Sunborn March 2024 Headcount Leak Sparks Player Uprising — QA, Designers & Balance Planners All Sentenced to Death by Community, Debate Escalates Into Full-Blown SRPG Genre War

Sunborn's March headcount leak dropped, and not a single player mourned — only 'they deserved it' all the way down.

It started with a post on NGA's mobile general board — someone leaked what appears to be an internal list of employees who left Sunborn Games (散爆网络) in March 2024. The departures span QA, systems design, and balance planning — essentially the core gameplay team. The original poster attached three screenshots of what looks like internal documents.

Instead of sympathy, the comment section turned into a tribunal. The top-voted reply flatly stated 'QA and systems design deserved to die ages ago.' Others piled on: 'Balance planners should get the boot too — the game hit numerical inflation within a month of launch, with trash mobs hitting harder than your characters' HP pools.' A tactical RPG reduced to a raw stat-stacking gacha grind. Then came the legendary three-stage death sentence: someone initially showed mercy saying 'balance planners can live for now,' immediately shot back with 'nah, they can't,' before the final verdict arrived — 'Does balance even deserve to live?' Case closed, unanimous vote.

But the thread wasn't entirely one-sided. Around the central question of 'is the balance actually trash,' players split into two camps. One side argued the balance team simply plugged in random numbers (脚填数字, literally 'filled in digits with their feet' — NGA slang for lazy, braindead number-tuning): players gain less than 20% stats after 10 levels while enemy stats double, material stages are tuned to whale-tier difficulty, and prominent content creators have made video breakdowns proving the math doesn't add up. The other side tried to pin it on genre conventions, claiming this is just how Western-style SRPGs work — everyone's a glass cannon, one hit out of cover = crippled, two = dead. The real problem, they argued, isn't raw numbers but the combo system: follow-up attacks (协击) are so overpowered that the meta degenerates into rush-down cheese, and if you don't exploit it, you're stuck grinding through mobs the slow way.

The 'SRPGs are supposed to be this squishy' defense got demolished almost immediately. Players brought up XCOM and Divinity: Original Sin 2 as counterexamples — classic Western SRPGs that don't have this 'peek once and you're dead' extreme tuning. The knockout punch came from in-game data: reportedly, some players cleared Lv.60 challenge stages with a full freebie squad (all gift characters), purple weapons, zero dupes, at Lv.50. Meanwhile, some whales with maxed-out everything couldn't beat it. If raw stats were all that mattered, this 'F2P clears, whale fails' paradox wouldn't exist. The debate ended in a stalemate — nobody convinced anybody.

Whether Sunborn's reshuffling can actually salvage the game remains to be seen — a headcount list doesn't answer that question. But one thing is painfully clear: the community's patience has run out, and the verdict on this team has already been rendered. From 'they deserved to die' to 'does balance even deserve to live,' every word drips with despair over the current state of the game. Everything that needed to be said has been said, every argument that needed to happen has happened. Now we wait and see how Sunborn responds — if they respond at all.