Community Q&A: October 17th

It's Friday  folks! It's an especially spooky one, too. It's also time for more awesome Q&A with the Defiance team!

1. Any plans on Show/Game cross overs again, like season one. in the future?

   Like we did with both season 1 and season 2, we will continue crossovers with the television show.

2. Now that the weapon reload times have been adjusted any chance or removing or reducing the cool down times for ego reload bonuses?

   The changes to reload are primarily to resolve the 0-reload loophole and move individual reload weapons (e.g. pump shotguns) to a more consistent system so they aren’t penalized by adding extra magazine size. We aren’t planning on these changes having any major gameplay effect on other weapons. The changes to the ego reload bonuses were done with that in mind, so we don’t have any plans to change them.

3. Any chance to get Nolan and/or Irisa to make special guest appearances (as in live playable characters) in San Fran?

   Nolan appeared this last season, and there is a chance that he and other characters will appear next season as well.

4. Any plans to make swords more than just decoration ie. synergies and mods?

   Good lord, yes. We have a soft spot for our melee weapons as well as for the BMG and Infector. However, we can only address so many features at a time.

5. Before items got processed into resource in your overflow area, you could make new characters with all of the incentive weapons (i.e., buy the game from Amazon, you get the Plague Bringer [I think that was the name]). Post that update, you don't receive them. Is this intentional or is it a bug?

   That was not intentional.

6. I have seen this asked a few times on the forum's about having a Warmaster spawn somewhere in the game world. it seem's like a great idea to have to make players take a break from farming arkfalls all day. Do you think players will be able to see this in the future any time soon?

   While we do intend to use the Warmaster and other bosses in the open world, that feature is not currently the priority.

7. Will there be FOV adjustments available in the future for Defiance?

   We're looking at a few visual settings updates, and some FOV adjustment seems reasonable.

8. Can you please adjust the TL scaling so two veterans can play together again without an insane amount of top level enemies?

   We're currently discussing updates to how the threat level system calculates threat rating, but we have nothing concrete to discuss at this time.

9. Will there be a bonus week or some sort of event planned when Xbox Gets F2P? Because we've been waiting 3 months for this with no explanation from anyone about why it was delayed. (We’ve explained why it was delayed before I believe, but we can reiterate here.)

   We will be activating bonuses across all platforms to welcome our new players, and we plan to continue to add new bonuses. For example, the Aftermath patch coming shortly adds a new bonus event – Arkforge!

10. Is there any plans to update backpack synergies? Players feel they aren’t useful.

    We are not updating old loadout synergies, but we do have more loadout and mod synergies in development. 7th Legion is a potent synergy, as are many of the Corporate Espionage synergies.

11. Congrats on the season renewal! Can we expect episode missions before the show's new season?

    Definitely!

12. Many clans have risen and fallen, can we expect more clan related content in the game?

    The next big Clan update will have to do with private matches and mass invites. We're creating a system for both inviting all your clan members at once and for creating a private version of any instance you enter.

13. Will private instances/matchmaking ever be a thing?

    Definitely, see the above! However, they currently are only slated for cooperative content.

14. I am curious if there will be a patch to address how the world events are occurring?

    We are okay with the pacing of world events at this point as we are seeing larger groups of players at each event. But we will continue to watch this and make changes as necessary.

15. Could we get a situation report on the lag?

    One of the challenges when we discuss lag is making sure players understand what bugs fall under the category of “lag” and which don’t. This is important, because if we say we made a fix to reduce lag and players expect it to fix a bug that has nothing to do with lag, it can be confusing. They report its not fixed, which causes confusion on our end too!
    
    So: Lag is a result of the game client having a high latency in its connection with the Defiance servers. A high latency means packets (information) sent to (or from) the client to the server take longer than “normal” to deliver. The result of this is the lag players see – some events (but not all) lag behind when you would expect them to happen. Common indicators of this are enemies, NPCs and other players “snapping” to new locations, taking longer than normal to switch weapons, or summon a vehicle. Basically, any interaction where the client needs to ask the server to do something or the server tells the client to do some would result in lag. However since most players don’t (nor should they need to) know what is and isn't communicated between the client and the server, its easier to look at it this way - when you experience lag the game will be running at the proper frame rate (30 fps, 60 fps, etc) but you will see these certain events taking too long. This happening is a good indicator of lag.
    
    Lag has nothing to do with the game crashing (hard freezes, etc). Lag has nothing to do with gameplay bugs (ie an event gets stuck). Disconnects could be because of lag, but they would be precipitated by 30+ seconds lag. Lag has nothing to do with the entire game slowing down (perhaps you have a low end video card, and graphics settings to high, causing your frame rate to drop to 5FPS).
    
    With that out of the way, we made a significant “lag” fix on October 9th for PC and PS3 and to some extent, on the Xbox 360. On Oct 14, Xbox got the remainder of those fixes.
    
    We have access to a lot of data on what Defiance players do, and one of the reports that tell us how much of a problem lag is. For instance, we track the average latency for all players. The average latency dropped (which in this case is good) significantly after the Oct 9 fixes. This was echoed by many players (see the posts in that thread).
    
    We know we have not fixed all cases of lag, but we feel we have addressed the major issues players have been reporting as of late. We are now moving on to the more specific cases.

16. Will we be able to obtain legendary tier mods "Tier 5" for other synergies besides paradise territory and chimera?

    For sure! Although, not for many of the synergies you are familiar with.

17. Will you ever bring back the Wandering Hulker?! I miss him!

    We will, but the plans to improve wandering boss encounters to prevent trolling and griefing (a particularly large problem with hulker) have been put on hold while other features are tuned and developed. When those improvements are in, our hope is to bring back the hulker and add a few more wandering bosses.