April Q&A with Demiurge_Will

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  • Tony_Foot
    Tony_Foot Posts: 1,814 Chairperson of the Boards
    Ian, Ray or Craig, which is your favourite PW3?
  • broll
    broll Posts: 4,732 Chairperson of the Boards
    edited April 2018
    Demiurge_Will said:
    wymtime said:
    How often do you feel major updates should occur in the game?  Examples of major updates would be DPDQ, champion rewards, 5* tier, CL. 

    Examples of of non major update: balance changes, new PVE, New boss events
    I think more often than we did in 2017.

    Our strategy last year was more, but smaller, changes, and while that I think that led to some real and steady improvements in the game, no amount of smaller changes adds up to the excitement of a big new feature.


    However at the same time the little improvements like updating rewards while they may not get the fanfare are also super important and need to happen regularly.

    I think in a perfect world I'd like to see 4 small improvement and 2 major new features per year:
    Month 2 - Small Improvement
    Month 4 - Small Improvement
    Month 6 - Major Feature
    Month 8 - Small Improvement
    Month 10 - Small Improvement
    Month 12 - Major Feature

    However this assumes that you didn't have to spend time after each major feature tweaking, which I know you guys would.  So it should probably be more like this:
    Month 1 - Major Feature
    Month 1-2 - Frequent touch-ups to balance feature.
    Month 3 -  Very Small Improvement
    Month 5 - Small Improvement
    Month 7 - Major Feature
    Month 7-8 - Frequent touch-ups to balance feature.
    Month 9 -  Very Small Improvement
    Month 11 - Small Improvement

    Demiurge_Will said:
    Demiurge_Will said:
    For sure. There are a few games/companies. mostly in the PC world, that are doing community work that I really admire...
    Question back at the group - if you could transplant the community approach from any other game onto MPQ, whose would that be and why?
    I would love to see a feature where I hit a button and I see all official forum messages from Demi or D3 employees.  Star Wars: The Old Republic forums had a feature like this it was called the dev tracker.  It was it's own thread that just had a copy of all the dev messages in one place and links with how to jump to them in context:

    http://www.swtor.com/community/devtracker.php

    In general any improvement to the forums would be appreciated.  The forum upgrade was more of a downgrade from what was in place before and it makes communication harder on a number of levels.

    Also more communication from D3 on the forums.  Even if it's Brigby just doing a daily or weekly here's the scuttlebutt from Discord update so people don't have to follow two places if they don't want to.

    Roadmaps would be nice where you announce features you're working on at a high level so people know what to get hyped for.

  • Blindman13
    Blindman13 Posts: 504 Critical Contributor
    aesthetocyst said:

    Anticipated problem would be balancing for the round totals. lower health boss means more clear per round, higher health boss means fewer clears per round. Would have to think that through, run some models...

    I wonder if round clearing could be tied to the number of times the Boss is downed instead of points. Personal progression would still be tied to points, and could be scaled based on the selected SCL. Alliance progression (round clearing) would start at something like down the boss 20 times, for round one and add 5 or 10 for each additional round.
    As I typed this, I realized that some people could deliberately drop down in SCL to face easier bosses for lesser rewards, but would get faster alliance rewards. 
  • aesthetocyst
    aesthetocyst Posts: 538 Critical Contributor
    Lystrata said:
    Is there any plan to review/revise roster slot costs at lower levels?

    I know this isn't an issue for most forum players anymore (certainly isn't an issue for me), but a lot of newer players that come through my alliance end up quitting because of the roster slot expenses - and there's 0 advice I can give about that.

    Either they hit a paywall that even multiple Logan's Loonies can't fix, or they need to hoard for months - neither of which is an encouraging option or something that keeps someone interested in the game.

    There are 150+ playable characters in this game now, but from the time you have around 30, roster slots are at 500hp. That's really, really expensive for new players, who have far greater odds of opening yet another new character these days.

    From what I can tell, obtaining the volume of characters isn't so daunting as the timeline in which they can even just be added to a new player's roster at all.

    We had a mass forum meltdown a while back (a year? two? hell if I know, time blurs) about roster slot costs, and it got fixed to a point where it's not an issue for us anymore. But anyone joining the game now is basically locked out in a way that we really never were.

