February 21 Livestream Answers

This was Cole's first livestream and he was joined by Trick, the atmosphere was relaxed and was probably the best livestream we've had so far. Trick was answering questions very freely.

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The Defiance portion starts at 1:23:00

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Answers

7th legion lockboxes and incursions can award shields with specific 7th legion synergies. However these shields do not have ego levels. That means these shields regardless of rarity are worthless for higher level characters because they have such a low shield capacity and are treated like quest items. When will this be acknowledged and addressed?

It is being addressed, that fix will go in with Gunslinger, the benefits from those shields are still good, we will be doing a fix which will fix that for your existing gear as long as they are below power rating 5. Anything that goes in your inventory that is below an arbitrary power rating threshold it gets boosted to your ego rating.

Any big ticket items on top of your task list currently?

The big ticket item we are working on right now is we've just scheduled our next voiceover session with characters from the television show, so after gunslinger we are doing a big story update with characters from the show. When you are writing the show characters we have to do a lot more work to maintain consistancy with vocal styles and the way the actors deliver their lines. We are hard at work on the next DLC.

Anything new on the Vehicle despawning issue?

It bothers the hell out of me and it happens all the time, but it only happens when you have lots of people around you. It has something to do with having someone else with a matching model of vehicle and having it  despawn and that message gets confused and sends it to your car. We've not been able to reproduce it in labratory environments and so we haven't been able to create a solution for it.

Are there more standard looking outfits coming?

Totally, right now if you pick up the biohazard lockbox it has a mix of outfits in it, it has one weird power armored suits like a biohazard hazmat suit but also a rather normalish suit. Also the 7th legion samurai ronin outfits are normal clothes. And the gunslinger images when they come out none of them are power armor they all all old west style.

Co-op arena game modes

You will be able to co-op the thorn liro arenas as well, so you are going to have those for your fast action points for killing things mode, and the other ones which we are releasing 9 more arenas not set in the thorn legion arena location. Scattered all over, one in the military academy, two are in the 101 keys map and segments of it, one of which is fighting dekuso. THey all add optional objectives giving you the opporunity to increase your score at the risk of failiure. Inside of the new arenas death will equal failure.

Dark Matter enemies in Arkfalls do some weird things when they are being affected by D.o.T. Most notably they teleport to a predetermined spot repeatedly. Why does this happen?

What your looking at is some behaviour related bugs, bad scripting. On the plus side its not resetting health but its ugly and i dont like it. if anyone is familiar with the concept of tethering, they find themselves in a state where they dont have any behaviors they can choose so they pop to where they were supposed to be in the first place. We should be able to fix that but it takes some debugging but since it still works we are going to work on things that dont work first.

High resolution textures for PC

I still have it on our engine programmers to look into, the textures are there you have them and you see them inside the cinematics and it's just a matter of not breaking everyones machines when we turn them on. I would love to have it in for the next DLC.

How can you obtain the Heavy Plasma Repeater?

It's totally in the loot tables inside of arkbreaks, its a pretty rare drop.

If a weapon doesn't have a mastery how can it be fixed?

The mastery bonus reroll for when you have a broken mastery, and that is now fixed and in. So if you have no mastery after you finish mastering a weapon you can do the reset mastery points and it will re-grow you a new mastery as well as reset the points, it will also be free and instant if I remember correctly.

In the Warmaster fight, he does a "Drop Shock" attack that EMPs all the players fighting him. When this happens players can elect to wait until the effects wear off or roll to end it sooner. Currently, after you do either of the 2 your shields still remains empty for an extended period of time. Is this a mechanic of the Warmaster?

It does a shield drain instant attack that drains your shield down to zero and a sustained effect where you spark for a bit and your shield wont recharge during it because its completely supressed, the period after that supression ends is the recharge time on your shield, so if you want that to end sooner get a faster recharge shield.

Is there a known issue where in some circumstances you are not rewarded keycodes from conflict sites?

There is one thing that can cause you to get zero keycodes from a conflict site and that is not having any contrivutiuon to the event, not having a single kill to your name, not many critical hits. The invisibility of your contribution is something that score fixes so am excited to get that into gunslinger.

Sometimes DLC 3 not acting like you have credit

You can end up in a scenario where you are credited with two copies of the benefit of the dlc, and if that happens you can randomly you can either be alowed or not allowed to have it, you can contact CS and they can fix that for you super fast.

The fundamental issue with the RNG system that trick mentioned previously. Has this been fixed if not, is there an ETA on the fix?

It's not deployed to the servers, as lots of things can happen when dealing with the random number generator. the fix is actually in gunslinger right now and is going through some thorough testing. the loot table for the weapons is fixed and doesn't rely on the rng fix, but there are a few others things that are affected, we may have to delay the rng fix until after gunslinger if it continues to act up, but players probably wont notice the change other than certain enemies are going to become much less predictable.

The Volge Lightning Rifle's fully charged (full velocity) shot does not register any damage when hitting any enemy except some of the larger ones. Is there a fix planned for this?

