FAQ-ing Fridays #1 - 21st April, 2017

(Chris Mullins) #1

Hey all,

I know what you’re thinking…what is FAQ-ing Fridays? Well, we’ve had a few conversations recently with you lovely community people and we realised that in our dev videos we talk about what we’re up to, but we don’t take the time to focus on what you’re up to…

So! Every Friday we’re going to have FAQ-ing Fridays. Which consists of all of the devvy replies we’ve written this week to community questions on a variety of social sites including Forums, reddit, YouTube… everything.

Our plan is by combining all of that juicy information into one central space, no-one will be out of the loop with anything we say. So let’s give it a go! As always, all feedback is welcome, and if you can think of a way to improve this further let us know. We’ll also be doing a Facebook live version too to try and spread the word even further.

Without further ado, here we go:

Facebook

Kyouko - Can you up the minimum level in Ranked to help prevent hackers from entering?
While this could help deter hackers from joining Ranked matches, we’d much rather focus on preventing them from being able to play the game in the first place by improving our anti-cheat system and encouraging players to report suspected hackers in-game.

Tom - Why is this game still in beta?
There’s still features and content we want to test and add beforee take the Beta tag off

Twitter

Ayman - Why did you stop the live streams?
We made the decision to make a weekly video series instead of live streams and they’ve been great at reaching a wider audience.

ItsAGhost - Are user-made maps ever going to be a possibility?
We’d like to see this at some point, but for now we’re focusing on building up the map pool and in-game content ourselves

Ken - Can you add bots to private matches?
We don’t have any bots at the moment, but it would be a nice feature to have. Keep your ideas coming

Reddit

QC_R3QUI3M - Why does the katana and the kukri have a hard time destroying Health and Ammo Stations?
We’re aware there’s a few issues with the hit boxes of some melee weapons, but when it comes to bug fixing we generally have other issues of a higher priority that need to be fixed first, such as the Ranked matchmaking algorithm.

Scarfi0ne - How do you use Weapon Kits?
You can use Weapon Kits with our Crafting system to craft a card using Fragments and Credits with the primary weapon of your choice. They’re hard to come by and you can only find them in Arsenal Crates which drop when you level up

36crazy - Could we have longer queue times so Ranked matches are more balanced?
We want to find a balance between both. We recently updated our matchmaking algorithm by removing bugs and improving features. The more players in Ranked, the better balanced it’ll be. We’re also looking at more improvements that we can make for the next Ranked Season and we’ll let you know once they’re locked down

zanitz - Is Dirty Bomb ever getting an official discord server?
We already have one! If you’d like to join the conversation and find some new people to play with, it’s the place to go. https://discord.gg/0gP8aNVcecBH9lxS

yard1e - Could a vote option be added to Ranked to call for the match to be drawn due to a number of reasons
Similarly to our previous response, we’d rather fix the cause of these issues rather than add in a feature which may fix a symptom of the problem some of the time

Dirty Bomb Forums

3hawn - Can we have a training map where we can practice our aim against moving opponents
A training map with AI is possible, but we have a ton of other things which we need to work on and complete before we think about starting on another feature. If you’re looking to generally improve at movement and aiming the Assault Course is always a good choice to check out. Granted you can only use Skyhammer in it, but it sounds like it’s just generally gameplay you want to improve on.

Elkus2000 - Will there a case-a-day-May
Even-though it was a fun event, sadly it was just for last year. Ranked Season 2 is still going though so earn those Ranked Points, get those cases and get warmed up for Season 3

pleta9 - When I logged in I saw a pop-up which said I would get 500 Ranked Points for free, but I didn’t receive any.
There was a bug which caused the pop-up to still show after the event ended. This has since been fixed and we apologise for the confusion.

MarsRover - I’ve left lot’s of feedback, numerous times yet I still get asked to leave a comment everytime I leave the game. Could you not?
All feedback we receive we go through and use to target future updates, so when possible please do leave a comment and a score. We do understand that it gets a bit annoying when you’ve left feedback and have nothing to add, but every comment is important to us. You can still use the ‘Exit’ command in the main menu if you’d rather close the game instantly without leaving feedback.

