Hello everyone,
We’re excited about a lot of upcoming things. We have PAx East coming up where we’ll be showing off a mountain of new content which will make its way into the player prototype shortly after and just as exciting is the revamp of balance testing a procedure.
As always we’ll be talking about this and more on twitch.tv/gunsoficarus at 3 pm eastern as well as taking your questions live!
Follow the jump to see the balance revamp, what the team has been working on, and our player of the week.
Balance Procedure Revamp
We’re coming to you today with what we hope will be some reassuring and exciting news about how we balance Guns of Icarus Online and our aims for the future of how we play the game together. Let’s talk about it!
After the last balance cycle, we can totally understand why everyone is frustrated – us included. Having reviewed the process, a lot of things were done wrong and communication across the board left a lot to be desired. We want to change that because these changes ought to benefit the players and community instead of causing developers and players unnecessary grief.
In order to help everyone out, we are going to change the way that we handle balance. The hope is that this will make changes less intimidating and keep everyone better informed as to what our goals are. Here’s a brief summary what we’re going to do.
Instead of making many changes at once, we’re going to deal with problems on a more regular basis, but balance changes will be made one or two at a time instead of in lumps of nine changes once a year. This will mean that our balance changes don’t fight each other as hard and will create a more regularly updated game environment.
The changes will be less significant in general so they will be less risky to implement. This will help the ease of adapting to the new balance and will ease the tracking of changes.
We will be tackling a confirmed problem statement during each cycle. This will be determined based on player feedback with corroborating data as we already do. We will be discussing with the community which statements we tackle and do our best to communicate our aims so that everyone is on the same page.
The hope is that the changes we’re making to our method should help everyone out. In order to get the ball rolling, we’re going to have a discussion about the first problem statement that we’re going to tackle for this first cycle. At the moment, we’re looking at the effectiveness of the Meta Mobula. We’ll take some time to gather data and think about it and see what we can do!
In the meantime, please send us your balance feedback. It doesn’t absolutely have to be related to our current problem statement by the way – we want to know all about the things you’re seeing in our balance so that we can generate new problem statements to prioritise and work on for future cycles. Go ahead and tell us what you think!
Team’s Weekly Progress
Howard:
Been doing some testing, some outreach for Pax and Alliance previewing!
Michael:
Has been testing and fleshing out new modes.
For skirmish:
- Battle Arena – Each team has a fortress that must be protected. If a fortress is destroyed, the other team wins. (no creeps or anything else)
- Skyball – A soccer / basketball-like mode. Drag the floating ball-barge into the opponent’s goal to score.
- VIP – A deathmatch variant, where only killing the enemy team’s VIP ship counts towards the score.
For Alliance:
- Protection (working title) – Coop VIP mode. One player ship must be escorted through the map and to the exit without it dying.
- Escape – Players race against the clock to the map exit, destroying numerous obstacles in their path.
Alex:
Testing, finalizing things for PAX, and making slow but steady progress on upgrading GoI to Unity 5.
George:
Working on the ability for Boss guns to charge before they fire.
Tom:
Working on Ambush and tutorials, with some minor bug fixes.
Eric:
Lore, new game modes, old game modes, and planning data collection for next balance cycle.
Player of the Week
Our player of the week is:
SteamBrains
“A-Star Level Leadership”
“Helped us out when our captain left.”
“Truly a 100% decent pilot.”