January 5th 2017 Update Discussion

[Sparton_LOTB]

Since the patch notes thread normally ends up becoming a general discussion thread, I figured I’d try something new and just make a separate discussion thread in the General Discussion subforum to improve visibility of discussions about the new update.

You can see the details of the update that has just gone live in the Game Updates forum post (http://forum.ironmaidenlegacy.com/showthread.php?4658).

[Aristo4]

Great, some nice quality of life issues addressed :cool:

Keep it up.

[BillLion]

Thanks, Sparton. These look like some positive adjustments.

Can you clarify what this means?:

"Adjusted rewards for some tiers of "Improve Trooper Champion" to give Ironite instead of Gold"

[slauki]

hi sparton, sounds good so far. is the trooper removal bug also adressed in the tuning update?
many people cannot remove troopers, would be great if that could be fixed, since this is really hurting our progress...


i like the changes for PVP only the 60 minutes is maybe a little too much, 45 as adressed in the first try would maybe be better, but we have to try it before a final conclusion is possible :D

EDIT: still not able to remove troopers, maximum is reaches it says. wasn't able to remove them since new years, and a lot of guys too, that's really annoying.

EDIT 2 : wow winning and loosing up to 25 points it's really hard, i wish the defense would only lose 50% of the winners points.

[Sparton_LOTB]

Can you clarify what this means?:

"Adjusted rewards for some tiers of "Improve Trooper Champion" to give Ironite instead of Gold"

Before, all tiers of this achievement gave gold (20k, 30k, 40k, and 50k). However, after the tutorial, because you could easily change your champion to the starting 3 star Rock Golem, you'd suddenly get 50k Gold (or if you lucked out with an early 4 star or 5 star pull from a Rare Soul, you'd get even more Gold). This really messes with our early-game economy expectations, so we figured it's better to give a bit of Ironite that players can spend on Sands, souls, etc instead of all that Gold (or they could convert it into some Gold if they felt that was best).

If you've already redeemed the rewards for those achievements, though, they're still already collected.


hi sparton, sounds good so far. is the trooper removal bug also adressed in the tuning update?
many people cannot remove troopers, would be great if that could be fixed, since this is really hurting our progress...

This is still being investigated.


i like the changes for PVP only the 60 minutes is maybe a little too much, 45 as adressed in the first try would maybe be better, but we have to try it before a final conclusion is possible :D

In all honesty, a lot of us think shorter would be better too, but we want to try it anyways and see if we'll be surprised. Definitely let us know in the PVP Discussions subforum what your thoughts are after playing with it for a bit; maybe it'll be easier to climb when there's less attacks going out on average.

[HomemLivre]

As I've said before, Visions Eddie's Equilibrium ability is not working as it should. The healing works normally, however this skill does not remove negative effects in the second turn.
For players using Visions Eddie in PvP this is a big problem and I thought you guys would fix it in this patch ... apparently I was wrong ...

[surfingwithdje]

Hi! Since the new update, i can't enter into the game :/ It crashes during the download of the new content!
I'm on iphone 6, ios 10.2...
Anyone else has this issue ?

[mjmxiii]

Hey Sparton,

Just want to be sure I understand this correctly;

"Shard and rune inventories now allow up to 60 stacks of items each"

Does this mean that you can have 60 total items in a stack or... 60 stacks of individual items at 99 items per stack?

Thanks in advance for clarifying!

[Kaz_LOTB]

As I've said before, Visions Eddie's Equilibrium ability is not working as it should. The healing works normally, however this skill does not remove negative effects in the second turn.
For players using Visions Eddie in PvP this is a big problem and I thought you guys would fix it in this patch ... apparently I was wrong ...

We have this issue being worked on and it should be fixed in the next update.

-Kaz

[Sparton_LOTB]

"Shard and rune inventories now allow up to 60 stacks of items each"

Does this mean that you can have 60 total items in a stack or... 60 stacks of individual items at 99 items per stack?

60 stacks of individual items at 99 items per stack (up from 50 stacks of 99 items per stack).

We tried allowing more items per stack, but there was a compatibility issue that needs to be looked into to make that work.

[Demoonchild]

We have this issue being worked on and it should be fixed in the next update.

-Kaz

Great to know Kaz! Now F'n Visions Eddie will be more F'N on PVP!!

[PS-RagE]

My teams seem to be losing at "Game of Death" (Madness). Both the dice and the demons seem to be more accurate? Has something changed with the AI?

[slauki]

Some problems i see so far with the PVP changes:

1. the playerpool of good targets shrunk to a handfull of players. it's really dangerous now to attack lowranks, if they will revenge.
if you attack them you gain 13 if they revenge sucessfully you loose 25. so this gives you a expected value of -12 points per SOW (assuming 100% success on both sides).