    One of my favorite drums to bang.

    I'll just put this here for reference:


    Dead Horse Walking: Roster Slot Costs
    https://forums.d3go.com/discussion/57585/dead-horse-walking-roster-slot-costs/p1

    15 months old now. From back when Brigby was young and full of vigor. No promised action or response materialized.

    But there was a brief, modest money grab on slots last January, only a year later :D
  • jamesh
    jamesh Posts: 1,600 Chairperson of the Boards
    Would it be possible to include token odds in percentages in addition to or instead of the current "1:N" style display?  Various aspects of the UI and information on the forum seem to imply that the "1:N" display is a nearest integer approximation.

    That's a bit of a pain, since it means the accuracy varies with the value of N.  For instance, while "1:20" is fairly accurate, representing 5% ± 0.125%, "1:4" is a much larger range at 25% ± 3.17%.

    I realise that the old method of displaying a percentage for each individual character was unwieldy (both due to the number of characters and how small the percentages were), but perhaps showing percentages for groups of characters where each character has even odds would satisfy the accuracy and readability requirements?
  • abmoraz
    abmoraz Posts: 712 Critical Contributor
    Steve111 said:
    Can we have an option to remove the dialogue scenes in pve which slows down gameplay, when there is such a high emphasis on speed for ranking in pve?
    Do you realize that this will not change rankings at all, just your perception of how you would finish?

    If it takes 3 seconds to deal with each cut scene and there are 10 nodes per event with cut scenes and you do each node 7 times... that's ... *carry the 1* ... *multiply terms*.... 3.5 minutes saved.  That might get you the few extra points that you needed to place higher... HOWEVER... the competitive people above (and below) you are also saving that same 3.5 minutes, negating any gains you think you will get.

    All removing the scenes will do is frustrate you further as to why people who are slightly faster than you place higher than you.  It won't actually change the rankings.


    ---

    Alternatively, I would prefer auto-play cut-scenes to go away entirely, being replaced by a button next to the "Play/Replay Mission" button that says "Play cut scene(s)" so we could go back and read them after doing our clear.

    To this day, I have no clue what the story line is for several of the events** since I have to plow through the nodes as fast as possible to maintain reward rankings.  I feel bad for whoever the script writer is for the events, because his work is not seen by a sizable chunk of the player base.

    ** Strange Sights, the Guardians of the Galaxy one with mindless ones and symbiotes, Wakanda, and the Howard the Duck/Spider-man one come to mind.  I have no idea what the "plots" are for any of those... just the layouts and the order to speed run them.
  • aesthetocyst
    aesthetocyst Posts: 538 Critical Contributor
    abmoraz said: ... Do you realize that this will not change rankings at all, just your perception of how you would finish?

    Not the point. 1 less click every node cleared = the world is that much a better place.

    abmoraz  ... I would prefer auto-play cut-scenes to go away entirely, being replaced by a button next to the "Play/Replay Mission" button that says "Play cut scene(s)" so we could go back and read them after doing our clear.

    .That would be better yes. Unlock pages, read the whole issue later on your own time.

  • abmoraz
    abmoraz Posts: 712 Critical Contributor
    aesthetocyst said:
    abmoraz said: ... Do you realize that this will not change rankings at all, just your perception of how you would finish?

    Not the point. 1 less click every node cleared = the world is that much a better place.

    Agreed, but the OP didn't frame it that way.
    aesthetocyst said:
    abmoraz  ... I would prefer auto-play cut-scenes to go away entirely, being replaced by a button next to the "Play/Replay Mission" button that says "Play cut scene(s)" so we could go back and read them after doing our clear.

    .That would be better yes. Unlock pages, read the whole issue later on your own time.
    Thinking through this more, from a player stand point, this seems like a "no-brainer", but from a developer/publisher point-of-view, that could be seen as a tacit approval of the "tapping/play as fast as possible" meta of which the optics may not be well received.

