Friday Dev Livestream (September 27)

September 28, 2013 | Etaew | Viewed 3,420 times | Question and Answer,

Friday September 27, 2013 the Defiance Dev team streamed a play and Q&A session on the Trion Worlds Twitch channel.

In this stream dahanese and OverloadUT was joined by Trick Dempsey.

Upcoming Draft Patch Notes

Next week a patch is coming, no date yet. They covered some of them in the stream, this is not the complete list, apparently it is.

Fixed the appearance of female characters when wearing the Echelon Specialist armor.
Seriously improved the value of Tier 4 lockboxes, they will no longer drop uncommon gear.
Volge Violence pursuit fixed.
Volge Battle Rifle Gun MK24 will now drop at sieges (for real this time)
Interactions when a player is incapacitated are now cancelled (no longer finish reviving someone after you die)
Players can only benefit from one damage reduction source from shields, perks and weapons each of these sources will pick up the best damage resistance.
Players can now earn new rewards by replaying main storyline quests.
With the Castithan Charge Pack it broke the rewards on the mission replays, now you will getting an appropriately leveled reward.
Suspected fix for the North Point stage 6 hang

Questions

Damage Reduction

We started getting reports from PvE and PvP, in PvE they would back up to the Motherlode when it was trying to do attacks. There were a series of perk and weapon synergy, and weapon mastery and shield bonuses that could provide you with temporary invulnerability ranging from 3-9 seconds.

They revealed that many of the traits (perks) created to be a tradeoff that you would choose which damage resistance to have at the time, did not stack appropriately. They made certain to break them down into classes, perks, weapon effects, shields they will choose the best bonus from each group to stack.

It lets them all proc, and when it calculates the resistance it uses the best one from each group.

Revamp UI and social features

They are being worked on, but will be coming further in the future.

They will require actual patches to the code of the game, they have to go through more approval processes.

What will be fixed in the next 30 days?

An update to contracts, to get them to have much better communication and are more obvious. They will appear on your map for example. Also to get them to be much more predictable in their rewards, so they are much clearer objectives and encourage teamplay atmosphere.

Priority rank list of what they are fixing

They are working on showing us this on the blog and forums, bi-weekly / monthly. Draft patch notes as they are going.

What happened to Clan Boosts?

We should see them again. There is a really strange technical reason they dissapeared. Someone is working on fixing them right now but it requires a big client update.

Raptor speed upgrade

Unlikely, the Raptor it has the tradeoffs of the other vehicles.

Arenas not giving weapon XP

It is something I want to address. Since they are rampages, there seems to be a tendancy towards not giving weapon experience. I want to make a consistancy pass on that. I think that if you take the time to fight an enemy you should be getting the weapon experience for it.

Nerf to Volge Emergencies

They are rolling the same loot table from the elites which is something they keep hearing is changed but no record of that change. They didn't get easier.

Gear progression

Yes there is going to be power rating progression inside of the game. No release date as it is quite a lot of work.

Weapon changes to existing or new drops

A combination of the two. If we are going to change how a roll works or a synergy or the base stats of any weapon, they will change globally for any weapon that exists.

One of the changes we are looking at right now there is a lack of blue rarity bonuses, exclusively melee and nano effect procs for shooting. We want to make that more obvious and take that off the rarity in the same way so you will get a roll for blue rarity, when that happens only new weapons will get that.

Game events

We will have a set of costumes for halloween but they are still in development.

Will infector grenades receive green, blue and orange versions?

We are looking at doing a rarity update to infector grenades, that might be on their internal test right now. With the grenade update coming with the second DLC we made certain to have a good progression for each of the grenades instead of the serial numbers.

Will blades ever be tradeable?

Tough question, I've got that on my notes of things to address for the second DLC and I'm not going to answer that just yet.

When can we expect the map to expand?

We are in the earliest of pre-productions for land expansion right now, that is all we can say.

Next rewind weekend?

In talk with the producers at Syfy, future episodic quests will be left on. Given that some of the previous episode quests overlapped geographically it would take some time to make sure they dont conflict with eachother.

Shotgun magazine issues

Fix in the works. Programmer working on them right now.

Weapons with a missing XP mastery roll?

BMGs are missing mastery rolls, we are trying to see how widespread as it is not all of them. Once we have gotten that we can address it.

Co-op arenas

We have every intention to have co-op arenas come in with the second DLC. There was a long running series of bugs that prevented them being activated with the Castithan Charge Pack.

How are you going to change the Grenadier synergy, grenade based perks and the grenadier shields?

We've gone through a couple of things, rather than giving you a recharge on the cooldown, giving you a bonus on your next throw is a popular option. We are playing with this right now, the winner so far is a damage boost for using grenades.

Clans

Right now we do not have the clan rivalry, there was a plan for that but we had to redirect for other issues. We have got it in clan progression, at the moment we have a rating for each of the different activities you can pariticpate in as a clan, arkfalls/emergencies/conflict sites. As you do each of these you gain experience for your clan in that skill set, the higher the clan rating inside of that the better the rewards you get for that activity (extra ark key, more scrip and xp).

Did you regret making loot progression the way you did?

Yes I do, clearly we are going to make the loot progression have progression.

There is a long involved story why it is the way it is. I want to have loot progression, the old system didn't work out.

Plans for more story?

You will get non DLC updates for content. We are starting some pre-production on the episodic content with the lessons we learned from the first season of the show. To do mid season plot updates on the state of the world, the state on various concerned entities that have been left in a state of flux. They both contain crossover content and updates on the bay area.

Remove individual mods instead of all

All of us are frustrated with the salvage matrix, so we are looking at more convienient ways to do things. I want to be able to replace mods at will, it seems strange the way it is now.

Once you have progression you no longer need to make people choose between the weapons and the mods because they will be getting better and better things all the time so you don't need to artificially create an economy of destroying your weapons.

We are going to address that, and allow people to swap out individual mods. It should be in the pipe not for this upcoming DLC.

Break down multiple items

Yes two of the ideas we are looking at a checkbox to salvage multiple to breakdown or select ones to save and breakdown all.

Free for all pvp zone?

Probably not as a zone, but we may do that as a gameplay mode. I'm rather dissapointed in Shadow Wars, I think they could have a lot more interesting objectives inside of it. We are addressing core gameplay modes before new additions.

Switch loadouts

We are investigating the core balance of that, it is definitely something we are looking at this as we get more into the weapon balance.

If you could change one thing in the game what would it be?

If I could snap my fingers and make nano effects be more than a proc, for example electricity do more damage to shields, radiation gets armor penetration bio does damage to armor. It would be nice to have tactical choices, everything that does more damage to vehicles also apply to machines.

Bonuses to outfits

I like the vanity fact for your outfits, I would rather add it to shields. Would rather people look how they want to look instead of being forced to wear heavier armor.

Chat changes

For example being able to go into a channel and say I want to hear all of these channels simultaneously and instead of just listening to one channel. Being able to quieten your own mic or others. Chat wouldn't block your view.

Making it work all of the times you expect it to.

Difference with green and orange charge blades

Rarity does increase damage for charge blades.

PC users use more ram to load players

That option should be coming for PC players, we have it on the dev side now and we will be exposing it. Calling it the player load proxity slider is going to be weird. Our settings aren't as in depth as they should be.