It's about time.

Unknown

CrookedKnight wrote:

Plus, we had IceIX tell us here that Devs optimal play in PVE is for your characters to take significant damage. Why is that? No explanation, and it certainly doesn't make sense in PVE mode that avoiding damage is a bad thing. But in the Devs' mind it is.

Because if you can breeze through the dev-designed fights without taking damage then the game isn't hard enough? It's not really rocket science. There's a reason the nodes aren't just "tap here for points every 150 minutes" and instead require you to play the game.

If the game is too easy, you'll get bored of it and leave. Still, "easy" has different meanings for different folks. Knowing when to save up blue to heal and when to gather green or red to go for the jugular wasn't easy per se, it required planning. Avoiding damage lets you play more for the same buck, so it had to go because devs are after more bucks. Way easier to understand than the fancy "getting pummelled in pve is as designed" non-explanation.

Dreylin

Hi IceIX,

If you're still around do you have any info on new Story content? Since Feb it's been one new chapter every 3months (if you count Deadpool, which I guess we do), is that the intended pace for new Episodes? If not, what is the goal and is it likely to change soon?

Thanks.

IceIX

Dreylin wrote:

Hi IceIX,

If you're still around do you have any info on new Story content? Since Feb it's been one new chapter every 3months (if you count Deadpool, which I guess we do), is that the intended pace for new Episodes? If not, what is the goal and is it likely to change soon?

Thanks.

Yes to more story, pacing is more difficult to say. I can say that I wouldn't expect a new Episode within September.

Nonce Equitaur 2

Could you sticky this thread?

CrookedKnight

sorcered wrote:

If the game is too easy, you'll get bored of it and leave. Still, "easy" has different meanings for different folks. Knowing when to save up blue to heal and when to gather green or red to go for the jugular wasn't easy per se, it required planning. Avoiding damage lets you play more for the same buck, so it had to go because devs are after more bucks. Way easier to understand than the fancy "getting pummelled in pve is as designed" non-explanation.

I really don't understand how "PvE enemies are supposed to be able to put up a fight" is not an explanation in its own right. Devs generally aim for opponents not being total pushovers in any game, no matter how it's financed.

Dreylin

IceIX wrote:

Dreylin wrote:

Hi IceIX,

If you're still around do you have any info on new Story content? Since Feb it's been one new chapter every 3months (if you count Deadpool, which I guess we do), is that the intended pace for new Episodes? If not, what is the goal and is it likely to change soon?

Thanks.

Yes to more story, pacing is more difficult to say. I can say that I wouldn't expect a new Episode within September.

Thanks for the response. I'd guessed as much about September after your comment about October anniversary celebrations, but is 1 new chapter every 2-3months really what you guys are aiming at? While I'm not optimistic enough to hope that you aim for new PvE content for (or after) every Character's release, at least one new event per month doesn't seem like too unreasonable an expectation...

Unknown

IceIX wrote:

Dreylin wrote:

Hi IceIX,

If you're still around do you have any info on new Story content? Since Feb it's been one new chapter every 3months (if you count Deadpool, which I guess we do), is that the intended pace for new Episodes? If not, what is the goal and is it likely to change soon?

Thanks.

Yes to more story, pacing is more difficult to say. I can say that I wouldn't expect a new Episode within September.

Not suggesting you should be spokesman for the company, but I'll ask anyway - do you think that is acceptable? I've not played for a while, but have kept my finger on the pulse enough to know that the storyline of this game has gone nowhere for a good while. The content updates have been shoddy at best throughout this year.

For the benefit of your playing public, is there an easily explainable reason for the lack of timely content? If I had to guess, regular story content would keep people more interested than a flavour of the month new character. Of course, your metrics might explain otherwise.

Yours,
The Departed Ladder.

Trisul

Has any thought been given to possibly increasing the pace of events for PvE? Even to the point that they overlap? Having 2 events going on at once would be great! (I don't even care if they are re-used events)

- Events are the best part of this game
- More rewards are available! Helps combat a diluted hero pool since transitioning to 3* is so difficult now (I'm stuck here).
- Players/Alliances have more choices for events to target
- Heroics can overlap with more roster-flexible events
- Overlapping events can have different hour-of-day end times (more fair for Europe/Asia!)

