Brent "XLB"

There's a couple of different reasons we do that. Part of it is our job is to provide context for folks like Yogi and Rich. When we see players say, hey, this particular feature isn't working as well, or we see them talking about anything, we need to get into game, we need to test that. But it doesn't create a fair test if we're on a CIG account. Say for instance, if I go into Master Mode Squadron Battle and I'm on Bayor-CIG, everyone's gonna focus on me, right? They're immediately gonna go, oh my gosh, the CIG person, I'm gonna go attack them. That's not a player experience, right? That's not what other people are seeing when they join those matches. So it's important for us to go in on incognito accounts and test that that way.

It's the whole, the scientist doesn't want to disturb the experiment kind of thing.

Exactly. It's the prime directive.

I was going to say, we definitely see that, especially in live QA. If we're on a server, people are asking us questions, but we get hunted down. And so being on incognito accounts, we can go and reproduce the issues that you guys are having. And that can even be with master modes, like Bayor said, we join a match or something, we get pounced on pretty quickly.

We want to get what players are seeing when they actually go into these modes. So we want to use as authentic of an account as we can.

There's definitely a lot there. It can even just be on balancing, whether it be the tuning of the ship, how it handles, or just even health pools, or even the weapon gunnery changes that are coming. There's definitely a lot of things that can contribute to why 1v1s sometimes don't feel the best, but the furball or the Squadron Battle feels really good.

I'll mention a couple of key observations that I think players are having with it. Because we limited the velocity space with master modes, you're seeing people get this locked-in feeling where they're hitting these max speeds and they can't go beyond that, and their opponent is hitting the max speeds, and you get kind of stuck in a position where you can't get an advantage over them. That's that locked-in feeling caused by the velocity space itself. In addition to, a lot of 1v1s are what we call mirror matches, where you're facing the same ship. So the most common is going to be Gladius versus Gladius, right? And when you're facing the same ship, you have the exact same performance characteristics, so you can counterbalance one another pretty easily, and you end up with a head-on situation quite often. And this is something we're observing a lot of when players are talking about it. And we're advising Yogi, advising Rich that this is something that we're seeing. Players are talking about it a lot. And as for solutions, I'll let Yogi and Rich talk about that a bit more. But that's the information we're passing on.

Yeah, so we do a lot of iterative testing here on the vehicle team. So we're constantly testing new things. And Mike and his team did a really good job of adding the feedback. And then we discuss that feedback. But then we action that feedback in testing. And we try and find out what causes it. And it's never just like, oh, just move this thing here. It's always a really complicated combination of things that are quite difficult to get sometimes, and also difficult to basically implement in the game. Because we've got very complex mathematics behind a lot of the systems in the game. So is it just a case of just tweaking one number here and there? We've got to really break down and really understand the problem of what's causing it. As I said, we do a lot of play testing, we get a lot of feedback internally, but we also go to Spectrum and the forums and everywhere else to get a lot of feedback to understand the way and why the combat is the way it is.

Yeah, the feedback from master modes was very, very diverse. I mean, just the comments on the YouTube video that we had last time were very diverse. And then we're also monitoring Discords and so on. And what I usually do is I listen to the worries that the players have, but I let Bayor and Brent actually come up with an actual proposal, because for me it's very hard to filter through what's actually actionable feedback. But in terms of what we're trying, we absolutely agree that the 1v1s, they're a little bit meh at the moment, but this has to do exactly with the problem of the velocities. We want to not go into high velocities, because going into high velocities just causes one thing, and this is dragging out the fights more. The only class that really benefited from high velocities were light fighters. And in the legacy systems, there was not a lot of space for medium and heavy fighters. So in terms of what we're trying to make this more interesting in 1v1s, we're trying to break up that specific pattern where you have two ships circling each other and then they're feeling locked in. One of the tries that we did was actually adding more dynamic rotational speeds, so that when you hold boost, your boost pool needs to spool up first before it is expended, and then it actually not just gives you higher accelerations, it also gives you higher rotation rates and so on. That did a little bit, but not enough yet. We do hope that with other things, like smoothing accelerations out a little bit more so you don't get a super strong initial kick, but rather ramp them up, this will create enough diversity in the maneuvering so that we're getting to a better place with the 1v1s again. That said, six degrees of freedom is very hard to balance. Michael talked about the feeling of being locked in. Another worry that always comes up is the feeling of backstrafing. The backstrafing problem itself is just mathematically hard to solve, because you need to have an insane amount of acceleration to actually overcome a target that is accelerating backwards on you just to get around it, right? That's really, really complicated. So we're thinking about trying things out like X-shaped velocity spaces so that you can, for example, not fly as fast backwards as you can fly forwards. But what this exactly does with the dynamics is insanely hard to predict, even internally. Because even when we're playing internally, it produces some results, and sometimes we think, oh, yeah, this might work. But the actual test is only when we're playing with actual players and actually letting them play for a while, for a couple of days or weeks. So we can actually see if the new changes are creating some dominant strategies that then cannot be countered or something like that.

I mean, it doesn't really bring us down. We see it as a challenge, really. Because we take everyone's opinion on board. And it's our job, working with the other teams, to analyze the feedback. And it's fine that players react in a certain way if they don't like it when they first play it. But we've also seen people that didn't like it, and now they like it. So it's important to be balanced with the general view on the feedback. There's definitely some people that don't like it, but there's definitely some people that do. So it's about balance. I don't take the feedback personally, and that's a really important thing. It's not personal. It's about the feature itself, and it's up to us to make that feature as good as possible. So it kind of motivates me personally in a way. I'm not sure how other members of the team feel, but that's the way I feel about it.

I definitely see a lot of the feedback, whether it be negative or positive. And it's definitely helpful when we get the constructive feedback, when people give us more like, hey, have you guys thought about this? And it gives us a lot to think on versus just, oh, this is awful. So definitely keep that coming. Definitely keep all the good constructive stuff coming.

I do say, though, that ultimately we need to decide what we're going to do with the game. So even if you think that somebody else said what you think, it's always important. Sorry, I'm talking to our player base here, right? Please always put your feedback in. Write what you have, what you feel. The feel is super important for us, because you can argue about speeds or whatever, but if you forget to describe what your feeling is, then often it's harder for me to understand what's actually going on. But in general, I was very happy with the amount of feedback and the diversity of the feedback that we got. Even some of the negative feedback, because in the master modes AC mode, or experimental mode, we purposefully added some stuff in there just to try out how things feel. And some of the feedback, even when it was negative, quite often actually matched up with our expectations, which also helps us to know that we're on the right track.