Question? Ask.

IceIX

bonfire01 wrote:

Just 2 questions....

When the PvE level cap was increased from 230 to 395 the reasoning at the time was to deal with the spiderman effect. Now that Spiderman has been neutered I was wondering if there is a plan to fully or partially revert this increased level cap. Although you said that hell scaling has been better in the Sentinel event I still ended up with bad guys over lvl300 as did a fair number of other people and, regardless of whether it's possible to beat those nodes it's both tediously long and akin to russian roulette where a single cascade can annihilate you.

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?

Scaling for this last Event was definitely better when we looked at data across all levels of the bell curve for people. Still not where we want it, as you noted. You're at the far end of that curve. It was mitigated somewhat by the strong selection of powered up characters this time around, but that's obviously not always going to be the case. With Spider-Man out of the picture, it's easier for us to scale things back and not hit spikes overall like we did with him messing with ratings. So I can say that no, we don't plan to revert the level cap, but yes, we do want players to start stepping back from that ledge of "one cascade'll do ya". Unless of course, they're still beating those missions *constantly* anyway.

The relative stupidity of AI tile placement is an intentional design. Pre-launch, it used to be much smarter, but it caused battles to be *much* harder and for players to lose far too often against certain characters like Black Widow (Grey Suit) or Magneto (Classic). Hawkeye (Classic) was also simply evil with it, causing the same kind of 4/5 of a kind cascades that players do. It didn't feel very fun at all for the AI to build up a relatively paltry amount of AP then crush you with smart play. We had quite a few people call it out for cheating actually, when it was nothing of the sort. Thus, we made the AI more random with that placement, and yes, altered powersets a little accordingly. It *does* tilt the power level more in favor of the player/offense more, but we believe that's preferable to people ragequitting because Magneto played as well as you did and cascaded you to oblivion.

NorthernPolarity

Are there any plans to introduce game modes signifncantly different than what weve seen before? For example, a survival mode where you see how many rounds you can beat with a team and no healing until you die? If so, is there any information you could give to us about whats currently being discussed? PvE/PvP as is feels like its grtting somewhat stale, and a new mode would do wonders for keeping me engaged in the game.

user311

D3 or Demiurge.... Which roles do they play in development / server maintenance?

Unknown

1. Squirrel Girl ETA?

2. How many more months will episode 4 last?

4. What happened to 3?

5. Squirrel Girl ETA?

Nonce Equitaur 2

IceIX wrote:

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.

One main reason for looking at the player rank screens is to see the number of points needed for various award brackets. For example, suppose the following information was provided. It would be much easier on the servers, and could be delivered faster. There would be much less reason to look at the various player ranks if the most vital numbers were given more transparently.

1. IW Yellow red and all rewards from the previous rank (1290 points)
2-5. Cmags Red and Blue, (1040 points)
6-10. Cmags Red and Blue, (940 points)
11-25. Cmags Red, (820 points)
26-50. Cmags Red, (780 points)
51-100. OBW Purple (760 points)
101-150. OBW Purple (655 points)
151-200. OBW Purple (540 points)

Unknown

IceIX,

I think this guy has a good idea. I think his idea would help a lot in alliance expansion as well. Not to mention, I like the idea of being able to give gifts to other players. (viewtopic.php?f=8&t=8719&p=155593#p155593)

Dui_br wrote:

~snip~
What if I could buy in game, but have it delivered to someone else? That would work!
I can buy gifts for friends that decided to join and play with me, I can make tournaments inside my alliance, much love everywhere.

Just to clarify, I'm not asking for trade option, I'm asking for have an option to buy for someone else.

mohio

daveomite wrote:

Ice,

Some of these questions/thoughts may have already been mentioned here, but going to ask anyway.

1. In PvP, as others mentioned, we wind up in pockets where the same people keep cycling in nodes, no matter how much you skip. Given that, we have to skip...meaning, many of us are spending tons of iso skipping instead of on leveling. That's not a good thing for progression.

Sorry to cut out the rest, it was well thought-out and good points, but this is what I wanted to comment on/2nd. It might just be "MMR hell" or just being in a particularly small bubble of people both in my MMR and in my point range, but I have literally hit skip only to be given the exact person I just skipped. This has actually happened two or three times in just the last week as a matter of fact. It's completely absurd and as I'm paying 10 iso each time I skip someone (whether you literally pay or just take a smaller reward next time, it's costing 10 each time) it is a complete slap in the face. I get to 7-800 and all of a sudden I'm skipping the same 6-8 people (always worth 18-22 pts) over and over before somehow (how come I wasn't seeing this guy after the first round of skipping?) being offered someone worth 28+.

Unknown

Simple question how does your customer service deal with tickets, I seem to get replies for newer tickets before older ones. It can be quite frustrating when your initial complaint/concern is not looked into and they reply to the most trivial one and don't even acknowledge the more concerning one to you.

rixmith

Ice,

Any idea circulating at Demiurge about how to get more diversity into the PvP teams? I know we kick it around in a lot of threads on the forum, but:

1. Do you guys think there is a problem with team diversity during PvP
2. If so, any thoughts?

IceIX

DayvBang wrote:

1. I haven't gone on at length about it, but I've posited before that web tiles are a broken mechanic. Venom's original Devour and all of Classic Spidey's original moveset could be overpowered by over abundant web tiles, and both characters were made much weaker when attempts to mitigate this were introduced. Has there been any discussion over the possibility that web tiles just don't add enough to the game for the complexity they add to skill balancing?

