choose and I think We like that people had a strategy, right? I think we like that people could go, I want to play in this way, I like this team, but not to the point of like I like this team because I win. Like that's not what it is. But anyway, we're jumping to the data mark. Yeah, yeah. So the top five percent of matches went from being forty-six minutes roughly. So that these are like complete stops. These are like the matches where one team took dominates the other. They went from forty-six minutes to forty-one minutes. So that's 12% faster rate. We already know that the end of match bonuses. last season were around thirty to forty percent of a role's identity. So now a large majority of the role's progression is now twelve percent faster, which isn't game breaking, but added on top of that is Well people's views are game breaking. So what's your answer to them saying it's broken, my God, Joe I'm gonna kill your family It only it affected, you know, like thousands of play like yeah, like less obviously in the five thousand players is a lot, but when we have one point five million unique logins within, you know, the first twenty four hours. It's but if it's the the thing is what we saw is it was one point five sorry, one it was fifteen hundred, five thousand users, sorry, that were the most vocal y YouTubers, influencers, tweeters, Reddit posters that were turning up at nine, ten AM to play, that were picking it up and the sentiment. yeah, we we did fuck that up, right? I think We didn't expect it to be we didn't expect players to just want XP and cash that badly. Like it's two point five percent. We didn't expect people to just go fucking crazy. But but again, if you look at the comments, they're like, obviously. Yeah. But people are gonna pick the bonus over nothing. Yeah, but even if it's slight, they're still gonna go for the bonus over nothing. You're sitting around the park in the youth student park at the university where they walk across the grass. People are always gonna take the path of release resistance, even if that path isn't the one that's like drawn out. So the example is d of of that university campus where they have like a courtyard, large square courtyard, grass throughout the whole thing. There's paths around the edge. All of the students start walking across the grass. There's no paths there. But then over time, paths start to appear that are across the grass. It's like they're they're just gonna use the quickest the from quickest from point A to B. They're not gonna walk around the edge because you've put a path there. They're gonna take whatever the fastest route is. And the fastest route to that is The XP bonus then. Then our problem is gonna be if we put up fences to make them send signs that says keep off the grass, they're not like, thank you. No, they're just like no. Why? I think the thing I found interesting about it was that we didn't anticipate the people who cared the most about getting that edge would all join blue very quickly and then win the match. That yeah, I I I think the best yeah. You can see statistically in that first bit the best players from season one joining Blue. Which again people say told you yeah knew that was gonna happen. Yeah, like hindsight, you see. You know, we've got like a lot going through our heads, a lot of different things going on, but still that one does feel a bit obvious where we should have been like, Okay, well now they're just getting deep dicked by the top fucking ten percent of players who were up at ten AM to play. Like I don't know. Anyway, sorry, I you know, I just wanted to follow that background there, but Okay, so everything was fine, there were no problems. No, no, it did create kind of like an imbalance there. We we we fixed it as quickly as we could. Like we understand that hindsight. We won't do that again. But but when we spoke about it, you still and I think we still don't think that the blue I don't know, do we think blue was the wrong move there? Because we needed to fix the PR issue. Yeah, yeah, there were like sixty-seven percent win rate or something on blue team. Like and then once we removed it, it equalized. So like It did fix the theory. I mean, like I thought it'd be there for the weekend. That was what I thought it was the weekend. I think we'd said we'll probably do the first week. Yeah. And I was like, I bet it's the weekend. And then it was the first like ten hours, was it? Eight hours? Ten hours. Yeah, ten hours. So like it's when people, you know, I don't mind going on camera and saying, Yeah, we fucked up, that kind of thing. Cause sometimes when people are angry, they just want to hear that. Yeah. I don't want people to think we were lying. We thought we'd fucked up, but then when we really looked at it, it was like, This was what we set out to do was to change win rate. And then over the weekend we kind of so you were getting annoyed when we came in Monday. It was like, well, hang on a minute. If you look at the stats in the weekend, like actually we retained players really well. People had a good time. Not saying there wasn't issues, but like vertical progression, right? It's like there's also something else in there that we've we've spoken about briefly where it's like how fast people are leveling and the difference from season one. Brand new players hitting the game, not really understanding the way that they earn XP, how they progress all of their roles. This was an oversight we made. did you talk about this before? Like pre release season two. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We we predicted this, but we didn't exp predict the numbers. Yeah. Right. But we we're we're also wrestling, right? Like we're so live service is new for us in terms of like the things that we we've got to really like keep a beat on and understand where where players are gonna pushback on things, changes that we make, what they're gonna like, what they're not gonna like. We haven't got the full picture of everything yet. Where w I think what we didn't anticipate with the that there was going to be that many people that then level as fast as they do, and then there still be like almost a pushback on how fast they're leveling. So like we didn't think that people were going to level as fast as they did, really. Like what was the what was the stat that you said that Compared to season one, how fast are people leveled? So for context, season one, we had what, like 3.4 million, 3.5 million unique players. Season two, we had 1.5. So the top 25% has now become the top 75%. So that is already skewing everything. The top 25% are 2.4 times quicker than season one. So the players that we retained are the good players, and then those good players are now even better and leveling even faster. Yeah, and those people that are playing that are those that we count into these top. Top players are the people that are booting the game at ten o'clock. They're there. By the time then battle dads get on, those people are already progressing two and a half times faster than they did in the beginning. So that early game almost became like a a a myth. But then this is where the second so there are two kind of major issues that led to the sentiment shift. And I'm yeah, we are saying it was too fast, right? The whole season was too fast, but If we'd changed nothing, it would have still been too fast, right? This is what we said. If we'd left it how it was, it still would have been way too fast. But the fundamental issue where it the the thing that tipped it over the edge, because the blue thing was almost whatever, it was creating a problem where people were like, they they couldn't, the games weren't starting because everyone was waiting for blue, which is that's stupid. But the real problem here was when they saw we we released a new tank. And we were yeah, it's a new thing, people are gonna want to play with it, let's put it early. It's weak, right? Like it's not powerful. It's not powerful. But when it turns up at level twenty, which is now two PM. Yeah, then I was like three PM. Like people turn up with the and then the loudest, most social vocal players, YouTubers, influencers, what going, tanks are already here. It's broke no no no, tanks aren't there, they're not there from where they were appearing. It's a new, weaker tank. Was the first you say the first one showed up ten hours in because of exploit. The driver exploit, sorry. That's another one affected less than four hundred players, but it's what in the in the tweet that we did was the focus of the tweet. So it looks like in that tweet we all. This this video that we we did. