You run for a train and it departs right when you’ve made it to its door? Unfortunate! The sandwich you just made with the last cheese and pork in the fridge after a long day at work somehow gets robbed by your dog? Unfortunate! The dev that was in charge of the biggest class balance changes since Module 6 leaves in the public testing phase of said changes? Unfortunate!

Here’s a hint guys: One of the three situations above applies to Neverwinter! And since we don’t expect everybody to be able to solve the riddle, we’ll just pass along the info: Tony “Balanced” Marasco appears to no longer be with the studio. There have been some rumblings behind the scenes in the last days and yesterday the official forum tagged him as “former developer”. The last time they tried to tag people they accidentally included more than intended, but given that this matches information we heard, we think he’s indeed gone.

Tony Started at QA

Tony started as QA at Cryptic before being promoted to a Systems Designer. Since he had the most actual experience with many classes not only in his role as QA but also personally, he was tasked with the balancing process that we are going to see in Modules 15 and 16 (hence the username “balanced”). That’s why his departure comes at a weird time. Now that he’s worked on balance for probably several months, he just disappears after opening all those official class feedback threads? It’s speculation, but this would suggest that it wasn’t really planned and he may suddenly have left on his own terms.

Could also be that Cryptic knew and they still wanted to have his name in the threads to acknowledge his accomplishments. Or they let him wrap up the changes of Mod 15 and then showed him the door. Who knows really.

*** UPDATE *** We know now! Julia confirmed that Tony left on his own terms.

NoWorries Takes over as Balancing Guru

Anyway, NoWorries has taken over Tony’s duties and we hope this won’t delay the balancing process. This nonetheless affects the class balance feedback for Mod 15, especially given the scale of the changes. It’s not that other devs don’t know what they’re generally up to in terms of balance, but the assumption is that Tony was the guy that worked on the stuff the most.

Whatever happened behind the scenes, we hope Tony and the game will make out fine. We’d like to thank “Balanced” for his contributions to the game and wish him all the best for the future!

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