IceIX

The Ladder wrote:

Not suggesting you should be spokesman for the company, but I'll ask anyway - do you think that is acceptable? I've not played for a while, but have kept my finger on the pulse enough to know that the storyline of this game has gone nowhere for a good while. The content updates have been shoddy at best throughout this year.

For the benefit of your playing public, is there an easily explainable reason for the lack of timely content? If I had to guess, regular story content would keep people more interested than a flavour of the month new character. Of course, your metrics might explain otherwise.

Yours,
The Departed Ladder.

Definitely a good question and it's one that we had a long discussion about very recently. Basically, it comes down to the fact that we've got a relatively small team working on the game compared to most other companies that run Live Ops style games of this magnitude. It's a matter of either working on that new story chapter and the work there or putting those same engineers and designers to work on getting character buffs or into sequence updates or game modes going. We do this on purpose since we don't want to hit a situation like you see at big Live Ops mobile game companies that ramp to 200 people, lose that Top Chart position, then lay off 3/4 of the workforce. That's not fair to anyone. We don't think it's proper for the industry and we don't want it around here. That means staying lean, which is good for our current workforce. It's less good in terms of parts of teh game we can touch at once.

Do I think it's acceptable? Speaking purely as a player, and one that's sitting squarely in 3* land, no. I want more story. From a current workforce/workflow point of view? Debateable. The current things that are being worked on have a definite impact for a large swatch of the player base, many of who haven't even seen one go around of the current story, much less newer pieces.

I'll say that we definitely do want a better cadence for story releases. But I'll also say that for the last bit since Deadpool, we've had other fish to fry.

Unknown

The Ladder wrote:

IceIX wrote:

Dreylin wrote:

Hi IceIX,

If you're still around do you have any info on new Story content? Since Feb it's been one new chapter every 3months (if you count Deadpool, which I guess we do), is that the intended pace for new Episodes? If not, what is the goal and is it likely to change soon?

Thanks.

Yes to more story, pacing is more difficult to say. I can say that I wouldn't expect a new Episode within September.

Not suggesting you should be spokesman for the company, but I'll ask anyway - do you think that is acceptable? I've not played for a while, but have kept my finger on the pulse enough to know that the storyline of this game has gone nowhere for a good while. The content updates have been shoddy at best throughout this year.

For the benefit of your playing public, is there an easily explainable reason for the lack of timely content? If I had to guess, regular story content would keep people more interested than a flavour of the month new character. Of course, your metrics might explain otherwise.

Yours,
The Departed Ladder.

different things fir different people. Honestly, I've never read a single bit if the story. I just skip through and get to grinding. The only thing that entices me is speedy release of quality new characters. At least 1 new character every other pve. The slowing down of character releases is probably the biggest reason for my departure of the game. Maxing them twuce as fast as they are releasing when before I could barely keep up. I personally liked it that way. Other reasons would be the effort vs reward has become lackluster since seasons, and the balancing delays was also a factor, came just a week or 2 too late.

Unknown

papa07 wrote:

PPPlaya wrote:

sms4002 wrote:

Bowgentle wrote:

Another devil's advocate thought: You really think nerfing Sentry will reduce the points the X-Men put up? No, it won't. They'll just switch to the next speedkill combo, say Patch/Hulk. Sure, Hulk needs a Health Pack after every match instead of after 3 like Sentry, and you might get a bad board, but it's still 3 fights every shield hop.

I don't think the solution to the crazy high scores is as easy as nerfing Sentry.
Yes, he needs a nerf because he's more prevalent than Thorverine at their best times, but it won't solve the underlying problems.

I don't really agree with this. Without sentry you can't do 2 50 point matches in 1 min and not get hit.

That doesnt make sense. If you don't have Sentry and your matches take longer, then it will also take longer for other people to beat you, so you have more time.

Not true - let's say currently matches with Sentry take 1 minute. 3 wins = 3 minutes. Let's say it takes someone 2 minutes to find you once you unshield + 1 minute to beat you, also 3 minutes so you can get those wins and reshield without the loss.

With a Sentry adjustment, wins now take 3 minutes. 3 wins - 9 minutes. However, it still takes 2 minutes to find you + 3 minutes to beat you, so 5 minutes on the loss. Not to mention the other 10 people that may find you in that longer window.

