Adam Pyle - Lead Design at id Software

- Lead Design at id Software Brandon Riffe – Senior Producer at id Software

– Senior Producer at id Software Matt Charles - Senior Producer at id Software

- Senior Producer at id Software John Hill - Esports Manager at id Software

- Esports Manager at id Software Alexander Larionov – Game Director at Saber Interactive

Last week, the community had the opportunity to ask the development team atabout all thingsand now they have delivered the answers.Development Team Responses & Contributions from:: I'm so happy you asked.: Only around ~1.4, but I like to experiment with different playstyles.: Excited!: My personal favorites are Ranger and Sorlag. I have a large number of contenders tied for third, and am still sorting out who deserves that spot. I absolutely do not have a favorite weapon, but instead enjoy mixing it up and earning combo kills.: Ranger! Mobility is key. The Rocket Launcher is still my favorite weapon.: Sorlag she is a beast. My favorite weapon is the lightning gun.: Absolutely not. Lowering the skill floor doesn't mean you inherently lower the skill ceiling. We hope to make the game more accessible by simplifying some game systems, while adding depth by adding more mechanics to utilize and master. New players do not need to quickly compete against higher ranked players, they just need easy access to players of a similar skill ranking and improve their standing (and their skill) over time.: See the next question below.: Hopefully not. Someone really should have told him.: Yes. Whether Tim likes it or not.: Of course. All styles come back.: We are always listening to player feedback and monitoring match data, both have been important in evaluating what Champions are having success and under which conditions. However, it is worth noting that Clutch has some upcoming changes to both its active and passive abilities.: Hitbox adjustments are one of the many knobs we always have at our disposal and consider when making balancing adjustments. Light Champions, like Anarki, Nyx, Slash, have smaller hitboxes, but that is an important counter-balance to their very limited health pool. Recently we have discussed increasing the padding for one of these Champions, but we are looking forward to evaluating data from this weekend's beta test.: Slash is currently a little weak in Duel and a little too strong in Sacrifice. After preparing this week's CBT build we made an adjustment that increased her max armor points by 25, but reduced her plasma trail lifetime significantly.: We have no intentions on reworking the fundamentals behind the speed caps, as they are quite important to preserving the fundamental balance between light, medium, and heavy Champions. However, we’re constantly adjusting all aspects of the Champions acceleration and max speed values to improve balance. Most notably we recently increased the speed of our heavy Champions, and have some upcoming tweaks for Visor, Galena, and Clutch on the way.: Yes.: I'd love to! Currently two weapons deal extra damage while zoomed-in: the Heavy Machinegun and the Railgun. We are certainly aware that this is a hot issue and many players have expressed their dislike. So let's take a moment to look at our rationale behind the bonus damage and our plans moving forward. The Heavy Machinegun currently does 9 damage, with a 75ms rate of fire, resulting in 120 damage per second at 100% accuracy. (And note, the weapon is only 100% accurate at point blank due to spread.) While zoomed-in the weapon deals 10 damage at 80ms RoF, resulting in 125 DPS. While the extra 5 damage per second is very minor, it does not present an interesting player choice. The player needs to zoom-in for more damage, has little consequence in doing so, and it would always be to their advantage to do so. What is of interest to me is giving the player a risk vs reward choice. Let's make the HMG deal 10 damage, but lower the RoF to 100ms, resulting in 100 DPS vs the current 120 DPS. And for our player choice, let's consider the HMG Zoomed to deal 15 damage per shot, but at a much lower rate of fire – twice as slow – 200ms between each shot. This results in more damage per bullet, but lowers the weapon's DPS from 100 to 75. In this design, choosing to zoom-in too soon or for the entirety of a combat situation would not be a wise decision, but as your opponent becomes weaker or if they begin to flee, you could choose to sacrifice your sustained DPS in favor of more damage per shot to try to finish them off. In doing so you risk dealing insufficient DPS due to missing critical shots, or losing the escaping enemy if they were healthier than anticipated. For those not familiar, this same mechanic existed for the Machinegun in Quake 4, and was well received and enjoyed by that community. We would like to implement this change to see players enjoy this strategic choice that may add some depth to the gameplay. Concerning the Railgun, our intention is to introduce a radial charge meter around the crosshair upon zooming-in, and only once charged would the additional 10 damage become available. This would provide players both the UI and audible feedback to understand when the damage is available, and eliminate the ability for players to quick-scope their shots. It positively reinforces that the railgun is a long-range weapon, rewards the player for using it at long-range, but it comes at a cost of remaining in a tight FOV for an extended period of time leaving the player vulnerable to being flanked from the side or having reduced mobility through the arena, all while still fully allowing the weapon to be shot from the hip at any distance or on flick shots. Our current plan is to see it through as designed and then re-evaluate both player feedback and statistical match data to determine our path forward.: Yes. It is a normal cycle to generally have new flashy effects put into place and over the course of testing fine tune them to address those issues. We reduced many of our weapon effects after