K1X455 - What is going on with the DPC stacking in the game? It’s reduces my performance.
This issue is something which is inherent with UE3. Currently we are working on ways to reduce CPU usage to improve it, however as it’s quite intricate and we don’t have a release date planned

Owyn - Punishments for friendly fire. Why are they in and what is their purpose?
With enough punishes gets you kicked from the match, along with receiving a leaver penalty. There’s definitely some areas which could be improved though. ThunderZsolt suggested the idea of kills from objectives not counting towards this vote system which I like.

Tepid Jesus - There’s a lack of reward for progression. Could this be re-worked and improved?
Yes. We want to completely overhaul the progression system in teh game, hoever, just like it sounds, it’s a big job and requires a lot of investment from a lot of different areas. Yet another reason why we’re hiring for so many positions.

Splash Damage Forums

Wrightosaur - Can you confirm if the problem with Potent Packs is being worked on or doesn’t even exist?
Potent Packs is currently bugged on Aura, but is functional on all other Mercs. The fix priority on this bug has been increased, but we’re still a few months away from the work being done due to greater priorities.

Chronicler - Could we use Weapon Kits on melee weapons
Generally we find that players main focus is on their preferred Primary weapon followed by Augments. I don’t imagine this system changing to incorporate selecting melee weapons in the near future, but when Crafting gets overhauled, possibly.

Sadly I didn’t have enough time to collate Steam Forums, YouTube, Customer Support tickets and a couple of other areas, so they should be in next weeks’ one. Again, any feedback is more than welcome.

Thanks!
shoe.

(Nibbles02) #2

Q: Why did it take 10 months to start patching Thunder?

(Mischievous_Mac) #3

^ This is a good start, but I too have the same concern.

(spartamania302) #4

Hello shoe.

You may remember me from your stream, been popping bye every now and then, I stream DB myself and make a youtube video sometimes. Been wondering when you will do another stream.

So today, I want completely mad, I needed 1 more game to get to gold, the devision I belong in. Though you said that your mm algorithm has been updated it still feels the same, since I had players that did not understand at all how to play the game, against a team that has a guy playing like a cobalt/elite with the rest of his team decent to good. This happens every single time I get close to gold. yeah sure you can blame the low playerbase, but this is not the only problem lets all be honist here. And if you want to know I deinstalled your game because of this, and will probably not play untill next update, knowing that I won’t get to gold because every single time I get close to gold I get 100 bad teams with potato brains, and making me derank to officer again. Then rank up to master get close to gold only to get the same again.

First of all, your placements is where it all went wrong, I mean come on, putting litterally everyone in silver at the start of the season? 80% of the players are completely bad at the game and should start in bronze not silver. They have no idea what is going on and end up ruining the game for higher skilled players that try to help them by telling them to please switch to a second medic or not playing tiple engi or wathever. They just never listen. As feedback for this I would suggest that in next season, you look at player performance rather than wins/losses, like in CSGO, you only get a rank after 10 wins and not 10 games, so I would suggest you guys to do the same but completely forget about the losses the player went trough caus we all have a bad match once in a while. After the 10 wins you look at each performance from every match the player made during those 10 wins and give him a rank based on that. After that you can look at wins/losses again.

Second of all ranking up and down doesn’t work the way it should. I get matches I completely carried my team and destroyed the enemy team though we still lose since my team doesn’t know how to do the objective, revive or even that kill-to-revive is a thing, seriously give nader an instant punish for blowing up a teammate medic ffs. So for this I would suggest you look at player performance even more idk but you lose way too much for losing 1 match you had 40k points and the guy under you only has 10k. Also losing a 4v5 takes away 40%??? Seriously??? What are you guys even thinking??? We also need a ping limitter to kick players at the START of the match if they are higher than 100-200 ping, these people can’t play purely because of the lag, though playing against them is even more annoying. Players that are trash but win a match still gain too much %, so I would suggest brining their earnings down as well.

Oh and maybe showing a % on when you will rank up is not a good idea, I would rather rank up after 4 wins in a row where I completely stomped the enemy team then seeing that stupid progress bar slowly fill up, with 20% at a time most of the time.

Glad I said it, please consider my ideas, they will make ranked and your game so much better. And btw, you should put casual matchmaking at the top of your priority list and disable ranked untill you get a solid playerbase.

(OwynTyler) #5

Will Kiras laser getting stuck on roof ever gonna get fixed?

