Wednesday, November 7, 2018

MiriamRowan's Unofficial BC Live Report - 7th November, 2018


Presenters: Wrkshp Warrior & Masta Don



Next events: Battle Royale (with merging and traders) and then Serpenta ("Sky Boss 3").

Players asked for stones for Dominion so much that Masta Don did it for us. Masta Don suspects that players were apparently trolling him - asking for stuff to get Masta Don to do it, knowing it would be unpopular and get him into trouble. Next Dominion will be back to specials as these are definitely preferred.  (Stone boosters not working was a surprise to BC, and they discovered this during testing that they cannot work with the tower mechanics. BC couldn't do anything about this.)

Tower damage displayed during Dominion on Android?  (Android has a maximum integer value that can be displayed, and often top troops are exceeding this and can't see their actual damage done).  BC will look at this, it's slated for client and server to have a look at.  This is a higher priority over purely visual problems as it has an impact on how the event runs.  

Any updates for people damage capped? Damage cap requires server to take time to fix this. Server is currently working on hacking tools, figuring out how hackers are doing what they're doing, finding hackers and going into their logs to discover what they're doing, and then fixing this. All of this takes time and manpower. This is a priority for now, and comes before damage cap.

Arena isn't coming back soon. BC has started discussing Arena though, which means that it's possible to return in the future. The raid boss mechanic didn't seem that popular and the simulated (not live) PvP, so BC will bring it back in a more interesting way. They're trying to see how they can make it feel more like traditional PvP. It's not in a state to be returned to the game currently.  When it comes back, it will be with corrections and fixes.

Coliseum has been talked about. It could possibly return in December. Team Brawl is currently scheduled for December but this is too close to BR, so they could possibly swap Coliseum in instead.

Pvp sacrifice bug? This has been on BC's list of things to fix for a long, long, long, long time. There have been other problems to fix as a priority lately.  Their primary issues have been: bug and hacking fixes, more frequent updates and monsters and costumes. Avatar grab returning is a priority too.  PvP will be fixed to become fair and fun, but only when PvP becomes a super big priority. 

PvP is boring right now as it's not very rewarded.  Many games have PvP as their primary focus and so they incentivize PvP highly with rewards.  This makes PvP fun because it's an end goal and players are rewarded for doing well in it.  Right now, you're not rewarded much for PvP and this has become a vicious cycle. BC can't put big rewards for PvP while the sacrifice (and other) glitches exist.  But BC can't prioritize fixing these glitches because not enough players play PvP because there aren't big rewards for it.  It's all a vicious cycle. PvP is buggy because it's not prioritized, but it's not prioritized because people don't play it because it's buggy.  BC prioritizes where they can, and it's the things they need to immediately fix, and these are the areas where more players are participating heavily.   Masta Don knows that more people would play if they fixed the bugs, but they need to prioritize on what players are participating in now with their resources, compared with what they want people to have fun doing in the future. 

Next Troop Wars?  Masta Don is considering TW vs Coliseum.  There was very little participation last TW.  It made veteran players very happy, but participation wasn't even close to the next worst performing of all the other events.  If TW can't outperform even a bad event like Team Brawl, and that isn't very popular with players... Coliseum is more likely to run before TW again.  Troop Wars is not dead.  It will be slated in where BC can fit it and when it won't negatively impact the game.  Ideally it could come after a big surge of beginner players so that BC can see how they interact with it too.

Needing to log back into the game after closing it?  There was a bug recently with Android that automatically fixed when Android updated their system (fixed on Google's end automatically). It wasn't a bug with BC but Android itself.  Make a support ticket if this keeps happening to you.

Google login missing?  No, BC didn't take this away. It should still be there.

Missing Monsters? For support stuff, unfortunately support needs to check on these issues themselves.  Recently BC has been hammering down on hackers and tracking people. The problem is that many hackers try to implicate other people through bad trades.  (MiriamRowan's note: It sounds like hackers hack to get good rewards, then trade their monsters away. BC removes the monsters, but it's the innocent recipients of these monsters whose monsters seem to go missing for no apparent reason). It's a bit of an issue, so it's probably taking longer for support to track all that stuff.  Keep on at support and they'll probably get back to you as soon as they can on it.  Support won't literally be ignoring you, but it takes time to check.

