Q and A with Gedden (06/05/14)

For anybody that didn't watch it live, or wants to hear it again - here is the Q and A with Gedden!

I'd appreciate all feedback, good and bad on how to make future Q and A's better.



I am considering taking questions in advance for future Q and A's but i'll make a seperate thread about that nearer to the time.

Hope this provides you with some answers to the questions on your lips!

I've just spent a long time putting together a 3300 word transcript to cover all the questions asked! Hope this helps. Its shortened a lot in places and removed a few of the reactionary comments from our team to cut down on the reading and get all of Geddens responses in.

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Present: Moles1909, h0SPY, Taylor, DevilsRath and Gedden.



Devil: did you catch the games between tiny and rav taylor?

Taylor: no

Moles1909: I think Gedden is going to nerf Nora Drain and Augur after watching that

Gedden: i’m looking at augu....

Taylor: don’t you dare shoebox augur

Gedden: Its not going to shoebox, and but it will be changed and not because of that game, I’ve already changed him

Taylor: have you decided what you’re going to do to him Gedden?

Gedden: yes and no

Taylor: can you confirm he’s not going to lose slam?

Gedden: yes, but he is losing bounce!

Taylor: he could lose bounce and reflexes I suppose. Will he get a nora decrease?

Gedden: yes and no, champions costs will be based on their abilities and stats – right now Augur should cost over 100 nora, but he won’t cost that much after revamp. Although there will be other champs that are really fun and spikey that do cost over 100 nora.

Taylor: will he cost around the same as his current cost?

Gedden: he should be around 75, I am aware of the first turn 75 nora sweet spot

Taylor: with regard to Nora Drain could you make it like limit to target a champion or just increase the cost?

Gedden: “ah thats actually not bad”

Devils: you’d have to reduce the cost if you did that

Gedden: “right”

From Movntarget: are spells and relics etc going to be looked at in the revamp?

Gedden: Good question! In the larger picture yes – however the initial revamp, we’ll only be changing spells and relics etc that need changing to not be broken. A good example of this is Blacklabel Brew which I previewed in the forums. Carouse will now give out a pale ale/brew which adds condition drunk – its not a good beer but it gets you drunk. Another example of this is Draksar racials which we’re still looking at, if that racial is changed we’ll have to change the spell taint.

Gedden: Spells need a lot of attention to themselves so thats why we’re going to look at them mainly after the initial champ revamp

Taylor: there are several spells and relics that do need changing though

Gedden: there is a lot of spells relics equips that need changing, for example we were talking about Marsh Song for FS, it used to be a 2x auto include and now it isn’t being run at all

Taylor: its just too slow for the current game

Gedden: right, one of the issues right now, after talking with corpse and Sokolov, corpse said something interesting to me, the damage after maljara basically went up, so champions started to NEED to get stuff like block, dodge, evasive, calcify just to stay alive. The burst damage got so high that spells like marsh song and other patient spells stopped getting used. I don’t think the game will be slower – I want to be clear on that!

Devils interrupts moaning: (whilst receiving stutter lag) OMG this lag blab la thats the worst i’ve ever seen it, i’m reconnecting

Moles1909: I do think the stutter lag is worse than its ever been right now

Gedden: I’ve got reports of that, i’m going to look into that again as soon as I have time, Champs are priority right now but last week we spent one whole day fixing bugs to show players we weren’t in the Bahamas, I know there are a lot of issues but that (stutter lag) is a big one on my list.

From omeletefrom: are abilities beyond racials being changed?

Gedden: yes, a couple of things cost of abilities is going to be more important than ever, all abilities will now have a cost associated with it and thats part of the magic juice which tells us what the ability is done and what its used for. That might not be exactly what you mean, but the cost of most abilities are being tweaked, which affects how champions play and which champions you may play. There were some abilities when playtesting that stuck out as I didn’t like the way they worked or that might be broken, for example I want to change defile corpse to be more useful, another one i’m changing is Dwarf Driven from when this champion has a dwarf adjacent it loses lumbering to this champion has lumbering unless there is a dwarf adjacent to it, that might not sound a lot different but it helps with issues behind the scenes. The main ones getting attention for changes are theme or racial abilities though

From PoxRevenge: are you going to be treating champions such as general corsien, coragh and the displaced in the same way as the WAG?

Gedden: every champion is now going to follow the same rules, i’m a really big believer in that! The first few generations of pox, things were costed based on stats abilities etc, so what i’m doing now is putting the champion into our internal admin and check its old cost and new cost (based on new ability costs) and I adjust the units to the point where its a playable rune. The displaced will follow exactly the same rules as the wag and other similar champs.