QuakeCon, after PAX, and will continue to take player feedback to address extraneous effects as we continue through our CBTs.: I absolutely agree. We will try to integrate some adjustments in the near future.: Yes and no. While making all effects adhere to a friendly/enemy effects color helps you easily distinguish who fired the shot and which shots are threatening, it also begins to detract from the weapon identity. The more effects that become team colored, the less you can identify what type of shot it was. We obviously do this quite a bit with the abilities where we color effects like Clutch's Barrier, Slash's Plasma Trail, and Nyx's Ghostwalk smoke, so there is a bit of a balance there we need to maintain. We also want to preserve some of our art style and not just turn everything red and blue. Are we open to suggestions? Sure. I know quite a few people are interested in team colored rails and lightning beams options.: Those types of weapon customizations may be best served through our existing weapon customization systems. So for instance, vanity weapons could come with their own effects.: We need to fix the input delay (the same issue as the rockets) before making any damage adjustments. In theory, fixing the input issue will significantly improve the feeling of this gun.: Weapon values are constantly evaluated and tweaked. We do plan on settling into values as much as possible, but in these early stages we are always listening to feedback and reviewing stat data. Currently the Rockets move at 1200 ups, faster than any previous Quake, and have a splash damage radius of 132u – slightly larger than the 120u radius found in Q3, Q4, and QL. All weapon stats are subject to change at this time.: Two reasons. 1.) The BFG has always had a tumultuous past in Quake. In Quake 2, the BFG was fun, but so effective it had to be banned and disabled in competition. In Quake 3 the BFG was only scarcely available on a few maps, and none of those maps stayed in favor when it came to competitive play. Quake 4’s Dark Matter Gun again was only present in a handful of arenas, and wasn’t well received outside of Deathmatch. We would prefer that all of our weapons be embraced, and all of our maps be viable in both casual and competitive play, without altering the item layouts. 2.) We just released DOOM and while the BFG has found its way into several Quake games, it is a weapon that clearly originates from DOOM and is a key piece of that game’s identity. In that respect, I prefer to give the brands space to define their own identity.: While there is nothing inherently wrong with headshot damage in other games, Quake has traditionally stressed the importance of the hitting rather than overly concerned with location based damage. Our Headshot medal brings some fun to the action without altering the gameplay, and while they do not deal extra damage, they are meaningful as earning medals generate both XP and Favor. Headshot damage sounds like something that we could include in a fun mini-game, but not in normal play.: Spoilers.: The Spoiler Gun: it shoots tiny Orbbs.: One thing Quake 3 successfully did was make simplifications that improved the game for both new and returning players. Quake 3 took a rather complex tiered armor system and reduced it down to three pick-up items: Body Armor (Red) and Combat Armor (Yellow), and Shards (Green). In Champions we have maintained that same concept of two more significant armors, the Heavy and Light Armor, but have moved Shards from being a pick-up item to a kill reward. The catalyst for this change was our introduction of Hourglass Cooldown Reduction pick-ups, which to our designers felt like a better small item to chain throughout the map. Like in Q3 where Shards were often meant to be small bonuses most useful to the player out-of-position, we place Cooldowns in locations where we help bolster players who may not have the high ground or item control. Looking at how Quake 3 managed to simplify game systems, making them more accessible to a broader base of players while still creating what is often touted as the most skill based competitive shooter of all time, we began to reconsider many of our own similar systems. Ultimately refining things down to Major Items and Minor Items felt really good as a way to both reinforce the importance of key items and ensure that players always maintained a good stack of health and armor. Concerning our move to a container system over flat values, one thing I had noticed over the years that greatly divided the good players from those who were struggling was their lack of control over their health and armor stack. But not just item control – they were missing health management entirely. Players when weak would often wait until they were below 25hp to begin gathering health (when it was too late) and others would walk over health bubbles when already at full health. I thought, if we could improve everyone's health management habits, then we could begin building better players. We hope that over time our move to a container system, much like Heart Containers popularized in adventure games, would help players begin thinking about health differently. If you have one empty heart container and you understand that all you need to do to refill it is run over one single item, you are more likely to do so. Over time as we make improvements to our HUD, we hope to make health management be more intuitive to all users. Ultimately, this nicely ties into our concept of Major and Minor items. Minor items, be it health or armor, will refill one of these containers, while Major Items restore you to full with the potential of overmax bonus points that decay over time. This makes the game easier to learn, without taking away from the greater experience.: We hear the request for this feature and have it as an item on our list.: Quake Champions is developed to be an always-online game, but that being said we understand practicing against bots is a frequent request. While I can't speak to the timeframe for this, we