We’d like to make a public statement regarding a recent change that made it’s way into nightly, the way the community reacted, and the developer response.
The Brief (TL;DR)
While we would appreciate you reading the entirety of this post for some insights into developer thought processes, here is a TL;DR of what is happening:
- The landing lag changes as a whole are being reverted (the parry and shield changes which were included in the initial patch will continue to stay in the game and receive support and iteration)
- Organizational changes will be made to both the dev team internally and to the HewDraw Remix public discord server to make presenting feedback more straightforward and streamlined.
The Changes and the Intention
The changes in question were a cast-wide change to landing lag. On-average, characters’ aerials’ landing lag had been increased by 2 frames and some change, with some characters receiving a lighter set of landing lag changes and other characters being hit a little bit harder.
We understood the change that this would have on the way that the game would feel and how characters would play, and it was intentional. Unfortunately, these changes combined with defense buffs and resulted in a swing towards defensive play that was too strong for a game that has historically prioritized offense and movement.
We want to be explicit and clear: We knew what these changes would do, we went forward with the change, it was not a guess. We knew that it would drastically upset the state of the game, and that it would shake things up a lot. However, we can see clearly now that the resulting impact on the game was not desirable to us or to our playerbase.
We will be fully reverting all of the landing lag changes as well as the accompanying shield stun changes that were applied to compensate for that landing lag.
Discord Server Changes
Our official Discord server has been through many iterations, ranging from a wild house when we were a game in our initial alpha stages to a (allegedly) more organized server now where social and development conversations can stay separated.
In it’s current form, the Discord server has a few public channels which have become problematic for interactions between developers and HDR players, these channels are:
- #meta-general
- #balance-discussion
- #dev-general
While these channels were created with good intentions when we launched beta in March of 2022, the game and community have grown beyond what we could have anticipated back then, and the purpose of these channels has been muddied and the usage of them has become problematic.
Moving forward, these three channels are going to be publicly archived in a new Archived channel category at the bottom of the server.
These channels will be replaced in both form and purpose with a new forum channel called game-feedback. This channel will be open to all players, but read-only for the developement team:
- “❌ Declined/Not Doing”: The change is not going to be implemented. The forum post will stay open once this label has been applied by a moderator in case changes happen.
- “📝 Considering”: The change is being considered by the developers, but there is no promise on whether or not it will make it’s way into the game.
- “🔍 Researching Options”: The problem is understood and identified, and we are researching options to address it that may or may not align with proposed solutions if they were provided.
- “✅ Planned”: The change is planned. There is no guarantee whether the change will make it into the next nightly cycle or beta, just that it is planned on has the attention of the developers.
In Conclusion
These landing lag changes are going to be fully reverted. We have seen what the other side of this game can look like, there are some things that we liked and a lot that we didn’t. As we continue to work on the game we hope that you trust us to make the right decision and hope that you will continue to support us in our venture on this project with our new and expanded understanding of our role as a team and the game we are building.
We ask that you do not harass, dehumanize, or otherwise talk down to the developers that have poured their heart and soul into this game for years and continue to do so. We are all extremely passionate people and players just like you trying to create a game that we all love to play.
- The HDR Development Team