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Haswell

July 8 Q&A with SS - Answers and Discussion

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As described in the Q&A questions thread (https://armoredlabs.net/index.php?/topic/59785-qa-with-ss-post-your-questions-here/), here are the first round of answers provided by SS.

If your question didn't get answered this time or you would like to ask more questions, feel free to submit them in the questions thread.

 

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Are there any new mechanics that SS or the developers would like to see added to the game in the future?

That’s a super-broad question. We’d like a ton of things – full vehicle rebalance, more modes, more story, more story impact etc. Sadly, wanting and making are different things and in game development, there’s never enough resources around to do EVERYTHING you want to do. In fact, not editing enough is one of the most common rookie mistakes that prevent many a great game from being born. In our case, we’re focusing on the achievable. One specific thing we are working on is a new crew and commander system that is currently in the concept stage. As for me, I’d like more synergy – more integration of various elements with each other.

 

Where do you (Silentstalker or the developers) see the game going in the coming years?

Forward? Again, a super-broad question, so let me answer a bit differently. For the foreseeable future, we’ll be doing what we did for the past couple of years. We’ll be introducing Battle Paths as well as new PvE and PvP maps and, of course, Special Operations, in which we’ll be returning to the story roots of the 2017 Storyline Campaign (this is probably an unfamiliar thing for the Russian players so we’ll have to start working on an introduction). In parallel, we’ll be running Perihelion with some exciting new prizes and ideas that I hope you’ll like.

But that’s the current status quo. As you may or may not know, our team underwent significant changes recently. One of the things that it offers us is the opportunity to review the game in its entirety, including its core concepts such as balance, modes and lore integration. And that’s pretty much what we are doing right now, starting with one of the spots we have long wanted to address, our new player experience (how well are new players eased into the game), which we hope to significantly improve in the future.

 

Are very recent vehicles planned to be added? Like Challenger 3. And if yes, how would they be implemented in the tech tree? Tier 10's? Tier 11's?

Adding them is quite possible, although at the moment we are not planning to do so, at least not this year. Their main problem is as follows – what do they bring to the game? The coolness factor and some tiny PR bonus aside, they are basically “mutations” of existing tanks. What new does the Challenger 3 bring to the table? The answer is: nothing by default. It’s just a Challenger hull with a different shaped turret and a different gun that is in the game already as well. In real-life terms, it is definitely an interesting upgrade, but gameplay-wise, it’s just “another MBT.”

To make them interesting would require some unique mechanics that are, at the same time, useful but not overpowering. Typically, the more interesting they get, the harder they are to implement to the point of the idea not being viable (usually due to various quirks of CryEngine). An example would be the Pereh with its first-person-guided-missiles. We tried to do that years ago and the estimate for the feature was 6 months’ worth of development (and that was without the programmer doing anything else). Well that – and the feature would be pretty toxic, but that’s another matter. Adjustable terrain would also be pretty much impossible. However, that is not to say we won’t ever do anything complex. We have some good ideas (we think) for vehicle abilities, some of which you will see in the next few vehicles.

As for further Tiers, at the moment we aren’t planning to introduce Tier 11, although there have been various ideas floating around for a separate “cutting edge” competitive Tier consisting of tanks with unique abilities each that would introduce a new system of circle-like balance. Nothing concrete though, and certainly no “plasma tank” Tier 11. There’s no need. Anything developed in the next couple of years will be suitable for Tier 10.

 

What sort of feedback has been acquired on the Perihelion rewards so far?

Rewards specifically? Fairly decent actually, roughly 6.5/10 (slightly better than the BP reward pack using a similar scale). It’s clear that it would be better to have more unique rewards such as skins, colors, avatars, decals and such.  At the same time, the event offered many players a LOT of valuable prizes and a LOT of Gold, at least in our eyes. The fact players think otherwise is a problem with the game’s expectation creep, which is also a major issue of the game as a whole.

 

How has player sentiment been across the Raids held so far? Was the last one considered a success? Will we actually see another one in the future?

Difficult question. On one hand, yes – interest-wise, it wasn’t terrible. On the other hand, we aren’t deaf to the negative feedback caused by copycat camouflages and other “cheap” content. We really don’t want to make you guys unhappy with further such “experiments” and would like to change our ways. As such, the Raid format is shelved for the time being pending a full review. We’ll deal with it as a part of our future considerations.

