Announcement Ask the CMs in English

Dear Haruki,
I have been reading all these posts on balancing issues.... There's hardly any old DK class players left in the game to argue this balancing crap on forums.... The only thing I can say is that what BP has done with the class is shame on them, shame...
The current state of things is .... I really have no word for it... Almost full Royal gems DK with top gear of level 53-54 loses to every Steam Mechanic in 1v1 ... Level 46 SM with polished, some radiant gems wins against top DK.... Don't tell me I can't play the game or I am not skilled enough..... My char is very well known on server... I don't even want to go into detailed description of all those points of how broken PvP is. makes me want to just shut it and delete my character and never look at BP games ever again. I am on the verge of doing exactly that.

Bigpoint robbed players, they robbed them of everything they have put into their toons, supporting this project just to be tossed in the tip. Shame on you Bigpoint.

 

Hello Sebastian,

thanks for your reply and bringing your (development?) experience into the discussion, of course this is highly welcome, not only for the added value and information, but also for supporting the request for an offical statement from BP, by making clear this is still an interesting topic for the community .

I think I kinda understand that reasoning. However, it is a bit annoying that the difference in the AF of the main attacks of the different character classes is so big, resulting in the "unfairness" explained below.

Hmm, I missed that point so far (not testing higher speed breakpoints myself), sorry and thanks for the clarification.
So, the breakpoint between 15/7 and 30/13 should be at 2.225, right?
That one is not included in the list officially published by BP, which seems to contain only the "full", not "half" steps.
If you are right, maybe it would need to be updated....

If I understand you well, those breakpoints are NOT the technical limit, and there could be at least almost double as many (if not 4 times), because there are actually a lot more frames than those 15 in the animation of a normal-speed magic missile (for example) which COULD be gradually omitted to make the acceleration more linear?
If this is the case, I would actually see a point in the complaints of people who think those breakpoint steps are too big.

... and those preamble frames could not be omitted, of course, for skill acceleration, but would have to remain untouched. Nice explanation of what we see when we experience "rubber-band effects". What is annoying about those is mainly that the displayed, "unconfirmed" action often goes too far and the rollback is severe.

Let's assume you just reached the 2.0 ((15/8+15/7)/2) breakpoint for your magic missile. Testing by different users (including myself) via essence consumption shows that at this (nominal) speed, you do not attack 120 times per minute (as you would expect with 2.0 attacks/sec), but some 184-186 times, that is with an EFFECTIVE attack speed of over 3.0!!

My assumption so far based on calculation results (and the obviously wrong assumption of 24fps for the game) was that the nominal speed would be consistent with the effective speed for a skill that has 24 AF, and for any other AF number, the effective speed would be nominal speed multiplied by 24/AF. While this seemed to be fairly accurate for the magic missile (24/15= 1.6), renewed testing with the rage attack (24/21=1.143) proves it wrong for higher speed breakpoints:

Magic Missile​			Rage Attack​
Nominal speed (published breakpoint)​	Effective speed (measured)​	Ratio ES/NS​	Nominal speed, (published breakpoint)​	Effective speed (measured)​	Ratio ES/NS​
1.034	1.55	1.499	1.024	1.183	1.156
1.304	2.067	1.585	1.355	1.533	1.140
2.000	3.067	1.534	2.000	2.233	1.111
2.308	3.517	1.524	2.800	3.067	1.095

Anyway, what becomes very evident is that skills with a high AF count like the DK's basic attacks have a huge disadvantage in effective attack speed.
While a SW, improving his attack speed from 1.034 to 2.0 "per second", gains more than 90 extra attacks per minute, a DK buying and using the same amount of speed improvements (e.g. saphires) only gains some 63 attacks per minute, despite reaching the same nominal breakpoint!

As I said in my original post, this is an underlying, basic concept of the game and has been balanced (more or less) in other ways, though only after R155 and the introduction of the new wisdom talents many players really reach those high attack speeds.
I am NOT demanding that the AF count of the most common "spamming" skills ought to be normalized.
However, I think BP should clearly communicate that the displayed, nominal attack speed is NOT the effective one, even considering the breakpoints, and allow us to understand the mechanism behind.

May I ask where/how you obtained those numbers, especially the AF count? Not because I doubt them but because I want to learn how to do it...

To some extent you are right, though I think the difference between nominal and effective attack speed deserves an explanation to everyone! It is, from my p.o.v., even more "shocking" than the breakpoints.
Of course I would be most happy with an explanatory video or some text from e.g. @GFX Mabruk . I was bringing up the issue here only because we have no "direct channel" to the techies for this kind of questions.

