Dev Q&A - Post your questions here!

[Kaz_LOTB]

Kaz's Answers will go here.

Will there be a way to acquire Reaper / Trooper talismans WITHOUT running the Infernal Dungeon or spending money/ironite?

Yes. They may be featured in events and offers as many Talismans are.

What % of Maiden lore do you think has already been covered, and what % remains to be introduced in the future?

It's hard to say what percentage has been covered, as there is always new content being created (i.e. we are always discovering something new that could be brought to life in the game in some way, such as new Maiden T-Shirts featuring cool Eddies, commissioned artwork by talented artists like Dan Mumford, and so on.). At the very least, in our eyes there is still a TON of content and themes left to explore (years worth). What's amazing about Maiden's catalog is how many diverse time periods and mythologies it touches, opening up entire pantheons of characters and lore related to the songs to explore.

Regarding the overall game mechanics, there has been a huge increase in the "arms race" lately, with introduction of extremely powerful characters and talismans. Could you please share your thoughts on that?

As any live service game grows, some degree of power creep is inevitable. The main reason why is that players always want new ways to play or things to do, which requires new content to support it that wasn't there at the beginning of the game when it was first designed. This can end up creating a larger degree of asymmetry and mixed strategies that emerge and inevitably some content will end up underpowerd or overpowered based on the strategies that become dominate in a given time (a.k.a. whatever the Meta becomes).

Getting the balance perfect in any game is difficult, but it's exponentially more so the more content you have and we are indeed a content heavy game, because that is the primary way we keep the business running. We have been looking at other ways to generate revenue that do not rely as much on a constant treadmill of content that will help slow the rapid shifts in the meta, but not all of those initiatives are in play yet and some are going to require more work and fine tuning to balance community sentiment and our business needs (such as Frontier Keys, Guilds, and other unannounced features) in order for it to finally reach a good pace.

At the very least, when it comes to balancing all of the content we do create, we use 3 main approaches:

A.) Adding Trade-Offs - We try to ensure that content has some inherent trade off so that it's not the single answer to all of the challenges present in the game (i.e. the health stats of a high damage character might be low or they might lack some important utility for a given game mode).

B.) Creating Counterplay - When it comes to PvP focused content, we want to make sure there are various ways to counter the content, which helps reduce its overall power (i.e. Using Marks, Doom, Ghost, and other highly specialized characters vs Labyrinth / Eclipse / Viper Talismans, etc.).

C.) Buff / Nerf Content - If we've found that a certain piece of content (Character or Talisman) is just too dominant / underpowered in terms of both win and play rates over an extended period of time, despite having things like counterplay introduced, then we will ultimately choose to adjust that content to maintain a healthier competitive environment. We also do go back and amp up some of the weaker allies and Eddies on a constant basis, but of course there are only so many we can get to each release depending on where all the resources have been committed for a given release.

The end goal, from my stand point, is to make sure there is a purpose and place for as many characters and talismans that exist as possible for our various player groups (Early, Mid-Stage, Late Game, and Elder players across the various game modes). This will ultimately mean some content IS intended to be a bit weaker or stronger based on player progression and the game mode it is intended to be used in. Not all content is actually meant to be strong in PvP.

It's a shame that most of the old Eddie's are so behind the times compared to the newer ones. Back in the day, there would be big makeovers for the old ones to compete with the new ones. Will we see more tuning changes to old Eddie's soon? Meaning Viking, Vampire Hunter, Beast, Trooper, etc.

This is somewhat answered in my response above, but to clarify, the answer is Yes. We always try to get some updates and tuning adjustments in for characters every month, which often includes improving older Eddies as well.

The Frontier Keys have been a cool addition to the game, but with the high Sands of Time cost to play, it doesn't make the rewards worth it. Could we please bring down the cost to play from 15 to like 5 or 6?

