Dev Diary: The Future of Quests

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  • Etm34Etm34 Member Posts: 1,667 ★★★★★

    @danielmath Who is that?

    have you heard of corvus? the flow killer?
    This guy?

    Never heard of him.
    And he’s far from being best champ in the game.
    yup! he's not the best champ, i specified 6* and quake doesn't exist as a 6* :)
    He's far from the best 6 star too. Ghost, Sparkles, Fury, Sunspot, Colossus, Aegon, Doom, and Claire are all better than him. Corvus's only use is in AQ, EQ, and AW whereas all the ones I listed above can be used everywhere
    that's bonkers, granted outa those i only have ghost and fury at rank 3 (neither are close to corvus) but to say sunspot, aegon, doom, claire are BETTER is complete insanity
    Have you done Act 6? Corvus is almost useless in Act 6, unless you are running full suicides and cosmic power boosts. Claire, Doom, Aegon, and Sunspot are absolute beasts for Act 6 and I definitely wouldn't have done Act 6 100% without them whereas I used my Corvus for a total of 1 path in all of Act 6. He is still a great champ, but in order to be one of the best, champs need to be used in more than just AQ and AW.
    Don’t want to turn this into a Corvus debate, but I’ve never run suicides and used Corvus for a vast majority of my Act 6 exploration.

    The roadmap is an excellent start, but I was really hoping for more finite information. As a whole, it’s all very vague. We have no timeframe for the Act 6 nerf, which is extremely disappointing for the community. I’m excited for the rollout of the placeholder Canadian difficulty next month, as well as the new boss rush and ultimate summer fun time smash mode that’s rolling out though. After 100% act 6 I’ve been looking to recapture the excitement again, and I think this will help
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  • MenkentMenkent Member Posts: 889 ★★★★


    There are hundreds of feedback which comes off as lists of grievances with actual demands. Having a focus group allows you to work with a manageable size of people which would make coming to a consensus --and probable solutions --far easier.

    Oh, no doubt. And the majority of the lists of grievances were absurd. But it's been two months. Now they're planning a focus group... what happened last month?
  • GroundedWisdomGroundedWisdom Member Posts: 36,634 ★★★★★
    gsil6374 said:



    They gave a tentative for what they have. They can't give time frames for what they don't have yet. It's a detailed look into what they're working on. It isn't an itinerary.

    Dude, movies can get a timeframe when a script is just being written. Your going to tell me they can't give one from the development team here. I find that very hard to believe.
    Movies have their setbacks, and they also don't have to deal with people being disappointed when those goals aren't met like this community. There are also some things they don't know yet. Things don't happen overnight.
  • DNA3000DNA3000 Member, Guardian Posts: 19,844 Guardian

    My only real problem are these few lines that seem to contradict each other...

    Here, when taking about Act Content, you say every account has a specific Flag to tell when you've Completed/Explored a Quest like Act Chapters...

    But then here you say it'd be too difficult to figure who all has Completed/Explored each Act for any Future Compensation...

    So couldn't you just search for the Specific Flag you gave each account to see if they've done the Act you are planning on reworking and compensate them accordingly?

    I believe the difference here is this phrase "we only compensate players who have cleared the content up to 3 months prior to the update." So while there might be a flag to denote completion, the flag might not be dated. So it might be easy to tell who completed the content, but non-trivial to determine who completed the content three months prior to a given date. That might require ignoring the flag and parsing the game logs directly to determine when things happened. It might not be possible to fetch a list of all players with the flag and then search for them in the logs: that could actually be computationally more difficult than just finding everyone in the logs (SQL people: joins are expensive).

    Finally here you say someone going against The Collector wouldn't need the Previous Act Rewards, once Buffed, to beat him.