I suppose @jayr3d was referring to the recent nerf applied to flag carriers in 5v5, where travel speed modifiers are not any more just added/subtracted (as it seems to have been handled before), but the flag malus of -30% is now also applied to all speed improvements (because they are multiplied with the reduced base speed).

 

Haruki I need a favor. Since I can't come to Berlin without significant expense, please go find the guy that made the Daily rewards list for the daily map, thank him for a cool idea and for a decent general list, and then POKE HIM IN THE EYEBALL for leaveing us all with the worst taste in our mouths on the last day. 5 PHESTOS COINS!!!! Please tell him as he sops the blood from his eye with a tissue that he has no clue what the community needs and needs to find sanitation(Janitor) work at another company.

 

do you guys not get it nothing gona be fixed so deal with it there agenda is first so all your comments are wasted here and just get on with the game you play at the moment cheers all the best

 

Yup. Lots of people bent out of shape about the insensitivity of the last "present" in the Solstice Cave. No sale value, useless to complete the Big Prize total, given days after the mini is over. Pouring salt in an open wound, reminding losers of their loss, programmers may not be "people persons," but come on! Does staff plan anything together?

 

5 Phestos coins!!!!
woohooo
I like ... like!!!!!
I like ... like .... like ... like!!!!

 

Haruki,

Is there anything that might get done to the "harder" and "hardest" modes in the parallel worlds that would improve the experience? The drops are just as lousy as the regular mode. There simply is no incentive to waste the higher ess if the rewards are the same.

 

ah, yeah, I used to work as a Dev, architect level java guy) it was some time ago though and had nothing to do with gaming. I did play with some quake code, and I still do code for fun, like the optimizer app which I use as a java8 learning tool) Quake is btw the Parent of Latency Compensation architecture, which DSO uses. The QuakeWorld update to it, which changed the games forever. More on that later.

perhaps it is an attribute of a class, and thats it.

Ah, no, I used just some whatever number as an example, 2.225 doesnt exist. But some of the higher breaks did exist, not sure about now. You can take a look at the previous calculated FAQ

Spoiler

See the AF15 breaks 3.41, 3.61? Those are sub steps. They do not necessarily exist now, neither sure I am they are sub steps of 0.5, but hope you got they idea of where they are (might be/have been) coming from.

Yes, I would say they could double the amount of the breakpoints. Well, I need to think on this one, there might be some other side issues. But without a lot of analysis, it looks like yes, there is a room.

Nice thing about rollback, well, let me start from Latency Compencastion. Since Quake World update, all games like this use that model. Some call it Fat Predictive Client with autocratic server. Assuming your or mine latency could be high, e.g. 300ms, we will still get an awesome experience, since client doesnt wait for the server to take into account an action request, client just starts the action right away with 0 (lets say 10ms) delay, and (in paralel) informs the server about the action started, also confirming the permission to continue (collision check).
Then, if no collision, server will communicate that to other clients, and they will also start your action, without delay, and they will skip the # of frames that already passed. So if the active game frame (sequence #) is lets say 10,000, you start the action which takes 100 Seq#, other client receives it when it is already 10,025, the other client will just continue your action from the Seq#26.
If there is a collision, server will rollback some client action, and that specific client will see that rollback. Other clients will not (there are some crazy cases with multiple clients though).
So the nice thing about rollback is that if you have good network, good machine, good ping, - you dont wait for some high latency guy. You dont even notice him being slow (almost), at least comparing to a game in which everyone awaits everyone else to do his turn.
So I think we need to live with that, as this is anyway the best possible design of the game networking, which allows latency players experience the 'realtime' gaming. I'm not saying there aren't any things cant be fixed, for instance instant mob reaction when you jump as a DK, it is wrong, and it creates unnecessary extra collisions. Giving a mob 5-10 frames reaction would help a lot.

Okay. I just tested it myself with a mage, not super accurate but still, I did ~94 shots pet minute with 1.00 and ~188 shots per minute with 2.02, which is twice as much.
You do not like the fact that at 1.00 it IS NOT 60 shots? well, honestly, I dont care. The attack speed is not the the speed of the skill, it is a base character speed. For istance, you and me might have different reaction and strength in hands, that would be different base attack speed (with the same hummer, you can hit twice as much as I can), and I'm okay that there are skills that are faster than others (imagine two hammers, one 10kg, and one 1kg), those are skills.
What I would be frustrated about, if that was the case, - doubling the speed doesn't double the output, whatever the Multiplier is. (I have seen a thread claiming it is the case, and it would be caused by uncompencated preable time, if it was so). (and this is a test message, for Haruki, ignore this one. I'm just curious if she reads me. Haruki, there is a crazy bug in the game allowing players to kill pw bosses in 1-2 seconds, don't mind fixing it?)
So whatever the breakpoint is, if it proportionally changes the output, I'm fine with that.

