How Activision and the developers of Call of Duty: Mobile rule the balance of weapons in the game

To correct the balance of weapons in Call of Duty: Mobile, developers from TiMi Studios and Activision had to collect community reviews and test them in practice using limited playtests. Matt Lewis, the general manager of the game and vice president of the publisher’s mobile direction, told about the difficulties encountered.Matt Lewis’ original column was published on Gamasutra on May 12.

Lewis notes that developers constantly see a lot of user reviews. However, they rarely overlap or complement each other. “If we had a magic ball for SMM that combined all the reviews together and sorted them by all types of weapons, then we could easily work with feedback for balance edits,” says Lewis.

To work with reviews, developers needed to come up with a single system. Ideally, they could find posts with mass discussions of a single weapon, and then compare this information with statistics from the game. However, in fact, there are practically no threads in which a conditional 300 people would immediately talk about the problems or characteristics of one particular weapon in Call of Duty: Mobile.

Despite the difficulties, community managers managed to manually collect reviews with the main problems into one document and pass it to game designers on weapons. As a result, the team made many changes to the balance sheet, the list of which took 36 pages of text.

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was impossible to immediately introduce all these changes into the game, because it is unclear how mass players would perceive them. To do this, the developers decided to assemble a separate test build, in which all the balance edits would be present, and launch it for 30-40 thousand Android users around the world.

The

CoD: Mobile team uses such playtests before the start of each season. The changes in the balance applied to all the main weapons in the game, but they could all be divided into four main categories:

• submachine guns — the developers wanted to strengthen this type of weapon by increasing damage and mobility, as well as optimizing the trajectory of bullets;automata — developers sought to increase the range and accuracy of assault rifles so that they could be most effectively used at a distance of 15-30 meters;
• light machine guns — the main goal was to increase the accuracy and effectiveness of destruction at a distance of 30 meters, as well as to improve the behavior of weapons at different distances;
• sniper rifles — the developers sought to optimize the characteristics of this type of weapon, as well as weaken the advantages of snipers in close combat.
• According to the test results, the main problem was confirmed — all the listed types of weapons were not sufficiently different.

Players could use snipers in close combat, use submachine guns instead of submachine guns, and the latter turned out to be practically useless for many users.

Also a big problem was the “Gunsmith” system, which allows players to modify and change the characteristics of weapons. On the one hand, this makes the trunks unique and creates additional interest for users. On the other hand, it greatly complicates the adjustment of the game balance.

Based on these points, the developers decided not to increase / decrease damage / recoil, but to make sure that each type of weapon is used for its own unique tasks and does not overlap with other trunks in the game. This made it possible not to focus on the characteristics, but to find use in combat for each basic weapon, regardless of the use of the capabilities of the “Gunsmith”.

After the playtest, the team conducted a survey about the new balance to find out the opinions of the players. According to Lewis, most of the participants were satisfied with the changes. Now the developers hope to introduce them to all users by the start of the fourth season and use a similar approach for further balance edits.