After a community revolt, DICE is going back to the way things were when Battlefield V launched. The changes are now live on all platforms. The devs are also removing the ‘Core’ playlists since they are no longer relevant. Here’s part of what DICE had to say when implementing today’s changes.
“We have learned a lot over the past week. We’ve gained clarity on the issues you’ve shared with us around Time To Death (TTD), we’ve identified imbalances in weapons, and have recorded real-world data on how TTK changes our game and impacts our players. With that knowledge we have a better idea of how to improve the game going forward, and have already begun taking steps to improve the experience for all our players, new and veteran.”
While TTD (Time To Death) and TTK (Time To Kill) seem similar on the surface, TTD leans more towards the server side of things. A hiccup on the server side could show you dying in one frame from a submachine gun despite being at full health. Many across the community feel fixing the server issues will fix the dying too fast issue DICE used as justification for a higher TTK.
So what happened in the past week? About a week ago, big changes were made to time-to-kill or TTK. DICE made them to keep players playing Battlefield V. Here’s what the data showed according to DICE:
“Although not extremely vocal within our deeply engaged community, we see from our game data that the wider player base is dying too fast leading to faster churn – meaning players may be getting frustrated with dying too fast that they choose not to log back in and learn how to become more proficient at Battlefield V.”
The changes meant guns across the board were taking more bullets to kill enemies. 4-6 for assault and semi-auto rifles. The Medic Class (which uses SMGs only) was hit even harder with guns taking 6-9 shots.
This caused sweeping changes to the gameplay from moment-to-moment engagements to Battlefield V’s attrition system. It didn’t feel good, and the Battlefield community were quick to voice their opinions about it.
At least DICE listened and fixed it. What DICE needs to do next time is fire up the CTE (community test environment they’ve used in previous Battlefield games) to test out major changes before pushing them live.