 

I understand there was a 54 “for” and 46 “against” vote for the Perihelion plot for EU/NA, while the Russian side had roughly the opposite vote. Are there any details as to what factors resulted in the for/against votes?

Well, this one is pretty simple. Players in general are conservative by default. When you ask about game balance for example, most votes would always be for fixing the current system, not for creating something brand new. As such, Perihelion – which is a radical departure from the current narrative – was always at a disadvantage. Another factor was the fact that the event had a lot of issues such as the lack of a tracking mechanism, the repeated payouts caused by incorrect internal documentation and such, which likely caused a halo effect. On the other hand, the story arc ended with the best story rating of all previous polls and story arcs, so in this sense, I take it as a huge win for me personally :)

 

Are there any plans to introduce skins from the community into the game? Is it possible with the current modding that's going on to have some sort of events or voting to have some of these modded items (for example camouflage and skins) added to the game?

Possibly. The issues here aren’t strictly technical (although the skin would have to undergo a check from our artists), but also legal. How do we transfer the rights? What would be the price for it? Or would it be free? What other terms and conditions would apply? And so on. Some skins we’d be interested in, some we definitely wouldn’t be (talking to the guy who attached boobs to an Abrams). Each case would have to be solved on an individual basis. If any author has a suggestion about such skin’s introduction, he or she should come forward and discuss it with a community manager. No results guaranteed, of course.

 

Are there any plans to have an overhaul of balance to older tanks?  Currently they seem to be left behind with the constant increase in abilities and features of the new shiny premium tanks, making tech tree tanks either very niche or obsolete (and other balance-related questions).

At this moment, fixing everything would require a total balance overhaul. It’s something for the distant future – in the near future, we’ll focus on fixing some truly nasty outliers (Type 99 series ammo rack, T-15 firepower and others) as well as not breaking anything before we put together a full balance overhaul plan, which is something we want to do for the distant future.

 

When can we stop having to actually double check every patch to see what errors have slipped in (stealth changes)?  Is there something we can do to highlight these issues, other than reporting to you, you escalate, we then get told we are wrong?

We have taken steps to improve the situation. It is, however, worth pointing out that the reality of game development is that you’ll always have some margin of error – the more changes you implement, the more problems you will encounter. That’s a matter of statistics. The game went through two major balance overhauls recently, followed by several major patches that corrected what left was there to address – and some things simply fell through the cracks. In some cases, the “hidden changes” reported weren’t even hidden, just some things that had been implemented months prior and forgotten. Either way, things should be better now. 

 

If you could go back in time and change a single 'thing' in the game (rebalance patch, decision, idea, lootboxes etc.) what would it be any why?

That’s not how it works though. There hasn’t been a single decision where you could with confidence say things would have been better had it not taken place. Even the dreaded lootboxes once saved our budget and subsequently the game. What would I personally have made differently? Probably take everything easier, be more chill :)

 

Some of the documentations on game mechanics are like armor and ammo are either somewhat hard to find or are outdated on the official website, and given that there's probably no relevant developers around to ask due to changes in developer teams, is it still possible to go over them again in the future? Some of them are not fully understood by players, and it feels like it's up to us to figure them out ourselves.

As far as I know, the video guides on Youtube and the written guides on the portal are fairly up to date. The video series was concluded last year. There may be some obsolete bits, but guides in general aren’t generally supposed to contain every single equation that takes place upon pressing the mouse button. Either way, right around Christmas, I am taking the time to generally review the Guide section. This year, I’ll probably do that sooner because we are expecting an influx of new players at one point (no, can’t tell you about THAT) so everything should be in top shape.

 

How did the current commander leveling system originate? Was it more or less labor intensive to develop than other systems we haven't seen or weren't used?

As far as I know, it started as an old Obsidian design, but that was (like everything old Obsidian) just written down as a rough idea. The system was fully developed by the Allods Team and I am not really aware of any alternative solutions or prototypes. Certainly there were some discussions as to how should it all look, what skills should there be and so on, but the core idea was pretty straightforward. With that being said, it is a very labor-intensive system, that’s why there haven’t been that many commanders recently. We are working on a more practical solution to this problem, although I am not ready to give you any ETA or details on that one.

 

In the longer term, how committed is the current team to maintaining the Wargaming-style tier-grind-ad-nauseam model, where there's little goal of the game besides reaching an arbitrarily high number of games in a given period of time? Do they have any ideas on what else they could try with the game that are at least on a drawing board? Or building it into a new title if necessary?

