system
June 12, 2014, 8:04pm
1
The original thread Question? Ask. — 505 Go Inc. Forums has descended into the murk, so I figured I’d just collect the questions and responses in one place.
IceIX:
Clintman:
Actually if you would be willing to go through the Stickied Green posts thread I think that would be a great place to start. I compiled all the posts that have gone green (25+ upvotes).
While not every sentiment is pretty it does give a fair indicator of current perception.
Oh, I’ve been reading various threads as time allows, so I’ve seen quite a bit of them. A lot of the threads that are big aren’t really “What about…?” style stuff though and more “Here’s an opinion on what is right/wrong”. Like the metrics thread. Great stuff and food for thought for both the player base and us, but there’s not much I can say to a lot of it other than that there’s a lot there that we do already, other stuff that are great thoughts but a little off mark due to some inner workings knowledge and yet other stuff that’s good to chew on.
IceIX:
Assuming you’re talking about getting hit between the time you put a Shield up and it taking effect: Much of the lag that you’ve been experiencing is tied to the same server issue stuff that everyone has been, just at different load points on the server. So when everything is working properly, that’s not usually an issue. It’s when things start getting wonky that things like that pop up. So our more general work with improving our infrastructure to decrease that sort of general lag will help with this.
What’s happening at current is that you put a Shield in the queue for the server to process, the server drops the request for whatever reason, someone hits you which goes through, then your client resends the shield request since it never got an answer before. Result: Hit gets processed before shield goes through. Now,there’s a bunch of corrective work that can be done on checking timestamps of the original request and updating points and such that could be done but that’s difficult to display to an end user correctly and could get confusing quickly. Getting rid of the issue with the servers rejecting the first request would solve that much more elegantly in the first place.
IceIX:
Just wondering if you could Spoil She Hulks colors and ability names so that we could start her page on the Characters section of the forums
Also any luck on trying to get the guys to make 3* storm have 1*'s red ability? ( I so want to see that ability on some 3* its rather silly)
Nothing on Storm (Mohawk) yet, she’s still going through final approvals so I don’t want to count chickens before they’re hatched. She Hulk is a Red/Green/Blue character, so that’s a new combination and a bit more info. You’ll have to wait on ability names a bit longer.
IceIX:
Is there any plan to give us the option to turn off animations in the game any time soon?
Are there any plans to enhance alliance chat? (I understand this is not a priority over game play issues, I’m just curious)
Does the newest patch remove the “tap through” to the tiles when trying to use special abilities? If not, do you have an approx to when it will be implemented?
Animations - Unlikely, but possible. Turning off animations means that in order to play efficiently, all players will do that and as a result, the amount of work that gets put into creating the animations goes largely to waste. We could do something snazzy where we turn them off after X uses, or after the first time in a battle or something, but that’s a bit complex for a relatively small efficiency. With changes to characters removing a lot of the low AP abilities that create much of the ability animation spam, that sort of time factor gets removed to an extent anyhow.
Alliance chat - It’s possible. We’re always doing data style patches to improve that sort of thing. Like we’ve improved occurrences of chat getting eaten or it not showing up for several minutes.
Tap through - This is a rough one. It’s weirdly related to device specs and reacting differently per device. Faster devices have it worse than slower ones and there doesn’t seem to be a specific issue with tap areas being off or something like that causing it. It’s definitely become more pronounced as of R53 and it’s on our radar. At the moment, just be careful in your taps and let the ability pop up sit for a moment before blazing through it.
IceIX:
Emeryt:
How do You plan to deal with the growing amount of spam on those forums?
Can we have some more members (especially morning EU time) promoted to moderators? like this guy above me
Other than that, how bout implementing some more anti-spam options, as suggested in a couple of threads already?
More moderators are a possibility. More anti spam options are also possible, but harder to implement. The thing about this particular breed of spammers is that they are real live humans being paid peanuts. So normal options that would stop robots from registering does nothing. And options that stem the tide for real humans also slows new legitimate users from joining. It’s a rather rough situation to be in.
IceIX:
What’s the long range plan for dealing with the increasing number of characters? Clearly you can’t stop adding characters, because that’s what keeps people stuck to the game, but at the same point, it becomes increasingly difficult for new players to win enough covers of a single character to make it viable.
We’ve got some nascent plans for that at the moment, but they’re not nailed down quite yet. We’ve definitely envisioned the game to be more of a marathon than a sprint, so we’re not worried so much about people being able to jump in and have a 40 character roster at day one. That being said, with current growth it’s getting harder and harder to get any given 3* character any reasonable progress without being lucky enough to get them when they happen to pop up on the Versus Tournament reward roulette. It’s definitely something we’re looking at.
IceIX:
As I said to another related post on 3* progression, it’s something on the list of things that we’re looking more heavily into. As the user base matures and we stabilize the thread from 1*-2*, it becomes apparent that the next link in that chain is more of an issue.
IceIX:
Hi,
I am a little unsure exactly about the link you posted.
I, personally, am referring to this thread: Heavy metal crash...covers missing? — 505 Go Inc. Forums . A few of us experienced this, and none of us have received any communication from CS regarding it in the last few days.
Nope, this is completely separate from any missing rewards. Those requests can and should go through the CS process. If you haven’t heard anything back on an active ticket that’s over 48 hours old, please PM me with the ticket number. I’ll round up the PMs and send them off as a concentrated blast to CS to get it handled.
