14 DAY TRIAL // David Vonderhaar, the design director working on Call of Duty: Black Ops 2, says that his team has the hard game data to explore and refute the claims from various player groups that one weapon or another is overpowered on the battlefield.
The developer tells Destructoid that, “I can combine how something feels with how it’s actually behaving. I know, I know this is going to happen: a million people are going to Tweet me and tell me that the ‘PDW 57 is overpowered, Vonderhaar what are you doing?’ What I’ll do is I can go and look at the math and I’ll go ‘Actually, you know what dude? You’re just good with it.”
The aim of Treyarch is to make sure that any future patches are based not on emotions and influence from the player base but on mathematics and average performance across all the multiplayer modes.
Voderhaar adds, “I’m just going to kill people with facts 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.”
He believes that there’s no use in making decisions about Black Ops 2 without telling the player base and that his team will constantly talk with the community in order to explain why they are changing the game via patches.
The developer acknowledges that players will continue talking to him via Twitter and says that he will try to investigate as many of the messages as his time permits.
Call of Duty: Black Ops 2 will live and die based on the strength of its multiplayer modes and it makes sense for Treyarch to react as quickly as possible to complaints.
The game is available on the PC, the PlayStation 3 and the Xbox 360.