Silentstalker

Should be fixed in release version of 0.33

7 hours ago, knutliott said:

Looks like 8 "Takedown" stages (don't forget that computers start counting with 0) and an easy-to-beat participation trophy mission (the "quest" in the list).

Yup. But the prizes are cool :)

Heh. Our GM (currently on vacation) freaked out a bit when I reposted that first image in our company chat.

4 hours ago, reciprocate said:

I won't make excuses for them, but I see this type of development ideology in Path of Exile. Some overpowered set of mechanics interacting with certain items becomes available and people exploit the crap out of it leading to a "development manifesto" as Grinding Gear Games likes to call it which is just code for: "We're going to nerf stuff since we didn't expect our playerbase and community to exploit the crap out of it." That would've been noticed if there were more people testing things internally and they had a larger set of players reporting such matters before every 3 or so months when a new league/major content patch drops onto the game.

The same can be said here for AW where just about every Battle Path Tier 10 final reward vehicle is more or less some semblance of power creep. I actually regret I didn't fork over the $ to get OPhelia. I'm glad she's finally getting addressed, but even if she doesn't get directly nerfed, she's still made enough money for them to warrant keeping her untouched.

I hate the fact game companies do this, release barely tested content that seems invariably overpowered and gate it behind some form of pay mechanics, then nerf it or tone it down after awhile, but still has a clear advantage in power over many other changes equivalent to it's tier.

Hmmm, have you read the first 0.33 Tier 7-10 rebalance dev diary about power creep? Sounds like we addressed exactly what you are talking about:

https://aw.my.games/en/news/general/tier-7-10-rebalance-part-1-power-creep

43 minutes ago, Komitadjie said:

Hey, just out of curiosity, were those player-count numbers adjusted for hour-to-hour performance of the server?  I'd imagine getting a PVP Random to queue could be a real challenge with relatively few players, by compared to the five needed for a PVE, leading to a lot more folks going for PVEs to have something to play, instead of playing queue simulator for an hour hoping for a single PVP.  

No. During off-hours, PvE makes up for like 90-95 percent of matches.

Alright guys. Thanks for your feedback, it was an interesting read.

54 minutes ago, Friesenstahl said:

For me it is important that PvP, in my case Glops, is maintained. PvE is also an important, if not the most important, area of AW, of course. So I voted for "Make the game continue the way it is now, a bit of a mix of both PvP and PvE".
If Glops were dropped, the game would unfortunately be of no interest to me.

 

From the recent PTS poll, the mode preferences are as follows:

PvE: 75 percent
PvP: 8 percent
GLOPS: 17 percent

48 minutes ago, Lenticulas said:

how about you start by making sure that in Glops

A. there is NEVER a platoon on one side only.

If you are having trouble counting to 1, please get an adult to help you.

Hurrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr durrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr.

Such cases only happen when there are no other suitable platoons in the queue. The alternative would be making the platoon stuck in MM for far longer, which is a worse result for us than an imbalanced battle.

The biggest problem with GLOPS is that:

• It fundamentally multiplies some problems. The vehicles that are toxic but die early on if played incorrectly become REALLY toxic with infinite respawns
• It combines the negative sides of both modes, PvP players complain about balance issues while PvE players complain because it's fundamentally PvP

As a result, it isn't liked by anybody except for a narrow niche of experienced players, who get to identify the FOTM meta and pwn the shit out of everyone else. As you might have imagined, that's not a good recipe and it cannot be realistically built upon.

So, right off the bat, just to make things clear, I am not posting here as a member of staff, but as a player. This isn't an official thread and is not intended for an official gathering of feedback. This is merely a discussion that I am personally interested in.

Armored Warfare is quite an old game deep into its life cycle (from this perspective, it's actually a success as many other games don't get to live that long). It doesn't have millions of players, but it does have a relatively stable core audience - you. So the question is:

If you had the choice, what would you prefer the future to look like?