    But I would argue, namely for Act 4 and possibly Act 3 Rewards, you very much may need them. Hell some Cavalier Players may need them to help beat the Grandmaster, for an example any T1 Alpha Catalysts that any of the Buffed Act Rewards could give since taking a 5 Star from Rank 4 to Rank 5 still Requires 6 T1 Alpha alone and Even More for each previous Rank Up that you may need to use on a certain champion to help you beat that Grandmaster or Collector Fight. That's just T1 Alpha as an Example too, not even counting any T4 Basic Catalysts, Rank Up Gems, Iso, T2 Alpha, Gold, T4 Class Catalysts, Signature Stones or anything else y'all could possibly add to those Acts that still effect mid-endgame players.

    It is easy to trip into loaded words when writing colloquially, things like "need" and "fair" and such. I believe what they are trying to say here is not that a player doesn't think they need a particular reward, because how would they know what a player thinks they need or want, but rather the reward boosts are targeted at specific kinds of players at specific progress tiers, and in general the more targeted the rewards are, the more useful they can make them. If rewards just get sprinkled everywhere without targeting them, then they have to balance them based on more global economic issues, and now the priority of the rewards gets lost, and the rewards become subject to other concerns that will affect what they look like.
  • PandayPirataPandayPirata Member Posts: 23
    @DNA3000
    DNA3000 said:

    New content (that actually has release dates) looks exciting. A lot of words for a few tidbits in information was very annoying tho.

    Super annoying that Act 6 and 7 related content has no dates or time frames, the longer this takes the more stagnated the game will get.

    Damn, that is a big nerf to Act 6. Like huge. I honestly think compensation should be huge as well.

    I'm thinking:
    4 T5C
    12 T2A
    4 12.5% T5CC crystals
    1 50% T5CC crystal
    1 12.5% Selector
    1 6* R1>2 Gem
    50,000 5* Shards
    25,000 6* Shards

    That or literally 10,000 Units.

    If that's what you think just *some* of the resources you spent on Act 6 are worth, why did you do Act 6 in the first place? I mean this is arguably comparable to and within a small radius of Act 6's completion and exploration rewards combined. If you think the difference between what you did spend and what you would have spent is that high, you arguably spent more to complete the content than it was worth to you in the first place. You can't be rewarded for spending excessively to complete content.

    Compensation can't be based on what everyone spent to do it, because that's saying the more someone spent, the less skillfully they completed it, the more they deserve to be rewarded for that. That's simply illogical.
    How is it illogical to base compensation on how much units or resources someone spent? Whether someone is superior in skill or less skilled, the resources they would have used would be less because of the drastic change in attack rating and other changes to bosses like The Champion. A player who used 1000 units might use 600 units with the nerf. A player who used 10K units might use 7K units with the nerf.

    If Kabam did not collect info on how much everyone spent to 100% Act 6, then it is impossible to compensate us individually. But Kabam can create testbeds to established baseline of how much on average is spent for Act 6. For example, testers can complete a normal path and then the same path with the nerf and see the difference. If the test or experiment is done scientifically and with honesty, the difference in units use would be a good starting point for the compensation.
  • MauledMauled Member, Guardian Posts: 3,957 Guardian
    Menkent said:


    There are hundreds of feedback which comes off as lists of grievances with actual demands. Having a focus group allows you to work with a manageable size of people which would make coming to a consensus --and probable solutions --far easier.

    Oh, no doubt. And the majority of the lists of grievances were absurd. But it's been two months. Now they're planning a focus group... what happened last month?
    Presumably filtering through the 1000s of comments to get the constructive criticism/complaints and loosely categorising them to decide what direction to take the game/Act 6. This focus group sounds like an off-game beta to spitball potential changes around those areas that they’ve identified, in this case ‘pain points’.
    Though whether we can just label Act 6 as a pain point and be done with it is a different debate.

  • DNA3000DNA3000 Member, Guardian Posts: 19,844 Guardian
    DrZola said:

    Hopeful—yes.

    But I think it would be a nice gesture to see something concrete and soon. Like before July 4th. The devil is always in the details.