The key now is that you can get 2 wins in before anybody gets you queued up (due to slow servers and the skipping process in general) for a relatively safe 3 attacks per hop. If matches take longer, that safety goes away

Yeah this is what i was getting at. Not to mention that while you can still boost in and get a huge advantage, a lot more can go wrong. Since matches are taking longer than 30 seconds, the AI has a chance to actually get powers off and you may have a bad board that makes the match take a lot longer or even cause you to lose. I will bet anything that you can take out sentry tomorrow and the points will go back down to how they were.

Unknown

Hey Ice, since you are here, I had seen a little while back that Will said they removed boosts from drops since they want TU's to be used now and that boosts were viewed as "cheap". Any chance at removing boosts completely? I would be all for it.

IceIX

sms4002 wrote:

Hey Ice, since you are here, I had seen a little while back that Will said they removed boosts from drops since they want TU's to be used now and that boosts were viewed as "cheap". Any chance at removing boosts completely? I would be all for it.

Not in the short term, no. Longer term is more uncertain.

Unknown

IceIX wrote:

The Ladder wrote:

Not suggesting you should be spokesman for the company, but I'll ask anyway - do you think that is acceptable? I've not played for a while, but have kept my finger on the pulse enough to know that the storyline of this game has gone nowhere for a good while. The content updates have been shoddy at best throughout this year.

For the benefit of your playing public, is there an easily explainable reason for the lack of timely content? If I had to guess, regular story content would keep people more interested than a flavour of the month new character. Of course, your metrics might explain otherwise.

Yours,
The Departed Ladder.

Definitely a good question and it's one that we had a long discussion about very recently. Basically, it comes down to the fact that we've got a relatively small team working on the game compared to most other companies that run Live Ops style games of this magnitude. It's a matter of either working on that new story chapter and the work there or putting those same engineers and designers to work on getting character buffs or into sequence updates or game modes going. We do this on purpose since we don't want to hit a situation like you see at big Live Ops mobile game companies that ramp to 200 people, lose that Top Chart position, then lay off 3/4 of the workforce. That's not fair to anyone. We don't think it's proper for the industry and we don't want it around here. That means staying lean, which is good for our current workforce. It's less good in terms of parts of teh game we can touch at once.

Do I think it's acceptable? Speaking purely as a player, and one that's sitting squarely in 3* land, no. I want more story. From a current workforce/workflow point of view? Debateable. The current things that are being worked on have a definite impact for a large swatch of the player base, many of who haven't even seen one go around of the current story, much less newer pieces.

I'll say that we definitely do want a better cadence for story releases. But I'll also say that for the last bit since Deadpool, we've had other fish to fry.

Thanks for the timely, honest answer. If you ever added perennial single player storyline content, I might consider returning. But I can understand that this might not be the biggest priority for a small team. All the best - you have always done your best for the playing community, nobody should ever doubt that.

Unknown

Now, if only Sentry would get Nerfed, so I can play with all these great characters.....

Unknown

IceIX wrote:

The Ladder wrote:

Not suggesting you should be spokesman for the company, but I'll ask anyway - do you think that is acceptable? I've not played for a while, but have kept my finger on the pulse enough to know that the storyline of this game has gone nowhere for a good while. The content updates have been shoddy at best throughout this year.

For the benefit of your playing public, is there an easily explainable reason for the lack of timely content? If I had to guess, regular story content would keep people more interested than a flavour of the month new character. Of course, your metrics might explain otherwise.

Yours,
The Departed Ladder.

Definitely a good question and it's one that we had a long discussion about very recently. Basically, it comes down to the fact that we've got a relatively small team working on the game compared to most other companies that run Live Ops style games of this magnitude. It's a matter of either working on that new story chapter and the work there or putting those same engineers and designers to work on getting character buffs or into sequence updates or game modes going. We do this on purpose since we don't want to hit a situation like you see at big Live Ops mobile game companies that ramp to 200 people, lose that Top Chart position, then lay off 3/4 of the workforce. That's not fair to anyone. We don't think it's proper for the industry and we don't want it around here. That means staying lean, which is good for our current workforce. It's less good in terms of parts of teh game we can touch at once.

Do I think it's acceptable? Speaking purely as a player, and one that's sitting squarely in 3* land, no. I want more story. From a current workforce/workflow point of view? Debateable. The current things that are being worked on have a definite impact for a large swatch of the player base, many of who haven't even seen one go around of the current story, much less newer pieces.