I'll give you three options as a poll in this thread:

• Tune the game more towards PvP (that is, competitive gameplay at the expense of PvE content)
• Make the game continue the way it is now, a bit of a mix of both PvP and PvE
• Tune the game more towards PvE (that is, more PvE content at the expense of PvP one)

Originally, I thought I'd explain the advantages and drawbacks of each but having those "served together" would make you biased towards one of the options and I don't want that. I want to hear what you think, ideally with your reasoning why you'd do it. Please vote and submit your answers, I am looking forward to them.

On 8/18/2020 at 2:57 PM, dfnce said:

Strangely enough I started watch WoT few months ago, and I found there is no lack of quiet brilliant commenters there. WT is less, but compared to AW it is huge content to watch.

In terms of twists and action AW PvE falls quite low. It is entertaining, but watching it is pointless unless new SO comes out for educational purpose. It is not walkthrough of AAA game.

Well, yes, that's what I was saying.

On 8/18/2020 at 2:57 PM, dfnce said:

These three are certainly have their influence, but they still pale compared to Polezny Bes which used to describe quite well whole picture of AW issues. For now Zuberg is one who doesn't repeat news from official site and capable to bring own complex ideas.

Miracle Expert plays best among them imo, but even he melts struggling all these PvP mechanics and bugs. Also he barely influencer personality.

Any of English-speaking streamers i met were either lack of skill, charisma, or simply (or rude) whiny snow flake queens. They abandoned AW once it didn't pay off to do it. 

Meh. I am... hmm... how to put it politely... not a fan of Zuberg. For a number of reasons, including some that I can't talk about. The "issues" of AW are typically whined about in a very "WoT-like" fashion without much imagination. Not really useful, but the Russian audience likes it and the devs take it into account, so... *shrugs*

As for the western guys, I really like Primer, that was some solid content. Spitfire's okay too, but there's nobody REALLY pleasant to listen to. Abandoning AW is something I never blamed anyone for though. I mean - you only have limited time on this planet, why waste it on a project that you aren't happy about?

Regarding the PvP focus... initially (we're talking 2011-2012), the considerations were basically twofold. Apart from the obvious stuff mentioned by you guys above (players themselves being the content):

1) PvP is interesting for streaming. Nobody wants to watch the same PvE missions over and over but skilled PvP, now that's more like it. Essentially, with some very specific exceptions that we did not classify for at the time (MMORPG - hardcore raiding), you don't get a big audience by streaming PvE. They hoped to grow the content creator community this way.

2) In the beginning, they specifically hoped to expand the playerbase by inviting harcore PvP clans from WoT over (aka "unicums"). The rationale was that these clans had established fanbases and very little churn. If they crossed over and the PvP environment was interesting enough, they'd form a very stable playerbase core.

The fact that I don't generally like PvP elitists is well-known and I was advising strongly against 2) for a few reasons. For one, hardcore PvP players rarely (almost never) take into account the needs of wider populace. They want as much skill-based gameplay as possible (logically, they want to show their skilly), which tends to lead to very niche gameplay that's not interesting for anyone else. WoT specifically became successful because it offered very casual experience in the beginning.

But, more importantly, hardcore playerbase isn't instant noodles. It doesn't come pre-packaged by taking it from somewhere else. It has to grow from the roots. Easy come, easy go, they say - and this is one of the biggest cases where I was proven right. The logical happened - these clans (like RSOP and a few others) did come over, they kinda enjoyed the game, but soon started having demands that were incompatible with the vision of the game as a casual experience. Their demands were not met and so they left. The rest packed up when PvP first on the NA server and then on the EU server collapsed. Of course the whole shitshow with Obsidian didn't help.

Regarding the streamers, this too practically collapsed in the west with the demise of PvP queues. The most harmful thing here was the death of the NA PvP queues because most - if not all - great streamers we used to have (who weren't paid) were Americans. This is important because... let's face it. Everyone wants to listen to people with pleasant voices and good English. Streamers are mostly entertainers, they don't even have to be good players (see Jingles for example). When the Americans and English went, the community contributor scene mostly collapsed. We still have dedicated streamers, even good ones like Spitfire, but their views are generally very low.

