May 2 Livestream Answers

I've got the livestream answers transcribed from the May 2 Livestream.

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Loadout Switch

We've added loadout quickswapping. That's going to be coming in with the June 4th patch, and no you don't have to pay for it. We're going to clean up the UI a little bit, we'll probably make the loadout names a little bigger. It will also show the icons and nano effects of weapons, I'd also like to try and get in time unique icons for spikes and stims.

It's a real convienience feature and something we've been trying to get in for a while and we've got the opportunity to do so.

Item unequip

You can unequip things.

- Will it unequip from all loadouts?

Upgrade weapon rarity

This one is currently set to cost 40 arkforge, it's probably low. It takes 20 minutes.

Arkforge cost will scale with the destination rarity, you are only able to do it one step at a time.

Upgrading a rarity will grant a new bonus for that particular rarity from the appropriate bonus group.

CLAIMS

We are changing how claim items are operating.

My daily and weekly ark hunter rewards look quite normal as do the change tokens, but items which go to your inventory, spikes, stims, shields, weapons etc have days hours and minutes. This is how long it will be before they are automatically salvaged, you will get a popup anytime you login thats very close to one of those times.

Right now we are testing with 7 days but we'll bump it up a bit before we launch it.

It's a serious technical problem to have lots of claim items there from a server standpoint, we never intended for the claim items to be used as a bank.

As such you might want to start clearing those out, the countdown won't start until the first time that you log in after it goes live.

QUESTIONS

Free to Play

Defiance will be going Free to Play on June 4th for PC, July 15 for PS3, we will be figuring the final date for XBOX 360 in the coming weeks.

What does Free to Play mean for Defiance?

This is already a massive co-op shoote rand bringing more people in is always of more benefit. The world feels more alive, events get to a higher level the enemies start having better drops. For most of us all that is going to mean is that there will be more people to play with. 

For those of you who have already purchased the game we will be lavishing nice things on you like a 30 day patron pass, 1000 arkforge, for those who have picked up all the dlcs the daily and weekly rewards will have a little bit more inside them. The exact details of that we haven't released, but that is going to be little grabbags little missives for each of the DLC you've picked up. You will be getting bonus arkforge if you are a patron pass holder as well as the ability to get boosts in the following.

Patron pass holders get boosts to:
- 20% Scrip
- 20% Reputation
- 20% Skills
- 20% Salvage
- 10% Score


Cost of the patron pass per month?

We're still in flux a bit on the price, but we're aiming for 800 bits for 30 days, and we'll have different durations available.

15 day - 400 bits
30 days - 800 bits
90 days - discounted for longer amounts of time
180 days - discounted for longer amounts of time

Not only do they offer boosts but a 10% discount off every item in the store. Another new bonus is the arkforge that is going to come with the daily and weekly claims.

OBTAINING ARKFORGE

We've dropped arkforge a little bit more frequently in open world event, scores above 35k. If you go into arkbreaks you will find them when you would normally get keys.

KEYCODE SPACE

As a free to play player you have 50 keycode spaces, you can purchase keycode upgrades.

You can buy them in 25 slot increments, and get up to 125 as a max.

MAP EXPANSION

Relatively early in season 2, I'm not going to say where since it has some show spoilers.

PS3 STABILITY

The servers have not been crashing or showing particular slowdown, we've had a couple of distinct times where the servers had had issues. It's not what leads to the issues you've been experiencing. It's more of a client optimisation issue.

SEASON 2 RELEASE DATE

We've already announced that cradle is coming in a number of weeks, we are aiming for mid may for the first of the crossover missions.

MAX EGO PLAYERS RECEIVING XP AND SKILL BOOSTS?

They will be able to have reputation boosts and such, and the loot and xp boosts will still be able to roll within them. It's not something we can make a decision tag to process.

DLC STRUCTURE FOR SEASON 2

We're moving away from DLC, we're going to have free crossover content as part of our move to free to play June 4th. We may in the future create a larger DLC pack but more likely similar to Rift selling the unlocks in the store.

The DLC's from season 1 will still be available for purchase, it won't be part of the free to play package.

MAX CLAN RATING PROGRESSION

Less than 1% of our players have reached the maximum clan progression, so something in the future we can explore. There are a bunch of features for clans that I'd like to lump together and get out of people, raising progression beyond 10 in an activity is one. Another is interface with offline players.

BROKEN CONFLICT SITE

Dark Matter Disguise, we found 2 problems. The big one is when the guys enter combat and the snipers cloak and people can't find them. We have a hotfix in the works to fix that issue. We'll put a cooldown and duration on cloaked guys. The other issue is when people try to enter the conflict site as part of a mission, as it's a different encounter so they would need to abandon or finish the mission before doing it.

