ThunderBrush · @ThunderBrush
8th Feb 2023 from TwitLonger
To the Paladins community some additional information for your consideration...
Hello Everyone!
I know it's been a hard couple of days as of late, thinking on matters some more I think providing some additional info and perhaps context can help some of the "pieces" fit and bring folks to a better understanding.
First up outright directed insults and antagonizing is not the way forward, on behalf of Evil Mojo I am truly sorry this had been the case recently. We are actively working on ensuring this path of communication is improved moving forward.
Because game-dev is a very interconnected process between art-design-programming-audio-community and many more I am going to do my best to stay in my lane and speak to what I know. I cannot answer folks questions in regards to game balance etc so any comment I may make that alludes to that just know it's NOT my area of expertise.
What I do have however is perspective over time, I have been on Paladins well over 5 years now and have seen many changes and can hopefully paint a somewhat clearer picture for our players.
First a brief timeline and some context...I came to Paladins roughly around the dark days of OB64...
I was brought onto Paladins with the intent of improving the art department. Paladins early-days had consistently failed to turn positive, there are many theories to be sure but I've always settled on the simplest explanation...the game simply wasn't offering skin/champion content that our players found worthy of purchase. As far as I am aware Paladins never had a truly "positive" patch until Siege of Ascension peak which coincidently was the first patch after some major internal shake-ups and I began working with the team on a new visual direction.
Fast forward a bit onto Realm Royale, due to the history with Paladins and a strong internal interest from company stake-holders for a new game project the Paladins team (if memory serves correctly close to 90 some folks at the time) was split to form the separate Realm Royale team. With an aggressive content schedule ahead of us and a reduction of staff we had a lot of challenges ahead. The team however was working VERY hard. Ultimately as time marched on the Evil Mojo team has continued to reduce in size to maintain a sustainable project with continued support from the right sized team. Hi Rez's objective has always been the continual support of Paladins.
I will in the next following bit try to highlight and address some of the high level points of Syberbolt's recent video in no particular order.
-Payload, at the time of it's removal I recall the intent was to improve matchmaking in our more popular queue's and for whatever reason Payload had fallen noticeably behind the rest. There was intent to bring it back at some point in the near future but this is where we enter the live service production issue, our team's resources at the time were maxed out maintaining the existing content production with events/champions/bug-fixes and limited features. There were deep concerns of re-introducing the mode too soon without being able to give it proper internal review and support.
-Siege Beyond, again I can't comment to the specific gameplay balance/impact but in response to "nobody asked for this" comment. This mode was put together in an attempt to add something new and exciting to the game while impacting as few departments as possible. We brainstormed a ton of ideas internally but sadly art and (I think) programming had little capacity to support any new features of a large scale. We needed to maintain the content pipeline's we knew players responded positively towards which kept the game running. The response to this from players is usually met with "hire more people" but again this is the issue I want to highlight, our team is the size it is for a reason. You can not "fight the math".
"EM values their own priorities and wishes over everyone else". Evil Mojo is simply a team within Hi-Rez the company. We answer to company stakeholders the same as everyone else and work to align ourselves with the companies overall strategy and goals to ensure success. Nobody and I repeat NOBODY gets to risk money with no accountability. Decisions are weighed among various departments both in and outside of Evil Mojo and best strategies are acted upon accordingly. This isn't to say we always get it right but I want to assure everyone we are not some rogue entity with the company either, that simply is not true and never has been.
"Developers padding their resume" This is at best a subjective statement but one I want to try and break down a bit. No developer in this industry gets noticed or hired for "developed x feature for Paladins etc". Years of experience in relevant roles as well as competency tests for relatable job skills are what matter. I would go so far as to say Hi-Rez is not a company that is large enough or well known enough to have a large impact on a resume from name alone like a "Riot" or "Blizzard" might. That is not to say Hi Rez is a bad company because it's not at all, in fact Hi Rez has done some amazing things for its employee's I've never seen a studio do in my 15+ years working in games. The industry doesn't really function the way outsiders tend to think it does. Developers simply work on features they are able to with the resources given, game systems are complex and require specialized expertise within the team who are not always readily available due to ever shifting priorities.
"Thunderbrush is a furry" I've said this before elsewhere on twitter, Pepper and Salt exist to make money because Paladins has for whatever reason a noticeable Furry fan community. As skins they were simply developed to appeal to an audience that we wanted to cater a tiny fraction of content towards (frankly two skins in five years). I absolutely admit to hamming up some of the drama on twitter around these two to keep players talking about Paladins more, to keep things interesting and fun. Its ok for players to have some spirited debates as long as we keep things civil. If you found yourself making posts/video content to "complain" about this then frankly you were helping to keep things running so thanks! I definitely get a good laugh out of it but in the grand scheme of things the complaints some folks might have over two skins merely existing is so inconsequential at the end of the day I hope people haven't spent too much time and stress over it.
I suppose in summary I want to say this. It is perfectly acceptable to not be a fan of changes/features added or removed from a game. What I want to caution from the communities side however is the assumption as to the reasons why. More often than not the reality is far simpler than most realize. At the end of the day we are a business trying to survive and figure out how we can best support our players with what we have and sometimes that's gonna fall short of what players wished we had to work with sadly.
Despite the length of this post I know this is all still very brief but thank you for reading this far. I truly believe communication between developers and the community can and will improve. We are all passionate about the things we make and the things we enjoy for entertainment, sometimes reality can get in the way of that being the best we all feel it can. Thank you for your patience and understanding.
Much love and respect,
-ThunderBrush