Defiance Community Q&A: October 24

 Hey there ark hunters! Are you ready for this weekend? The entire community team will be streaming for Extra Life! No time for more talk of that now, though! Why, you say? Because it's time for more awesome Q&A with the Defiance team!

1. Any chance they can increase the amount of Sieges and Incursions that happen daily, doesn't seem to be enough to do, with waiting for daily faction quests to reset, there seems to be only a few Arkfalls happening.

   Each server has an ideal and maximum capacity for players (and this number has not changed significantly for quite some time). However we have increased the size of the world with Silicon Valley, which means even more events active at once. Even before Silicon Valley players were too “spread out” in the game world. With a high event frequency, players would often show up at events and be the only one there, or one of only a few. This can be very frustrating, and is in fact a major cause of someone leaving the game. We don’t want this! On top of this, we see an increase in posts/chat about how events are empty and then (making the incorrect assumption) that the servers are also empty when in fact they are not.
   
   This is why we have the events balanced as they are now: we like to see events with many people at them – and the longest period there should be without a major event is 5 minutes.

2. Will we ever see the Defiant Few outfit from the flash game anytime before next year or was it never intended to be in game?

   The flash game wasn’t actually developed by Trion; it was a SyFy product. We don’t have any plans to implement that outfit.

3. Also when is Aftermath slated to release it's been on PTS for awhile now?.

   There are two reasons we are waiting on releasing Aftermath

   1) We have had many, many, requests from players to put patches up on PTS and then allow the community ample testing time to find bugs. This is what we are doing. We are still finding bugs.
   2) We have fixed a patching bug on Xbox, and that patcher needs to go through a special certification phase, which is taking time. We would like to release the two together.

   Once those are addressed, we can schedule the actual launch.

4. Do you plan to change jackpot item regularly every month ?

   More or less! While the Jackpot will not rotate exactly once per month, it will rotate in and out approximately once per month.
   And, also, look for the newest one – the Cataclysm - on PTS right now. It will go live next week.

5. How did the dev team solve lag issue?

   There typically isn’t a silver bullet for lag. We have actually made significant, incremental, fixes over the past several months. However there was (ironically) one underlying issue that made the fixes we were putting in much less apparent to some of our players. That problem was found several weeks ago.
   Without getting too technical, there were several Router/Operating System settings on some (but not all) of the game servers that could cause players issues. One of those was a TCP packet routing optimization developed by John Nagle back in the 80’s (hey, those Computer Science theory courses I took way back in University have a real life application!). Each TCP packet (which is how the server and client communicate) has a header. The header has information about the sender, receiver, etc. Then there is the actual “data” in the packet (perhaps a “YES” for the server telling the client that you can change your weapon). The header can sometimes be much larger than the data being sent, especially if there are frequent, small packets being sent. The Nagel optimization takes small messages, condenses them, and sends them out together as one. This saves bandwidth, and in situations where immediate feedback isn’t really relevant, it works great. It should be no surprise that its bad for gaming. There was a bug that caused this setting to get turned on at the HW/OS level, which overrode the settings the game itself had (making sure it was disabled).
   This is one, (but not the only) example of one of the ways we have improved lag.
   We are still working on more fixes, but right now a lot of them are down to specific problems affecting a single, or small group, of players, as opposed to large numbers of players.

6. Will the Hulker Arkfall be a regular event after Halloween event is over?

   To keep the Halloween event unique, we plan on removing them when the event completes. However we would like to bring a version of them back to the game later!

7. Can we get an time estimate of when the Downgrade Ego Rating (lowering ego rating 100 egos) will be available in the Salvage Matrix?

   It’s in the Aftermath patch. Check it out now on the Public Test Server! (Though it works by lowering the ego to your level, not by 100 increments).

8. Will there be another outfit sale for the bit store?

   Yes, we will run sales, though we don’t have one planned for the near future.

9. I'm seeing a lot of questions about Extra Life. I play Defiance on the PS3. I still don't understand how Trion is supposed to track my progress, because I can't see a connection between my Extra Life profile (which I did create) and my PS3 character. People told me it would be on a honor system, but I'd really appreciate input from Trion on how exactly this whole Extra Life thing works (I'm really new to this, so a step by step guide would be really appreciated). And since the event is this Saturday, I'm really worried about it -- I want to do things right for the kids!

   As long as you're linked and logged in to our Trion Worlds servers, you'll be golden! We register how long you're logged in, but you can be logged in to any Trion Worlds game. RIFT, Trove, ArcheAge, Defiance! You've got choices! It's going to be magical, thanks for joining us.

10. Can we get different Icon's for Minors/Warmaster on the main map?

    We don’t have plans to do this because we feel the map is already crowded enough as it is.

11. Can you confirm that legendaries can actually still drop from T3 boxes?

    Yes, they do, though you have better odds with a T4 lockbox.
    (And, once Aftermath releases, we will be renaming the lockboxes to: Recruit, Expert and Elite)

12. Will we see anymore major updates soon this year before next season starts?

    Yes, we have several updates planned. However we aren’t quite ready to announce them yet. Look for details post Aftermath!