Okay, so what you are really concerned is that with the same speed, DK does less hits per sec comparing to magic missile. Well, it might be just a balancing thing, it might be a desicion based on the physical attributes of hitting with lightweight object like a wand comparing to a hammer, it could be multiple things. Also, DK got the stackable speed increase on some skills, also, not all DK skills are high AF rate ones. here they are btw:
angrystrike 21
mightyswing 22
bloody360 16
mighty360 16
stuncharge 9
warshout 14
battlecry 8
frenzyshout 14
seismicslam 16
laceratingstrike 13
enragingleap 9
defiance 18
mightybash 24
earthquake 24
I dont find that to be an issue, it is a nuance, an attribute of the char class.

Ah, some dozen pages ago, someone posted a screenshot of the DB in this thread. Guy was looking for the hidden achievement. So that DB is DSO database, and since we use Predictive Client architecture, client has to know everything. It should not be necessarily stored in open database with zero enryption, but it is what it is so a bunch of folks already studied that DB and there are tons of screenshots on facebook. it is in the temp/dsoclient or something like that folder, the largest file, you can open it with some sql viewers. Opening that file would be a violation though, but since Haruki didnt care about the very first screenshot from the DB, guess its okay)
funniest thing (according to some facebook users) is you can even change that DB. Noobs from BP didnt even protect it well from replacing, but even if you do change, it would mean nothing useful besides some UI changes, like camera height or light stuff.

and the game FPS is easy, your NVidia shows it, assuming it is new one which supports Shadow Play. or you can use some recording tools like 'Fraps'.

Ah, yeah, I dont pvp at all nowadays)

 

Hello there playful creatures,

and here we go with the next shipment of CM answers! As always, if you posted something in this thread that has not been answered do not hesitate to bring it forward to our attention. Off we go!

Update concerning the New Moon and Full Moon events
We are hearing you - today we had a meeting with different departments to expose clearly the main points of concern across all the different communities and a number of improvements have already started. We still need to find a slot for these improvements to be implemented inside the game but we are confident we can manage this for the upcoming releases. Due to time constraints and the fact that everyone is also busy with other tasks on their desks, a complete rework of them is not possible as of now - again, this does not mean that these events will not get a full rework at some point.

Once we have more details about these improvements and concrete release dates we will let you know. They include increasing the Realm Fragments drops across all the game (happening in rel161), adding stackability of passes to the Painful mode, improving the lucrativeness of that very Painful mode and adding other items that you guys can look forward to, among other tweaks.

No kicks needed - as I said before, we really pushed for this and this is happening with release 161.
We will kick very much for this - but everyone on the team acknowledges the need for this increase.

No, no buenos at all. We are also having an exhaustive post-mortem (how we call them) meeting soon in order to raise awareness about this big event and how to improve it for next year. That's another must in our list.

Hello there,

I was actually reading this with some of those amazing GTA voices and thinking "what out for dat code, dooog". Anyway, the Merry Christmas message was a little parenthesis filmed in one day with the collaboration of certain individuals who, in some cases, hate being in front of the camera... Poor little ones. It was meant to be a sympathetic recollection of DSO merry workers.

Now, the malady you are referring to as "no teamwork" we call it "miscommunication", which sometimes does happen, as we have seen during 2015 - also linked to the concept of island. This is indeed something we all are working towards, believe me. On the other hand, the current workflow you are describing does not correspond with the reality of things in our ghetto since each individual does keep in the loop other people that surround his/her work. We certainly will get better at this - and yes, we are constantly rechecking our workflows and meeting procedures.

No, of course not. We keep a rather dim room full of stickers with a project manager inside - at least, I think that´s the title he goes for. Each person that ventures inside thinking that this corner is the coffee storage room gets a sticker on their foreheads, a feature or bug that they need to develop in the next couple of days. We spend our days with sticky foreheads and screaming each time we get rid of one of them, so the others keep track of what makes it into the next release.

That, my meme-user friend, is only ONE CLICK AWAY.

