Discuss our answers from the Dev Q&A here!
Edit: Matt, Kaz and Llexi will continue to respond to questions they missed over the next week or so.
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Discuss our answers from the Dev Q&A here!
Edit: Matt, Kaz and Llexi will continue to respond to questions they missed over the next week or so.
I'll admit, this was a fun Q&A session, and while some responses were not clear enough, we have gotten a better idea of where the wind blows.
None of my questions were answered :-(
I would like to address this from Matt....
I think there is a disconnect between Devs and users here....Quote:
Once and for all: there is no boost applied to the defending AI team in the arena, as far as any person working on the game is aware. I went and had a chat with the engineers who built our most recent improvements to the arena system just now to confirm this. The AI used by the defending arena team is identical to the AI used by your team on autoplay.
I would agree that the AI used in the arena is the same as the AI used by a player.. I've always felt the AI is the AI... BUT... and here's where there is a disconnect... PLAYERS are NOT typically using AI in the arena.... therefore the AI on the defense team is getting FAR MORE accuracy than MANUAL players actually experience. THIS IS THE BOOST which is always referred to. There's never been any insinuation, from me at least, that there's a "special AI" somewhere. No. Merely that the AI gets, as you put it, "Streaky" runs of success which players, manually playing your "game" will NEVER, ever, ever experience. Therefore the AI pretty much ALWAYS has an advantage over manual play.
Some have figured out that you actually win MORE if you tap the auto-play button as soon as match starts.. why? Because then it is the streaky AI against the streaky AI rather than non-streaky player vs the streaky AI.
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Seems pretty clear to me.
It's not merely perfect hits.. All accuracy is better for the AI.. echo fires more often and more times, blocking works better.. effects inflict more often.. the AI has generally a 15-20% better chance of performing an action than anyone manually playing does... you can ONLY even that out by auto-playing all PvP matches.
And rather than giving me shit.. you might want to actually read my response above.
The response was basically.. "I assure you the app uses the same 2005 Prius to drive to the store. It's not any faster or better than any other 2005 Prius. If you have a 2005 Prius, it's the same.".... when in all actuality on manual play.... players only have a skateboard... and aren't going to keep up with a Prius regardless.
They should implement some sort of non-streak feature where if you or the enemy continuously gain/inflict, say, a 25% chance status effect, then that character cannot do so again until the second turn. Just an idea.
I've suggested that.. Cap all "extra turns" at a maximum of 3.. that's what players on manual experience. Things like that. They could write limits into the Ai (which would effect the AI for both player and app) to prevent the increased "streakiness". That implementation was somewhat eluded to by Matt - but understandably the "when" is another matter.
I wonder. Does anyone here think that the Devs were being honest or no?
I think they were .... even if a couple responses did paint things with a slight "marketing twist" :) I don't think they are inherently, or purposefully, deceptive ever. They are human though and can mis-read or misunderstand the same as any of us. :)
I do think they, much like anyone in a creative endeavor, can be "too close" to their work and not fully understand player sentiment or perspective at times.
Was there ever an actual question regarding how many extra turns may he triggered? If it was I missed reading the post.
Last gauntlet season I came across a green bot that had 3 extra turns by itself, then raven fired off gave the bot another turn. It then had 2 more extra turns. This may be even worse than mag lilith in her heyday.
Id just like to say thanks. And how good was this concept art!?
Oh and THIS was really interesting! Makes a lot of sense, as someone who it not top echelons, I do notice that some rounds in Gauntlet I do quite well and then the next round it seems a fair bit tougher. I think I actually appreciate this, its just good to know about it now!
Quote:
The difficulty of the Gauntlet is based on your account strength. This basically allows newer players to at least start to play and enjoy Gauntlet up to around Grade A. At Grade A, difficulty becomes tiered and is the same for everyone (it scales from a given account power level up to the max account power level at SSS, with some variation created by the selection of opponents and filtering of characters and talismans from the list to, as best as possible, avoid repeats).
Does extra turns stack from its abilities and talisman as cited by HK-47?
Hold on. I have a feeling that the extra turn effects are not actually working properly. For example, my Tailgunner Eddie's special states that it can grant extra turns only when I kill an enemy, but I've had experiences where he does so without killing anyone.
I did appreciate the answer I got considering the combating of bugs surrounding all the updates. I never meant to insinuate they were bad at their jobs, just curious about how they're approaching it. I'm on a dev team of 12 for an account base of 12+ million. I personally know the struggles that can happen when your user base is much larger than the team and how well they are at hitting scenarios never even thought of in development.