    That being said, I would prefer to have the story be a separate part of each node that could be re-read without having to play the node and the meta be solved by removing the placement rewards entirely and folding them into the progression rewards instead.  Leave placement for PvP and leave Progression for PvE.
  • Phumade
    Phumade Posts: 2,501 Chairperson of the Boards
    abmoraz said:
    That being said, I would prefer to have the story be a separate part of each node that could be re-read without having to play the node 
    Ultimately you would think they as content developers would want people to actually read and appreciate the work they put into the episodes.  I would agree they would have more readers/viewers if they offered some way to just read the dialogue / intersitials

  • Ducky
    Ducky Posts: 2,255 Community Moderator
    **Please keep the thread on topic. If you want to discuss the logistics of Story mode and speed, please do so in a separate thread. Thanks!**
  • carrion_pigeons
    carrion_pigeons Posts: 942 Critical Contributor
    Could you walk us through the thinking that leads to a character getting buffed/nerfed?

    You've referenced win rate as being a significant factor in your internal rankings, how important is that compared to other factors, like speed, cross-synergy with other characters, sustainability, or raw usage?  How important is PvE relative to PvP in this conversation?  Regarding OML specifically, his win-rate could be #1 on the list and he could still be unplayable under most circumstances, if it takes forever to win and he doesn't endure well from match to match.

    (I don't actually care about the OML nerf specifically, I'm not trying to argue about it.  It's just the character that you happened to be talking about when you were discussing nerfs.  I'm curious about the process, not the justification for OML in particular.)
  • udonomefoo
    udonomefoo Posts: 1,630 Chairperson of the Boards
    What %-age of the active player base has at least one champed 5*?


    I love random stats, you guys should throw some out once in a while.
  • Punisher5784
    Punisher5784 Posts: 3,845 Chairperson of the Boards
    Demiurge_Will said:
    carrion pigeons said:
    Could you walk us through the thinking that leads to a character getting buffed/nerfed?

    You've referenced win rate as being a significant factor in your internal rankings, how important is that compared to other factors, like speed, cross-synergy with other characters, sustainability, or raw usage?  How important is PvE relative to PvP in this conversation?  Regarding OML specifically, his win-rate could be #1 on the list and he could still be unplayable under most circumstances, if it takes forever to win and he doesn't endure well from match to match.

    (I don't actually care about the OML nerf specifically, I'm not trying to argue about it.  It's just the character that you happened to be talking about when you were discussing nerfs.  I'm curious about the process, not the justification for OML in particular.)
    Key metrics we look at are:
    - Win rates
    - Usage relative to ownership
    - How many resources players are investing in this character vs. others

    And we look at player perception, including:
    - Sentiment about the character on the forums and elsewhere
    - How expert players at the company feel about the character
    - Where the character shows up in power rankings/tier lists
    - Comments about the character from reviews/surveys/player interviews

    When those sources give us signals something might need to change, we ask:
    - From a pure numbers perspective, considered by themselves, is this character balanced? What assumptions underlie that and are they correct?
    - How's the meta impacting the strength of this character? Is the problem with this character secretly a problem with another character or another class of characters?
    - How is the way the meta is likely to change in the future going to affect this character?
    - If the character is too strong and that's causing a bad player experience, is there something other than a nerf that will help? Releasing a counter, or adding a buff to someone else?


    This is great info. Thanks. But there is still a constant plea to rebalance (nerf) 5* Gambit. On the other hand, there is a constant plea to rebalance (buff) 5* Hulk. What is the estimated amount of time it takes the Development team to choose a character that they want to rebalance, revising their skills/costs/damage, testing, then releasing the rebalanced character? It would be extremely insightful if you can walk us through the rebalancing process.

  • Stax the Foyer
    Stax the Foyer Posts: 941 Critical Contributor
    How expert players at the company feel about the character



    Top. Men.
  • alphabeta
    alphabeta Posts: 469 Mover and Shaker
    Demiurge_Will said:
    - How expert players at the company feel about the character

    Must not get self banned
    must not get self banned
    must not get self banned


    tinykitty the tinykitty - it’s so insane i’m crying with laughter - a 5 year 4* transition roster as best is an expert player 

    smh
  • TimGunn
    TimGunn Posts: 257 Mover and Shaker
    hello, my question is will more than one 4 star character feed the same 5 star character (through champ rewards) or is it limited to one 4 star per 5 star?  
  • LifeofAgony
    LifeofAgony Posts: 690 Critical Contributor
    - How expert players at the company feel about the character

    How do you quantify expert?
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