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So this was the faction bonus, the travel progression fixes, which is the exploit. what we addressed here was essentially ten hours in, we are removing or fixing the loan stop bonus, which people thought were a lot more than they actually were, and we have fixed the exploit. So players coming home, this was what, 10, 10 PM or something. By the time that most of our players were logging in, they were like, okay, so everyone else has abused this exploit to get further ahead, and everyone else has got a massive loan star bonus to get ahead. So I'm logging in and I'm now seeing a tank that's at level twenty, which is extremely doable in 10 hours. But the perception has been ruined. The perception is And then we your problem is we reinforced it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's also how that perception snowballs. So if let's say these four hundred people use that exploit and they all unlock tanks, except then those four hundred people then all end up in four hundred different servers. Well then you've got f what four four hundred teams. Four thousand? Forty thousand? Yeah. Got lot of tanks. You got a lot of tanks. There's a four, there's some zeros. Bad math. Everyone's on camera trying to do maths. Like it was can you actually give them a move or yeah, was in thirty, forty percent of games. It is that, right? Like if you then say you say those take those four hundred people and they all go into a server by themselves and use a tank, you've then got that snowballed perception of there's there's tanks everywhere. In reality, it's a small number of people that have the tanks. But the number of people that then have visibility on the tank is much, much larger. How news spreads, right? It's like one person, they tell two people, two people tell four people, and so on and so on and so on. So it's like you're like seven steps from the whole world where Yeah, exactly. Like it's it's really, really quick. So the second that you have four hundred people, those four hundred people go spread out to a hundred and all their servers. That's forty thousand people that then have eyes on tanks. So then the perception will be there's tanks in every game. It's not but that's forty thousand people that that that that that can spread that message. So then that goes further. And the second that it hits online, it's like, wow, it's a massive issue. Where in reality, Mark's looking at it from the pain of view of, well, I can see this many people have got it, which is a small number. Yeah. But it's affected people, it ends up being much larger. So then on the product side, sorry, P like with we call it the product side or like marketing side, right? We kind of we have like a good trust layer between design and marketing. And then it kind of we basically broke down over the weekend, didn't it? Where we're like, what the fuck? You didn't tell us about this and why is this happening? We told you it too too fast. And it it was like marketing were right in the sense that we said, if you speed it up, people are gonna hate that. But it was also the biggest bit of complaint from people by far was it's it's too hard to level up. So, okay, well, here you go. Okay, well, now you're mad at us for that. So we probably we spent nearly you know, nine months saying how tough we are and how we're not gonna change our vision. And I think when we got into live in, you know, I think top end, the our in our like business budget, we were like, the best case scenario, we've got to have some kind of plan for if it goes really well. We've sold a million units. When we did that like in pre-orders, and then it was like we were like, well, shit, we have no plan. And the game comes out and we're breaking these numbers and we're being called duty on stuff. And then all of a sudden we're like, we we we have no plan, right? And then I think that knocked our confidence. Weirdly, we didn't get more confident. We got less confident and we're like, we don't know what to do with this. And I think that's where, that's where my leadership failed. I kept saying, like, we don't have a plan. Like, and people were looking at me and I'm going, I I don't have a plan right now. We need to see where this goes. Because at one point it was like, two million, it won't go keep going. And then it's like again the three million you're like, what the fuck? And then, you know, we have we have A board of directors we have to report to. We have investors, we have Turko plants, we have budgets we have to stick to. And then all of a sudden these budgets split of the water. And when we're releasing, we've still only got like 700K in the account. It's it's a lot, but when we spend 600k a month, it's like, you know, like we gotta go find a way to, you know, hire a thing quickly, hire hire a code dev support quickly and update a customer service team who can just do anti-cheat and sit on our anti-cheat tools. We've got to train them for a week to do anti-cheat. I think you were doing night shifts on anti-cheat. so like it it just went crazy and we just made too much of we reacted too much and that's kind of on I mean on that point I think we had a conversation where I was like it's not your job to react, you do whatever you think's right. I'll be reactive to the players. But I think when we're all reactive to players, I think it's a problem. So just have to make sure they're always kind of singing from the same hymn sheet, right? And we weren't, and that's what I mean it showed, right? It showed that we weren't aligned. But we are gonna have Fuck up again. I there's one more that I haven't even got into. The last stats. Go on and lust that. From season one to season two, we went from nine percent drivers to forty-four percent in the first day. We had a 340% increase in people wanting to drive because of the tank. Because of an early tank. People want a fucking tank. So that's what I was trying to say, like that's what I'm trying to say is that people really like driving tanks. And what as soon as you have the tanks in the zone, it's not like you've got an out overpowered gun in the zone that you could easily miss or somebody could drop. When there's tank in the zone, you know there's a tank in the zone. And the guy who's spotting has spotted that tank. And now everybody in the server knows there's a tank in the zone. But the optics are crazy. But the cough game mode, we can't have one driver for every two infantry. Like it doesn't it doesn't it's not fun. And and we could have predicted that. But again, like the two point four percent faster players, the three hundred and forty percent increased drivers. You say we couldn't have predicted that? We could have, but we couldn't have predicted it to that degree. I don't think you could have predicted that. We could've in all of our no all. We have predicted that we would have had forty out of a hundred players playing vehicles. No no no. I'm saying we could have predicted that there's gonna be an intake and more people wanting to drive, but I'm saying we could not have predicted three forty. We could have said people like tanks and that we're probably gonna get some more people as drivers trying to I don't think overwhelmingly we've seen anywhere that people love tanks. I think we all know that our like high intensity damage zones is a bit shit. We think tanks have not yeah, it's not like it's somewhere we wanna rework and it's like so I think that's not accurate at all that we could you're thinking like we could predict the future about everything. You could but like try it. Yeah. It's the same with the two point four. Like players are two point four quicker. Like yeah, we said they're gonna be quicker, but two point four is an insane two point four times quicker than season one. Yeah, the top twenty five percent. They're just they're just good. What about the middle to the median then? The medians are actually are the ones returning the most out of this weekend. They're the ones having the most fun. And this was the weird bit that when we were panicking all weekend and then when we play if you go play with our friends who are like not of the company and not game as well, like I play with my rugby friends, play games, whatever, and their like view of it is this season is so much better. And they're like, This is awesome, I'm having loads of fun. And you don't feed them that you just listen. And I think you said the same thing with some people. I there's a bunch of the artists who were like, We're this is way better, like they're not involved in design at all, and they're just playing. Like the average person Did enjoy it more, but like I mean, Heeb, the helicopter guy, just talking about some of the stuff where he's trying to protect the little guy and some things he's right about, but some things are just like way off base. And you're just like, that's not it. And then now we're getting to this weird point where like we look, we can't just share all of our data, right? But we are trying to share some of it and find ways to do it. But like Yeah, it's just that the average player was enjoying it. So then we've put ourselves in the situation where I have put us in the situation where we are like on the defensive, but really, did we ever need to be? I th I I think we did because we're fighting like we're fighting against a valve system of if we slip to mixed reviews, which we did in recent, we've got a problem. We've got to go to our board and answer questions, right? We've got business and investment issues and It's a business at the end the day that we have to react to certain things. So it's crazy when a bunch of people in a certain region can