    It will surprise no one that I admit to being skeptical regarding promises. There is so much here across numerous modes...it makes me wonder how there could suddenly be sufficient bandwidth to get everything done in anything close to a reasonable time frame.

    Dr. Zola

    Well, we aren't seeing what is being displaced to execute the new roadmap. Some of this stuff is probably just modifications to what they were already planning to do, in terms of workload if not style. Some of this stuff is probably completely new, and it is probably displacing other stuff they were working on.

    For example, one of the things they said in the Book 2 beta was that they were going to try to up the cadence of story arc quests being released. They seem to have backed off that goal a bit, now saying they are going to try to release them at six month intervals. That frees up content development time to spread out to other kinds of content. So while we were originally supposed to get more rapidly iterated (and super difficult) Book 2 acts, now we're going to be getting them slower, but hopefully better designed and with design time opening up for other kinds of content.

    A lot of less visible to players juggling is probably happening behind the scenes, where we're trading things we would have gotten for what the road map now says we're going to get. Hopefully it is a good trade.
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  • MauledMauled Member, Guardian Posts: 3,957 Guardian
    On the compensation front, I’ll be honest I would like some. I’d guess that it would have to be broken down between Completion of each chapter and then exploration of said chapter and if you’re at 50% of a chapter you’re probably just out of luck.

    Now unless it comes in the form of a huge chunk of units, it’s going to be revives/potions which will go into everyone’s overflow (except those who are ready for an AoL run or something), along with a token gesture of shards here and there. Can we, therefore get them going into our inventory in the same way that T4CC does when your sigil expires - 17/16 as opposed to 16/16 and one in the overflow?
  • DNA3000DNA3000 Member, Guardian Posts: 19,844 Guardian

    @DNA3000

    DNA3000 said:

    New content (that actually has release dates) looks exciting. A lot of words for a few tidbits in information was very annoying tho.

    Super annoying that Act 6 and 7 related content has no dates or time frames, the longer this takes the more stagnated the game will get.

    Damn, that is a big nerf to Act 6. Like huge. I honestly think compensation should be huge as well.

    I'm thinking:
    4 T5C
    12 T2A
    4 12.5% T5CC crystals
    1 50% T5CC crystal
    1 12.5% Selector
    1 6* R1>2 Gem
    50,000 5* Shards
    25,000 6* Shards

    That or literally 10,000 Units.

    If that's what you think just *some* of the resources you spent on Act 6 are worth, why did you do Act 6 in the first place? I mean this is arguably comparable to and within a small radius of Act 6's completion and exploration rewards combined. If you think the difference between what you did spend and what you would have spent is that high, you arguably spent more to complete the content than it was worth to you in the first place. You can't be rewarded for spending excessively to complete content.

    Compensation can't be based on what everyone spent to do it, because that's saying the more someone spent, the less skillfully they completed it, the more they deserve to be rewarded for that. That's simply illogical.
    How is it illogical to base compensation on how much units or resources someone spent? Whether someone is superior in skill or less skilled, the resources they would have used would be less because of the drastic change in attack rating and other changes to bosses like The Champion. A player who used 1000 units might use 600 units with the nerf. A player who used 10K units might use 7K units with the nerf.

    If Kabam did not collect info on how much everyone spent to 100% Act 6, then it is impossible to compensate us individually. But Kabam can create testbeds to established baseline of how much on average is spent for Act 6. For example, testers can complete a normal path and then the same path with the nerf and see the difference. If the test or experiment is done scientifically and with honesty, the difference in units use would be a good starting point for the compensation.
    I don't think my post was clear to you. In the context of the rest of the post, what I intended to convey was that specific individuals cannot assert that the compensation for Act 6 changes should be based on their own personal expenditures because that would then mean, as I said, that people who spent more would think the compensation should be higher, and those who spent less would think the compensation should be lower. If we set compensation to the average, say, like you seem to be suggesting, then every single player above the average expenditure who thought that way would say the compensation was too low, and for the players who spent way over the average they would think the compensation would be ridiculously too low. So you can't judge by just your own expenditures, because if everyone did that almost no one would judge the compensation as appropriate. There needs to be a compensation metric that is independent of individual anecdotes of expense, that all reasonable people can agree is logical irrespective of whether it returns comparable resources to them personally than they spent.
  • Pali32Pali32 Member Posts: 9
    Any idea about date and time
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  • StevieManWonderStevieManWonder Member Posts: 5,019 ★★★★★

