Many of you are wondering, now what?
Last week, we said we are working to deliver better builds more reliably. But we also realize we’ve lost a lot of trust with each week that passed without delivering on our Spring wipe. We got excited about what we were working on and announced it before it was ready.
- We failed our players by announcing our Spring wipe prematurely. Our desire in early communication was to respect players’ time and let them know our target goal as soon as we set it, but now realize it was overly ambitious and hasty.
- We failed by promising and setting dates on features that weren’t fully designed. Mastery design was still being discussed internally when the original messaging went out with a date.
- We failed by leaving the impression through our messaging that PTR was more than it was meant to be. We wanted to keep momentum and that resulted in level cap increases before fixing the existing bugs and class issues, before content was adjusted for those levels.
- Quality Assurance was another failure point. We sent builds to PTR with insufficient internal testing. This put a heavy burden on players who experienced lingering bugs from previous sessions which quickly frustrated our player base. We committed to weekly patches, which we simply could not keep pace with while trying to implement new systems, server and tooling updates, mastery skills, core class kits, itemization, unified NPC templates and ability loadouts.
The pattern here is premature and incomplete communication. This is and has been an issue internally and publicly. We have run out of good faith tokens and simply need to get this right from this point forward.
PTR
The Public Test Realm was originally intended to be a very rough feature testing realm. Our communication failed to adequately set realistic expectations in a timely manner. Those of you who have been helping test on the PTR, thank you so much. It’s been a huge help as we’ve been exploring our upcoming features.
Mastery
Once we realized that mastery was going to be a much larger undertaking than originally expected, we should have communicated sooner as we changed course.
PTR Update Pace Slow-down
Internally, half of our team has shifted to working on the new production candidate build, while the other half continues working on features and tools being tested on the PTR. You may have noticed less frequent updates on PTR. We should have explained why sooner.
Production (EA) Server Wipe
When? When it’s ready. Once we have a build on PTR that contains all the goals and features we want to include in the wipe we will give players a date.
We will be removing mastery for the upcoming production candidate build. The state of the system and game are very clearly not good, as reflected in your feedback. Mastery is not ready to be a part of Pantheon without more time and effort to get it right. The goal of the system is to emphasize expressions of the class kit, not diminish the core class kit. It’s not meeting our expectations and it needs time to be done correctly.
Although trust has been damaged and deadlines have been missed, our team is resilient and will endure to the finish line. We pledge to continue to see the project through and are excited for everything awaiting you all in the upcoming update.