Meet Broken Circle Studios - Developer Blog (6/2/22)

jredd

hopefully expanding/improving supports is on the table. And maybe try to speed the game up a bit and make it actually work more than one match a month. Anyways, good luck.

Yepyep

illusionist_KA said:

honest question, will feeders (3 to 4* and 4 to 5*) be looked at.  Specifically, older characters as feeders and the not new characters as feeders. This will bring life back into the older characters that are sitting doing nothing.  Not everyone has resources to push for new characters. Making new character feeders right away was a travesty to the game.

I haven't read the whole thread yet, but I have to think this is the main reason (other than the cash-grab roster slots thing) to push growing the 3* tier: to restructure feeders across the board. It is fundamentally flawed now. We badly need new feeders grown in the 3* tier for farmers to harvest.

Regarding the roster-slot issue, I'm guessing someone addressed it before I did, but the introduction of a "pocket slot" is a killer idea for helping with this problem.

fight4thedream said:

 I noticed you used the terms micro/macro rebalances and I was wondering if you could expound a bit more on that topic. [lots redacted, sorry @fight4thedream]

This is important. "Rebalances" as a term most definitely includes the possibility of nerfs. I want specific, early info if they're going to nerf my hard-earned tinykitty characters.

ThaRoadWarrior said:

Should we expect schedule disruptions as the new dev team learns where all the bodies are buried and how all the tool chains work? Or was all the previous event start disruption we saw starting with Moon Knight that handoff?

You, of all people (ITB), know that we'll see those disruptions. That's inevitable and totally OK -- as long as they have a plan to communicate with us about it. Preferably in advance. But bc that's usually impossible, ASAP is mandatory. And a rational, reasonable compensation policy for people who get burned in the process.

Vhailorx said:

I am leery of a change this significant.  Renewed dev investment is good, but major revisions to an 8- year old economy are not trivial.  There is a lot that could go wrong,  and that is even before we consider the worst possibilities like a pure cash grab or other bad faith actions. 

More releases = more HP pressure.  And if they intend to do an aggressive balance pass,  should we also expect to see nerfs?  who is designing characters now?  I would exist some wildly high variance (both positive and negative) for new characters for the next year at least. 

I am cautiously pessimistic,  but hope to be proven wrong. 

This is absolutely the most insightful, important comment here. The potential for disaster is ... vast.  Hopefully the goal is big change, executed incrementally. [Forgive me, @Vhailorx  for the emphasis changes.]

Yepyep

Tony_Foot said:

hell969 said:

I would love to see true PVP so you can play vs your friends and alliance members in a real time match. 

I'd like to see actual PVP so have no names at all and cut out all this hopping nonsense and getting messages because I hit someone who left the alliance 4 years ago but is still friendly. If they wanted you could have the hits on alliance member not take points on their end so alliance fire wouldn't hurt. 

PVP should never have been about using an external app to announce shield breaks and who has the most mates on an app outside of the game. That's not even a fair system to the huge number of players that don't even know this exists.

I'm not sure how I feel about this point,* but it's absolutely spot-on in theory.

Where, exactly, does the game inform you that competitive PvP play requires 3rd-party apps and extra-alliance coordination using those apps? You'd better have more than 1 phone/tablet/computer!

*I'm not sure because I use those apps and play PvP that way. 

ThaRoadWarrior

I’m well aware we should expect some unexpected teething issues, but I asked here publicly so a public answer would exist. 

It’s been my professional experience that you are looking at at least 2-6 weeks before an engineer new to a project is meaningfully contributing to an existing code base, and that is when the original dev team is on boarding them actively. So I was curious if this was a cold, black box handoff, or if it was a transition that had already started prior to the announcement and maybe we had already been through some of it without knowing.

also the Broken Circle website lists James as the CEO, so we should probably also temper our real-time communication expectations down a bit as I’m sure he has a lot on his plate.

HoundofShadow

I'm not sure how you interpret this:

The folks at Demiurge, Broken Circle, and D3 Go! have been working tirelessly for months to align on what’s best for the game and most importantly, its players.

It was also mentioned in reddit that Gargantos was the BCS' first boss event created.

Dark Nova

Quite excited to see what the upcoming changes will be.  Rebalancing and additional content have the potential to breathe new life into a game that, let's face it, has been running on auto-pilot for quite some time now.  Have you met Rocket and Groot?  I've taken out a restraining order...

