Duncan Bunting

So Gun Rush, as you can see, as Sam gets a kill, his weapon changes. His gun will change. You've got 16 levels that you work through. And this mode, other than being a favorite amongst us in the team from other games, it's where we used to prove out our refactor of our spawning and loadout modules. So the switching out of weapons, the changing of your armor, you'll notice that everyone in the match is wearing a different color armor. Previously that wasn't possible. It proved out a lot of technologies and got one of our favorite modes in the game as our first experimental mode.

SBo: So the Gun Rush progression is essentially we didn't want to start people off on the easiest guns and just go all the way to the hardest from there onwards. We didn't want to go from the easiest to the hardest, and that was it. We wanted to basically start you off with easier guns, SMGs, LMGs, and then every one or two easy guns, we would then switch it back to a harder one to allow people to catch up, essentially. Obviously, it doesn't work because some people are just really good at snipers, which makes it not a great stopgap. But that's the overall intention of it.

Experimental modes are limited time modes that rotate through a patch cycle. So out here on PTU right now, we have almost all experimental modes available, but in live, it'll be one at a time. But those modes are used to prove out features, gather feedback, or just have fun with something. Like if we have a wacky idea, which obviously won't work in the PU, we can't just switch your weapon out in the PU, right? But we can do that in Arena Commander. We can have a bit of fun with it.

But no, this patch was primarily meant to be a bunch of refactors. There wasn't meant to be so much content in it. We got some more time, we managed to get a bunch more stuff in there. Gun Rush is the one that we were most passionate about to get in because we thought it would be pretty fun and successful, and PTU has kind of proven that. I don't think there's been a time I've went in PTU and there hasn't been a lobby of Gun Rush going on.

But what about the weird kind of off-the-wall stuff? Are those the kind of things that are rife for experimental modes?

Absolutely. With Arena Commander, we can take more... I guess liberties is the word with the engine. It's a simulation, right? A simulation within the simulation. We can put stuff in there that's just for fun, right? We can focus on the fun. So if that silliness is fun, why not? If it's not fun, maybe not.

So imagine you had to spec out a game mode with the foam dart weapons now. What are your first instincts? Should we keep zero damage? Where does the gameplay come from with zero damage?

Or I'm thinking even more out of the box, like maybe you've got an EVA race where you've got the dart gun and you shoot it and it has increased push. So it pushes your opponents off to the side. Maybe you're trying to get through some freight boxes or whatever it may be, and you push them and they go out of bounds or something like that.

SBo: That is an issue that has been fixed but isn't in the PTU yet.

Unfortunately, we rolled the lightest gravity map. So on this, you need to be a little bit more mindful of your acceleration and whatnot. But also, there is a bug right now in that you can pull a wheelie with a tank.

SBo: Yeah, currently you can do a lot of styling.

It was fixed last night, but we are on that mode where Sam is now pulling wheelies.

That's not to say that there can't be a mode where you're on an incredibly low G. But that's not what that's supposed to be.

SBo: It's a lot more floaty than it is meant to be at the moment.

Don't get us wrong, it is meant to be a little bit floaty. Like being Yela, that's 0.2 gravity, which is really low, so you do have to manage your speeds going over these hills.

I'm going to go ahead and jump on this one here and say that we have an entire team dedicated to processing, but two, really, teams dedicated to processing and ingesting this feedback. We have the Player Experience team and, of course, our community team. And a big chunk of what they do is to correlate that kind of data, and to process it, and to verify it, because it's not always super accurate. To verify its accuracy, and then to get that into the proper hands: people like Duncan, people like Sam, if it's Arena Commander related, PU designers and stuff like that, and even Squadron designers, if it's something that might affect or benefit that. So to the amount, it's not like I can put a number or a percentage on it, but I can tell you there are literally two teams, two complete teams that both have worldwide presences, dedicated to gathering and collecting and processing that information.

I think I can probably speak for everyone. Those teams are incredible. I'm in the vehicle balance syncs and discussions being had, all the considerations being had before any change makes it. It's awesome to see.

And we have a number of internal resources. People that work here are very involved in this stuff, like Yogi Klatt and Salty Mike, folks who have worked here for years and been on the payroll.

Oh, yeah. Well, and I mean, private lobbies is something that really hurt my heart from the standpoint of I was running the team when we had to remove them. And it wasn't something that we actually removed. It was we had changed over some details that Duncan will probably get into, some details with the lobby system so that we couldn't continue to support the private matches. Now, it was always the thing was next quarter, we'll bring it back. Next quarter, we'll bring it back. Next quarter, we'll bring it back. And it was always something got, the resource got taken, something got missed or whatever. So finally, with a little bit of collaboration with our new friends at Turbulent, we've been able to bring back online private lobbies. So Duncan, do you want to talk any more about that? Maybe some details over why it went away?

Yeah, so it went away essentially because we did that big refactor where we got the friends and party systems to the new system that we've got that you're using in the PU now. And that just simply wasn't compatible with what we had in Arena Commander. So the option at the time was we delay this or we shut down private lobbies for now and we revisit it for the next thing. And as Sean says, priorities got shifted, people get moved on to different things and it just kept getting pushed out. Now, thankfully, we're working on it. And we didn't want to just bring them back. We want to do better with them. We want to give more. So private lobbies aren't called private lobbies anymore. They're called custom matches. And custom matches leans into you'll be able to customize more things about it. And we've got so much more planned for it. For now, we're getting what was old back with private lobbies. But we've got so many ideas, so much requests from the community for what we can add there as well.

Yeah, so this leans into the whole "we want to do better with the private matches." So the almost obvious thing is letting you arrange your teams beforehand. So we've got the idea of you've got a party leader, you've got moderators that can help switch people between teams and whatever. And then you've obviously got the members that join. And then for right now, we've got that team organization. And we're hoping to get some custom settings in and expand upon that. But yeah, bringing back org content to private matches is such a big thing for us because we knew how much orgs used it. We saw the weekly posts on Spectrum like, hey, we're running an org event. Who wants to join? And as soon as the private lobbies went down, that went away. And I'd get pinged constantly about, hey, when are we getting them back for that specific use? And we really want to start accommodating that again.

Yeah, because basically the competitive scene basically shut down without private matches, without being able to customize the match parameters. And it's something that we always want them to be able to have within AC, because ultimately the PU is a multiplayer experience. AC is played best in multiplayer with friends, and we want that to be as easy as possible. And honestly, being able to set up your own little scenarios, I think that's really cool.

So there's actually a lot to this question. Now, right now, behind the scenes, we do have, there is a ranking. And behind the scenes, it works here and there, but it's really not as simple as just a single value. We've come a long way in matchmakers in the game industry overall, where it's got to be region-dependent, it's got to be skill-dependent, it's got to be time-dependent. There's so many different angles of matchmaking. Sort of with that, Duncan, do you want to talk a little bit about what we're going to do for these guys?

Yeah, so as you guys know, we have the leaderboards that are currently online and they haven't really been representative of, well, leaderboards for a while now. The algorithm behind them broke. People have found many exploits behind them. So we want to completely rework those at the same time as doing this proper matchmaking. And that matchmaking is the thing that will have to come later because it needs more help from Turbulent on the online side. But the competitive community in Arena Commander and Star Marine is so passionate, I'll say, about leaderboards and that matchmaking behind it. And we really want to hone in on that and especially push Squadron Battle and Duel to be our primary competitive modes because we think those better reflect those as well.