The same happened with the Russians to a degree, only not as bad because their PvP never truly collapsed. But all "influential" (and I am using that loosely, we're talking about guys with single and low thousands of views per video) people on their side are old players (Zuberg, Snake, Chavez mostly). There's nobody new and our playerbase is too small to grow a truly big influencer. Influencers are results, not reasons games get successful.

So why am I telling you all this?

Because making games has a LOT of inertia. The Mail.ru development team was tuned to this kind of thinking, that's the people there were around when the direction was kept and the people who are around now are the veterans of that era. AW is a five year old game now (a decade if we're talking the initial development phase, which was very long). Changing directions is very, very very hard. Plus you have guys who are good at what they do, with years of experience, at this. At PvP tuning. This all came together in the 0.33 rebalance.

Thanks. Looks like we don't need any more evidence.

Well guys, if it is so, please provide ideally a video + replay of your rubberbanding.

12 hours ago, Haswell said:

•  
• Type 15 (ZTQ-15) will be available before the next BP. It will be a premium tier 9 for sale.

I never said anything about "for sale" I believe.

On 8/2/2020 at 2:53 PM, Katsumoto said:

This is where the issue lies.  There is, based on what all the devs in any game like this says, a base line that says for this thing at that level this is where it should be at performance wise.  It is already assumed that any other vehicle is "perfectly balanced" prior to release but when put to the test that isn't the case. 

Let's just assume it means what it means to you. There's no point in defining every single term and, quite frankly, it's not necessary for this topic.

On 8/2/2020 at 2:53 PM, Katsumoto said:

It's true.  Why would one want to buy another vehicle that gets power crept or nerfed after the fact due to it not actually being balanced when it is put to the test.  Most developers such as AW's don't want to mess with a premium vehicle due to the back lash that is caused and hurt sales  If this is going to be part of the new contract mission, it's stuff I'll do anyways so if I get it I get it great.  But if after 5 or 6 battles in it if it's ~meh~ then it'll collect dust.

But the vehicle is still not free. You pay either with your time or with your money (gold can be a sub-group of both). But let's assume this is a sales premium, the question stays the same.

23 hours ago, Lenticulas said:

I thought, a long long time ago, the idea of AW premium vehicles was they wouldn't be OP or anything like that, but they'd just be like a regular progression vehicle, but since it was a Premium, it would shower the owner with Credits. Like the terminator sapphire or whatever.

Of course the premium tanks at that time pretty much were all actual progression vehicles, plus a few others. That was one of the things that I thought was a really good idea: you could get an advantage out of a Premium, without anyone screaming "pay to win".

Now the situation seems to have changed a bit, am I right?

Well, no. This problem actually concerns all newly introduced vehicles, be it premium, progression or obtainable otherwise. The new progression machines suffered from the same problems (eg. being powercreeped). If a new premium vehicle was introduced on the level of the vehicles from 2015/2016, it would be significantly inferior to the new progression vehicles. So are new premiums better than old progression vehicles? Yes. Are new progression vehicles better than old premiums? Yes, significantly. Another problem that compounds the issue is that the "credit printer" argument is no longer valid except for new players, which we do have, but it's very different from the 2015 where EVERYONE was new. Most veterans effectively have unlimited credits and/or obscene amounts of gold. So the need to make premium vehicles attractive by other means than just presenting them as credit printers is obvious. Especially when you have nothing to spend the credits on (all new premium vehicles are effectively unlocked on day 1 by veteran players, which is obviously not a desired state).

23 hours ago, Lenticulas said:

 

Addressing power creep as you are doing now, that's a good thing, you only need to do that, because it becomes a problem... You know you're going to end up in the same situation.... Right?

Eventually, if nothing changes, yes. That is a way many games do it. They gradually powercreep (the trick is to make this manageable by powercreeping only slightly, it's called the salami method). Then they either make a BIG RESET (aka 0.33 rebalance) or introduce new "tiers" (typical for World of Warcraft where DLC1 top gear suddenly was inferior to DLC2 basic gear and so on).

