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IceIX

daveomite wrote:

Thanks for the reply Ice.

How about doing something like I've seen in some other games? A pack you can buy that would have both a certain level of hp and iso combined?

We've got that already on Steam, so it's by no means out of the question.

Unknown

IceIX:

While I understand that *3 are meant to be harder to come by, has the option be entertained for an all-*3 cover pack? Needless to say, I don't see going 10 and 42, but maybe 3 and 13? With so many *3 characters (and more all the time), some of them are not getting their chance to come out to play. I can't tell you the last time there was a Black Panther tournament.

Nonce Equitaur 2

when will the site get a favicon?

Unknown

what can be done about players exploiting OBW and other covers healing abilities in prologue to gain a higher pt total afterwards in PvP events

Unknown

icex,

someone else touched on this subject already but you didn't go into much detail about it.

what is stopping the devs from changing numerical values for some of the underpowered characters slightly each patch to try and funbalance them. if the changes are small then you could see the metrics on how often the heroes are used and the increase in their viability plus get feedback from users in real-time.

it just seems so incredibly silly to me that your company spends so much time and effort pumping out new characters when there are easily 10 or so characters that are completely worthless.

see:
bagman
yelena
IW
Xforce (in the pipeline)
Mhawkeye (in the pipeline)
Chawkeye
rag
moonstone
gsbw
loki
bullseye
daredevil

imagine a few small tweaks that would barely take any time to make would be like adding 10 new characters all at the same time. i guarantee that would make the game much more enjoyeable to players than adding one new hero. i know i for one would love that a third of the heros in the game suddenly became viable instead of the release of one new hero that will take ages to level up and get covers for.

IceIX

AresWr4th wrote:

Hey IceX....In my alli Spider-Men.I am the chief among commanders, despite allaince structure orignally being a Co-Leader with Creator( of alli) .With that said, I post today in hopes of saving my alli.My Co has been offline except one day before season one began around 8 to 10 weeks.With scare of ppl getting booted and no being able to return when alli's started he had went and made all origanal players commanders.So now I have who was supposted to be my Co-leader ghosted and a few ppl who know they cant be kicked who sign in to fight 100 points then wait for rewards.As is we have gone from top 20 to top 50 and now outside of top 100 with my hands tied.Already there is talk of some of my core best leaving cuz commanders are inactive or not contributing.Is there anyway we could un- commander all except me,and maybe another.I realize in hindsight I should Have created alli to avoid all this chaos and annoyance but, if you can find it in your power to give us our alli and earn our rewards, a chance to find others of like mind, It would save our core from scattering to the wind.Thank you either way. AresWr4th

Our policy is to largely stay out of Alliance doings unless we need to step in because of inactives or abuse of position by the Commanders (like kicking people just before rewards to troll and such). I took a look at the Alliance and demoted inactive Commanders. I can't really do much for those that are still active but sandbagging it at the moment. If/when we were to put in Admins over Commanders, this would give you more power over this sort of situation.

Unknown

Any thoughts on possibly improving AI performance? Improvements on conditional logic, having the AI eliminate strike tiles if there are too many, or shields, etc? Or properly identifying all match 5's. Or using certain abilities in a better way (like having the AI layout GSBW's purple in a straight line or waiting until 8-9 AP befor launching Ares or Human Torch's green ability)?

Seems like improvements in AI would help tamp down on the scaling problems as they are merely way to mask it's limitations against humans.

IceIX

Impulse wrote:

Great thread Ice, thanks for doing the Q&A. All interesting reading.

With regards to Spider-Man, is his usage continuing to be monitored and evaluated, or is he pretty much done for the foreseeable future?

Yep, he's still on the steady monitor board.