just go and like douse the shit out of your game and we've then got to react to that. Not saying reviews aren't fair, but there's there's so there's so many parts of the game as well. And if if we change one little area of the game, but that's like a major focus for someone and we've then upset the way that they play or anything else, it's like it has that like kind of larger Earthquake effect where it spreads out and then any other players of that person who's very vocal sees it and it's almost like a bandwagon where it's like, yeah, they're they're broken. Like even if they didn't, it's it's just this sentiment that kind of gets echoed throughout communities. Do you remember the story that or when we're talking to Sumatra about when they introduced the spawn vehicle in Koff and they upset all the helicopter pilots? And it's kind of like that for us. Like any change we make. You we have dedicated communities around roles and you can upset a whole community. That can be a lot of people. It's it's and we we've we've tried to be as open as possible as well with the fact that like the things that we're working on in in early access will change. We need we need the flexibility to be able to grow the game and change different areas of it, find what works, what doesn't work. And it we're in a really tough position now where if we do make any changes, we get such a v such such a you know, vocal response to changes, that it speaking to your points where it then hurts us in these other areas. And it's like we don't want to be we wanna be so tired that we can't make changes, but we also don't want to be making every change that's been suggested everywhere. So that's like just a bit of how it works, because you've I've been teaching you about this recently, where it's like, Joe, why are we making these decisions? I'm like, blah, blah, blah, business, blah, blah, blah, boring. in that like we have to so if we get negative reviews, right? We have to answer why has the season not gone well? Are you spending money on this season? Like, what have you done wrong? That kind of thing, from non-games people. And I'm like, design, why have we done this? Like, here's for these very logical reasons. And all of a sudden I'm explaining to some board of non-gamers, like, why this is happening. And the nuances of balancing. I've got to explain it to this. Like, can't you see each other? And in the end, yeah, at the end, no one knows. But then, so there's that part of it where it's like reviews really hurt when they go bad and valve don't really help, right? So, anyway, we'll park that for another episode. The the next one is player numbers. So the CCU is really important because it says how hyped people are to come back and try stuff out. We have really good CCU. So what's what's annoyed on a are like business and investors and and Like, you know, projections on stuff is CCU is great. And they're all like, champagne, let's go. And then the next day they're like, what happened to the the CCUs hated it? What is this? And we're like, yeah, we're this that happens sometimes. Like, like it's not, we're not gonna get it perfect. And they're like, but we asked for perfect. Okay. So then we've got those two metrics, and then you've got unit sales, but you won't sell any more units. Steam's algorithm doesn't push you if your recent reviews slip to mixed. So the second why why we put that video out was because we slipped into mixed and we'll if you go to like mostly negative, you're just like bang, no advertising. So we didn't sell many new copies of the game this this weekend. We did a bad job. And you know, we're here for the long run, right? we've said before our plan is to raise the game. So by all means, you think it's mixed right now. raise the price, sorry. If you think it's mixed right now, just you don't buy it. Don't you worry. You wait. But Yeah, it it when it when it comes to this stuff, I saw a guy actually being about reviews. it would honestly be a mixed review at this point. First forty to fifty hours. Forty to fifty hours in a month, like that's okay. I mean, that's not crazy for gamers, but like that's good value. some of the most fun I've had in gaming years. But season two has been boring, poorly thought out, and it's becoming clear the devs are massively full of shit. So there you go. Yeah, the entire forty fifty hours now Fuck you. In t the entirety of it. But so so then at this point I'm thinking like what is it? What is it that you play? What was the way that you played? What is it that changed so much in season two that it stopped you from like even wanting to play the game at all? Because the core of the game is the same. Like the game hasn't changed that much. Those forty, fifty hours that you had before still exist. What is it? What is it exactly? So it's probably something like helicopters, potentially, that's changed for him. Like what is it? Yeah, I don't know. I I get it. Like the gamer side of me, I get it. Yeah, like I don't I'm not saying don't change. Yeah, I'm not saying don't review it negatively or anything. I'm just saying that like this one is great. Look, 33 up votes on it all favorites. Give them a negative after two give them a negative after two hundred and fifty hours. We've been out for like 40 days. Two hundred and fifty hours because they aren't balancing or testing changes. And we're there testing every night a new build. We're every night and our partner's like, I thought release was last month, and we're like, Sorry, gotta test next release. My wife's gonna kill me. The success we now suffer from is that people now assume immediately that we're much bigger than we are. So it's like we are testing every single day. There isn't there isn't a there isn't a point where we're not testing and we're not looking at these things. It's like but there is still a human error element, like where certain mistakes are made with things. It's not it's not that we are gonna be perfect, but it's we're also not such a massive organization. that nothing's gonna slip through. It's it's we we've also I mean, these players who got two hundred and fifty hours a month in, they are invested. And the I don't think their re review is ever gonna be like, yeah, it was pretty good. I'll give it a pause. It's either going to be I love it and I've done two hundred and fifty hours, or if anything changes they don't like it is gonna flip entirely. Yeah. And I know that 'cause that's that's how I would be. It's a double edged sword as well. It's like you Well, we want people to review the game, it's like how we can get a lot of feedback. It's also if if everyone then reviews the game negative, all of the knock-on effects that come from us having a what appears to be mixed or mostly negative or whatever else game, that then hurts the game. So the game that you did love or whatever else, you're hurting us. Yeah, it's not just war dogs, either. This is not like a war dog. It's games in general. Yeah. If you if you like something in general, you like the overall premise, like you can still give feedbacks within review. DM Joe feedback. Positive review. But it is Yeah, it's it's a scary space. For us, as like a new game that's come out, we're in early access, we're still, we're still trying to grow the game, we've still got lots that we want to do. And kind of we want people there with us for that journey. But with with that, there's there's a there's an acceptance that things will change, that maybe it isn't gonna be the exact same every season. If it was if season two was gonna play out exactly the same as season one, well then why why make the changes? I reserve the right to change my mind. I was otherwise to get things wrong. Like, like w we literally went into this, like, we're not perfect. We're gonna screw it up. And we screwed it up. And then we address it within our 10 hours. We were like, right, let's back those two things out. Not even fully, like we did what the players wanted, which again, this may have been our failing. Now, I think we know that the tank thing we've learned from putting something like a tank early, even if it's the right move and what we wanna do, maybe we want tanks early this season to change it up a bit. It's not worth it. So now we're being dictated to in the other way by players because we're worried we'll upset you and you'll give like a bit of a misrepresentation, not entirely, but in some aspects. So, I mean, just look at this one here. Gave a negative. Season two is a drastic shit bomb. Sadly haven't touched it after they said new season's coming faster because of their own mistake of listening to dudes who cried about grind. So we're listening to players. no, but I don't agree with those players. And then we're They people were saying wipe today. And we're like, no, no, no, that's not fair. Like people have come home and played and we can see people are enjoying the game. We're not wiping today. Give it a few weeks. We'll wipe a bit earlier. Instead of it being like a six, seven, eight week season, we'll four or five, right? We're gonna we're gonna bring some of that content forward and we we're gonna work a bit harder, work a bit