14 hours ago, knutliott said:

 

I still prefer to play Premium vehicles whenever possible even though I have 800M credits saved up.  For a PvE player, the credit grind is crazy in this game if you're just playing along and not perfectly stacking boosts and insignias.  So even with a fat back account, I still feel the need to earn as much as I can at all times.  Ergo, premiums.

I'd disagree here. From the statistics, IIRC, it takes about 4 months to get a Tier 10 vehicle without grinding like crazy or paying (you have to add all sorts of stuff to the equation, for example the regular weekly bonuses which we don't even often announce anymore). Compare that to WoT or even WT (without paying) and you'll find AW being easier by an order of magnitude to the point of it being detrimental (players skip low tiers in PvP so quickly the queue has problems and T1-T3 bots have to step in).

3 hours ago, Lenticulas said:

Official representatives of AW/My.com,... are you/are you not saying:

"there's no way we can sell Premiums unless they're OP, it's 'pay-to-win' from now on"?

Like Haswell says, I am not here on official capacity, more like a player interested in some discussions. But no. I think there are other ways. Not that I want to describe them in detail because some ideas weren't accepted by the production, some even depend on you not knowing. Nothing shady. Just different and considerably more difficult than just spamming lootboxes.

2 hours ago, Haswell said:

I have very little experience in PvP, so I'll comment only on the PvE aspect here. And since we don't really have any details for the 0.33 rebalance yet I'll base my comments on the current meta instead.

The tier 8 squishy dakka meta right now includes the K21, Marder, Griffin and Bradley. K21 and Marder are damage incarnates, Griffin specializes in high consistent damage over time and great stationary camo, Bradley kind of just derps around. All of them are fairly adept at vision control (except for the Marder, but it's also not bad) with very decent damage output, with moderate mobility.

The Stalker could fill the niche of having high mobility and great vision control (but not necessarily both view range and camo at the same time), at the cost of comparatively lower damage output (think BMD-2M levels), which is basically what the article suggested. The hard part would be how to balance it as to not make the VBR completely redundant, since the VBR already do the same things at the cost of having wheels instead of tracks. The obvious way would be to simply let the Stalker have slightly lower vision control capabilities, lower total view range and camo for example, but still higher than the other tracked AFVs.

Admittedly this sort of low damage output, high vision control playstyle wouldn't necessarily be friendly or easy for inexperienced players, nor applicable in every map. This may decrease the appeal of the Stalker to the average player, but likely no worse than the VBR already does.

Rosomak is a turd who's only saving grace is the autohoming missiles, so I won't even try to compare it.

Alright, but that's still not a system solution. I described the problem above and I will generalize it even more:

Let's assume you have a perfectly balanced premium that's not stronger than other vehicles. For everyone, it will be more like "meh why bother, we already better vehicles in the game."How will you make it attractive to players so they buy it?

And to make things clear - assume being a "fair developer" (playing the "good guy" card, CDPR style) is not going to work (certainly for AW, even if we are saints, even if you sell the project off to a guy who works charity by day and saves puppies from shelters by night, we'll always get caught by the past actions so there's no point in trying).

16 hours ago, Lenticulas said:

Thank all the Tanking Gods for that one. With any luck they'll have learned their lesson from last time, and the time before that, and the time before that....

... oh, who am I kidding, it'll somehow be OP as fuck.

 

Just out of curiosity. Let's assume that it won't be the case and the Stalker will be perfectly balanced. Which is something elite PvP players (aka 1-5 percent of playerbase, depending on what metrics you use) will appreciate, but for everyone else, it will be more like "meh why bother, we already better vehicles in the game."

How will you make it attractive to other players?

On 7/22/2020 at 12:53 PM, Zardas said:

Hmm, minelaying would be an interesting new mechanic.

We considered it and even tested it at one point. If was either useless or incredibly annoying.

On 7/30/2020 at 10:43 PM, Baron_Georg said:

out of curiosity what can support do about it?

