Question? Ask.

IceIX

So, I've got a few straight hours this afternoon to sit around and poke at things on the forums solely. I'll be poring over threads and such and posting there too to catch up, but if you have anything you'd like to ask here, feel free. I'll keep checking this thread throughout the day and answering what I can. Obviously I won't have all the answers to every question or be able to answer spoiler type stuff but that's par for any course.

If it's something regarding the recent server issues, please be sure to read this first. That may prevent a question before you even need to say anything.

Clintman

Actually if you would be willing to go through the Stickied Green posts thread I think that would be a great place to start. I compiled all the posts that have gone green (25+ upvotes).

Compendium: Topics that have gone green. http://www.d3pforums.com/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=8561

While not every sentiment is pretty it does give a fair indicator of current perception.

Bacon Pants

With the inclusion of 1 and 2 star characters as match rewards, is there anything on the table regarding a massive overhaul to tokens? The standard recruit token has been effectively phased out by this change. Follow up, is there any discussion of a three star only token?

Thank you for your time.

IceIX

Clintman wrote:

Actually if you would be willing to go through the Stickied Green posts thread I think that would be a great place to start. I compiled all the posts that have gone green (25+ upvotes).

While not every sentiment is pretty it does give a fair indicator of current perception.

Oh, I've been reading various threads as time allows, so I've seen quite a bit of them. A lot of the threads that are big aren't really "What about...?" style stuff though and more "Here's an opinion on what is right/wrong". Like the metrics thread. Great stuff and food for thought for both the player base and us, but there's not much I can say to a lot of it other than that there's a lot there that we do already, other stuff that are great thoughts but a little off mark due to some inner workings knowledge and yet other stuff that's good to chew on.

Unknown

When will the shield lag issue be solved?

Unknown

Just wondering if you could Spoil She Hulks colors and ability names so that we could start her page on the Characters section of the forums

Also any luck on trying to get the guys to make 3* storm have 1*'s red ability? ( I so want to see that ability on some 3* its rather silly)

Emeryt wrote:

When will the shield lag issue be solved?

Have you tried refreshing your leader board a few times right away after putting the shield up? I do that every time now and it seems to help prevent that issue

Unknown

Ice,

First, thank you for taking the time to spend with us today. It is much appreciated. I'm pretty sure by all.

Just a few questions that I have seen in the "Suggestions" forum that I'm curious about.

- Is there any plan to give us the option to turn off animations in the game any time soon?

- Are there any plans to enhance alliance chat? (I understand this is not a priority over game play issues, I'm just curious)

- Does the newest patch remove the "tap through" to the tiles when trying to use special abilities? If not, do you have an approx to when it will be implemented?

IceIX

Emeryt wrote:

When will the shield lag issue be solved?

Assuming you're talking about getting hit between the time you put a Shield up and it taking effect: Much of the lag that you've been experiencing is tied to the same server issue stuff that everyone has been, just at different load points on the server. So when everything is working properly, that's not usually an issue. It's when things start getting wonky that things like that pop up. So our more general work with improving our infrastructure to decrease that sort of general lag will help with this.

What's happening at current is that you put a Shield in the queue for the server to process, the server drops the request for whatever reason, someone hits you which goes through, then your client resends the shield request since it never got an answer before. Result: Hit gets processed before shield goes through. Now,there's a bunch of corrective work that can be done on checking timestamps of the original request and updating points and such that could be done but that's difficult to display to an end user correctly and could get confusing quickly. Getting rid of the issue with the servers rejecting the first request would solve that much more elegantly in the first place.

Unknown

How do You plan to deal with the growing amount of spam on those forums?

Can we have some more members (especially morning EU time) promoted to moderators? like this guy above me

Other than that, how bout implementing some more anti-spam options, as suggested in a couple of threads already?

IceIX

MTGOFerret wrote:

Just wondering if you could Spoil She Hulks colors and ability names so that we could start her page on the Characters section of the forums

Also any luck on trying to get the guys to make 3* storm have 1*'s red ability? ( I so want to see that ability on some 3* its rather silly)

Nothing on Storm (Mohawk) yet, she's still going through final approvals so I don't want to count chickens before they're hatched. She Hulk is a Red/Green/Blue character, so that's a new combination and a bit more info. You'll have to wait on ability names a bit longer.

Unknown

What's the long range plan for dealing with the increasing number of characters? Clearly you can't stop adding characters, because that's what keeps people stuck to the game, but at the same point, it becomes increasingly difficult for new players to win enough covers of a single character to make it viable.

