AROUND THE WORLD & UPCOMING SEASON A9DEVCHAT
#šć»dev-chat-answer
hidden shell
dull moon
Hey everyone, thanks for taking some time to join todays Devchat.
hope you have all had at least a tolerable week and have a better weekend
This Devchat I want to focus on a few things, firstly the next update coming in December and then I'll talk a bit about some things we are looking at for next year and try and answer some questions in between.
So next update, which will launch in Early December will have 2 special seasons as we will be celebrating the end of the year with the Winterfest season and the start of the new year with the Lunar New Year season.
Each season will have a different focus and it's own set of events.
Winterfest is all about celebrating the end of the year with the continuation of the Drive Syndicate story in a brand new Drive Syndicate event. Keep an eye out on the A9 social media over the next little bit for some exciting information around it.
And as I know not everyone wants to spend time in the syndicate we will also be bringing back the Ultima RS in it's own event during this period of time.
Additionally we are making a change to the tracks that will be available in multiplayer during this season and rather than a big list of random tracks we will have all of the world series multiplayer races taking part in the cold of Greenland or Himalayas
With the new year we will kick off the second special season to celebrate the lunar new year. During this season we will be launching a brand new car in a brand new event.
This event called Road Test will allow you to (surprise, surprise) take the car out and road test it in a series of missions.
This is a new repeatable event (this means it will reoccur more frequently like the starways do). You will take the test car and put it through its passes, upgrading it through the event and unlocking BP and other prizes to keep once the event finishes. If you don't get to far in the event or miss the event don't worry the event will repeat allowing you to keep unlocking rewards.
Of course with any update there will be a bunch of new cars available (8 this update), additionally we are introducing a number of decals for both new and old cars over the 2 special seasons so check them out to see what you can get.
this includes the introduction of some new animated decals to the game.
We also have a bunch of smaller changes coming with the update
For daily tasks we have made a small change, now if you have more than 1 daily tasks finished the minute you claim it all claimable daily tasks will be claimed so you won't have to claim them 1 at a time anymore.
We are also making a change to club wars for the update. The map has been changed to both reduce the number of intersections and total number of nodes overall so you wonāt have to defend or attack as much. As part of this we are also changing the bonus point conditions so now as you advance along a path the number and specificity of what you need to meet them will increase making early ones easier to get maximum points and changing the strategy on defense.
Another big thing for this update is starting in December the Asphalt 9 series starts, this is an e-sports in which you can take part for a chance to win real world prizes but also in game prizes (including a new decal for all participants in each of the qualifier events)
I saw a question about the road test.
Q The Road Test seems like a new name for SE with free try. I don't see any difference.
A It differs from a normal special event in a few ways. Firstly it is totally self contained with it's own store and currency that you earn during the event. Secondly the car you upgrade in the event is the prototype version of the real car which means it has it's own progression in the event and you don't get to keep it. However by upgrading it and reaching different milestones you will get BP and parts for the "road version" of the car to keep and use elsewhere in the game.
So what about next year?
First off, a bit of a caveat for what Iām going to say, anything I mention here is not final yet and we do not have specific dates for them so please keep this in mind, these are some of what we have planned for the next year.
The first thing which I am sure many of you will be excited to hear about is we will be increasing the garage level (Yes I know people have wanted this for ages and we have wanted to do it as well). As Iāve mentioned previously this is not a trivial amount of work, but we now have a plan for what we want to change and how to go about it (so we have done the work). This change will more than double the current levels and will impact not just the legend store but also the level up packs and introduce a change to levelling up. Instead of just new cars being added to the free packs you will be given a direct reward for reaching a new level in addition to the free packs.
The second big new feature I'll talk about is something that I think will give everyone something they want.
One of the most common things we here is "bring back old event X" or "I want an event for car Y"
We have a design for a new feature which will address this, we will be creating a new section of the game which will have events created and focused on specific cars that you will be able to select to play when you want.
These events will have some conditions around them, you can only have so many at 1 time (we want you to finish and unlock a car before moving on), some of the event will have unlock conditions (e.g., make sure you have the car you need to complete it).
Once unlocked you will be able to play and replay the event until you have completed it (gotten all the rewards, got the car to a tier etc)
When it launches we will have quite a number of events for you to select from and more will be added with each update.
The events in this area will have older cars that are not used in the normal seasonal events and the seasonal events will be focused on newer cars.
Other stuff we are looking into for next year which I'll mention in passing as it's still to high level and this is not an exhaustive list.
-Total revamp of the onboarding experience for new players including changes to early career.
-Introduction of new longer multiplayer seasons that are made up of smaller events building into 1 global leaderboard.
-New mission types in special events, dailies etc
-A daily login that rewards both daily but also return play within a period of time.
To answer a few questions i'm seeing, I'll group and summarize the comments
Q Any plans to change wildcard system
A At the moment the only change we are doing is to increase the caps (this will be in the next update) and add more wildcard sources in the game.
Q Removing the piggy bank post race notification.
A We've heard the complaint and are looking into adding an option to disable it. We have made some interim tweaks to reduce and speed it up a bit but the final solution is still being worked on.
Q Are we concerned about leaks of upcoming events?
A While it doesnāt have a major impact on the game it is not something ideal as some of the leaks are for future things that may or may not actually occur so we donāt want to get the community expecting one thing when it might not appear for a long time if at all. At the same time we work with various licensors to reveal new cars and other events at times and these we need to keep hidden for legal reasons so it is something that will need to be addressed.
Q Esports available in India
A Don't quote me on this (it may change due to legal restrictions) but I believe the Asphalt series will be world wide and all platforms so that would include India
Q Greenland track in multiplayer
A We are going to try something with multiplayer in the next update with each of the 2 seasons having itās own set of tracks (2 or 3 only) for multiplayer for the season. And the first season will have Greenland in it (the lunar new year is Osaka and Shanghai)
Q Club trading system will there be one?
A Short answer is not anytime soon, we actually were discussing what is needed from a tech side to enable this sort of thing and there are a few hurdles we need to solve their first before we can more seriously look into it.
Q Is the legendary pass car hunt going to be limited to one car from now on or it was only a one-time feature?
A This was actually a temporary fix for a bug that was causing a crash as this event is only for the LP holders we had to put a quick work around in order to still allow the event to run and stop the game crashing. The issue has been fixed and it should be back to normal for the next update.
Q Any info to disclose on the upcoming map?
A I can't say much about the upcoming map or maps as we want to have a big reveal once it's all nice and polished looking. I will say the 1st one will launch early next year.
Q Merging A9 platforms
A Yes this is on our roadmap, it's not something that happens overnight and will take at least 6-8 months just to get the tech side migration done so it will be started next year but no end date as yet. (this means cross platform)
Q Buneos Aires added to MP and ramp fixes
A Ramps have been tweaked and it has been added to MP but won't be in the next update per previous mention we will have 2 sets of themed environments
Looking at more questions to answer, please keep in mind to phrase it as a question also I won't comment on rewards or costs of things
Q Could we add tag mode like in A8
A Not currently planned to add it, we are looking at game modes to add in and there are still some we want to add/polish and use in our game. For instance bringing the looper mechanic across to daily events, bringing the police gameplay from the undercover syndicate into multiplayer (cops & robbers mode)
Q Changing the MP rating system
A This is part of the change we want to do to the overall MP meta, both spreading out the rating range so it becomes more granular as well as changing the values for win/lose to mention a couple of changes.
Q Legend store changes
A As I mentioned these will come with GL increase as the 2 are intrinsically tied together and need to be done at the same time.
Q Weather variables for tracks?
A We would love to do it, currently we cannot for various tech reasons but it is something that is being looked at under the hood.
Q Missions for win/finish on specific tracks are hard to do.
A Part of the theming in the next update is to make this sort missions easier to do and to give everyone a chance to try and master a track in MP by having it repeat more regularly.
Q Longer races 2 or 3 laps
A We've tried this in the past and it was really unpopular except for a very small segment of players so we don't do it now.
Q pasta or pizza ?
A Neither I prefer Sushi
Q Why keep adding new currencies?
A Adding new currencies allows us to change the reward system and remove some of the randomness from it by giving players the control to buy what they want
Q Bring back mastery from A8
A First off there's no bring back it hasn't existed in A9 so it's a totally new feature š Secondly it is not something on the current plan.
Q What happened to 1 vs 1 events?
A They will come back from time to time, some people like them and some don't but overall we don't see a huge number of players participating in it so we don't run it as frequently
Hi, to start with thank you to everyone for taking time to come be involved in this Q&A. We are going to try a different format from last time to see if it makes things a bit easier to follow and help us answer more of your questions as well as get your answers on some of ours.
As mentioned the new format will be to split the questions and answers into 2 channels, Iāll be posting answers and dev question in 1 and you can use the other channel to ask your questions and give answers. Please be patient when asking/answering as it is hard work to keep up with everyone (The moderators and myself will try our best to cover as much as we can). If you donāt see your question answered immediately donāt worry we will do our best to answer them in groups of similar themed questions.
Before we begin let me provide everyone with a bit of background of what the design team is up to at the moment.
As we approach the end of the year we are looking and starting to plan our upcoming features for the game (Yes it is August but it takes time to design, get art and build things so we need to plan ahead). One of the big areas we are looking at focusing on next year is clubs. Specifically How they work, what you can do with your club and the benefits/rewards of being part of a club. These Q&A session can be a great help to the team when designing and prioritizing the work as it gives us a chance to hear from you the players as to what you are interested in and would like to see.
So to kick us off, thank you to everyone who posted some early questions we have been reviewing them and have grouped them into 4 areas that we would like to talk about in rough order:
-Clubs in general
-Trade system
-Clan wars
-Rewards
Time allowing we will also try and answer any additional miscellaneous questions at the end (so please keep anything off topic till then).
And with that let start the engines and get ready to roll š
Clubs in general
Letās start with talking about clubs in general. Before I go into what we are looking at Iād like to address a common question that has come up and was mentioned in the last Q&A about the club milestone rewards.
Many of you mentioned that the club milestone rewards feel like they are to high to achieve and it felt like you had to grind for way to long. To address this we have changed the club reward progression milestones to reduce the total number of stages (but kept the same total amount of rewards you just now get more sooner) as well as reduced the amount of points you need to get to reach the final reward. We will be seeing how these changes go in the next update and will keep balancing as needed.
Ok so what are we looking at with clubs (this is a big topic so we wonāt be able to cover all) and why.
Well firstly we are taking a look at clubs because we believe that they are an integral part of the game community. We want all the players to feel that the game is not just something they play because they are bored and want something fun to do but because we want them to become involved and feel like they have become part of a wider community of fans who enjoy the cars, racing and competition.
Now as part of that clubs help people meet other players, can help players help each other and provide a great area for fun competition
So let me talk about some of the changes we are looking at (and no promises as to when and if any of these will make it into the final game as what seems simple can be very complicated to implement)
Firstly we have been discussing and looking at changing the size of clubs so that you can have more members.
Currently clubs are capped at 20 players which is fine but at the same time can feel a bit limiting, imagine if you could only have 5 friends on a friends list but you had 6 it's not great if you have to tell 1 of them nope sorry. What we would like to do is increase this number, to what not sure yet.
So my 1st question to all of you is
Question what size clubs would you be interested in? 30,40,50 or even bigger?
Check out the #ā-dev-chat-vote channel to vote on your answer
Ok next thing we are looking at with clubs is around how you search for & manage your club
We want to make it easier to search for and find a club, as part of this we also want to make it easier for officers to manage their club. For searching we want to add more criteria such as:
ā¢ Set a minimum garage level
ā¢ Set a time zone or region of the club you are looking for (I know for me it's always more fun to be in the same time zone as my club mates).
ā¢ Ability to search for a club when already in a club (do you really want to leave your awesome club? or maybe just try and poach that person who beat you for your club)
ā¢ Option to auto accept an applicant or manually accept
And for managing and interacting with the club we are looking at ways that we can allow club members to:
ā¢ See who is offline or active
ā¢ See player contributions in the season/week
ā¢ Adding a tag to player name to denote the club
Question is there anything else you would like to be able to do when searching or managing your club?
Also I'll talk about club rewards in a bit so feel free to hold off on questions around that and trading as I might answer them saving you from having to ask š
So from the question above what I'm seeing so far is:
-More restrictions such as # of cars
-Additional club officer role/ability to hand over club leader role
I'll talk about some of the other stuff in a second (races etc)
As the next area we are looking at with clubs is to make them something both new players and veteran players want to join and be involved with, to help with this we are looking at making a number of changes to existing systems:
ā¢ Add more maps for club races (we will be doing this incrementally as it is additional work to setup races for clubs)
ā¢ Look at how we can introduce different race types for club races so that clubs can create their own internal challenges (e.g. allow you to chose a track & set a time for people to beat)
ā¢ Improving club chat
o Adding emojiās into the chat
o Direct messages
o Expanding club chat to other areas of the game (especially for club related activities)
Basically is to slowly build on what we have currently for clubs by giving you more functionality and control
Also we are looking at adding new features (this is where it gets interesting)
so the 1st idea is to introduce an achievement based mechanic for clubs (that all members will contribute to) that will come in 2 forms:
ā¢ A āclub perkā mechanic unlocking these would give longer term tangible benefits of being part of a club e.g. bonus rep, able to have more options in club races etc as some early ideas.
ā¢ A club ātaskā that requires everyone in the club to work together and achieve something over a period of time (daily, weekly etc). Completion of these would earn not just the rewards of completion but a general reward for everyone in the club.
The idea behind this is everyone in the club would help the club grow (gain XP increase in level etc) by performing activities that earn club points
As the club progresses you would unlock the perks getting permanent benefits
Additionally the "task" would be a variation of the daily task idea which give solo rewards but instead everyone for a club could work together to complete these and earn something for the entire club.
Now something that I'm sure has come up and people are aware of is the issue of club hopping
Personally I find it annoying when a club I am in has worked hard to get a reward and someone joins at the last minute, collects it then moves on
we are looking at way's to discourage this sort of behaviour for instance you only get the rewards if you have contributed X% and/or been with the club for 1 season etc
not sure what the rules will be for it yet but it is something we will have. Since if we make clubs more important and give more rewards from them we don't want people exploiting it
so **Question and thoughts/comments about these new ideas? **
Another new feature we are looking to add is an internal club leaderboard
the idea behind this will be to rank everyone in the club based upon their contribution over a period of time (be it weekly or season length TBD).
Based upon your rank we would then give out bonus rewards for the top X% e.g. top 1% get Y, 2- 20% get B etc
as part of the leaderboard we would also look to expand the info on it so we could show more than just contribution potentially e.g. best time etc
@pearl osprey will post a poll in the #ā-dev-chat-vote for the 3 new ideas for you to like/dislike
Ok let's move off clubs in general for a bit and talk about what seems to be everyone's favourite topic rewards
Rewards
This is 1 of the hardest things to discuss as it impacts the balance of the game and of course everyone always wants more and bigger rewards š
To give everyone a bit of context when it comes to rewards if we just look at cars (driving them is the core of the game after all) it is a complicated process involving not just the team building the cars (which takes time) but also ensuring we have a license for the car, getting sign off on how we have built the car, what it looks like, the colours, the decals basically everything. Since this takes time it is a limit on how many we can do per update
but naturally we want to make sure everyone gets something out of playing the game
so we have been having a number of internal discussions about what we could do to ensure we can give rewards with real value to you for the game without breaking the game, breaking our artists (trust me when I say the 3D team are some of the hardest working people you would ever meet) or totally watering down rewards so that they have no real value
An idea that we have been discussing which I would love to get everyone's feedback on (we will put a like/dislike poll up for it in a minute) is the following:
Once you have a car maxed out you can āevolve itā into the legendary version. This would allow you to get even more out of the cars performance making it faster, handle better etc, so side by side a maxed out car and a legendary car the legendary would have better stats.
this would work hypothetically (it is still early discussion) as some kind of hybrid between the current BP system and import parts
we would look at having different UI for legendary cars, treat them as a second car in the garage (it's important so we can have races of legend vs. legend as well as not to keep things balanced) etc.