later, and we're gonna pull this stuff together. And it's like, what do you want, guys? Like we're we're we're trying here. Like we're not we're not perfect. And we're forty dollars, we're not fifty, we're not sixty. Like Part of that conversation as well is that the even if we had wiped that day, if we had even if we would set it back to season one values that day, kind of what we were talking to at the beginning, that we would have seen it play out the same way. It's a fundamentally broken system and we are working on improving it. Sixty thousand what it look polar opposite. I changed my positive to a negative, unfortunately, which d I don't mind that actually. If you're someone who's responsible, who swaps reviews basic that's pretty good. That's a good thing to do. Each season Well, the idea is we fucked up, we deserve Yeah You know, we deserve it, okay. Please we fix it, now we're update. But what happens is the update doesn't come and cause you're like, they fixed it, yeah. And then you don't think like, you know, yeah. So then anyway, but like it's just not been fun. Went went to work, came home to tanks and stuff. Three days in, trying to level pilot to get camped by three geppers, this wipe cannot end sooner, it's so broken. So the opposite. I want it to wipe now. So negative review. So you wipe because you fucking reviewed us because we are gonna wipe it sooner, and you reviewed us because We're not wiping it soon enough. Two negative reviews. What are we meant to do? Perfect perfection. The problem that exists there as well is going back to that point I was talking about a minute ago, where even if you did wipe, even if we set it back to season one or whatever it that is, that person, what is their issue? Well, within the they call out people having tanks and then geppards. So in season three, even if we wiped it now, unless we remove the geppards, are they gonna have the same problem? So the problem Last season we had seventy thousand players that hit level thirty five. It wasn't the speed, it was just players quit. Because the great like we had so many players get stuck at level nine and fourteen, like millions of players get stuck at those levels. Nine and fourteen. Nine and fourteen. It's probably it's probably important to touch on this point 'cause this is like one of the main this was one of the main drivers that kind of Mark made changes basically. So this was so from my perspective, right? I'm not in design meetings. It's not like what I do. It's all w we we trust people to make decisions, right? Never again. No, no. We we we let people do their stuff and then we kinda get told and like the patch notes were what like there was so much in there that it was too much change, but but largely like the what you'd said is like, look, we can see that people are like churning out the game at level nine and they're going, This is hard, I'm done and level fourteen and they're just basically brick walling and just going, No. And a few people squeeze through. And you were like, So we're gonna speed up these bits. The the role has an identity at twenty is what we believe. Like i if you're playing Medic, you you get the med bag, you get the default back twenty-four now, I think. But like the role comes online at level twenty. And if you're quitting at level fourteen, if if one point eight million players are quitting at level fourteen because it just gets too grindy at that point, which is what we were seeing. We were seeing a lot of reports of it being too grindy and like the kind of data was aligning with what they were saying. But on top of that, it is a fundamentally broken system because career level is not representative of role level. So we have an infantry player, you know, leveling assault. Getting level 40 assault, given getting level 30 medic by just healing friendlies and reviving them, and not taking him, you know, 74 hours to get to level 70 and getting a level three armor. And then we have another player who's leveling, you know, level 12 in every role and getting that within three hours. And now he's got level three armor. And when you open the scoreboard, the only thing that you see is like, I have a level 70 in my game within 10 hours, the game, you know, blah, blah, blah. It's just a fundamentally broken system that we are aware of, and we're trying to push to its limits while we're working on something better. Why don't we why don't we cover why? First, we will cover why. We did it that did that. And then we'll go to what the actual future holds for it. So so from a business standpoint, we left our previous publisher and the business was going to get closed down in December last year, right? Left, set up a new, we kind of bought the company back and went, let's, you know, just make the game, we're really believing it. kind of scratched and scraped and worked with Team 17, our publisher, and pulled the money together. And you know, we we we we we had a choice here of You know, what our 1.0 is is what the triple A big version of the game was always going to be. So 2028 was going to be our that's the release, right? So we had to go, well, look, we've got two choices here: give up or make a smaller version of the game, charge less, and then grow it over time. That's the route we went. We didn't have time to build out the whole meta game and build out the XP, the the the way the progression was supposed to work. So we made a primitive version that was pretty much based on King of the Hill. Armor Three King of the Hill, right? It's very similar without perks. And that's why it is what it is. And I'm sitting there going, we have to do this. This is how many people we've got, this is how much time, this is how much money we can do to get here. And it's still a fun game. Like, no doubt it's a fun game. It was MVP. was what we did. Yeah, minimum viable products, what that means for anyone. Is that what's the minimum you can make? It'd be fun. Players feel like they get real value. And when you talk about 250 hours in a month, you got your value. But you're like along the way, like, this is gonna be a problem. This is gonna be a problem. This is gonna, this is not gonna work. And I'm like, well, here's Gonna have to work. So Intel. Talk about Intel. What it's meant to be. And we're doing this next year. It looks like Q two next year we're gonna bring out. Yeah. So d the the initial idea the initial idea for Intel, I think I think I don't know how much we talked about it on that the other live streams or other questions and answers that we've done in the past. But i Int Intel was always meant to be the system that we were gonna use to drive progression for players during a season. It being a seasonal resource that kind of resets each season. And it plays into the idea that like weapons could come in and weapons could go. We could pull things out, bring stuff in, and the the the kind of order that you play with equipment throughout a season completely changes. And Intel being this thing, originally it it was it in the black market, you kind of build in connections within the black market and you kind of reach out to all of the different stuff that you can that you could get. So Intel was going to be a paced resource that like you could earn X amount of it every single day. We don't cap it. So that those that do want to play lots and lots and lots, they will still progress, but then hopefully at a slower rate than the majority of people. And then have the idea that there would be a buildup of this kind of allowance that people would be able to get. So if if you're busy, like we are through like say Monday through Friday, you'd be able to sit down at the weekend and kind of get those extra get the extra hours in that you kind of missed out during the week just because of time restrictions or whenever, whatever day throughout the week that you then have the time to play. So Intel was always going to be a way though where we could look at the system and say, okay, if if you were to turn up and play the game every day for X amount of hours and you'd be able to earn this amount of what is effectively like XP for this amount of time, we can say that roughly everyone is going to be around this level, this level, this level, this level, at this time, this time, this time. We can pace how how fast people progress through the game and how fast they can build through trees. And it it's just a different way of us. presenting content to be played throughout a season. And that that that was also meant to be coupled with like other systems at play. So we've spoken about in the past the idea of skills and what skills were. So XP was a system that we piggybacked off of to use during the MVP because it was a system and a currency that we already had and it was there and it was ready. And that the idea of that was to basically enforce the way that you play the game. So if you play Medic lots, you play Driver lots, you play pilot lots. You're gonna earn XP within those individual roles still. And then you would be able to earn effectively skill points within the driver role, within the pilot role, and then go and spend them in a driver or pilot