Why this game is getting worse every patch?
If you feel like the game is getting worse and worse with each patch, here's why:
Poor gameplay design. I don't know who is in charge of the patch creation process, and I don't want to blame him, but he's just not doing his job. The game has been perfectly designed over these 4 years of development. Yes, there were some broken comps and bugged items, but they were easy to fix. Every element of the game was in the right place and made sense. Now they're just trashing all those 4 years of development. I'll explain:
Why were passive items good from a gamedesign perspective? Because they have their pros and cons:
Pros:
- They can be activated faster than normal active items.
Cons:
- When you add passive items to your build, you become more valnurable against any type of control (slowing and freezing) because there will be fewer targets and slowing your entire build will be easier.
- You should build your comp around these items.
Now we have almost no passive items left. Instead, most of them have become chargeable. Is that a good decision? I don't think so. Because charged items simply have no downside:
- You don't care about any type of control. Slow mechanics are completely useless right now. What do slow items do to items that just retrigger each other? Nothing. And actually freezing isn't that bad either. Because as long as your items are frozen, you can just recharge them with other items and use them immediately after the effect wears off.
- You don't need to build an entire comp around these items. Some of them can activate indefinitely, like Proboscis with a slow enchantment or slow skill on the right item use (pretty easy to do every time I get it). Or matches + marbles. And so on.
What should the game designer have done?
Slightly buff some of the charge items that already existed:
Still don't understand wtf is this item...
Nerf some passive items. If you don't like that the puffer casts so much, make a restriction that allows it to cast a maximum of 1-2 times per second, for example.
And of course, don't make a lof of chargeable items, because that will make it easier for you to build comps with a lof of chargeable items that will recharge each other in a loop.
What did the game designer do? He removed pretty cool mechanic with its pros and cons for no reason. Maybe just because he didn't know how to properly handle it. So the next patch will be like: “we decided to remove the charge mechanic, and now we only have normal items” or what? xdd
And now most of the ladder only plays charge items because those items just don't have valnurals, so what reason to play other cards. Was this easy to predict? Yes, but not for the game designer of The Bazaar. It seems like he just makes random changes in every patch and depending on the meta performance makes further changes without thinking about it at all. For example:
Why was the poison ray so strong? Because there was a Monitor Lizard that triggered very quickly, so it was very useful to make it as poisonous as possible. But now it has an 8 sec cooldown, and even with haste it can't trigger faster than once every 4 sec. So now it's better to put more haste into the build rather than ray for better scaling. So I'm just saying that even the old version of ray wouldn't be a good item in the current environment. But he decided to nerf it anyway. This tells us that he's just looking at the metascore, “Hmmm, this item was pretty popular in the last patch, let's nerf it” without any thoughts on why it was strong, whether it will be as strong in the future without changes. Pretty bad design again...
Let's go even further. What is this?
Yes, balancing a game like Bazaar is quite difficult. But when you at least try to make it balanced, there has to be some line that lets you know that this item is too far stronger to normal items. These items are exactly the same, but bellelista has a 3 sec charge on a diamond tier and more scale. Is there any reason why it is so much stronger? I don't see any. Oh yeah, sorry, sharkray counts as a ray, so it “kinda” has less power, make sense (sarcasm). Then again you don't need to be a game designer to realize that you have two counterparts, and one of them is much stronger. So another change he just made randomly, without any predictions. And a change he'll bring back in the next patch to make this item even more unplayable than it was before (like he did with rays).
And I could make this list pretty long, because a lot of the decisions are pretty bad from a game design perspective.
So, Reynad, I fully recommend you change the person responsible for these decisions. He's the only reason why this game is still in closed beta (besides the eu server issues), and why this game will be there for a long time to come, or will be in very bad shape unless you decide to change the open beta release date. What's happening is bad for both players (we don't know how many people are playing right now, but we can tell from twitch that the game has dropped a lot in popularity) and businesses.
One more thing I want to point out:
For your information, they (developers) make every change manually in the json files. For example, they changed the tier 2 Trashtown Mayor boss and made it tier 5. So now they need to manually update all pools where we can encounter this boss, such as the Mountain Pass event. But they forgot to do that, and now you can meet the tier 5 boss on day 2 if you go to Mountain Pass, because he's still there (in the boss pool of day 2 of that event). This was also the case with items that, for example, no longer had slow, but were still found at the respective merchants, simply because they had forgotten to manually remove them from there. It's just awful that it's 2025 and someone still has such low skills that they can't even automate such processes. Just imagine, Mark Zuckerberg has said he plans to replace all junior and mid-level developers with AI by the end of this year. And at the same time, someone is manually refactoring json files after every patch. It's like two different universes. People are not robots and of course they can forget something, so such processes should be automated, because then you will spend much more time tracking down bugs and fixing them. It's not that hard to write a utility where you load all the changed items and it automatically rebuilds the pool of each event according to the changes. That is, you decide to remove haste from an item, remove the hate tag from the item, and the utility will automatically rebuild all pools without any errors.
I'm not heckling anyone personally, just giving a performance review, and it could very well be that different people made all those decisions. Just wanted to give my opinion and listen to yours, love everyone <3