We will continue to monitor the reception and performance of these dungeons and will indeed adjust the costs if it makes sense. More likely though, they will just be balanced to grant better value for the time and cost added to the dungeons as they are intended to be an easy way to convert resources like Sands of Time into other, more valuable, resources (e.g. Frontier Coins, Sands of War, Talisman Soul Fragments, High Value Talismans, etc.) so the Sands of Time investment can only go so low in order to maintain an overall balance of resources in the economy. I hope that makes sense.

I love the cosmic talismans, I think they're a fantastic addition to the game. But it's too difficult to max them out and when you get 3 or 4 or more per month and you can only max out MAYBE one of them. So how do you plan on tackling this issue with bottlenecking materials?

We are looking to increase the number of Cosmic Evolution Materials you can get from both the Cosmic Talisman Dungeon as well as the number of opportunities you have for acquiring them in our Monthly Events.

What is your process when it comes to the difficulty of the Gauntlet?

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).

...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.

Guilds:

- Can you please tell us a little more about this feature?
- Do you have any time frame for the release of this game mode?
- and if you could give us an overview of functionality? (Ex. Member numbers, raids, basic plan of implementation, etc.)

The high-level design summary is along the lines of:

- Create and Recruit members to your guild (between 15 to 30 members)
- Battle powerful Gods together with your guild to obtain their blessing.
- Wield the power of the Gods in combat versus other Guilds.

As Matt mentions, this will not all be available at the launch of the feature, but is the ultimate vision for the experience we are creating for guilds. It will come online one part at a time and is intended to include critical social features like Chat, Resource donation, and unique shop items and rewards exclusive to Guilds.

The first phase of Guilds is currently looking to launch this year, though I can't give specific dates.

Game Future Plans:

- What is the expected game life? Can we expect the game to be alive for years to come?
- Is the game going to continue to be “Event based” or are there other plans for the game?

That is the expectation, yes. Years!

As far as the second question, Events will always be a part of the game, but we are looking for other ways to engage players and give them new ways to play without piling on so many events. Initiatives like Frontier Keys and a soon to be revealed feature, as well as new game content that is more infinitely repayable, such as Silent Planet, are all part of this.

Event Dungeons
I love the event dungeons, i do the grind to get the max achievements, spending ironite to do so and have no problem with that
The Problem though is the rewards are woeful...

For our monthly character dungeon events, we've been continuing to improve the reward structure to ensure that there are multiple tiers of payouts (low, mid, and high fragment rewards) so that more players are able to walk away with something new from the event. We'll continue to adjust and expand on that idea so that eventually, if you complete all the event challenges, you will guaranteed walk away with something new from the event.

Souls and Frag cost increases
The Cost of Gold to summon souls was put up, i can sort of understand this to a degree but at the same time the number of frags to get the souls went up as well...why were those increased and by such a large amount, without increasing the chances to get more to mitigate the increase?

It's actually the opposite, we have, over the last year, dramatically increased the amount of rewards flowing into the game. At this time last year, players were hardly obtaining rewards like Ironite, Frontier Coins, Souls, Fragments, 4* essence value, etc. at the current rates they are now. The tuning change was to better balance this inflation such that it didn't cannibalize the value of the overall economy and still allow us to maintain granting these rewards at good rates.

Will you change your direction regarding In-game purchases with real money??
I mean, I have spend cash in some kind of razonable offers, like the Sirius Dog, some packs and etc, BUT the usual prices in the whole store have ridiculous prices for any player with just a little of integrity and morals...

I think Matt is answering this one, but I'll just add that we have a variety of price points that offer different value. Some people actually prefer to buy things in bulk (like Ironite) as oppose to doing it piecemeal, because they want to go ham in the Cosmic Talisman Dungeon all month, non-stop, like me. Others may prefer a direct character purchase at a lower price point, like Sirius, and so we try to offer that as well. But most interestingly, most people who play the game don't spend any money at all and enjoy it perfectly fine.