The other idea we have been discussing, which could work with the legendary version or be by itself is to give you the players the ability to "tune" your car
the idea would be that once you have maxed out a cars you would unlock the ability to adjust the tuning on the car within a range of parameters so that it plays a bit more how you would like it. For instance reduce some speed on a Lamborghini but make it handle better etc.
both systems would allow us to add more rewards to the game without adding more cars
and as a bonus for those who have not already maxed out the cars it means we can also look at bringing in more ways for you to earn "old" (i.e. not the current updates cars) cars. I'll talk about these in a bit as it ties into Club wars (spoiler alert)
ok looking at the votes on the 2 new ideas for rewards it seems they are not very popular is there any particular reason why?
I should also clarify the idea behind the 2 rewards is that these are things you can earn from being involved with clubs and other areas of the game, not necessarily something you need to buy or compete heavily to get
Ok let's move on to the next topic
Trade System
since this question has come up a ton
We are looking at introducing a trade system for members within a club
the idea would be to allow you to request and donate blueprints to other members of your club so as to help them improve their cars and garage level. Current discussions are to look at a system that:
ā¢ Allows you to request BP based upon the cars you have and your garage level
ā¢ Donate BP based upon your garage level and the type of car BP you are donating
ā¢ Donations would earn a reward.
what we don't want to do is introduce a free for all auction system as this will inevitably get exploited
@pearl osprey will put a poll to see if people like the concept or not
and in the meantime is there anything else you would like to see in a trade system, please shout out in the discussion channel. Keep in mind it will at least initially only be within a club
Ok let's move onto the next big topic for the day
Clan wars/club wars
I've seen a few mentions of wanting club vs. club racing in the discussion channel which ties in nicely with something the design team has been researching and thinking about
which is to implement some sort of club war system for a bit now and the design team thinks this could be a great new feature allowing clubs to compete against each other for unique prizes as well as to find out which clubs are the best.
Our current thoughts are to have the club wars work a bit like this:
ā¢ Club signs up for a club war
ā¢ Matched with another club of the same size, average garage level etc.
ā¢ Each club then has a period of time to ācaptureā nodes and setup defences (Use your cars to set times to beat) while at the same time unlocking rewards and āboostsā to help them in the club war.
ā¢ After the initial time has passed the club would then try and defeat the other clubās nodes.
ā¢ At the end of this period of time the club with the most āpointsā would be declared the winner.
ā¢ This cycle could be repeated e.g. best of 3 to determine an overall winner or it could be a 1 or done. In any case rewards would be earned by both clubs and bonus rewards could be earned by reaching different āpoint thresholdsā (so you can get even more rewards even if you technically lost).
During both the capture and defeat we would be looking at methods by which not only do you use your own cars (free fuel so no cost to try again) but also have ways in which you can "help" your club mates
by lending them cars etc
however to make it a bit more strategic and not just a spam the Jesko over and over event
you would need to make decisions on which cars to use to capture and which to use to attack
as we would lock "nodes" once they are in a set state so only that car can be used
additionally who can attack a node will be limited (think multiple branching paths)
so the club would need to work together to capture nodes that give the most points and boosts
while at the same time supporting each other to use the best cars in the right spot
does this sound like something you would play/enjoy?
Put your votes over in the #ā-dev-chat-vote channel for it
also toss any questions about it in discussion
Ok next little bit about club wars and a question. As most of you know the game currently runs on a season basis
we want club wars to be something that is continually ongoing e.g. you can do it at anytime.
But we also want to use the club wars as a way for clubs to show off who is the best so we have the idea of a meta leaderboard. This leaderboard would run during the normal season and rank the clubs based upon win/loss record (so small clubs can compete against big ones) and as the mode will require strategic thought bots will not be easy to spot, eliminate or won't work (I'll talk more about bots in general at the end)
ok looking at the voting it seems club wars is a popular idea š that's good to know
so last question for now on club wars
How long do you think a war should last? 3 days, 1 week, 1 month?
go to #ā-dev-chat-vote and cast your vote
I felt a bit like Ryan Seacrest when I typed that
Ok let's do a final wrap up with a few
Miscellaneous topics
So things that I've seen come up in the discussion channel not directly touched on
Bots
everyone's favourite irritant
So no making any excuses (it will sound like it so I apologies) but bots are not just a pain for you the players they are also a nightmare for us
We have people dedicated to reviewing all complaints, banning, removing etc as fast as they can
yet like a bad game of wack-a-mole they do keep coming up
several things we are actively doing
-improving our bot detection both automatic (find and hammer) as well as manual
-Putting in more reporting tools for you the players to report them (see last update)
looking at ways we can modify the game so bots cannot run easily (this is the trickiest part)
Next question I've seen a bunch is Fuel on club races
currently as club races give rep they also cost fuel
we can look at removing the fuel from the club races however to keep things balanced we would also then need to remove or lower the rep
otherwise you guessed it we have an exploit were players just grind it for rep (or we get even more bots)
now having said that 1 thing can look at is a "practice mode"
the idea behind this is that a club leader creates a practice track -> sets a time by racing themself (or a designated person)
this track is then free cost for club members to race on
basically a club mode allowing you to teach new members the best path etc
And next one Account sharing
this is a tough one for us
as it is virtually impossible for us to tell if you are sharing an account (hand your phone to your friend who is a good racer and we cannot tell easily)
so how do we solve it? again not an easy solution we can look at checking ip
etc
doesn't always work and is annoying
1 thing we do and are improving is checking concurency
so if people do share an account we can catch them if they are both logged on at the same time
which does help reduce it a bit
Alright back to more fun topics š
Filters on club races.
To elaborate on what I mentioned earlier as part of improving the overall club experience we want to give the clubs more control over setting up their own races and internal competitions
part of this is not just adding more of the tracks to choose from (which we are doing slowly) but also adding more options you can set when setting up a club race
for instance filters to set slipstream + ghosting, or no KD etc
the idea is in the end to make most of the controls that we have for creating our events available to you to create your own club events (maybe even up to allowing clubs to setup their own prize pools)
Next one was different club ranks
Now this has 2 answers depending on who asks the question š
Club ranks in the sense of founder,officer,member etc
are something we are looking at adding. (I'll call these club roles)
ranks as in level 1, 2,3,100
is something that we would be looking to have as part of the club progression system I mentioned before
were a club at different "level" would unlock different perks and benefits
And last but probably not least checking out other players garage
this is a bit more of an in depth topic but I'll give you a snapshot of what we have been looking at
Firstly we are looking at the player profile and seeing what could be added to this to give you more info when you inspect another player (e.g. garage level, highest rated car, best time etc)
We are also looking at a "garage collection" feature which would allow you to sort your cars based upon different filters so you can easily see which cars you, don't have and want
as part of this we are considering allowing other players (be it anyone, club mates or even friends (and yes we are thinking about friends lists)) view this
kind of like showing off your sticker book to your friends
Ok going to wrap it up for now. Thank you everyone for coming along and being involved. I hope you enjoyed it and got something out of it, it is certainly great for me to hear from everyone, see your reactions and have got some great feedback from it.
We want to keep doing these once a month and will have a think about the next topic and get it posted as soon as we can (or feel free to suggest an area you would like to discuss)
Before we close it off we will put a vote up in the #ā-dev-chat-vote on how you found this format as it is different then the last one and we look to improve this each time.
Thanks everyone, and have a good weekend
dull moon
Welcome back everyone to the Q&A, let me start out with a big thanks to everyone who submitted questions, Iāll try and answer as many as I can and while your specific question might not appear donāt worry we have read through them all and will try to answer them if not now in a future Q&A.
Okay so letās get things rolling and start with some general special event (SE) questions. Again thanks for everyone who submitted questions
First up we got a bunch of questions about new formats for special events (I'll use SE going forward as to lazy to type more)
It's great to see questions about this as this is something the entire team has been discussing and we are planning to add new formats in the coming updates. We have been discussing a number of different types of events and formats and hope to have both single player variations (e.g. similar to how the Gran Prix work but different game mechanic) and multiplayer variations (not a MP series but a stand alone SE). I'll go into a few more specifics down the line.
But first I'd like to say that in addition to new types of SE we also are planning to have a new game type for you to all try out. It should launch hopefully in the next update (we are just doing testing, bugs and polish and I have to say I'm enjoying). As well as this we having started the work on a big new game mode for next year (more news will be shared on this when we get closer).
So to start the morning/afternoon/evening (wherever you are) off I have a question for everyone: Do you prefer single player modes were you are competing against yourself? Or would you prefere competing against others (e.g. leaderboards)?
A poll should come up in #ā-dev-chat-vote in a min or so
please go vote and let us know what type you like better
I'll give it a min or 2 more before moving on
ok next question that got raised was (and I'm paraphrasing)
"Too many SE that encourage spending tokens & token payouts for support cars are very low for most players. Investing in them"
So talking about tokens (seems to be a common topic that comes up) is a bit of a tricky subject. Something we are doing continually and will keep doing is look at the balance of the game economy (tokens are a key part of this). As changes to the economy have a huge impact on the game and each update affects the economy differently (popular cars = more people play, new cars, new rewards etc all change the balance) we have to be careful with the changes and slowly make incremental changes.
What I can say is we do make changes as we go along and are continually evaluating how many tokens are in the economy, how many are being earnt vs. spent as well as how many people might "need" at any point in order to progress
so unfortunately there is no clear cut answer where I can say we will give more/less or do X to the tokens. All I can really say is we do look at it and will keep tweaking it as we want everyone to have a chance at unlocking all cars and progressing.
Ok back onto a more fun topic
Thanks to @#MTMguy#4070 & @iron pilot for the question about adding older events back into the game and letting players have a chance to collect older cars. (I think I just saw a few other questions about this as well)
Oddly enough this was something that was just discussed last week in our live-ops meeting. We are aware that as new players come into the game they face quite a daunting tasks of unlocking all the cars (over 100 cars in the game at the moment and growing). As well as longer term players who may have missed out on the car they want.
Some of the things we have been discussing and will be looking to add into the cycle in the future to give everyone a chance to collect and complete older cars (be it a past season or a year) is to introduce specific new car hunts for old cars, a revamp of the career mode to make it easier for new players to collect cars (e.g. imagine the car hunt mechanic as part of career). Adding in "old car" GACHA packs as rewards for new SE and game modes. As well as opening up rewards from club activities to include older cars so clubs who recruit new players can help them progress further
@odd vortex thanks for your question with regards to bringing back Drive Syndicate and reserving one or two cars for drive syndicate only.
This 1 is a really easy one to answer, stick around for the Christmas update to see what we have planned š
The update just before Christmas has some cool cars in it and we are planning to launch a brand new Drive Syndicate
I was looking at the design for it today and it looks to be bigger than the previous 2 events and will continue the story of Blue Rabbit and Red Fox (as well as introduce some new characters)
Okay, next question that has come up in a few forms
"Please have SE similar to the ones in A8"
so question for everyone here are there any particular events in A8 that you thought were the most fun?
obviously can't do a poll but drop a comment in the #dev-chat-discussion and if you see it mentioned add a š or š and we will compile the info later to see what people liked
@solid perch good point vote on that comment if you want more "new" and less recycled as it is a valid point
Next question from me, I've seen some mentions about having more Skill based SE. My question is what do you consider skill based?
Is it having to use manual drive, perform specific actions in a race or having everyone use the same car? Or is it something else?
Let's do 2 things #1 vote in #ā-dev-chat-vote on the poll and if there is something not in the poll raise it in the discussions
While people are voting let me answer the next question that came up
From @Paul Hank#6612 with regards to your question about long lasting events that people can play to obtain new cars. As well as setting milestones, and people have to accomplish them with the cars of that same class.
We are starting to work some of these elements in with the career element (hope everyone plays the new career we are adding each season) we are adding each season as well as by slowly changing the different season pass missions to make them more varied. For instance. we are looking at adding season pass specific TLEās to let you try out the new cars (who doesn't like trying cars) as well as adding free tries into new career mode.
One thing we do want to avoid is to many season long events that are mandatory or to big of a grind as people have said that they donāt find this fun and suffer from burnout as it becomes a chore to play. As a philosophy we want to try and give you the players more options and variety to play.
so free tries with season pass cars, ways to get additional progression on them outside of TLE and other SE but still part of the season
@Teddy26#1997 asked about introducing new club SE and rewards (and I saw a few other comments in the other channel around this)
This is something that is near and dear to me (1/2 the reason I play games is to be in clubs with people). We are looking at doing a revamp to clubs next year (talked about it in the last Q&A). As part of this we will be bringing in more club based activities (both solo and cooperative in your club). We really want people to join clubs and for clubs to play together and compete so having SE and game modes that are aimed at clubs is one of our key goals.
This may range from a club only SE (have to be in a club to be able to enter) to a club based game modes and other cooperative aspects (e.g. club head to head MP or club head to head GP maybe)
quick answer @gray lion regarding getting an event calendar, it is something we can look into. It all depends a bit on how far in advance the calendar would be "Accurate" we often have to adjust things on the fly
Next one we got a few questions about "Free try stages and chance to play around with new cars for beginners"
I kind of mentioned it before, but to reiterate a bit . Free try events and stages are something that the team is bringing in for some events (e.g. the mini gran prix in the Stars & stripes season) additionally we are looking at ways to bring it in more as part of the season pass and career so as to give everyone a chance to try the cool new cars.
Additionally we have been talking about a concept of "loaner cars" as a feature which would allow you to borrow a car from a club mate to use for a period of time
Another idea that was raised was to "Make extra conditions with good rewards for legend pass player's who have exclusive LP car"
I quite like this idea, so the question would be if we were to bring this in what sort of conditions would you find fun? Let's put a poll up for everyone to vote
Okay let's move on to the real fun part new SE ideas
We are aware that over time the game can start to feel a bit stale and boring if the events are always the same. We address this with some variations but in the end what makes the biggest difference is when we are able to bring in new game modes and ways to play the game. As such one of our goals for next year is to bring in some new SE types.
first up @chrome pilot I really like your idea for the new event type: Stunts Galore. Asphalt Studios is making a film. The player helps the director make it by being the stuntman. Scenes vary from races, chases, time trials, etc. Players will use select cars as the stunt vehicles.
One of the things we have been talking about is bringing in more narrative and story based elements into the game. We have this with our drive syndicate which is a ton of work for the team so we want to look at smaller ways we can do this more often and give some more themes to our special events. Something like this is exactly what we have been discussing
And a great idea like this is a nice intro to something I want to ask everyone about. As Iāve mentioned we are looking at bringing in some new game modes for SE and Iād like to get a quick reaction from you on what you think about these ideas. We will put a poll in the other channel for you to react like/dislike.
I've split these ideas into 2 groups
1st set of ideas are focused on introducing some multiplayer variations. Each of these would provide a reward for participation as well as allow you to grind for additional rewards (won't discuss specific rewards as yet as still way to early.)
Also all of these are very high level ideas so don't read to much into "how" they will work
Idea 1: Infection mode, the aim of this is to take the mode which you might have seen in A8 and bring it into A9 with a few tweaks. For those who donāt know it the player in last position becomes infected and will āself destructā after a set period of time. Your goal is to infect other players (extending your time) and make it over the finish line alive.
Idea 2: Asphalt Jungle: Itās demolition time, respawn time will be almost instantaneous and you will receive points for destroying objects and other players. We want this mode to feel like a chaotic demolition derby. Finishing the race would give you an immediate reward and the points you earn in each race will allow you to progress and unlock bonus rewards (so even if you keep getting knocked out you can still earn great rewards by destroying things).
Idea 3: Risk vs. Reward: This mode is a real test of skill and nerves, each time you use your nitro the total amount of nitro you can hold is reduced, so it will refill quicker but you need to be strategic when you use it.
