Jens Lind · FPS Engineer

Where to start? So definitely a concern internally too, right? So I would say visually very strong at the moment. If you ping someone, as you saw in the video, you see them and almost nothing else because it's such a strong visual. So definitely that needs tuning. There's a lot of work left to do on that. There's the time it takes to charge up the ping. There's whether you should be able to see through all types of occlusion. Can you have thicker walls, stuff like that, to make encounters different. Then we've given tons of parameters for designers to tweak, like pierceability, range, signal-to-noise ratio. My radar or my scanner better than your anti-scanner, whatever you want to call it. I think those are the kind of things we can do on the technical side, the engineering side. But then at the end of the day,

Zach · FPS Designer

Yeah, so obviously we don't want to make it busted. That was a very strong version that we showed off; we said gameplay balancing in progress, I believe. But it's the case of how emissions tie into this, right? So for example, we have the idea of decoys and jammers potentially in a suit. Those could be components inside suits that essentially make your emissions much lower, maybe practically invisible. That's obviously going to be down to gameplay balance. And if you're in a heavy armor, maybe you have heavy emissions. But there's always a forward and backward with this, right? So if you're light and you're invisible and you scan, for example, a Heavy, you should be able to see him in theory. But if there's a Heavy, for example, and he scans you and you're in more of a suit with a much lower emission, or you're in a state with much lower emissions, you potentially might not come up. So there's so many things we can do to balance it, and we essentially showed it at its strongest, right? When we communicate something out like that, we always want people to see it in potentially its strongest state and things like that. So gameplay balance, all of that is in flux, it's tweakable, it's changeable. So obviously we don't want PvP to be trivialized by anything like radar becoming a crutch, essentially, right? We're completely aware of that, and obviously we're conscious of that. We play the game ourselves and we wouldn't want that happening to players.

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community

First of all, I don't think it should go without saying, but we always get new people every week, every month, every year, so it bears repeating that nothing you've ever seen on any ISC, SCL, CitizenCon, Pillar Talk, we've done so many shows of this, is ever final. We've never ever showcased anything that's final. That's not what we do. We are always showcasing our work in progress. We'll wait until it's presentable. We'll wait until it gives an almost complete picture of what we're trying to do. But we're not the people who wait until it's done to show it to you. We're not the people who wait until it's done to put it in the game for testing. That's just not who we are at CIG. So it's always important to remember that whatever you're seeing, wherever you're seeing it, is always this work in progress. And for something like scanning and radar, it's much easier to take it all the way to the max, and then prune it down like a tree. It's harder to add twigs back to a tree after you've cut them down. So you start with as big a tree of features as possible, and then you start pruning it down through the anti-scanner. So it's just much easier to bring it down and find all the ways to impact it and stuff.

Jens Lind · FPS Engineer

I was going to mention one more thing. If you think of it from a PvP point of view, it's more like if you do a ping to find people, like Zach was saying, you might see people that have the right thing, but they will see you, right? So you're basically going, it's like a taunt. I'm saying I'm going to check if there's anyone here, but I also know probably everyone's now going to know that I'm here. So it's a bit of a tricky beast for PvP that I feel is definitely tuned more towards PvE.

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community

I think anybody that's ever worked for any MMO in the world is going to tell you that PvP tuning is never done. It's just this constant, ever-evolving, ever-changing beast.

Zach · FPS Designer

That's a nice thing, right? Because if you really, really dislike radar scanning, it's like, okay, you can put the armor on which is heavily resistant to that. So you will be able to have the player expression that you want, to be able to get the gameplay that you want to facilitate.