I welcome new alliance events, but for the sake of new players with limited rosters, and in the interest of being able to include everyone, can we please remove the 'required character' nodes so that anyone can take part using whatever characters they have?  I've seen so many new team members get excited about a Boss event, only to be disappointed when 3 out of 5 nodes they can't play.  It makes them walk away.  Let them join in: it builds alliance unity and game loyalty.

Also, I don't think alliance events should be restricted to Boss events - let's have some new games/tasks for everyone to achieve by joining forces.  Maybe tag-team matches, where alliances have to combine to down an enemy team, but only get one shot each? (i.e. one player uses team of three, inflicts as much damage as possible, then "tags out" before their last team member dies, allowing another alliance member to take over with their own team).  No timers involved.  The skill is in co-ordinating alliance teams and knowing when to tap out before dying.  Just a thought for something different.

Finally, as many others have said, with lots of new characters in the pipeline, the cost of roster slots should be maximum 1000HP no matter how many slots are purchased.  Fix the feeders, but respect the veterans who generated 9 years of longevity.

Looking forward to the interesting times ahead.

ThaRoadWarrior

HoundofShadow said:

I'm not sure how you interpret this:

The folks at Demiurge, Broken Circle, and D3 Go! have been working tirelessly for months to align on what’s best for the game and most importantly, its players.

It was also mentioned in reddit that Gargantos was the BCS' first boss event created.

Optimistically I interpreted that as “we already did the handoff, so expect things to run reasonably well.” But pessimistically, I wasn’t sure, so I asked lol. This game isn’t built in an off the shelf game engine, so the only way to learn it is to be taught by the devs or reverse engineer it from what one hopes is good and current documentation. 

HoundofShadow

I strongly suspect they've already messed up/with the code. The frequency of cascades has increased considerably in pves. Something feels off.

Bad

They have to make their decisions accordingly for what is better for the game, although many players could think it otherwise, and what many players could think a great decision actually could damage financially the game. 
Effectively the game was on autopilot and the former studio didn't want/afford to invest a lot on time and resources for to do all what the game needs. 
I hope on this new age the previous limits could be cleared, like:
-creating more new funny content with solid rewards but not focused on speed and adressed to all types of rosters (my suggestion, gauntlets running for a week)
-to balance all the characters needed despite actually being popularly used.
- ways to help new players with the dilution but without damaging game's income (my suggestion, cover gifts without filling roster slots).
With just all the above there is a lot of work already. I'd be really happy if they did that satisfactorily.
Like I said before, I only wish them the best of lucks.

HoundofShadow

If I were them, I would differentiate paid HP and HP earned in-game. Paid HP gives you a 5-10% discount across all in-game purchase like roster slot, in-game hp bundle, shard store etc.

MegaBee

HoundofShadow said:

If I were them, I would differentiate paid HP and HP earned in-game. Paid HP gives you a 5-10% discount across all in-game purchase like roster slot, in-game hp bundle, shard store etc.

That sounds bad for UI (where to display another in-game currency?) and player morale (do we need another acceleration for purchases?).

ThaRoadWarrior

Yeah it’s fun to speculate from this side of the forum, but the deal itself most likely took months. At some point the studio wanted to divest and do other things, maybe some key talent got poached and couldn’t be replaced, or the publisher wanted a more cost effective dev team, any number of business realities might be possible, so the decision would have been made to issue a request for proposal to other studios. Then depending on how many contenders there were, the publisher would have found the option most aligned with their goals for the game, and there would have been some sort of handoff which could have been amicable and collaborative, or cold and abrupt, or somewhere in between (we have no way or need to know which tbh). Anyway, best of luck to all parties involved, I’m curious to see how it all shakes out as a player.

HoundofShadow

They will work it out. As for purchase acceleration, it's just giving bonuses to paying players. It's not like the dev is going to increase the roster slot cap from 2000hp to 2050/2100 hp. It will still be at 2000hp, but using paid hp gives you 5-10% off your next roster slot purchase. This will benefit even those players spend $2, especially for new players.

On Demiurge website, they were talking about two new games coming out and they're working some FPS PvP game, and it seems to be a big project. 

