Michael "Baior" Smith

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.

I think this has more to do with the realities of how games are developed. Things like quantum interdiction speak very strongly to the quantum travel experience. And when we created master modes, we did this roughly in parallel with a new quantum travel experience for Squadron. The thing is that although these things work together, we're bringing them separately to the PU. And quantum dampening is not a thing that is of big importance in Squadron. So that feature in combination with master modes was just not ready. But the thing is, if we don't move tech that's ready over early, then we're dragging a lot of legacy with us all the time. So basically for master modes, let's say for IFCS, that means that large parts of the code are doubled there because we know which parts we can throw away when master modes is active and we know which parts we can keep. If we keep too much legacy stuff around for a long time, it just increases the maintenance effort a lot. And also, the game is not finished, so these things just happen. Engineering and game design is hard. It's really, really hard.

What Yogi said is there aren't other players using QD in Squadron 42. And we're moving a Squadron 42 feature over to the PU. So it wasn't in the original master modes mandate because it wasn't necessary in Squadron 42. Now it will be considered and now it will be addressed in the PU, is what he said. He did not say it wasn't important.

It's also important to consider that our team is part of these conversations pretty early on, and we call out this stuff really early, and it could be developed in a way that, let's focus on master modes and then figure this stuff out later. But we mentioned these things earlier. We mentioned how do you tackle a ship? How does the Mantis work in this context? And Yogi and Rich are already thinking about that ahead of time, even if they're not necessarily solving those problems right away. They're like, how does this fit into the overall picture anyway? And so we already consider those things and we call those out extremely early in the process so that they are part of the overall design, even if we don't get to them right away.

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.

Okay. So I spoke with PT about this, what players mean by that, because technically there is no difference in what kind of flight performance your ship has between SCM and NAV mode, and NAV mode is actually a little bit better because you have a wider velocity space available to you. What we think it is, and Michael, correct me if I'm wrong, is the absence of the overly high G advantages you got from tricording in the past. The problem with tricording was always that you get more acceleration when you go forward, left and up, right? Because the accelerations on each axis actually accumulate. The problem is that the more acceleration a ship already has and the more spherical its tuning is, that advantage can get up to 70% in the worst case, right? So that's why we cut down on these accelerations. And this basically deprived racers and high-skilled PvP players of their capabilities to quickly evade, because they couldn't access that acceleration anymore. So I believe that is part of why it is perceived that you're less agile in racing. Would you agree, Michael?

I would, and it's really an important question to understand our process a little bit, because we see comments like that, and it's easy to go, well, that's just wrong, and just dismiss that. But in reality, what we do is, well, why are they saying that? Let's look into the process. We understand the context of what they're saying and figure out what exactly is going on. Yogi is exactly right. It's the tricording issue. You got a lot more acceleration from that, and it's much more noticeable if you're going faster. So it seems like when you're in NAV mode, you have less control, even if the accelerations aren't necessarily different between NAV mode and SCM. So we don't dismiss feedback, even if it has sort of the wrong statements in it. We try to understand that context and understand what are they getting at? What could they do that they can't do anymore? And try to figure out if there's a problem there that we can address.

At the moment, not. Honestly, the team, we don't know yet if we're keeping this or not. At the moment, we don't see any reason to actually allow that, because we're really fast and we would like at least the opportunity that the counter gameplay against missiles in NAV mode has more to do with your maneuvering than just putting out some countermeasures. Actually, maybe Brent and Bayor, could you talk about how this is currently being used in the Arena Commander modes?

Sure. What we see is that people are using missiles to counter someone moving into NAV mode. Typically, when somebody is moving into NAV mode, there's a spool-up period. If you're paying attention to the signature, you can actually see an EM spike on the ship when they go into NAV mode. And so people who are skilled and understand what that looks like can already start to spool up their missiles to counter that. Or they can watch the speeds. They can watch the rate of closure or the rate of separation that they're seeing, which is available on the UI. And they can start to lock on a missile and launch one to counter that and force them either to drop out of NAV mode to launch countermeasures, or to figure out a manual way of evading, or take a hit from a missile. There are some balance things I think we can probably talk about in the future to figure out how to get that to work a little bit better, but it is interesting gameplay and it does add a little more spice to the use of missiles than we had before.

And some of the behavior I've seen is folks dropping chaff and then switching into NAV mode, which is a tactic that's viable because the chaff can't be fired in NAV mode. And I want to be clear, you're saying that right now the thought is that it's not usable in NAV mode. That doesn't mean that some very compelling argument can't be made and change our minds.

Yeah, and that's a really good point. This is about the now. When we talk, we're talking about the now. We don't sit here and go, we're never going to do this or we're never going to do that. We've made certain decisions based upon things we've learned and things we've seen along the way, but those things change. So we're definitely not afraid of changing that rule in that circumstance. It's one of the things that's open. We thought it might work that way, but if it doesn't work that way in game and the feedback says otherwise, we can change it.

Usually what I'm looking for to pass on to Yogi and Rich is ways to deepen what we have. So what I see of what we created is a framework. And so now once we have a framework, we need to find ways to add depth to it later, to add individuality to these individual archetypes and these individual ships. And so that's the kind of feedback I'm looking for: somebody specifically talking about, hey, I'm trying to use my Khartu-al, my San'tok.yāi, and I'm finding it not very effective in these specific ways, and it doesn't match the role as described. I'm looking to pass that kind of information off. Or I'm using my Vulture and it's basically impossible for me to get out of a combat scenario. I never do. I'm always trapped into it. Those kinds of things where players are presenting problems that I can then pass off to the team with context and go, okay, this is what we're seeing players observing. Does this match the design we're going for? Maybe we need to make some adjustments there. And it's that deepening. How can we add further depth? How can we add further skill checks? How can we actually make this a little bit better of a skill curve, a little deeper, all that kind of stuff. That's usually what I'm looking for.

But just to add on that, there was some more to it, right? Because what we're also getting from Michael's team are sometimes recordings of actual flight combat that happens, which we can then analyze and go back and forth. We're getting KDR graphs and so on. So sometimes we see that something is wrong in the data. There's a lot of stuff that is going on. It's not just the qualitative stuff that Michael just described. It's also quantitative data.

Yeah, that's an important part. I do want to mention that we don't just look at Spectrum and Reddit or YouTube videos and go, this is how it is. We compare what people are saying with what we observe in the data from our behavior analytics, too. We look at kill-to-death ratios. We look at accuracy values. And we combine that with our own observations in the game. So sometimes people might be like, multi-crew ships are terrible. Then we'll look at the kill-death ratios and we'll go, well, looks like they're doing really well. And then we'll go into the game and look and go, wow, everyone just avoids them. And that provides that kind of context. We don't ever look at a singular piece of information and go, this is the truth of the experience. We look at everything we possibly can to provide all of that context.