Before I say anything - my apologies to Clotho personally, for accidentally causing some confusion in another forum topic that they had to manage on a very tight schedule.

It's not an enviable position to be in. When I was a younger gremlin, I actually wanted to be a voluntary community manager for SK or its forums but now in my thirties (and with a lot of perspective in industrial operations), I can probably guess that having to manage expectations of an excited community while *also* not stepping into hot coals is at least moderately stressful? Revealing something better kept secret or even potentially damaging development progress by igniting a demand to pivot what's being built is a very easy way to earn yourself a sternly worded email on monday morning.

I'm certain GH isn't beating its community managers with sticks, but they do have to be mindful. Pallaskat still has a point regardless, though - things like dropping Rage Boxes again without much fanfare, for example, is *proof* that we're being listened to, because I've seen that suggestion in this very forum prior to that and it does satisfy player desires, but dropping Rage Boxes again without an announcement is... strange? I didn't see one, but there must be one somewhere, surely...?

I know that regardless of GM awareness of what's happening behind the scenes, legacy redevelopment is volatile, and engine work makes the capabilities afforded to developers vis-a-vis creating future content even hazier, so they probably can't say much anyway... but they *might* be able to confirm whether things are going well back there, or whether the issues we've raised at least been nodded at with a, "yeah, we'll probably have to tackle that pretty soon but we need more time to solve a problem we can't disclose right now."

"That's basically the size of it, give or take" would probably do a lot of legwork as-is, honestly, with player optimism at the heights that it is, heh.

Edit: Another thing to have in mind; these same GMs are probably managing the Steam discussion forum too, and that division of attention (and the lack of a central dashboard) cannot be making their job any easier, so I do sympathise.

@Pallaskat you quoted ""if you want more people playing this game, it's crucial that rebalancing and gameplay loop get adressed""

I agree this is a big one for long term player retention.

@Thats-Rough-Buddy Two months of progress is indeed a short timeframe when, from what scant few comments have been made, we can assume that everyone working on SK is tied up on the technical side of things. Still, even if we charitably assume the game's scaling numbers are spaghetti and it's difficult and/or annoying to change damage values, it's unreasonable to assume that changing or removing a knockback flag, converting to a different damage type without messing with numbers, adjusting the size of a hitbox, or changing where a hitbox spawns relative to the player would be time-consuming. I've just described what would be welcome buffs to over half of the presently bugged or underperforming weapons and sprite abilities. Some weapon permutations even received fixes where other variations didn't, where certain Antigua shots still fizzle with the player's back to a wall even though others were adjusted.

As such, when they say "we're thinking hard about the FSC problem," "there will be some balancing" and "there will be nerfs," players have no idea what to expect, where it could even mean outright bad changes, retreading old history. GH has precedent for occasional spontaneous, arbitrary, negative changes, generally not openly responding to player feedback unless to dismiss it and sometimes even make fun of them. If Summer 2026 Revived Tell Your Friends Spiral Knights is different, where they're suddenly taking player feedback into account constructively, it makes more sense to talk about things like balance patches early to get a discussion going on what the design goals are and achieve them in ways that aren't tonedeaf or openly antagonistic. Why not sprinkle in little buffs to whatever weapon's getting sold for at least 6$ in this month's lootbox, like how remodels and recolors of those remodels include not just meta equipment but also infamously weak items like Cutters and Catalyzers? There's enough time to make a completely new model for them, but not enough to so much as flip WHB's Normal damage type to Piercing, a change that would see many players suddenly scrambling to make Hunting Blades?

For an example of something that happened without warning for the worse, the heart trinket changes that were relatively recent in respect to this game's dev speed (i.e. several months ago). Suddenly a hyper-rare drop is best in slot among heart trinkets, but not by buffing True Love Locket, and instead by nerfing the other trinkets to be below it. The subtext is obviously that they like giving (let's politely say dedicated) players a carrot to chase, where the strongest armor, trinkets, and UVs are all extremely low chances meant to sink literal millions of crowns and hundreds of hours. Maybe that's not negotiable. What would be is boosting TLL exclusively and leaving the other trinkets alone so they weren't made retroactively worse. The super-special trinket that was equal for years is now stronger "as it should've been" or whatever their exact words were, but nobody who invested their very valuable, very painful to farm Krogmo coins making them feels cheated.

