StarDestroyer.Net BBS

That's what I really don't get: high DLC price points. A dollar or less? Everyone even vaguely interested will buy that fucker. Five or ten dollars? Now it's a 'do I really want this?' question that results in a lot of people leaving a lot of DLC on the table. Think back to when DLC was new, before it had standardized nomenclature; do you remember what people used to call it? Microtransactions. And it worked. It worked really well, and people by and large didn't bitch much because of that operative descriptor, and the studios still made bank on it. Then they got greedy and started playing with the demand curve.

There was a fair amount of blow-back when video games made the jump to $60. Now, a lot of that came from people who don't actually play the games, but buy them for other people. You've got to convince them this stupid "Nintendo game with it's Halos" is worth the money. But DLC is going to be purchased almost certainly by the person who is playing the game. I think this is why game prices have stayed consistent whereas DLC prices are no where near standard and just idiotic at times.

Also of note, if it's priced too cheap, people think it's a cheap product and not worth even the paltry amount of money. Because people tend to be stupid like that.

Vendetta wrote:Evolve ain't Call of Duty though.

CoD has a massive and massively committed playerbase, so much so that splitting it doesn't hurt it too badly. Evolve needs to build that playerbase essentially from scratch because it's a reasonably new type of game and it is a bad value proposition to start with so it isn't going to.

The problem with map packs is that, by splitting the community it harms the people who don't buy them. Because the number of people playing matches that they can join goes down.

As for "Doing it right", it would probably have been more right to include more maps and modes to start with instead of making sure there was enough cosmetic DLC to sell day one to double the price of the product, because the game doesn't have enough in it.

Doing DLC right does not mean doing everything right. I've admitted that Evolve has problems. I'll go a bit further and say that those problems are serious enough that I won't be buying Evolve. But, unless you can show how those problems are related to their DLC plans, I don't see those problems as relevant to what I'm discussing.

And also: Is that cosmetic DLC really harmless?

What exactly is the harm in cosmetic DLC ?

Do you honestly believe that the full cost of creating it is going to be recouped only via selling it individually? If you do I have a bridge to sell you. That cost is bound to be at least partially covered by the base price of the game as a hedge against the DLC performing poorly by itself.

From a publishers perspective, the DLC might be priced wrong because they might be able to get more total revenue with a much lower price. I don't know enough to know for sure either way.

As a consumer, the price only matters if it's cosmetic DLC I want. If I don't want it, then the price doesn't matter to me at all.

I'm arguing from a consumer perspective.


The facts are simple.

This was a hotter issue at the start of last generation, when gamers were stomaching a 20 percent increase in the base price of games. In nearly a decade, retail prices have remained largely constant. We’re paying $60 today for games that on large offer overwhelmingly superior visuals, audio, gameplay features, and interconnectivity than the ones for which we paid the same price in 2005.

Budgets are increasing significantly. Whether those costs are being kept under control is a topic that has come up before (particularly with regard to the Tomb Raider reboot and comments made by Square Enix in 2013). Regardless of why, though, bottom line costs to make a game continue to mount, and we’re still paying the same price of entry.

Cost of production is going up. The base retail price isn't changing. Therefore more money needs to come from somewhere to get the return on investment the publishers want. How do you rank the various ways that a game could earn that extra money ?

There are all sorts of ways. Ranging from harmless cosmetic DLC to the manipulativeness of F2P monetization tricks.

TheFeniX wrote:Then they need 99% complete copies of games weeks before release to keep that from happening. Movie studios do this all the time with test audiences. What makes video game publishers so special?

My understanding is that this is what publishers do with video games. The embargo is not when reviewers start playing the game, it's when they are allowed to start talking about it. They usually get the game some time before that so that they can produce a finished review.

Budgets keep balloning when the technology to develop games keeps dropping. The ballooning budgets is almost all tied up in marketing and with certain games, the licensing.

Why budgets are rising doesn't change that they are rising and that there is no sign of it stopping for AAA games. So the increased costs have to be covered by increased revenue somehow.

White Haven wrote:That's what I really don't get: high DLC price points. A dollar or less? Everyone even vaguely interested will buy that fucker. Five or ten dollars? Now it's a 'do I really want this?' question that results in a lot of people leaving a lot of DLC on the table.

