About two months ago, in early December, we ran a little experiment over a weekend – we would lower the health for all players, in all playlists and game types, to be roughly the equivalent of activating the Crushing variation in a Custom game. We wanted to see what you – our player population – thought about this change. We also invited everyone to take a poll on NaughtyDog.com to let us know what you thought. After a couple of months had passed, we took the poll down and looked at the data we got from running the poll. The results are in the graph below. 
What did we learn? Overwhelmingly, to the tune of 39% of everyone who replied, you let us know that you enjoyed the lowered health during the Experimental Weekend. Coming in at a close second, 33% of you felt that it was a good thing as well, but that we should keep it within its own playlist, rather than have the lowered health active across all playlists and game types. By contrast, only 20% of respondents disliked the lowered player health outright. If we take into account everyone who responded critically to the Experimental Weekend – adding those who didn’t like it along with those who thought the health was lowered too much – then 24% of all respondents didn’t like the change to player health. Even counting our margin of error (at the bottom of this post), the results are pretty clear – the majority of you liked the lowered health. So… where does that leave us? We hosted the Experimental Weekend to see if the lowered health addressed criticism that opponents were “bullet sponges” without affecting the overall game mechanics. After reviewing gameplay data and the poll results, if this is something we really wanted to do, then the answer would be far more complex than just changing health. After a lot of tweaking and a ton of internal play-testing, we collectively determined the only correct way to tackle this would be to tune a broader range of multiplayer mechanics rather than only change player health. Our upcoming Title Update 1.05 will reveal the minor weapon damage and attribute balancing we’ve done based on this poll, which we feel evolves our multiplayer game and keeps it fun to play and true to our gameplay philosophy. (Results are based on a poll hosted on NaughtyDog.com which had 5,920 respondents, after removing duplicate and invalid responses, that was conducted from December 4, 2009, to January 30, 2010. For results based on the total sample of our unique player population, one can say with 99% confidence that the maximum margin of sampling error is ±1.7 percentage points.)
