Q&A with Demiurge_Will Answers from Demiurge_Will begin on p.2

maguirenumber6

ZootSax said:

Why was 1* Spider-Man changed and why was no mention whatsoever of the change made in official channels?  While I love the new 1* Spider-Man, that was the single oddest change in the past year for me, if only because of the inexplicable secrecy.

I've seen one or two others talk about this. I have heard that he can be very good in the Balance of Power event (when everyone is boosted to 550). Maybe making four critical tiles was too much, but two is alright. I don't think he was particularly overpowered for the 1* tier.

The rockett

You see a lot of people talking about match damage and power creep especially on 5* so what is your plan on making sure that you don't make older 5* obsolete even more than they are now? 

Here is a chart that @Dayv did to show how much this has changed from the Sliver Surfer release to Archangel.  It is concerning to see how much this increase is and not even relooking at some of these older 5* for anything. 

https://i.imgur.com/Mh7bi91.png

Daredevil217

After wins-based PVP was reverted back to points-based, we were told that the development team would still be looking at changing/improving the PVP experience.

Can we expect some tests/changes relatively soon, or is PVP more the less staying the same?  Are there any plans down the pipeline to address PVP?

The rockett

In the current state of the game, burn out is real and seeing more and more players going casual or leaving.  Do you have any long term plans to address this?   Have you considered a new game mode that would keep us intersted in the game longer and continue to invest in the game/D3/ Demi?  

The rockett

How long does it take for you to look at character Rebalancing? How long do they have to be out before you will address them Nice the community keeps on asking about them?  Example, Banner has been probably the most requested rebalance, besides Gambit getting the OML/XFW treatment. Why does it take so long for this to be addressed?  

Demiurge_Will

Colognoisseur said:

PLEASE READ: This post does not indicate that there are any plans for the fictitious interview I am proposing below.

I have proposed to the Demiurge team that they should communicate in a place they feel safe.

In comments made on Discord they stopped doing the YouTube videos because they were not fond of being roasted when they said we don't have anything to add at the moment.

I have believed the problem with the videos was there was no discussion. The single best piece of communication was the long interview some of the Demiurge guys did on PW3. The reason I think it was so good was because it was interactive. I also think the PW3 guys are good representatives of players who represent a wider demographic of the overall player base.

So to try and maybe get this rolling I think it might be good for the Demiurge team to see what questions are on people's minds.

To do this please only post one question in a post. This way it can be "liked" so that there is information on what most of those on the forum would like to hear about.

Hi, Colognoisseur,

Thanks for kicking things off - this thread has some great questions in it. I won't be able to get to anywhere near them all (and if the thread blows up I might lose the ability to keep up) but I'll try to grab a few over the coming days.

(To start with - this isn't a question, but we stopped doing regular videos because they're a fair amount of work, were reaching a relatively small fraction of our players, and didn't really seem to be making people that much happier. There's a reasonably good chance we'll do them again at some point, but probably only when we have something big to announce. Getting roasted is part of the job - we'd still get insults and worse if we never showed our faces.)

Demiurge_Will

Colognoisseur said:

Is the current use of tapping to insure placing in top 10 of PvE limited to few enough players that you feel it does not need to be changed?

No, I think tapping is a flaw.

ZeroKarma

Demiurge_Will said:

Colognoisseur said:

Is the current use of tapping to insure placing in top 10 of PvE limited to few enough players that you feel it does not need to be changed?

No, I think tapping is a flaw.

Yes yes yes yes yes. 10,000% yes.

This right here officially justifies the creation of this thread. 

Thank you Will. 

Demiurge_Will

ZeroKarma said:

Aaaaaaaand the big question. There are a lot of rumors that go around on the interwebs. One of them is that we are nearing 6* characters in some shape or form.

Are they coming? Should we start hoarding? Will they be as big of a leap over 5* as 5* was over 4*? Will 5* covers start to flow more quickly once the 6* characters start coming out?

Will we have to sell any essential organs to acquire these characters?

While we usually say little about future plans*:

There are no plans currently in the works for 6* characters, and we've heard a clear consensus among our players that they don't want them.

*: Reasons for this: software development, creative work, and entertaining people are all messy and unpredictable, and when you cross the three together in a live game, making very many promises can lock you into disaster. And we know most of you are happiest with more detail and dislike when something you're expecting changes, so we typically talk about new things when we're certain of the details. Because of the nature of game development, that's usually when the feature's about to come out.

Colognoisseur

@Demiurge_Will

You're back! I thought you were off creating the next latest and greatest game for Demiurge.
With Ice IX's return as well it seems like a return to the early days of MPQ.