For Evolve that's probably just stupidity. Maybe they are trying to chase the whales that F2P games target, maybe the numbers they have access to say that higher prices earn more revenue in total. Maybe because they are reading them wrong, maybe because the data is wrong. Maybe the data is correct and people just aren't behaving in the way you would expect.

Maybe 2K Games know they don't have enough data, so they wanted Evolve's DLC priced high as an experiment.

bilateralrope wrote:My understanding is that this is what publishers do with video games. The embargo is not when reviewers start playing the game, it's when they are allowed to start talking about it. They usually get the game some time before that so that they can produce a finished review.

Yes, and the big change is now certain publishers are forcing review embargoes on game until after release. That's a problem and one I think deserves boycotting that publisher/game as a matter of course.

Why budgets are rising doesn't change that they are rising and that there is no sign of it stopping for AAA games. So the increased costs have to be covered by increased revenue somehow.

Tough shit? Not my problem? Recouping your failings off the customer is some shady shit.

I'm not obligated to just buy into the rising costs line of bullshit when it's been shown time and time again other developers and publisher can make good money by not doing this. Just as I'm not obligated to give SEGA $60 for Colonial Marines when they tried to recoup the cost of blatant fraud by Gearbox by dumping a half-done game on the consumer. Same that I'm not obligated to buy Tomb Raider so Squeenix can make their 7 million copies cut-off because they spent so much money on marketing. And that was actually a good game that is marred because they couldn't keep their costs down.

Microsoft cut Epic a check for about 10 million to make Gears of War and handled most all of the marketting and we got... Gears of War. By not going crazy with voice actors (except Mr. DiMaggio, who should be in everything ever... and probably is) and integrating cutscenes into the game engine, we got.... well, Gears of War. I don't know how much MS spent on marketing, but this stupidly cheap and simple trailer pushed a lot of the hype for the game. Best part, the game actually looked like that.

Now, I get people were starved for a first rate title at the time and people go nuts for big dudes with guns bigdudegunnning it up. Hell, Epic, John DiMaggio, and a main character named Fenix: I was all over it no matter what. But the game really shows how a smart developer can pull themselves out of the brink with a smart payday. Know what you can accomplish, know the tech you're working with, and downplay what you're offering instead of constantly up-playing it.

Years later, Skyrim was released and as cut-down as it was, you need a lot more time and money to make sandbox games. The budget was around 80 million, but I remember reading the actual development cost was around 15-20 million and of course I can't find the damned article anymore. But stable, big budget development studios with staff on hand should be driving costs down, not up.

So where's this ballooning budget? Waterworld and Titanic cost a bajillion dollars to make. So why was Mad Max better both as a movie and a money-maker than Waterworld? And why did Titanic make all the money ever? Maybe because you can spend all of Earth's money to make even more, but you don't have to. Meanwhile, in video game development saying you spent 300 million to make a game is supposed to push copies as a matter of course. This isn't a good reason for ballooning budgets, it's a good reason to have people committed.

Two things

1. Angry Joe posted his review of Evolve this morning and layed out some interesting tidbits such as Evolve cosmetic DLC includes things like 1.99$ to color one gun blue instead of gun metal grey. Yes just one gun for one class to color it blue is 1.99$ and no you can't then color it purple or orange or black. It's just the exact same model tinted blue for 2$ which to me just speaks to the height of DLC experimentation. Such an option I've seen in countless Korean FTP MMO's but there it was the equivalent of 25 cents and I could color my weapon anything I liked.

2. A lot of costs in modern game development are because of the industry that professional companies have forced on development studios. For example when Ford designs a new car they don't fire 80% of the design team the instant the car hits it's first trade show but in any large publisher this is seen as par for the course.

That builds up lots of hiring/firing costs, a very mobile talent pool and to be blunt hurts moral and team building since you know your going to work two years of your life away pulling 18 hour days and then be fired with MAYBE a call back in six months. And rarely is it the top talent that is kept, they simply keep those people required to push out the six months worth of updates.

It also denies the ability of companies to grow their people as resources when they operate on the use/discard model. All these massive two hundred person studios are all designed to be temporary affairs holding together just long enough for a game to be finished then 160 of them will be fired and the core 40 will continue. There's a reason why the few studios that don't do this are famous for being... wealthy and successful.

