Due to its nature as an online game, Paladins is constantly receiving updates. Not all of them are received positively.
Still present
- Third person mode being removed caused its own minor controversy, leading to players complaining on Reddit and the Steam forums, the argument being that being able to switch view modes made the game more unique and fun, while others claimed they were unable to play without it due to getting motion sickness in first person. The reasoning Evil Mojo game for the removal of third person was primarily because most players almost never used the option, as the game was always intended to be an FPS, continued to be designed as such, and most players were used to the first person view out of habit.
- The removal of both the Kill Cam and Top Play systems in the Sands of Myth update (3.02) got a very mixed reception. The devs removed the systems as they explained that they had become far too buggy to deal with, which was only made worse by new champion abilities not easily meshing with the system (such as Atlas' time travel or Imani's dragon), something which they tried to explain
. While many viewed the removal as a necessary action to make the game more stable, there were others that thought it wasn't worth it, especially as other, more serious bugs, continue to be unfixed for years, and see it as Creator's Apathy. When Death Cards, pieces of artwork that could be equipped and displayed to killed enemies, replaced the system, it raised complaints of the player not seeing the image they chose (despite the point being to taunt the person you killed). On top of that, for a long period, the most popular Death Card was a Stripperiffic image of Pepper, which caused its own issues as Death Cards can't be disabled, meaning players were stuck with looking at what they called "furry porn". This was lessened when more Death Cards would be made more easily available, and even the original controversy of removing Top Play and Killcams has lessened over time as the developers continually mentioned the work and effort needed to rebuild it. - The Warders Gate rework in Patch 5.2. While the visual revamping of older maps is something most players are at least okay with (In general, the maps do look nicer than before, even if they play the same or worse), and most players also understand the devs' main motivation for doing thisnote , but this map being reworked left quite a bad taste in people's mouths. The only main gameplay differences is the removal of the floating crystals (which are replaced with a bridge and a teleporter), as well as making more places for Drogoz to fly about the map (including over the river). Throughout the PTS and full release, players didn't find the map to be all that much better to play, and its reworked visuals also left people utterly baffled, as it was already some nice Scenery Porn that used assets that weren't old enough to warrant such changes to begin withnote , with the new visuals suffering from flat floor texturing in certain places with barely any ground props, and an oddly pristine look on walls next to the capture point where every other part of the map has a derelict aesthetic. So far, it's the only map rework with such a mixed reception, with many players preferring a rework to Serpent Beach (a Closed Beta map that really is showing its age) instead of a comparatively newer map that never raised the same complaints.
- The game's lore has gone through several variants of this throughout the years. While a huge amount of players are unfamiliar with what's actually canon, many still find the overall approach to characters and stories has gotten far darker than what they were originally; finding the older characters more lighthearted, goofy, and generally fun, while viewing newer characters as arrogant edgelords with basic personalities and uninspired designs, coupled with the game's story moving in a much darker direction, moving from unclear conflicts to a war over crystals to conflicts involving demonic monsters and world ending alien worms. Some people enjoy in this way though, preferring the generally more serious approach and believing older characters instead were the ones that lacked substance.
- Additionally, when the game's modern lore was first introduced, as mentioned, the initial conflict was focused on crystals and the subsequent back and forth of the Magistrate and Resistance. Ever since, this conflict has received less and less attention throughout the years, only occasionally being referenced, and with the A Conflict Reignited lore cinematic seems to have completely disregarded it following the Darkness Arc. Many in the community were infuriated by this, largely due to the story having never been completed, as well as viewing it as a more interesting concept than threats such as Raum and Yagorath being more generic explicitly evil big bads that the good guys have to defeat. Others however, are unbothered by it, and themselves find the latter storylines more interesting, or simply didn't like the initial Crystal Arc.
Reverted
- The OB44 update, which saw the introduction of Essence and Legendary cards, had not gone well with the playerbase at all. Prior to this update, all loadout cards could be either found in Radiant Chests (which were purchased with real money) or purchased using Gold, which was obtained by completing matches. However, this update changed card crafting so that cards could now be bought with Essence, a currency that could only be obtained by getting duplicate cards from chests (which could now be bought with Gold). Many players saw this change as essentially taking a once-perfectly serviceable multiplayer FPS and turning it into a pay-to-win grindfest. You can probably see why this caused such an outcry, with many players vowing to never touch a Hi-Rez game again, and some anticipating a good portion of the playerbase migrating to similar games like Overwatch and Dirty Bomb en masse, particularly with the latter holding an "All Mercs Free" event the weekend after the OB44 fiasco. Fortunately, the massive backlash prompted Hi-Rez to balance the Essence and Gold systems based on feedback to be less of a grind and give out generous amounts of Essence to players to get them started. On top of that, they announced a double weekend afterwards, which doubled the amount of Gold and XP from matches and unlocked all champions for everyone.
- Then came the announcement for OB64, which significantly overhauled how cards work.
- While the removal of the Essence currency and making every card free garnered positive response, there was much outrage over the removal of customizable 12-point loadouts in exchange for permanently upgrading cards via collecting duplicate cards from radiant chests and champion-specific chests. Having to get stronger cards solely by using RNG loot boxes and that beginner players would have weaker loadouts than older players gave off the feeling of the game becoming very grind-to-win. The fact that this only effected casual play and that competitive wouldn't have varying card strengths made players think that Hi-Rez cares more about competitive players than casual, even though casual players make up most of the playerbase. Many players advocated sending feedback while the patch was still in the Public Test Server in hopes of persuading the developers to change things before OB64 went live.
