As someone with a stake in the contributor/beta/dev/open/legends/scrim/troll scenes, I think you guys are being extremely over dramatic and paranoid.
Something to keep in mind, at least regarding my statements, is that it is something I have dealt with for a long time. Much longer than most beta testers, and a good part of the development team (Such as Frenzy) have even bee a part of the process. Certain periods were better, certain periods were worse. However, from a developer perspective: there have been times where I have had a highly motivated day to work on MB2, but then because beta testers have their flavor of the week and its super important to them so it must be discussed right now. In my perspective, I've seen a constant trend of inexperienced developers listening to the loudest in the community, so it often means I have to spend time time trying to convince people to stop going the band-aid route because everyone is amateurs rather than professionals. Over the years it has wasted tons of time from both beta testers and developers, arguing over stupid little things like were some government bureaucracy and never actually getting things done.
Just as an example, the scrim community decided one month that A-280 was a massive problem, even though balance had not changed for the weapon in like a decade. I agreed that there were issues, but beta testers/scrimmers were adamant it had to be immediately solved with their balance values the moment it was discovered. Where as my method was slow, methodical, anti-band-aid, group based balance changes. As part of my overall class update plan, weapons like A-280, DLT-20a, Westar M5, would have had a lot of their balance values detangled from one another. Things like accuracy are the same for half the weapons in MB2, and many of the projectile speeds are all the same. Other balance values like ammo costs, magazine size, reload times, etc are buried so deep in code its impossible to easily modify. Past MB2 developers kept tacking multipliers-on-multipliers in order to do things like projectile speed increases or FP drain modifications. Multiple global-modifiers, multiple sub modifiers etc. Everything needed to be cleaned up and myself, tempest, etc. needed time to clean all of that up and unlock all possible balancing options and stop the slow cascading failures. All those discussions and stuff wasted a fuck ton of time trying to convince people to follow basic proper game design/efficiency/optimization related ideas.
It feels like I wasted 12 years of my life trying to convince people to just follow what I consider basic common sense. Like hey, we need to be able to balance a weapon with ALL values, not just damage, burst count, or FP drain. And it just partially results in the next part of what you mentioned:
I think R20 had the right idea but was rushed and bloated, the numbers were off and beta testing fell off when it should have been at its most populated (where were the complainers?), resulting in hilariously obvious missed bugs.
It was rushed and bloated, because 75% of the features for that release were decided last minute, against the goals of leadership, and the result of beta testers and two rogue developers forcing things rather than sticking with the plan that was decided years in advance, and cemented as the plan for the release months beforehand. It has nothing to do with developers not playing the game. Such a statement is baffling to me when, one of the people responsible for a large majority of the "hilariously obvious missed bugs" was someone who was on the scrim discord, playing and testing with scrimmers on a weekly basis. You would think someone playing and testing that often would have spotted obvious things, and would be able to avoid them when they're modifying core parts of mb2s code base.... but no and its been a frequent problem with that specific developer missing the obvious because their communication skills with the rest of the development team sucks ass and I can even provide a good example of that. If we would have stuck to the original plan, we wouldn't have had issues, and if we had people in the development team that developed as a team and not solo developers, we wouldn't have so many problems. And with that I'll give an example of why I say this, while also addressing another part of your comment:
Legends is more popular because it's funnier and more laidback, changes can more easily be made to the mode to keep it fresh or address balance, and classes have more robust kits and have more lives/bigger health pools/more mobility than their Open counterparts, which DOES actually fix a lot of the "problems" many have with Open.
Which to me is a little hilarious, because a lot of the backend changes I was championing were for the purpose of making much faster balance changes overall. A lot of MB2s balance values were in random files and locations within 10s of thousands of lines of code, often impossible to find, tied to other things, or stacked on top of previous balance changes. Tempest and I worked really hard to centralize all of that in a single easy to read location, which also allowed them to be read into the UI for even players to see. It is something that should have been finished years ago, but has faced resistance due to flavor-of-the week issues taking priority. We also had a list of plans, multiple years old (just look at the date on the thread that is just combining things into a single location as most ideas are way older), that gave classes more options. Below is an example of things just written down, but also notice that there are at least 3 new classes on this as well.
It is also absolutely hilarious seeing the legends system nowadays, especially with some people taking credit for the idea. Here is a news article we published on ModDB of the legends system existing in 2009:
From the MB2 Labs: A New Gamemode news - Movie Battles II mod for Star Wars: Jedi Academy Far before any of those people joined the dev team.
- If you do not create an SA, a default one will be used. Currently, the SA defaults emulate the MB Open mode classes. This effectively turns your SA into per class limits on the MB Open mode classes.
That right there sounds like even Legends itself.
However, the person who worked on the current system never discussed it with the team as a whole before creating it and getting it to the point where it was mostly complete. Thus wasting weeks, months, whatever of his own time when I had part of this system still lying around on my machine. That version that I had would have also solved a few of the issues that cropped up post-release if they followed the initial game plan and communicated and designed things with the rest of the team, rather than on their own. Some people on the dev team think they know better or more than those that have been around longer, yet their ideas are decades old and belong to others.
We had the opportunity years ago, to get Open to a much better place. That chance was completely squandered by a selfish few.
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