The point is, the game is free to play and is, for the genre, one of the most generous games in terms of rewards or the need to actually spend any money to make progress or acquire useful and iconic characters for players to enjoy. I mean, I wish we could give everything away for free and still somehow be able to produce content and keep the game servers up and running, but it's not really economically viable. Early days even things like Kickstarter or a donation system were considered, but unfortunately wouldn't actually cover the cost of operating a game studio, as many Kickstarter projects have come to learn :/

Nevertheless, we are always open to feedback on what people like and don't like about our offerings and attempt to do our best to adjust and provide value at the level various players appreciate.

Speaking of Nomad talisman slots . . . Why does he have red slots when he deals true damage? Any chance we can see a change to purple in a tuning update?

The main reason is that most players use Echo Talismans on the Nomad at the moment, so we're hesitant to change the current strategy of so many when it works well for them. We've mainly changed Talisman Slots in the past of characters that are not used as much or are underpowered and would benefit greatly from the change without creating a new imbalance. That being said, there is a feature on the horizon that would allow us to open up the talisman slot restrictions on certain characters, like the Nomad, so that players can experiment with new builds, but keep any strategies they currently use if they would like (this would not be something that will for sure apply to every character, but just a few select characters).

Why are there so many elements for evolving cosmic talismans?

One of the goals for the Cosmic Talismans, which we haven't quite finished executing on, was to give players the opportunity for more unique and customizable builds as well as to embark on a distinct adventure to complete those builds. While we have been seeing lots of diversity and creativity in the Cosmic Talisman use, we're still a bit behind on adding in the unique farming areas where you can acquire specific materials in bulk (such as Black Rain, Ashes of Ice, etc.)

The point of this is to create different motivations to play different challenges and areas in the game and break up the monotony of only grinding the one dungeon or quest all day, every day. That's part of the rational of why there are the distinct materials, but I can understand the current frustration off not being able to adequately pursue the completion of your specific Cosmic Talisman at this time.

In the short term we are increasing the drop rates of these materials in the Cosmic Talisman Dungeon (which is meant to be a more general source of evolution material) while we continue to develop the locations that will allow players to farm specific evolution materials.

My question is will there be some way to play a certain amount of time without tying my phone is so long and still be able to progress in the game?

We have had discussion about an "auto-complete" currency or "familiars" system that would allow players to strategically auto-complete certain content (such as your Trooper Runs, Skull Quests, Auto-Arena, etc.), but it is currently further down on the priority list since we are working on larger initiatives like Silent Planet, Guilds, Avalon, etc.

That being said, we have been generally making moves to reduce the time commitment required from the game by lowering the number of Events running and adding in features such as Frontier Keys that allow players to engage with the game at their own pace.

Are there ANY plans it make playing trooper badges faster? Easier? I feel i should need to expel all SOT merely to send Trooper badges.

As mentioned in my post above, there are features further down the design backlog to potentially address issues like this, but they will not likely be something we can action on in the short term.

How do you decide what 'themes' to have for each month? Some like the tour are obvious, but what's the process for other months? Similarly, will there be another Mega-Event? Personally, I loved the Gods Of Powerslave and Night City events, so it would be awesome to see something like those again!

We're always looking at what we haven't thoroughly explored and what can bring a new or different flavor to the game than what currently exists when it comes to new themes. We have a huge backlog of possible worlds. characters, and talisman ideas that we discuss for months in advance of making them. We get input from Maiden as well in terms of what they would like to see and we plan around and balance the various interest of all the creative voices involved to come up with a final roadmap of content.

You will definitely be seeing more Mega Events. One potentially quite soon...

How do you decide on the characters that you can earn from Gauntlet?

Gauntlet characters are intended to be the most recognizable characters from Maiden Lore (who don't already exist in the game in some form), so we always are looking at iconic songs and imagery that most Maiden fans can identify by name or otherwise.

[/B] Will there ever be another Eddie which will eventually replace Final Frontier?

The Gauntlet is currently the home of Final Frontier Eddie, in the same way the Trooper Feature is the home of Trooper Eddie and Eternity Eddie is tied to the Arena, so he won't be going away. However, a longer-term cast may be added to expand his world at some point which would give other characters a home there as well (similar to the Eternals in the Arena).