IceIX:
Can’t go into it in detail, mostly because I’m not a server tech and I’d likely mix up the jargon. From what I know though, it’s a matter of overall server loads being created through momentary spikes and things not degrading gracefully. So the servers will be humming along just fine one second, get a spike of data that doesn’t resolve itself quite properly, more data piles up behind while the first is resolving, and within a minute or so there are cats and dogs living together, mass hysteria. We’ve got a bunch of resources to pull from to fix the issue though, so we’re confident we’ll get it all locked down.
IceIX:
If you noticed in Prodigal Sun, this effect was much less pronounced than earlier, and we’re continually making more tweaks to make things fair without being punishing. We want people to be challenged, not beaten into submission for being successful.
IceIX:
Jumping on this, are there any conversations going on right now over there to level out HP per Cover slot as hero count increases?
And without “spoiling” naything, can you give a list of topics that the team over there are activly looking for solutions for? For example, are you all happy about the new sharding and bracketing system, or are you guys activly trying to find a solution to that issue (the issue of why a 15 day old player should be able to get the same rewards as a 150 day player but with less effort). Dont need details on what solutions you are discussing, just would be nice to know if you guys are actively working on a solution to certain things, or even consider things like that a problem.
There are conversations, yes. No outright solutions that I can share at the moment though. It’s currently tenable to continue to expand your roster through rewards at the rate new characters come out. That’s not always going to be the case though with how the slots scale.
There are a ton of things pinned up for active development work time when designs get worked though and ready for further implementation
Sharding/bracketing definitely, it’s not where we want it to be
Matchmaking in general. MMR Hell is still a thing, and that’s bad.
Scaling still isn’t where we want it. Prodigal Sun was much better, but still not great for people on either end of the bell curve. Still too many people with either too easy or too difficult fights.
Character releases, ability gains for 3*s, etc are a looming problem that we need to get worked out before it becomes a huge thing.
IceIX:
This may be too off topic to ask, but can you give a few bullet point reasons why it makes sense to level up our characters if it only means we will face higher level opponents while the rewards stay exactly the same?
See topic: Is this the only game where leveling up is actually bad? — 505 Go Inc. Forums
You may not be able to answer for various reasons but figured it was worth a shot since you’re kindly fielding questions and this has been bugging me for quite some time now.
Thanks Ice!
From an Event standpoint, leveling up your characters should mean that you face harder, but not equal to before challenges and can likely push further than someone lower leveled. That’s more been the case with Prodigal Sun and moving forward, so that’s good. But it’s still not where we want it.
From a Versus standpoint, Players get a kind of free ride for their first couple tournaments and can sneak out some high placement victories and pull a couple 3* covers down. They can’t keep that up though as they’ll start to hit 2*'d opponents and will need to build their roster. Once you hit the full 85 level, you need those 3s as much as the 141 3 players themselves do, and it’s hard to say that the 2* players should be locked out of that race due to simply not having been developed that far yet. While there is an element of disparity of risk/reward in Versus Tournies, it’s not something we’ve (yet) pushed towards actively fixing since much of it is self regulating as it is and any changes could have farther reaching results than we would otherwise intend.
IceIX:
Any idea when alliance chat will be fixed? I get the ! all the time and about 60% of the time get no new posts. Scrolling doesn’t help either. It is impossible to converse when I don’t get to see everything that posts. Support responded to a ticket but an ETA from your standpoint would be appreciated. Thanks.
Also, when does the simulator start? The pop up says today but nothing yet.
This is one of those things highly related to the general server issues. Alliance chat is one of the first things sacrificed as a nonessential service when things start exploding, and one of the last thing to come back fully on line once we make sure things aren’t going to pop again. We’ve made some tweaks to make things more responsive and for chat to eat itself less often, but obviously we’re not quite there on having it on an even keel yet. So, in answer, it’s an ongoing thing to get it back up and fully running.
Sim Challenge (and Starfall) - Think we’re looking at tomorrow on both of those at this point.
IceIX:
Is there any plan to update the balance equation that you guys build from? We got a peak when the Rags changes went in and the subsequent list of characters in need of some kind of balance, but it would be really helpful to see what you guys consider balanced or unbalanced and what drives those decisions.
That might be a little inside baseball, but it would help tremendously. Also if you have already answered this, feel free to link slap me so I can go read it lol.
We do have some equations and such that we use to keep characters balanced within each tier. Those equations are often fudged a bit though since abilities don’t often do things that fall easily into an equation. For example, it’s hard to balance exactly how powerful Anti Gravity Device is in raising Cooldown tile counters versus dealing 1000 damage instead. A lot of the balance comes from a baseline from equations then a ton of playtesting to determine what actually feels good as well as fun. To give an idea though, Ragnarok is underpowered (even versus other 115s), Black Panther is about right, Magneto is a bit overpowered.
IceIX:
A little bit of all four. It’s always pretty amusing to me when a dev reads a bit of criticism on the forums and goes “They’re darned right!”. Since we play the game as well as develop on it, we hit those situations with our own personal grievances all too often. Same thing when players are talking about a cool new feature. It’s always neat to see it echoed here.
IceIX:
Thanos:
Please, for the love of God, any time frame for x-forces buff? I’ve got this here iso burning a hole in my pocket. If it’s not coming anytime soon i’ll just start spending it on other characters.
Just curious, why didn’t you give 2* Daken the same third ability you gave Lazy Daken?
It won’t be soon. Unless you’re talking a couple hundred K that you’re planning on dumping all at once, you should be able to build back up without any real issues.
