I'd love to have a developer come in and give his take. This is no different from any game community forum. And I don't think developer's try to indiscriminately act upon all feedback. I believe they're intelligent enough to read the feedback and be able to conclude what may make sense, what does make sense, and what makes no sense whatsoever. Because, let's face it, every community has its degree of whingeing just to whinge. People like to complain. Alas, I fear it's in our nature. Developers know this as well as anyone if not better (poor things).
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- I'm seeing a number of assumptions that character tuning is based solely on player complaints, which I believe is an incorrect assumption. If you read the patch notes the changes often have notes attached to them which refer to data collected, which indicates to me that while player complaints can prompt an investigation they actually analyze game play data to see if any tuning is justified.
As far as whether or not any character tuning is concerned, you will never be able to satisfy everyone because the character teams are not identical in the fashion that the teams in Battlefield or Call of Duty have identical classes and weaponry.
While each team has rough equivilancies on each side the mix of weapons and special abilities are arranged in different mixes.
The Citrons EMPeach is matched by the Engineers Sonic Grenade and Sonic Mines, the Peashooters Chili Bean is mirrored roughly in the All Stars Imp Punt and so on.
Because the teams aren't perfectly mirrored you will always have players blaming the classes for their difficulties because that is easier on the ego than admitting that the opponent out played you in some fashion. That's not to say that asymmetrical teams aren't a pain to balance properly because they are difficult to keep balanced- it's just that it's also very easy to blame the classes for poor play style, better opponent tactics, and so on.
I've finished the Trials of Gnomus, but despite that I can see that the random key rewards are ultimately unbalanced. I'm quite certain that when the idea was proposed and reviewed they must have assumed that the current 75% drop rate would equate to everyone receiving a full set of keys within 5 or 6 Mystery Portal events; because you would naturally assume that 75% means get a key 3 out of evey 4 Red Chests.
Unfortunately most RNG systems don't actually function that way over a small sample size. I'm pretty sure that while 75% of the community as a whole received a Key during any given Event I doubt that anyone predicted that so many individual players would continue to fall into the Keyless 25% week after week.
I don't think that the PvZGW2 community is dying, at least not on the PS4, but I do think that character balancing and tuning will continue to be a source or argument and I do think that it was a misstep for the Trials of Gnomus to rely so heavily on a pure, unfettered RNG system to allow players to advance towards the new character classes. I think this, more than anything else, will be what causes some players to walk away from the game out of sheer frustration.
Hopefully they do acknowledge the frustration of the players being continuously denied a Key week after week as being completely valid and act to change to Key drop rate soon.