Facebook friends gifting issue? This is still on BC's  list to fix.

Leader boards were shown for Dominion FFA.

An event where reward mobs have bonus?  BC has tried this in the past and have received a lot of hate mail for it, mostly from players who have put a lot of effort into creating event teams.  Masta Don wouldn't do that.  BC has instead looked at the overall role of event monsters in the game. BC wants to create other ways for reward monsters to have usefulness without essentially turning them into event monsters.  Event mobs are extremely powerful, beyond reward monsters.  Power levels should ideally be a bit closer. For example, an epic event mob should allow you to excel, but a super event mob shouldn't beat a team with legendary reward monsters.  So it's something that's always come out and there are so many of these monsters out there, and the effort that players have put into actual event teams needs to be considered.

Masta Don is aware that reward monsters are traded to gain event monsters.  If this game didn't have trading, it would save Masta Don many headaches.  But the game does have trading and they thought that trading would be a good idea, and Masta Don is now eternally punished for it. It was introduced so that players could trade to get the right zodiacs for their team. Back then it seemed like an awesome feature. The only repeatable monsters back then were the TW mobs. It was when BC made more repeatable monsters that trading has caused them headaches.

10 energy code was displayed.

Can we Craft bound equipment soon?  Maybe soon....?  It's a feature that Masta Don wants to time in with the Valentine's update during January. This update always includes the Chinese New Year CT event, which is in early February, so the Valentine's update would be before this.

Better rewards?  Masta Don recently compared the leader boards to those that were offered 3 years ago. Inflation has been incredible and the current leader boards are so much better than they used to be.

New land and badges?  BC is talking about this and are considering adding another map zone and another raid zone like Lost Temple. 

Avatar spins?  BC is unique in that you can't win the same item twice. This meant that everyone received everything once and then couldn't win anything more.  Now they're considering offering stones if you receive a duplicate item. Possibly 350 stones, for example.  They could bring back all avatar pieces this way. BC will be looking at the new avatar grabs holistically. They could bring back pieces of old trader outfits or wings from event rewards, for example.    This will make everything a bit more accessible to everybody and bring more value back to the avatar grabs. Exclusivity can create high value for items, but if it's out of reach for the majority of players due to the large power base of veterans. This can hurt newer players as they don't believe they can achieve these items within six months of playing.  BC struggles with this a lot internally.

Currency revamp could come during the Valentine's update.  BC wants to make it so that all monsters can be in the grabs, with increased chances for some monsters.

More than level 70?  BC does have plans for this but it will be matched with when they have the new land ready for us to explore.

Yes, Masta Don acknowledges that BC does have time to create a new land but not to fix PvP.  Most MMO games (like World of Warcraft) have about 70% of their players playing events, and 40-50% playing PvP. There's a weird overlap where 20% of players play both events and PvP, and only 30% of players are exclusively playing PvP.  So events become the focus because this is what the majority of players play. Unfortunately down the road, the more events are the focus, the less and less players play PvP, so it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.   "In a way, Don killed PvP, but in fairness it was Don's decisions years ago that slowly led to the dying of PvP".  

BC won't nerf sacrifice during PvP as they'd then have to nerf it in all areas of the game. (MiriamRowan's note: nerf = reducing the effectiveness of something in a game). Sacrifice is not often used in events, but some newer players have them in their teams, and so BC won't reduce the ability.

Increase stone drop for farming in LT? Don can add it to the list but it won't be worked on for ages.

Can BC improve servers?  It's not that BC needs to upgrade the servers. Early on BC created their programming quickly but it's not optimized. BC is working on re-optimizing everything to work better with the servers.  They built too many things too quickly ages ago and are now paying heavily for it now.

Don's favourite monsters are all of the phoenix monsters.  He only knows them by their server name: the Dark Phoenix and the other one that was released with the turtle boss.  He's a huge mythology buff. This is his personal bias.

Wrkshp Warrior closed with: Remember to bug Yulun with all your feature requests.

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