As for Daken, it’s quite possible that DA Daken will receive that third ability. May have to make some tweaks though, since the 3* interaction with Healing and Heat and Chemical Reaction both using Blue isn’t something currently present on the 2*.
IceIX:
Clintman:
Ok, here goes.
Is the development team happy right now with the way Sharding is impacting the game? Do you/they share the perceptions that mid range players are getting grouped with people way out of their league?
I know I don’t have to explain risk vs reward to you as you have a background with MMOs, is there any appetite for having a higher tier of rewards (ISO) for those of who with maxed rosters who have to fight other maxed roster folks?
How does the Development team feel about players tanking in order to reap faster ISO rewards at the expense of obviously weaker team? Is there any thought to incentivizing us to grind harder fights rather than find ways to game the system so we can do faster fights for faster ISO? (note the tricky circular path back to the risk vs reward question)
What is your opinion to a common sentiment among players that tying every event to seasons performance causes internal stress among alliances by overload? Do you feel this is a problem that the development team should address, or do you feel it is something players have to figure out for themselves.
The game is maturing, as such, there is a veritable buttload of new characters which makes getting desired covers very difficult from heroic packs. Many suggestions, color coding packs, grouping 3s in packs, removing 2 s from heroic tokens have been brought up, are any of these ideas likely to gain traction, or does the team not see the same problem many of us do see on the forums?
In a very basic sense, yes. It helped the server load immensely and serves as a good bed for being able to further push our user count up without making things explode while offering most users from a basic standpoint little change. From a per user basis as you state, no. The grouping of users is a bit stronger than intended and we’re tweaking things to make things more fair to everyone. There have always been death brackets and cakewalks before, that’s just statistics doing its little song and dance. It’s a bit pronounced with the sharding change though.
It’s definitely something that’s being discussed, yes. One of the things is that the game isn’t really currently set up for that kind of per user/group based reward structure. So it’s a larger sea change to support that all correctly. Sure, we could probably hack something in to increase values by a percentage or something, but we when at all possible prefer to make changes the right way and make sure things are scalable and changeable as needed when we do so. On the downside, that means slower, more measured changes.
Tanking is a necessary evil given how the game currently works. We’re not fond of it since it means vets are beating up on newbies a bit unfairly, but they’re not really exploiting anything. As you see, we’ve closed some of those loop holes and are aware of a few others. Our goal ultimately is to make it worthwhile to continue battling at all levels, and not to feel that the only way to compete is to beat on the little guy so that you get the big rewards and he doesn’t. Especially since the little guy is probably a 2* team that needs those 3* covers as much as the 3* team does.
It’s a rough one. Do we feel that players will burn themselves out on trying to score top in Season play? Yes. But then, people will burn themselves out over anything that they see continued competition in. We have users that beat every Event node down to 1 point every single refresh to stay on top over multiple Events. They’ll likely burn themselves out too. We make the rewards for the Seasons nice, but not absolutely amazing so that players feel they can play and push for it. But we don’t want to put anything so amazing there that forces players to compete, since that will just force burnout. It’s a rough balance between allowing players to work towards something over time (and thus possibly causing burnout) and telling players that continuing to play won’t help (like before Seasons where a Tourney with no award that was interesting meant that players wouldn’t touch the game for 2-3 days, or maybe ever).
It’s a looming problem, yes. Not quite an epidemic yet, but it’s something we’ve been discussing.
IceIX:
zulux21:
So I have a few random questions.
First off any plans to make a single cover give away the norm in future events?
Second, is there any way you can make the oldest member of an alliance (or the founder) the supreme commander?
Finally is there any plans to expand the rewards in the unbracketed stuff such as alliance rewards or lightning rounds.
edit: oh I remembered one more thing… any chance you can make it so you don’t auto change characters when a passive triggers, it’s rather annoying using the wrong move just because after I used one move black widow triggered her passive so she became the main character instead of the one I was using.
It’s possible. This is the second time we’ve done something like that (The Hulk being the first) so we have to see how the user base actually responds to this style of Episode reward. If it starts to become standard, it could actually have a negative effect on player participation since users will say “Well, I don’t think I can make Top 100, so I’ll just pull out my freebie and stop playing”. Since a lot of the Events use things like the Mayhem meter in Prodigal Sun to unlock more subs or nodes, less points coming into the system means those are harder to reach. It also then means others can’t rubber band as easily and the top end can’t push towards Progression Rewards so simply. On the upside, everyone can participate in the next Essential nodes more easily, so that helps with points some. But if they’re not playing because they don’t feel they can win and just take their consolation prize, I’m not sure how useful that is.
We have discussed adding something like a SupCom or Captain rank to Alliances, yes. I personally like the idea, not sure where it sits in terms of being something on the block.
It’s actually more likely that we’d bracket Alliances than just expand the unbracketed rewards. Which would accomplish the same thing as what you’re talking about, but in a different manner.
Sounds like a PC Master Race problem.
IceIX:
Couple questions:
Any update on when 2 skill characters may get a third ability? OR even any other character Buffs in the pipeline…
With 2 star characters are being given out like candy, any chance we see the 600 point progression reward turn into a second event token.
With Death bracket more common in new shard system, any possibility of expanding the completion reward tiers to help players progression to 3*? Example top 20 or 25 get 2 3* covers.
3rd abilities are back burnered. Still something we want to have happen, but we have bigger fish we would like to fry. Hawkeye and Magneto are next on the balancing list. No timeline for them yet other than that I wouldn’t expect movement on them within this coming month.
