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mags1587

bonfire01 wrote:

Secondly there are a number of heroes which are very strong/balanced in players hands but nearly useless in the AI's hands (most obvious example is C.Mags who's blue is placed randomly, who'll not save red til after strike tiles and only use it 1/turn regardless of availible AP and will use his purple with few if any of either blue or red on the board). Any hero that places tiles is instantly much worse, as well as any conditional abilities that rely on special tiles or specific conditions to work well. Are there any plans to improve this situation and does the severe handicap these characters have on PvP defence get factored into their balancing?

Another example is GSBW's deceptive tactics where the green is randomly placed instead of grouped together. Is making a change to where the AI places tiles a small tweak or a large effort?

Unknown

@ daveomite

You have some good points, however, when you sat people hit you for 45-55 points when 50 is the max and no one in history of game has been hit for 51-55, it kinda throws your credibility off.

IceIX

Ozark Boatswain wrote:

How much playtesting goes into a new character?

I couldn't give you an hour amount, but lots. Any given new character goes through multiple design passes on viable abilities that don't make it off the design block into prototyping. Then the abilities are given rough balance and tested by the designer. Usually this results in more tinkering or throwing out of abilities that don't work out. Then it goes to internal QA and staff for some playtesting. Repeat tinkering. Then on to D3/Marvel who bang on it as well. Cue more tinkering. At that point things are pretty well good, but in the meantime, a dozen or two people have spent hours each playing with any given character. Of course, that's dwarfed into oblivion upon the first hour of release in the wild.

kidicarus

1. Do you have any plans to automate the cheat detection process? I had the end of S1 spoiled by a 'suspected' cheater and it took far too long to get a response from Customer Services(A few days after when it wouldn't have made an impact to results or brackets), which would indicate an even longer timeline for back office to deal with the report.

2. I'm a big fan of the MPQ metagame, whether it's managing your scaling, or doing well on the leaderboards - well anything that deepens the gaming experience beyond match 3. I would like to know what the current situation is regarding achievements and when/if you plan to implement them.

Good to see you on the forums IceIX!

Unknown

Hi IceIX, thanks for doing this and I echoed the sentiments that more of such conversations will be much appreciated in the future.

For me, I would like to understand the inner workings of the devs and publisher.

1) is demiurge and d3 doing well financially?
2) how is the revenue/profit of MPQ over the period since launch?
3) is MPQ the biggest revenue driver for both demiurge n d3?
4) when does the license from Marvel ends?
5) do you guys have the permission and/or intention to provide cosmetic additions to the game? E.g. Costumes, hats, animation, etc

IceIX

TazFTW wrote:

So what happened that cause The Sentry to go from that teaser silhouette to his Fabio-ness?

That art was silhouetted from the art of one of his abilities. I'd have to check in-game to see which one.

Exce1sior

IceIX wrote:

Exce1sior wrote:

Will anything be done about repetitive covers? I received 5 Ares in a row from my 2* or better tokens.

Possible, but fairly unlikely. The covers are given out on a random roll and all our checks show that everything works out to a statistical distribution nearly exactly equal to the listed odds. Setting a streakbreaker in to stop that sort of thing for any individual user would stand a decent chance of breaking that sort of distribution without some very delicate balancing.

Thank you. I've also gotten a dozen Moonstone covers over the past 2 weeks. Any tips for getting variety for 2* or better other buying packs?

IceIX

tbighead21 wrote:

The Prodigal Sun event is easily my favorite PvE event in a long time. I usually lose interest because they become very repetitive fighting the same characters over and over. The mix in this one was awesome.
Did you guys see an increase in playing time compared to other events?

Really hard to say. Yes, sort of. We think it would have been higher than most other Events if it weren't for the somewhat random downtime. With that little bugaboo clogging the pipes, we can't say with surety.

daveomite

Psykopathic wrote:

@ daveomite

You have some good points, however, when you sat people hit you for 45-55 points when 50 is the max and no one in history of game has been hit for 51-55, it kinda throws your credibility off.

My credibility? Ok. Well, maybe I got the numbers wrong then.

Nonce Equitaur 2

IceIX wrote:

Exce1sior wrote:

Will anything be done about repetitive covers? I received 5 Ares in a row from my 2* or better tokens.

Possible, but fairly unlikely. The covers are given out on a random roll and all our checks show that everything works out to a statistical distribution nearly exactly equal to the listed odds. Setting a streakbreaker in to stop that sort of thing for any individual user would stand a decent chance of breaking that sort of distribution without some very delicate balancing.

It would be easy. You're using a pseudorandom number generator of some sort, likely MCG, Mersenne twister, R250, or Wichmann-Hill.

To avoid bizarre clumpings, use the Sobol, Neiderreiter, or MKL pseudorandom number generators instead.

Unknown

IceIX wrote:

kigoral wrote:

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.

Nope, this is completely separate from any missing rewards. Those requests can and should go through the CS process. If you haven't heard anything back on an active ticket that's over 48 hours old, please PM me with the ticket number. I'll round up the PMs and send them off as a concentrated blast to CS to get it handled.

Thank you. I sent you a PM with the ticket number. we all appreciate you taking the time...