Idea 4: Cops & Robbers: The idea for this mode is 1 player gets a tag as a robber with the other players tagged as cops, the goal for the robber is to escape and for the cops to eliminate the robber. If you eliminate the robber you get that role. Basically itās a game of tag played with cars ļ
and last but not least
Idea 5: Nitro drop: Each time you perform a nitro move you drop a bottle of nitro behind you which can help the other players catch up and pass you.
also names are all coming from my brain early in the morning so def not final š
I'll let everyone add emoji's above (please keep it to like/dislike as that makes it easier to judge)
or go to #ā-dev-chat-vote a poll is going up there
Alright well what about solo ones? We also have some ideas for these as we know not everyone likes multiplayer
Idea 1: Money run: We want to bring this mode out from the drive syndicate. As during the drive syndicate event you would be racing to reach the end of the track keeping as much money as possible (and collect some more on the way). We would use these values to rank players in leaderboards and tiers in a similar manner to the Gran Prix but using the money kept and not just time.
Idea 2: Stunt mode: With this mode we want to bring an element from fighting games into A9. As a player you will need to link stunts together in order to earn āpointsā as you link stunts together you will build up combo multipliers (Think Street Fighter Combo bonuses). In order to pass a stage you will need a specific āscoreā so you will have to plan your tricks and link your combos together.
see @chrome pilot great minds think alike š
and
Idea 3: Slalom: This idea is aimed at those who like manual drive or want to practice their skills. We would setup a track with a large number of obstacles forcing you to continually make choices and control the car to weave through them and reach the finish line.
Ok as we are coming towards the end of the Q&A let me also get your opinion on an entirely new game mode.
The idea behind this mode is to bring the feeling of an endless dungeon into the game (or an endless race in this case). Everyone playing would start with the same stock car and as you progress through the races you would be able to upgrade it how you want (different upgrade mechanism) and apply various boosts (new mechanic) to modify how it plays. Each race would be 1 stage of a dungeon (made up of multiple ālevelsā each consisting of multiple stages) and would have a series of requirements you need to meet to pass. Failing a stage would send you back to the previous checkpoint. You would earn rewards for completing stages, levels and of course how far you manage to get through the "dungeon".
Gameplay would stay the same the big change would be on what you can do with the car as you progress.
Does that sound interesting?
@solid perch car catalog is still a thing, in face we have a design and now need to work out when we can build it. It is part of our discussions for the next year. Not sure when we will get it in but it is still planned.
Thanks everyone for your time and participation. Hopefully I was able to answer some questions and give you a bit of insight into some of the things coming down the pipeline.
We will try to do another one of these in about a month and there will be a poll going around before to determine the topic and then gather questions again.
dull moon
Hi everyone, so before we kick off I just want to apologies for posting
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EJ9yAV8uQ7g
it's an earworm that is now stuck in my head
Okay so for this session we wanted to talk to everyone a bit about the Daily Tasks and Daily events.
these are related areas that impact everyone from new players to veterans who have been around since day 1
so please stick with me as I'll cover the goals we want from these features and talk about what we want to look at going forward with them
Also thanks everyone who submitted a question, the team and I have gone through lots of them and will try to answer a bunch of them either directly or indirectly (i.e. summarise an answer). If your question is not answered don't worry we have seen it and may just not have a good answer at this point in time or think it is answered by another.
Myself and the team do appreciate everyone who gets involved with these sessions as why it may not seem like it everything is taken onboard and helps make the game better (sometimes slowly but it does help).
Okay
let's start with the easy part Daily tasks
the goal of daily tasks is to give everyone a clear and simple set of things to do each day (I know earth shattering right?).
it is a pretty simple goal which however can become very complex when you take into account someone who has just started the game and what they can do and know about the game and compare them say to a veteran with a maxed out garage who is all about competitive multiplayer.
The list for 1 isn't necessarily ideal for the other
and the same with the rewards.
Now in A9 we have had the same set of fairly general daily tasks for a bit (and yes the rewards to). So we have been looking at it and thinking about how can we make this better. Specifically:
-How do we make the tasks engaging and challenging for players at different stages
-How do we keep the rewards worth while and rewarding?
What we have decided that we want to do for next year (The work on the next couple of updates is already underway so we try and design and schedule things a couple updates in advance to give us time to build, balance and test). is the following:
Firstly change what the actual tasks are, in my opinion the current ones are very generic and not that interesting as they are always the same and are not much of a challenge to complete them. I tend to do them everyday by accident as much as anything else.
So we will be looing at changing them up so that each day you get tasks for different areas of the game but within each area they can be different e.g. one day it might be finish in MP in 1st position and the next it could be finish a MP race (fake example).
as part of this we will also be looking at having a different number and "difficulty" of the tasks based upon your garage level in the game. So a new player wouldn't necessarily see a MP task as they have not "unlocked" that area of the game and instead might have more career ones and the veteran player might have more MP ones and less career.
by doing this we hope to add variety to the daily task and make them something that you actively try to complete
The 2nd part (and the part I'm sure many of you care about the most š ) is the rewards for doing them
what we want to do with the reward is have it as something that changes over time so that for many players it will become a way for them to unlock and max out (maxing out the stars of your cars will become more important next year with some cool new features) a set of cars that we think everyone should have
the other part of the rewards is that it will be a way for players who already have these cars at max stars to consistently gain tokens
So the 1st set of changes for daily tasks will hopefully make it something you all want to complete each day and will give you rewards that you can then use in other areas be it a new car or tokens.
Now because we are game developers and A9 is a live game we are not planning just to stop there with daily tasks. This is just the 1st round of changes we are looking at doing.
The second set of changes which would come after is to add a new layer to the daily tasks
We are looking at bringing in a calendar style daily reward mechanism. As I am sure you have seen in other games these work by rewarding you if you come back a set number of times (either in a row or in total depending on the game).
We have been looking at these sorts of mechanism and in general they work, they are not that exciting as you don't need to do anything and the rewards they give are generally kind of Meh
but what they do well is they let you see what you need to do to get something. So we have taken this idea and come up with a concept were you would be able to "tick off" boxes if you play each day and complete at least some of the daily task (no need to complete all and get the daily completion reward), and if you do this regularly enough (e.g. 7 days) you would then unlock a reward that you can choose.
rather than a fixed reward which might be something you don't want our idea is to give you a choice of reward from a small pool so while there is no guarantee it is the specific thing you want you would have some control over what it is (e.g. Pack, SC, Token might be a choice)
Ok
let's talk about Daily Events.
The whole goal around daily events is to allow people to collect and max out the common (in the sense of cars everyone should get so that they can be competitive in TLE).
So the current set we have play on a loop every week and have been the same since basically day 1
now A9 has a few more cars in it since it first launched so yeah it will seem to a lot of players as if the daily events are kind of boring as it is always the same and that we should have all new ones all the time
Now I don't totally disagree with this feeling and understand were it is coming from
however as with the daily tasks we also have to consider new players who are continually joining the game
our current daily events do a good job of helping them get these base cars for their garage
We have been looking at this issue and trying to find a solution that will allow us to make everyone happy (or just not be as unhappy)
and have a couple of things we are looking at trying. Firstly we can look at updating and modifying the cars in these events
we have a lot more cars now so we can change them around a bit while still keeping the daily events useful for new players and hopefully for mid to late garages giving them a chance to get rewards for cars that they have not maxed out and can't find BP for.
Secondly look at adding more of these events but gate them so that they don't show to new players but do show for late garage players. This will allow us to better tailor the rewards as well as act as a nice incentive for everyone to keep pushing their garage and collect cars.
And thirdly and in some ways more important (at least for me) we want to bring in new game modes for the daily event
so that even if we keep a reward exactly the same for the event on a Monday we could have it alternate between 2 different game types so at least every Monday doesn't play the same
so hopefully that gives everyone a bit of an idea of what we are planning to do. Please keep in mind it takes time to make these changes so they won't happen in the next week or even month but we are working to make them.
Alright let me now answer some of the questions that have been sent in or are in the discussion channel
A big one that seems to come up in 1 form or another is about getting access to old cars from previous seasons
As hopefully many of you (if not all) are aware each season we have a number of cars that you can get from playing in SE as well as exclusive cars for the season pass.
we think that after a bit of time has passed it would be good to let people be able to "go back" to win the car or finish starring it up (as I mentioned before maxing out a cars stars will tie in to stuff we have planned next year)
so starting the next update we will be having as a season pass exclusive (we are doing it this way as we are hacking it in) a couple of SE that will let you collect some cars from past seasons (I won't say which cars as I want to keep them as a surprise but they are both awesome).
this will only be available to SP holders for this round.
we will be extending this wider (i.e. outside of just SP holders) in future updates once we have the time to make the relevant UI changes that we need to do to support this.
and next year with some of the new modes we will be bringing in there will be even more opportunity to get BP for cars that you may have missed.
Alright another question that has come up is about having new daily events
I sort of mentioned it above but will repeat it here as I think it is worth repeating
We want to add new modes for the daily events not just ones we have in the game e.g. Money run as a daily event not just during a drive syndicate. But also totally new ones (we talked about them in a previous chat and have used the voting list to prioritise the ones we will work one first).
There were a few comments/questions about adding more good cars
As mentioned before we will be adding some new ones and changing them up. But we also want to keep the existing ones as these are the early cars for new players and once unlocked the aim is to move to the higher classes so that they can fill out their garages.
Question from @TRUā¢ SHI#1311: New cars in the rewards or garage packs
This and similar questions came up a few times. We have been adding new cars at different garage levels and will continue to do so slowly overtime as new cars come in. Additionally we are looking at introducing new types of GACHA packs that allow you to target smaller groups of cars as well as work towards āguaranteedā GACHA results.
@edgy mango said "Show the rank of the cars used in ranked daily events." 100% agree, this is something we want to add back into the UI and I made sure it is our backlog (that's the giant list of stuff we plan to do and which we review every 2 weeks)
This was a good question from @weary meadow: Token heist in daily events.
We are in the progress of adding in some token milestones and removing them from the leaderboards in the seasonal TLEās we believe that this will give everyone a chance to earn more tokens and not just the top players. Additionally we are going to extend this to the regular TLE so open up even more areas for you to grind tokens.
@lifegame#1111 said "Make Daily Events a bit harder and give tokens as rewards." Something to be conscious of and which I sort of talked about above is we are trying to keep these events as approachable for as many players as possible so making them harder isn't necessarily what we want to do. Having said that there is no reason we cannot also look at more "hardcore" events that run on a biweekly or monthly cycle
@stark temple: comment about "2 daily car loots 1 will unlock at the start (named basic car loot) and other after reaching garage level 12-13 (named advanced car loot) Because at this garage level most of the daily car loot cars got maxed. So after that we can collect trade coins from the basic one and new better car's from the advanced one"
This touches on something I haven't really talked about but will mention briefly. We are looking at updating our onboarding and career path next year as part of this we want to make the daily car loots more integrated into career so some of this will becoming in. Additionally we are also looking at how can we make career mode still relevant even when you have things maxed out (and we have some things for that which I will talk about in a later session)
For @Younxs#9147: Add a Jackpot in credit heist.
ā Example: The jackpot can be like a car point when we KD:
ā Police car = 10.000
ā Racer car = 20.000
ā The more we KD car, more money we get
This is basically how money run works in the drive syndicate and is something we are looking at bringing out of that mode into a more regular rotation.
Ok were getting towards the end of the time I actually have a question for you.
firstly @hidden shell don't ban me for going off topic
We are looking at the next MP series and are thinking of making a change
and I want to get your thoughts on it (we will put a poll in #ā-dev-chat-vote at the end)
The idea for it is as follows:
-We are going to remove the pack rewards from the league reward.
-We are going to add this to the score reward (so now from score you can get 10 packs instead of 6)
-To get the score reward all you need to do is race with each race giving you points towards it
-Each time you reach a higher league the multiplier you will get for being in that league and racing is increased. So the higher your league the quicker you can get all of the rewards.
Basically this is what we will call Rush 2.0 as all it requires you to do is play to rank up.
So if all you care about is the reward just play, if you really care about the league you will still need to prove your skill and compete (and your reward will be getting the rewards quicker)
hidden shell
and I want to get your thoughts on it (we will put a poll in #ā-dev-chat-vote at the end)
@dull moon I think I have anticipated a little bit š š
dull moon
I just want to say thanks to everyone for joining in and listening (reading) my babble
these sessions really help the team as it let's us ask you questions and see responses to things we are saying and helps shape what our plans are for upcoming updates in both the short and long term
so please keep joining in and sending in questions.
We will have 1 more of these this year in December (hopefully unless everything goes truly pear shaped) and will work out what that topic will be soon.
thanks everyone and have a good weekend
dull moon
Alright
Hope everyone's day hasn't turned into a total disappointed due to the Elite Prix having to be pulled
Let me start off apologizing for us having to pull it
as many of you would have noticed or seen in discord there was a little bit of an issue with some missing textures which caused a bunch of errors in the game.
As such we made the call to pull the Elite Prix that was meant to run so that we can fix it and run it properly at a later date. In the meantime we have launched a car hunt event to replace it and have kept all of the Elite Prix store offers still available (so if you are desperate for the car and want to spend you still can. or just wait till we run it again).
So overall perfect start to a day when we are going to talk about Gran Prix and Elite Prix
Let me also say a big thanks to everyone who sent in questions in preparation for this it makes life much easier for us and while I will try to answer as many as I can I'm also going to group them up into specific themes as there were quite a number of similar questions. If I don't answer your question specifically don't worry it doesn't mean I or the team didn't see it we have but sadly we don't have time to answer everything in each Q&A
Ok so let's kick it off with everyone's favourite topic and also the one that never makes anybody happy. Rewards from the events
We had a number of questions about decals and having them in every tier.
There are a few reasons why we don't have them in every tier.
Firstly the time it takes to make (art needs to create them -> this gets sent to licensors for approval -> back into the game for testing) means we don't have time or resources to make tons of them so we decided that decals should be something that feels pretty exclusive.
This leads into the second point which is to make them feel more exclusive they need to be both rarer and harder to get. So we only have them in some tiers so you know that when you see someone in a car with that decal that they have achieved something in order to get them.
Next question that came up a ton (and seems to be everyone's favourite topic) getting tokens.
I spoke a bit about this in the last dev chat so I'll recap what I mentioned then as well as how it impact the GP specifically.
We are including tokens in solo milestones in weekly and elite TLEs, and also in our seasonal TLEs, to introduce more sources of tokens for players who are not in the top of the leaderboards. - Is what I mentioned last time.
For the GP especially we have rebalanced the tokens and how you get them. Now you will be able to earn tokens via meeting the criteria in practice races we hope that this makes it easier for everyone to earn them as all you will need to do is participate in the practice race to meet the qualification times to earn tokens (as opposed to ranking on leaderboards previously).
Hopefully this helps everyone get some extra tokens they need and star up the cars.
So what about other rewards in the GP?
Well for the next season (starts in roughly 12 days or so) we have done a full rebalance for the Gran Prix and Elite Prix. This has been a lot of work for the team and hopefully you will all see and feel the difference it makes.
These changes (and I'll go into more detail) include changing up not just how the leaderboards are calculated but also what all of the rewards are from them.
First up as I just mentioned we have played around with how tokens are rewarded so you can now get them from practice. We have also carried this across to the credit rewards you earn from ranking on the leaderboard, as a general rule of thumb we have increased the values slightly as well as what ranks earn credits has been modified.
But we haven't stopped there (I did say it was a big rebalance). We also took a look at the GACHA's you can win and have updated them in a couple ways:
Firstly we have 3 levels of GACHA (Bronze, Silver & Gold) each of which contain new sets of cars and new balance for the BP you can get. Plus with 3 levels of GACHA we can distribute them even more across the leaderboards.
And probably of the most interest given the number of questions about getting access to old cars each of the GACHA types includes BP from an old GP car. So for those of you who are looking for those BP you will now have a chance to get them. We will be rotating these pools of BP on a set basis so they will be around for a bit then new ones will come in.
Now of course changing the rewards is all well and good but doesn't help if you can't get on the leaderboard. Well we have adjusted this as well š
Firstly we have rebalanced the leaderboard segments so it should be a bit easier now to qualify into one of the leaderboard tiers. This also means though that if you want the best rewards you can't just sit in a lower tier anymore you will have to work a bit and set a good time to qualifier higher up.