See above.
Unlikely that we’d allow outright trading of covers as it opens the doors to possible exploits and the specter of Gold Farming. More likely that we’d offer something more like a rental/borrow system, but nothing at all solid there. It’s always been an interesting talking point since it’s pretty much the most direct social interaction you can get in a game (See: Clash of Clans)
You already get that effect through Respeccing for purchasing new covers. I get what you’re getting at though, pulling cover 6 of a 5/1/1 character and having to sell it for Iso instead of use. I like the idea of such a system. Although, I can already imagine the forum threads popping up immediately after this would launch: “D3 is dropping duplicate covers just to milk us of HP!”
It’s an interesting suggestion, although that Token is more likely to be another 2* in any case.
We’ve got a bunch of options on the table for improving the 2*->3* transition. Nothing has been decided there though.
IceIX:
IceIX,
Can you or another employee with knowledge about the game host a thread like this on a semi regular basis? I know you often go thread to thread answering various questions, but it would be nice to know if there is one thread that we as users know will get your or another employee’s attention on a regular basis (weekly would be awesome, but I’d be happy with once every two weeks or once a month). I’ve enjoyed this thread so far and have learned a lot.
Thanks.
Unlikely that we’d ever centrailze a question answer section. Not impossible, but I don’t think it would work so well for a couple reasons.
1 - Keeping something up other than random incursions like this would quite probably make players wait to pile on complaints in that thread “since they know devs read it”. See any dev Q&A session that Blizz runs. We could look into doing something a bit more regular, but with our average workload, clearing off an afternoon to answer a flood of posts is a rough ask for a dev that is otherwise centered on tweaking an .ini for the next Event or somesuch.
IceIX:
Possible, but not necessarily something that needs a direct patch to stop it. A large part of this issue is in the remaining cases of MMR Hell. When users have two dozen or so other opponents to flip through randomly, with very few exceptions players don’t seek out one single player over and over. This behavior changes big time though when you’ve only got 6. At that point, the person 400 points above you turns into the only opponent worth hitting and is well worth spending a little Iso to skip through to.
IceIX:
We’ve had a bunch of conversations internally about what to do with EO abilities. There are a bunch of underpowered ones like Hot Dog Stand, a bunch that are too powerful for cost like Oasis, and none that we’d actually consider just right. They’re definitely one of those things that keep popping up on the agenda for “what’s next in the improvement queue”. We do appreciate the stories about how a level 230 Juggernaut will stop in his rampage of Headbutts to eat some of New York’s finest All Beef footlongs for a whole 50 health though.
IceIX:
danikalil:
With the Season ongoing, if you want to place high, you can’t have a day off. You must play more than one hour per day, every day. This is scaring people away.
Is there any solution incoming? Could we have only some PVPs count towards your Season ranking, or another kind of feature that would slow the game down?
My second question is about the bracketing: no matter how many battles I skip (my MMR is too high and tanking no longer works), I face always the same opponents. Even when I defeat them, they come back for a second round. Is there any chance of improvement on this issue?
As stated above, nothing planned at the moment for Seasons changing up. We do get there there have been a few high profile cases of burn out lately, but we’re actually not seeing anything abnormal about high level player’s patterns at the moment. It’s one of the things being actively monitored with the second season in full swing, and that being one of the hot spots for potential burn out.
Second, sounds like you’re in the top end style MMR Hell. We’ve made some tweaks recently and aren’t yet at the point where we consider it all good and proper. So yes, there will definitely be improvement on that front, but it’ll be gradual as we find and figure out ways to break those pockets without breaking the overall MMR formula or opening it up to obvious exploits.
IceIX:
Do you all plan for every1 to have 3 abilities eventually?
Do you plan to make different environments more balanced?
Any intentions to make old characters more viable or shall the power creep continue? I feel like as difficult as it is to get a 3* and level them that they should all be viable, new or old, and all the new 3* being better just makes older 1’s much less valuable and that much harder to transition.
Eventually, it’d be great. It’s something that comes up every time a designer doing abilities gets a spare breath from working on the newest character.
Answered above.
Continued balance passes will help with this some. That being said, power creep isn’t a huge issue right now. Magneto, Hood, and Patch are all characters at the top of the 3* tier at the moment and they were all designed back at launch (although Patch wasn’t released till later). Meanwhile, Psylocke, Falcon, Daredevil, and even Black Panther haven’t exactly flipped meta on its head with their power. There are definitely some pegs that are a bit higher than others, but the older characters tend to hold up decently to the newer ones.
IceIX:
It’s not decided to unilaterally move forward forever with the Cover Slot packs. It needs to be out in the wild for a while and gather real user data to figure out if it is a good move or not. The problem with it is that the single style at low levels sets a large number of the userbase into a poor cycle of spending habits which often makes them hit a wall later on when the tiny purchases they made before stop being good stepping stones. Meanwhile, a couple slightly larger purchases would have set them up nicely, and likely cost them a little less money overall. But until those new starting users that are seeing these Cover Slot packs mature in time played, we can’t tell if this is having the effect we actually want.
IceIX:
Der_Lex:
Okay, I’ll throw in a question: is there any possibility of shifting the event end times a bit to make things a bit easier for EU players? With rubberbanding still in existence, as an EU player you pretty much have to wake up at 5 am to keep your ranking in most PvE events. Having the events end two or possibly even one hour later would be a lot more pleasant, and would probably not affect US players that much, right?
