There are also people who can only jump in and play for an hour a night. How do you balance the difficulty of something, not just investigations but Siege and everything, for people who can't dump five or six hours into a play session?
TL;DRBalancing for short play sessions is hard, and while Siege was tuned through playtesting, markers are needed for now, with hopes to phase them out or replace them eventually.
Yeah, I think it's definitely a challenge, especially in our game when you can go and essentially choose to do whatever you want to do with your time. So sometimes even those players who play for a long period of time only have two hours on a day, right? And they want to hop in and get something done. And for us, when we're looking at balancing things around that, it's very hard to please everybody in every scenario. And I think Siege is a great example where perhaps the players wouldn't have seen us do this, but internally we did lots of playtesting and lots of changes to markers or information provided, and tried to find a happy medium between making it too obvious what you need to do and too difficult to find out what you need to do. That was definitely a time, at least for me, where I got to go through that iteration process and see what that is like. But for the rest, outside of Siege and big events like that, we sort of need markers in the game at the moment, with the way it is currently. But I think everybody wants them to be phased out more and more, or maybe even find an alternative to things like markers, giving players information through text and them having to decipher what that means, and then perhaps when you get closer, you get a marker. There's loads of ideas, loads of things we could eventually switch it to. But I think for now, markers might need to stay around for the foreseeable future.