Rocksteady applauds players for 'breaking' Suicide Squad with infinite damage scaling bug, but decides to fix it and start a new leaderboard

Rocksteady's Suicide Squad has finally arrived, and been met with something of a mixed reception. PCG's Morgan Park was pleasantly surprised by the endgame but, getting there's something of a grind and you wonder how many players will even stick around that long. Rocksteady's aim is to keep the game vibrant with regular updates, and the «live service» label hangs on this thing like an albatross, but we'll have to see how that shakes out over 2024.

The game's launch has, from a technical perspective at least, gone pretty smoothly: until now. Rocksteady's issued an update on the game's Discord about a bug that's allowed players to acquire Mastery Levels «beyond our wildest expectations.» When the developer began looking into why, it soon realised the problem was with the Burn status effect, which applies damage over time. 

Turns out Burn has been scaling incorrectly. Rocksteady's intention was for it to scale somewhat as players rose through Mastery Levels, but «a major unintended bug» meant that Burn's damage was increasing so much that it «basically meant that if you used a Burn build, every Mastery Level had the same difficulty.»

Surprisingly enough Rocksteady says it wondered both «what can we do to fix this, and more importantly, should we fix it at all?» This is because one of the game's design goals is for players «to continuously find a new meta and then break it by finding a better one.»

But Burn was just too powerful, to the extent that left untouched it would've been the only viable endgame build. Rocksteady says it's going to fix the scaling on Burn to make it work as originally intended, and it should remain viable but «no longer scale infinitely.»

The bigger problem is that the fire damage to the leaderboards as-they-are remains. Such that Rocksteady's decided the best thing to do is mothball everything achieved so far and create a new leaderboard. «All the entries on the current leaderboard will exist in perpetuity and will be a permanent record of all