Community Q&A - August 8

Stability is our first priority. We’ve had a huge surge of players into the game, both new and returning, and we’d like to provide a consistent stable experience. We’re going free to play on the consoles shortly, and any stability improvements will also help them.
We’re continuing to balance the in-game economy. To do this we’re looking at both how often we give out rewards and what quality they come out at. This has been discussed at length in other threads, and we’re continuing to work on it. Check out PTS as we update further.
We have two more batches of Silicon Valley missions coming along, and we’re giving them all the attention they need.

We actually have a build on PTS right now where the whole of North and South bay are visible at once. When we first built Silicon Valley, we had it split from the world to maximize stability and server performance. However, we’ve since placed it on the same server and we’re testing the effects of unifying the bay area map. At the Water Temple, you can see the unintentional results of an early test of that unification.

With two fast travel points in Silicon Valley, we see no reason to add more until there is more land to cover.

We’ve got two more batches of missions coming up. Events with the Guiding Light are going to heat up, and there’s more going on with Karl Von Bach as well.

The Corporate Espionage synergies can only be obtained from the Corporate Espionage Lock Box. We will be introducing more exclusive synergy lock boxes in the future as well.

We’ve got some new gear lined up still in Season 2, but it’s less related to our factions and more about our overall game economy. A lot of our economy overhaul comes from making gear more exciting, so we’ve got gear improvements lined up, but we’re not focusing on the faction merchants at present.

We’re re-tuning the Gulanee Arkbreak so that the Comms Systems are speedbumps rather than monolithic damage sinks. I’m not happy with that section of the arkbreak for exactly the same reasons I dislike the old destroy arkfalls. The Silicon Valley incursions have already seen one update and we’ve got another coming. The Evangels have a player activated means of bringing them down more quickly – destroying the Guardians to make the Evangel reveal its weak points – but the Evangels are still just too durable. We’ve got two updates coming to them to give players more significant decisions when fighting them.

Death and extraction carry huge penalties because they are significant events. This is working as intended. Death is a serious matter that carries steep penalties. Be careful when putting your life at risk.

We are planning on expanding further south in the future. We’ve discussed both going as far south as San Jose, but we’re also interested in expanding to other areas of the Defiance universe.

That rifle effect is very processor intensive, so we have to be very careful how many we render on the screen at a time. As such, we cannot make it available to players.

It is a known issue! It took us a little while to track down, but it had to do with the overlapping events with the Silicon Valley Conflict sites. This caused score to be added to the wrong event. Once we tracked down the cause, it was a relatively simple fix. We should have it out to PTS then to live shortly.

Keycodes have been multiplied in price by 10x. Additionally, they now drop much less frequently as the rewards for score. As soon as we started giving an in-depth look at reward balancing, we discovered that we could not improve rewards without drastically reducing their flow into the game. Rewards were coming so frequently that even good gear was being discarded as people sought only the highest gear. There was no adaptation or development of new tactics as a response to available resources because ark hunters could reliably maintain their most familiar loadout from an early EGO rating right to the endgame. In order to make gear more rewarding and significant, we need to reduce the flow of gear first.

We hope to have a post about this up next week showing our progress.

We do not have an estimate for this. As we’ve looked into the rewards systems we have in place, we’ve found that there are higher priorities than rerolling or replacing synergies and bonuses on existing weapons. It’s still on the books, but it’s not on the books for the near future.

Due to how Sony deploys new (updated) products, our North American PlayStation 3 servers will be down on Tuesday, August 12 for a restart when the deployment occurs (estimated between 12:00 PM PDT and 4:00 PM PDT [GMT-7]). We will post an absolute outage window next week when this time is finalized. The same will occur for our European PlayStation 3 servers on Wednesday, August 13. The team is working closely with Microsoft to launch Defiance Free-to-Play on Xbox 360 and we’ll post an announcement about the transition when we’ve finalized the date.

Yes! We will be restructuring the forums and will include a New Recruit section.