are looking in to this feature.: While I can't comment about specifics yet, we are looking into various ways to train players how to use each Champion effectively.: Onboarding and training for new players is one of our top priorities right now.: Creating a Stats API is an important step towards building the competitive esports and social features infrastructure we have planned. That work is a significantly large task, but is already underway. While building it for our own internal use is our immediate priority, our goal is to make it accessible to either partners or the public to allow the community to build robust tools that depend on match stats and player rankings.: Yes, we already have some nice spectating and replay features in the works. Spectating is incredibly important to both esports and community-building, so we are trying to improve the spectating experience beyond what we've offered in previous Quake titles.: Weapon control in Quake Champions is similar to Quake Live. Weapon respawn is 5 seconds so the technique of grabbing the weapon to deny your opponent won't be as effective. However the technique of using your positioning to protect and prevent your opponent of obtaining a weapon is still very much a part of Quake Champions. We've seen in the beta that a common tactic on Blood Covenant is to occasionally check on the Railgun to ensure your opponent is not attempting to grab it for their benefit.: We are continuing to monitor model visibility.: Yes, we do plan on adding a ranking system in the future.: We look forward to sharing information about our esports landscape soon.: The audio team is continuously evaluating the mix. We keep not helping them by changing how things work. It's a never-ending cycle.: Wallclipping, or SlideMove in idPhysics, is something we are currently testing but need more time to fully integrate.: The pick-up delay is a known issue to be addressed in the future. Don't worry, it bothers me too -- I really looking forward to addressing it.: We plan on adding these options within Custom Game. Lately the average length of Duels have been extending, producing a significant number of comebacks, and it spectates quite well. We are interested to see how it evolves.: Maybe. Am I allowed to answer this yet?: We have no current plans.: We will be testing similar variations in the future, but it is not something we're actively working on.: Although we have discussed it, nothing currently in the works. We know that space maps, and Longest Yard in particular, were quite popular and memorable arenas but they are also many who dislike space maps. We feel it would best to wait until we have more maps in the pool.: Vulkan is being considered, but currently we are focusing on getting the game done.: Yes, we are actively working on the netcode.: We have a fix for the warping checked into a development branch that will be rolled into the CBT testing at some time.: We want to make loading as fast as possible; we are actively working on load-time improvements.: When it's ready. We know it's frustrating to not be able to play now, but we're gathering valuable data right now in an effort to allow as many people as possible to play in the near future.: We're open to a lot of options as long as they don't grant any competitive advantages. Right now our focus is on improving the core game, but soon we will start integrating more options.: We agree this would be cool. It's in our future plans.: Mouse acceleration is nearly ready for testing. The current mouse implementation uses DirectInput. Raw was tested early on and found to produce higher latency under the current conditions. However, I'm personally a big fan of raw input and moving forward we hope to reevaluate and provide more options if they provide superior input quality.: Also, we are actively working on other mouse settings, such as m_filter, m_pitch, and m_yaw.: We intended to add these.: While we will be continuing to improve our Main Menu UI, we don't foresee ever allowing custom main menu layouts... if that's what you were asking.: Yes! The pacing of the updates may vary, but we do want to continuously update the game with interesting new content.: There is absolutely more to come.: We have a ton of cool customizations planned for future updates - and even a few surprises along the way. Stay tuned!: Maybe! We're keen on that idea.: While Daily Challenges will continue to offer digestible tasks that can be accomplished over the course of 1-5 matches, we do have additional progression systems coming online that fill that gap of providing more sustained challenges and goals. The first of which we're bringing online is the Rune Book, where players complete Champions specific Rune Challenges to unlock rewards to show off your mastery of a Champion.: We have several factors that influence team modes matchmaking: skill levels of participants, party size, and difference between median skill of two teams. The system tries to fill the match with players of same skill level/same party size, but if it cannot find matching opponents in a given amount of time – it prioritizes the search for teams with lowest difference in median skill.: We currently have servers available in Portland to serve most of the west coast, but we're actively looking to add more data centers across the globe.: Please report any and all bugs via the in-game BUG REPORT when possible. In fact for those really interested in reporting bugs, I recommend keeping a notepad or text document that you can update while you play to make notes of issues you encounter and feedback you wish to provide. Bugs that result in technical issues are best suited for the forum, just be sure to search for existing threads to contribute towards first before creating a new thread.: We have servers available in South Korea at the moment, and we're looking into Japan and Singapore as well.: Create and share content. Be a positive and welcoming force for all of the newcomers. Play as often as we let you, and invite your friends.