Developer Q&A: July 27

Welcome, ark hunters! You’ve asked, we’re answering. We’re back with another action packed Defiance Developer Q&A! 

Source: http://forums.defiance.com/showthread.php?220564-Defiance-Developer-Q-amp-A-July-27 

1. How about adding some terraformed aquatic creatures to menace the coastal waters?
   

   We are staying away from water based enemies, many spaces in water would prohibit combat. We are looking in to some shallow water combat spaces in a future release but the enemy types will not be water specific.

2. Any chance of introducing an expedition that takes place around the town of Defiance? 
   

   In general, both the game and show teams are given their space in the world to breathe and are given the ability to do things that work best for their medium. We have given the SyFy team their space to utilize their medium effectively in the Town of Defiance. It would be unfortunate if we were to build out parts of Defiance and use it in a mission that would prevent them from using it how they see fit. For example, the St. Louis Arch. That being said, we should find some safe areas to work together more.

3. Clan leaders would like the “Message of the Day” character limit to be expanded to allow for clearer communication. Is this possible? 
   

   We just put this in as a task for the team, hopefully this will be an easy change.

4. Are there any inventory improvements or quality of life improvements coming our way soon?
   

   We are looking into the schedule and have discussed some bug bashing after this next update. Changes to the inventory UI is not currently on that list at the moment, we may save inventory UI for a later update.

5. I remember LoCarb talking about putting Golden Skitterlings and Treasure Chests hidden about in the open world to give players a reason to explore far corners they would otherwise never have a reason to go. Anymore details on that?
   

   We have snippets of the over world golden Skitterlings in game, just not currently flipped on at the moment. This is something that we are tweaking to work for the next update.

6. In the last Q&A, it was mentioned that optimization changes that should help with hard freezes would be made with the next major update. Around when can we expect to see the next major update?
   

   We are currently in the process of verifying our builds before we submit to Sony and Microsoft. We hope to have an official release date after Gamescom and PAX.

7. Would it be possible for Team Defiance to divulge any information about the remaining parts of the new "Wrath of the Omec" synergy? Shield type? Secondary weapon type?
   

   All we can say is that the next item will show up in the Defiance show codes on SyFy.

8. Players are still reporting cases of sieges and incursions stalling, is there an update on what the team is doing to address this?
   

   The siege stalling issue is still being looked at, we have some more debugging to do so that we can trace the root cause. For the time being the changes we have made are to prevent Sieges from sitting there idle for the remainder of the day.

9. Around when will PvP balancing changes arrive on the Public Test Server?
   

   We’re still trying to get caught up on some backlog tasks, but sometime in early August we should get some PvP tuning values onto PTS. Keep in mind that the PvP specific changes may not persist to our live servers until much later on.

10. When should we expect to see the changes to BMGs implemented?
    

    We’re still working on scheduling time with a vfx artist that can tone down the visuals appropriately. As for the scoring changes, we will still need to evaluate what changes will be necessary.

11. It was mentioned that players that had difficulty with Patron Pass Contracts would be compensated. What is the compensation and when can it be expected?
    

    We have assessed the amount of players that were impacted and we will announce our full compensation plans in the coming week.