    Kaspy said:

    gsil6374 said:



    They gave a tentative for what they have. They can't give time frames for what they don't have yet. It's a detailed look into what they're working on. It isn't an itinerary.

    Dude, movies can get a timeframe when a script is just being written. Your going to tell me they can't give one from the development team here. I find that very hard to believe.
    I've worked in movies, and I can tell you that this is not how that works. Game Development is also a very different beast and you can't compare. We don't have timelines yet because we don't have a final list of what we want to do. Exploration of Data takes time, and then so does coming up with what changes we need to make to address those issues, and depending on the scale... we could be looking at weeks or months just to implement them.
    The lack of details and information puts many of us at a standstill with act 6. Do we keep trudging along with hopes that we will get compensated? Or do we just halt act 6 all together?

    I realize it takes time, but the attack values seems like something you could adjust relatively quickly and give a specific timeline on. I mean, you adjusted attack values in act 7 Beta in like 1 day. Why is adjusting the attack values in act 6 going to take months?
    And then we'd have a different set of players getting a different experience in Act 6 with lowered Attack ratings but an unchanged Champion, and if we do those two, then we have ANOTHER set of Players that are having a different experience than those that will come after when we've hit some of the other Pain Point fights.

    This is not going to be a quick and easy thing. If you want to go forward in Act 6 now or wait for adjustments is up to you. While you don't have a timeline, you are aware that we are coming up with a plan.
    On a positive note, I am sooooooooooooooo excited to see that Book 2 Act 1 won't have quests that cost more than 70 energy. That was legitimately my favorite thing in the post and made my day!
  • KaspyKaspy Member Posts: 179 ★★★

    Kaspy said:

    gsil6374 said:



    They gave a tentative for what they have. They can't give time frames for what they don't have yet. It's a detailed look into what they're working on. It isn't an itinerary.

    Dude, movies can get a timeframe when a script is just being written. Your going to tell me they can't give one from the development team here. I find that very hard to believe.
    I've worked in movies, and I can tell you that this is not how that works. Game Development is also a very different beast and you can't compare. We don't have timelines yet because we don't have a final list of what we want to do. Exploration of Data takes time, and then so does coming up with what changes we need to make to address those issues, and depending on the scale... we could be looking at weeks or months just to implement them.
    The lack of details and information puts many of us at a standstill with act 6. Do we keep trudging along with hopes that we will get compensated? Or do we just halt act 6 all together?

    I realize it takes time, but the attack values seems like something you could adjust relatively quickly and give a specific timeline on. I mean, you adjusted attack values in act 7 Beta in like 1 day. Why is adjusting the attack values in act 6 going to take months?
    And then we'd have a different set of players getting a different experience in Act 6 with lowered Attack ratings but an unchanged Champion, and if we do those two, then we have ANOTHER set of Players that are having a different experience than those that will come after when we've hit some of the other Pain Point fights.

    This is not going to be a quick and easy thing. If you want to go forward in Act 6 now or wait for adjustments is up to you. While you don't have a timeline, you are aware that we are coming up with a plan.
    Okay, so this is actually helpful and is giving some clarity. You make it sound as if the plan is to make ALL act 6 changes at the same time. Is this correct? If you can at least confirm that then I can plan accordingly.

    The impression i had after reading the post is that they would be phased.
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