I understand it's wishful thinking for wanting an open forum or compromise like that because even during the OOO days we'd have full-blown testing server sessions to try out new/modified equipment, but it was treated as more of a sneak peek for paying players than for actual feedback. The Gunner Update came and went with almost no discussion nor adjustments and ultimately did more damage than good to the game, and the Shard Bomb rework before it is arguably the most infamous gameplay change in the game's history (setting aside the Forge's gameplay changes). Leading up to the Shard Bomb patch, there was communication of why they were changing and what their goals were. There were all sorts of player responses to this, for and against, expressing many perspectives on the gameplay style they offered, and even some followups from the developers.

However, and I'm not making this up, a number of the promises somehow ended up being lies. Nick's own words: "It is not our intention to reduce the power of these bombs in any way," among other statements, and then almost everything about new Shard Bombs was weaker, not just raw numbers but mechanically too, ensuring none of the things players used old Shards for would be possible with the new Shards. There were some unhappy posts about this in the testing period when they went live, awkward silence from a number of players who welcomed the rework because they didn't like how the old bombs worked and trusted the new bombs would play well, and even some big petitions to "fix" them where the most the community was able to get out of the devs was "we're gonna make the game the way we want to, go away," to paraphrase. At one point the hit limit or 'invincitink' threshold was relaxed a bit without being removed entirely, but that's it. Over the years since the rework, I've only ever seen Shard Bombs used in spite or contrarianism. Similarly, I've never seen anyone say anything nice about them except in respect to what they could have been, even from players that disliked the original Shards. Tortofists are notoriously undertuned and a lot of that is from carrying a lot of the same anti-player mechanical baggage new Shards did, and this is with them being made long after the rework...

... anyway, the moral of the story is transparency's good and games where developers and their audience interact healthily are wildly more successful; the customer's not always right but devs that can admit where they're wrong are the ones that win it big. Communication's just the tip of the very neglected SK iceberg. It's not strictly necessary to have a whole roadmap or anything; what matters most is whether there's proof anyone's home listening. I agree that how thoughtful the balance patch is will be future-defining. It's disappointing they're not taking easy wins as they build up to what's implicitly PvE level creation, in any case.

@Thats-Rough-Buddy

I don't think the Aesop with the heart trinket changes is about loss aversion so much as a need to mend the visible disconnect between what GH did and what they justified it with, which is why I mentioned Shard Bombs as a far more extreme example of this happening in the game's golden age.

Zeddy is an excellent guy, and many of the people I met through him too. Got me into Earth Defense Force, often roped me into doing reverse-engineering tests with him instead of making longwinded rants and suggestions threads, continues to be a good friend to this day.

"...poll all legacy players on if they felt each one positively or negatively..."
We got something painfully close to this with the Gunner Update, where some quantitative radio-selection questions were posed about what damage types players felt were missing, what they felt about individual guns, etc., but only at surface-level with no qualitative questions about how they actually worked mechanically. I filled it out myself! Then the update shipped and we got 36 armors when we should've had no more than 12, ideally fewer; the best guns in the game got buffed and became almost untouchably strong; the weakest guns in the game somehow got worse; and Magnus got a funky charge attack with weird behavior I hope they keep if they plan to make its damage output less absurd in the future. Big surface-level mess of blanket changes.

I don't really see that post by Pallaskat as rude. We've seen ruder from GH themselves. It's written in a direct and critical way, but impersonally, and a fair thing to bump with nearly a month later since we've had multiple promos go by with no more of a clue. Going to have to admit my biases since I obviously agree with the message, though.

The game's sitting on oodles of deprecated or poorly tuned content, so it's exciting to hear anything will be done, and there are so many angles they could start tackling that from.

The trend I've seen in modern games for communication is roadmaps. Risk of Rain 2 did that during early access, and it set fairly realistic expectations for players (even if they lagged behind a month or two compared to the map). Players griped, but they put out quite a reasonable amount of content every 3 months, if you ask me.

I understand that this wouldn't be desirable for Grey Havens, because if players saw a roadmap that said in 3 months we'll get a new run of the casino with a 0.1% chance of a Prismatic Blorgleflorgh (reskin of an existing sprite you'll need to spend a lot of real actual money to finish leveling + actual weeks of grinding) they're going to do the rational thing and stop playing, at the very least until the time specified on the roadmap. GH would rather you kept playing the whole time, checking in every so often if there's anything to do in the game yet so you can have the current lootbox advertised to you.

