Vonderhaar discusses weapon balancing and feedback

David Vonderhaar recently discussed how Treyarch will be handling feedback on weapon balancing.

Black Ops 2 has a new internal feature called Black Box which allows them to analyze player data and see what is actually happening. “What we said was we need to balance the emotion of using something, like your personal visceral reaction to it, with math,” design director David Vonderhaar told me. “There’s a lot of instrumentation in this game, there’s a lot of data logging, so I know exactly what the power band of a weapon is at all times.

But how will they handle feedback?

“So combining your opinion with mathematical fact is the way we can handle this and that’s only possible if the game is instrumented well, and it is,” David continued. “Like a whole new level of instrumentation, it’s crazy cool. Data nerds would just die if they had any idea what kind of stuff we can yank with this.”

He went on stating with how the player feedbacks can be determined false instantly:

“I’m just going to kill people with facts [with] this game when they come over and go ‘This thing is OP.’ I’m going to go ‘Actually it’s not OP, you’re wrong.’ I’m not going to yell at them or anything, I’m just going to tell them the truth. I don’t have to hide this stuff from people, just drop knowledge bombs on guys. It’s gotta be done! What people are doing is reacting emotionally, and I’m like a really emotional guy so I get it.”

Overall it seems that Treyarch has deep control on the Black Ops 2 systems and will deeply analyze data before changing anything in Black Ops II

SOURCE: Destructoid