Also, will a rooster slot price increase be implemented for those guilty of fowl play? Or are you guys chickening out on that issue again?
We’ve been discussing something like that internally but haven’t come to any kind of consensus yet. Having a single Event/Tourney means that one area will always miss out. Having Double Shots like we used to where the ending times flip means that both sides always miss out equally, which also sucks in a different way. We could split out Events so that there are different ones for radically different time zones, but then you’re playing with a fractured playerbase and we’d have to worry about different rubber banding/progression reward/mission pin values per region which gets nasty quick. Buncha things that need working through to make it work correctly. It’s a case where we want to do something , but we also want to do it right.
No comment on the status of our roosters or their slots.
IceIX:
Hey IceIX,
Any chance we could get new 1*/2* characters?
Any idea if revising the ability system is possible? I know this would be a lot of work, but would it be possible to have the last upgrade of each ability the option to branch?
Any idea if putting a proper pause option for matches is possible? I’d like to be able to stop while in the middle of a match, do something else on my phone and come back to the game and not have it be an automatic loss.
Any plans to move the game away from the Dark Reign crossover to other storylines or perhaps a general Marvel universe game and each “event” would be a different story line/crossover?
Any chance we can gift covers or Hero Points to fellow allience members? The person who created the alliance I’m in spent money on slots for all the members. I’d like to pay him back with some HP I’ve earned.
Thanks for taking the time to do this!
P.S One more question…I don’t suppose you’re hiring any entry level positions? I’m thinking of changing careers and trying to look for options. I do in fact live in the greater Boston area. Just thought I’d ask.
P.P.S I realize ending a job inquiry with a smiley isn’t the most professional thing, but in this casual environment, I hope it wouldn’t look too bad
1s are pretty unlikely. There’s a decent breadth of 1 characters at the moment and people work through to 2s quickly. It’s a lot of work for characters that most players won’t get much use of outside of the odd 1 tourney.
Branching abilities are also pretty unlikely. What we ideally want is for people to have meaningful build choices between 5/5/3 or 5/4/4 which accomplishes somewhat the same thing. Obviously, some characters are better about forcing this choice than others.
Ouch, sounds like you have a relatively low spec phone. Normally the game will stay paused just fine while you switch to other apps or telephony tasks. The only time it doesn’t is when the OS kills the game due to lack of memory, which it seems like is what it’s doing here. Unfortunately, we haven’t seen a way to distinguish a user purposefully switching tasks then killing the app and the OS doing it itself, which means that if we didn’t do the auto-lose, people would just quit matches without consequence by force quitting.
It’s possible. We’re not locked into Dark Reign, it’s just the story we’re telling right now. Of course, there’s still more Dark Reign to tell (Iron Patriot hasn’t even come on the scene yet), so there’s that.
Maybe. We’re still working out how to allow something like that without opening up the quite possible specter of Gold Farming while having that sort of possibility available to everyone, not just Private Alliances. Especially with in-game chat, it would make for a messy time if currency/covers could be gifted and some company decided it would be a good thing to step in and offer their services.http://www.demiurgestudios.com/careers
IceIX:
Possible but unlikely. It’s personally how I prefer changes to come, but it’s not really feasible for our workflow. What would be more likely and similar is if a gameplay mechanic changed and therefore affected certain characters. At that point, we’d want to go back and rebalance that group.
IceIX:
Arogntbastrd:
With all the cutthroat competition that ensued at the end of s1. Are there any thoughts to add more friendly competition or interalliance cooperation
For example have those top 3 trophies in each alliance get an added iso reward. Doesn’t even have to be much.
Or how about alliance progression rewards. Or alliance networks where alliances unit to reach a common goal and get a reward? There’s a small % of us that actually like each other. It’d be nice to work together from time to time
Oh. And let me pay for an iso multiplier! I give you hot sweaty cash, you give me twice as much iso til the end of times. Do you not want my money?!
There have been thoughts to that sort of thing, yes. There was an idea for doing Alliance x Alliance battles at one point but when we took the design near to the server that does the MMR calculations on our internal structure the hamster running it nearly had an aneurysm from the amount of work he’d have to do. We would definitely like to get more inter/intra Alliance stuff in game though.
On an Iso multiplier - While it would probably be a pretty good cash cow, there are worries here that it’d be a bit much on the side of P2W. It would also introduce the possibility of burnout from players buying the multiplier then grinding away to make use of it to the max. New consumables are things that we’re always discussing. Having choices of stuff to buy, whether you’re interested in it or not is a good thing!
IceIX:
This came up earlier in the week, but why is ISO such a “bad” value? HP seems a little steep but reasonable, while ISO will give you, what, 5 or 6 character levels for 20 bucks? It seems kind of ridiculous. Is that just to act as a brake on people being able to rapidly level all their characters and then getting bored?
Any thought to selling alternate costumes and hats? It’s a gold mine, I’m telling you!
Iso purchasing is intended to be a nice little injection but not a method with which to buy your way to the top. It’s a type of “Ahh, crap, if only I had the extra 5K to level Psylocke for this Tournament…” thing instead of “Just got Daken! Let me blow some stocked HP on him and max level him instantly!” If Iso is priced too low, the game comes closer to the dark side of P2W.
IceIX:
Possible, but fairly unlikely. The covers are given out on a random roll and all our checks show that everything works out to a statistical distribution nearly exactly equal to the listed odds. Setting a streakbreaker in to stop that sort of thing for any individual user would stand a decent chance of breaking that sort of distribution without some very delicate balancing.
