The difficulty changes are broadly ok, but the coherency and respawn times on lethal are flat out unfun.

5 full minutes of not playing?   Who thinks that’s fun?

not being able to clutch a game save because you can’t get armor for 5 minutes if both teammates go down?

Need to take out a sniper or a TSon that teleported far away?  Suicide.

Either these changes weren’t played by real people that play the game or the devs have some warped vision of what’s fun.

Big L guys.

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Hawgsmoke wrote:

The difficulty changes are broadly ok, but the coherency and respawn times on lethal are flat out unfun.

5 full minutes of not playing?   Who thinks that’s fun?

not being able to clutch a game save because you can’t get armor for 5 minutes if both teammates go down?

Need to take out a sniper or a TSon that teleported far away?  Suicide.

Either these changes weren’t played by real people that play the game or the devs have some warped vision of what’s fun.

Big L guys.

I am not experiencing a general sustainment of fun, much less an increase. I don't have the time to coordinate with other gamers to form regular groups and I don't like running a mic; I have to talk people all day long at work, I game to relax. So, I run pugs, and up until tonight, even pre-3.0, I was pretty successful with pugs in substantial and ruthless. Tonight, it was a cascade of wipes in substantial that didn't even see us getting half way through the level. 

The game is simply not fun, now. This will drive players away, period. The number of people who have made accounts today, explicitly to voice their frustrations with having something they enjoyed ruined, is evidence of that. Games need to stay engaging in order to stay relevant and achieve retention. "Engaging" means accessible, "accessible" means that core content is completely attainable to regular players if they put in the time and effort. With this patch, this game moved to extreme territory, and as a result the community will start to shed good players and only noxious "git gud" elitists will remain after a while, and those little don't actually contribute to retention, nor do they spend money. Ask FS why they spent so much time learning to balance "challenge" against developer sadism, which in return relies on player masochism.

Most people do not consider experiencing repetitive failures a good time, and pvp focused games can thrive, but those communities are always toxic. Saber needs to carefully consider what it wants this franchise to be, before it catches a reputation that turns into organic, player based negative marketing.

The five minute thing only really matters if it starts at the beginning of an area. You can force a checkpoint respawn pretty easy in most maps.