I am curious what was meant by:
This happens to me so often I just assumed it was a feature. Is it not able to be forced to happen, or are they not even seeing it when they themselves play gauntlet(as they said they are playing the game all day)?Quote:
...why do we sometimes see characters wearing talismans they couldn't normally equip? That seems unfair and believe me, it's hard enough already.
This is a bug. Unfortunately we have not been able to reproduce it in house and so have created tools to allow us to better monitor and catch the issue on live, as it happens very sporadically and doesn't appear to have a consistent repro case. It is VERY high on our list of things to fix and was only second to the Arena Disco hang and Gauntlet Reset issues, which were recently tracked down and fixed.
I also took it for granted that opponents in gauntlet could use any talisman set, especially in SS and SSS. The problem that many see is when they can have 2 sets of talisman that are 5 or 6 sets each, unless they have cosmics with these augements.
They also indicate that they try not to have almost duplicate teams in SSS levels. Its almost a given, the first team in SS and SSS are the same.
Sorry. As someone who has played this application for a couple years I am going to have to respectfully call "bull". My personal, first-hand experience is that the AI gets roughly a 15% accuracy increase over the (manual) player.
This can definitively be proven by running random number generator with a % chance of duplicates.... run it at 35% chance of duplicates and you see what the player experiences.. run it at 50% chance of duplicates and you see what the AI gets. As posted previously, if the player wants an EVEN MATCH, then the player MUST run the match on auto-play to take advantage of the extra 15-% the AI gets.
The player is ALWAYS at a disadvantage compared to the AI. Everyone who has played PvP for a period of time knows about the AI advantage... you stating it isn't there simply makes it all look like a cover up. Hordes of players are NOT imagining things. There's a REASON players complain that Viper's reported "50% chance" to counter is ACTUALLY countering almost every time....
Ina room full of people... is it the majority who sees a problem that are mistaken..... or it is the lone individual denying the problem that is mistaken?
To be clear, I don't expect anything to change. it is rather insulting to see players treated as if they are "stupid" or "imaging things" when many players experience the same thing. You can tell me the Earth is flat until you are blue in the face..... but logic and personal experience tells me otherwise.
Also.. you contradicted yourself is your own post, Matt.. "It's the same...." ... then a sentence later... "we know the Ai is 'streaky'.." so yeah.... you seem to be tellin' stories. Which is it? the same or "streaky"? Because players don't get any sort of "streaky" behavior.
The other disadvantage we have is that even when played on auto the highlighted character (who our team will attack) on the defence team will always fall in a sequence from Eddie to the extreme left /middle/ right.
So even on auto we are at a disadvantage, I played on auto for a while but I pretty much always manually do the arena now, to me that’s my entertainment, it is the complement of all the farming, and mind numbing auto play we must do to secure new characters and Talisman.
I want to know when we can have a QnA with Customer Service.....
loved the q/a session and i think the devs were as honest as possible. people want to belive what they want to belive no matter if you argue against it. but for marvel strike force the devs confirmed that there is a defense boost to make up for the AI being AI. they also said this is industry standard.
but if matt here says there is no AI boost then i want to belive it.
and for those who don't: well you will never get another answer to that question from the devs, would be nice to accept it.
what i took away from the q/a:
1. the devs have plans for the next years which is cool, so the game will be around a bit longer
2. the devs have a great sense of humor
3. and they are passionate about the game and want to create a great game, but they are a very small team which makes things difficult.
i'm more positive about the game for now.
I would like to thank you Matt, for sharing the concept designs! They look great. Nice to know Odin is joining the God forces too.
Also, cannot wait to see gunner and assassin ox souls! :)
Great post Slauki and I came more or less to the same conclusions.
It was really interesting to read through the q&a and I enjoyed many of the dev's comments and their sense of humor. I'd say it was a great thing, much better than I assumed to be honest. Many answers were quite long and comprehensive with a nice mixture of understanding, explanations, often with a clear yes/no and the sneak for future stuff creates excitement for what is to come.
I was a bit shocked by the huge numbers of bugs that were already solved so that it seems like most of the other (many) bugs we see right now are known, but there seems to be no way to solve them. All of that consumes a lot of time for the people working on these things and I understood that this is also the reason why many other things are not addressed yet. Seems like we all still need a big portion of patience and indulgence, which isn't always easy!
