Community Q&A: Halloween Edition!

 Hey there ark hunters! Happy Halloween! Guess what? It's time for more awesome Q&A with the Defiance team!

1. Players believe that the Crimefighter weapons are causing latency issues. Could you shed some light on this?

   While nothing is impossible, it’s unlikely the Crimefighter is directly causing lag. The visual effects for this, and similar, weapons (Bloodhound, BMG healing, etc), are rendered client side. It is much more likely that these effects cause the framerate to drop.
   In most cases:

   - Lag: Is a result of information transferred between the client and the server taking a long time. The client waits for a response before completing those actions (ie changing weapons, enemies responding to being shot) – this is lag. Anything that doesn’t require communication with the server will update fine. The game should be rendered to your screen at a typical rate, even when you experience lag (ie approximately 30 times per second – it won’t stutter)
   - Low Frame Rate: Is a result of something on your console/PC taking a long time to complete. This prevents the game from updating the screen frequently (say, 30 times per second). This causes everything to appear slow – the game stutters.

   What situation to people typically experience when the Crimefighter is being used?
   
   Regardless, with enough players reporting this, we know there is an issue. We are spending time on retail PS3 today trying to isolate the exact issue. A few more bits of information would help from people who experience problems (we have read the threads on this, and there is a wide range of reports):
   

   1) Does the problem happen when you use it, when others use it, or both?
   2) Does the problem immediately occur, or does it only happen after an extended play session?
   3) Does the problem happen all the time? If not, is there any specific thing/location that will always cause it to happen? For example, can you go to an isolated area with no enemies, no other players and get it to happen?
   4) What platform do you see this one?

2. Are there any plans to implement Ark Salvage to Scrip exchange system? Players over 4k EGO have accumulated a lot of Ark Salvage and are looking for new ways to use it.

   No plans for an exchange, but we are looking to add more things to purchase with the currencies so they have more value.

3. Why is the inventory slot limit 400, and is there any chance the limit will be raised?

   Both the inventory system, and the claims item section where originally implemented with the expectation that they would not grow to very large numbers. There are numerous cases where players with large inventories/claim items can do things that cause lag. Going back and fixing every one of those cases didn’t make sense since it was a small percentage of the population who had very large numbers (but, since we grandfathered players inventory, we did fix the significant issues). So, we chose the 400 limit based on several factors:

   - It was a good balance between reasonable size and didn’t cause potential lag
   - We have the data on min, avg, max, etc inventory sizes. This number worked well given this data.

   That said, we have room to reasonably increase the max, and it’s certainly something we can consider if it’s a big issue to players.

4. Will there ever be Lock Boxes that cost more than 75 keys so that larger key capacity would be considered more valuable to players?

   No plans to add additional key purchasable lock boxes at this time.

5. Does Aftermath somehow advance the story of Karl Von Bach in SV? If not, when are we likely to see more of that storyline?

   Aftermath is almost exclusively concerned with the story of Karl Von Bach, LOCI, and Yargad Gorhash.

6. What are the chances of getting an auto log out after x amount of time that the player is inactive?

   In nearly all cases, an inactive player is not going to cause any lag or server slowdown – since an inactive player is not doing actions that need to be replicated out to other players. Rather, MMO’s typically kick AFK players if they have limited hardware and the AFK players put them over their PCU limit. Defiance is not gated by hardware. We have enough hardware to support the number of players we have. Given this, we don’t really see any reason to disconnect players and force them to leave the game. If AFK players ever become an issue, we would of course add rules to disconnect them.

7. How will we be getting our Extra Life rewards?

   Look over here!

8. Can you and will you make the favorites system work for the outfit/helmet/vehicle/title select screens?

   We have a task for this and it is assigned out, but it is lower priority. We want to implement it, but can’t make a promise on when.

9. Once SV is expanded, would there be a possibility to see it connect with other parts of the California area?

   We’ve considered it, however we’re working on content other than another land expansion currently. When we expand Silicon Valley, we’ll re-evaluate what areas we’ll expand to in the future.

10. On topic of SV, will there be any challenges added to that area?

    After evaluating player activity, we decided we would rather allocate the resources that would have been used to create more Silicon Valley Hotshots, Rampages, or Time Trials to instead be used to create different, new, content.

11. How many EGO points total will we get for completing all of the Aftermath content?

    We’re not raising the EGO rating cap for Aftermath, but we are adding several pursuits which focus heavily on the Silicon Valley area. In total, they bring in a little over 200 EGO rating.

12. Are defiance servers shared with any other game?

    Absolutely not! There are multiple reasons for this: Security, game hardware/operating system configurations, resource contention, etc.
    Here is a very high level summary of how a Defiance environment is setup so you can understand how the servers are used:

    · Each Defiance Platform/Region (PS3, Xbox, PC / North America, EU) is composed of a collection of “chassis” (think a “rack” of machines).
    · Each chassis houses multiple “blades” (machines).
    · Each blade can run multiple “processes” (executables).
    · Defiance has multiple servers: Social Servers (for chat, etc), Battle (for matchmaking), Authentication, and of course Game Servers, and others.
    · Each of these servers run as a process on a blade. The available memory/CPU/etc on a Blade determines how many process can run on it, typically it’s not that high. We distribute processes across blades based on populations, memory usage, etc.

    All this means: Only Defiance processes run on the Defiance hardware, though your player avatar could certainly exist in an instance of a Defiance world that exists on a piece of hardware that also houses a completely separate instance full of other players. It does pose some interesting philosophical questions…..

13. Could the Hulker Hell arkfalls please be kept around? As well as the Purge synergy items? They are fun!

    Glad you’re enjoying them! The arkfalls will only be around during the Halloween events, but we’ll likely keep the Blackened Hellfire Supply Crate around for a bit longer depending on player demand.

14. Could we please get some weekend special events started? Nothing big is necessary, but some ideas like double arkforge or scrip, half price lockboxes or keycodes at vendors, PvP giving extra rewards are a start.

    Yes, we will continue to have special events. For example, just last month we had a Reputation Bonus week, and a concurrent bonus XP weekend. The bonuses where chosen by the community. Aftermath adds the arkforge bonus weekend, so that one can’t be done until it is released. I’m certain you will see it shortly after we release.