Another crit....
Any given night on a TF2 server, one often hears the lament “DAMMIT! ANOTHER lucky crit!” It seemed like soldiers in particular were constantly getting critical hits (read: one shot kills) on their opponents. The end effect was a lot of bitching and moaning about overpowered soldiers, too many crits, and even cries of “HAXX!”
The TF2 developers have been paying attention. Of course, they get to see the math behind the game, and they noticed that crits were a bit out of hand as well. They embarked upon a mission to solve two problems:
- Reduce the overall number of critical hits occurring in the game.
- Make critical hits more skill / performance based.
To solve the problem, they implemented three key changes in yesterday’s patch. They lowered the base crit chance from 5% to 2% (meaning just blindly firing, without having hit any enemies prior, you now have a 2% chance for a crit), while lowering the range based on damage dealt as well as lowering the range of damage required to score a crit. It sounds complicated, and it is complicated, but they’ve graphed it on their blog, as well as given a more in-depth explanation of the changes and their reasons for making them.
The end story here is that the TF2 developers, over a year after the game has been out, are still delving deeply into the mechanics of the game using data gleaned from months and months of observing the actual players. It’s a beautiful way to make a great game even better.
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