March 9th 2017 Update Discussion

[Sparton_LOTB]

When i'm attacking against a team which has endure active and i send all the enemies to 0 hp, the big golden Eddie's face shows in the background as if i already won the battle, in spite the fight is still going on lol.
This problem is underlined also by the fact that the angel of fear's passive, which gives all your troopers an extra turn when you get the first kill, triggers when you set any of your enemies' hp to 0, even though it's still alive thanks to the endure.

The golden skull thing is known, but that is at least entirely cosmetic. The Angel of Fear thing is also known, but is slightly more problematic to say the least. They may share the same underlying problem of calculating when a character is dead, but we won't know until we find out what the exact bug is in the code.

p.s: talking about endure, not sure if it's on purpose or another bug, but while your troopers have the endure buff, even though their hp shouldn't go below 0, they can be killed anyways when they receive some enemy's shield damage, returning part of the dealt damage.

It depends on the shield. If the reflect damage is from a Void Shield, that damage has a chance of removing beneficial effects, which means the reflected damage would be lethal to a 1 HP character.

I have been looking at the PVP stats and results over the last 3 weeks as well as the rewards and I think that there is something fundamentally flawed.

[Analysis regarding PVP]

While the general gist of your thoughts on PVP is pretty spot on for those who want to compete at the top, I don't think it paints a fair picture of the value it brings for everyone. For example, if you only care about the prizes in the top 25,t hen sure, there's a lot of demands to be the top of the pile... but that's discounting all of the rewards you can get from earning Iron Coins, which doesn't require nearly as much investment (although still some skill and time each week). Skill shards and legendary souls can be earned this way, and this week we added the ability to earn potent talismans for a limited time, and in the future we will have the ability to get certain characters unique to participating in PVP... there's lots for people to be able to earn with combat that evolves and plays differently from the other features in the game, and we are planning on adding more, too.

That said, this feature definitely has been designed with rewarding highly-engaged play in mind. However, this is just one addition in a long roadmap of features we want to introduce. We've definitely taken the praises and criticisms in mind from all of you as our community, but ultimately we want to refine PVP with that in mind and look to have future features that help scratch competitive (and cooperative) itches with differing level of engagements.

I guess the tl;dr is we respect the criticisms you have, but we want features to excel at rewarding certain kinds of players while still having something for other kinds, and future features will spread the love around.

[slauki]

hi sparton,

one observation: when viking eddie steals the shield from the corrupt gunner rescuer, she sometimes replaces it instantly.
i couldn't reproduce this so far, but it happens about 10-15% of the time. would be nice if you could send this to investigation.

[Patrice-1201]

Thanks for the response Sparton.

I did not really mean it as a negative critic, just something to think about. It is totally normal to reward regular players and to be honest I am one of them and have spent all my free time and extra hours on the game.

The iron coins and this week's contest are very good but not enough to encourage people to compete and reward them on a merit basis.

I think it will be good somehow to reward progress with skill shards or legendary souls. Or reward by tiers and only have a special extra prize for the week's winner but all others say on 2500 points get the rewards for 2500 points.

Hope this makes sense and thanks for a great game and a great community. We all know you guys are working very hard and this is why we are all here.

[Sparton_LOTB]

one observation: when viking eddie steals the shield from the corrupt gunner rescuer, she sometimes replaces it instantly.
i couldn't reproduce this so far, but it happens about 10-15% of the time. would be nice if you could send this to investigation.

Yeah, I know we have that one in our internal bug tracking software, but I'm not sure if we have a fix for that yet (I don't have access to the tracker at home). If you find a consistent condition that makes it occur, do let me know, as that would help us confirm if we have a fix.

I did not really mean it as a negative critic, just something to think about. It is totally normal to reward regular players and to be honest I am one of them and have spent all my free time and extra hours on the game.

No worries; no offence taken.

The iron coins and this week's contest are very good but not enough to encourage people to compete and reward them on a merit basis.

I think it will be good somehow to reward progress with skill shards or legendary souls. Or reward by tiers and only have a special extra prize for the week's winner but all others say on 2500 points get the rewards for 2500 points.

Well, we do want to reward the absolute top player (as we currently do), but one of the biggest complaints we had during the beta is a lot of people felt like there was no reason to compete overly hard for anything but the top prize once you got ranked highly, which is why we increased the relative quantities of skill shards and ironite at higher divisions so there was a reason for more people to compete at the top. I feel like only giving an extra special prize for the week's winner but then substantial rewards for everyone else past a certain point threshold would again just discourage people from competing for anything other than number 1, when we would much rather encourage exciting competition across more than 2 or 3 people.

[The Educated fool]

Very cool idea to promote the Arena, and it explains the number of attacks this morning too! lol

Just one question for you, Sparton: should we be seeing our number of battles displayed in any limited time window (as in the Victory/Defeat pop-up screen, for instance), or just in our "My Arena Stats" tab as usual? I have the message about the promotion in my news screens, but I don't see any additional/special calculations towards a reward going on, so I imagine the awards achieved will simply be awarded along with the usual awards next Saturday?

Just gonna quote myself from the Bonus Battle Event thread here, hoping you see it, as I remain curious.

[Caretaker]

The bug is that endure is written as revive with hp 1, no revive animation. Solution is to add 2 lines of code into aof's passive, something like 'if target has endure on, do not proc'. Same with skull/sword.

Has something been done to Viking's 'loot'? Has it allways removed a benef on all creatures? I feel it has been just on targeted, or am I wrong and it has allways been remove on all?

And has something been done to energy talis? Don't seem to generate as much as they did, or am I in a wierd streak

[gmac]

Hi Sparton (and LOTB community)

Some considerations I have on PVP future.

1 - We want to watch the combats!
Give people some way to watch the Saturday madness, replay of the fights etc.

2 - Make it easier for newer players.
They have a hard time catching up and there is the snowball effect mentioned by Patrice and Slauki. (promotion this week is totally awesome and on the right direction on this issue by the way).

3 - Competitive Arena, no pay to win.
Spending money to play should not get into the equation for determining Arena weekly results. I know you need to monetize the game, but perhaps that makes the game too exclusive and leave people out.

Thanks again for interacting with us.
Gmac

[Caretaker]

As much as I like your ideas gmac...
1st won't go. People don't want to share stats, making them share fights? You could watch yours perhaps.
2nd more than anything!
3rd, I'm with NF here. Should be pay to win above all. Not all lucky pulls from the book and then rest on it. But making it reachable for all, so allmost all can feel they can catch it, so money drops constantly trough time. Matchmaking took a lot of hard work and it's hard to drop for devs because of it, but should change. You can have lots of people paying hard now, but in a long run just a few, for others giving up not rewarded, watch same people picking up rewards and feel waste of time and money, or you can have constant lower but steady income from different sources. Being heavily attacked for beeing on top is not the bad thing
Some other interesting stats and ranking by those stats that doesn't bring much if any rewards, or even don't have anything to do with arena, but the satisfaction of ranking itself should be added. (In OGame we had points overall/fleet/economy stats)

[Tritium]

Huh. Did daylight savings time push the daily refresh back to 5pm PST? Darn, the 4pm time worked quite well for me. That extra hour wait is going to suck.

[RCarter]

Huh. Did daylight savings time push the daily refresh back to 5pm PST? Darn, the 4pm time worked quite well for me. That extra hour wait is going to suck.

Lol

Yeah man, I am totally with you on this. My schedule naturally opened up right about refresh, and my grinding chores wrapped up at the right time too.

Oh well...