Taylor: will the similar rider abilities be costed the same?

Gedden: yes thats the plan, even stats will be costed the same for all champions, for example there will be a nora cost for 1 defence, a cost for 2 defence, a cost for 3 defence and all other stats. Even Range will affect the nora cost of a champion. Reason behind this is for example a champ with 3-4 range is not as good as a champ with 2-4 range

Taylor: agrees

Gedden: Ah! The whisperghast! Thats what I was going to mention, post revamp It currently has 4 upgrade abilities, phase shift, cast despoil, drain and voices in their head. The Nora cost for voices in their head is about 20 nora, its a really good ability wheras drain costs 2 nora, so with the new system you can choose which way you want to go and it will affect the choice, with the old system the champions got those upgrades for free.

Taylor: how would the revamp work with a champion like the firk mind shredder that has one ability?

Gedden: heres the thing, mind shredder is supposed to be a cheap champion, psychic ping is a good ability, ping rank 3 costs 25 nora, its a very expensive ability. But this guy i’d be willing to bet would only go down very slightly in cost but don’t hold me to that

Taylor: champs like that might need to be balanced then

Gedden: yes, i’d have to run it to know the exact cost, which wouldn’t be possible right now

Moles: this is what gedden has been talking about, he is going to apply discretion to runes that are in obvious need of rebalancing

Gedden: yes right, for example lumbering champs usually break the mould and they will probably be looked at with a bit of intuition

From DMrBadguy: what is your favourite moga?

Gedden: Buckethead – as when we got the art on him, we had to get it re-drawn several times as the artist quit and got a new job elsewhere and started to just phone it in as far as what he’s doing. We said we need an armoured moga - He basically just drew a moga with a pot on his head and it was awful so we asked him to re-do it, you can look at his artwork (Layne Johnson) he likes to draw hats on everything, so we’re like “even when he draws a moga he has to put a hat on it!” so we asked him to re-do it and out came the buckethead which we loved!

From h0spy: is Ride Down being nerfed?

Gedden: (laughs) oh yes. Here’s the deal, the fist of bastion as it stands right now he’d be an extremely expensive rune. Ride down will also be played with, but it is his signature ability, so the fist of bastion itself will also be changed somehow. I’m also changing the barbarian racials again completely from the ground up, as right now they are difficult to understand and you cannot find almost anywhere what the abilities actually give and there is hidden abilities all over the place.

Gedden: to summarize Ride down will be looked at and Fist of Bastion will be majorly overhauled.

question: has there been any champs that have been very difficult to balance in the new revamp?

Gedden: yes there was one, when a champ changes a lot, I like to do a big redesign, I mentioned him earlier - Whisperghast he can do all sorts of stuff right now, the version I have in front of me now though does not have voices in their head and he cannot cast spells like despoil – he does still have some of the drain and phase shifting stuff and the wormhole but he’s a melee champ! It takes a lot of time to do a lot of changes on the same rune like that. Generally I like to keep the same flavour on a rune but if there is a rune that is a damage dealing chaos tank ranged support unit, I say ok lets pick one and remake it. I’ll try to keep the same flavour based on what players want. Now I want the whisperghast to be an initiator melee champion.

Moles1909: very interesting perhaps you can post that in your next preview?

Gedden: right on we will try to do a few more previews this next week

Moles1909: all communication with the playerbase is helpful!

From iodomy: do you plan to add more forms of payment in the future?

Gedden: absolutely! We have it slated in to happen at the time of the next expansion, i’ve got cortices trying to find us a good company for SMS, we’re also looking at amazon payments and a few other things such as the steam stuff we want to go back to

Moles1909: very glad to hear that, will it cost more to pay by sms

Gedden: We don’t want to make it so SMS costs more, this is a challenge but hopefully we can find a good provider for this service

From h0spy: are you planning to do anything about repeat scammers using alternate accounts to scam new players.

Gedden: its more Senshu and cortices handling this, but I am aware of whats going on with this recently. We have no way to police third party trades, every time we’ve ever tried to get involved on third party sites previously it has bitten us on the ass every single time, if it happens in our area such as the forums we may be able to look into things if we can verify it. The only way to avoid being scammed is to only do even trades

Moles1909: I’d advise people never give out your password and never give runes before payment.

Gedden: I know this is a cliché but nobody at Desert Owls will ever ask for your password as we do not need it, if I wanted to access your account I could. I don’t I want you to keep playing!

Moles1909: To make one last point on scammers, is it possible to attempt to ban all their accounts.

Gedden: we have a one button hammer of justice which bans all their accounts, and we have other methods of getting their main accounts. If we ban somebody they will have done something really bad, we don’t dish them out easily.