Anyway, we got to wait a few more days and see what BCS got to say.

KGB

Maybe they should change the HP cost based on the level of the character. Something like

5* - 2000 hp

4* - 1000 hp

3* - 500 hp

2* - 100 hp

1* - 50 hp

Then adding more 3* won't cost a lot of HP for the majority of players who have larger rosters. Making 5* more costly might also serve as a warning to new players to not open legendary tokens quite so fast and end up with a 5* character or two that ruins their MMR and turns them off PvP.

KGB

Ptahhotep

KGB said:

Maybe they should change the HP cost based on the level of the character. Something like

5* - 2000 hp

4* - 1000 hp

3* - 500 hp

2* - 100 hp

1* - 50 hp

Then adding more 3* won't cost a lot of HP for the majority of players who have larger rosters. Making 5* more costly might also serve as a warning to new players to not open legendary tokens quite so fast and end up with a 5* character or two that ruins their MMR and turns them off PvP.

KGB

That’s not going to work. Just roster a 1* for 50 hp, sell them and put a 5* in the slot. If you are going to label slots by level going forward then how would the existing slots be labelled?

ThaRoadWarrior

fight4thedream said:

Hello James,

[...]

Finally, if I may ask one more question, will the reintroduction of 3* characters mean they will be variants of the new 5* release or a totally separate character?  For example, when 5* Dr. Strange was released they also released a 3* version of him. Ideally, for the sake of variety, I hope they will be separate characters but thematically relevant to each other.  For example, a 5* Spiral co-released with a 3* Longshot.  

[...]
A true believer,
fight4thedream

In the twilight days of 3* releases when we were seeing 3/5 concurrents before, I seem to recall the rationale given was that they wanted young rosters to have access to the characters they liked also, which is why they were the same character at different tiers, and some of the 5*s at that time like Doc Ock seemed to be "catch up" versions. I'm curious also if that is still the driver for this decision.

KGB

Ptahhotep said:

KGB said:

Maybe they should change the HP cost based on the level of the character. Something like

5* - 2000 hp

4* - 1000 hp

3* - 500 hp

2* - 100 hp

1* - 50 hp

Then adding more 3* won't cost a lot of HP for the majority of players who have larger rosters. Making 5* more costly might also serve as a warning to new players to not open legendary tokens quite so fast and end up with a 5* character or two that ruins their MMR and turns them off PvP.

KGB

That’s not going to work. Just roster a 1* for 50 hp, sell them and put a 5* in the slot. If you are going to label slots by level going forward then how would the existing slots be labelled?

That's easy. They label by what's in the existing slot. So if you sell a 1* character, you open up a slot that holds a 1* character only.

KGB

Aueio

I'm glad to hear.
Being a pretty new player to the game still working my 3* roster up I've felt "left out" with zero new relevant content for me. A note diverse 3* roster will be good and fun for newbies.
All those who don't see any reason for more 3* why don't you just skip them?

KGB

Aueio said:

All those who don't see any reason for more 3* why don't you just skip them?

You can't. They are required for PvE/PvP.

KGB

FairyBlades52

Long time casual player here, rarely post. 

Many of these changes sound exciting. I already liked getting an actual Gargantos cover instead of a vault token or LL
token in the last Alliance event so thanks for that change! 

I do wonder, with more 3* being released, will 4* releases slow down? There are just too many! I would appreciate a few more 3* if the 4* releases go down to once a month. 

I would love new PVP events that limit the amount of 5* characters or lock them away from play. Like have iHulk but Okoye locked away. Or have SW locked when Colossus is god boosted. One of favorite events is where you have to use one character of each star type encouraging me to change up my teams. PvP gets stale when it is the same teams over and over, the god boosted 5* are what brought me back to PvP. 

I like when the game forces us out of our player comfort zones or forces us to look at which character has a certain power needed. 

I don’t think slot cost keeps out newbs, I think lack of variety in 3* does when it takes forever to get one 4* covered now that there are so many. Having a max champed 3* locking up 1000 HP, when the dupe is farmed it will only give you 650 HP, you’re entering a 350 HP deficit every time you duplicate a 3*. The deficit is greater once you get to 2000 HP per slot.  

I just don’t see how the rewards garnered on your SCL 10 level per event  is worth more than the deficit created.