Hello there, contestants of reddit,

This is a megathread discussion post regarding some of the changes we want to bring to the subreddit, but only after sufficient discussion is held with the community, please read through and respond.

To preface, this is a community-run subreddit, we are volunteer moderators from within the community that have the freedom to run this subreddit as we please, but we make it a point to uphold the values and policies that Embark Studios implements as part of their official community. This freedom allows the community to have its own voice, but this can backfire too, as the mod team has come to observe. As we are volunteer moderators, we understand the importance of a community voice, be it positive or negative, however, we are still untrained and most of our decision-making is based on a whim. The problem worsens as this community is the most visible internet space for the game, and the oversaturation of the negatively toned posts is damaging the image of the game, in our opinion.

As moderators, we take responsibility for the state of the sub, and our past attempts at implementing stricter content policies did not come through well, our mod team were not on the same page of how well to police these implemented rules (As lead moderator, I take full responsibility for what happened, and I do not blame them for this). We also have our own IRL stuff and things happening in the background, we are not paid to do this, hence most of the time, we will be too late in responding to a post, which results in sufficient damage being already done.

I have spoken with Embark regarding the tonal shifts and overall community sentiment that arises from within this community before I am making this post, as I am completely aware that the changes we are proposing will be considered quite controversial for the reddit community and will have backlash. But we want to clear everything up with you guys and have everything ready in time for the Reddit AMA, scheduled to be held with patch 5.10.

Addressing the Egg-lephant in the room: Light players

Most of the community complaints we see are regarding the state of light player/contestant kit and fighting against them. To begin, we will be aligning with the sentiment of Embark's approach to the design and primary gameplay intent of lights, which could be categorized as "glass-cannon/play-maker/fragger" for the team where mediums are the "support/utility" and heavies are "protection/defense/damage", this is to address one of the most common sentiments that many users here seem to make, that light players are focused on kills, which, when we look at their design seems to be their intent, hence we will be taking action on posts parroting these statements from the future.

Moving on, several users talk about how lights have advantages in terms of their weapons being too strong, but a comparison of TTKs across the classes like below should give some context.

TTKs of Different Weapons of each class against each class [Data from Zafferman's Spreadsheet]

Additionally, the developers have stated that lights have the lowest win rates when compared to other classes, even though that statement might be from several patches ago, it still holds today as is seen across most of the higher competitive play and WT, the mod team also consists of active players, and we often play and communicate with players high in ranks, as well as content creators from time to time and none of us feel that lights have an advantage.

This might come off as the mod-team telling the complainers to "git gud", but we must address a few of the actual valid takes on light players that come from a place of rational thinking:

• Fighting against light players as newcomers to the game is hard (This is where the community should help each other out and provide guides/tips/etc. to new players on how to better play around light players)
• The playstyle of Lights is pretty hard to learn, and it does showcase skill expression.
• The prevalent problem is that lights do not have a good incentive to be objective players, even if they have some utility like gateways/vortexes/etc. (A good informative video by Arddrake talking about this). Embark tried to cleverly experiment with this idea by enforcing tertiary objectives like the "Fan bonus" and "Strike a pose" events.
• Light class's melee options do still seem inconsistent and hard to read, this questions the game's performance and netcode (Another excellent video by Arddrake), as well as hitboxes, but despite that, playing against melee classes is completely possible with the use of utility and positioning (Again, help each other out with guides and tips).

Update Scheduling and how balance changes work

Embark has stated that major balance changes and updates will be fewer within a singular season, but will be timed to be around the middle of each season. Hence, we will be taking action on posts that call for lack of changes. Moving on to how the balance changes are structured, Embark runs these changes through the data that they collect and analyze from games. As stated above, they have made cases for why more actions are taken on mediums and heavies. The primary mode of the game still and will always be Cashout Tournament, hence most of these changes are centered on data collected from there, this does mean that in some instances, it will feel as if other modes get their flow altered. Balancing a game between casual and competitive is hard, and every game developer struggles with it. But THE FINALS has an advantage of a counter-play being available to every aspect of the game. Nothing in the game has ever been truly as broken as C4 nukes from S1, but even they were countered with an APS turret back then, which was super beefy too.

These changes are not meant to positive-wash the subreddit, we will still allow constructive criticism.

The goal is to have more rational and structured discussions, and negate the amount of rants/complaints that we will take action on based on moderator discretion on whether they are baseless or are hurtful to game/company for no reason. We will also be implementing a system to filter posts and temp-remove based on reports, so if you feel a post is being problematic, please report it, and with a few reports, the Automod will be removing it till a moderator can take action. Again, this will take time, none of the moderators are paid, hence we are not constantly looking at the sub and screening through everything, we will take action when we have time to do so.

Additionally, some of you might feel that our approach to this might be too harsh, hence, we will have a rant/complaints thread on a designated day, where if a particular topic is upvoted and talked about enough, we might stop removing posts on said topic, based on severity.

Helping out content creators

We will be opening up the subreddit to allow for content creators to more actively post on the subreddit, we will be implementing a system of whitelisting content creators, and have strict guidelines on approval, content structure and promotion, and a very sensitive scale of demotion, where we will have a strike system to remove creators who do not stick within the guidelines that we are providing for them. This is to increase both content creators' reach and promote the game in time for the eSports to kick off with more viewers and content being within the algorithms, we can garner more people into this fantastic game. Interested content creators can provide any feedback or suggestions below. This change would also help a little with the content drought that might arise on this sub with our implementing the above complaints post removals.

That's all for now, please provide feedback and your thoughts on these changes as these are crucial to the direction in which we want to take the subreddit in, we want the subreddit to become an active hub for the game, the developers, and the eSports too, and these are not possible if the community is hostile.

It will be community run, and as the community, we need to learn to be better.

Sincerely,
tron3747
Lead moderator,
r/thefinals