Posted 03 May 2013 - 01:53 PM

Ask the Devs #37

Community Relations Questions/Concerns

Community Warfare/Clans

`Mech's and Mechbay

Weapons & Loadouts

Matchmaking/ELO/Server

Gameplay/Game modes

Miscenalleous

Cockpit, HUD & Customizations

Forum/Website/Sales and Tournaments:

A: If you want to find useful information, you go to the proper place. If you want to know more about military weapons, you will not go on a food site. It's the same principle and, contrary to what you feel, it actually helps us a lot in finding specific information, this is also easier for the dev team to find topics related to their specialty and respond + interact with the community. It's still a work in progress (like the FAQs need to be populated) and small changes are to be expected, but GD is not coming back. As for GD being the only place to go, we think there is lots of interesting information in other part of our forums, and this will help them to be discovered and populated, once the dust have settled and final tweaks done, it will be much easier for everyone to find discussion about what they are looking for as there will be a forum for it, with GD, we felt like lots of information was getting lost and lots of redundancy. As for the search function, it's scheduled to be improved. Also, with less moderation to do in GD, the Community Management team will have more time to interact in other forums.A: Thank you, it's hard to please everyone. The game is not completed yet, while there are lots of great Battletech site, MWO somewhat became the hub of lots of BT fans. Drama is a bit to be expected in every forum that has such a strong fan base.A: Current morale of the community is based on missing features, UI in the process of being revamped and lots of bugs that are to be fixed before full feature launch. It breaks our heart that the community feels like that, but here we'll have to rely the virtue of patience as we can't do everything at once. One comment that we see often is releasing new Hero Mech or anything consumable, one thing need to be understood, the team creating mech and consumable are not the same team creating CW feature and fixing the bug, they are separate entities and their work is streamlined.A: Satisfaction rate of tickets sent to support is above 85%. Most complaints are about known bugs that are planned to be fixed before launch. On the forum side, we did two official polls recently, more specifically about HUD bugs and Forum reorganization, there is approximately 300 people who participated, which represent a very small % of our user base. As the main concern of the community are the bugs and lack of feature, we will do what we planned to do, fix them and deploy them before full launch.A: In a purely non-faction public match, this would be possible.A: There is a matrix of enemy/friendly states. So no, not all Factions will be at war with everyone. Alliances will exist, and they will change dynamically according to the BT timeline.A: Currently there are no pay-only unlocks, and no plans to add them, other than existing concepts like Hero Mechs.A: Merc Corps will be able to fight for and occupy specific systems.A: We’re not quite ready to discuss Clan tech specifically. IS Factions and Merc Corps will have access to all IS tech, however allegiance will affect prices.A: For now, yes. More will come.A: As we flesh out the roles for each `Mech, yes. But this is not specific to just Lights.A: Variety. We’re focused on adding more different chassis.A: UI 2.0.A: Sorry, no.A: Players will always build and use `Mechs that are perceived to be the best or most powerful. This changes on a regular basis as new mechs are introduced or items are tuned/fixed. There will always be a mech or two that people will favor. We do our best to make sure to encourage players to use a variety, this comes in the form of nerfs, buffs, tuning, etc.A: We review it continually, changes are made when necessary.A: Eventually.Not yet. Details will come out closer to launch.For now we are planning only to offer XP boosts.A: Yes, we continually fix items like this. Thanks for the heads up.A: Possibly, currently no plans to change this.A: Once we have a lobby and players can vote for certain maps to be player, and players can bring more than one Mech with them to select from – yes.A: This is for the planet as a whole, not just the map. And it is complete fluff.A: If I told you about the easter eggs they wouldn’t be a surprise.A: Trees which are destructible (but not turned on currently), do not block targeting.A: Machineguns are getting tuned to help with this.A: Currently we only offer weapons from existing timeline. I believe Light Gauss is available in 3056.This actually does not happen, not every missile hits the CT every time. It’s random where each missile hits. Sometimes it may seem like you are being cored directly, however it is most likely due to splash damage. We are tuning this right now to minimize the SSRMs coring potential.A: It will come under review soon.A: No plans to change how the hardpoints work right now.A: It will be equipment and takes up slots.A: Yes.A: Probably not, as this is a fairly big change and would allow for some powerful permeations.No plans yet.A: Yes, with Community Warfare. Details are still being worked on.A: Yes. We’re expanding the meta game post launch.A: Seismic Sensor should debut in the next 60 days.We have some ideas to add more defense, nothing we’re quite ready to talk about though.A: Yes, we are exploring permanent (match) damage caused by overheating.A: No plans to tweak Gauss Rifles