The second big change is that once you qualify you will no longer be competing against 20 other players for a ranking but only 14 which should help you get a reward.
Let's move off rewards a bit for now and talk about plans for next year for the Grand Prix and Elite Prix
First off as I mentioned today and in previous dev chat we want to give everyone a chance to get at the cars that they may have missed previously
so we have added some of these into the GACHAs for upcoming events but we also want to re-use these cars and make them the focus of the event
so you can participate and try to get the key you might have missed.
So over the next year we will be running some elite prix using previous run cars
which ones and when, well you'll have to keep playing to find out š Only hint I'll say is the next update is looking to be pretty exciting
We are also looking at how the events run in general from a functionality point of view. I'll run through 3 of the main ones (which also correspond to a bunch of questions and feedback) quickly and will give a bit more detail afterwards.
1 - Ability to control the ghost cars
2 - Touchdrive vs. manual
3 - Reporting as well as general improvements to detect hacks/cheaters.
While I go into more detail @hidden shell will put up a poll as we would love to get your vote on which one you see as more important to your experience. It will help us prioritise resources on the work.
Okay ghost cars. Some people love them, some people are scared of them and some people are going huh? what?
Basically the idea we have is to add a toggle in settings which allows you to control if you want to see a ghost car or not. If it's off then ghost cars would not appear in any event they are used for. If on then well pretty self explanatory.
Touchdrive vs. Manual.
This is actually a pretty tough area for us and is something that impacts not only the GP and EP but also MP so the team has been discussing this and going back and forth on potential solutions for a bit now. We know we want to make some changes we just need to work out how we can do it and were to start.
For the GP and EP one of the solutions (may not be the final one we still need to look at the tech side) is to do the following:
-Auto sort players into different leaderboards based upon the control scheme. You would be locked when you start your 1st race to that control scheme so if you start touchdrive then switch to manual during the race to cheat and set a better time you would not be able to do so. So basically you chose your control scheme then you live with it for that event.
-Touchdrive only or Manual only events. This idea is to run an event were you can only use the control scheme. This is a bit easier for us to do so we might try it first. It also has the added benefit of we could run smaller events that are manual only to encourage people to practice and play manual long run (I personally think that playing manual when I'm home and have time is great (even though i suck at it), when I'm on a bus or train then touchdrive is easier so both types have their place)
Reporting, hackers and cheat.
Hackers and cheating is something we are aware of and know ruins the experience for everyone. We are looking at what we can do to catch these people automatically and quarantine or even outright ban them. Currently we tend to play it a bit safer and give people the benefit of the doubt until we can clearly prove they have cheated and then when we do down comes the hammer.
One thing that can help us with this and we have seen it work in MP is giving you the players the ability to report others as cheats.
The idea would be to add functionality into the leaderboards to allow you to report players. This reporting tool generates notifications for the team who look at the reports everyday and can do more in depth investigation (this is outside of our automated systems).
So those are the main GP changes we are looking at for next year. Now having said that we do keep an eye on how the events are performing (how many people play, how many win and what, how many races are done at each stage etc etc) and we will keep adjusting and tweaking things especially as we have new balance in and we want to see how it ends up feeling with 1000's of people playing it.
Let me look at my notes for some other questions that came up.
Also big shout out and thanks to @jaunty valve for compiling the list of all the feedbacks. Totally awesome and made it so much easier to review
Someone suggested fixed ranks in finals and packs in the store.
Fixed ranks in finals are how the Elite prix work and in all cases we keep the packs in the store both during the event and for a bit afterwards.
We got asked about increasing the attempts from 3 to 5 or 6. This is something we don't want to do as part of the excitement of this sort of event is the pressure of having limited attempts at setting the best time
when we played and tested it ourselves we found having just 1 or even 2 more attempts did not have quite the same amount of pressure feeling we were after.
Make special car hunts exclusively for the people who have unlocked the car in the grand prix. This actually makes it possible to get blueprints for cars like the Boatley, MK2, C7R and cayman. And similar questions came up a bunch.
As I alluded to previously we will be bringing them back not just in GP and EP events but also in car hunts, TLE. Basically all sorts of areas of the game will be expanding to include older cars
so even more chances to fill up your garage and star it up
Another questions was "Introduce key/BP packs after the finals are over or at some point in the near future after the event. The AT96 was the first GP car and still no encore event or key/BP packs. Progression with GP cars is essentially nonexistent. Not to mention any Epic Imports for them."
quick answer is check out the next update š
@pseudo plaza good question about Spectate
not something we have currently planned for the GP but it is something we are looking at to add to the game in another area. I won't go into to much detail right now (mainly because the design is about 100 bullet points and a bunch of scribbling on paper on my desk). But I will say we are working on it
There are a number of statements about locking all cars during the event to a set level as it would level the playing field.
What we have found is it ends up actually doing the opposite
it levels the playing field for skilled players but makes it harder for less skilled players as they cannot compensate by improving there car. Now and I 100% acknowledge that it also causes the issue that a skilled player who stars up the car ends up with an even greater advantage.
Part of a leaderboard adjustments should help address this issue as these players will be pushed to compete in higher tiers and if they want to try and sandbag they will find the rewards they gain are not as useful for them since they won't get tokens from the leaderboard anymore and 2 they will have most of the BP rewards since they have already fully upgraded the cars.
@solid perch good question about the stats. These come to us and get put in a giant DB which we then have analysts run scripts on to generate reports etc so it's not something we can easily pull out and expose to the public (not to mention other potential issues around tech, legal etc). What we can look at though and is something in our backlog (pretty low at the moment as we have some higher priority stuff) is to start recording some of this information in player profiles
so you would be able to look at someone and maybe see top GP placing, best time etc
Ok as were going to close the chat shortly couple last bits and pieces.
If you haven't tried it please think of giving multiplayer challenges a try. We rebalanced it for this run (started today and runs the week) and the more people who play it the more info we get to keep adjusting it (we have a few more planned each with some different tuning).
Secondly make sure to grab the next update when it launches in just under 2 weeks. as I mentioned previously there is a drive syndicate coming and it is amazing. So don't miss out on it
And last but not least thankyou everyone for participating in these sessions they are really good opportunity for us to hear from you and give you some answers and get feedback. It's hard to see now but over the past few discussions we have revamped and modified plans for next year because of them so while it is slow you are helping us all improve the game.
Thanks, have a good weekend and since this is the last one for the year have a good festive season and new year.
dull moon
Ok let's get rolling
or should that be trolling?
nah it's not April 1st yet
Welcome everyone to the 1st Devchat of the year.
As it is a new year and some people are joining us for the 1st time let me do a quick rundown etc of what we are doing (or more specifically what I'm doing)
We will be trying to hold these once a month (probably towards the end of each month, but don't hold us to specific dates).
and the idea is out great CM's will ask the community for topics for suggestions (generally a vote from a list to keep it focused) and then once decided we take questions, comments, random sentences (really some odd ones this time round) etc from the community
I then spend a bunch of time reading through all of these (and yes I read all of them even ones that were just a single letter)
and from this we do the devchat
I've combed through and put together the most common topic areas and will be talking about most of them
so while a specific question might not be answered hopefully I will cover most of the big ones
depending on the topic, time etc we also look at the #š£-dev-chat-discussions channel and I'll try and answer some one off there
but as the questions come flying in at light speed it can be hard to do on the fly (as we found out the in the 1st chat we did, hence we use this format now)
So if you question isn't answered I apologies if it was an on topic one and I didn't get to it and if it was an off topic one well (ask again when that topic comes round š )
So hopefully clear? if not doesn't matter as lets start with the 1st topic of today
Last seasons MP, League rewards and Rush 2.0
Rush is a popular MP mode from way way back in time
it has been brought up multiple times that people want it back
last year we made a change to MP (roughly middle of the year)
that changed MP to move away from the old rush system which was a very long event with a huge score milestone based reward system
were all you had to do is race over and over and over to eventually got the rewards
now before this 1st MP change we had a ton of feedback from players saying they did not like it as it was boring, to long etc.
So it was changed to make it shorter and have 2 types of reward system.
the 1st reward system which mirrored rush (but on a smaller scale as shorter period of time) is the series score rewards.
This works by giving you a score based upon your position in a race that accumulates over time and at set milestones you unlock a reward
anyone can get them all you need to do is play.
The other reward is the league rewards. This is based on an ELO system which has you gain or lose rating points based upon where you come in a race and who you race against (very important factor) if you beat better players you got more points and if you lose to better players (higher rating) you would lose less points etc
at the end of a season you would get your league reward based upon the league you finally ended up in
this system is inherently competitive
because you can go up/down a league
many people don't like the competitive side and on the other hand many people do
so we have both of these systems to try and address both types of players. Competitive players can race it out to move up leagues and get the bonus rewards for doing so. non-competitive players don't need to worry about it and just race to get the series score reward.
So prior to the last update everyone was clammering for us to bring back rush. We wanted to try bringing it back without spending a ton of code time (which we didn't have due to other stuff) so we looked at our current system and removed the league prizes (we did keep a series score multiplier which isn't shown so leagues still made a difference) and put all the rewards into the series score (this increased it from 30K at the top to 70K as we added more rewards).
Now as you might have heard this wasn't very popular
so what are we doing about it?
Well 1st things for the next update league rewards are back
in addition to being back we looked at the rewards themselves and some of the community feedback
and the suggestion to give "cumulative" league rewards was considered
without going into specifics we are rewarding you with league rewards that will also take into account the tiers you pass through
so if you end up in bronze you get reward A but if you get to gold you will get not just "better" rewards in the case of BP etc you will also get more rewards as you will get some of the rewards you would get from lower league tiers
overall this means the higher the league you end up in the better the reward and the more you get
now what about the series score? Naturally were not getting rid of this (remember we want to also address non-competitive players)
We have reset all the reward and series score milestones for the next update
back down to the 30k mark
in addition going forward as a strategy
we will be adding more series score rewards incrementally
this means the current amounts up to 30k will stay as is
if and when we add these will be new rewards added on top
we will be looking to do these based upon how many people are actually getting all of the series score rewards
so if only (and i'm making up numbers as an example) 2% of players get all the series score reward we won't add more
but if say 10% do then we would add 1 more set above
with each set of course being better than previous etc
so in someways how high and far the series score milestones will go is up to the community
if you are racing and getting them we will keep adding
Let me also talk about a few other changes we are doing for next update around these 2 things
1 thing we have heard is people complain about how punishing elo loss is at times
now elo is a competitive system so there has to be some penalty (no risk no reward and no value in achieving something if you don't have to work for it)
so we are putting in place a cap for the max ELO loss
this cap works in 2 ways
the 1st cap will stop you losing any ELO initially (basically bronze league)
the 2nd cap will stop you losing more than 20pts once you are based an initial "protection" threshold
the idea behind this is to make it less punishing as you progress and early on help people progress
The other change we are doing is to series score
Currently depending on how many players are in a race if you come last you could end up with a series score reward of 0
this was done to help discourage bots and idle racers who tend to come last from farming
we have data that shows that it did accomplish this however it is a bit harsh especially in higher leagues where you might end up in races with only 3 people and the effort to race is the same as a lower one but you got 0 reward
so we have updated this and you will now get a score even in last places assuming there are at least 5 people in the race (this covers a big chunk of races in higher leagues). If there are more than 5 people in the race last place can still get you 0
If you want to maximize your rewards from MP you should
-Finish the races to get the series score
-Try to move up the leagues to not only get league rewards at end of the season but each league has a multiplier that is applied to the series score for races in that league
-Win (obviously coming 1st gets most ELO and series score)
Quick comment @ionic lichen more rewards does not necessarily mean more import parts I won't mention specific rewards but it will increase overall BP
Changing topics slightly
let me talk about the BP in the rewards
so we have 3 "types" of MP in the game we have the world series (classic, ghost, ghost slipstream etc) we have limited series and trial series
they each have a different purpose and goal in the game when it comes to rewards
MP series is intended for everyone to play and compete and the rewards here tend to be more varied
and yes the Targa has been around for a bit and many players might have it
it is something we are conscious of and we are looking to add more variation in the rewards over this year. However it is not something we will be changing between every series or even every update as it takes time to setup and we want players to have a chance to collect these BP
Limited series is a different beast as these change all the time as they are themed rewards based upon specific cars and groups of cars
Trial series is all about trying out cars (kind goes with the name) so the rewards here will vary but will tend to most likely be focused on credits and tokens (not always). Because this is the series were if you want to see what it's like to race with a maxed out car you have the chance to do so
Let me cover a few other bits and pieces quickly before the next topci
We got a bunch of feedback about issues around collisions at start of the race
so one change we are making is extending the "ghost" or no-collision time at the start of a race (obviously only for those events were it applies)
to give you more time at the start, hopefully this will help the start of the races be a bit smoother
We had a request to show drop rate of BP in the MP rewards. Really good suggestion, we do it in the store so no reason we can't do it for MP rewards (and in fact rewards everywhere) so have added it into our backlog so we can try and work out when we can add it.
Club vs. Club MP
a saw a few comments around this
I'll talk about something sort of related in a minute but let me remind everyone we did a club devchat a while ago and 1 of the things we talked about was club vs. club competition
we have something (that I think) will be pretty exciting and awesome coming later this year that will allow clubs to compete against each other (it will also encourage and reward you to use a variety of cars)
so check out the old devchat and we will post an article or something as we get closer (and when we have pretty pictures) @pearl osprey don't let me forget
Ok next topic
There was a suggestion about a hunted mode in MP and I've seen some comments about jungle MP and bringing it back
So Jungle MP was a special (at the time) 1 off for the anniversary
there is no reason we cannot look to bring it back if it is popular enough
we can look at polling the community and seeing.
Having said that we are looking at bringing 1 new type of MP this year. By new type I mean new format of racing so changing up conditions etc.
Current front runner is to look at bringing the infection mode from A8 across
for use in SE and MP
Cheaters in MP
specifically someone raised the issue about a club in windows who are all cheaters and sit at the top
I'd like to quote one of our anti-hacking team here when I asked about it as I think it is an awesome comment: āI have made it a personal mission to get rid of them, they have all been banned and will keep an eye out for them and ban again if they create new accountsā.
please keep reporting cheats and hackers and we will keep trying to do our best to detect and ban
the anti-hacking team who review the reports (both submitted and manually reported ones) do multiple passes each week to get rid of individuals and players
I should mention that bots and cheaters are treated the same
as both are accounts that get banned
bots we tend to detect via automated systems
cheaters it is a mix
Matchmaking was something else that came up a bit
so currently we matchmake based upon the league tier you are in as league tiers = cars that can be used
in the past we have tried a variety of different systems none of which made anyone really happy. Matchmaking by car rank meant either a really wide range (so basically ends up being class) or a narrow range (limits players)
doing matchmaking by a specific car or group of cars also has it's problem as it limits pool of players
and in the end what we want is to have as many people be able to match as possible
while at the same time keep it competitive
so by league and elo within league has tended to be the best
it does mean however we have scenarios were everyone just wants to use car X because it is best
which isn't ideal
so how do we solve it? well I don't have a good solution at this point in time
we are looking at doing some changes for things like trying to match manual vs. manual and touch vs touch 1st before going cross control scheme
we are also looking at how we group our cars up to potentially move away from class filters to be more "pools" of cars
so a competitive class A might be in the same group as a class S because they can compete
ok let me talk about MP challenges
so it is coming back in next update with some changes
first and biggest change is no entry fee
second change is we are looking to take it from a 2 lap race to a 1 lap race
this means you should be able to do more races in the same period of time and if you win get more rewards from it.
MP challenges has been an experiment were we have adjusted it each release and will keep doing so
@ionic lichen I would love cross platform, sadly every time I raise it with the code team they reach for weapons and threaten to kill me š In all seriousness it would be great unfortunately there are huge technical hurdles that need to be solved for it to work so it is not a simple thing to do.
