January Video Q&A Transcript

mischiefmaker

While I enjoyed the recent video Q&A, I also prefer the text format, as it's more easily and quickly consumed. I thought there might be some other people who feel the same way, and we have a saying where I work, "the best way to complain is to make things", so I thought I'd put together a transcript of the Q&A for people who might have skipped the video but want to know what was said.

Caveat: this is not a word-for-word transcript. I summarized the answers to what I thought was interesting and relevant; I added timestamps in case you want to go watch that part of the video and hear exactly what was said.

0:00 Introduction
Participants in this Q&A:
Kabir Hemrajani, Product Manager
Will Jennings-Hess, Lead Designer (Demiurge_Will)
Casey Malone, Designer
Miles Benjamin, Designer

0:53 What characters are being looked at for rebalance?
We work in 2 week chunks. Our current chunk has no character rebalances (though we did work on a lot of new characters). Not clear when we'll do the next one. She-hulk, Beast, Dr. Ock, IW, Rags' third ability are top of the list; pretty close to what the forums want. We look to balance characters that dominate the PvP meta (Rags, Sentry) before balancing underpowered characters.

3:49 Roster slot pricing
Agree it's an issue. Increasing progression/placement rewards so that you have more hp is one possible solution, but this makes things too easy for beginning players. Everyone from the CEO on down thinks this is the top issue in the game right now. The solutions we're considering need engineering work and aren't quick patches, so it'll be a little while.

5:47 Is vaulting characters a permanent solution?
No plans to change vaulting for tokens, but we're looking at different ways to give out 3*s that wouldn't need to use vaulting.

8:13 Related question: why not have tokens where the player chooses between two sets of possible characters?
There are two problems with this. 1, some players won't understand that to optimize, they need to put all their tokens in the same set. Second, players who do optimize will only get to play with some characters, and that's not ideal either.

9:28 Characters whose tile damage doesn't line up with abilities
Tile damage and ability order are complicated and come from different places in the config, so they're hard to change. If we changed ability order, you'd suddenly have a different number of covers. We could also change tile damage order to match abilities, but that's definitely not the right thing to do (doesn't explain why).

This doesn't really affect gameplay and it's a ton of work so we're probably not going to get to it soon. But we do think "strongest color" is an important mechanic so we do want to communicate that better.

12:17 More non-competitive pve events, like cooperative events?
The idea of cooperative events is similar to the old global counter. Problem there was that individual contributions don't feel meaningful, so it ends up just being like a timer. Also it's really hard to predict how those fill up, which is why we've removed them from existing events.

We're looking at developing some non-competitive features; you might see something in the coming months.

14:27 Scrolling leaderboards
Client-server comunication is expensive. You do talk to the server every time you play a match, so we piggy back on that to send top 10 and your rank. But scrolling through the leaderboards would negatively impact server load, battery life, and data usage, and it can easily get out of hand if a small number of people scroll a lot.

16:39 How closely do you work with Marvel?
Really closely. It's great. They send us lots of secret stuff. We're not saying anything about whether we're doing anything for Secret Wars (laughing). All our dialog goes through them, but they rarely change what we send them.

Data mining hurts our ability to launch stuff alongside the comics, since we have to be really careful about not leaking anything sensitive in those files. People who are data mining should be aware of that.

Unknown

Thanks mm. Next to jm, you are the best.