Wall of text incoming, but there is a tl;dr at the bottom.
It was a good update overall. I liked Urk's section. It does a good job of letting us know what's ahead, while maintaining the surprise. But I do have 3 major issues with Jon's section of the weekly update:
1) The issue isn't about the patch notes not being updated in time. It's about the preview not being updated.
Jon's preview reads with real authority and generated real excitement in the community. But as described yesterday, the numbers were "not ready for prime-time" and "scratch numbers". The fact that the preview didn't indicate this and that they were never updated it is very frustrating. Jon apologized for not getting the patch notes right, which I applaud. I just wish that that was never a problem in the first place.
Also, the unaltered preview notes are still linked to in the actual patch as where you can go to get the philosophy behind the changes. Come on, guys.
(In the past, I've rolled my eyes at DeeJ saying he's needed until the 11th hour to make certain the patch notes were right, as if the patch wasn't locked in place days earlier. Now I get it. My bad.)
2) Doubling down on describing changes in a way that players cannot see in game.
The final section of Jon's post about an exercise in hand waving. I'm not sure how many people understood his example, which brought in fps and magazine sizes which have never been discussed in patch notes before, but guessing based on what I've seen not many. I mean, he never even finishes his example. He begins with hard numbers and then talks about "Feeling" if you use an "exotic". It felt like this:
If the "base" damage descriptor cannot be seen by players in game and can generate wildly different results than players expect, then it should be abandoned as a descriptor to players. Don't talk about damage inputs to your damage formula. Talk about damage inputs. Bungie actually did this Year 1:
3) Doubling down on autorifle changes that really aren't changes.
Here is a summary of auto rifle changes to date.
There are two changes that stand out. One is the time that we didn't get any numbers at all. And the other is the time that the change was significantly closer to 0% than 1%.
Let's discuss magnitude of changes. Within this same patch, pulse rifles were nerfed 14.23%. A change that's 356 times greater. Additionally, in review all weapon balance changes from the beta to date, the smallest change to damage has been 2%.
Let's also discuss how precision changes within the patch notes. We have changes such as 0.04% and then we also have "roughly 5%". Using that same descriptor, autorifles were changed "roughly 0%".
It's also still a bit weird that the final changes are almost exactly 10x or 100x smaller than the preview. Like, we can all admit that's weird, right?
The fact that they're selling this as a buff at all is a bit ridiculous.
How hard would it have been to say, "We kept testing and auto rifles are in a good spot when we bring everything else in line?" Or they shouldn't have said anything at all. Make it a stealth buff. Or gone back to the 2.0.0 style of just saying "increased slightly."
Conclusion:
There were understandable mistakes and I applaud Jon for copping to them, but the way that they're being handled isn't helping.
I know that I'm going to treat any weapons balance preview much less seriously going forward. And will probably wait to play things in game, because at the end of the day, that's all I got.
tl;dr: Bungie has bungled expectations (again), gives patch note changes in a way that's not clear to players, and continues to stand by a 0.04% "buff".