Thank you so much for taking the time to answer the questions as you have time.

The first two answers have put some of my long-term worries at ease.

FinnyMPQ

 Appreciate the info @Demiurge_Will!

IceHockey333

My question is about the forums, and player comments in general:

How do you handle the constant negativity and whining that happens with an entitled/spoiled group of participants? Do you just take on a "Haters Gonna Hate" attitude and focus on the constructive criticism rather than the bitter bile? Do you check sales and engagement numbers against the constant haterade levels?

Demiurge_Will

The rockett said:

With some the cheats that have been used in the past and current, (I will not name them due to forum rules but would love to list them all) what is being done to make sure the game is secure?  With a lot of players investing money into this game/company, how quickly can these cheats be uncovered and dealt with in a swift manner? 

I'll send you a PM in a moment so I can make sure I know about everything on your list.

It's hard to be super specific about cheats and exploits without saying something that makes it easier for cheaters to cheat, but:

- We've closed a couple of significant exploits over the last six months.

- In the past year, we've banned 13,671 accounts for cheating.

- Most games have some delay between when they detect a cheater and when they're removed from the game, in order to make it more difficult for cheaters to reverse engineer the cheat detection systems and work around them.

- We investigate every report that comes into CS about cheating. We appreciate the reports and they've directly helped us shut down several exploits over the years. A large proportion of reports are mistaken (two common causes of this: 1) some players think they know about all the buy clubs and don't recognize players who use a different set of them; 2) sometimes players bank a whole bunch of currency or tokens over the course of many many months (sometimes years) and spend them all at once). We don't typically respond to the individual reports with specifics, because that could reveal information about how cheat detection works. Put that together and that allows the perception of cheating and its impact to be larger than the reality. I'm not sure how to fix this, and not 100% sure we should - any amount of cheating is a big deal and we're working to get it to zero and keep it there, so I'd rather deal with mistaken cheat reports than not hear about an issue.

huktonfonix

@Demiurge_Will Thank you for these carefully-constructed, thoughtful, and insightful answers.  It certainly doesn't hurt that you're giving the answers I want to hear, but the detail around the decision making process is great even if you were to give unpopular answers.

As a software development director myself, I really appreciate the information and the reasoning.

Demiurge_Will

Colognoisseur said:

@Demiurge_Will

You're back! I thought you were off creating the next latest and greatest game for Demiurge.

I did! It's poor form for me to advertise it here, but it came out and I'm very proud of the team's work on it and how it was received... but now I'm back to my roots!

wymtime

@Demiurge_Will
thanks for jumping on and answering questions.  I know getting flamed on by the playerbase is never fun and reading the forums can depress anyone’s day.  I for one am very thankful for you taking your time to answer questions.  
Tell us about some of the projects you are looking forward to working on now that you are back!!

Nabistay

I would love to see the original post updated with the questions/responses all collected in one place if/when this thread blows up..

Demiurge_Will

ZootSax said:

Why was 1* Spider-Man changed and why was no mention whatsoever of the change made in official channels?  While I love the new 1* Spider-Man, that was the single oddest change in the past year for me, if only because of the inexplicable secrecy.

1-star Spider-Man's powers were too confusing for new players and causing people to bounce off the game.

We goofed on the announcement of the change. (Details: We made the change for a subset of new players first to make sure it had the impact we hoped, and didn't announce it widely at that time because it wasn't likely to affect anyone who read the forums. It's very unusual for us to do this sort of test with characters, because it wouldn't be fair for people to be seeing different versions of a character in a competitive environment - but we felt this test would have minimal impact because it's a 1-star. When we flipped the change on for everyone, we missed it in our usual updates because it took an unusual path to going live.)

I'm sorry about that, we'll try to do better going forward.

I'm stepping out of the forums for a bit, be back tomorrow.

Eichen

Have you ever considered doing live Q&A chats?  There are some great Q&A service providers that let people send questions in live and you you decide which ones to show and what to answer.  (JotCast is one that I see used allot)

Doc L

First, it's great to see you posting, and I think if you can jump in and answer a few questions a day, that would make a lot of people happier. I remember you doing that a lot in the past, and it was great. 

I have one question only, which has been echoed already in many other threads, and even in this thread - can we get 4* feeders linked to 5* a bit quicker? Like 2 a time, one more recent, one classic 5*, something like that? I mean, there are currently 22 5*, soon to be 23, and only 5 current 4* linked to 5*. Even two a month, given the new 5* that will be coming up, will take a year to catch up from now. I think it would increase 5* diversity a bit if we all had a few more covers of older 5*, especially if 5* Gambit does get a bit of a nerf that he does need.