Mr Bean wrote:1. Angry Joe posted his review of Evolve this morning and layed out some interesting tidbits such as Evolve cosmetic DLC includes things like 1.99$ to color one gun blue instead of gun metal grey. Yes just one gun for one class to color it blue is 1.99$ and no you can't then color it purple or orange or black. It's just the exact same model tinted blue for 2$ which to me just speaks to the height of DLC experimentation. Such an option I've seen in countless Korean FTP MMO's but there it was the equivalent of 25 cents and I could color my weapon anything I liked.

So, two bucks for a Photoshop color overlay? Interesting also that Evolve has no current mod support. Anyone own this? How accessible are the files? Raven took a while to release animation and map tools (EDIT: for Jedi-Outcast), but the zip/pk3 folder structure made skin and model replacement ridiculously easy. Same with Skyrim and most Beth games. Essentially, there are files like Assets.pk3 which are just zip files that are uncompressed when you load the game. However, uncompressed folders using the same structure override the default stuff, so modding was really easy. You could just drop newcolor.jpg into a folder and change your skin instantly.

Something tells me, modding Evolve at this point is next to impossible by design.

It also denies the ability of companies to grow their people as resources when they operate on the use/discard model. All these massive two hundred person studios are all designed to be temporary affairs holding together just long enough for a game to be finished then 160 of them will be fired and the core 40 will continue. There's a reason why the few studios that don't do this are famous for being... wealthy and successful.

There's two conflicting development mentalities I've seen at play. The problem is the one which is extremely bad for the community is also extremely profitable if you don't mind being a shitbag who preys on the uninformed and/or do all you can to keep people uninformed until you can get their pre-order money. In my experience, these are the ones driving this budget ballooning by spending so much money on marketing and also stifling development by emphasizing graphics solely for bullshots to push said pre-orders. I have to wonder just how much development time and money is spent releasing prerendered gameplay or tech-demos running on high-end PCs that the publisher knows the hardware they're actually developing for will never be able to reproduce.

Double post time:

On the Order 1886 front:One of the devs gets mad, says maybe they should pull ads from sites that give them low scores. NOTE: they are in no position to pull ads. Probably mad they can't shit up GotY boxart with 10/10! 10/10!

I cut together a little image to show point one


I'll note again the 2$ DLC only makes exactly one gun blue.

How much did Evolve cost to make? All I can find is that 2K paid $11 mil for the rights when THQ went belly up. I assume that gives them all the completed content and the development contract with Turtle rock. Worst case, maybe 20 million? We're talking way less than a million copies needing to be sold to make a substantial profit. What was the point of the cash-grab DLC? Was 2k willing to take a hit to test the waters? EA is more than happy to do this, but usually only with already established series with dedicated fans.

Evolve supposedly had 6,000,000 games played in the first week. But average match time is 10 minutes. So, let's say people played an average of 100 games in that first week, which isn't exactly pushing it considering it's 16 hours (give or take) of game time . You'd have 60,000 active copies out there. If they pushed more copies, that mean people just haven't been playing the game for whatever reason. So, this doesn't look all that good any way you take it.

I guess this is what happens when you try to heavily monetize what's essentially a free HL2 mod.... when you aren't valve. Can someone please revive Zombie Master or The Hidden? Now that was some good asymmetrical MP.

I've got two problem with all the complaints about cosmetic DLC. The first is that it's the one that has got the most people complaining about it. While more serious complaints, like companies chopping bits out of the base game to repackage as DLC, get a lot less complaints.

The second is that I'm not seeing anyone explain why cosmetic DLC is a bad thing. Yes, Evolve's DLC is overpriced. Yes, the changes it makes are pathetically small. But it's completely optional. If you decide to buy Evolve and skip the cosmetic DLC, you will be on a level playing field with the people who buy all of it. So how is it harmful when it's completely optional ?

TheFeniX wrote:

bilateralrope wrote:My understanding is that this is what publishers do with video games. The embargo is not when reviewers start playing the game, it's when they are allowed to start talking about it. They usually get the game some time before that so that they can produce a finished review.

Yes, and the big change is now certain publishers are forcing review embargoes on game until after release. That's a problem and one I think deserves boycotting that publisher/game as a matter of course.

True. I can't think of a single post release embargo that wasn't on a game with serious problems. Release minute embargoes are worrying. Pre-release embargoes usually mean the publisher is confident about their game.

Why budgets are rising doesn't change that they are rising and that there is no sign of it stopping for AAA games. So the increased costs have to be covered by increased revenue somehow.