H0spy: moans about somebody thats made a lot of scams recently

Moles1909: Discuss this more with senshu, as we have other questions and don’t want to blacklist on the stream

Question: does 3 defence on a melee champ cost the same as 3 defence on a range champ

Gedden: yes! However the ranged champ will cost more because of its range, defence doesn’t cost as much as range either

Taylor: would a 3 range champ cost as much as a 6 champ?

Gedden: I have an algorithm based on a heuristic which pivots upon how many squares you can hit, so simply a 1-5 champion would be more expensive than a 3-5 champion and there might be a balance in there for champions that have really high range such as 7-8

Taylor: so for example Timothy the Vile with 5-7 range

Gedden: if he keeps 5-7 he’ll be really expensive yeah!

Moles1909: laughs, so the lich King with 4-8

Gedden: laughs, lich king got a lot of updates in the last 2 years, oblivion shield... the lich king is a release champ and oblivion shield isn’t a release ability! A high ranged champion with teleport shouldn’t need crazy defences!

From Iodomy: what buff will the goblin stickyfingers be getting?

Gedden: Stickyfingers!? Uh... I have not reviewed this guy yet....

From DMrBadguy: which moga would you be?

Gedden: (in character) Dirge, Moga Lord! In that voice too I mean why wouldn’t you?

Taylor: and i’ll drown you!

All: laugh

question: will ability combos cost more than abilities on their own

Gedden: its costed by deltas, each rank has a cost for example regeneration 1, 2 and 3. Regen costs 3, 6 and 9 nora for each rank. If you had Regen 2 and you switched it to regen 3 it’d cost 3 more nora, if you swapped from regen 2 to regen 1 it’d cost 3 nora less. This is what I wanted to happen with upgrades to make it a more fair system so upgrades costs are not ignored anymore and we only add deltas

Moles1909: so to summarize each ability is costed on its own but if you think it has too strong a combo, you can play with its cost

Gedden: right !

Question: Did you see apostate’s PoxNora warfare, do the greens plan to run community events in the future?

Gedden: I know Moles is running his tourneys right now and Senshu is giving out player awards for it, so we will look to support players running events, if apostate wants to include some rewards he can get in touch and we’ll see what we can do!

Taylor: free rune packs for all?

Gedden: something, we’ll figure it out, if anyody involved with running that is listening feel free to start a conversation with Senshu and we’ll see what we can hook you up with.

Taylor: thats good because i’m going to win that.

Moles1909: Senshu did also confirm in our previous Q and A that he is looking to run some tourneys and community events in the near future as soon as the owls are less busy.

Gedden: yes, i’m totally behind all of that!

Moles1909: do we have any new questions

H0spy: not yet

Gedden: ok let me tell you about a rune late to battle, it has the face of a previous designer we let go a long time ago, can you guess why its called that?

Taylor: lateness?

Gedden: precisely check the flavour text on that rune, its all there.

from iodomy: what plans do you have for the titans?

Gedden: this isn’t a final decision, but i’m thinking of the making the titans massive characters with insane stats and really high nora costs, something to set them totally apart! We are also thinking of single player users with this one, as they would like to have a big boss champ to help them against bosses. I want to make it so when a titan goes down it is like wow thats a titan.

Gedden: there will be beefier champions with high nora costs, do you know what I mean by spikey? A spikey rune is a crazy beater, I like the idea of having them, but the costing needs to be high enough.

Devils: I’ve always been a big fan of nora gen, under SoE this was systematically nerfed and counters made harsher. Now you rarely see nora gen.

Gedden: there were a few influences when making pox, I liked final fantasy tactics on gameboy and command and conquer generals. One of the things I liked about that game was the fact you could self generate your resource. I like the idea of having a game where you can capture things, but also if you play vigilantly you can provide your own resources that way too. But each faction has their own way of doing this, for example Ironfist with the Miner and Mine, Savage Tundra with the Nora Beasts and Forglar Swamp with Marsh Song

Moles1909: points out the nora cow costs over 60 nora

Gedden: WHAT?!

Gedden: With Nora gen, I like the idea behind it, for example Essense capture I see as a UD way to generate nora, I don’t like it on a Brutality Barbarian.

Gedden: post revamp the games may not be as much about burst damage, which may also help nora generation.

From xxLordQxx: Will dark pact be fixed to not work on friendly spells? Will the WAG be fixed to cause bloodied on death?