Designs of the characters - How do you go about this? Of course there's the Eddies and The Beast, and some of the themed characters like the Gods of Powerslave too, and they all have a "base" to work off of (Album art, official posters, mythology, history, etc). However, for the characters that don't have this "base", how do you go about designing them?

Our talented artists work hand in hand with designers, such as myself, to come up with ideas about the world and gameplay concepts for the characters and then produce concept art that marries the themes and imagery from the songs and lore with the expected gameplay or use in the game. This is then sent over to Maiden for feedback and goes through some iteration until it is finally signed off. From there, we build and implement the character for the game.

There was the visual revamp to Wicker Man Isle, but will other worlds receive this treatment? If so, which worlds, and will there be any visual updates to some of the older characters?

We definitely would like to revamp some of our older worlds, likely continuing in sequence with Kingdom of the Sands, Battlefield, and then Underworld. This would ideally improve updates to the characters, similar to Wicker Man Isle.

What has been the most interesting/enjoyable character, dungeon, level, etc. to make? Do you have favourite designs? Is there anything you would personally change if you could?

We probably had the most fun with the 2018 Christmas Dungeon as there were a lot of interesting Easter Eggs featured in that level. I, personally love the Ferryman's design as well as the Shadow Wickerman that came with him. In terms of something I would change, it would mainly relate to the complexity of our gameplay systems and lack of communication and / ease of use of things like our inventory system. I know I'm not alone on that here, so hopefully all of these get sorted out in a reasonable time frame.

You asked for character ideas, and one character I would love to see would be a Tears of a Clown Eddie (even made my own design, lol). Any chance of him or something similar in the future?

I wouldn't count it out

Why does every aspects of the game rely on grinding?
(Related to the question above) Why can't you introduce an instant/swipe concept instead of auto-replay.

I'll attempt to break this down as best I can.

In many games, particularly RPGs, there a concept of level progression (usually acting as a vehicle to take players from a weak power state to a strong power state). The purpose of this progression is to pace out the player's growth and gameplay experience such that when you start the game you can tackle a certain amount of content up to a point at which you need to diverge and "grind" to level up and take on the next layer of content, which grants higher levels of rewards but takes more effort, resources, and skill to obtain.
This is mainly a pacing tool used to give players the sense of development as they advance further and deeper into a game. When you start a new game, it doesn't feel like a grind because you have a consistent feeling of advancing and new things to discover beyond each challenge wall.

At a certain point, players inevitably reach an "end game" state where their level caps out (dependent on the game) and the value of the rewards remains consistently high (relative to their early player state), however, the amount of time / skill /effort to reach the highest tier of rewards doesn't actually decrease. On top of that, if the actual gameplay objectives or activities remain the same and it doesn't feel like there are new things to discover behind each challenge, this can lead to the feeling of "grinding".

So, the general structure and meta of our game has had a very similar development in this regard and there are aspects of it that have become a bit of a grind. One of the ways that we look to improve this feeling is to introduce different gameplay activities or create meta-goals that break up the need to do one thing a thousand times and provide players with a new experience. The Gauntlet is one example of this, the ultimate vision of Frontier Keys is another (the idea of taking your own journey at your own pace). In addition, with the upcoming reduction and removal of miscellaneous "grinding" Events and more interesting Event Challenge Types, we hope to improve this aspect of the game in the short-term.

As mentioned above, we have some ideas to reduce the investment for things like running Troopers and routine tasks further down the road, but our focus right now is to get new and different gameplay experiences introduced into the game that we feel will have a bigger impact all around.

Why are characters and talismans still introduced in a really high rate although it was said that the pacing would decrease.

See some of my answers in posts above.

Are there any plans to make arena more enjoyable and faster again? Back in the days arena was the best mode in the game, but i know some people who barely touch it at the moment.

The "meta" will constantly shift so long as new content gets added to the game, as per some of my explanations above, but what's interesting is that, right now, the time to clear battles heavily varies between players and is largely based on the specific strategies each player is using.