2. Any discussion of the fact that giving an over-leveled Human Torch two goons to feed him four AP per turn might be objectively evil?

3. Any chance we'll see Captain Marvel (Marvel Now! version, Carol Danvers)?

4. Is Sentry's green skill considered to be well-balanced, and were the effects of strike tiles taken into account for it?

1. Yes, they were. The problem really manifests in when both are used together, which admittedly doesn't happen due to their power disparity. If we were to do a 2/3* Venom, both characters would instantly see quite a power boost by the relative ease of Web tile generation and their associated effects. So it's hard to say that they're broken, just that they don't have the key to unlocking their true power by themselves.

2. No less evil than giving an over levelled Black Widow (Modern) the same.

3. Possible, yes. Makes sense given that Moonstone is already tooling around in her Ms. Marvel-esque costume. That's not a tease for her imminent arrival or anything, but she makes more sense to show up than a character unrelated to the DR story.

4. For the base effect, yes, fairly well balanced. For the Strike tile enhanced effect, unsure. I'll double check on that. I *think* it's supposed to either take the effect of your or enemy Strike tiles into effect for the self team damage, but I'm not 100% sure.

ragthor

what is the max number of covers that we can get? and if no max will the price raise on cover ever set on one price? thank you for your time on these Q and A.

IceIX

BelligerentGnu wrote:

Regarding Season 1 Burnout - there was a fantastic suggestion on how to deal with this in a recent thread: Only the top 80% of your event scores count towards your total season score. Only the top 80% of an alliance's player scores count toward the alliance's score in that event. Gives everyone the chance to skip a few events without letting their alliance down or putting themselves out of contention. I really don't see why you couldn't adopt a system like this.

What the heck happened to theme events? Divine Champions? Lone Star? Bad is Good? I seem to remember hearing there was a female-champ only tourney at one point, too.

As appreciated as the compensation is, is there any internal discussion going on about improving the way Demiurge handles events like Heavy Metal/Heroic Oscorp, and customer service in general? Because I'd rather have communication from the devs during these kinds of events than extra ISO afterwards.

Oh, and when is the Simulator starting?

You'd think that would solve things, but from everything we've discussed with people at other devs that have anything similar, it doesn't really. What it does is causes players to play a lot at first, fall off for a couple Events towards the middle (because they've got slack), then play *extra* hard towards the end as they realize they may be under quota.

Themed Events like you state have been taking a nap while we figure out how to make them a bit better for income. I know it sounds a bit mean, but themed Events did horrible in sales in comparison to even a 5th run of a character based PVP Event. While not *everything* is about the money, the disparity is just a bit too much to shrug at when we look at where to place more dev time.

We need better communication as a whole for things like that, yes. Really, what happened was that with the relatively small staff both Demiurge and D3 has, we were all running around doing different things to handle things and communication got prioritized lower than it probably should have had. It's a good learning experience for something to avoid the next time (hopefully never, but Murphy's Law says otherwise) something explodes spectacularly.

Sim (and Starfall) should be popping up on the morrow.

Unknown

It might've been answered elsewhere, but I couldn't find it: any plans to add Facebook integration to the Steam version? Seems crazy that I can't continue playing with my account on my PC when I come back home and need to keep playing on my phone.

Unknown

IceIX wrote:

bonfire01 wrote:

Just 2 questions...
The relative stupidity of AI tile placement is an intentional design. Pre-launch, it used to be much smarter, but it caused battles to be *much* harder and for players to lose far too often against certain characters like Black Widow (Grey Suit) or Magneto (Classic). Hawkeye (Classic) was also simply evil with it, causing the same kind of 4/5 of a kind cascades that players do. It didn't feel very fun at all for the AI to build up a relatively paltry amount of AP then crush you with smart play. We had quite a few people call it out for cheating actually, when it was nothing of the sort. Thus, we made the AI more random with that placement, and yes, altered powersets a little accordingly. It *does* tilt the power level more in favor of the player/offense more, but we believe that's preferable to people ragequitting because Magneto played as well as you did and cascaded you to oblivion.

Me and the GF always said that the true hallmark of a great game is if you thought the damn thing was cheating yet still kept coming back to play it.

Xeonic-Ice

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.

I really hope that something is added to the season rewards that guarantee at least one 3* character for placing well in a season. I can't begin tell you how upset I was finishing the season in a pretty good position (12th), getting 20 tokens, and only getting 2* characters while everyone else in my alliance got at least two 3* or higher. It was very depressing or a month of stress to get nothing I could use.

IceIX

daveomite wrote:

Ice,

Some of these questions/thoughts may have already been mentioned here, but going to ask anyway. <Snipping good commentary that isn't directly addressable>

2 (cont). Given these types of changes, it has basically made "shield hopping" almost a necessity. Since a players visibility in some one else's queue is not based on power level, that leaves many players in the "punching bag" situation if they get too high in points. Because they appear almost immediately, are worth large points, and are more easily defeated.