Nemek

One random one...

It seems like a lot of effort/resources were put into creating the alliance structure/features, have we implemented all of the current slate of alliance features or is there more currently being looked at? Or...has the team moved on to a different yet-to-be-announced feature?

Unknown

With a lot of people complaining about getting 3* covers they don't need, would either of these ideas be feasible?

1) Make a wildcard cover that can be any of the respective character covers
2) A small HP fee (let's say 100 HP or so) to modify the cover to a color you want

A good example for me would be my CMags. He is currently 5/1/1 and I've sold off 3 other Blue covers. The current event has a Blue cover as a reward, so really my goal is to hit top 50 instead of top 10 since a high season score isn't likely for me after the Spidey nerf. If I did get top 10, I get Blue/Red, use Red and change Blue to either the Red or Purple cover I actually need at the expense of HP.

Unknown

When will the bracketing go back to flat time or luck without any nudges based on profile data?

Unknown

When will the long outstanding bugs (like Sunder) get fixed and the most frequent trivial UI requests (like turn off animations at least for passives, stop tab switches, which goon controls CD) will get implemented?

Unknown

Many of the changes lately seem to be encouraging higher levels of competition. This has caused me to pull away and actually play more casually. As an effectively casual player I have mostly resigned myself to only earning a minute fraction of the covers I used to, which is largely unexciting and makes me feel the effort I do contribute is never going to accumulate into any rewards of interest.

Is there any merit to my suggestion regarding Alliance season progression rewards or other ideas that would specifically help the casual base in the game, or is the overwhelming majority of the game's focus going to continue to be based on increasing levels of competition?

Unknown

Hi,

I am a little unsure exactly about the link you posted.
Does this mean, that if we are missing rewards due to a server crash (in the middle of receiving rewards), that we need to forget about them and move on, because of this blanket reward?

I, personally, am referring to this thread: http://www.d3pforums.com/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=8409. A few of us experienced this, and none of us have received any communication from CS regarding it in the last few days.

TheHueyFreeman

As a network consultant IRL, is there any information that you can share about what the cause of the server issues are? Possibly share symptoms that you're seeing on the back-end? I'm not sure how much I would be able to help but I'm curious.

IceIX

aaronschmiz wrote:

- Is there any plan to give us the option to turn off animations in the game any time soon?

- Are there any plans to enhance alliance chat? (I understand this is not a priority over game play issues, I'm just curious)

- Does the newest patch remove the "tap through" to the tiles when trying to use special abilities? If not, do you have an approx to when it will be implemented?

Animations - Unlikely, but possible. Turning off animations means that in order to play efficiently, all players will do that and as a result, the amount of work that gets put into creating the animations goes largely to waste. We could do something snazzy where we turn them off after X uses, or after the first time in a battle or something, but that's a bit complex for a relatively small efficiency. With changes to characters removing a lot of the low AP abilities that create much of the ability animation spam, that sort of time factor gets removed to an extent anyhow.

Alliance chat - It's possible. We're always doing data style patches to improve that sort of thing. Like we've improved occurrences of chat getting eaten or it not showing up for several minutes.

Tap through - This is a rough one. It's weirdly related to device specs and reacting differently per device. Faster devices have it worse than slower ones and there doesn't seem to be a specific issue with tap areas being off or something like that causing it. It's definitely become more pronounced as of R53 and it's on our radar. At the moment, just be careful in your taps and let the ability pop up sit for a moment before blazing through it.

Unknown

When will the PVE game stop punishing good play (minimum time, turns, health loss) by adding 10-20 levels every 5-8 games?

Unknown

ZenBrillig wrote:

What's the long range plan for dealing with the increasing number of characters? Clearly you can't stop adding characters, because that's what keeps people stuck to the game, but at the same point, it becomes increasingly difficult for new players to win enough covers of a single character to make it viable.

Jumping on this, are there any conversations going on right now over there to level out HP per Cover slot as hero count increases?

And without "spoiling" naything, can you give a list of topics that the team over there are activly looking for solutions for? For example, are you all happy about the new sharding and bracketing system, or are you guys activly trying to find a solution to that issue (the issue of why a 15 day old player should be able to get the same rewards as a 150 day player but with less effort). Dont need details on what solutions you are discussing, just would be nice to know if you guys are actively working on a solution to certain things, or even consider things like that a problem.