@woven talon winners get series score points. The amount of points you get is based upon position and total number of players in the race. As for higher leagues getting a lower score than when in same position but lower league it is something we are looking at
Another question that came up a bunch was about making it unlimited fuel in MP2 (limited series)
there is a reason why it is not unlimited fuel. We found in the past that when it was unlimited fuel those modes became full of bots and idle drivers (which defeats the whole purpose)
when we added the fuel limitation it removed most of these. Hence the fuel is limited.
@lean mulch nope no entry fee 1v1 does not change the rewards at all
I'm seeing a bunch of comments about series were you chose cars then match based upon them
these are great ideas, but something to consider which we always have to factor in is how many people can you match against
i'm sure you would all agree that it sucks to want to go and play MP and then not find a match at al
so whatever changes we do with matchmaking our #1 consideration has to be will enough people be able to get a match
@weary meadow ok I'll touch that flame and talk about LP exclusive
so making it LP exclusive or giving LP a bonus is something we could look at (I'd go with bonus not exclusive)
we want to give our LP holders more value (hence access to the divo SE which will come back for others so don't flame me)
@latent crescent don't have a concrete answer for it as we are still looking into the design.
Ok going to end this chat for this month. We have another 1 next month (buggered if I remember the topic). Thanks everyone for participating I'll take some more time and go through the #š£-dev-chat-discussions to see those I missed (am doing this with discord in 2 windows to try and keep up)
@lapis cypress several people raised it and it is something I'll take a look at
hidden shell
A9 DevChat - Open Question Session
dull moon
Alright everyone got their šæ ready?
Welcome everyone to the 2nd Devchat for the year (yes it's already almost the end of Feb the year is flying). For this one we opened up the topic to anything so thanks everyone for all of the questions you have submitted. I've gone through the entire list and will pull out as many as I can to answer. Many of the questions were duplicated or variations of the same one so if you don't see your specific one it could be due to this or just me rephrasing it. And if you still don't see then sorry it might be one of the ones we don't get to.
As so many different questions came in covering lots of areas of the game
I'll try to answer them by area so if you have other questions try to ask when that area comes up
as it will make it a bit easier for me to see them (if you care š )
so let's start off with some general miscellaneous questions
Question 1: A simple question:
When would you say was the exact time GL sold its soul to the devil? sometime in 2016
Answer: Well GL was hitchhiking down a long and lonesome road. All of a sudden,There shined a shiny demon, In the middle of the road, And he said!
Play the best song in the world, or I'll eat your souls.. Sadly that song was copywrited by Tenacious D so here we are
ok on to some other less fun ones
Q: What is Gamelofts stance on players using emulators like bluestacks to gain advantage over other players? Should it be in terms and conditions ?"
A: While using a game emulator is not expressly prohibited, please note that we strongly discourage their use. The game is not designed to support them, and an account using an emulator may unintentionally appear as if it was modified. This can lead to a ban, or a complete reset of your game profile. Use at your own risk.
basically if you do something that gives you an unfair advantage you run a risk of being banned
a follow up question to this
Q: Is it acceptable to GL/A9 in Windows for us to setup keyboard macros to map keys (i.e. I want to map my "f" key to generate an "s" key press) ?
A: Currently it is not support so could cause problems, we donāt have anything against using it but as with emulators you can end up getting banned if it gives you an unfair advantage. So use at your own risk.
Q: Hide emoticons from the notification section of the game when you have them turned off.
A: We can do this and I have added it to the backlog for code to do so, it's something we will look at working on.
Q: Can we have our own custom decal option, like from the game OverDrive City? There's literally custom decal system. We wanna look cooler in mp.
A: sadly as much as we would like to do this we have a ton of restrictions on decals due to licensing constraints so it is not something we will be able to bring in.
The next one I thought was a good question
Q: Update the game icon itās been the same one since launch
A: Interestingly enough (well for me) we actually run different A/B tests continually throughout the year to test different icon styles, colours etc. The reason we have kept the current one with the Lamborghini is it keeps coming out on top as the one people like the most. So as long as it keeps people clicking in the stores we are unlikely to change it
Q: Have a training mode where we can practice on any given track without losing fuel and wasting tickets and I don't care about gaining rewards.
A: Something I didnāt get a chance to talk about in the last Q&A but can talk about now is that we are working on a private lobbies system that will allow you to create a lobby, invite up to 7 of your friends and race with most of the cars in the game (you will also have the option to set rules from a list and control which cars people can use). This should let you practice easier as well as just race for fun and try out cars. Additionally once done we will be moving these options from this mode across into the club races as well (it uses the same screens etc).
Q: add a confirmation pop-up for every item that can be bought with tokens or credit coins in order to avoid non intentional buying
A: In fact I just had a meeting this week about it and it is a task that we have on our shortlist to start working on in the next update or 2
and one of the most popular questions
Q: Increase garage level
A: This is something we want to do in the later part of this year as part of another big feature update we have coming (hint itās around clubs). We are looking at how much we will increase the garage level at the moment (it will be at least 2 new levels if not more). The update will mean not just new garage levels but also updated cars and associated packs
Q: Allows us to ārentā a car out to a club mate. There can be a minimal fee in tokens the renter pays to the rentee (which can be waived if the rentee so chooses) with a limit on the number of days the car can be rented out. Once a transaction has been executed a cool down period will commence to prevent spamming.
A: Iāll answer this in the general area as it touches on a few things we are looking at how we can help players try out more cars than they have unlocked and the idea of renting a car has been brought up. Current thoughts are to look at it as something you could have in MP world series but we are also looking at other areas of the game and working out exactly how it could be used.
Q: a bunch I'm seeing about graphics issues
A: It is something the code team is looking to fix this update
Q: do we play test the game
A: yes we do, keep in mind the game runs across multiple platforms which in the case of android and windows can have a ton of variations of devices so it is difficult to find every issue even with the QA team we have working on the game full time to test
Q: Car catalogue still a thing
A: yup, was also discussed this week in the meeting were we covered car catalogue, confirmation of token spend and a few others
Ok moving away from general stuff onto MP
so first 1 about MP
Q: Make rewards for MP leagues more valuable as you go up in leagues
A: In fact this is how it works in the current update for the MP series, the league reward increases with each league you reach.
hopefully everyone is enjoying the changes we implemented this update on MP, we are keeping a close eye on them and seeing how involved everyone is and will make future adjustments based on this
Q: MP series car rewards not changing and people having these cars
A: So this was something that was brought up last devchat. Without going into specifics (we still need to set them up and test) as to which cars I can tell you that for the next update we are adding 3 new cars into the packs for MP series rewards so that we can cycle between different combinations to increase variety and will continue to do the same in future updates.
Q: Car selecting in leagues based upon the cars and not just the league (e.g. in Legend not just S class cars but also some top A class etc)
A: This is something we are discussing and seeing what we would need to change in the code to allow this and to work as well as decide on what it would take to do (Itās a ton of work to setup the individual cars in filters and not everyone can agree on were each car would go). So no concrete answer now if it will happen but we are looking into it
it might be something we look at doing for a one off MP event first to test how it works out
Q: make multiplayer limited series playable by tickets instead of fuel tanks, so that everyone can get all milestones rewards
A: This is something I'd like to change, not necessarily tickets as used elsewhere in the game but have cars in these types of events have their own fuel pool (be it fuel, tickets or something). Myself and our Tech lead had a look at what we would need to do to make the change and are moving onto the planning stage so we can see the scope of work (how long) and work it into the schedule.
Q: variation of tracks 120 in MP,
A: yes we can look at doing a MP series with longer tracks in the future
Q: Increase MP league ELO ratings
A: we are looking at adjusting the league ELO ranges and as part of this we will add to the ELO cap.
As I'm seeing a bunch of Club questions, I'll move onto them now
Q: Increase club size
A: Yup I want to increase the size, if you remember we did a devchat last year about clubs and people voted on what size they would like (30,40,50 or same if i remember correctly). There were quite a few people who don't want an increase so it hasn't been a big priority so far (also we have big club features coming this year so will try to do it all at 1 time)
Q: About keeping increasing club milestones
A: So we have kept them the same for a while, there was 1 update when we added on top to give clubs which were maxing out more rewards to aim for but everyone complained so we removed this back to were it was.
And we are against botting
Q: Can we ever have a trading system. We could try to either trade blueprints/epics with club-mates, or we can type someoneās player id to trade with them
A: Short answer is yes, long answer is yes but no idea as to when, we have a rough design concept but need to work out how to fit it in with all the other things we want to do in the game. The 2 biggest limitations we have with any feature is time and resources and sadly other things come up that are a higher priority so this feature gets pushed back. Having said that we are looking at improving clubs overall this year with addition of new feature for clubs as well as a number of smaller improvements so we are slowly working our way through the list.
And to give you an idea of club improvements we are looking at (in no particular order other than the 1st one)
-Big cool new club feature/game mode
-Club search/join/recruit and club information for people in clubs
-Club races (more tracks and options)
-Trading/helping club mates
-Emoticons in chat
to name a few
if we increase club size we don't plan to increase milestones.
Something I brought up in the last devchat and is worth repeating, when it comes to milestones we are looking at % of people who accomplish them and based upon that we will look at adding additional ones on top but if not many get there then we won't change it
Q: add a sort of filter for the clubs to make it easier for people to join the club while the club can stay open and no low level players will join. So u can set requirements of rep and garagelvl but the club is public and not restricted.
A: see above š
Q: When will we get Back Custom Logos for our Club Please Reply GL
A: Currently there is no plan to bring back custom logos for clubs. Between potential technical issues and legal constraints we have decided to not have them available for now.
So SE
Q: Reruns for previous SE when there is a LP exclusive so that non LP players can also progress at the same time.
A: While we wonāt necessarily have them in a SE we are slowly bringing back cars that were previously LP exclusive (or hard to get) so as to give more players a chance at these cars. For instance in the next update we are bringing back 2 older cars in 2 different events.
Q: about using old SE while a LP-exclusive SE is running
A: we run multiple events in parallel so while something exclusive is running there will be other things for you to do. As for it being a SE no guarantee it will be that but we are looking at our schedules and will keep adjusting them.
Keep in mind even LP holders might want to participate in an old SE so we can run into issues with their being to many options for people and then everyone complains about having to play to much.
Q: You have released Techrules AT96 GP so I want to say that next time plzzz bring GP with two types : Rookie Grand Prix where ppl will get key and second one Elite Grand Prix (it is still existing) where you will get Epic Import Part.
A: In fact this next update will have both a normal GP (where you can get the key) as well as an Epic Prix (import parts). We are also bringing back previous GP cars for 1 of the events.
and we are looking at a 3rd GP format called Epic GP (working title and it gets confusing) which will have its own set of rewards
Q: bring new cars and release them as unleashed eventsā¦
A: So without saying what the car is, next update this is happening
Q: Make a new weekly event epic hunt which allows us to get epic imports for random cars. You can also make it a class based event. We have a daily class based event which gives out blueprints of a particular class cars. So another event can give out epic imports of the same class
A: All I'll say on this is we are looking at our epic import parts and have some new ways coming that will let you get these.
Q: Please re-add the old roster of vehicles in the Weekly Elite cups. My huayara and hurracan are no longer able to compete and sit in my garage collecting virtual dust
A: Well these car's aren't top of class anymore so they are no longer "elite". However we will take a look at a different weekly cup. Also we have something coming this year were having more cars will be of a benefit
so older good cars will be valuable
Q: A third weekly event to go along with the Weekly and Elite competitions: the Weekly Premium Event. In this event, rather than being class-based and relying on a playerās garage size, this event will feature a different vehicle each week at a regulated performance level, and will rely solely on player skill in a competition to earn tokens and premium card packs (the ones you can buy 5 of for 325 tokens.) This will not only help players improve their racing technique, but will also allow newer players to obtain some nice rewards to help them get a foothold in the game.
A: quick answer this is what the Elite prix are for
Q: Make the weekly events more interesting by bringing in new tracks every week rather than same old tracks. The blueprint rewards in the weekly class based events should also be improved to provide more variety of blueprints. Link the blueprints given out in those events to the player's garage level.
A: interesting fact the tracks actually change each week and it takes 11 weeks before we repeat a track. We keep a track constant for the week so as to keep the event balanced, if we had to rebalance it for each random track it adds a lot of overhead and would result in us actually being able to use fewer tracks overall
Q: Change the Exclusive Weekly Car Hunts
I think it is time for those cars to change, they have been there since Day 1, and I'm sure the majority of players will appreciate the change, to presumably better cars.
A: We have actually added new cars since day one. Also we keep these fairly constant as they are big help for new players to help catch up.
Q: add another weekly competition called "deluxe weekly" in which we can use class c cars in one week and b,a,s class cars in the next weeks
A: we have elite class A,B,C,D week after week.
Q: keeping 1 car in the elite class event permanently
A: Not really as in theory if a better car gets released eventually it would not be elite which breaks the purpose
Alright let me talk about the shop and drops a bit
Q: Guarantee key drop
A: It is not ideal if you open lots of key packs and don't get the key (It sucks, probabilities can be fickle). We have a bad luck protection mechanism in place to help reduce this (basically it helps guarantee something for a car after X count and resets once you get it)
and we are looking at breaking down further so we can give even more specific control for rewards and help with bad luck protection.
Additionally as we did with multiplayer challenges (and yes there is a new one coming in a couple week I believe, don't have a calendar in front of me) we are bringing in new GACHA pack types that will give different options (e.g. re-roll if you don't like a reward, guarantee a specific reward after X packs and a bunch of others)
Q: update the cars in the legend shop
A: yup this is being worked on
Q: Show drop rate chance for featured items for packs
A: This is something we have on our backlog currently, when we will get to it I donāt have an answer for but it is something we want to do and is something I've been trying to fit into the schedule since last year
Got a question sort of related to this about rewards, which I think is worth answering. I'll try to keep it high level as it goes into probability maths for the full answer (and nobody wants to do maths on a friday)
So the question was: How do we design rewards
A: We have data that shows how many races players do on average per day, how far people are progressing in a season (both points gained as well as reward collected). We use these to distribute the rewards. When we do these calculations we set it up so that earlier rewards are easy to get and later rewards can be achieved but require more consistent play and dedication. If you just do the bare minimum each day you will get most but not all of the rewards, in general the final milestones are for those who are more active and push themselves to compete.
Q: Add more decals to the legend store
A: As decals are something everyone wants and we don't have a ton we are keeping them currently for rewards in events (be it in the various Prix or others)
Ok let's move to car hunts
1st one
Q: Car hunts guarantee X BP every X races.
A: They do currently, there is a system in place were you are guaranteed BP based upon the number of gacha packs you open the system guarantees it (see above about bad luck protection)
Q: Better drop rates for car hunts or limited tries, 2 tickets feels expensive for no drop of BP
A: I'll answer this in 2 parts
Firstly no plan at the moment to change the ticket cost
Secondly with regards to BP drop rates. Something we have done is increase the total number of BP that are given away in car hunts. The actual drop rate of BP has also been increased slightly from other car hunts, however it does vary between hunts based upon the cars so keep this in mind if you try to compare 2 different car hunts
also car hunts repeat on a cycle so if you don't get it all done in 1 don't panic it will come around again.
Q: New car hunts
A: We add new ones regularly and have added a new format which has a guaranteed key reward
Q: Increase number of days available for car hunt cars for higher stars
A: We keep the number of days available for several reasons, firstly it keeps the schedule balanced as there is a ton of live operation events so we need to plan everything out to ensure not to much is going all at once so a consistent length helps with that plan. Secondly keeping them all the same length gives everyone the same play opportunity for the cars (imagine a car you wanted but only had 2 days to get and you were busy those 2 days). Thirdly car hunts repeat so if you donāt get it done the 1st time round it will come round again.
Q: players vote on car hunts?
A: I'm not adverse to this with a few caveats, we could provide a list of cars for the community to vote on to see which ones they would like to have as car hunts (if we keep it open it will all be Chiron or we will get to many to get a decent answer).