Gedden: I’ll tackle the wag first, he’s been completely remade – at the moment i’m still playing with a few ideas for the wag, at the moment he is basically a champ that becomes a gahlroon with impervious after he dies for less nora, one of the ideas I have for him, he can still become a gahlroon but he has to earn it, it can be prevented him becoming the gahlroon. Is that enough of an answer?

Moles1909: yes it leaves us wanting more in the next preview!

Gedden: confused with the question regarding dark pact

H0spy explains that there is currently a bug with the ability dark pact that triggers on friendly spells like sac and ret as opposed to the spell

Gedden: (checks the code for dark pact) ah this is what I mean about the unification! If an ability is going to cast a spell, why isn’t it doing the exact same thing or why doesn’t it have a different name to the spell, that will be fixed (creates bug ticket). In the longrun I want it so when something works one way, it works in the same way for everything!

Gedden: let me ask you guys a question! Is there a reason why the WAG is called the WAG?

All: no idea

Gedden: unless there is a reason why its called the WAG i’ll be changing the name

Moles1909: somebody in the UD forums might know more about this

Gedden: ok, well if anybody knows let me know, if I don’t find out i’ll be changing the name!

Gedden: I’m getting hungry, so i’ll go soon, but to address one thing mentioned earlier. About updating abilities, if an ability doesn’t have an effect that bugs me to no end, recently there have been a lot of those, so they will be getting touched, at least so you’ll be able to see what happens when the spell does go off!

Moles1909: One last thing, I tried the new tutorial, it is a massive improvement, it actually teaches new players something about the game. It tells them pretty much what they need to know.

Gedden: we’re also planning to give new players a chance to have like an extended “hand holding” period, for example we’ll guide them to try the dailies or the training grounds to give them a better understanding of the game when they first begin.

Moles1909: ok thanks for coming on, next time i’ll get a list of questions from the community beforehand and try to run a bit more professionally.

 

A transcript of the qa would be nice

 

I'm not going to be doing this as its over an hour long. There isn't much to watch so just playing the youtube video and listening works well.

 

Summary of key points?

 

I'll work on the transcript later on this evening, but it may take upwards of 48 hours for me.

 

That'd be awesome if you could!

 

Accent and foreign language, combined with weird background noise makes it impractical and difficult for me to listen to it. In essence I would have to sit down and make a really concentrated effort to see it.
It would take me 1-2 hours to see it.
Reading a transcript would take me 5-10 minutes.

I understand why you do not want to make a transcript of the QA. but I really appreciate KTCAOP taking the effort

 

or just the questions ?

 

I guess I didn't think of issues such as that, Great that KTC is willing then!

 

6-5-14?? Did you time travel, and then return to share this spicy nugget of fun?

Or is it a much more boring explanation, like day 1st and month 2nd? Thanks for indulging my curiosity.

 

(Europe)

 

Wait! So I have been freely associating with... well... ugh... Europeans all this time???

 

Ah, Gedden's accent makes me feel much closer to home. Though in response to Dark Jello, us in America have been known to wear inappropriately small amounts of clothing while being rather out of shape as well.

 

Cliffs Notes for this long interview.....We'll see costing of champs follow a metric more closely; basically what older players are familiar with until we threw the metric away around Grimlic's Descent. The developers acknowledged the uber/unkillable/"too efficient" factor that arose with champs being stepped up with each release. There are some passing references to plans to address this in a fairly global revamp. There also seems to be some serious attempt at redrawing themes to eliminate or at least tone down naked power amplification and/or abilities that dominate without having any offsetting deficiencies.

They also touched on their reticence to get involved in scamming and their reasons why (think police responding to a domestic dispute and how often the police get burned in those messy situations). However, it sounds like they have a nuclear button for shutting down scammers that they may be more willing to use in the future.

What I took away was that a lot of sacred cows are going to be hamburgers.

 

Being an American is tops! BK is so much better than a basket of "healthy" garbage. That whopper makes me salivate.

Viva el Yanqui Doodle!!!

Hamburgers are supreme. See above.

 

Prude psycho on the left can't touch the liberated hotty on the right. The things she can do with that tongue ring and them rolls, booya!

 

Also, did some quick entymology research aka google and found:
wag (n.1)
"person fond of making jokes," 1550s, perhaps a shortening of waghalter "gallows bird," person destined to swing in a noose or halter, applied humorously to mischievous children, from wag (v.) + halter. Or possibly directly from wag (v.); compare wagger"one who stirs up or agitates" (late 14c.).

 

These maps certainly shed some light on the root cause of disagreement between America and Europe:

 

Thats how Europeans see Europe aswell, you did however forget the land of the sheep lovers

 

I think the Europeans may now recognize Florida and I think Americans can place Scotland but good job DarkJello.