Jonny Jacevicius · Lead FPS Systems Designer

So many. But yeah, we've been gathering a ton of metrics recently, especially out of our recent Theaters of War playtests, which is our ideal combined arms, concentrated combat scenario, where we are getting people in environments that are more indicative of combat that will happen in the PU, versus, like I said earlier, the Star Marine levels, which were a lot more enclosed. And obviously in the PU, combat will happen on ships, which is a much more enclosed environment, so that's valuable too. But the way we tuned our combat previously was for short range. You can take long-range combat and apply it to short range and it still works. Take something for short range and take it to long range, and everyone's like, why the hell am I not hitting this guy? Or the recoil is too strong, or the spread is too strong, and my guns aren't doing enough damage, and the bullet drop's too strong. So yeah, we've managed to get tons of data from the analytics team on how individual weapons perform, loadouts, what that loadout was killed by, so if it was a soldier killed by a soldier, and the stats versus versus. So it's given us tons of valuable insight into how effectively weapons are being used. So we've actually been able to take a look at some of the weapons that were really underperforming and think to ourselves, OK, is this due to how the weapon itself works and plays, or is it just down to stats? And is it something that we can tweak quite easily? So there are some weapons that we've actually gone and had a rethink on and gone, actually, yeah, this functionally doesn't work as well as we originally intended for its original purpose, that we've gone back to, not the drawing board, but gone back to explore some new ideas on how we can change it and how it works. So those bigger changes haven't actually rolled out yet, because obviously it's got to go back through the weapon concept pipeline a little bit. But the tuning and balancing changes, they're always happening. We never stop making changes as we need to.

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community

And just to go back to the analytics question itself, we get analytics from the PU and from Star Marine as well. I see those same reports that come through, so I know that they're being done and they're seen. It's just that one of the whole reasons Theaters of War has been created is so it can serve as a petri dish for that kind of thing. So it's just designed to be a little more effective for our needs, specifically for testing.