So what I will do is work with Mina & Clauwudia and work out the best way to give you all some input
Q: Car Hunts: Giving maxed hunted cars a purpose
Please make the hunted cars more useful in their own hunts. For example, having an objective requiring the hunted car (in the same style as you did with the key hunt for the Cayman GT4) which grants a good amount of credits, tokens, or even a few epic imports (depending on the number of stars your hunted car has you'll get more rewards). This motivates players to play hunts even if they already have the hunted car at maximum stars.
A: The purpose of maxed out cars is to use them in the car hunt riot after the car hunt to get epic import parts.
Will go back to some miscellaneous bits and pieces i'm seeing in the other channel
Q: car hints for 6* cars
A: I actually made these less helpful last update as we got a ton of bugs and it annoyed me. In general 6* cars are SE related
Q: Fix the drifting on the Bentley Continental GT3
A: With the next update we have fixed a number of cars, the bentley, valhalla, SF90 and a few others
Q: make drop rates viewable
A: I answered it above (I think, losing track) yes its something we can look at across the board
Q: do something about players who switch clubs to get rewards
A: we have for this upcoming update, if you jump clubs during the season you will lose out on rewards
Q: daily login/daily mission type thingy
A: Yes it is something we want to bring in, just a matter of time and resources we have a design now we need to work out how and when we build it
Q: not all devices having 30/60 FPS support
A: I don't remember the full explanation off the top of my head but there was some technical limitation as to which devices we could apply this to (manufacturer based)
Q: Switching garage background
A: this comes up a bunch, as of now we don't plan to allow switching it ruins the nice UI š
proper answer we can look at it, but it will be low priority for us this year
Q: Can career chapters be increased
A: We are looking at revamping career to make the layout more user friendly, help new players and allow us to expand it further. So yes we will eventually increase it
Q: Make the game cross platform playable
A: Answered in previous Q&A we can't due to technical issues and cross platform is not a simple thing to solve for a game once live. (plus it's not just A9 but all other GL games that use the same server system so lots to coordinate)
Q: New tracks
A: we have 1 new track coming this year (it feels awesome) and have started work on a 2nd one. Given we have a bunch of tracks in NA, Europe and Asia. We are looking at Africa, Oceania or SA for the next few
Q: When is DS4 coming
A: This year
Alright closing the chat down for this month.
Thanks everyone for taking part
dull moon
CAREER
Hey everyone, I hope you are all having a good end of the week (be it the start of the day, middle or end)
so this month we are talking about something that we haven't discussed in a bit (if ever) which is career mode
were it sits now and what are the plans for it long term.
Once again a big thanks to everyone who submitted questions it helps me try and answer as much as I can and gives the team a feel for what everyone is interested in and wants to know.
so before I start with some answers, I actually have a couple questions for all of you
Mina will put up some polls in the #dev-chat-vote channel in a bit so please take a look at them and give us your vote
Question 1 so the first thing I'd like to get a feel for is how many of you play the new career season that is added with each update?
and
Question 2 secondly do you finish it or only play through it partly?
so while the polls go up let's get the ball rolling with a bit of general career mode information
Who is it aimed at?
Well the simple answer is that the career is aimed at everyone š
A little bit more complicated is that the career mode besides being a solo mode that you can play and complete at your own pace is actually targeted at 2 groups of players.
The first group are new players in the game. Career is how we help onboard people, let them unlock and get access to the first few cars and get familiar with the base mechanics of the game.
The second group is obviously everyone else. The reason we keep adding to career each season is to keep providing more solo content for everyone. Even if you don't play it in 1 season it is still there for you to come back to when you want.
So what does this mean with regards to career long term (and the answers to your questions)?
well it means 2 things:
1 - Any changes we do to career we need to take into account the impact for new players and existing players
2 - Any changes we do cannot take away the time and effort you have already put into the career.
so what are we thinking about?
First thing
Well the first thing we are looking at involves a bit of an elephant in the room when it comes to the current career mode.
Which is that it can be pretty overwhelming for a new player with all of the different seasons and multiple chapters. At the same time the flow between seasons and chapters does not always move in a linear method so it feels like you are jumping around unlocks which makes it hard to see what you have done/not done and overall progression.
Additionally it muddies the water when it comes to longer term rewards you can get in career as it is not always clear what seasons you need to do to get a guaranteed reward.
So one of the first things we are looking at is re-organizing the layout and flow.
This will mean a few things:
-Ordering of seasons will obviously move around
-We will potentially end up with "new" chapters to allow us to chunk things up more (I'll talk about chapters a bit more shortly)
A new chapter
So what does this mean for chapters in career? Firstly it means we can look at our chapters and set them up so that we have "mandatory" chapters which are ones everyone should do to unlock guaranteed rewards and we can focus on using for onboarding of new players.
Secondly it means the seasonal elements we add in each update can be added in a manner that will make them easier to find (can be a problem at times) as well as let us look at a few other things for career.
Third and most important it means we can add brand new chapters to the mode in a manner that keeps a logical flow, doesn't make the current setup worse by building on a foundation that isn't intended to support it
by separating things out it also helps us with balancing overall of the career progression as a new player may enter chapter and select a season with cars they haven't unlocked yet and feel blocked when really they should be playing on a different bath.
What would be in a new chapter?
or to phrase it another way what makes up a chapter?
New chapters would obviously consist of new missions, rewards etc but additionally it will give us the opportunity to do things such as:
-Add new BP for cars not currently found in career (as these new chapters would be aimed at players with higher garage level)
-Potentially unlocks of an entire car (maybe, don't quote me on this)
-More maps (not just existing ones but also some of the new ones coming up)
-More room to theme seasons in the chapter around tracks, missions etc.
A question that i'm sure will come up if we do this is
What if I've already done all of the career?
As mentioned above any re-organization that we do will need to ensure you don't lose any of your progress, it's one of the key reasons we would re-organize everything before we add a new chapter so that we can make it both easy for ourselves (as we will know were everyone is exactly at that time) as well as for you as you will be able to clearly see what you are up to.
Seasonal pieces with each update
I mentioned previously we would be able to more easily show the seasonal additions that we add with each update. Looking at the poll it seems people are playing them (which our data also shows us) so we would keep adding these
but because they won't get added within the chapters we will be able to make them stand out more clearly. Be it adding them as a "side career" or use them to start building even further chapters (so we wouldn't add just 1 new chapter but could add X)
So what about game modes in career?
I saw a few questions submitted around this and in the current chat, so let me give you some more info here.
Again short answer is yup
I don't know if anyone has noticed but in the last year we have actually taken some modes that were previously found in career and have made them available in Daily events and SE
likewise we have looked at modes not used in career (e.g. money run) and have looked at moving them into career so that we can start using them.
Additionally one of our goals this year is to bring new modes to the game and we will plan to have these modes introduced both via an event but also added into career. Assuming of course the mode works with AI and doesn't require multiplayer (e.g. 1 vs 1)
Onboarding new players
I mentioned the onboarding of new players early, and this is something that someone made as a comment in a previous devchat
at times it can be hard for new players to catch up
they don't have access to all the cars that veteran players have and often the only way to do that is via the various events that are run which can be tough as they don't have the best cars to compete at times
so how do we think we can solve this?
Well that's is were not only the reorganization can help by having manadatory chapters vs. optional ones so we can ensure they get a "starter set" of cars that will help them start competing
additionally we have been thinking about what we are currently calling side elements
So what are they?
Side elements is a catch all term we are using at the moment for things like the additional seasonal updates that wouldn't go into a chapter
but probably more of interest to you it also includes the idea we have had bouncing around of "mini daily events"
which for a lack of a better term would be events that are a smaller and simplified version of the daily events that are present in the mode not just based upon time but driven more by specific criteria
For example: We could have a mini car hunt that is present if you don't have car X and stays until you get it to 2 stars.
Now this would mean these sorts of events would be present for everyone who met the criteria, so even a veteran player might see them as they might not have stared up a car and would now have a chance to do so at their own pace.
Ok let me take a look at some of the new questions and give some answers
Mastery
I've seen a few comments on this, and it's the sort of idea we would look at for the side elements. It doesn't fit perfectly for a career chapter or season but it works perfectly for an addition.
Cops vs Robbers
So this is something that's come up a bit, being able to be the cops rather than being chased by them. It is actually a mode we have thought about and want to design. Obviously we have cop cars already in the game but what we still need to work out is not just making sure you could drive as them but how would the AI work for the chase. But yes it's on our to do list and would be a good addition to a career season.
We could even do it as a back and seasons one from the cop point of view and 1 from the robber.
Rewards
As part of our re-organization we will look at rewards overall. both for existing ones to make sure they work but also for how we will approach future ones.
I will note that if we change existing ones and give out more rewards we will need to make sure that if you have already completed the career you would get the additional rewards so as to not penalize players.
MP in career
At this point in time there is no plan to do MP in career. The aim of career is to be solo mode that you can play at your own pace which goes against the MP side of the game.
LP cars in career
I've seen a few comments about LP cars in career, we will take a look and see about not always having them as it can be annoying to be 1 flag away from completion. The flip side is we may still use them as some LP cars will come back into wider rotation so while it means you might not be able to complete it now you will in the future.
Mini event clarification
To clarify on this and in general, the cars we reward in career are generally those which are older so they don't appear in live events as much or are cars that when used in live events are secondary
so rewards in career and the mini events would allow you to get these cars to 1 or 2 stars to help you use them in live events
Mission requirements
I didn't mention it previously but worth mentioning it here, we want to add more mission requirements in the game (not just career but across the board)
this not only allows us to make them more interesting it helps bring variety.
While this would have a massive impact on career as it is something that affects the game globally we are looking at this as a separate block of work that hopefully we can do before we do the reorganization (which is a ton more work)
GP tracks in career
I saw this and good idea, it is something we can look at doing for sure
F1 in A9
Would be nice but yeah I don't see it happening anytime soon both due to licensing and if those cars leave the ground their never coming back down
Car keys in career
This has come up a few times, right now we don't have a plan to have a car key in career.
Having said that there is no reason why we might not, it very much will depend on how we want a car to be unlocked it could be collect BP and you get the unlock or it could be complete X seasons and get a key.
Key's are just a mechanism for unlocking cars so it will depend on how we setup rewards
Daily play career
Yes for sure, as mentioned since career helps with onboarding we are also looking at our overall onboarding approach and one area we have looked at and would like to change is our daily missions
and make them a bit more contextual to overall progression as well as add variety.
Season about exclusive manufacturer
We try to theme our seasonal career additions based upon that season
but when we build new chapters this is obviously outside the normal "season" so no reason we couldn't make it all about manufacturer X
Getting a manufacturer car for completion
Maybe is all I can say on this it will depend. Generally it wouldn't be for a single season but more for a couple of seasons or a chapter or even X flags.
Remove fuel in career
In general no, career shouldn't be something you blow through in 1 day (it means we would have to make a ton more to keep up which means we couldn't do other work). Having said that we are looking at potentially allowing free tries in career
so you would be able to play with a car you don't have (and could solve some of the LP car requirements)
Alright we have about 5min left so get your last questions in now!
off topic club changes
No precise timeline other than we are working on something now that you will see in the 2nd half of the year
timelines in general
I try to avoid talking timelines until we actually start code and art work on something mainly because so many things can happen to derail the plans (like lots of people having kids and going on leave so we can't do as much š )
for career and onboarding we want to start working on it later this year so hopefully changes will come towards the end of the year but that is still pretty vague at this point in time. As we get closer we can give more precise information.
Decals, emoticons, titles
Decals we are limited but can look at adding as rewarda
Emoticons we can add
Titles is a new feature and probably out of scope for now
for decals even something as simple as a stripe needs to go through licensing and manufacturer approval so not quick to do or even possible at times.
Covid and development
Yes it has impacted it to some extent, there obviously was a ramp up curve of learning for everyone working remote and somethings are not as efficient (design brainstorms are tougher without beer and whiteboard) but overall the team has adapted really well
development in and of itself is a ton of work and has lots of unknowns and ups and downs that's why things can take longer than expected at times and we try to plan as far ahead as we can
That's all folks!!
Alright that's a wrap, thanks again everyone for joining today and have a good weekend.
dull moon
Welcome
Welcome to the DevChat for this month everyone. This 1 is a little bit different as you wonāt be seeing me answering most questions instead we have invited @Charlie here to answer questions on the topic. @Charlie is directly involved with all hacking, ban, cheating matters, so heāll be able to discuss these topics in more detail. So please be nice to him so that he comes back (and so I can slack off in a future Friday again).
So without further ado please give a virtual round of applause for @obtuse comet
quiet fjord
obtuse comet
Hi everyone! Iām happy to be here today in my first dev chat. Thanks @dull moon @pearl osprey and @hidden shell for inviting me, I obviously follow these chats and I think they are a great opportunity to interact with you guys more directly.
Iām sure some of you might be very looking forward to this specific chat, as fair play, hacking and bans are some of the most frequent topics in terms of questions, complaints or comments, and I hope I can answer most of them in an efficient manner. Please bear in mind, however, that thereās going to be a common theme in most of my replies, and that is that there will be a line that I wonāt be able to cross in some of my explanations. This very logically responds to the fact that our internal workflow, systems, and policies are confidential as they could be very well taken advantage of if they were known by bad actors. However, I am sure Iām going to share a lot of previously unknown information and to respond to most of your biggest questions.
Stay tuned to #ā-dev-chat-vote for some voting during the chat so you can have a bit of fun with them and let us know your thoughts.
Also if you want to laught at me, you can go to #šæć»memes and see my emotional state 10 mins ago. All good now š
Okay, so letās start with some of your most common questions/requests related to today's topic!
Automated detection
One request I've seen a lot is: āwhy donāt you detect automatically all cheaters?ā or āwhy donāt you detect nitro boosts in the first 3 seconds of a race and ban those players immediately?ā.
The truth is, we do have automatic detection (we ban almost 1,000 thousand players every day) and it is something we try to improve and expand all the time. With technology there are little things that are impossible, but I can tell you that we do face some limitations that will prevent us to have a 100% perfect system. Our game is not old, but some of the changes we would need to do in order to have that perfect system are really hard to implement at this stage. This doesnāt mean that we wonāt get there, it is just that we canāt rely entirely on that and we need to find ways of improving also in other directions. The good news is that we have a team of dedicated people trying to improve anti-hacking all the time and, together with your reports, we keep improving every day.
What I can tell you though, is this: we can track a lot of stuff automatically and my advice to anybody reading this (šØ) is to play it safe and donāt do anything against our terms of use. If youāre unsure if youāre breaking them, donāt worry as weāll cover everything in this chat.
Avoid banning legit players
That leads me to a very important aspect of our fair play enforcement. Our golden rule is to not ban any legit players. And although this has happened sometimes, we have dealt with those cases individually and compensated players for that.
The impact that this has in our workflow is that we donāt ban players until weāre 100% sure that theyāre not legit. This can rule out some of the drastic measures sometimes we see suggested by the community, but it is very important to us that every ban action we take is correct.
Iāve read sometimes that youāre worried that somebody is reporting without proof or using weak arguments, but please** do not worry**. Weāre not banning nobody based on reports. Reports just help us to look closer into certain places, but we are not basing our final decision on the fact that the report exists.
For those of you that are legit players and had an issue with our ban system in the past: we apologize! We have had issues with the system that are now solved and nobody should be flagged incorrectly. We worked hard to fix this and we will be working hard to avoid this from happening again, but please know that our intention has always been to ensure a fair competition and a fair playing experience to everybody.
By the way, I take this opportunity to tell you that, if you havenāt received a reply in more than 7 days from our Customer Care team, please let Mina, Claudia or myself know and weāll look into that.
"Dear Lord, why are hackers coming back?"
Talking now about the ānot-so-legitā players, one of your recurrent complaints is that youāve seen a player coming back a few times after being banned. Obviously, we all would like to know why a player is wasting time in creating new accounts despite us banning every single one of them swiftly, but regardless of the reason, some people choose to do that. While IP bans or device bans could be somewhat effective here, the risks are far worse than the rewards, as some of these bans might affect legit players too.
