Post Dev Q&A Discussion!

[infinite dreamer]

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 Eddies are in the works. Concept art is always cool to see as well. Good question slauki, curious how many people play the game?

[Matt_LOTB]

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.

You have misquoted me here. What I said was:

The AI used by the defending arena team is identical to the AI used by your team on autoplay.

That said - we are aware that the RNG system used by the game is streaky. This is something we would like to eventually address. the streakiness of the RNG does mean that a character, might, for instance, see a string of low probability successes or failures on a given chance based effect. However, this streakiness is equally applicable to the player and enemy teams.

The only coded imbalance in arena is that the player that goes second gets additional power to offset the disadvantage of being attacked.

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.

[fred10141988]

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.

Hello, Leviathan. About the talismans system, I think devs could reference the mods system of Warframe.

Warframe designs that very well, and I think their mods are really like our talismans. Thank you.

[druid138]

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.

[Yup]

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.

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.

[SinGularity-8786]

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.

[Delegreg]

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.

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 Educated fool]

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.

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?

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.

Up the Irons!

- TEF

[druid138]

Reading through the Q&A again, is Matt_LOTB hinting at a Halloween new content release here (note the italics)?

[Yup]

stuff...

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.