at this time, however, we might nerf PPCs not that you brought it up. : )A: We’re still deciding exactly how this will all work. Public Tests will be open to all during specific short time slices, say 4pm-6pm. They will test specific changes, say weapon balance, or matchmaking. Players will not have control over these changes. Standard game rules will be in place.A: Some of this will be solved with CW and Private Matches. Synch dropping is fairly disruptive and can be abused. Instead of putting in code that prevents this from happening, we’re focusing on developing features that allow players to choose opponents, and allowing large pre-made groups.A: While no matchmaking system is ever going to be perfect, Elo offers a nice balanced approach, that is easy to feed data to create desirable matchups, whether solo or team based.A: We have no plans to release Elo scores to the public.A: We haven’t released our plans for the Command Console yet. Still in design.A: Yes. TBA.A: Interesting idea. Possibly.A: This would be modal, and yes we have considered it for asymmetrical game modes.A: We have a command wheel coming after launch that should help with this.A: They are working ok. More love and time is needed though in order to improve the experience.A: DropShip mode is essentially the ability to respawn, which could be available to any current or future mode.A: For public faction play, players will hit launch, be matchmade and put into a lobby. In this lobby will be 2-3 maps to vote for. Each map will affect a different faction front based on the outcome of the upcoming match to be played.A: UI 2.0 is a complete overhaul of the Front End menu system. We plan to put out a nice overview about all the changes when we get closer to testing phases.A: Yes. All of the above pretty much.A: With the new UI we have the ability to funnel players through a specific training phase, which teaches the player how to play the game, use Mech and Pilot Labs, etc. UI 2.0 + Achievements allow us to reward the players for completing specific key goals. Once the player completes the beginner tutorial, we can gift a `Mech to them, removing the need to use Trial `Mechs as starter `Mechs.UI 2.0 will start showing up in Private testing around Mid-June and Public test in Late-July, and go live in Late Summer. It’s a complete overhaul of the UI. The changes are mostly form, with some new functionality as well, plus Community Warfare tabs (Faction).A: If we make changes, and they would have to be dramatic, we would refund all of the XP spent and allow you to respect as necessary. There are currently no plans to blow up the existing Basic/Elite/Master structure, rather we are looking to expand the efficiencies into other categories such as weapons.Players will never be able to drop as a group into Testing Grounds specifically. This is a local, single player only concept. Down the road, we are exploring opening up Private Matches to give players this ability.A: Yes. No ETA yet.A: We have no plans to bring back repair and rearm.A: It’s a minor update that addresses many CryEngine DX 11 bugs.A: Probably not. It would be purely cosmetic at this point, since players can’t walk around the environments outside of a Mech.A: We’re still looking for the cause. Our telemetry tracks user FPS, and there hasn’t been a widespread drop in FPS. Some behind the scenes automated testing is about to commence on the build previous to April 2and the current production build in order to track down the problem. Stay tuned.A: We do support 5.1, however there may be situations where to many sounds cause distortion/noise.A: Yes. We’re going to be adding more details and functionality to the BattleGrid.A: Yes. The current implementation provided by CryEngine is designed to be a Debug tool only, and is not easily released to the Production environment without exposing more debug aspects.A: Ongoing fixes are coming over the next several patches.A: We haven’t decided on the final format. Both 3and 1person will be available options, however we have yet to confirm how one or the other will be selected for specific scenarios, like Merc Corp vs Merc Corp.A: Due to licensing restrictions, we are not able to sell physical items.A: I would guess a few hours (4-5).A: The BattleGrid serves this purpose (pushfor now. We may add the additional units to the HUD via a toggle of some kind.A: If you are meaning hitbox - the head hitbox is similar to other Mechs.A: We have paused development on adding more info for now until a few HUD related bugs and performance issues have been fixed.A: Opacity and color changes are on the horizon. No ETA when they will arrive. This will also player with color blindness.A: We needed to come up with a solution for reverting back to the default Hero Mech colors. This functionality will be available in the May 7patch.A: Due to technical and performance reasons, we have elected not to offer any form of picture-in-picture modes. This requires the entire scene to be rendered at least two times, dropping FPS significantly.A: When we finish the eggs and hashbrown patterns.A: We do not have any plans to add specific camera modes yet.A: Possibly. It’s something that will become more realistic when we get Factions into the game.A: We’re going to allow player to change their names in the near future. Expect this to have a reasonable MC price associated with it.A: Team tournaments will come with Community Warfare, 12 v 12, and UI 2.0.A: Eventually.A: Dev blogs have been replaced by a variety of different concepts, like Command Chair and the Ask The Devs posts.