Another thing that was surprising is that the carzy Talis on Gauntlet enemies are a bug. To me it was clear that this was to a bug, but intended, as it was reported right from the first day of Gauntlet, there was no bug-confirmation yet, and I see it in almost every fight. If Kaz is really playing the whole day, he should see that aswell, although we all get different teams (was there a question about it, whether this stays like that or not?).
The thing with the AI boost is tricky. I always said that I can understand that this exists to a certain degree, as it is needed to compensate the (sometimes) stupid AI decisions (which is not that bad anymore I'd say, e.g. if a character could be killed with another hit, the enemy tend to do it now, even if it is a character with class disadvantage). Marvel seems to be a bit more transparent on that point, as Slauki wrote. We all know it is there, and we might need to accept it. We could record some videos to clearly show that the AI has advantages in almost every part of a battle, from the coin toss to the "who gets the small% debuff chance applied on", the "who get's the healing or the extra turns", to the trigger rates of all skill and talisman effects.
I was curious to see how they deal with that question. If they would have said something like "it is somewhere in the code, we don't know, can't find or access it" or "it's a company secret", this would have been a conformation of the existance and this would also mean that they should be able to change it. This would result in a lot of discussion again, so it probably was the "best" solution to insist on saying it does not exist. Guys, just turn it down a bit, secretly, with the next update or so, or stepwise over a couple of updates, and nobody will talk about it again :)
one thing i forgot to ask, maybe someone will be so kind to answer this:
how many people play this game one a regular basis, so several times per week?
would love to see some kind of permanent q/a section if it's not too much work for you guys and gals.
at least it would be nice to these kind of things more frequently, since you made a lot of goodwill through this.
I really enjoyed the Q & A. They revealed way more than I expected. They have quite a long term plan for the game. Thanks again to them for doing the Q & A. Sounds like new content may be coming around October (silent planet maybe?) Also, sounds like Stranger in a Strange Land, Live After Death and Infinite Dreams :D Eddies are in the works. Concept art is always cool to see as well. Good question slauki, curious how many people play the game?
You have misquoted me here. What I said was:
The AI and the RNG are not the same thing. The RNG can be streaky, but it is streaky for everyone, player and AI alike. You are exactly as likely to get a string of successful effects as the AI is given the same actions. The AI has no advantage here. We did not at any point design nor implement such a weighting system. As above, the only balancing effect we applied to arena battles was to give the player that goes second more power with which to use abilities.
Thanks for the Q&A session, Matt, Kaz, and Llexi! I really appreciated hearing your thoughts about the current state of the game and plans for the future. I've never been more optimistic about the future of the game.
Okay.. but that makes little sense if you play the "game". There NO WAY any player EVER gets echo to fire more than 4 times maximum on manual play.. even with 4 perfect hits.... However, the AI gets 6-7-8 turns with Echo OFTEN.
It also doesn't explain why.. a battle can start.. and there's NO WAY ON EARTH I'll win. The AI teams goes first is just keeps getting every buff, every counter, every "possibility" and I get none or next to none. Battle takes several minutes. I lose. 5 seconds later I fight the same team with the same allies all with the same talismans.. the AI goes first again.... on my first turn... and I kill the ENTIRE Ai team in one or two hits. The varying in difficulty MUST be accounted for somewhere. If my team can beat another team in such rapid fashion, then why doesn't it all the time????
This is what has had be essentially "done" with PvP.. there's really almost no logic to it.. no way to get better.. no strategy.. it all seems purely based upon who the AI decides will win. Yes fight more and you clearly get better stats for other fights... but the complete lack of consistency has yet to be explained, other than that the AI gets some advantage at some point.. or my team gains a DISadvantage -- something like my relics are not counted for this match..... then the next match they are. Or there's some "crap shoot" as to how may relics count... some variable.. variance to try and create more "randomness" in battles.
Matt_LotB: "In the mean time, we have been trying to make sure that any event packs stay in the store for at least 24 hours after the end of the events, so you have some grace period."
Sadly it didn't work with the frontier talismans for ffe fragments. They disappeared the same moment you got the fragments rewarded.
Hey yup, some bits of coder knowledge that might help understand those things.
Computers aren't designed to handle randomness, be it to create it or to handle it. Everything comes down to a series of 0 and 1 that makes sense, nothing is random.
When a coder needs to 'generate' a 'random thing' it all boils down to getting a 'random number'
Getting a random number is done by calling some bit of code that tries to ba as random as possible, but in fact, isn't.