tree. And those would then give you access to different passives and then like what we were calling like was it gold, gold passives or capstones, where it's like you get like a bigger reward. Th there's like a larger larger larger skill that could change the way that change the gameplay element and how you play with it. So like one of the early one of the early like designs was the idea of like infantry combat, assault players and ladders. So like the way that you would interact with a ladder, like how fast you could move through it would be like a very small passives. So like you would get like point point two five percent. And then maybe overall like your top cap out on that is I don't know, maybe maybe you climb the ladder. Point point five percent faster. Yeah, yeah. And it's it Those things were meant to persist across all seasons. That's persistent character. You're building out your character, your war dog, and it lasts forever. But we are collecting. And we are collecting that. And the idea is to go back to that, but it's a system that we didn't have ready just f from all of the pressures that we had. I think it's important to mention as well, Intel doesn't lock you into a specific tree. Like you don't have to deliver pallets for twenty hours to get the tank. Intel, you you can play however you want and use it to unlock the things that you want. And and and and it's a great point because it it's where one of the pillars of the game, play your way, really came from. The idea was that you would be able to play any way that you wanted to play in the style and role that you wanted to play as, and then still progress in those other areas. So if you kind of wanted, if all you wanted to do was play sniper. We didn't want to lock you out of all of content outside of sniper. So you could keep playing sniper, keep playing recon, keep playing the way that you like playing, and eventually be able to like spread out into those other trees through your playing your way. It's I think there's a like a good example would be if you don't you want to play sniper, but you only want to play with the MK22. You don't like the other guns. You can amass enough Intel to actually unlock the MK22 without having to Deal with those weapons that you don't want to play with. Play your way. And it lets us balance those weapons to make them more fair with each other. Like there's no more linear kind of like this has to be better than this, this has to be better than this. We can do what we want to do. Yeah, that one sucks, because at the end of the day, three bullets to kill is three bullets to kill. And there's only so much you can make a little Yeah. And people don't realize that they're like it needs to increase the damage. And like it doesn't quite it's not that simple. Like we just and we it it it's not it's not there's no there's no ego and there's no Don't know what the best way to describe it is. There isn't there isn't it isn't meant to be a moment like, ha, we already know. We know everything. Like we know everything. Like that isn't that isn't what we're trying to get across. It's just like imagine if you spent four or five years thinking about something. A lot of the things we have already spoke about or the original design was meant to work a certain way. And then it's like almost means just. Like it's just we're just doing what we can at the time that's possible. It's yeah, we just make it work. That's minimum value pro that's making games, right? You spend millions of pounds making games, you it ruin the shit with All gonna lose our jobs at one point, and then we went, let's just with with with the roles specifically, it's like they're all in these linear tracks, and we know that like there's there's lots of talk. By the way, just just as a side note, the amount God. So World of Warcraft. We we've all played World of Warcraft. I've been playing World of Warcraft for the last 20 years because Wow Forever Beta came out during the time of our launch. And the discussion around WOW forever and its progression system moving from a vertical progression system, which they've traditionally done, to their new horizontal progression system that then meant that then all of a sudden made everyone a game design expert. And we should we we as war dogs should have you tried horizontal progression? It's like Mm. Thanks. Yeah. It's like it's it's crazy. And it's like then all of a sudden you hit start hearing like horizontal progression comes up all the time. And it's like this isn't this isn't something that's c al always talked about. It's like the the design megaboard. Like there's a design megaboard on Miro, which is like a digital whiteboard we use. If you haven't used it, it's very cool. But it's like got every idea we've ever had put into yeah, it's so laggy now, but like it's huge and you've just got everything on there, and then you've got another one that's like Developed ideas designed. You've got pages where it's like this is a design documents like a six page document, like this is what it's gonna be like. And then you've got all the cut ones. And it's just like Yeah, it's not like we didn't know what this stuff was. It's just like there that people forget it's like like water's bulkhead is one of the more passionate, like we we we work really hard on what we do, we love what we do. Take it personally, as you can see. Like we take it personally in it and I think it's a good thing. Yeah, but like ultimately, like we Can't like there are business constraints that like we are overcoming and we tell you about them. Like we're telling you. So it really sucks when someone's just like, these guys are fucking idiots. And like, all right, well, you fucking wait for someone else to do it. You fucking wait for that. You know what though? I I wouldn't do it differently though. I I I really like that we've got like it's hard, like life service is hard. It's way harder than we thought. I love that we've got it out there, and there's things in the game that we knew were good, and we've proved that now. And now we know there's a bunch of stuff broken. And Like players coming to us and going, Have you tried horizontal progression? I it's annoying, but you know what? Like, good. I like they care. All of these ideas that everyone has, it isn't that we're saying, like, huh, we've already thought of everything. And it isn't that we don't want to do these things. So, like, horizontal progression is obviously something that we want to do. We don't want to create it where like this one weapon is the best weapon to play, and you shouldn't play any other weapons, or this style of play is the best objectively, like you shouldn't be playing with anything else because it doesn't make sense to you. That is not what we're going for. It goes against the pillar of play your way. So when we do make design changes where we try and bring some of the some of the rounds, like 762 by 51, otherwise known as 308 in our case, just to differentiate the MNAMs, we we trying to bring that back in line. Like 762 NATO is like a it's not it's not a super big round. It's kind of it it is that intermediary round where we were sat. And it being a content problem that we've kind of addressed a lot in the past, is that it was sitting at like the higher end. It was sitting at the higher end of like the damage tables. So as we want to bring more content into the game and we want to kind of define some of these roles a little more, especially with sniper, recon, we want to have the room to be able to put new calibers in that fit somewhere in between those. So like new sniper s new sniper rounds like 338 that can fit in there, where it's like that is a desiccated designated sniper round. They're not using the 338 Lapua in in you know ARs. It's like we're using we'd we start defining these roles more. And again, it was a content limited problem. Your thing was like we need more content, and we're like, we have no more artists and we have no more money, so we can't do it. And you're like, okay, we're gonna have a content problem. And if you remember our videos we were making when we were saying 10 reasons not to buy ward dogs, and we're like, this isn't gonna be a content problem. This you're hitting it. Like you're you're people hit. And actually, we went further than we thought. And we were so worried about it. Do you remember the season update? Season two, this was a huge mistake on our part, actually. in that where there are a few points where we let our fears and kind of PTSD from battalion like get in our way, where we were so worried about not having enough content. We overstacked the amount of content and everything changes. We worked really hard. More stuff, more things into season two. Get it all in there. And you know what happened? The quality dropped. We didn't double down everything the way we've iterated and iterated for years and thrown things away twice and kept the third one and we didn't do that and we just pushed it out and went, Look, there's loads of content. And they went, Yeah, okay, but the XP's broken. So 'cause we're we're on the treadmill and the treadmill's on max. Early we were talking about