I see that it's good to protect lowranks from being the target of highranks, but this seems too far off for me. BTW the difference that matters is the difference in points. If between Rank 3 and rank 1 is more than 300 points you will also get +25 even if there are only 2 ranks in between.

now you have to focus on higher ranked and higher pointed players, but they are hard to find when you are among top 20. you will have to play
the same players again and again, and they will take revenge again and again. This could eliminate any progress and get boring soon.
But that's only my expectation for now, we need more time to investigate that, but this scenario is very likely. So far the old point system was far better IMO.

2. with 60 minutes for SOW to recover, PVP is getting even more pay to win heavy. You will have to rebuy a lot if you wanna gain some good rewards.
That was better before. In combination with point 1. this could be really bad. OTAH i really enjoy the time extention for SOW to refill. The game feels
less stressfull now. It's definetly better than 30 minutes IMO. But as stated before 45 minutes seem perfect to me.

But anyway i like the trial and error approach you guys seem to have, this could lead to a nice and well rounded PVP package in the end.

Is it possible to give us some more information about the release of BNW, PVP (worldwwide) and sacrifice? Would be very thankfull for further information.

Thanks in advance

EDIT: i would eliminate, cap or cut down the loss of the players. Don't want to sound repetitive but after the mentioned problems came up, this would be more necessary than before.

EDIT 2: The rune drops on GOD (madness) seem pretty good now, thank you for adjusting that!

[MrFreeze]

Thank you for the runes. I feel like I'm making progress on talismans again.
The endless revenges are annoying in my opinion. This is one way to deter it. limiting it to once could be another way.

[Leo_ID]

Good to hear the update, and now XP runes are indeed easier to come by! Thanks!

[Leo_ID]

I still have a question regarding MACLO, GALO3, and all those sort of error types though... What are they? What triggers them? Is it really related to inventory? Or is it my internet provider?

Got 4 of those today before the loot chest drop. Lost 100 trooper badges and 20 SoT :(

[slauki]

One further suggestion:

What about BNW beta testing? PVP seems to work great and you can gain many valuable informatons.
Wouldn't it be possible to also implement a BNW beta soon? :-)

[BillLion]

Some initial feedback:

1. The increased drop rates are vey helpful -thank you!
2. The increased inventory is amazing -I cannot tell you how much frustration has been relieved since I don't have to keep selling junk after every few farming missions.
3. PVP -PLEASE keep PVP team changes separate from the PVE experience. I just lost a match because I haven't had all my coffee and didn't notice my PVP offense team was short a character due to changes I made in my PVE team. It is also annoying when doing a quick PVP match and returning to farming to have to make the changes again.
4. PVP balance -I actually like the idea of 1 SOW per 60 minutes -this goes a long way to cut down the grind. However, it is a tough pill to swallow to see so much overnight loss due to a few matches that cost a lot. PLEASE eliminate trophy losses for defensive losses. Since you won't do that please cut the losses in 1/2. This is the only way to eliminate the frustrating/annoying/defeating revenge cycles. I think this tweak might help you achieve balance without having to adjust SOW again.

[Sparton_LOTB]

[Various insights for PVP]

Thanks for sharing your thoughts.


Is it possible to give us some more information about the release of BNW, PVP (worldwwide) and sacrifice? Would be very thankfull for further information.

I think we'll be posting something along those lines soon as well.


EDIT: i would eliminate, cap or cut down the loss of the players. Don't want to sound repetitive but after the mentioned problems came up, this would be more necessary than before.


4. PVP balance -I actually like the idea of 1 SOW per 60 minutes -this goes a long way to cut down the grind. However, it is a tough pill to swallow to see so much overnight loss due to a few matches that cost a lot. PLEASE eliminate trophy losses for defensive losses. Since you won't do that please cut the losses in 1/2. This is the only way to eliminate the frustrating/annoying/defeating revenge cycles. I think this tweak might help you achieve balance without having to adjust SOW again.

This is something we're looking at adding some control over, but we need to be really careful, because otherwise people will just inflate their scores to crazy high amounts, and I feel we risk it becoming even more pay to win (as the general playerbase will have even more limited ability to respond to people indiscriminately attacking everyone else). In general, we want there to be a healthy amount of people across all the divisions, especially the highest sets (Eternal, King, and Warlord), and we're not quite there yet (partially due to the size of the PVP beta pool, but we do also feel partly due to scoring and player play habits).


The endless revenges are annoying in my opinion. This is one way to deter it. limiting it to once could be another way.