Unknown

IceIX wrote:

AresWr4th wrote:

Hey IceX....In my alli Spider-Men.I am the chief among commanders, despite allaince structure orignally being a Co-Leader with Creator( of alli) .With that said, I post today in hopes of saving my alli.My Co has been offline except one day before season one began around 8 to 10 weeks.With scare of ppl getting booted and no being able to return when alli's started he had went and made all origanal players commanders.So now I have who was supposted to be my Co-leader ghosted and a few ppl who know they cant be kicked who sign in to fight 100 points then wait for rewards.As is we have gone from top 20 to top 50 and now outside of top 100 with my hands tied.Already there is talk of some of my core best leaving cuz commanders are inactive or not contributing.Is there anyway we could un- commander all except me,and maybe another.I realize in hindsight I should Have created alli to avoid all this chaos and annoyance but, if you can find it in your power to give us our alli and earn our rewards, a chance to find others of like mind, It would save our core from scattering to the wind.Thank you either way. AresWr4th

Our policy is to largely stay out of Alliance doings unless we need to step in because of inactives or abuse of position by the Commanders (like kicking people just before rewards to troll and such). I took a look at the Alliance and demoted inactive Commanders. I can't really do much for those that are still active but sandbagging it at the moment. If/when we were to put in Admins over Commanders, this would give you more power over this sort of situation.

Thank ya kind sir I can work with that...

IceIX

Nereb wrote:

IceIX:

While I understand that *3 are meant to be harder to come by, has the option be entertained for an all-*3 cover pack? Needless to say, I don't see going 10 and 42, but maybe 3 and 13? With so many *3 characters (and more all the time), some of them are not getting their chance to come out to play. I can't tell you the last time there was a Black Panther tournament.

Given that a 3* is "valued" at 1250 per additional cover, the perceived value for the first cover would need to be a bit higher. You'd probably be looking at something in the range of a 6K HP 3 pack at that point. I suppose it's possible that something like that would sell, but it'd be to an extremely small subset of players that would find worth in a large proportion of 3*s with little trash. For comparison, the 3* Tournament that we did a while back had a 1/10x pack and offered something similar but did fairly poorly in sales.

IceIX

Nonce Equitaur 2 wrote:

when will the site get a favicon?

Just set that on my todo. It'll probably be a D3 logo.

IceIX

aflynn wrote:

what can be done about players exploiting OBW and other covers healing abilities in prologue to gain a higher pt total afterwards in PvP events

We've got an idea about that. It's currently in test at the moment. If it works out, you can expect rioting in the streets on the forums when we talk about what we're planning for a change. Mainly because Prologue healing has been status quo for so long that any change to that is going to make people HULK SMASH angry.

Unknown

Hey, thanks for the reply. I will continue to shoot you with more non-related questions

1) what is the current size of the dev team and are there plans to increase this given the popularity of the game?
2) what other games do you play other than diablo?
3) the World Cup is coming! who are you rooting for? personally I am a Spain fan
4) The Surface Pro 3 looks cool, should I get one?

IceIX

Toxicadam wrote:

Any thoughts on possibly improving AI performance? Improvements on conditional logic, having the AI eliminate strike tiles if there are too many, or shields, etc? Or properly identifying all match 5's. Or using certain abilities in a better way (like having the AI layout GSBW's purple in a straight line or waiting until 8-9 AP befor launching Ares or Human Torch's green ability)?

Seems like improvements in AI would help tamp down on the scaling problems as they are merely way to mask it's limitations against humans.

For the most part, a lot of that would be bringing back old code. The AI used to be much more intelligent and had been dumbed down as a result of very poor playtesting. We've talked about doing something similar to that where maybe the difference between Simulator and Simulator Hard isn't levels but AI, but nothing has congealed.

Clintman

IceIX wrote:

Nereb wrote:

IceIX:

While I understand that *3 are meant to be harder to come by, has the option be entertained for an all-*3 cover pack? Needless to say, I don't see going 10 and 42, but maybe 3 and 13? With so many *3 characters (and more all the time), some of them are not getting their chance to come out to play. I can't tell you the last time there was a Black Panther tournament.