However, one of the main topics I want you to take out of this chat is that: š EVERY CHEATER WILL BE CAUGHTš eventually. For that reason, while some players might stick around longer creating many accounts, they will eventually be gone from the game. You might remember some cases we had of clubs or players that sticked around longer than usual, but you will also remember that they were gone in the end. Our goal is to reduce the amount of time it takes from the new account creation until the new ban, and let me tell you something beautiful: we have improved this drastically and if somebody wants to waste time like that, youāll have to deal with them much less than in the past.
Of course, automated detection is key for this, and we for sure get them faster and faster everyday.
How can I know if a player is cheating?
A lot of times you are also asking us to show examples of hackers or educate you of the different types of hacks that you can encounter in the game. While I personally donāt see the value in providing a detailed account of all the cheating that you could potentially see in the game, I can provide you some tips on this. Let's go:
- Most of the times, if you encounter a hacker youāll know right away. 99% of the times is clear-cut.
- Please note that if you see players teleporting with red lights around them, this is not a hack, players don't get a benefit because they are not actually teleporting. These are network issues that the player is facing and are affecting the amount of information that is reaching your device, so you will not be able to see that car normally. Also know that you wonāt be banned for having a poor connection. Trust me 100% on this.
- If you are unsure, please go ahead and use our report option, as thereās no harm in that, but also do it responsibly. I have seen players reporting their whole GP group, and you must be realistic here: you wonāt find a whole group of GP players cheating, or at least thatās a very, very, very unusual scenario.
Talking specifically about GP/EP, we have seen some suggestions about having a report button for GP. This is a good suggestion, I believe, so weāll be sharing it with the team to evaluate if itās possible adding this to the game in the short/mid term.
Please know that it is not your responsibility to detect cheaters in the game, it wouldnāt be fair for us to ask you that. However, as this Discord server is proof, our amazing Community can help a lot when it comes to improving the game, so we of course appreciate the fact that you take your time reporting players in and off the game.
Botting
Okay, itās time now to talk about botting!
You have done a great job to bring this issue to our attention and we are aware now that there is an issue with players using bots. Please note that the use of third-party software to get advantages in the game, such as constant racing in the Multiplayer mode is not allowed by any means.
Good news for legit players worried about botting: weāre making a lot of progress in the detection of this type of cheating, and I can tell you that weāll be bringing down a lot of players that do this. We have, in 2021, brought down to zero another type of exploits in the game (less visible and known to all of you, maybe), and our hope is that we can do the same with botting, or close to that. Bad news is that it might take its time.
There's where you can actually help us! We ask you to use the Multiplayer report option for botting too (not only other types of more obvious hacks) so we can speed up this process.
Account sharing
Another topic that has been brought to our attention is people sharing their accounts for multiple reasons. Please let me state clearly the following: allowing the access of another person (regardless of your relation to this person) is not permitted in the game. Doing this will end up with your account being banned from the game.
We take account sharing very seriously and let this be a šØ warning šØ to everybody (no matter your level, trajectory or involvement in the game), if you are sharing your account, stop immediately. I understand that you might have done this for a while without repercussions, or seen others do so before doing this yourself, so I donāt blame you. However, it is time to stop now, as we have made big progress in the detection of this and results will follow soon.
Account sharing, to put it clearly, is allowing another person into your account, no matter if it's only for a second or for 2 hours. Stop that for your own good.
Emulators
Many of you are worried about the use of emulators. Will that get you banned?
Long story short: we are not specifically against emulators, but we don't advise you to use them.
Why? Your account might be detected by our anti-hacking systems. My advise is to only play the official builds released by our approved stores.
eSports
Some of you might be worried about hacking on eSports competition. How do we keep these competitions fair? What I can tell you is that we thoroughly check players who advance to later rounds and we have specific rules and systems to check this type of events. Rest assured that every player that ends up in the final stages is legit.
"Why was I banned?"
Some of you have requested us to provide more details about your bans or account restrictions. We can of course look into it, but follow our classic instructions: get in touch with Customer Care. They will review your case and provide more details if appropriate.
Game exploits and mythological creatures
Okay, so it might be a good time to address some of the true game exploits we have detected and some of the false rumors that I'm seeing in the chat.
Don't always believe at face value what some players might be saying. For example, there are no such things are account cloning, pack glitches, etc.
There can always be bugs or weird isolated cases (comes with technology) and we'll investigate that and provide answers if you approach our Customer Care team with that.
However, there are game exploits that sometimes go undetected for a while and players start to talk and they start to use them. A couple of examples:
- Crashing your car to get teleported in the Osaka track
- Bypassing purchase limits
Again, my honest advice: if you hear about an exploit, don't do it. We'll end up banning you, it might take us a while, but we'll get there.
Of course, we believe in fair warnings and second chances, but be smart.
--
Okay so I'll be focusing now more about live questions, so shoot your shot!
I see that some of you mentioned third-party software, auto-clickers and so on. This is what I referred to as "botting" above. To sum it up: don't use them, if you see somebody using them report them with report button or contacting Customer Care. This is not allowed and it'll lead to bans.
Some of you would like to receive feedback when your report was useful to us. Although I'd like to hug some of you personally sometimes, please know this: EVERY report is useful. Every single one is productive as it allows us to have a wider view into the general state of the game. So thank you to everybody reporting.
Quick summary about how to report: in-game report button for Multiplayer, or Customer Care for other game modes (such as GP).
Somebody mentioned game dynamics such as 360 abuse or the difference between TD/manual drive. That doesn't belong to anti-hacking, I'm afraid, until it becomes an exploit. However, your feedback is always welcomed if you feel something is broken in the game and needs fixing.
Some of you have referred to the possibility of having resources back, taken from hackers even and redistributed among legit players.
That would be awesome and fair, really, but sadly virtually impossible. However, I can tell you this. Have you been very clearly wronged by a cheater? For example, you got displaced one position in the GP final leaderboard? Get in touch with Customer Care and we'll look at that for you. We are most of the times ensuring you get the right rewards.
About bad network and punishing players that experience it: this is not likely to happen, as everybody can experience bad network at some point, and you wouldn't want to be punished by it. Do you feel a specific players is abusing this? Please report it either to our Community team or the Customer Care team and we'll look at that individual case.
Also Chris pointed out that we're making those players ghosts so it doesn't affect you
It was also asked, why don't you punish players who falsely report?
Well, basically it's virtually impossible to learn about the intentions of a report. And as I said before, no report is bad, as it allows us to get more info and no player is being banned based just on reports, there's thorough checks behind every ban decision.
By the way, if you're curious about the amount of ban actions per season, stay tuned to our social media, as we do publish the accurate number of ban actions taken in the previous season once it has ended.
Obviously, a big number doesn't tell you much, but it is part of our commitment to be transparent and to have an open relationship with you when it comes to this topic.
Another big topic for you guys is clubs that are cheating, and this is related to botting.
We don't punish clubs as there might be legit players in them. Remember our golden rule: we try to not ban any single legit player.
However, as I explained we're coming after every player that is using botting or cheating the game in other ways, so big clubs full of abusers will take a hit.
I won't give specific details, names, or anything, but there was a famous club in Windows that was dismantled after your reports were found to be true, and there are currently top clubs' members being banned for botting.
Also, the dev team is always trying to come up with ways to keep the game mechanics as exciting as they are but with less room for abuse.
I see that you have made some complaints based on individual cases, which I understand.
It is not very easy to understand why somebody is banned for something while you see other players do it. Let me address this while I dispel some false information:
Our wonderful Community team is not banning players. It is not just that they are awesome and fair (which they are). They job is simply not to ban players directly or influence those decisions.
So please stop going after the people in this Discord chat if you don't agree with a ban decision, as they haven't made it.
Having said that, the only difference between a player that was banned for something and another that hasn't been banned is only one: time.
They will all be banned when the review process is completed, if they are found to be guilty.
One last thing before wrapping this up, you ask about multiple accounts for individual use.
This is not allowed, sadly. Do it at your own risk. However, I can tell you we won't be actively going after people doing this strictly for personal use, but you are at risk of being flagged.
I'll hand this over to Chris now, it has been a pleasure to chat with you and read your comments, see you! š¤
dull moon
Ok thanks @obtuse comet for taking the time today to join us.
As we wrap it up please let me re-iterate some of the key points
-Don't cheat
-Please keep reporting cheaters
-Changes take time but we are working on improving detection constantly.
So thanks everyone for attending and your questions (it's a passionate topic as can be seen in the discussion channel).
Have a good weekend all and see you next time
dull moon
Hey everyone
going to start in a sec just let me get myself organized
also I suggest not spamming discussion immediately as I might cover some stuff
Welcome
Alright let's kick of the 4th or 5th devchat for the year (wow this year is going fast I'm losing track).
Welcome everyone, our topic today is Tracks (I forget the exact wording but this is basically it)
I'll cover a few different things today and try and answer a bunch of the question that have been submitted.
one thing to note as many of the submissions were suggestions for track locations, no need to spam them again in the discussion channel we have them compiled and have noted them (and you will hopefully see why shortly)
ok first area
Creating tracks
let's start with a brief overview of what it takes to create a track, I want to give you all a bit of context on the work involved and some of the decision making elements as I think it will answer some questions but also give you an insight to the effort involved in creating a new track.
So when we 1st start thinking about creating a new track we know that it will involve a number of people across a number of teams (and sometimes studios) and takes a fair bit of time. The normal process is:
-Brainstorm of what the track should do, where it should be, the feel etc. We look at the surveys that have been run and run new ones (like we did for Nevada) to see what people would like (this is were all your locations suggestions come in) as well as look at how well a location would work in the game (Iāll talk a bit more about this).
-Once we agree on a location and style of the track the level designer and artists go off to grab some references and research the location. This means they look at real world images, grab pictures, lighting/mood style etc.
-We then have a meeting to make sure everyone is on the same page and we don't see any red flags that might cause problems (or if we do we are aware of them and work around it).
-The level designer will then create a rough 2D layout of the map with key elements. This usually goes through a couple of rounds of quick sketches on paper until we have the rough shape we want and then we label elements we will need e.g. Towers, tunnels, bridges, landmarks etc.
-We then have another meeting to agree on the 2D and high level of the track. This meeting is generally a check-in to make sure what has been sketched can actually be built, at which point work really begins.
- The level designers will start blocking out the track in 3D to get the circuit the right shape and put in large objects for line of sight testing. The end result of this is a really really ugly flat colored track which we can then test drive in our engine to make sure it works with cars.
-While this is ongoing the art team is doing concept sketches and mood boards for lighting as well as start working on the larger props for the track.
-More meetings to review
-Once the level designer has the track shape done (this means not just the road shape but also how it goes up/down and curves) it gets passed to art to place all of the scenery, the sky, collisions, track textures and all the other bits and pieces around the track.
-More meetings to review the final art version.
-It then comes back to the level designer to place ramps, nitro, destructible objects, respawn locations, basically anything on the track that can move or be easily modified.
-Design and art do a final pass to make sure it is "looking good"
-It will go to the QA team to test, they try to break it in as many ways as possible by crashing into every conceivable object and angle trying to be as comprehensive as possible to find any issues and make sure it all works.
-While QA is doing this the designers add it into the game and setup the relevant names and other database entries.
-It is then ready to launch
as you can see their are a fair few steps to get a track from concept to launch and involves a number of people and time.
So why did I just go through this? Well please keep in mind when I talk about tracks and things we want to do these take time and resources and while we would love to do lots of new tracks the reality is if we want to produce them at the quality that they are we can only do so much each year.
What makes a good track location?
So one of the most common questions/feedbacks about tracks was do a track at X
but why do we decide to do 1 location over another
or why do we decide to do 1 style of track vs. another
Well there are a few reasons, firstly let me talk a little bit about verticallity and what it means for building a track
As you all know A9 is a game with jumps and drifting, and while drifting is easy to work into tracks jumps present a different sort of challenges.
Jumps in the game add verticality which means you can see over objects or down on to objects and we need to factor in this verticality in a couple of ways.
Firstly in general we need to have some sort of verticality in the game as we donāt load all of the track visuals at the same time we hide things when not on screen so that the game runs better. This means all our tracks need to have an element of up/down to block views and keep the play focused on what is in front and not way off to the side, when you add in jumps to this it becomes a potential issue as a barrier which might solve this such as trees is something the car could now be flying over (not to mention if you can look down on something it means more art to produce as it needs a top/back). So for tracks out in the desert, savannahās etc this is a problem we need to solve and can add a chunk of work to the track creation.
I'm not saying we won't do these sorts of tracks it is just more work and limits some options.
and before anyone says do a track with no jumps, that wouldn't be A9 if we didn't have jumps
So when we look at tracks we are looking for locations that have a natural sort of verticality such as cities, areas in mountains/hills etc as these allow the creation of natural obstacles to block line of sight.
or we work out ways to fake it
Another thing we look at for tracks is how similar it is to existing tracks, we want to add variety to the game so we look at locations that give us not just different visuals but also the opportunity to have different sort of track layouts and shapes. At the same time the track needs to fit in the world of A9 (so no tracks on the moon for now as cool as that might be).
We also look at what the last track added was so that we can try to avoid adding 2 of the same types in a row e.g. we added NY last year so didn't want to immediately add another big city track (One of the reasons for Nevada)
The other thing we look at is the location should have landmarks that we can make feel iconic, this does not mean we can use real life landmarks as sadly to many of them are legally protected and getting licenses to use them would be prohibitive for us. So sadly no destroying the Eiffel tower or racing around Elizabeth Tower (where Big Ben is located). It does mean we look at places were we could do our own version of those landmarks
Fourth but not last as there are a bunch of other things we consider is how āexpensive & complexā it is to make the track in the sense of work hours, if we are making a huge complicated track like Osaka or New York it takes us longer to do than if we do a remaster of an existing track like we did with Nevada.
so what does this all mean for this year and into next (yep i'm going to be using my crystal ball a bit and talking about next years work)
New Tracks
So disclaimer, I may get shot because of what I'm going to say next so if I don't do the next Devchat Clauwudia you know who killed me
We are actually working on a couple brand new tracks this year. The 1st track we are aiming to have launched in August (donāt quote me on this as things can go wrong).
and the 2nd track we are shooting for December release but it might be tight so may slip to early next year
with regards to the 1st track this year, let's call it our Summer track (Sorry all the poor people stuck in the cold southern hemisphere winter)
I saw quite a few requests for tracks that are:
-at night
-F1 or Nascar
-Feature wide lanes and straits
well good news
actually hopefully good news I'm sure someone will complain when it launches but really I think it's an awesome track and the majority of people will love it.
The new track is based on existing real world race tracks
it is not a copy of any existing one but takes elements of inspiration from some of the great F1 races (especially Singapore's fantastic night race) as well as elements from Nascar tracks (insert just turn left joke here)
it is a night track and has a great atmosphere.
As to what it will be called and where in the world it is located, well I'll keep that secret for now
What about the other track?
It is in it's early stages still (currently it is a truly ugly orange colored 3D track).
With this one we are basing it in a real world city
hopefully when done it will capture the excitement that is Buenos Aires and let you race through a "fictional" version of the city
so before I go on I've got a question for all of you (we will put up a poll)
Elements of tracks
One of the big parts of a track is the shapes of the track itself (straits, curves etc). Iād like to get a quick straw poll from everyone to see what style of track you would like, this will help us with next years tracks
you should see a poll over in the poll channel
please go and give it a vote
so while people are voting let's talk about
Remaster A8 tracks
I saw a bunch of comments about this in the other channel and we got a bunch of questions submited
Remastering an A8 track is something we do look at when deciding on what next track to make
one of the reasons to look at remastering is in theory it is "quicker and easier" to bring it across because all the assets are done and the track is designed
well, not quite as easy as that
A8 is a few years older than A9 and things have moved on since many of those tracks were 1st created and we as a team have also learnt some more about what makes fun tracks. Not to mention phyiscs and car behaviours are different between the 2 games
so not all A8 tracks can be translated across all that easily.