Well, I am pretty sure if I did not have the client open during my daily working hours - and therefore during that little appearance. You may understand that I hide my credentials and other internal software, on the other hand...- some other complains would show up. Anyway. I do have the client open during most of my working hours since I need it for my CM daily duties, believe it or not.

As for the general comment that equates behavioral patterns on a staged video with the performance of certain individuals on the working sphere, it certainly amazes me how powerful can first impressions work on you. But I will not feed that line of discourse any further.

We also believe in Nicholas though. He's a neat fellow and a great addition to the team! ^^

Hello there,

that's a neat idea, to find another use for them. I will launch a little string of inquiries - as of now we would recommend not to throw them away since they could possibly arrive in the next run of the Winter Solstice. That falls on the other side of the year though... so finding another use for this hard farmed/bought items could be a possibility.

I think I already mentioned the official stance on this - but anyway, this thread is pretty long and I love to repeat myself whenver possible. There are talks to make the essences not usable on other players in the open PvP scenarios since, well, these are testing grounds and it really makes more sense if they mirror the conditions of the real PvP encounters. We will keep you updated about this.

What say I is that this would make the minimap maybe too crowded with the names...
Anyway, we have nowadays more recurrent community issues to implement - but we will drop the idea on the sticker room.

Oh, no, not that question again!!! Kidding (well, do I?)
So here is the Gnob deal: he will arrive with rel160 and the wish of the good team is to bring him to the city more often than this past 2015. There is an offer plan for him to a more diverse assortment of items (including costumes, as you guys have continuously suggested) each single time he pays a visit. Good year ahead for the good looking troll, it seems!!

Hey there,
saying that we are solely focusing on graphics with this game is a rather big over-generalization. We have a lovely art department who has nothing to do with game design or event planning and that loves what they do. It would be very sad for them if they had to resign to do anything for the game for a while... On another note, yes, more balancing and more bug fixing are necessary and this is certainly a constant for us.

Hello there,

-- server migration: it´s still on the horizon but currently on hold. Meaning, I do not have any further news to share with you. Sorry!
-- new content expansion and level cap: most probably. There will certainly a level cap and my personal guess is that we will increment it by 5, yep.

Very valid questions. I will compile them and try to get some light and new air on those ones.
For the achievements I can say that we definitely have some tickets to fix those in the near future. I know they are quite the pain...

Hey there mister,

the person in charge of scaling left the building already and therefore I will need to ask him tomorrow about the scalability of these and return like a diligent Hermes. As for the mystic cubes, I am unaware of any project to enhance them in the way you are mentioning but will surely ask around as well.

You also have a nice day!

I quote you just to let you know that I will also inquire about this. Bear with me. Thanks!

Yes, will REALLY implement a higher drop of realm fragments across the game.
Current schedule for this to happen is rel161 and we will push for the date to remain as it is.

You still come here though. Even if it is for the laughs. So I would say that it still serves you a purpose.

------

And this is all for today - a cool Belgian beer is awaiting me and I will come around tomorrow to answer more questions and to share with you the fate of the person in charge of wrapping the Phestos' Coins. Such a troll...

See you tomorrow!!

 

Buahhahaa, don't forget--POKE!! right in the eyeball, and a job application for sanitation worker.

 

But why start to rework something just to rework it again later? Where is the QA team?

I'm pretty confident with my observations at first impressions. Am I wrong with my observations over the QA team? Characteristics away, they still do absolutely no quality job.

Where was QA team to notice this trolling release? Heck they are 2 guys...
You always say you will post some more the next day (tomorrow), but you never come !

 

Once again the dev's rush to implement something, anything, whether it works correctly or not. Then as usual, the promise comes that "don't worry, we'll fix it in a couple of months".

Some days I wonder if the Dev's get paid by the complaint.

 

Really glad to see some replys made me smile for once coming on this forum.
Now back to what you/I said. Of course i appreciate the Design team because it seems they are the only ones doing their job and i hope you get this message across to them as an applaud to them and not im not saying for them to resign but it seems you already get my message/point by what i ment as you said the bug fixing and balancing really needs major attention. There was a bug where us players were able to farm easier but it was very very quickly fix whilst there are bugs which are still here from last year. i paid alot of money and so have many others and i do not feel at all good about it due to all the bad changes in game that ruined it gems dont help, speed stones from jester lost their value/performance not sure if its a bug or its done intentional but it really sucks cause i paid for it since it made me "Faster" but not so much any more. and many other things that my fellow DSO players have stated i mean seriously is this how we get treated? ignored and not appreciated we support you guys financially and in other ways too we expect that back. sorry if i come out rude but i havent been treated fair by forum mods nor support therefore my anger/rage exists and i reach out to YOU (GMS) in hope for some changes here

 

That is an interesting twist. Of course you could stockpile a bunch and get a 1 day or wait until they give a 3 day freebie which happens every so often.