Typically, they send the person back to the respective community manager, which is me or Maciek. Yes, sending anyone to support is more or less a copout from me because I know it's not gonna gelp most of the time. But such is the procedure. In some very specific cases, support can ask the community team to revert a decision. It's still my call in the end, but I will listen to them and adhere to their recommendations because I respect them a lot. This did happen in the past, but like twice in total over the five years I'm around, so you can imagine how rare this is.

What also seriously (and I mean seriously) influences the outcome is also the way the ticket is formulated. Like Komi said, we generally tend to not ban people unless they are long term trouble. And even then, if someone sends me or Maciek a PM about somethng, I do read it and consider it. But the support guys and gals are human as well, just like I am. So I can guarantee you that no matter how justified your anger is at some decisions, if you rage in tickets, include profanities, start insulting Russians or threaten us with legal actions (those are our favorite), they will throw your complaint out of the window.

Smudlicko had a history of prior infractions on both the official Discord and within the game.

But, more importantly:

I don't think any public justification of actions we take on official platforms is required. For any further info, everyone who feels they've been treated unfairly can contact support.

6 minutes ago, itzjustrick said:

Either my memory is total crap, or this vehicle doesn't exist in game. You mean the t7 Japanese td right? Wasn't that called the type 16?

Yeah sorry, Type 16, my mistake.

I'm gonna read through this discussion a bit later, it's very interesting.

One thing caught my eye though, the TD vs LT discussion, so a quick response. These articles are meant mostly for non-high-end players for kinda obvious reasons. First, players who can truly see the consequences of some choices are very rare. Second, most players who read these articles are average (by the very definition of the word). Hm that sounded a bit weird, but you know what I mean.

My point is, for most players, you gotta define expectations first, because that's the starting point where the opinions will come from. Most players do not think in shades of grey, they think black and white, or, more specifically, black or dark grey (black with some leeway) and white or light grey (white with some leeway). So, in this specific case, defining TDs as snipers is an important aspect because it ensures that players will try to first play them as snipers and then move towards the grey zone when they find out this isn't working all THAT well. Likewise, defining LTs as flankers is important because while the same players will start that way and then gradually move towards the TD role.

The reality is that both classes basically occupy more or less the same niche of "second line fighters". TDs (excluding some weird shit like BMPTs) are better at longer distances, LTs at shorter ones, but the truth is that the role of a "flanker" is a fictional one, at least for LTs. LT flankers are a myth - they don't work because the maps are too small. So what you have instead is something like faster "marksmen" and less agile and more fragile "snipers". But, if you describe it like this to wider audience, we're getting to what I described above - players don't think in scales of grey, they think in absultes. In other words, they will understand "kinda the same" as "totally the same", which it is not, there will always be nuances, either in different characteristics or indirect ones (for example, TDs don't typically carry ERA, which is pretty significant given the upcoming changes). Getting really deep into these statistics and rebalance, you'll start discovering some really weird shit, such as the Type 16 is effectively a wheeled Light Tank and a better LT than some other LTs to boot, yet it must retain its old class because it would completely mess the basic narrative of the game - when all vehicles are the same, it will become incredibly difficult for new players to orientate (and yes, we are getting new players, every day).

There were thoughts about merging LTs and TDs into one class (FSV), but this would be REALLY complex. Right now, every single TD and LT has its seprate table in developer files where its battlefield role and intended gameplay is described. In other words, we're not cutting legs to fit the shoe, we're changing the shoe size to fit the leg - or, we're assigning classes to fit the vehicles based on how we want them played, not vice versa.

I guess the TLDR of it all is, you'll see what happens. We all will (that's why I am specifically avoiding giving any numbers because when everything changes, listing specific changes makes no sense).

Yes. For all these strange terms (eliminate etc) please check the BP FAQ table.

Yeah we are working on player settings for this (surprised they aren't finished yet) and it looks like something got borked along the way. Should be fixed soon.

Or we can just nerf the York and DCA.