BROKEN CHALLENGES

Minigun mayhem not doing enough damage. We had a problem with Sharpshooting Savior and that was a relatively easy fix.

KENN FARM HULKERS

We're continuing to address the difficulty. We've fixed a lot of issues where events weren't scaling. Mutants and Dark Matter guys are way less horrific, we have a patch where it restores some of that.

Clan rank up message broadcasts, and clan member progression / drop broadcasts

We don't want to spam the chats, we don't want to have the constant roll of that going on. We can definitely look at the rank up going to clan chats. Clan rank happens so rarely that it's not anything we have to worry about being spammy regardless of how large your clan gets as you can literally have a max of 10 a day. That's something that is certainly possible, and we could put it up like when you get a weapon mastery and flash across the top of the screen.

- It's something that is spammed on area chat for people around you, I'd rather see my clan / friends instead of them?

AMMO BOXES HANGING AROUND FOR LONGER AFTER ARKFALL OR EMERGENCIES

The moment an event ends it shuts down, and it tells the rest of the world to go on with their lives and have the boss spawn, if we left the ammo box around the boss wouldnt spawn until the ammo box went away. It's just how it's built and would be a pain in the *** not to work that way anymore.

Scattering more ammo crates in useful positions along the routes to and from arkfalls we might be able to do. I think there are some already around the major arkfall locations not part of the event for that reason.

- Some emergencies do hang around for several seconds before they dissapear, I want more instead of popping a spike

JUMP TO CLAN MEMBER

That should be relatively easy, the functionality exists and we just need to activate it for active clan members and remember that if we expand the clan stuff to handle offline memberswe don't allow that behavior.

CAN COOLDOWN START WHEN DECOY IS DESTROYED?

Cancelling it isn't something we're going to put in as it would mean we would remove the switch location functionality as that is the button it is on, but when your decoy is destroyed it goes into cooldown is something we should definitely do. It might be tricky so it might take a while but it would be a good feature to have. It's a pain when you watch your decoy be destroyed and be unable to use your power stim to instantly reactivate it.

SCORING SYSTEM

The kills number that is reported on the scoreboard is currently massively underreporting the number of kills people get. We found the cause of the bug earlier this week, it's only counting the actual kill shot. The highest number of kills is arguably the person with the best ping. We are tying that in to when you get kill credit. People who have the highest score does tend to be the top killers and damage dealers.

FREE TO PLAY BACKPACK SPACE

You are keeping your current capacity while newer players will have lower numbers to begin with. You gain inventory slots as you level up but now everyone who comes into the game will have 75 slots. Anything you have purchased as far as inventory slots go will remain, although the maximum number you can purchase after free to play is going to be 300, however anyone who has more than that will be grandfathered down.

People coming in with very large inventories and claims spaces are a significant part of the lag that you experience.

WARMASTER OPEN WORLD

Not the warmaster specifically we are making open world events, it will become particular obvious when we hit the land expansion.

ENEMY NPCS TAKE OVER LOCATIONS

Yes, they aren't going to be able to take over fast travel points because that would suck. You log in and repeatedly murdered by people, it already happens from time to time and stinks we aren't going to make that worse. But a more dynamic world that you see enemies take over, we aren't going to do anything as persistantly for like a zone for weeks but creating incursions 2.0 in which the bad goes go into a space and take it over is in the works.

SYNERGIES ON WEAPONS

I'm suprised that brutals are still showing up on new sniper rifles, getting them off old sniper rifles isn't something we will be able to do but we can look at if they roll on new ones because we they shouldn't.

CHIMERA WEEKLY CONTRACT

We didn't want to give people too much Caeruleum cores, we want to encourage chimera always having a fresh new thing. We made a first pass at it but it complicated matters. So we wanted the majority of cores coming from the daily contracts.

OLD PURSUITS

I'm pretty sure it's just 45 EGO Rating, we aren't going to bring it back.

GROUP CUTSCENES

We did support that at launch, we had to pull that out for performance problems. Cutscenes load high detail textures for each character, it was easy to pull out but we can't easily add them back. So that feature while possible in our engine we aren't going to turn on for old stuff.

ZAGGERS WITH 0 RELOAD TIME

It's an unintended side effect, but we aren't going to change it. We probably should have had a minimum reload time

MELEE WEAPON SOUNDS

We don't plan to have different sounds for them both.

DODGE RACES

They will make their way back, there may even be new ones. 

ESTIMATE FOR MAX EGO POINTS

It's 5800 with change.

- Question should have read exact and not estimate, and broken down by DLC ownership

CLAN RANKS CAN PROMOTE TO SAME TIER

We are going to keep it so you can promote it to your own tier. Not being able to access offline people is really annoying. Make someone cease being the found in a usable way is important as people do cycle in and out of MMOs.

Will upgraded rarity DLC weapons have roll their bonuses from appropriate groups

Yes