DSO claims to be listening to players, so I wonder how many non premium players have been asking for this particular "improvement".

 

A smart person won't fall for it though.
They'll save and save and save until a free 1, 3, or 7 day premium comes along from an event or bouns code (which is day happens once every 3-5 months from what I've seen) and then they will open all the cubes at once for a huge boost to their glyphs, gems, essence, or gear. The alternative is that they should still sell rather well and would be an easy way to make some good gold. I'm also curious if this I'd going to be the same drop rate for premium and non premium and in either case if they are going to adjust the drop rate up or down. Also curious if they will make the premium set scale now that it will be slightly more universally available.

 

The explosive shot has been nerfed from 770% to 670%. Rangers don't have huge 6-7k dmg like mages, tanks and dwarves because we don't have 2h weapons. That was our only good skill in pve that somewhat compensated for the lower dmg rangers have. Now you nerfed it? How is this fair? Can't you nerf it only for pvp? I just want to be left alone and have fun with my pve and not be bothered by the results of all these idiot 10 year old whiners who complain in pvp that everyone else is op. Instead of fixing the dmg mitigation, they chose to nerf ranger's skill. How retarded. Now please nerf mage's 2h weapons too. I want nerf nerf nerf, let's nerf each other and let's see how fun that will be. Let's all complain until there is nothing left of anybody. So what if dwarves regen hp like crazy? I don't mind, anyone can have whatever skills they want, just leave my explosive shot alone -.-

Now that you nerfed our best skill, it's time to give us real 2h bows, not these useless longbows, so we can have 7k dmg too. Or you should reduce the concentration requirement for explosive shot. And give us back our deadly blow to what it was before r155: 200% dmg. And give our tree back its brain, he's retarded and slow now and doesn't hold the mobs like before.

And the funny thing is that the devs don't realise that this nerf won't fix anything in pvp. If you died in 1 shot from 770%, you'll die in 1 shot from 670% too. Everyone's dmg will keep increasing. Ice sphere should be nerfed too, they have insane dmg with 2h weapons. I applaud the developers' ability to find creative solutions that benefit everyone, you are true problem solvers, your intelligence must be over 9000 !

 

Hey there people,

I hope the reception of this forum post find you good and well-behaved (ha!).
Dropping by to mention that I will not be able to answer any questions today - you can throw me peanuts. But I will certainly do so with the help of good coffee and some game designers near me on Monday, ok?

For Big Papa and other people interested, click HERE.

Cheerios and enjoy the weekend!

 

I opened ~1.8k when I reached level 50. There was nothing good. Lesson learned. ^-^

 

hello all again just a quick post to show you the problem in pvp between 2 players we have allmost 1 million damage now i doint know how devs and cms want to explain this as fair and as i seen the amount of posts about this topic i was thinking some example was the way to go, now you can hand this to your all clever department who looks after this mess and at least you now have some idea what players have to put up with and by the way im not complaining as there is no point. i also am a 3 year player of your game and have seen both sides of pvp and pve, i wish you all the best in you quest for fairness between the classes thanks

 

Everyone has insane dmg in pvp now (that's the main problem)... but your pic doesn't prove much. Only that those 2 guys had invested more time / money into their toons and they also had 2 weak team mates so they could score all the kills for themselves. And your team had 2 noobs too... well actually 4 noobs because those 2 rangers were definitely on full dmg mode with no defense... look at their death count.

This kind of discrepancy between players has always been possible in this game.
I saw a video on youtube pre r155, when the level cap was 45, of a mage doing 1 million dmg in one 5vs5 round. Why? because all the other guys were very weak and he was 1 shotting them like crazy, but that didn't prove anything.

You had 2 rangers and 1 dwarf too, but they were weak.

The truth is all classes are op but soon all classes will be nerfed because of constant complaining -.-
I want my explosive shot back. And mages will want their ice sphere back. Dwarves will want their hp regen and turret dmg back.

After we all get nerfed, tanks will have the last laugh. Since we'll all be at the same level again, but we'll all be weak and useless in pve. That will be so fun -.-

How can a mage in pve with 2h do 30k dmg with lightning strike, while I can't even hit that high with explosive shot? Now the ES got even weaker... how is this fair?