Tough shit? Not my problem? Recouping your failings off the customer is some shady shit.

Kotaku has a list of how budgets have grown. Development budgets, excluding marketing costs. You picked Gears of War as an example, looking at that list and 10 million isn't surprisingly cheap for a 2006 game. Since then the price of development in general has gone up. I haven't done the math, but I'm pretty sure budgets are rising faster than inflation.

Other products typically increase their retail price when cost of production goes up. Optional DLC means that video games don't have to. Compulsory DLC is just a marketing trick to say that the retail price hasn't gone up. Non-cosmetic DLC is somewhere in between, varying on a case by case basis.
Though the fact that companies can get so much extra profit through DLC might be one of the reasons budgets have grown so quickly.

I'm not obligated to just buy into the rising costs line of bullshit when it's been shown time and time again other developers and publisher can make good money by not doing this. Just as I'm not obligated to give SEGA $60 for Colonial Marines when they tried to recoup the cost of blatant fraud by Gearbox by dumping a half-done game on the consumer. Same that I'm not obligated to buy Tomb Raider so Squeenix can make their 7 million copies cut-off because they spent so much money on marketing. And that was actually a good game that is marred because they couldn't keep their costs down.

The increased costs still exist. Publishers still want to recoup them. So you should at least think about the means they might use to try and recoup them. Which is why I like cosmetic DLC. It doesn't disadvantage me at all for not having it so I never have to pay for it. But, since it provides a lot of profit, it keeps the base price down.

I think that the best way to fairly judge a game is to try and figure out what it will be like if you're playing the base game while everyone else has all the DLC. Then decide if that is worth the price. DLC that was cut from the base game to sell separately is a problem. Extra weapons and classes are a case by case basis. Cosmetic DLC is never a problem.

The size of the development budget is only useful information when trying to explain why DLC is so attractive to devs and publishers. When it comes to your decision to buy the game or not, I think I agree with you when I say that the games budget doesn't matter.

bilateralrope wrote:
The second is that I'm not seeing anyone explain why cosmetic DLC is a bad thing. Yes, Evolve's DLC is overpriced. Yes, the changes it makes are pathetically small. But it's completely optional. If you decide to buy Evolve and skip the cosmetic DLC, you will be on a level playing field with the people who buy all of it. So how is it harmful when it's completely optional ?

I'll give you one, the economics of what their charge for their "cosmetic DLC". Two dollers for something that I could do inside thirty minutes with Photoshop and access to the model. Compare that to another game, lets say Payday 2, a game about masked criminals stealing things as cops try to stop them.

Hotline Miami was a DLC that was released for 8$ (Often goes on sale for less) that gives you an entirely new two day mission, eight new masks along with eight materials and patterns to customize said masks. Along with five new melee weapons and three new secondary weapons.

Based on the Evolve DLC pricing had a similar DLC been released containing two new maps, eight new cosmetic DLC's and new weapons it would have cost.... (8x2$ colors, 2x15$ maps, we will count the extra weapons and melee as more cosmetic so 8x2$) a bargain price of 62$. If we assume the maps are free to season pass holders or just free... that's still thirty two dollars which is a few times more than eight.

Or direct compare it to something like ArchAge, Wildstar, or as I said a dozen other Korean MMO's were a simple recolor (Of any item) costs only the equivalent of twenty five cents... if that. The only two games to feature such massive costs are The Old Republic (Where recolors cost 2$ and only cover a single item) and Evolve.

Mr Bean wrote:I cut together a little image to show point one


I'll note again the 2$ DLC only makes exactly one gun blue.

Seriously?? $2 for something I could mash up in Photoshop in ten minutes and give away for free?
That's going through being greedy money grubbing shitbags and right out the other side.

bilateralrope wrote:So how is it harmful when it's completely optional ?

Because resources are spent to develop cash-grab content. If it's profitable, it will continue to be a focus when said focus should be elsewhere.

Kotaku has a list of how budgets have grown. Development budgets, excluding marketing costs. You picked Gears of War as an example, looking at that list and 10 million isn't surprisingly cheap for a 2006 game. Since then the price of development in general has gone up. I haven't done the math, but I'm pretty sure budgets are rising faster than inflation.

Did you read the article? I swear I've posted that exact same one. We seem to have come to different conclusions:

In 2009, EA executive Rich Hilleman indicated in a speech that his company "now typically spends two or three times as much on marketing and advertising as it does on developing a game."