That is an extremely good question. The lack of purpose has been a problem for a long time now. Unfortunately, there isn’t a consensus regarding this matter, even on the player side – many players are fairly content just turning the game on, play a few matches and that’s it. Such casual players have no desire to immerse themselves in a game world. I too share this concern but to be fair, even my opinion is biased and mostly based on the fact that such loyal players (“retained” is the term used in the game industry) are far more inclined to... you guessed it, support the game with their hard-earned cash. In my personal opinion, it’s definitely something we should improve and an ongoing immersive storyline is my preferred tool of choice.

 

In the short term, are there any plans or 'drawing board ideas' to revisit AI issues?

As was stated many times, the AI is currently an Obsidian era black box that we have no documentation for. Quite literally, it’s just lines upon lines of code. That’s not to say we can’t ever understand it – of course we can, it’s simply a matter of research and manhours. The issue is – the programmer that’s working on this issue (and we are talking about many months of work) is not doing something else, something that would potentially add more value to the game (for example, new mechanics of some kind).

So the real question is – is it worth it? Would somewhat better AI improve the game significantly for the majority of players? The answer is, probably not. Some of the more pressing PvE issues such as spawn composition or placement have literally nothing to do with the AI code, that’s map design. The only issues that I can think of right now is the infamous “showing the butt” behavior (which was already mitigated by the Allods Team developers), the “ATGMs targeting turret rings” (also largely resolved) and the defense from enemy ATGMs (also known as “APS doesn’t work in PvE”), which admittedly should be looked into.

Either way, this is one of the “big” questions that we’ll get to and ask ourselves eventually.

 

In a similar vein, are there any plans to update and revamp the PvE missions that have remained untouched since their original iteration in 2015-2016? Including mission structure, objectives and side objectives, size of the maps used, and the quality of the maps themselves?

Well, as you can imagine – not easily. A map overhaul (so that it is noticeable – not just moving a few things around) is a huge and expensive endeavor and, once again, a developer working on an old map is not working on a new, fresh map. When the resources required are comparable, why not create a new map?

There are other serious considerations as well. Different maps were made by different people using different techniques and, internally, they can be quite different. We encountered this with the Wages of Sin PvE map that was originally supposed to use a lightly modified American Dream Arizona map and was supposed to be released for the conclusion of the Arizona arc of the Perihelion event (a month ago, that is).

In reality, what started as a straightforward task ended with a massive overhaul because the map’s coding simply required it (and we didn’t know in advance). We got it running properly only recently. I’d like to take the opportunity to congratulate and thank our level designers and programmers for their effort because this was an incredibly difficult task and internally we fully considered scrapping the map altogether. Now it thankfully looks like we won’t have to and the lessons learned will be used in future maps as well.

 

After the successes regarding various Air Defense vehicles being added, and especially due to two being tier 9 and a single tier 10 (not forgetting the various low tier ones), is it within the potential future plans for trying to look into additional Air Defense vehicles e.g. Gepard, Marksman, and etc.

Absolutely. Seeing the positive feedback its unfinished model received, we’d like to add the Gepard in the (somewhat distant) future. The Marksman is pretty much indistinguishable from the Gepard in game terms (they use the same guns and similar turrets) so it is quite likely that both of them would be mutually exclusive.

 

Are there any plans with SPG's/artillery in general?

Not at the moment. One of those “big” questions we need to discuss in the future. This class has been a pain in the butt for seven years now (longer, if you count the initial development). As you can imagine, it got into the game because World of Tanks had it. There’s a certain niche of players that just enjoy either griefing others (for which this class is perfect in PvP) or just sit back and click with a mouse.

Even the first alpha tests showed that adding it wasn’t that great of an idea, but the code was by then firmly embedded in the game – at least it got nerfed after the first testing rounds. Guided artillery shells such as “Krasnopol” were not fun to play against and were just obnoxious. From that point, over the years, the class received a series of direct (splash damage) and indirect (improvement of the incoming shell warning symbol) nerfs until it was finally relegated to PvE and left there.

The way we see it, the only really viable course of action (without making it toxic) would be to turn them into some kind of super-heavy tank destroyers with thin armor but big guns – in another words, getting rid of the indirect fire ability. It is not unprecedented in real life for artillery to fire over “open sights” (directly at the enemy), but it’s certainly not its primary modus operandi and some players still enjoy artillery in PvE as it is, so this is nowhere near a clear-cut case.