I'm personally sticking to a policy of "when the game actually gets its fabled balance update I might play it" rather than burning out again before that actually comes to pass, but a changeset exists out there that would make me excited to play again and rope others in. Like if I saw a roadmap that had a "Who's that pokemon" silhouette of what is clearly Radiant Sun Shards I would hunt down old SK bombers and shake their shoulders and we'd squee in unison.

Anyway! I'm not the first to point out that the game could use some incentive for moderate, regular play. SK used to have that in the form of mist energy. It was removed and drop rates were nerfed encouraging a poopsocking meta instead of a "play for 1-2 hours every day" meta. Warframe has daily login bonuses and a "first win" bonus that doubles credits of your first run of the day. Deep Rock and others have small daily objectives you can finish over the course of three days in addition to weekly challenges. Small, healthy things that makes you check in periodically and feel rewarded for keeping SK relevant in your day-to-day would go an extremely long way if there was also a roadmap telling us something cool was coming in closer to 4 months rather than in 4 years. Danger missions were supposed to be this, but the reward isn't there.

I will lastly reproach that Draycos is a stand-up fellow you can count on for emotional support or straight up carrying your butt through difficulties. One time we were hard stuck in a DLC mission in Earth Defense Force 6 and invited Draycos to help us, fully confident that he would get us through it. He did effortlessly.

Draycos had never played the DLC missions in EDF6 before in his life. He can just do that.

GH seems to be in a difficult position of having fans rabid for communication, and quite possibly big plans, but little to actually communicate. Normally just being quiet would be fine, but as SK is a live-service game with a long history (and a number of very long-standing issues that most veterans could probably report accurately).

Sad as it may be to say, I post here more for love of the game itself than any actual hope that I will bring about change. I have a lot of ideas, which I try to think out the best I can, but as I am neither the programmer nor the game designer, I don't have a full scope of the details. And without that scope, GH's development does seem incredibly slow. Remember that it took them like, five years to fix the damage of Neutralizer, which was very clearly less than it was supposed to be and supposedly as simple to fix as changing a few numbers.

Draycos is right, though: most swords and handguns could be fixed by changing their damage output to be competitive with the existing good alternatives (or, in the case of a few outliers, like Acheron and Blitz Needle, toning them down appropriately); calibur, flourish, and spur style swords also tend to have hitboxes stubbier than their visuals, so they have issues with missing what seems like should have been a hit. Handguns and swords have a secondary problem in that it's generally far better to swap off them than use every attack in their string (shamelessly plugging my thread on that), which for handguns is more complicated, but another consideration. Doesn't help that the Gunner Update attempted to fix this by making shooting and reloading safer/faster rather than by making reloading worth doing.

Certainly, in terms of communication, laying expectations of what would be addressed in a balance patch would be much appreciated, though I suppose I can empathize that there would be a gulf between the players upset with their favourite braindead roomclear tools being nerfed and those that would happily see the playing field levelled (as long as the end result is actually fun to play, anyway.)

Lets start with better tooltips! and without needess-ly re-hauling the Entire UI be able to show actual info about Gear and Sprites... Instead of "Trust me bro" it does what is Says here in this almost filled gauge... with a moniker.
Does it need lovely explanations like the materials and Gear descriptions... not really, but does need to say, everything clearly.
The attack indicator on the enemies tell us the type of damage they do without having to measure pixels, is clear and concise. What Defense type we need against them is equally clear, the same color protects me. Telling without word is difficult but can be done.
Filled up gauges can do that, but need to normalize the values behind those, so they don't lie.
And also the sprites 5 marks of "Hunger" someone thought it was "satiation" therefore didn't feed it for a long while. We need better tooltips.

Also Zeddy said Something important, maybe with weapons is not that hurtful, but with Sprites the "re-skin" doesn't work anymore (maybe worked long ago as retention of players) Now is a burden, make the "costumes"... Did I get a Lizzard I get to use the dark, the gey, the light, the monkey the pig skin. A Kitty? the dark, the grey, the tabby, the siamese.. You got the point by now. abilities Ultimates Should be interchangeables now, like we switch perks of the sprite, so the ultimates (this is funny because some people don't).

We need clarity, I said it before, I join on this post to say it again.