Most random generating bits of code are actually giving out a series of precalculated numbers, the series is so complex it looks random.
To further increase randomness most use what we call a 'seed' which is the starting point in the complex series.
This is done for each random thing needed (whether you hit or not, effects proc'ing, shields, amounts of damage, etc)
When you see more streaks when the play is faster (like in autoplay) it often is because the 'seed' used is based on your devices clock, so really fast play uses really close seeds, giving really close results (streaks).
What needs to be done is probably change those seeds. But to do that you need to do it globally (you can't just change the seed once, it needs to be done for each and every random thing generated in the game so it's consistent everywhere). It's easy if from the start you have isolated your random number generation in a single place, but since it's a rather common small code block, chances are it's been copied and pasted and refactoring it now is a significant task.
Depending on how the various historical coders have behaved and cooperated, you might also find out that actually modifying the slightest thing can be tricky and cause strong side effects.
Or even worse, the team could be dependent on some third party number generator that they have no control over and that's so strongly tied to the code it can't easily be replaced.
Here you go, just wanted to shed some lights on the maybe's, hope that helps you understand Matt's answers and stance.
Now, where I actually understand and agree with you is, since this game's release, there's been ample reports and ample time to undergo those tasks that are detrimental to the player's experience.
I've enjoyed the Q&A, got some answers, some confirmations and some grey zones, but what shocks me the most is the team's stance or attitude.
First of all, problems are just temporary, be patient because we don't have enough ressources to go as fast as we want.
And that should alleviate all our concerns.
Grinding 12 hours per day during some events ? Be patient. Losing to impossible teams ? Be patient. Not getting due rewards ? Be patient. New content ? Be patient. Bugs ? Be patient. Need info ? Be patient.
We have an active community that would actually be okay to help the team, alleviate their workload, test things out, build things around the game to answer people's requests, and the answer is... Be patient we'll do it ourselves.
I find it kind of sad.
The second part though terrifies me.
All their errors, miscommunications, failures and bugged content that cost hundreds of players things that they spent dozen of hours building or good dollars buying, all those should just be forgotten and forgiven, because you know, they work hard, and it's only a game.
They came out on that AI boost thing like it was a personal attack, they find we are salty, but we should handle losing value, however indirect, smile and say ' that's ok, they're working hard and it's just a game '
In the end, they're saying the players that felt robbed, cheated or stinged by their shortcomings are the bad guys.
And that terrifies me....
The Q and A was cool, and definitely left me feeling better about the game than I have in a while. I agree with those who said that it was fun to see the sense of humour being brought to the answers. Specifically, thanks, Matt for answering my questions so succinctly! The Dumb & Dumber meme gave me a chuckle. :cool:
That said, succinct as your three yes answers were, telling me that there was a chance that the things I proposed might happen in the future, they were... rather vague, all the same. ;)
To keep your answers succinct, in terms of follow-up, how about tossing out a few odds of the things I mentioned actually happening? :cool:
From one to ten, what are the odds...
1. Of The Prisoner
2. Of the Corrupt General
3. Of Warrior Troll
4. Of Angel of Fear
seeing returns to their original states?
5. Of The Nomad
6. Of the Allied General
7. Of The Witch Doctor
getting tweaks?
8. Of seeing additional talismans added as rewards to the Brave New World Dungeons?
9. Of seeing characters initially added to the game as purchase-only (Sirius, Gangland Eddie) available to earn, or purchase by other means?
I eagerly await your succinct clarification, good sir. :cool:
Up the Irons!
- TEF
Reading through the Q&A again, is Matt_LOTB hinting at a Halloween new content release here (note the italics)?
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I'm not completely ignorant regarding coding.. surely something built on a seed is a library or function which is then called from al the "various bits of code". An "include" if you will..... So, one change results in updates across the app.
But of course, there's no way to know that everything was built properly to begin with.
And I agree, they attitude about the entire thing is what I find really annoying. I mean a Q&A where if you don't bow down and just blindly accept everything it's YOUR fault... nice customer service... I know I can be "challenging" or present and stick to issues which other MAY want simply swept under the rug.. but that doesn't mean I'm intentionally trying to be difficult.. I simply don't accept "squirming" as an answer easily -- it's always clear to me when I hit on an area the devs would rather not detail or go into.. they avoid it hoping it'll go away rather than answer anything forthright. -- just like they will continue to avoid my questions regarding difficulty variable for battles. I'm nto asking for ANY proprietary secrets.