Information Notice About Reverse/Timeless Pirate Weapons

Hello Legends,

This post is about the issue with level up weapon attack gains for Reverse and Timeless Pirate weapons.

First of all; effective immediately, all future level ups for any Reverse/Timeless Pirate weapons will return to being between 0 - 2 weapon attack, instead of the 1 - 2 range that have been incorrectly affecting weapons during this past year.

Now, for a bit of insight into the history that led to this problem.

It was brought to our attention, around the start of December, that Pirate weapons seemingly never gained 0 weapon attack upon level up. Despite this being a simple check, we were unfortunately in the middle of the massive Christmas patch preparations, and we were unable to confirm this till a later date.

We managed to verify that there was indeed an issue caused by an accidental file revert early in 2021. This meant that weapons leveled from release to sometime around February/March 2021 did have the 0 - 2 weapon attack gain, but since then all pirate weapons have had a 1 - 2 weapon attack gain. For some added context, originally in GMS the weapons did have a minimum weapon attack gain of 1, but we made a conscious balance choice upon the release of Pink Bean to bring it in line with all the other weapons.

At this point, we assessed our options. The viable solutions we saw were:

1. Revert the accidental change, making all subsequent level ups have a "handicapped" chance (compared to owners of the weapons who had a 1 - 2 weapon attack gain already) and thus require more investments than all the ones made so far.
2. Keep the "new" watk range, making all new level ups fair among pirates, but giving them a significant investment advantage over other classes.

None felt like a truly satisfying route, so we opted to give ourselves more time to plan, prioritizing a relatively stable patch release.

After the patch hit live, and after those few days of troubleshooting and fixing the few things that went wrong, we picked the discussion back up. We tried looking for alternative solutions, such as:

• Revert new weapons back to 0 - 2, and "patch" existing and already leveled weapons. However, this was deemed impossible to execute due to the RNG nature of the weapons. We have no way of determining whether affected weapons would have rolled a "0". Additionally, if we were to retroactively deduct "x" amount of weapon attack as part of a "fix", it would be unfair for players who heavily invested in their weapon because of what they deemed to be a high roll.
• Somehow rebalancing pirates to make up for the increased 1 - 2 chance. However, that would mean hurting lower level players all for the increased damage from Reverse/Timeless weapons, which some players might choose to not even utilize and instead resort to alternative weapons like Dragon or Neo Tokyo.

More ideas floated around, but ultimately we decided that the best of the worst solution, which was to go with solution #1.

We would like to sincerely apologize for this incident.

In retrospect, what could/should we have done different?
Looking back, it's hard to tell. This issue was brought up to us directly in December, but we lacked the time needed to investigate issues such as this. Our bug fix testing, aggro testing/planning, patch preparations, and event preparations were taking up the majority of our time, and the remainder was being used to handle other pressing matters such as server moderation and responding to the Discord takedown.

Had we issued a statement acknowledging this bug without instantly applying a fix would have caused more people to take advantage of the situation and attempt more level ups on their Reverse/Timeless Pirate weapons. After looking at our logs it seems that the level ups for the past month have been condensed around Christmas, which we deduce to have been due to more overall playtime and there were little to no extraordinary level ups regarding these weapons.

What will we do different?
We're working on reorganizing the way some of our files gets handled between updates, along with updating our in-house tools for easier and safer patching. Because the issue originally stemmed from the accidental revert of data (only Pirate weapon attack gains were affected), streamlining specific internal procedures will prevent this from reoccurring a second time.

Conclusion
We once again wish to apologize for this incident, as it is something that undoubtedly was caused by our own mistakes. Mistakes unfortunately do happen, but we hope to always work to handle them in the safest and least disruptive way possible, and to minimize the chances of such mistakes happening with our more streamlined internal procedures. Moving forward, if players notice any other bugs that they think is of a sensitive nature, we've created a new section on our forums called (Private) Bug Report as we noticed that the Bug Report section is for public view and might deter some players from submitting their concerns.