I'm not letting companies recoup their marketing costs with shitty games. Had EA swapped their philosophy for SWTOR, we might have had a game that wasn't complete shit.

What's that old addage? Marketing is what you do when you can't make a quality product?

Following an incident in which The Wall Street Journal retracted claims that Starcraft II cost $100 million to develop, Chris Sigaty, a producer on the game, told Gamereactor that, unlike most companies, Blizzard doesn't have any sort of set budget for their games, and spends as much as is necessary to make the games the company wants to make.

Holy fuck, and Blizzard prints money on IPs while releasing quality games. Bitch about the quantity of content, but it's hard to look at any Blizzard game and say "it's shit." Maybe this is because they can balance a budget without gouging the fuck out of the consumer.

Look at some of those budgets in that article: $23 for the LICENSE for ET. How'd that work out? Garriot made Ultima for pennies because he had a small group of guys to do it. This is with their insane mentality of "Throw everything out from the last game, start from scratch." You know what bankupted Origin? Floppy discs and the distribution of them. A problem resolved with CDs, and now Digital Distribution. Look at some of those classic titles on that list and compare their budgets to the other "big blockbuster" budgets at the time. Money does not mean quality by any stretch.

Other products typically increase their retail price when cost of production goes up. Optional DLC means that video games don't have to. Compulsory DLC is just a marketing trick to say that the retail price hasn't gone up. Non-cosmetic DLC is somewhere in between, varying on a case by case basis.
Though the fact that companies can get so much extra profit through DLC might be one of the reasons budgets have grown so quickly.

Which leaves out digital distribution has to be cutting a lot of expenses and marketing has gone haywire in the past decade. valve does most of it's adversting through word of mouth and trailers made almost exclusively using in-game resources. And, crazy that, their budgets aren't insane and they make even more of all the money out there.

The increased costs still exist. Publishers still want to recoup them. So you should at least think about the means they might use to try and recoup them. Which is why I like cosmetic DLC. It doesn't disadvantage me at all for not having it so I never have to pay for it. But, since it provides a lot of profit, it keeps the base price down.

You keep repeating this, but I don't care. If cost increases boiled down to "CEO has a massive coke habit:" not. my. problem. Why is it so many other companies can release a game for $50-60 and make an ass-ton of money on a quality game? Just because certain companies can't due to a myriad of issues is not my problem. I'll put them deeper in the whole by not giving them money.

The size of the development budget is only useful information when trying to explain why DLC is so attractive to devs and publishers. When it comes to your decision to buy the game or not, I think I agree with you when I say that the games budget doesn't matter.

Mindless cash grabs are always popular. But I don't respect Gameloft for doing it even though I'll click away on 1 or 2 of their free games, why should I respect it when I dumped $60 on a product? I had this same issue when EA crammed Burger King ads in my copy of Fight Night and Burnout Paradise had them as well. I paid money for this shit, I'm not asking for a fucking hand-out, don't treat me like I am.

I got off ranting and now have to ghetto edit: look at the budget for Dragon's Lair. Hand drawn animation put them out a few bucks. That stuff is dead now. Even sprites are used for very few things these days. Back then, different costumes or skins for a character would require changing the sprites for each individual animation frame for a given icon. Now, it's 5 minutes to an hour in photoshop. New armor for a character? Same thing, just with modelling software. With the correct editing tools and models made with it in mind from the start, modifying models is stupidly each and less time-consuming than it ever has been.

Ok, so I'm digging this one back up: Evolve went F2P recently.

This wouldn't be too big of a deal, but the flop of this was pretty hard. I don't know how much money the devs made off this game, but there's been more than a few big stinks made about this title over the past year and this is another big one according to what's left of the community. I'll just post a recent review from Steam that has a pretty high "helpful" count. Whatever that means.