- Hardly helping was the fact that A)The new system was surprisingly similar to a "Talents" system Drybear suggested that wasn't implemented due to similar reasons, and B) The update also added new legendary cards that were so overpowered it wasn't even funny., among the more ridiculous ones being Inara's "Wrath of the Stagalla" note , Lex's "Fought The Law"note , Lian's "Death and Taxes"note , Makoa's "Davy Jone's Locker"note and Tyra's "Burn, Monster!"note However, most of these overpowered legendary cards got nerfs either in development or in a hotfix, and in some cases weren't as bad as they appeared at first glance.
- The hate over the card system became so intense that gaming websites like IGN, Kotaku, and Jim Sterling created articles about it.
- The removal of the Diamond Chest from Battle Passes, first occurring at level 49 of Battle Pass 9 (Damned Frontier's) free track. This was not something players liked, to say the least. It instead was been replaced with a Gold Chest, which contains significantly more filler (Sprays, MVP poses and Emotes). By comparison, the Diamond Chest only contains two mounts for filler, with the rest being Epic and Legendary skins. Many players liked that even if you didn't pay for the paid track, you still got something good by the end of the grind. At the time of Battle Pass 9, The complaints also mentioned that exacerbating this problem was that the free track only doled out the bare minimum in terms of rewards; Gold (which becomes increasingly more useless the more you play), Battle Pass XP boosters (which are nice, but similarly to Gold, becomes increasingly useless, especially with how many players often received), and titles (which are literally just some text underneath your name). The only rare items in the free track was a still image avatar of Swindler / Hustler Strix at Level 27, with two sprays given out at Levels 9 and 44 respectively....and that's it. When a community manager responded, the response was panned, and got a pretty respectably bad minus 35 downvote score. The response itself was less than stellar, as it outright ignored the outcry, tried to sell people Battle Pass 9 as a solution, and generally ignored the original purpose of putting a rare chest at the end to begin with (to reward committed players for playing until the end). The most popular theory for the Diamond Chests' removal was that a minority of players can no longer open the chests as they own everything in it, which raises the question of why Evil Mojo can't just add more skins to the chest to curb this problem. Functionally reverted, as the Battle Pass was changed to an Event Pass system, which moved a lot of rewards to require doing challenges, rather than solely grinding. And while the Diamond chest is still missing, you do get a free skin instead at level 17.
- The restructuring of the VGS system, or Voice Guided System, in order to make it more newbie friendly has earned some ire as it necessitated removing some commands. Some of the lines were redundant ("Save yourself!" is no different to "Retreat" in actual player use, for example), The Artifact from older games that use the VGS ("Attack the enemy base" and "Enemies have returned to base" would almost never be useful in a Paladins match), or were associated with toxicity ("Bye", and to a much lesser degree, "Quiet", were almost exclusively used to signal a Rage Quit or to shut people up respectively by someone, which in turn caused people to yell "Quiet" back at you). The revamp also removed lines that that could potentially be useful (telling your team to defend the objective for example) or it slightly expanded on the personality of the character saying it (such as "You're welcome" and "Nice job"). Some players, however, just didn't want to re-learn the new setup, simply on the grounds that they didn't want to. Others did point out how the key combinations were ingrained into Paladins's culture, to the point that players often typed them outside of the game as shorthand, so changing them for completely different ones was always going to lead to backlash to some degree. When asked for a toggle to switch between the new systems, Xienen, head of Evil Mojo responded and gave the reasoning that the two systems are different enough that it would take more developers to maintain both systems. This baffled people as not only are the systems, design-wise, pretty much identical (they both require key combo's to play a voice line), the most they've done to distinguish it from the new system is a new UI, similar to that of Overwatch, so the above answer comes off as Xienen ignoring the userbase of their suggestions. The post is also heavily downvoted and several "protest" memes in the vein of OB64 were made, so it was clear players weren't happy with the answer. After much criticism, and to alleviate some of these issues, on January 20th 2020, the game was patched to bring back the old key bindings as legacy option, alleviating the muscle memory issues older players had. The "Legacy VGS" option is still missing 35 removed voice lines, so not everyone is satisfied, although it was definitely seen as a step in the right direction. This did come with the side effect of the text chat printing the New VGS commands into chat, even if the person typing those commands were using Legacy VGS, making it easier to learn some of the commands on the new VGS system). Fully reverted in Patch 4.5, when Legacy VGS got all of the commands back, and New VGS remains untouched.
Partially reverted
- Viktor's redesign for OB 70. While most champion redesigns go over well and many Viktor players genuinely like Viktor's new clothes, his new face and hair are highly disliked. Fans of Viktor hate the idea of giving the grizzled war vet a younger face and think his longer hair looks ridiculous. While his original design still exists as an alternate skin, fans would rather have his old head attached to his new body.
- The Pirate's Treasure patch severely nerfed the damage of Dredge's ultimate ability, from 4000 to 1400 (equivalent to one third of Viktor's ultimate), which was not well received since Dredge's ultimate was already seen as too weak. The worst part is that Hi-Rez claimed this was a buff, because the detonation time was slightly shortened (the main reason why the ability was considered lacking was because it gave enemies too much time to escape) and more knockback was added. The next update buffed the damage up to a more respectable 2500.