Given that a 3* is "valued" at 1250 per additional cover, the perceived value for the first cover would need to be a bit higher. You'd probably be looking at something in the range of a 6K HP 3 pack at that point. I suppose it's possible that something like that would sell, but it'd be to an extremely small subset of players that would find worth in a large proportion of 3*s with little trash. For comparison, the 3* Tournament that we did a while back had a 1/10x pack and offered something similar but did fairly poorly in sales.

You release 2 new 3* a month! and the game is maturing to the point where 3* are not really rare at all what is rare is having enough to even use the character. The prices and rarity of the 3* is a bubble! you would be much better off selling more plentiful 3* covers at a rate that passes a common sense test! no one really values a cover at 1250HP, they may value the last 2-3 that they need to max the character at 1250, but having a huge population with 5-6 covers isn't driving progression.

One you have a team of 3* you don't need the covers to compete, you get them for diversity and to have fun playing with different comps.

The game now has changed, I think you guys would make a killing by lowering your prices, as long as you keep releasing characters you can pretty much print money.

Unknown

Ice9

Is there any reason the AI refuses to match the L 5 combination and always goes for the 4 in a row instead?

tbighead21

I agree that having sales so often would devalue HP and lead to people needing to spend money to stay competitive.

Unknown

IceIX wrote:

rixmith wrote:

Thanks for staying late into the evening to answer our questions.

You're cutting into this evening's Diablo 3 time! Those T4 rifts won't clear themselves!

A man after my own heart...

Quick --- which is more likely....pulling a Green Thor cover from a standard token, or pulling a Ring of Royal Grandeur from an Act 2 cache?

IceIX wrote:

Given that a 3* is "valued" at 1250 per additional cover, the perceived value for the first cover would need to be a bit higher. You'd probably be looking at something in the range of a 6K HP 3 pack at that point. I suppose it's possible that something like that would sell, but it'd be to an extremely small subset of players that would find worth in a large proportion of 3*s with little trash. For comparison, the 3* Tournament that we did a while back had a 1/10x pack and offered something similar but did fairly poorly in sales.

Here I would disagree. If you can get a *specific* 3* cover for 1250 HP, then the value of a *random* 3* cover should be less. For example, if you offered a 3* token for 1250 HP, I would not purchase it, because I could buy the exact cover I wanted for the same price. I guess you have to factor in people missing 3* covers, so for them the perceived value may be higher.

Unknown

Pjoe0211 wrote:

Ice9

Is there any reason the AI refuses to match the L 5 combination and always goes for the 4 in a row instead?

Pretty sure this was covered couple of pages back. essentially he said the AI has been dumb down so people have more fun. further, this also shift the focus to the player/offence.

in short, they do not want the AI to be too smart or people have less fun playing the game.

IceIX

laoahpeh wrote:

Hey, thanks for the reply. I will continue to shoot you with more non-related questions

1) what is the current size of the dev team and are there plans to increase this given the popularity of the game?
2) what other games do you play other than diablo?
3) the World Cup is coming! who are you rooting for? personally I am a Spain fan
4) The Surface Pro 3 looks cool, should I get one?

1 - Haven't done a headcount lately. Want to say 28 dev, 10 publisher right now? And yeah, both D3 and Demiurge are on the look out to expand (a little). We both like staying small and agile over all though, despite the headaches it sometimes give in having to wear 8 hats a piece.
2 - Currently my jams for play time go in order of: MPQ, Diablo 3, Warframe, Dynasty Warriors 8 XL (insert whichever is the newest DW/SW/WO here), random indie game/iOS game. Gonna have to play through Watch Dogs here soon too.
3 - Germany, mainly because my wife is a huge fan of the team. Looking forward to June 26th when I get to watch them trounce the US team next to a couple friends that are fans of the locals.
4 - The Surface Pro 2 is the single best purchase of computer hardware I have made and I am drooling over the Pro 3. My single gripe about the Pro 2 is that it's only running an Intel HD 4400 and the Surface Pro 3 is the same. It's good enough for games right now as long as you're OK with low/mid quality graphics, but I would love a real card in there. Shocked the Pro 3 didn't come with an Intel Iris Pro like a lot of the Steam Machines have.