Well, I'm one of those so-called "founders" who originally bought the game for 79,99 € when it was released. Not to mention the money I spent on additional downloadable content.
I'm not blaming the developers for making "Evolve" a F2P title as this was necessary without a doubt to bring the game back to life. It was literally dead before and hardly possible to find people to play with.
But what I'm really offended by is the behavior of the developers towards their "appreciated founders". Within 234 hours of gameplay I managed to level up 18 of the hunters to elite status - which also unlocked their elite skins. With the switch to F2P my so far achieved progress has been completely erased. My hunters aren't elite anymore. The elite skis are gone. All unlocked badges are gone. I'm level 1 again and "Evacuation" mode - the only mode I played - has been removed from the game. Content that I originally paid for!
What do I actually get as a "founder" in return? Well, I couldn't find any new skins I didn't already own before. Instead of that 18 previously unlocked elite skins are gone. Oh, I forgot. I got the incredible amount of "3000 keys". An amount you can get by playing the game for one hour and that's not even enough to unlock a skin. That's what you're worth as "founder" to the developers.
I would have liked to return to the game before but wasn't able because there weren't any players left. Now the players are back but content I paid for and progress I achieved within hundreds of hours of gameplay simply have been wiped. I actually wished to return to the game but with a kick in the nuts like this that is sold to you as a warm hug this wish just got kicked into the dust.

Damn man, and I had the gall to get mad about my limited investment into TF2.

This one is a bit more about the gameplay changes:

I really enjoyed the idea of evolve when I first saw it.

The idea of an extreme game of cat and mouse where the monster snuck by under the hunters radar was invigorating, the idea that a slip up could lead to a massive disadvantage or even death was amazing, and the thrill of outwitting your opponent was even better. There was a real thrill in matching wits and seeing whether the hunters could work together and tighten the net or wether the monster could slip a way, punching a hole in their formation or simply slinking away un-noticed.

The hunt was intense and thrilling, a slight mistake could spell disaster for either team and could really change the pace of a match.

Stage two has removed these aspects.

Evolve stage two has been simplified and shrunk into a game where the monster must run full sprint to hit stage 3, there is no more cat and mouse, no more sneaking, stealth is no longer a feature.

the game is now more about the skirmishes and fighting than the act of actually hunting one another.

The timer is restricting as even if a monster manages to outrun the hunters and pull a perfect game, he's basically left with 3 minutes to finish the match or he loses. And with the adjustments made to the hunters (passive healing, extra sheilding, ect.) the hunters are harder than ever to kill even at stage 3. The monsters virtually garunteed to take health damage, even with a perfect execution simply because in their attempt to simplify it for new players the dev's have devalued skill.

The games devolved into more of a brawl than anything else and for me personally thats dissapointing.

TLDR:
The game used to be about nuance, wits, and skill made a huge difference.

The game is now about 4 hunters brawling it out with a monster with a little bit of chasing after in between.

Either way, I plan to give this game a shot now that it's F2P. Who knows what I'll find?

I'm level 1 again and "Evacuation" mode - the only mode I played - has been removed from the game. Content that I originally paid for!

According to the patch notes

Legacy Evolve

We have removed Defend, Nest, Rescue, and Evacuation from Evolve: Stage 2. These modes can be found in Legacy Evolve which is still available for players who previously owned Evolve on Steam.

Not that that's worth much, but at least they're still playable if you can find the people.

I've had a go at the game and I think the main problem at the moment is how much more skill the hunters need than they have on day one of the re-release. The Dunning-Kruger effect is full in force here so maybe they legitimately did overtune the monsters and I just can't tell yet, but it's a lot easier to find one sufficiently skilled Monster player than four sufficiently skilled Hunter players. A year ago I suggested a competitive PvE mode and I still think it would be useful now, to provide an environment where people can practice playing as Hunters and merely be outpaced by a superior opponent and not slaughtered in the first arena by a Stage 1 Monster who knows what they're doing.

First off: thanks you for mentioning Dunning-Kruger because I couldn't recall that name when it would have come in handy for a post on another forum and my google-skills failed me.

The balance for asymmetrical multi-player has always been a really hard call. Just balancing around symmetry is difficult without throwing casuals into a meatgrinder against more hard-core players. Starcraft and other RTS have to be the most common types of difficult games to balance asymmetry. But in FPS, I've found this problem compounded for reasons I've never been able to really put into words.

WRT these 1 vs Many gametypes: The Hidden is a perfect examples of how well pubs do against a single badass that requires coordination to take down. The answer is "not very well." From what I know, this is leading to numerous buffs to the Hunters in Evolve, which will then strike another shift over into Monsters getting shut down against organized teams, either as groups are formed or the playerbase just gets better.

Natural Selection was terrible about this for years. The balancing fight between pub play (pubs generally can't shoot for shit) vs competitive play was never over.