I should also note that the engagement with Arena is actually higher right now than it has ever been outside of running and Arena event, possibly due to the new revamp. All that said, we definitely want to make sure fights don't drag on too long and if we do find that to be the case for players on average at certain tiers, we will address it.

In general, we just try to create answers and balance out dominate strategies based on win/play rates, so you can expect to continue to see tuning changes and content focused in that direction.

Some character seem to have lower drop chances than others. Seems like newer chars (executionerd
eddie for example) have other drop% than other 4* assassin toons, is this true?

It's true that not all characters drop with an equal rate, but this is mainly for characters that are given in the story campaign and not really with other content. You also have to pay attention to the size of the pool for a given class. The larger that specific pool of characters, the lower the chance you will see any specific character within that pool.

What will be the next big addition to the game contentwise, silent planet, isle of avalon or something else? can you tell us a bit more about what we can expect there? Will it be "just another world" or something with more longterm motivation like gauntlet?

Silence Planet is currently in front of Avalon, but there is other "content" planned ahead of that. Silent Planet is definitely more than just another world. It's a resetting monthly challenge with its own metagame that is unique and different from other dungeons or worlds in the game.

Do you have plans to introduce the trenchcoat eddie (stranger in a strange land) as special version of cyborg eddie? I'd love to see this

Yep. It's being saved for a very special piece of content down the road atm

Will we get a new GUI with more filters to find talismans on our toons easier?

Yes. It is in our quality of life backlog.

Why you do bugfixing instead of recoding the whole game?

Because after 5+ years of code piling on code, that would take about 5+ more years.

Why you develop new toons instead of tuning the old ones?

We do both. See some of the answers and explanations in the posts above.

I've got only one but for me very very important question:
Can you develop a separate brave new world dungeon for each talisman color ? So 5 dungeons instead of 3 ? It's not good when you're searching for runes of a specific color and the drops are the color you don't need ...

Something we can consider, yes.

Good Questions.
Can we convert *shards to ** shards or *** shards? Maybe 10x* shards --> 1x ** Shards.

I believe there is an event planned in the coming months that will allow you to do something like this. We also have some ideas for a "Fusion" feature that will build upon Sacrifice, but it's too early to really comment much on that.

Any chance of an Infinite Dreams Eddie soon? He'd look awesome on his motorcycle next to Wrathchild and Charlotte.

Yes! Part of the inspiration behind doing Wrathchild on a bike was to allow players to take a whole biker team and ride through Night City. It's one of the characters on our list to do for sure.

I was wondering if you can create a way to 'lock' talismans to prevent them from being sold by mistake? And a 'remove all' option would really speed up moving around talismans, especially for gauntlet.

We currently have these or similar features in our Quality of Life backlog and they are nearish the top. So yes, they will hopefully become the priority after the current load of features are wrapped up.

Can you please create a exchange in the store WITH NO LIMITS to convert common souls, gold, trooper badges into something, anything useful...

We've begun to add common soul purchase options to many upcoming events and you will be able to sink around 5K common souls a month on various valuable items and resources if you are sitting on them.

Can you increase the Pack Rates for souls

I assume you mean Drop Rates? Our base drop rates are not up for changes any time soon, as it causes the whole economy of the game to shift, which is a large undertaking. Instead, we try and provide more focused opportunities for players looking to obtain specific characters they may be missing from their collections. Also, due to soul fragments dropping from each Rare / Epic Soul, you are always guaranteed a 4* and 5* Character at a consistent rate based on the number of that souls you open. We also attempt to add this to any event souls that we can and, as mentioned above, will be looking to do so even more in the future where content and event design allows.

How exactly is character generated when you open souls? It is possible to get 4-5 same Liliths in a row. There must be some kind of tuning. How the random numbers are generated?

I don't have the code in front of me, but it essentially randomly selects one of the characters in that loot table with an equal chance. We know that some players will get unlucky and so we include Frontier Coins in souls like this that allow you to purchase the Lilith of you choice if you run into a string of bad luck. There are other bad luck protection features we have in the backlog, but have not gotten an opportunity to action on as of yet, that might also help with this,