(blufflord) #6

whats the reason for bugs that were there years ago, to go away and come back recently? (I have no idea about programming or anything) . My specific example is blood splatter being on my screen the whole time for a game - had it last week out of nowhere.

(K1X455) #7

I profiled the game since the last update and I’ve seen a noticeable participation of the rest of 7 of 8 processors so I think processor 0 is being offloaded with handling the game. This is a good improvement but I’m not quite sure if it was the applied Win10 updates or whether you guys have done something to improve the game processing, but I still notice spikes that causes game freeze. I got a video of it, but the Plays.TV didn’t capture any audio for some reason.

EDIT:
http://i.imgur.com/7jrF1OF.png

This is the best profile I can do so far after 32 minutes of gameplay. Clearly, it has improved, but noticeable cracking in audio is still there after 25 minutes which is symptomatic of DPC stacking. Note that CPU 0 has not reached over 90% utilisation, and other cores (CPU2 & CPU 3) are well participating in the load.

I still haven’t applied the Crimson 17.4.4 update as of late for fear of false flagging by our resident temperamental paranoid AC.

(Tanker_Ray) #8

When will be the proper merc/weapon balance changes?

I don’t expect Turtle anymore. Seriously. I am still, STILL stuck in here waiting for proper machine gun buffs and this god damn burst rifle meta to be nerfed.

All you need to do is fixing some of the game data digits, and the last merc/weapon balance patch we had was last year fall.

Game hasn’t changed AT ALL since I wrote bushwhacker buff post in this forum.

Turtle is still behind the vague darkness curtain, Dockyard took year and a half for full release + rework. Just for SINGLE map.

Stagnant water is bound to corrupt, and DB is EXACTLY in this point right nowif you guys don’t change anything but just release one map and congratulate yourselves.

It took WAY, WAY TOO LONG to make excuse that you might need enough game datas/statistics to patch the balance. No excuse left for you, SD.

So please, please. If you can’t answer when,

then answer this. What’s the problem inside the company. What delays you guys so much?
What the hell is it? What is going on in SD that bothers the balance patch for over half years,
every single one of them using BR and Stark all the fxcking time.

I am so curious how reasonable your excuse will be, against all veteran players who are still expecting this unchanging - rotting water.

(Xenithos) #9

It would be really interesting if they changed the br-16 into a 32 round gun that fired off shots of four. At 8-10 damage a bullet, and if made just slightly spammy, and less accurate, it’d be a completely different gun.

Then they can nerf the Stark into a super accurate laser beam that does 7-9 damage a bullet, so 21-27 with all 3 bullets per shot, and 42-54 on a head shot if all bullets are hitting. Then they just have to reduce the recoil and horizontal spread somewhat, and drastically increase the speed of firing… making it just a controlled spamming gun. This would change the feel of both guns, remove the high dps while still giving them an advantage of 140-150dps (if all bullets hit) when done right (slightly higher than other guns, rewarding skill in use) AND change the burst meta.

They really should change the k-121 and the mk machine gun doe… at least the mk needs some kind of weird accuracy or random spread change… It’s just not reliable, and not enough damage. The huge magazine is nice… but not big enough to account for being the size of a billboard.

(Jaso) #10

Are you working on any new merc atm?

(AlbinMatt) #11

Just to make it easier on both ends, can you make a list of everything you guys are working on at the moment? This way, we’ll know what to expect for the near future, and can understand Splash damage’s pressure better.

(ThunderZsolt) #12

Yay, I’m famous now \o/

(Jaqueta) #13

Q: Why you guys don’t to anything about South AM Servers and it’s location?

(Jaqueta) #14

Will you guys fix the location of South AM Servers?

(By fix, I mean, putting them in South America, and not…wherever it is right now).

(Naonna) #15

I find it a little bit funny that I Get the same ping on u.s. east servers as I do south America. - Usually because the U.S. servers fill up way faster.

(Nail) #16

edit

(K1X455) #17

EDIT:

Still waiting for @Shoe re: What we found over the week before I spill beans.

(elire01) #18

Q: What can I do with the 2 same ranked cards?
I added one of them to the favorites, but now that I have 2 of them I can not do anything to un-favorite it.

Also why players are able to unbox 2 same ranked cards in 1st place ?

They can’t be recycled.
They can’t be used as trade up material.
They are waste of Ranked Seson 2 Case.

Fix please ?