Hello everyone. I just wanted to touch on a few things here. Regarding pro players involvement with balancing, we have talked about this in our Y5S1.2 Designer Notes. As stated in the notes, we consider the entire player-base when making balancing ideas for operators. While some operator strats do come from observing pro play, there are certain aspects that are not popular within the general game, such as Goyo. Goyo has an interesting skill ceiling, where he is performing well within the Pro League meta. Therefore, this change was specifically aimed at Pro-League. The other changes with this patch were made with the entire community in mind plus data gathered across the entire game. Pro-players are not controlling changes. They contribute to feedback related to balancing discussions, but they are not the main reason or source of all changes. As it says in the notes, the balancing team investigates their feedback, the general community feedback, and data when discussing topics. It can feel pro-player focused due to the large platform a lot of the players have, which can understandably make some of you feel less than. In our designer notes going forward, we will be providing context for which portions of our community we are targeting with changes. This should provide clarity regarding why certain changes were made to certain operators and where we gathered the feedback from.

They can always say, 'Oh yeah, prove it - show us the evidence',

As mentioned in our blog post, going forward we will be discussing who each change is aimed for, whether it is specifically for pro-league (like Goyo) or the general community (like Jager). This should help bring more transparency about the goals of changes and what they were based on.

No Focus on Cheating/Smurfing. The developer's time is not going towards fixing key aspects of the game that would improve Quality of Life for all players. Fixing the massive cheating problem in this game as well as the massive smurfing problem is the ONLY thing the developers should be doing.

From our Top Issues Blog:

AUTOMATED DATA UPDATES TO BATTLEYE
Description: Due to the increased mentions and player reports of cheating, we are reinforcing the bridge between R6 and BattlEye.
Objective: Strengthen our collaboration with BattlEye by implementing automated processes and reinforcing data sharing to shorten the feedback loop on banned players.
Status: Ongoing.

DAILY LEVEL XP CAP IN PVE
Description: Daily level grind cap from PvE as a prevention tactic to make Ranked requirements less accessible to illegitimate accounts.
Objective: Our goal is to make Ranked less easily accessible to bots and smurfs by limiting the daily XP that can be earned in PvE. This will make it easier for us to spot and catch bots and smurfs before they are able to make their way into Ranked.
Status: We are aiming to have this completed as soon as possible.

INCREASED RANKED + CHAMPION RANK REQUIREMENTS
Description: Increase Ranked and Champion Rank requirements.
Objective: Increase the barrier to access for illegitimate accounts to both Ranked and Champion rank to promote a better Ranked environment and a clean Champion leaderboard.
Status: (Target: Y5S2) We will have more specifics on the new requirements closer to S2.

Also, in some cases, I feel like pro league players should sometimes just deal with it. Ubi should listen to the majority of it's players, not just the "Special" few.

We talked about this in the Designer Notes as well. There are certain cases where balancing changes can go a different direction of what the professional player feedback was suggesting. In the future, we are going to provide more context for cases where we make a decision that is against the professional player's wishes.

Recently, an interview took place where we made the following statement:

So, if professional players are not happy with our proposed features, then that means we are going in the right direction.

We wanted to take a moment to clarify the intention behind this. It is true that part of our balancing efforts is to push every player, professionals included, out of their comfort zone. This does not mean we are going about things to be intentionally frustrating for these players, but instead make adjustments to ensure our professional players are the best at the game as a whole, and not a specific update or meta.