We do want to do something to discourage infinitely revenging back and forth, but we're just not certain of the best solution yet. I'm worried that by only allowing one revenge, one of two things happens:


Attackers can be revenged once, and the attacker can't revenge the revenge (if lower-ranked players commonly revenge, higher-ranked players will find it extremely hard to get to higher divisions)
Attackers can be revenged and can revenge back once (Attacker basically can come out equal at worst if they're preying on lower-ranked players, or come out ahead if hitting equal or higher-ranked players, which again strains people who've climbed higher)


Ultimately, I want to come to a solution that doesn't punish high-ranked players too much and rewards lower-ranked players so there's more people competing in the middle and higher divisions... but I'm just not sure what combination of mechanics and points will best do that.


I still have a question regarding MACLO, GALO3, and all those sort of error types though... What are they? What triggers them? Is it really related to inventory? Or is it my internet provider?

The different error codes have to do with different code paths for the game. The fact that they show up is just us being a bit more specific then the really vague HttpClientError or whatever messages we have before, but I don't know what all of the various codes themselves mean. That said, if you've found a repeatable way to make a certain error appear (maybe if you have a device with weak wifi signal you constantly see X error code in Y situation), please do report that in the Bug Reports (http://forum.ironmaidenlegacy.com/forumdisplay.php?35) subforum, as even though developers rarely respond in there, we are constantly doing passes through there and adding new issues found to our internal bug tracking system, and consistent reproductions of errors is the best way to ensure we can find and fix the underlying problem that causes an error code.


What about BNW beta testing? PVP seems to work great and you can gain many valuable informatons.
Wouldn't it be possible to also implement a BNW beta soon? :-)

I'm not sure if we'll do a beta for that feature specifically, since it doesn't have the competitive play that makes it hard to find and tune that PVP has, but it's still a possibility, and depending on how PVP's beta goes we'll probably do a beta for future features.


3. PVP -PLEASE keep PVP team changes separate from the PVE experience. I just lost a match because I haven't had all my coffee and didn't notice my PVP offense team was short a character due to changes I made in my PVE team. It is also annoying when doing a quick PVP match and returning to farming to have to make the changes again.

Constantly changing it is indeed the worst. I think our next App Store release will have improvements for this.

[Vertax616]

Hello Sparton and Kaz! I can't say something about PvP changes because I am not in Beta but I want to say drop rate adjustements are very much appreciated. Thanks a lot for that. Looking forward to BNW, PvP Worldwide and other new content!
By the way "12 Days of Christmas" video on the Facebook is really well done, loved it!

[Roquetas-5312]

Thanks Sparton for proving that I need to pay to improve on my pvp points
In case you missed my post earlier as predicted I could not make up the 215 points I lost overnight
From 10 fights still 27 points short let's see how many I lose again tonight as I'm normally attacked more than the 10 times.
I am ranked as eternal and 17th so I cannot fight anyone above my tier and only 1 person in my tier so I will always lose with this setup for points

[Chaosego888]

I am locked out, cannot get past the loading screen without uninstall/reinstall. I have did this 15 or 20 times since Wednesday night just to try to get trooper badges at least for the loyal ones. Tonight is not looking good at all since I get a server error after winning a match or upgrading a talisman, opening a soul, etc. then I have to repeat process over again. I e-mailed support last night with no response. I guess hundreds of people have the same issue. I shouldn't have to worry about losing troopers since no one can delete them anymore. Maybe this is by design to protect those locked out of the game. The update yesterday was supposed to increase XP rune drops and I had the lowest total from 30 runs through Game of Death than I have for awhile. I am not one to complain about things I know little about but this is getting ridiculous.

[Kardas]

Shield Talis are back, yay! And no more daily shard and rune clearouts! And Daily rewards are back, yay!
Not entirely sure if rune drops show up more. Sure, I get less XP shards, but I seem to get more evo materials instead. May just be RNG however.

Thanks for the update though (and a belated happy new year)!

I do have one character-related question though: I was looking at my Warrior Axis Bomber Boy and I noticed that despite dealing true damage, his MAGIC is way lower than his ATK. Is this by design or is this similar to the Warrior Pyro (who used to deal physical damage but his MAGIC stat was updated a few updates after receiving true damage)?