When we do look at it we consider 2 things primarily:
-Polls from the community for popularity
-Can we reuse the assets?
as many of you played A8 (or still play) we can get some great info as to what tracks people would like to see, it's one of the reasons we chose Nevada last year.
the other factor of reusing assets depends on the track, if we cannot take the majority of assets for use it means we have to basically build everything from scratch so it becomes closer to a new track from scratch when we need to work on it.
The other thing we keep in mind is remastering a track is great for nostalgia but it is not as exciting as a brand new from scratch track or location
ok let's shift track topics a little bit and talk about
What else can we do with tracks
Since tracks take time to build, what else can we do with tracks? and what do we do with tracks
this is an interesting area for us since we want to get as much use out of our tracks as possible. When we create tracks they are not just a single loop but actually consist of multiple roads and shapes so that we can open/close elements to create different tracks out of the 1 track (way to many uses of the word track there if your tracking it).
so when we look at the thing you drive on (can't use the word track again in that sentence)
we also look at the various props (ramps, nitro, obstacles) that we can place to give it not only variety but also different uses
As I'm sure you all know we have short 30's tracks, mid range 60's and longer 90's tracks
which depending on the shape and end points can be 1,2 or even more laps if we want it to be (and depending on the mode)
something we are always looking at and bouncing around as ideas is how can we use these different shapes and length in a different manner (this is part of the GP's came about wanting to have short tracks).
so question for you all as I saw someone suggest this and I thought it was a good idea so am going to steal it and take credit (unless everyone hates it then it's not my idea at all and I had no idea about it).
If we were to setup a different sort of MP event with different lengths of tracks would you like.... go to dev-chat-vote and vote please
ok looks like long tracks are popular
for MP
The other thing we can do with tracks is change up where and how many ramps or nitro bottles are present so we are taking a look to see if we could make variations of these that give us something that is fun to play.
bit of a shameless plug we have a "new type of event" called Nitro Pollution in the next update were we tweaked some of the tracks for you to try out. Give it a go and let us know what you think afterwards
alright back to me answering some of the questions
What about time of day or weather?
I saw a few questions about tracks with changing lighting (day/night) or weather? Unfortunately at this time we can have only 1 fixed lighting for the track due in part to how we create the track but also due to the performance hit devices would take if we had multiple light conditions. So if we were to have track that goes day to night that is basically 2 tracks from how the game sees it so not something we can do right now.
Dynamic weather is a similar sort of issue, having said that we currently donāt have any tracks with weather so it is something we are looking at having in the future.
Player created tracks
This is something that comes up fairly often and not just in A9 but lots of games.
While I'd love to have this in the game creating a tool that allows you to put your own track together, share it with others etc is not a small tasks and is unlikely to be something we will have in A9 in the near future as cool as it would be to have.
Length of tracks in GP
I just saw this question in the other channel and as I talked about in in MP let me talk about it a bit for this.
Currently GP have their own set of tracks (or well segments of the tracks) and tend to be short or medium
for now we want to keep them at their current lengths as the focus in the GP is going as fast as possible in the shortest time possible.
Now having said that there is no reason we cannot take a look at the lengths and do variations of them to shake up the normal format.
also GP tracks rotate through 15 or 17 different ones (I forget the precise number) so their is a fair bit of variation overall and we will add more as we get time to set them up.
Add more tracks to multiplayer
I had a look and there are a few tracks we are not currently using (e.g. some of the 90s tracks) which we could add to multiplayer so will look at doing so to give it more variation (separate from the poll question).
Dynamic events in tracks
This is something we like to do when possible and is something we look at each time we create a new track to see if it fits and how it would work in the game.
Some people love them and some hate them so we try to use them were they make the most sense and fit in with the overall style of the track.
Alright let me look at the other channel and answer a few other questions
@white frost free roam of tracks is not something we have in the game. We restrict the camera to the replays of the track to prevent cameras going outside the track or clipping through things. Blocking it out so that it still did this and allowed free view is ton of work which is why we haven't done it.
Q Adding new tracks never been in the game and have them be balanced
Yeah this is something we are looking at for the next,next,next track (mid next year roughly)
we haven't decided on a location or anything yet
but we are looking at doing something totally new with it
Q: optimization of tracks
I won't got into to much info on this (mainly because it's a technical topic on it's own). The engine team of the game continually works to optimize the game (this covers all areas). Unfortunately as the game grows and as phones get better overtime it is natural for older models to not perform as well, we try to keep the game running as well as possible on as many models as possible but sadly given how many variations of devices (Android mainly) there are it is not always possible.
Q: Would remastered tracks from A6 or A7 be considered.
We couldn't take these tracks and remaster them however the locations can be considered and might be (I'd have to look them all up)
Q: What about futuristic tracks (e.g. Terra , Mars etc)
Generally we are staying away from more fantastic/futuristic/arcade style tracks at the moment as we think there is more than enough awesome locations here on earth for us to play with.
Q: Fix rough patch in Nevada
At the moment we don't plan to fix it, knowing were the patch is and chosing the right car or approach is part of mastering the game.
Q: make a totally different lighting version of an existing track
Yeah we can do this, it is ton of art work to do so at the moment we would prefer to keep the artists focused on making something new.
Last Poll
Ok before we start looking to wrap up today letās do a final poll with regards to tracks you think we should look at next year. I donāt want to focus it as much on location but more style of track so please go across and vote
Alright while you are all voting
let me just say thanks everyone for being involved this month, tracks initially seemed like it might be a boring topic but for me it was interesting to read all the comments and feedback.
hopefully you enjoy the new track when it launches and we will keep you posted on the other future ones.
have a good weekend all
hidden shell
___________________________________________________________
dull moon
Good afternoon, Morning, Evening or some other time of the day everyone
welcome to a very special Devchat, random fact this is the 1st devchat or the 2nd 1/2 of the year it is also the 1st devchat we have done on the same day the update has released
so while I hope your all excited to be checking out the latest stuff, thanks for coming along and listening (reading) to what I'm going to be blathering on about
So this chat is going to be a bit of a mix bag of topics
as when we asked for topics we didn't get any 1 clear winner so we decided to talk about a few different areas
additionally one of the reasons for this is it gives me a chance to tell you about future plans we have and some of the stuff the team is working on at the moment around this
Let me set a bit of the stage for you all as to what this time of year means for the team
aside from it being August shortly when many people will take holidays, we are hard at work on the next two updates (last 2 for the year)
but also this is when we start looking at what we wanted to do this year and didn't get a chance to do and thus what do we want to do next year.
so some of the stuff I'm going to be covering today are:
-Shop, what are we doing and answering some questions
-Multiplayer (I'll type MP from now on as it's to long otherwise)
-New player
Let's kick it off with the shop
Over the next few updates we are looking at doing a number of things to and in the shop
the biggest and most obvious one will be a revamp of how the shop looks and works
now this isn't just a visual change for pure vanity but also to help support us to do internal changes for how it works.
We want to revamp the shop visuals so that we can segment out the sections better (so you can find what you want easier) and allow us to more easily add additional segments
specifically we are looking at putting in a "for you" section, this would be an area that is curated to you as a player so if you are GL5 you would see offers and packs that will help you at that stage but a GL17 player would see a different set
This ties into a question about the legend store
So the legend store is an area that allows you to catch up with different cars but is not intended to be the primary way by which you can get BP, if we put all the BP in the legend store some people would be happy and even more people would scream about the game being P2W (even more than usual š )
having said that we do realize it hasn't had an update in a while as to the content and rotations and we will be looking at refreshing this so as to change up the cars
this will be something we will do incrementally as the game economy changes as new things come into the game and other new features we are working on get released.
I've also seen a few questions/comments about "Add BP of cars in the shop that are difficult to grind"
As a general rule this is not something we are likely to do on a large scale. Let me explain making a car difficult to grind varies with the car, how old it is, how many people have it and what events are currently running. Since if a car is available in a car hunt it might not be difficult to grind at the same time a car in a SE which could be considered difficult to grind we also make available through packs in the store for a period of time. So itās not just a matter of putting in a specific BP. Instead this goes into the overall strategy of the game which has cars appearing in cycles giving players a chance to grind them for free or purchase packs when those packs are available. If we just put all BP in the store for purchase everyone who has money would just buy them then stop playing as they have nothing to work towards and people who donāt want to pay money would complain about P2W. So by having things primarily through events we keep it as fair as possible for all players since you can invest your time if you want or you can take a chance on purchasing packs at the time.
now something worth noting that is related to the point above
as part of the shop changes we are looking at introducing some new currencies in the game
specifically ones for Club wars when it launches as well as in MP
the reason for this is instead of giving you BP or GACHA directly we can instead give you currencies which you could then spend in the relevant section of the shop
and get what you want more directly
also we are looking at putting in logic so that these sections are more contextual so that the things you can get are more applicable to your progress.
Very important part these currencies will be earned from playing the game not purchasable
so you will be able to grind to earn it
Another question that has come up is "Reduce the prize of EIP in the shop"
Short answer we are not looking changing the price of EIP in the shop instead what we have done is bring in more sources for them in the game so that everyone has a chance to get them and it is not dependent on you having to buy them
Someone just asked about increasing the number of items in the legend shop from 6 to 10
yes this is something we will look at
another question around the legend shop was "Please add an option to buy 5 blueprints in the legend store for a discount from the individual prices (a bulk deal)"
Yup as part of the changes we will be adding this sort of thing to it
There were also a number of questions about "Add LO cars to the legend store. They are supposed to be āearly accessā yet the Taycan came out 16mo ago and canāt be accessed by f2p players"
We are slowly bringing cars that were legend pass exclusive into the game for all players via events. We want to do so via events as opposed to directly in the store since many f2p players didnāt buy the pass at the time are unlikely to buy if we put it in the store so by cycling it into events they have a chance to earn it for free.
Having said that as we will look at all cars in the legend shop these will be included in the decisions
Just to clarify on the new currencies further as I see some comments about it just making it P2W
These will replace rewards you would normally earn so instead of you being given GACHA pack A which you might not like instead you will be given the currency that will allow you to choose from GACHA pack A, B,C etc
these currencies will not affect the currency rewards we give e.g. if we are giving you 10 tokens and 1000 SC and a GACHA pack it would change to be 10 tokens, 1000 SC + X new currency
so it will not be a nerf š
Oh also I'm using the word GACHA above as a generic catch all as we will have both GACHA (random) as well as specific BP. I'm not going to be to specific on exactly what everything will be as we are still working on it
We had some questions and I see some now about customization and getting decals
which is a perfect intro to an in between section (not quite shop and not quite MP)
So 1 of the questions was Decals on the Legend store that costs trade coins
Quick summary (and I'll go into a bit more detail in a minute), we have a plan we want to look at for decals that brings them into wider availability for all players. The idea is to try and have more of them come into the game as rewards from season pass, multiplayer events and other activities. We are looking at bringing back older decals as well as themed groups of new ones with the overall aim of giving more customization options to the players.
so yes we will bring them into the shop however we are also looking at making them and customization in general a bit more prominent
When we look at customization we look at not just how it is used for you as a solo player
but also how do you show off this customization, as with a nice dress or suit it's nice to put it on and wear it around the house but it's much better if you can take it out for a spin and show it off
we are looking at building up customization in a couple ways:
-Firstly updates to the game UI to make it easier to know when you have customization options available
-Naturally bringing in more options (decals, colours, emoji's etc)
-Secondly tweaking MP UI so that you can show off your choices better
The MP changes will be around things like (not locked down yet so don't quote me long term)
-changing the loading into MP so you see all the opponent cars and the decals
-changing the intro/outro camera and timing to show more of the cars and let emoji's be used at that point in time
Thirdly sources for getting these options
-We will be trying to add more decals with each update (we add between 6 and 9 per update as now)
-Bringing back older decals so if you missed out in the past you can get a crack at it again.
-Creating groups of decals that you just "get" without having to have competed (e.g. in the free tier of the SP)
Let me move on to talk about some MP plans
specifically I'll talk MP world series events etc first
so currently we have a competition that runs from bronze -> legend league
we are looking at splitting these out into 2 different sets of competitions that run on 2 different timelines
The 1st set of competition (I'll call it MP fun for now) is aimed at newer players and player who want a relaxed MP experience. The rewards here will be targeted at new players and will be easier to get.
Additionally the league would be something like bronze, silver, gold and ELO will be very light
The 2nd set of competition which would run over a different period of time (e.g. 4 weeks instead of 2) and is more focused on those who are into PvP competition and have better garage of cars (e.g. gold, platinum and legend league). Rewards here will be "larger" but also harder to get as the ELO will be greater and we are looking at bringing in a rotating stable of cars you could choose from (there will always be a "free try 1" so even if you didn't have all the cars you would be able to play"
I've seen a few questions about rewards in MP specifically "MP rewards should be reworked; the cars you get from mp pack rewards can be unlocked easily from the legend store, please change them into more "exclusive rewards" for cars that can't be found in the legend store."
So this is something I've mentioned in the past MP1 is intended at the lower tiers to be a way for new players to catch up and unlock older cars
at the moment we are not planning to change the rewards (see above about new currency for when we will change)
as we want to keep the lower tiers of MP as a way for new players to get these cars and the higher tier rewards we can see from data are still useful for a large chunk of the player base.
I saw a number of questions were submitted around "Tweak MP knockdown system so it's more predictable without exaggerating how strong nitro is when it comes to performing them."
We want to tweak knockdownās overall, we made an attempt on it last year and didnāt get it quite right so reverted it and havenāt had a chance since then to go back. Hopefully we can do so in the near future, it has been a matter of resources to allow us to crack open the physics engine and play around with it again.
We had some questions along the line of "120 secs tracks in Multiplayer is what we are looking forward in future and also welcome to the Jungle season is one of the best"
Glad you like the welcome to the jungle season. We have tried 120 second tracks in MP before and received complaints from many players as the races felt overly long which is why we tend to focus on the 90s tracks. Now having said that I would not discount that we might try a MP event with these longer tracks however it is unlikely that we would have them as part of a normal rotation.
As a side note in this update we have 2 different MP events 1 using short tracks focused on having pure fun and chaos (who doesn't like smashing a car up) and another that uses longer tracks but is focused on pure skill (e.g. ghost etc)
I saw a question about "MP2 should give BPs of featured free try car"
MP2 is a good source of EIP for players, the free try cars as a general rule of thumb have sources from other areas of the game (e.g. SE). MP2 is meant to be a way by which you can try out cars you might not normally get and grab som
There was a brief question about having a way to try MP in different tracks, we are actually working on a lobby system that would allow you to create a room to play with your friends (think club races but open)
Another question that was submitted "Lower the milestone requirements for mp2"
We actually did an in depth analysis about milestones for MP and Clubs to see how many were being reached. At this point in time we are not looking at lowering the milestone requirements for MP2. We can see from the data the distribution of players completion in these events and are happy with how it is at the moment
Let me move on to the last section and talk about new users
So as I've mentioned in the past we know it can be hard for new users to catch up to players who have been playing for a while
to address this we are doing several things
Firstly we are running a test this update (so not all new users will see it) of offering a special car hunt just for new players at a set garage level
the car hunt has been rebalanced and is intended to make it easy for them to unlock and star up a new car
(don't worry it's an old car that the majority of people have so you are not missing out)
based upon how this test goes we will be rolling out this system wider as it will allow us to trigger events, offers etc for players based upon various criteria (e.g. garage level, car progression etc) so we will be playing around with this to give players more opportunities to catch up
The other thing we are working on at the moment is re-organizing the career section so that it is a more linear experience early on and tweaking the rewards so that we can help you collect and unlock the cars you will find most useful as you move from solo play into career to TLE/SE and MP
Another thing we are changing for new players is we are working on redoing our entire onboarding (all the prompts, click throughs etc) this is a huge task which will take time but is something we are planning to do incrementally.
While it doesn't help you catch up it will hopefully help new players understand the game better
There is a question about the free pass car and packs are not as useful
This is actually a fallacy since the free pass car is a single car that they would need to progress on were as with the packs they are actually able to progress on multiple cars (many of which are more useful at that time for them)
Ok going to end the chat for this week
thanks everyone for attending and see you next time
hidden shell
ELECTRIC SEASON A9DEVCHAT