the fifty cal and putting it on the wolf and the build ball. And we were like, shit, this is scary. Like this is talk to areas. Yeah, it came up like this is OP. Yeah, this is gonna be a bit powerful. And then we're like, okay, right, now it's in the game, man. We're going out the door and lock it. And like Yeah, that was that was a really big learning, is that how we fucked this up? And we did our town hall this week, Monday. So since release, we haven't had like a town hall meeting, gone up, here's the plan. We're finally pulling it together. And this weekend was a kick up the ass, really, wasn't it? It was just like this is not fucking sustainable. And part of that is we've got to slow down. We can't do monthly seasons. We j we can't keep up. So we think doing like a a three month season with like a a smaller update in the halfway is gonna be the way to do it. I think I think the other the other big takeaway and what we tried to change in season two that I don't think is really that clear to everyone, but I think the people that have stuck out with season two, where you've seen kind of like that that turn in the rhetoric that's been mentioned by some people where they're like, Do you know what? Season two isn't that bad. It's because we've kind of given some power earlier on. So yes, before like season one really was like a heavy vertical progression. All of what you quote unquote best stuff was at the end of the tree. Like d all of it was at the end of the tree. We've tried to bring some of that in in terms of like when you unlock stuff, kind of give some of the power earlier on so that players that felt like they never had a chance because they were never getting near the power, they have options earlier on. now it's a g now the big thing is limit servers, right? So we're calling it call it primitive. Because it's some it's something it's something that we we definitely we we called it out, I think e even earlier in tests, we've had these scenarios where we would say, okay, just run with these weapons or just with this set or don't use these things. And we've had good experiences in there. Obviously on launch, we kind of are want have one unified experience. The longer that we kind of stick around and the the more that we can sense what players like and don't like. then we can kind of offer more experiences. This limited gear experience is meant to replicate that kind of that that ex low to mid-game. Yeah, low to mid-game, which is again some of the f most of the feedback that we were getting was, I was really excited for that early game. So without locking it to low-level players and saying, hey, this is this is an experience within the game that replicates that early game, but allowing it for everyone. As we watch seasons evolve, Because the stuff that's coming online, the sentiment and even the stats, it like it ebbs and flows. That in itself was not something I expected to be so extreme. I well, I think we'd seen it a little bit in the testing where people were like, This is OP, and they're like, I'm not figured it out. This is OP. And we'll we're talking about we're interviewing a designer today, weren't we? And we had a good analogy where he was saying, like, I played this, but I couldn't do that. What why don't you give the RPG earlier? And I'm like Earlier, what the fuck? See, it was level four. You and this is where I you got lost in the data. I was critical of you this. I've moved it to level six, made it out a little bit. And I was like, that's still one game. This was in beta two. Like this was a while ago. This is still one game, right? But anyway, so it like you unlock it straight away and whatever. And he's like, You need to go earlier so they can attack the vehicles. And we're like No, we'll give it to them before they start. That's called battlefield. And then like it's okay. Like how you deal with it. I I don't have there's a tank, I don't have an RPG. Better stay fucking quiet then. And I'm not saying that it's perfectly balanced, but I am saying that like we put problems in front of you, and every day you play because of the way the progression works or should work, you have a new problem to solve in a different way and a new tool to do it. And the example was we're playing rock, paper, scissors, I get rocked. You get scissors, they beat you, and you're like, that's not fair. It's like, no, no, no, this is just it's just how it works. Like it's negative review. Yeah, like negative review. I want to add, like, we will fuck up again, right? Like why do you keep excusing it? Like, okay, the excuses in. The driver is a perfect example, right? The driver He is right. Right now we have what, 340% more drivers. We can't support this long term. So what do we do? Do we move the tanks to Korea? Drivers. No, no. Move the tanks to Korea. That that is one of the things that we but like Career. I I genuinely thought you said career. I was like, what are you talking about? Wold dog stuff. Like I was saying. Wardog stuff. 'Cause like we can either stop development on everything and then work on making the logistics role feel more have more of an identity, or we do something that might upset some players but makes the game healthier in the long term. For me though, I like changing it season to season. I'm okay with some seasons being like a bit more like like I like the resets because it's like, and it's a different game now. And it's a different game. There's something to talk about. I think influencers love and hate it, but the point is like if they can talk about something, say they hate it. That's creating content for them. That's interesting. Come back, try it out. It's too many tanks this season. Okay, well, next season let's fucking bump them back. Just prove the point. Definitely gotta be careful. So obviously we made some changes in season two to try and bring in some of the less used guns earlier, just to like kind of force a player's hand in terms of like the weapons they're using. Judge came forward, like we moved obviously we introduced the Bison, we kind of moved AK down. We AK's three now, obviously, MP five we kind of got brought in early. We pushed some of the more popular stuff out further, MP nine. And PKM is now level fifteen, just a lot of like shuffling. And they and and some of these were much further down the season. So it was kind of it was that balance pass of trying to s like introduce what was perceived as power weapons, like kind of in earlier. But it doesn't it doesn't always play out how you think it's gonna. Well, I got couple of questions to kind of round off it. Because I think we wanted to cue this to an hour and we haven't got the digital clock. I don't know where we are at, but I'm gonna ask you point blank, we haven't had the conversations about this, so this is raw and cannot be taken as gospel by anybody listening to this. Infrared binoculars. Because it's course people are like get out of the game. We're I'm adding limited mode, they won't be in limited mode. Let me just first. I've got I I people like delete them. People like just I just You you are big against the scars. I was I I was in the I was in the camp of no thermals, like from early on. We we have a lot of people in the team that like sniper. Because you never play sniper, I'm in the camp of fucking thermals. Yeah, but no, but you're asking for an item that just allows me to see everyone. It's like, yeah, of course you're gonna enjoy it. Like it is you get a big power fantasy from being able to see everyone and then my big issue is that we had a lot of players like We have a big mix of players that come from loads of different games, and some of these things are expected within them. Like people who play Battlefield and then they go and snipe in Battlefield, they all have thermal scopes. The people that we bring in from Battlefield, at some point they're gonna want or expect those things. My problem is that those things are overpowered. If we were to put a thermal optic into our game, that that to me feels crazy. That's so strong. And I think they're feeling the the power of. Thermals in our game where they're getting all of the spotting information. And I think again we've seen the rhetoric of thermals being overpowered in this season again because of rain. The rain and the fog, where it sits, the distance at what it is, and then someone just picks up i infrared go thermals and they're seeing straight through it. And they're seeing people that they wouldn't have known was there or anything else, and then they're pinging them or they're spotting them for other people and then they're able to communicate and work together. So you think back it out? Cause let's not pretend we're not gonna read these comments and go I I would back it out. And I know that's gonna upset a lot of people just because it's like it it it is it is a part of the way that they like playing, right? Like I I understand that a sniper likes to be able to find spot and then shoot those people. But in terms of balance, I don't think it's that balanced. I I would back it out. I th however I agree with Tim, my boss. Yes, Tim is correct. He is every time. No, I think that