At my first annual review, my manager at the time, Senior Designer Chin Xiang Chong wrote that I was, “deeply attuned with the wants of competitive players, while keeping in mind the needs of the wider player population.”
While I bring a competitive mindset to most everything I do, since day one of working on Apex I’ve been cognizant of the trap of catering to the vocal minority, pro scene, or any subset of gamer. Players won’t hesitate to tell us what they want, it’s our job as designers to diagnose what they need. I learned a lot about different approaches to balancing in my first year at Respawn, and while Live Balance was largely reactive, having a seat at Balance Roundtables with more senior designers helped me see the value in taking big, design-shifting swings. Perfect balance is boring, but a heavy handed approach prevents players from experimentation and discovery.
As a wide-eyed and bushy-tailed player and designer, I saw an opportunity to bridge the gap between player expectations of balance and the reality of the decision-making process that goes into each buff/nerf. Within the first few month of joining the team, I created a Twitter account with the goal of letting players feel like a fly on the wall in these Balance Roundtables.
My first post detailed a moment when I convinced the Legends Lead at the time, Daniel Klein, to walk back a Caustic buff last minute via hotfix update. I wanted to give some context as to why the flip-flopping happened, and reassure players that I was in touch with the competitive scene:
The thread gained traction, and the community was happy to read a digestible breakdown from an actual “dev” (which I use liberally here, as someone who had been in the industry for no more than six months 😅). I was confident something good was happening here in terms of community sentiment. I continued with more threads, and sentiment continued to rise:
Two of my most notable balance related threads had nothing to do with Legends or weapons at all. One was a more personal follow-up note to an contentious tweet from the Respawn account regarding emergent movement tech, tap-strafing. The other was related to the importance of accessibility for a cross-platform game and intricacies of thinking about different input types (in an era where the community was vocal about aim assist frustrations. I can dig up the twitlongers if you’d like more info, they seem to be inaccessible now).
There’s too many specific Legend and weapon to mention here. Instead I’ll list a few other areas I touched in my first few years as a Live Balance Designer:
- Tightening Drop Ship Flight Path Variance
- Managing map fixes, map rotations, and game modes via playlist updates.
- Arenas pricing for weapons, abilities, consumables, etc.
Some of these changes were editing text files and being mindful of a multitude of edge cases (our playlist process wasn’t the most sophisticated in 2021). Others required work in Respawn’s scripting language, a version of Squirrel. My job also consisted of triaging bugs, communicating patch content to our social team, and checking in with different design teams as the frontline liaison between dev and player.
John Larson 