IceIX:
I couldn’t give you an hour amount, but lots. Any given new character goes through multiple design passes on viable abilities that don’t make it off the design block into prototyping. Then the abilities are given rough balance and tested by the designer. Usually this results in more tinkering or throwing out of abilities that don’t work out. Then it goes to internal QA and staff for some playtesting. Repeat tinkering. Then on to D3/Marvel who bang on it as well. Cue more tinkering. At that point things are pretty well good, but in the meantime, a dozen or two people have spent hours each playing with any given character. Of course, that’s dwarfed into oblivion upon the first hour of release in the wild.
IceIX:
Really hard to say. Yes, sort of. We think it would have been higher than most other Events if it weren’t for the somewhat random downtime. With that little bugaboo clogging the pipes, we can’t say with surety.
IceIX:
mohio:
Forgive me if you answered in one of the threads it was talked about - as another poster said - link me and I’ll gladly go read it. My question is if you guys have considered making refresh times for PvE nodes server-based (i.e. fixed to “real time”) as opposed to the current situation? I was actually about to make a thread about this topic asking for people’s input if it’s something they would like or not, so seeing if it’s something you’re considering or not would be great.
Also thanks for doing this thread, it’s been great - and precisely what I’ve been hoping you’d do for a while now.
Possible, but kind of unlikely. Doing that sets things on an even stronger schedule base than it is now. At the moment, you can choose to play a little suboptimally with when you choose your refreshes to be based on when you’re going to be playing 8-12 hours from then. If you know you’re going to be asleep till 10 AM, you can time your refreshes to hit max again accordingly. If the server says that it’s 6 AM instead, you’d better be up at 5-5:30 to eke out those last few points. That’s not something we really want to be encouraging the player base to do. That’s not even taking account time zones where some users would get thwacked with horrible refresh timers along with bad end times for them.
As for putting this thread together, you’re welcome. I much prefer the scatter-shot more focused answers in threads that I’ve been doing up until recently, but with no info coming out for a while since I’ve been too busy, this is the next best thing.
IceIX:
Beast1970:
It seems a minor thing, but has there been any discussion or consideration to making the player rank screen scrollable? It would be immensely helpful to be able to see what is going on outside the ten player or alliance range. Probably not feasible to scroll the entire list, but possibly expanded at least a bit from the current.
We’ve talked about it, but oddly, that listing is one of the things that puts a huge strain on the server. It’s the reason why such lists are also really unresponsive in games on XBox Live / PSN. It’s something that we’d love to re-engineer for easier scanning down the road but isn’t a simple solution, unfortunately.
IceIX:
Just 2 questions…
When the PvE level cap was increased from 230 to 395 the reasoning at the time was to deal with the spiderman effect. Now that Spiderman has been neutered I was wondering if there is a plan to fully or partially revert this increased level cap. Although you said that hell scaling has been better in the Sentinel event I still ended up with bad guys over lvl300 as did a fair number of other people and, regardless of whether it’s possible to beat those nodes it’s both tediously long and akin to russian roulette where a single cascade can annihilate you.
Secondly there are a number of heroes which are very strong/balanced in players hands but nearly useless in the AI’s hands (most obvious example is C.Mags who’s blue is placed randomly, who’ll not save red til after strike tiles and only use it 1/turn regardless of availible AP and will use his purple with few if any of either blue or red on the board). Any hero that places tiles is instantly much worse, as well as any conditional abilities that rely on special tiles or specific conditions to work well. Are there any plans to improve this situation and does the severe handicap these characters have on PvP defence get factored into their balancing?
Scaling for this last Event was definitely better when we looked at data across all levels of the bell curve for people. Still not where we want it, as you noted. You’re at the far end of that curve. It was mitigated somewhat by the strong selection of powered up characters this time around, but that’s obviously not always going to be the case. With Spider-Man out of the picture, it’s easier for us to scale things back and not hit spikes overall like we did with him messing with ratings. So I can say that no, we don’t plan to revert the level cap, but yes, we do want players to start stepping back from that ledge of “one cascade’ll do ya”. Unless of course, they’re still beating those missions constantly anyway.
The relative stupidity of AI tile placement is an intentional design. Pre-launch, it used to be much smarter, but it caused battles to be much harder and for players to lose far too often against certain characters like Black Widow (Grey Suit) or Magneto (Classic). Hawkeye (Classic) was also simply evil with it, causing the same kind of 4/5 of a kind cascades that players do. It didn’t feel very fun at all for the AI to build up a relatively paltry amount of AP then crush you with smart play. We had quite a few people call it out for cheating actually, when it was nothing of the sort. Thus, we made the AI more random with that placement, and yes, altered powersets a little accordingly. It does tilt the power level more in favor of the player/offense more, but we believe that’s preferable to people ragequitting because Magneto played as well as you did and cascaded you to oblivion.
IceIX:
I haven’t gone on at length about it, but I’ve posited before that web tiles are a broken mechanic. Venom’s original Devour and all of Classic Spidey’s original moveset could be overpowered by over abundant web tiles, and both characters were made much weaker when attempts to mitigate this were introduced. Has there been any discussion over the possibility that web tiles just don’t add enough to the game for the complexity they add to skill balancing?
Any discussion of the fact that giving an over-leveled Human Torch two goons to feed him four AP per turn might be objectively evil?
Any chance we’ll see Captain Marvel (Marvel Now! version, Carol Danvers)?