though the the fantasy that they provide, I really like. And I think Ways about fantasy, you clarify player fantasy. Player fantasy. Like the idea that I am a sniper, I'm using this unique piece of gear that I've unlocked to get an advantage and I'm getting this like it's j and it's just cool, right? I'm using the infrared spot rangefinder to to ping people, find people, it's just cool. And I think role fantasy. Roll fantasy. And I think s our spotting mechanic is something But I'm I like I think I'm really proud of it as a as something we've made because it's just it's it's something we do a little bit different to other games and it just fits War Dogs so well. And all those things are the things that I'm like, yeah, I probably would remove it because it is massively OP. But it's so fucking cool and fits. So I just spotting speaks like s so well to the type of game of like what War Dogs is, how someone is able to provide. Like a large benefit service to the team and get rewarded for what they're doing for what would traditionally be like almost like a side piece. Because without doubt, we saw more people playing support and logistics roles. And the people in the office and the the the leadership that did not play Hella Loose Project Reality Squad Armour who have never run logistics in squad. And they're like, Why would I do that? We've played squad with them. God, needed logistics. Like, I wanna do that. I just want to I'll play Grenadier. I'll use grenade launcher, I'll do this. And you're like, they cannot compute why it's fun. The same way I can't compute why you'd ever play Final Fantasy is like, it's I don't understand that. Like, unless you're masturbating, I don't get it. But like the logic drives Like But like I it's just not my thing. Like, both the same Masturbating is the fucking Final Fantasy is not. but like I just don't. Compute how they can they don't they don't compute how they can play it. And then when what happened was when they came into War Dogs and they were like all of sudden like I'm getting rewarded. Not just anything, because XP is like if you actually break it down and you're facetious about it, a bit simplistic, you go, cash is just XP you can spend, right? It's just there's two XPs in the game. There's your XP, your roll XP, and then there's your cash you can spend, XP you can spend. That's all it is, and we give it a dollar sign. And I think because it has a dollar sign, because early on we talked about using like Credits or something, we went, no dollar sign because people are portioning the value in their head. And I see a couple of posts where people are going, hang on a minute, a tank costs the same amount as an AK forty seven. And you're Yeah, well games. Yeah. We wait till you get like twenty million dollars. We've seen the helicopter. Yeah. So like it's a used helicopter. That's different. Like it's not a new one. But yeah, I think We we did I want Mark's answer on the y you're you're whatever Tim says, you agree. And then I'm checking that's definitely not how goes. Go on Mark. You gotta the most amount of time to make a decision on infrared. 'Cause this is basically the design meeting now where I'm gonna go and say, Fine, we'll do it. Mark's gonna struggle to make a decision and then say sorry. Sorry. Sorry. I don't want to remove it. I think I think there is a way for us to to balance it and stuff like Battery life is just like really quick. You I got USB C you gotta buy one as That's that's that's boring. It so it already is affected by rain. It's four hundred, five hundred meters shorter in rain, players don't pop as much. but at this end of the like the the map is darker, so it doesn't really matter the players don't pop as much because everything else is darker, so you can't see them even more, obviously. I think it's just level design, like level design. A level design thing, right? I think I don't know. I tell you what, it's going through trees, it goes through trees. I think that could be probably too well. Yeah, it probably does something. Trees and bushes. It should be blocked by bushes. It should be blocked by like foliage. Well, and then the level should not allow a sniper to have full view over the whole map. Like I think Fuck off. Hang on. Hang on. That's happening. No. It's not happening. Do you can't just be like, okay, what should what should it be? Close quarters combat for everyone? No, no, but I I just everyone's got a piece because they had this. That fucking thing that you Yeah, I did lower design with this team and they're fucking difficult for the whole time. This is I you know me. I'm CEO and junior level designer. Can we talk about the new map? Fucking Yeah. I think the new map is perfect. If you can pronounce the name. Perfect. Perfect. please, no, let him go on, please. No, good, it's good. Shut up, we're listening. Let him say the new map and why it's perfect. Listen and we don't judge. When we were playing it, there are more chances. The compliments, though. The compliments. I just need everyone to know. yeah, no, it's fucking amazing to play inside interiors. There's like different levels of verticality. Everything just feels like I feel like I'm actually exploring a map. It feels like I'm not running from one field to the other. So what happened with this new map, right? Is the first map we made is Baccharani and it shows, right? We that map has been like so many different shapes. But went with it's a bowl. And that's some people are like, snipers because it's all always looking in and down. It's a bowl. So then the next map we made was like, okay, let's put a hill in the middle. So there's a castle in the middle, and that's why it's that shape. So let's do the opposite of a bowl, hill in the middle. The next one was like, it's a sniper still. Let's make a flat one. So it's completely flat. And then this one I was like a secret answer. I've got the answer. No, th this is me doing level design when I I get to do the I'm lead level design and then I go over and I'm like, right, here's the idea. And then I f do feedback weekly kind of thing. And I'm like, it's yeah, it's like bowl, boob, like flat. And then finally I was like, I've had another brilliant idea, guys. Half bowl. It's gonna be half flat, half of it's a bowl. So now when you and it and you know what? We played it. It's fucking great. And it's all the learnings of the first one's just like bang. And you know why? Because the there's a boob in the middle. Is it hospital? Hospital. I had a powerful an amazing like a twenty minute life in hospital. I fucking went for every floor. I killed like fucking twenty people. It was like the most fun I've ever had in Wards and there's lot more verticality in some years. Yeah, it's good. So I think the infrared is not gonna be a problem there because you can't just stand on the hill and fucking stare in and like spot everyone. I think it'll still be a problem. You have dodged the question somewhat. I know. I think we should remove it. Fuck it. I think we need to rework it. Why can't why can't we just say you're just gonna give up basically say sorry? yeah, remove it. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. Why don't we just reduce the time the batteries take 'cause you just fill your backpack up? Yeah, we can. Yeah. It's we we tried to do that right with the introduction of batteries. and then I think with all balance changes, I think it's We we don't update the game at a frequency that you could really do it fast enough. So, like, I don't know, let's say after the first weekend, and people are saying, it's still two OP. Well then we should try and reduce it. But like how many times are gonna do that? I think it's just I think it's just it it has a lot of power just innately. It is just strong. and you're just gonna be fighting against that. We could reduce it, reduce it, reduce it, but then like there's gonna be a point where it's just not about making a random IM that spawns on the top of the tower, but you It doesn't. So that's something. It's not a bad show. We'd we talked about putting more exclusive things into the level like that, like on the tower spawns. we've explored we've explored in the past like the idea of like having gaining access to stuff once certain things come online. We kind of do it in a very light way in that like helicopters attack, helicopters come online at certain points and stuff like that. but like the more the more that you restrict stuff, it's like less Less of the sunbox. Yeah, and this is an important point this is a big bit of feedback we get from almost entirely the battlefield community for for obvious reasons. But like we mentioned I I think I said to you, I'm like, when we're on our down bit on the weekend, I was like, I think I think we're gonna have to implement restrictions, man. Like this is getting but but it so goes against what Wardogs is. It's so against it. What I will say though, that we agree with the people, you finally shoot down that Havoc, one minute later Havoc appears, that's the same guy that we get that. And we don't have a solution right now. When when they have lots of cash and like they they they kind