I'll say that we definitely do want a better cadence for story releases. But I'll also say that for the last bit since Deadpool, we've had other fish to fry.

Yeah, right. You spent your time doing Team Ups instead of doing something easier to appreciate like new stories, new game modes or a proper coralling of players and a proper progression system (take a look at FIFA's Seasons for a very simple and effective system). Having a small team and setting up the wrong priorities is an even better recipe for disaster than overextending.

reckless442

sorcered wrote:

CrookedKnight wrote:

Plus, we had IceIX tell us here that Devs optimal play in PVE is for your characters to take significant damage. Why is that? No explanation, and it certainly doesn't make sense in PVE mode that avoiding damage is a bad thing. But in the Devs' mind it is.

Because if you can breeze through the dev-designed fights without taking damage then the game isn't hard enough? It's not really rocket science. There's a reason the nodes aren't just "tap here for points every 150 minutes" and instead require you to play the game.

If the game is too easy, you'll get bored of it and leave. Still, "easy" has different meanings for different folks. Knowing when to save up blue to heal and when to gather green or red to go for the jugular wasn't easy per se, it required planning. Avoiding damage lets you play more for the same buck, so it had to go because devs are after more bucks. Way easier to understand than the fancy "getting pummelled in pve is as designed" non-explanation.

Thank you. "Damage" in the Devs' minds equaled coming out of the match with a lot less than you went in with. It never took into account how much damage you took during the match that you healed or how close an enemy was to using an AOE power that you thwarted with a perfectly timed move. I'm sorry, but it isn't "easy" to slow play a win using Mags' blue against level 150 (or 395) Ares/Rags when one wrong move or bad board will nearly wipe you out. Even with Patch, you need enough turns to get enough green, blue and red before your opponents will do their damage. Frankly, some of my tensest PVE moments have been those games where I've had to perfectly play Mags' blue so that I'll have enough for the next turn so I can prevent my opponent from slaughtering me. I think it's silly to dismiss that type of play as "easy."

Unknown

IceIX wrote:

The Ladder wrote:

Not suggesting you should be spokesman for the company, but I'll ask anyway - do you think that is acceptable? I've not played for a while, but have kept my finger on the pulse enough to know that the storyline of this game has gone nowhere for a good while. The content updates have been shoddy at best throughout this year.

For the benefit of your playing public, is there an easily explainable reason for the lack of timely content? If I had to guess, regular story content would keep people more interested than a flavour of the month new character. Of course, your metrics might explain otherwise.

Yours,
The Departed Ladder.

Definitely a good question and it's one that we had a long discussion about very recently. Basically, it comes down to the fact that we've got a relatively small team working on the game compared to most other companies that run Live Ops style games of this magnitude. It's a matter of either working on that new story chapter and the work there or putting those same engineers and designers to work on getting character buffs or into sequence updates or game modes going. We do this on purpose since we don't want to hit a situation like you see at big Live Ops mobile game companies that ramp to 200 people, lose that Top Chart position, then lay off 3/4 of the workforce. That's not fair to anyone. We don't think it's proper for the industry and we don't want it around here. That means staying lean, which is good for our current workforce. It's less good in terms of parts of teh game we can touch at once.

Do I think it's acceptable? Speaking purely as a player, and one that's sitting squarely in 3* land, no. I want more story. From a current workforce/workflow point of view? Debateable. The current things that are being worked on have a definite impact for a large swatch of the player base, many of who haven't even seen one go around of the current story, much less newer pieces.

I'll say that we definitely do want a better cadence for story releases. But I'll also say that for the last bit since Deadpool, we've had other fish to fry.

I wish there was a way y'all could contract out some things on a short-term basis, so it would not mean staff cuts in the long run, but keep the game moving and not getting stale with "rinse and repeat" PVE's. Granted I prefer a re-run PVE, to no PVE.

woopie

With the changes to both the colors and powers, any chance of a free 'reallocate your covers' pass?

IceIX

woopie wrote:

With the changes to both the colors and powers, any chance of a free 'reallocate your covers' pass?

No, we don't offer free respecs when changing abilities. We do offer increased sell prices for those that are completely unhappy with the new version of the character however.