Is Sentry’s green skill considered to be well-balanced, and were the effects of strike tiles taken into account for it?
Yes, they were. The problem really manifests in when both are used together, which admittedly doesn’t happen due to their power disparity. If we were to do a 2/3* Venom, both characters would instantly see quite a power boost by the relative ease of Web tile generation and their associated effects. So it’s hard to say that they’re broken, just that they don’t have the key to unlocking their true power by themselves.
No less evil than giving an over levelled Black Widow (Modern) the same.
Possible, yes. Makes sense given that Moonstone is already tooling around in her Ms. Marvel-esque costume. That’s not a tease for her imminent arrival or anything, but she makes more sense to show up than a character unrelated to the DR story.
For the base effect, yes, fairly well balanced. For the Strike tile enhanced effect, unsure. I’ll double check on that. I think it’s supposed to either take the effect of your or enemy Strike tiles into effect for the self team damage, but I’m not 100% sure.
IceIX:
Regarding Season 1 Burnout - there was a fantastic suggestion on how to deal with this in a recent thread: Only the top 80% of your event scores count towards your total season score. Only the top 80% of an alliance’s player scores count toward the alliance’s score in that event. Gives everyone the chance to skip a few events without letting their alliance down or putting themselves out of contention. I really don’t see why you couldn’t adopt a system like this.
What the heck happened to theme events? Divine Champions? Lone Star? Bad is Good? I seem to remember hearing there was a female-champ only tourney at one point, too.
As appreciated as the compensation is, is there any internal discussion going on about improving the way Demiurge handles events like Heavy Metal/Heroic Oscorp, and customer service in general? Because I’d rather have communication from the devs during these kinds of events than extra ISO afterwards.
Oh, and when is the Simulator starting?
You’d think that would solve things, but from everything we’ve discussed with people at other devs that have anything similar, it doesn’t really. What it does is causes players to play a lot at first, fall off for a couple Events towards the middle (because they’ve got slack), then play extra hard towards the end as they realize they may be under quota.
Themed Events like you state have been taking a nap while we figure out how to make them a bit better for income. I know it sounds a bit mean, but themed Events did horrible in sales in comparison to even a 5th run of a character based PVP Event. While not everything is about the money, the disparity is just a bit too much to shrug at when we look at where to place more dev time.
We need better communication as a whole for things like that, yes. Really, what happened was that with the relatively small staff both Demiurge and D3 has, we were all running around doing different things to handle things and communication got prioritized lower than it probably should have had. It’s a good learning experience for something to avoid the next time (hopefully never, but Murphy’s Law says otherwise) something explodes spectacularly.
Sim (and Starfall) should be popping up on the morrow.
IceIX:
daveomite:
Ice,
Some of these questions/thoughts may have already been mentioned here, but going to ask anyway. <Snipping good commentary that isn’t directly addressable>
2 (cont). Given these types of changes, it has basically made “shield hopping” almost a necessity. Since a players visibility in some one else’s queue is not based on power level, that leaves many players in the “punching bag” situation if they get too high in points. Because they appear almost immediately, are worth large points, and are more easily defeated.
Speaking of PvP changes, can you please consider adding a more friendly shield? In many cases, I shield because of spam attacks coming in. In others, I shield to heal up some. It would be nice to have a cheaper, shorter shield, similar to what you have in LR. I think a one hour shield, possibly 25 HP would be a highly used one. It would save a little money, but it would cause more people who don’t normally shield, to consider it.
Given the MMR issues with node cycles, that means everyone has to skip, a lot. Just earlier, I hit someone, won, came out and skipped in a node. That same player came up again. Skipping beyond them, they came up yet again. But the main issue to me, is the skip tax. That can easily lead to 100-200 between matches at times, trying to find a match above 15 points.
That leads me to the next one:
Health regeneration time is astronomical, especially for a 3* 141. That combined with the length it takes for health packs to regen, it all gets out of control if you are trying to put in an hour or two in a PvP.
Lastly, there have been a few threads and mentions of iso/hp sales, but many of us have never seen them. Is that not something that people who have actually spent money in game are allowed to do? It would be nice to see the occasional sale from time to time, as the costs are already pretty high. For instance, just for me to level Punisher from 120 to 141, if I were to pay my way to it, is well over $100. If you actually were to check my account in game, you’d see if have made quite a few purchases in my time playing. So, some breaks/kickbacks would be nice at times.
Thanks for taking the time to field questions today Ice. I know many of us appreciate it. Also, please excuse any misspellings, etc as I’m currently on my phone.
Shield hopping - We’ve noticed, and it’s an artifact of two things: One is the server lag that was allowing people to see you and queue you up quite possibly after you shielded. The other is that if you are sitting in someone’s cache of people to fight but haven’t popped up yet (so aren’t on one of the three nodes), then unshield, you’ll still directly be in that cache. So users will often see a freshly unshielded opponent when normally that person wouldn’t have popped up until the cached opponents would have been cycled through and you got pulled down from the server.
Friendly Shield - It’s possible, but it’s quite likely that what we’d see is that players would just change from 3 hour shielding to 1 hour shielding at the end of Tournaments. It would help with the situations you’re talking about but wouldn’t do much for the status quo. It would also increase the shield hopping issue you’re seeing as it would be more likely that you’d be hanging in more caches after an hour than after three.
Skip tax - Noted. Going back to previous statements and what you’re saying here, this another portion of MMR Hell. While we can and will make tweaks to alleviate this, we really want to get rid of those pockets that cause this behavior to begin with.