of had that that liquidity to be able to just keep doing that that very powerful thing, yeah, it does it it does suck. Because you've spent what you brought into the zone to get rid of it. Like then you're at the mercy of someone bringing it in, or you've got to kind of g get out and back yourself or hope that someone else comes in with supplies or whatever. I do think we don't use fuel well enough though for that. Or they're relying on building. I feel like there's something there with fuel that we haven't quite had the time to sort of really Do something interesting with I think we've spoken to But sorry, I did der it doesn't fix the fact that having timers on stuff. But but I don't I I really think like it'd be such a give up. Like this is the thing players don't see talking about like they're not wrong. And often players I find them really bad at solutions, but really good at problems. It's balance, right? It's the discussion around balance and what balance is. It it just like we can make battlefield. That's not I do not believe for a second that if you just took conquest and battlefield and went, This is, you know, take war dogs, make battlefield that it would Even remotely sell close to what it has and have the amount of players. It's been a conversation for a long time as well. Like if you start restricting stuff, like we've had to be so careful with it because you can just start adding restrictions in all sorts of places and probably finding good reasons to do so. But it just it waters down what the game is fundamentally. And and dying is okay. Losing is okay. Yeah. Not winning is okay. Okay, we're Rock Pavis's analogy was just Yeah, we're gonna remove rock for a bit. From from an outside point of view, it's really easy to dy dilute a problem or just just to make a statement like, just put a limit. Just put a limit on havocs, put a limit on rocket pod helys or team sometimes. Yeah, yeah. You say that and it's like, well, you're not taking everything into consideration. So let's imagine that we say that you can only have one rocket pod heli in the game at on on a team at a time. Right. So that rocket pod heli then, it spawns, he takes it. 20 meters out of base, he's no longer in the safe zone, and he crashes it into a tree and it lies there broken. That rocket pod heli is now in the game. What happens to it? He then gets out of it, leaves it, abandons it, it's there. Is now no one else able on that team to spawn a rocket pod heli for how long is that gonna be like that? Yeah. And then you can say, okay, well, then specifically, that vehicle blows up after a certain amount of time. It's like, Well, what about if I want to fly my rocket pod heli into the zone, leave it in this space, do this thing, come back to it getting it, fly it off. Well now I can't because it's gonna blow up in 20 seconds or whatever else. And like you're gonna just keep hitting all of these all the times. Like you're Tim's not saying that that we can't do it. It's like, well, there's edge cases that they create more edge cases that create well, actually, well, what's the fundamental point we're trying to achieve here is allow people to play how they wanna play. That does not mean that things are balanced. But I don't think we ever said to anyone in any bit of marketing ever that we were trying to balance it. But but I've I've I've got this thing I talk about work-life balance all the time. If you ask someone to imitate walking on a tightrope, i.e. balancing, they will not go like this and just walk. They will do this. And the idea that sometimes things are more powerful than less, and sometimes you have to go one way over the other, like the idea that balance is this perfect flat line. Like the very thing that makes games interesting and influences have power and entertainment and the cycle work is that sometimes It's just cool to see a bit of change in it and talk about what I think this is what well I don't. Like the comments, like the the first month of War Dogs, the comments were great. It was so cool to see people engaged. The second one was just like, the devs are retarded. Yeah, you've changed my things. You've changed it. Fuck you. And it was just like, hang on a minute, we're still we're we're I thought we're fucking friends. What the fuck's going on here? Like I think the way that we've we've spoken about like balancing as well is that with With seasonal content and when new things are introduced into the games, even in other games, when new content comes in, it does tend to be that that new shiny thing maybe is a little bit better, just because it hasn't had the amount of time that everything else has. And then naturally it then gets pulled down. It's like every everything should be almost allowed its time in the sun, just because your thing got slightly changed. Like it don't don't throw the baby out with the push shape. Do you know what the biggest Can I quickly add one thing on the edge cases? The other thing about that and having those edge cases, those negative edge cases come back, every time you do something to fix one of those, you like we have positive edge cases. I've seen videos of people buying 20 tanks and rolling out to the zone. That's a cool moment. You limit a tank, your fun moment is now gone because we had to do this to fix this thing that's a little bit uncomfortable sometimes. We don't want to do that. We want the crazy. It's wing it's when QA or bad designers tell you, but then someone could buy twenty tanks and you're like, yeah, they could. But then one team will just be so overpowered. And you're like, well, maybe they will. But are you saying are you saying that statistically people are gonna do that game after game after game? And that is why we stepped in on the infrared Range Finder and we removed it. Was because it was becoming Every single game. And that was the only thing where it was like, this is constantly happening. This is constantly happening. Breaking the Crates of spawn. Crates of spawn is the next one. We're going, you know what? We didn't want to limit people, but we found that when people placed in crates of spawn, they were getting a bit ridiculous. But also, new players would come in and go, I'll buy crates of spawn. And they'd spend, they'd bang, spend all their money because someone put a high markup on it. And then they're like off to a bad start, hitting us with a negative review. Joe's getting yelled at any board me. It's a positive because again in that same scenario where it's like you don't want to limit stuff, it has that positive and negative. So the positive side of it is that new players can get access to some of that later tree stuff that they haven't got yet because someone's putting the crates down in spawn. But the negative is all of these things that you just mentioned. It was I think it was messing with spawn logic as well. So I think there was like reasons to do it on So look, like ultimately, you know there's one you know the one thing that was the most sort of complained about with our patch notes? Do you know what it was? Well Too much. No. Builders are getting nerfed. yeah. Have you heard anyone complain about that? So it's to the point of you could limit the amount of and I don't think this is works, to be clear what we're trying to do. You could limit the amount of magnets you could build, right? you could limit that. You could just say one per fob. Easy solution. Yeah, I w at one point I was Like we were very close, but we're like, Nope, we're going against that stay strong, like we're going to get used Tim was like the one who said, Don't do that. So instead just price it up. Requires more fuel, requires more fuel. And we haven't found that balance yet because people are building it. But you know what, if someone wants to build three like the second artillery comes in, you can't do that. So the so the mid game, there are it's hot zone magnets everywhere, blah, blah, blah. And you see the reviews. If you look at the reviews across the thirty days of the first season. The middle is there's mortars everywhere and there's hot zone magnets. And then you look at the end, no one is complaining about hot zone magnets. They're complaining about infrared rangefinders and this stuff. Now there was no solution for the infrared rangefinder. But the middle, like there is. You're just not doing it. Like you're not figuring it out. And that's the problem. That's the fun bit. And I think I worry that the Wardogs is never going to be as fun. The session, because the metagame is pretty cool. But the the session is never going to be as fun against that first season because it's just like. the total discovery of it, which is why I love the idea that we rebalance, reorganise, and it's different and people are mad you've changed my thing. But I think they should just embrace it. Yeah, Wardogs, Wardogs was a new thing for a lot of people. Like in terms of like that the game mode, how it plays together, the kind of experience that you have, it is different. It was a new experience. I think that's probably a good place to start then, but we'll listen to this one back. That's our first one. We'll see how goes.