DD-The-Mighty

IceIX wrote:

gamar wrote:

This came up earlier in the week, but why is ISO such a "bad" value? HP seems a little steep but reasonable, while ISO will give you, what, 5 or 6 character levels for 20 bucks? It seems kind of ridiculous. Is that just to act as a brake on people being able to rapidly level all their characters and then getting bored?

Any thought to selling alternate costumes and hats? It's a gold mine, I'm telling you!

Iso purchasing is intended to be a nice little injection but not a method with which to buy your way to the top. It's a type of "Ahh, ****, if only I had the extra 5K to level Psylocke for this Tournament..." thing instead of "Just got Daken! Let me blow some stocked HP on him and max level him instantly!" If Iso is priced too low, the game comes closer to the dark side of P2W.

I guess the majority of my post concerns those who have all of the 1*s and 2* they need/want and are only in need of 3*s:

1- In light of this (somewhat assumed) revelation on the lack of "value" in purchasing iso, Are the systematically low 3* rates on almost all packs part of this design philosophy? As it stands a good chunk of players-in-the-know advise against cover packs as they are far too expensive for the risks of pulling nothing but/or majority 2* stars. This leads to my next question--

2 - Are there plans to address the recent spiked difficulty in winning specific 3* covers? IS the subsequent lowering of the number of easily available 3* covers (removal one one to give to alliances, bracketing pushing people out of the top 50, requiring top 10 to even smell more than one 3* cover), is part of a future change that has not been yet implemented?

Unknown

Have you guys thought about creating any kind of Alliance raid boss event. Have a crazy over powered tank boss that all members of the team get a shot at fighting, Each time someone fights the boss, HP damage carry's over and the team tries to chip down his health. Would make for a Fun inner alliance event and change of pace from competitive PVP/PVE grinding.

IceIX

seppethe2nd wrote:

When can we expect fury in packs

Not until he's fully released. He's being considered a teaser/trophy at the moment.

TazFTW

IceIX wrote:

TazFTW wrote:

So what happened that cause The Sentry to go from that teaser silhouette to his Fabio-ness?

That art was silhouetted from the art of one of his abilities. I'd have to check in-game to see which one.

His red then. Yellow is curled up into a ball and in green he's flying.

IceIX wrote:

- It's possible. We're not *locked* into Dark Reign, it's just the story we're telling right now. Of course, there's still more Dark Reign to tell (Iron Patriot hasn't even come on the scene yet), so there's that.

Yay more villains!

IceIX wrote:

New consumables are things that we're always discussing.

I would pay to increase my replenishable health pack allotment.

IceIX

mohio wrote:

Forgive me if you answered in one of the threads it was talked about - as another poster said - link me and I'll gladly go read it. My question is if you guys have considered making refresh times for PvE nodes server-based (i.e. fixed to "real time") as opposed to the current situation? I was actually about to make a thread about this topic asking for people's input if it's something they would like or not, so seeing if it's something you're considering or not would be great.

Also thanks for doing this thread, it's been great - and precisely what I've been hoping you'd do for a while now.

Possible, but kind of unlikely. Doing that sets things on an even stronger schedule base than it is now. At the moment, you can choose to play a little suboptimally with when you choose your refreshes to be based on when you're going to be playing 8-12 hours from then. If you know you're going to be asleep till 10 AM, you can time your refreshes to hit max again accordingly. If the server says that it's 6 AM instead, you'd better be up at 5-5:30 to eke out those last few points. That's not something we really want to be encouraging the player base to do. That's not even taking account time zones where some users would get thwacked with horrible refresh timers along with bad end times for them.

As for putting this thread together, you're welcome. I much prefer the scatter-shot more focused answers in threads that I've been doing up until recently, but with no info coming out for a while since I've been too busy, this is the next best thing.

Exce1sior

Nonce Equitaur 2 wrote:

It would be easy. You're using a pseudorandom number generator of some sort, likely MCG, Mersenne twister, R250, or Wichmann-Hill.

To avoid bizarre clumpings, use the Sobol, Neiderreiter, or MKL pseudorandom number generators instead.

And thank you as well. A lot of people talk about MMR hell. I feel like I'm in RNG hell.

IceIX

Beast1970 wrote:

It seems a minor thing, but has there been any discussion or consideration to making the player rank screen scrollable? It would be immensely helpful to be able to see what is going on outside the ten player or alliance range. Probably not feasible to scroll the entire list, but possibly expanded at least a bit from the current.

We've talked about it, but oddly, that listing is one of the things that puts a huge strain on the server. It's the reason why such lists are also *really* unresponsive in games on XBox Live / PSN. It's something that we'd love to re-engineer for easier scanning down the road but isn't a simple solution, unfortunately.

Arogntbastrd

ender wrote:

Have you guys thought about creating any kind of Alliance raid boss event. Have a crazy over powered tank boss that all members of the team get a shot at fighting, Each time someone fights the boss, HP damage carry's over and the team tries to chip down his health. Would make for a Fun inner alliance event and change of pace from competitive PVP/PVE grinding.

Ooh! Or two headed giant. You and an alliance mate team up to take down an overpowered enemy/team. Communication might be tricky but pre game strategy could be discussed via in game chat

rixmith

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