Health regen - The general concept at current is that you’ll move from one character to another if one goes down and you’re out of Health Packs. In PVE Events, this is fine and people do this often. In Versus Tournies, that’s point suicide. We’ve got some ideas on this.
Random Iso/HP sales - What you’re probably seeing is the incentive sales that we do from time to time for people that haven’t monetized in the game at all. Noted on more sales overall. We are however, extremely wary of training the player base to wait only for sales to spend money. We want the purchases as they are to have value and for sales to be bonuses. With sales run too often, the regular value becomes “overpriced” and the sales become the normal price.
IceIX:
I can’t get into how we deal with cheaters too far, but we have both manual and automatic systems.
Achievements are a very minor thing on Android at the moment (there are a few, but they don’t do anything). We’d love to get something a bit more robust in the game, but it’s not a priority at the moment.
IceIX:
Hi IceIX, thanks for doing this and I echoed the sentiments that more of such conversations will be much appreciated in the future.
For me, I would like to understand the inner workings of the devs and publisher.
is demiurge and d3 doing well financially?
how is the revenue/profit of MPQ over the period since launch?
is MPQ the biggest revenue driver for both demiurge n d3?
when does the license from Marvel ends?
do you guys have the permission and/or intention to provide cosmetic additions to the game? E.g. Costumes, hats, animation, etc
I’m surprised there aren’t more questions that aren’t mechanics related.
1 - Decently enough. None of us are driving Porshes or anything, but we’re both doing well enough to be confident enough in the project to push more resources into things and push things forward at a good pace as well as stay in the black overall.
Wow. This must have taken some time to collect. Great to have all the Q&A together though.
system
June 15, 2014, 4:57pm
3
Thanks - since I see some questions on the front page that were addressed, I guess it’s time to send this back to the top.
system
June 16, 2014, 11:10am
4
Event end times are the tiniest of all kitties for me. Every PVE, almost without exception, ends at 5AM for me or if i’m really lucky it ends at 5PM… when I leave work. So yeah, suffice to say I have never finished a PVE in the top 50 and i’m lucky if I get top 100.
system
June 16, 2014, 7:26pm
5
You know what confused me recently is that in this Q&A ice implied that she hulk was almost ready but storm was still on the drawing board.
How did we end up with storm first? And how did we end up with a lazy storm if they were still deciding her colors?
system
June 17, 2014, 11:57am
6
Event end times are the tiniest of all kitties for me. Every PVE, almost without exception, ends at 5AM for me or if i’m really lucky it ends at 5PM… when I leave work. So yeah, suffice to say I have never finished a PVE in the top 50 and i’m lucky if I get top 100.
A fellow UK resident i presume. i have exactly the same problem. The thoughtful staggering of end times so that they arent all geared towards USA is quite frankly the worst thought out idea possible. How hard would it be to have them end at 8 or 9 or 10pm over here? not every event clearly but at least some and especially if they re-run events (like they always do) have the 2nd run end at a more convenient time for the other side of the world (and by ‘world’ i dont mean ‘America’, i know thats how they think of it)
Dayv
June 18, 2014, 6:59am
7
I’m afraid IceIX burned himself out on forum activity with this thread. Nearly three weeks later, he’s posted about four times since.
system
June 18, 2014, 7:57am
8
I bet he was told to stop disclosing more evil plans.
mohio
June 18, 2014, 7:02pm
9
You know what confused me recently is that in this Q&A ice implied that she hulk was almost ready but storm was still on the drawing board.
How did we end up with storm first? And how did we end up with a lazy storm if they were still deciding her colors?
Maybe they hadn’t yet decided which Storm to lazify just yet? Or maybe they were considering doing what others suggested and combine the abilities of the 1* and 2* Storm into the 3* one. Either way I thought it was a little surprising as well, but at least she’s not completely OP so I can take it a little slower trying to get all the covers for her.
Enoc99
June 24, 2014, 3:04pm
10
IceIX:
We’ve got an idea about that. It’s currently in test at the moment. If it works out, you can expect rioting in the streets on the forums when we talk about what we’re planning for a change. Mainly because Prologue healing has been status quo for so long that any change to that is going to make people HULK SMASH angry.
This was an accurate prediction.
system
June 24, 2014, 3:14pm
11
You know what confused me recently is that in this Q&A ice implied that she hulk was almost ready but storm was still on the drawing board.
How did we end up with storm first? And how did we end up with a lazy storm if they were still deciding her colors?
Lazy Storm took five minutes to design; She-Hulk appears to have involved actual effort. The “lazy” moniker is earned, remember.
This might be beyond HULK SMASH. When Ice mentioned “prologue healing”, it made me think they would eliminate that form somehow. I didn’t think they would eliminate the healing mechanic.
system
June 24, 2014, 5:39pm
13
Yeah, I think this went quite a bit farther then most expected.
Now from the standpoint of psychology, later this week or early next week would be a good time to put in a teaser about one of the upcoming ‘big things.’ To, you know, distract us with the new shiny
system
June 24, 2014, 6:34pm
14
Guess they learned from Harry Potter 2 (iirc) where that prof cured the broken bone by eliminating it.
system
June 25, 2014, 6:34am
15
Yeah, I think this went quite a bit farther then most expected.
Now from the standpoint of psychology, later this week or early next week would be a good time to put in a teaser about one of the upcoming ‘big things.’ To, you know, distract us with the new shiny
Big will have to be huge to calm us down.