I have one of our designers right now making that gun not suck, it also doesnt increase in damage when you charge it up.

What can be done about warmaster locks being broken early?

The most friendly way to go about doing that is by having a longer period before you even get to the lock room, and that would best be done by extending the space there so there is a longer build up and a longer fight.

What has been going on with the server stability lately?

We found an issue with, what we were calling a memory leak initially, we always call things memory leaks when things stay on a long time and they start to crash or become unstable. It turns out that was not entirely precise but we are planning on fixing one of the major contributors very early, I think we have the fix in testing now and should be able to deploy to the servers early next week. Essentially it has to do with an issue when characters with very large inventories load and unload from the server.

What is being done to help console users have a consistent warmaster experience?

For a variety of reasons our latency and packet loss is worse on consoles than it is on a PC. There are two major factors to the consistent warmaster experience. One of them is simply for example losing a packet and not  receiving information on which way he is facing, and rather than have the game call you a cheater when shooting from the wrong side you can just go round to the side you see and shoot him. The other issue is where people stay up in the top room and not contribute to the fight, or they clear the top room and then bust the locks early. There are a couple of things we can do, none of them are fast. One of them is continuing to address issues with stability and also find a way to not make it feel super grindy.

What is the Motherlode?

The motherlode is a bioman to start off with, a member of Muire Union Mines who have a very kind take on interspecies relationships, he was one of the first people who took up the mechanetic implant system they did a lot of modifications to him, because of the Biomans capabilities to survive. his genic decree was to protect the natural resources of the usa he has no problems with hanging out in the bottom of a well forever waiting for people to try and steal his stuff.

What is the Volge Warmasters purpose in the Volge race?

The Volge Warmaster is a front line fighter, tank / insurgency platform. hes mobile and can climb up and is useful for breaking sieges. in a big line battle he would walk alongside other fighters, he isnt a leader just the largest walking weapon.

When will Gunslinger be on the alpha server?

Wanted to have it available today, and its not. I want it to be available next week.

Why aren't unused assets used more?

So there are several unused assets that exist inside of the game which a lot of people have found by looking through our packages that dont conform to the right animation and model standards. So they look great when they are sitting in t-pose and are looking at them through an asset viewer but as soon as they bend their arm they go all funny or they don't fit all the races or sexes inside of the game. The biohazard suits went in, we have another pack coming out and is going to be a power armor pack, those will be coming out alongside or near the gunslinger. Particularly as we get closer to the start of the second season of the television series we're going to be having a bunch more crazy MTX outfits.

Why do we get such a small amount of 7th Legion reputation for completing Incursions?

Lots of rep points for doing the contracts attached to the incursions. We don't want it to be larger than 5 per incursion because the thorn liro vendor doesn't have a chance of giving you a lockbox with legendary weapons so we don't really have to worry about people having tons of that or being able to make a whole bunch of thorn liro rep in a single day. If we did that with 7th legion rep you would be walking around with tons of legendary weapons, so any of our vendors which can spit out legendary weapons we have to be very careful about how much rep you can make every day. True of VBI soleptor and top notch as well.

Why does the San Francisco Incursion happen so rarely?

Because of all the events which can happen inside of san francisco it has a higher event density for the space that it can use. This incursion fires off very very rarely.

it queries the area surrounding the yellow circle and sees whether the space is available, since it has so many minor arkfalls and events frequently they wont be able to launch because there is stuff going on.

Why don't 7th Legion and Thorn Liro rep vendors have faction vendor bonuses?

Suprised they don't, will have to look at that.

Will DLC 3 outfits be placed on merchants instead of relying on the lockbox?

We are going to be putting some but not all of the dlc 3 outfits onto the dlc store for direct purchase, the rest will remain on the dlc 3 lockboxes for a longer and more fulfilling chase.

Will there be a warning before you attach a mod not of a weapons synergy?

I would like to upgrade that interface a whole bunch, for example now that you have the unity synergy which has 3 parts its even harder to tell the difference between synergies. I deal with applying synergy mods to weapons constantly, and while I don't get a message that says these match or dont match it is pretty clear since its written on the object and the weapon itself which synergies match. I'd like to put that warning in, but it won't be coming in soon since that information is technically available to you now and it's not game breaking which we want to fix first. I think it's on our tasklist, but I think it's after the season starts.

Will there be a way to visually identify mods in a weapon that don't belong to that weapons synergy?

That would be handy, there is a way you can see the information in the menus like recover mods, it's a pain in the butt, i really want the before and after images to be more descriptive.

Will there be clan-like bonuses available from a player progression path?

Complicated yes, the timeline on that is much longer than you guys want to hear from me. We are talking about a system very akin to that coming around at the end of season 2, the exact details we obviously can't give out. I really want to have a system in, but I want to do it right instead of having it not work or not encourage people to level up and chase and participate with eachother.

Will we be getting a true global server chat?

Worried that zone chat may secretly be global, need to be confirmed. we are not going to be having cross game server chat, to do that they'd need to add even more tags to your name when you send a message, however you can private message people, and form groups, clans to chat.