 

Any plans to change/update/add to the weekly/daily missions?

That’s yet another system that needs an overview in the future. But this one isn’t as complicated so the chances are pretty good. But everything like that will happen after the Battle Path release.

This is a bonus cringy comment for sladjan.

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On 7/8/2022 at 4:02 PM, Haswell said:

Are there any plans to have an overhaul of balance to older tanks?  Currently they seem to be left behind with the constant increase in abilities and features of the new shiny premium tanks, making tech tree tanks either very niche or obsolete (and other balance-related questions).

At this moment, fixing everything would require a total balance overhaul. It’s something for the distant future – in the near future, we’ll focus on fixing some truly nasty outliers (Type 99 series ammo rack, T-15 firepower and others) as well as not breaking anything before we put together a full balance overhaul plan, which is something we want to do for the distant future.

Just like they fixed previous “power creep”?  Making missions require such ridiculous DPM and the not retuning them after nerfing “over performers”. And basically reinstating damage monsters like T15 again as a crutch to not touch their mess more than they have to.

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0.33 and 0.38 were supposed to have been that "total balance overhaul" but were massive failures, at least in my opinion.  Which is why I no longer really care if things are balanced, because I'm honestly not sure that I want them to touch it again.

I have no idea how it feels in PvP, but in PvE you just buy into the DPM meta, play AC/ATGM combo vehicles, and shoot stuff.  MBTs are still good (enough), but require more skill to play successfully than the average AW player possesses.  

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" many players are fairly content just turning the game on, play a few matches and that’s it. Such casual players have no desire to immerse themselves in a game world. I too share this concern but to be fair, even my opinion is biased and mostly based on the fact that such loyal players (“retained” is the term used in the game industry) are far more inclined to... you guessed it, support the game with their hard-earned cash"  

But maybe ask why such casual player wont p(l)ay more ? Why they are not " driven"  to play the game more then just a few games, and pay for the ingame items. Why are my  approximaly 110 ingame AW friend (yes... still find it hard to believe I have friend.... ;-) ) just about 6 online.

Had some battalion members who vent their opinion on a way " which was not the most polite", but did addressed some real core issues.

It is not always what AW thinks it is the best for us, but more then that, also what we as p(l)ayers want.

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On 7/17/2022 at 12:35 PM, ceejee007 said:

But maybe ask why such casual player wont p(l)ay more ? Why they are not " driven"  to play the game more then just a few games, and pay for the ingame items.

I'm one of those "casual" players.  I'm just not interested in any game dominating my time like that.  I don't want to be "driven" to play a game.  That feels like work, not entertainment.  I used to be like that, but I've grown out of it and have other hobbies now, too.  Gaming is just one thing among many for me.

I still spend money on AW, but I doubt that I count as a "whale" for whatever that's worth.

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if they just left the game as it was when obsidian was kicked, it would be 1000% better game as is now.

Did you know that spg is missing fully aimed shots just like in wot ?

tanks are totally blind and unable to shoot on the move.

this game sucks balls and I went from playing every day to playing only BP to playing only one game a week ignoring current BP to installing shitty wot again.

It is unbelievable but tier 10 russian mediums are more accurate when shooting on the move in wot than all tier 10 tanks in AW. Do you know why ? bcs the game is programmed in a way that you will not do any dmg when you are shooting outside of a sniper mode. 

Just test it yourself shoot in sniper mode while aiming and then shoot when zooming out at the same spot and you will not pen or hit the target. only a slight movement will cause you to miss or not pen while doing so.

It is laughable 

When obsidian was here I was laser accurate while moving and also sniping for 500m+, now I have to stop to pen at 100m 😂

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Have the same feeling. Gone from a regular (10 games a day) to about 3 or less.

My personal opinion is that I get the feeling (more and more) that " the eastern part of EU" is been favorite in the game. Also got the feeling more and more that cheating /Aim mods etc are active in the game.

The fun is leaving the game (for me at least), and with that my wallet closes. But wont say that is would have been better with obsidian, simply because we never will know.....

And yes all my thoughts may be called a " tinfoiled hat" thinking, but that was said in the WoT forums, before it was proven in WoT that cheating / favouring was present. And personally I think that AW is making the same mistakes.

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