3. Speaking of PvP changes, can you please consider adding a more friendly shield? In many cases, I shield because of spam attacks coming in. In others, I shield to heal up some. It would be nice to have a cheaper, shorter shield, similar to what you have in LR. I think a one hour shield, possibly 25 HP would be a highly used one. It would save a little money, but it would cause more people who don't normally shield, to consider it.

4. Given the MMR issues with node cycles, that means everyone has to skip, a lot. Just earlier, I hit someone, won, came out and skipped in a node. That same player came up again. Skipping beyond them, they came up yet again. But the main issue to me, is the skip tax. That can easily lead to 100-200 between matches at times, trying to find a match above 15 points.

That leads me to the next one:

5. Health regeneration time is astronomical, especially for a 3* 141. That combined with the length it takes for health packs to regen, it all gets out of control if you are trying to put in an hour or two in a PvP.

<Snip some good suggestions>

Lastly, there have been a few threads and mentions of iso/hp sales, but many of us have never seen them. Is that not something that people who have actually spent money in game are allowed to do? It would be nice to see the occasional sale from time to time, as the costs are already pretty high. For instance, just for me to level Punisher from 120 to 141, if I were to pay my way to it, is well over $100. If you actually were to check my account in game, you'd see if have made quite a few purchases in my time playing. So, some breaks/kickbacks would be nice at times.

Thanks for taking the time to field questions today Ice. I know many of us appreciate it. Also, please excuse any misspellings, etc as I'm currently on my phone.

Shield hopping - We've noticed, and it's an artifact of two things: One is the server lag that was allowing people to see you and queue you up quite possibly after you shielded. The other is that if you are sitting in someone's cache of people to fight but haven't popped up yet (so aren't on one of the three nodes), then unshield, you'll still directly be in that cache. So users will often see a freshly unshielded opponent when normally that person wouldn't have popped up until the cached opponents would have been cycled through and you got pulled down from the server.

Friendly Shield - It's possible, but it's quite likely that what we'd see is that players would just change from 3 hour shielding to 1 hour shielding at the end of Tournaments. It would help with the situations you're talking about but wouldn't do much for the status quo. It would also increase the shield hopping issue you're seeing as it would be more likely that you'd be hanging in more caches after an hour than after three.

Skip tax - Noted. Going back to previous statements and what you're saying here, this another portion of MMR Hell. While we can and will make tweaks to alleviate this, we really want to get rid of those pockets that cause this behavior to begin with.

Health regen - The general concept at current is that you'll move from one character to another if one goes down and you're out of Health Packs. In PVE Events, this is fine and people do this often. In Versus Tournies, that's point suicide. We've got some ideas on this.

Random Iso/HP sales - What you're probably seeing is the incentive sales that we do from time to time for people that haven't monetized in the game at all. Noted on more sales overall. We are however, extremely wary of training the player base to wait only for sales to spend money. We want the purchases as they are to have value and for sales to be bonuses. With sales run too often, the regular value becomes "overpriced" and the sales become the normal price.

IceIX

kidicarus wrote:

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!

1. I can't get into how we deal with cheaters too far, but we have both manual and automatic systems.
2. Achievements are a very minor thing on Android at the moment (there are a few, but they don't do anything). We'd love to get something a bit more robust in the game, but it's not a priority at the moment.

daveomite

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?

Bacon Pants

Implementing achievements (or trophies for you Playstation losers ) would be an interesting addition. Obviously the easy ones are there...Win 25 matches, 50, 100, ect ect and you receive ISO or HP.

More interesting ones could be...Play an entire pvp with Bag-Man in your team. The reward for that would have to be something amazing though as only an insane person would do that.

Unknown

IceIX wrote:

Themed Events like you state have been taking a nap while we figure out how to make them a bit better for income. I know it sounds a bit mean, but themed Events did horrible in sales in comparison to even a 5th run of a character based PVP Event. While not *everything* is about the money, the disparity is just a bit too much to shrug at when we look at where to place more dev time.

It doesn't sound mean at all, it sounds honest, and I appreciate you for that.

Two questions:

1) What do your metrics show you about sales on your 10-packs, 42-packs etc. Are they still doing well compared to before? Better? Worse? I find it hard to believe the packs are doing better than if you were offering a guaranteed hero, or even if the featured hero's drop rate was upped back to 20%. The boards are full of stories of people feeling they got burned by buying the bigger packs. However, maybe your metrics show that that power of intermittent reinforcement is strong enough to overcome the poorer drop rates. As you are constantly tweaking the booster packs, which are your greatest source of income, where do you see the future for these packs and their drop rates?

2) Memorial weekend went by without a sale. I understand you are doing targeted sales based on user data you have accumulated so certain players who have not played for a while or spent for a while get discounts. However, are there plans for a global sale anytime soon? Do you guys base it on national holidays or to hit certain sales numbers? As publisher is it in your power to authorize sales or is there another entity that has to power to do so?