Discussion - Patch Preview: R41

ZzzWolph wrote:

I'm looking forward to the upcoming UI changes and future event types, though.

So am I... So am I. Playing around with the ability firing on dev, I want it out NAO for Live, but the client code just won't support it quite yet. Needs a little more baking.

forgrim wrote:

the only way it affects casuals is that you no longer have to game iso to level to heal, instead of leveling just naturally. lots of us were saving iso and not capping our characters for the end of tournament pushes, etc., so its a quality of life change altho it nerfs the healing. but now that you have 5 heals and heals come every half hour instead of hour and a half, ur net healing should increase.

Pretty much exactly it. From our data, this *should* net out to about the same playtime or maybe more (as you could pop a 6th Pack after using 5) compared to currently where you run out of your 4 and you're stuck waiting an average of 50-60 minutes. We're also expecting team variety to go up a little as players will use other heroes instead of gaming Iso as current.

ZzzWolph wrote:

IceIX wrote:

So am I... So am I. Playing around with the ability firing on dev, I want it out NAO for Live, but the client code just won't support it quite yet. Needs a little more baking.

What's the ETA looking like for this? Will episode 2 accompany this patch?

ETA for that change would be <InTheory>R42</InTheory>. I can't say that for sure till R42 is pushing out for submission of course, since things could always change. ETA for R41 is "When first party says it's ready". It'll have support for Episode 2, but I don't believe our plans are to release that right away. It's also got some improvements to Lightning Rounds as well, which went pretty darned well. We can still run Lightning Rounds with R40, but we can't really change them up as easily. There are other event support items in there that I can't talk about yet.

uuddlrlr wrote:

Ability maximums are now listed for each character in the Ability Screen for each character

Is it a maximum of 13 skill levels for all characters? I know one-star characters have that limit, but don't know about higher-starred characters.

Correct. 13 for all characters regardless of rarity.

greggray24 wrote:

Is there a followup to the prologue PvE missions or is it all featured events where we compete with each other from here on? Would not mind relaxing with non timer based missions again. Especially since I am falling behind and am concerned that this game will become too much pay to win.

Also, would like you guys to give some thought to the difficulty of opening up new slots for covers. I've pretty much exclusively used my gold for slots but at 200 a slot it is getting expensive and with new covers coming out space is tight. Perhaps a new reward might be a token to open up a new slot.

The first followup was Unstable Iso-8 which just ended. That was the first Episode of the story post Prologue. For the time being, we'll be continuing the story with these time based events. That doesn't preclude us from permanently adding to the story down the road, but for now, that's how it's being done.

We're constantly monitoring where people are spending their currency so that we can tweak things if they're too tight or loose for players. Cover Slots are one of many of those things. The thing to remember about Cover Slots is that they're "Durables", meaning that you buy them once and you forever have that asset. From what you're saying, you're right with most of our player base in your methodology. As with the above, that doesn't preclude any changes down the line. I've said it before elsewhere, but that's one of the nice things about a Live game. We can always change things if they're just not working.