Community Q&A: May 8th

Welcome, ark hunters! You’ve asked, we’re answering. We’re back with another action packed Defiance Developer Q&A! Make sure to keep an eye out for the next question collection thread on our official forums next week!

Source: http://www.trionworlds.com/defiance/en/2015/05/08/defiance-developer-qa-may-8/

• What are the current priorities for the Defiance team?

As of today, our priorities as a team include:

• Resolving several bugs created by Alcatraz patch.
• Addressing and maintaining on server stability.
• The next patch for the season premiere for the show on SyFy Channel on June 12th.
• The Summer Solstice Event update.

There are some other technical priorities, but they involve more planning and scheduling.

• Do you have any plans on expanding the open world maps to include new areas?

This is something we have gone back and forth with deciding between instance content and open world content, they both have their pros and cons. We are currently weighing out which one works out best for players and our team to execute within a reasonable amount of time.

• Any info you can give on the Summer Solstice event?

We’re still working out the details but we’ve found some fireworks that we want to get tweaked for use during the event.

• Any chance the Devs will remove the auto-matchmaking for expeditions?

This was something we discussed at the release of Alcatraz. We opted not to because we expect that players may drop out by choice.

• Was the Warmaster modified to make him easier to kill? He’s missing three of his moves from his typical attacks.

Aside from the changes to Threat Level and loot, the Warmaster was not touched. This is something we will need to take a look in to further. If anyone has any info please forward it on to the team.

• Any headway on things like adding the Night Porter to the store and adding things like roaming warmaster/golden skitterlings?

Those features are still being planned out, currently fixes and Season 3 updates are our priority as a team. From the question above, it looks like we need to make sure the existing Warmaster gets some love first.

• Can officer chat be changed to a different color? It’s the same color as clan chat so it can get overlooked right now.

That sounds like something that we can look at. Hopefully it’s a quick feature update between major tasks. Sometimes what may seem simple ends up being a monstrous task, but this is something we’d like to implement.

• Are you working on a Looking For Group feature that could be applied globally to Co-op Maps, Competitive Multiplayer, Expeditions, and Public Instances? It is difficult to form a group without going to chat or planning external to the game.

They are all different since they have different functionality and thresholds for starting. If we witness that players find this difference too jarring we may consider making a pass at consolidating the system, but for now they will remain as they are.

• Will you please expand the character limit on the Clan Message of the Day? The box for the message is large but the character limit is about 96. I don’t have room for all the info I want to share.

We can look into that and see what changing the limitation does. Same caveat for this as the clan officer chat change.

• LoCarb mentioned briefly in the livestream that they were looking for new ways to engage players with Season 3 crossover content. Is it too soon for you all to expand on that bit as far as what we should expect next month?

We’ll have news on this soon! It might be ready for the live stream at the end of the month. The main point was that we are trying some different ways to connect season 3 of the show to the game. More of a creative solution since the main characters of the show in Season 2 were, you know… (I won’t spoil it for those who are catching up on Season 2!)