[Roquetas-5312]

Really not enjoying playing this since the update will give it a week for them to change the pvp points
There thinking is completely flawed they seem to have a script that they are following without giving it any thought or listening to the beta testers
I am ranked 19 but am eternal tier so if I got the rank 1 guy I can get 19 point
Rank 2-25 I can 18 points
Rank 26 unsure as only 1 player in this tier <just beat him 13 points>
Rank 27 and lower I get 13 points
Anyone From rank 27 and lower who beats me I will lose 24 points

Am currently 124 points lower than where I was at update even though I have won nearly all my SOW matches

[slauki]

Really not enjoying playing this since the update will give it a week for them to change the pvp points
There thinking is completely flawed they seem to have a script that they are following without giving it any thought or listening to the beta testers
I am ranked 19 but am eternal tier so if I got the rank 1 guy I can get 19 point
Rank 2-25 I can 18 points
Rank 26 unsure as only 1 player in this tier
Rank 27 and lower I get 13 points
Anyone From rank 27 and lower who beats me I will lose 24 points

Am currently 124 points lower than where I was at update even though I have won nearly all my SOW matches

well yeah, i also think this system is very flawed this time. probably the worst pointing system we had so far. it also freezes the action i feel, since it simply incorrect to attack lowranks anymore and there are very few targets you should be attacking. i am happy if i can attack 2 players per refresh, that's really not fun to play.
my previous considerations were confirmed at least from a high rank perspective. most can beat you when they go first and you simply loose much to much points every time. Punishing players who creates action can't be good by any means.

EDIT: 3 hours before the reset everything is quiet...shouldn't there be fireworks all over the rankings?
everyone seems to be afraid to attack someone now. exactly what shouldn't happend for a healthy PVP environment.

[Ogdengl]

Not entirely sure if rune drops show up more. Sure, I get less XP shards, but I seem to get more evo materials instead.

I have wonder though. Over the last few days I have not gotten much in the way of regular runes, but my Evo rune status is off the hook. I can't evolve any talismans though because I can't level them. Think I am up to 200 3* rainbow Evo runes.

[BillLion]

well yeah, i also think this system is very flawed this time. probably the worst pointing system we had so far. it also freezes the action i feel, since it simply incorrect to attack lowranks anymore and there are very few targets you should be attacking. i am happy if i can attack 2 players per refresh, that's really not fun to play.
my previous considerations were confirmed at least from a high rank perspective. most can beat you when they go first and you simply loose much to much points every time.

EDIT: 3 hours before the reset everything is quiet...shouldn't there be fireworks all over the rankings?
everyone seems to be afraid to attack someone now. exactly what shouldn't happend for a healthy PVP environment.

Agreed -not loving this. I do like that it takes longer to get SOW because I don't have to grind so much, but this is no good. Did I ever mention the idea of reducing trophy losses for defensive losses? ;)

[Roquetas-5312]

Agreed -not loving this. I do like that it takes longer to get SOW because I don't have to grind so much, but this is no good. Did I ever mention the idea of reducing trophy losses for defensive losses? ;)

I think 45 mins is the ideal SOW counter
30 mins was a grind
1hour with these points is ok as I don't want to play it

[MrFreeze]

It does feel very stagnant. I'm sitting at 15. I don't want try for top ten because if I attack a bunch of lower ranks and they revenge, I've made little or no progress. I'm just waiting and trying to make sure I don't slip out of top 25.

[HomemLivre]

Why can't I buy from the Arena Store?
The cooldowns simply turn into 6 days again and I was unable to buy nothing!!!!

[Patrice-1201]

Hi Sparton,

I wanted to thank you for sharing the year's roadmap in this week's announcement on the forum. It is great to be aware of what's coming and especially for some of us who have pretty much achieved most of the interesting parts of the game and are just missing a few characters for our collection.

It helps us shape and define strategies on what to collect and farm for to be ready for the upcoming features. For instance the Fragmented Characters approached has clearly changed the way I am dealing with Trooper points :-)

One observation though for some of the newer players who haven't been there since day one and are seeing a massive gap between our teams and theirs it may seem and actually be impossible to reach the kind of inventories that most of us are sporting without spending a fortune in cash on the game.

A few months ago, Rare Souls were dropping in regular levels and it wasn't uncommon to finish a day of farming with an extra 15 Rare Souls. These have been suppressed on the premise of augmenting the chances to get better characters out of Rare Souls (obtainable only very rarely through Dungeons or Secret Locations which are impossible to get to for newcomers) but I must admit that I haven't seen any changes to the RNG odds on Rare Souls, they still mostly results in "unwanted low stars characters" or Dupes... with that in mind, I think you should really be thinking of re-introducing these as standards drops in standard quests.

Another way is to maybe also propose some of the rarer Eddies (like Cyborg, Vampire Hunter and Viking) as 3 Stars characters for short periods of time (one Eddie per Day for a week every month for instance) in order to give everyone a fair chance of at least getting them. The work will happen when they build up their skills and they will find a goal to their grinding and farming.

In reality, building and getting Eddies is what gets us Maiden fans excited :-)

Keep up the good work and Up the Irons 🤘🏻

-- Written 30ft over the Alps somewhere between Nice and Zurich listening to Live After Death --