LoCarb Gamescom Chat and Competition

We caught up with LoCarb the Creative Lead on Defiance over at Gamescom and spoke about what is coming up for Defiance and gets his opinion on some of the recent announcements.

We received a load of questions in our collection thread but couldn't get through them all, we will approach LoCarb soon to see if he can take some time to address them.

Coming up on Defiance

Coming up on Defiance are four major things. Supreme Weapons which is a new rarity above Legendary, Rarity Bonus Re-rolls, Private Instances and Shrill Enemies which are exclusive to Silicon Valley arkfalls.

Shrill Enemies

Shrill Enemies will show up in arkfalls in Silicon Valley. Right now Shrill Emergence arkfall can be found on PTS. 

No pursuits tied to them, in the next few updates planning to have story missions revealing what the Shrill are.

New instanced area, won't be seen on the main map. Will reveal that once more art is done.

Arkforge Cap

The reason why the Arkforge cap will be introduced is that a small number of people have ways to obtain a large amount of Arkforge in a short amount of time, and this needed to be addressed before the introduction of the new rarity tier upgrades so that more people couldn't take advantage of it.

To arrive at the Arkforge cap numbers they calculated an average weekly Arkforge number that very few people reach. They may need to look at how Patron Passes affect this number and adjust base don that. The majority of players won't get near the Arkforge weekly cap.

I didn't want the cap made public yet, but it was needed in the PTS build, and it was revealed due to the way the UI works. If we find in the future that people aren't reaching the numbers through exploits we might turn it off or adjust the number.

Destromathe has posted notes which indicate the cap has been raised from 250/week to 500/week as well as costs for rarity bonus re-rolls and supreme upgrades reduced.

Upgrade Rarity Arkforge Cost

Upgrading the rarity of an item from Legendary to Supreme is 9000 Arkforge for a 100% chance, people see that number and are shocked. However the price drops dramatically for lower percentages and can be obtained at them. For example 50% chance is 2000, that gives you 4 chances to upgrade for the same cost as 100% chance. Statistics could see good returns at 30-40% chances based on the cost and percent chance.

Destromathe has posted notes which mention the upgrade cost has been reduced.

The game is based on RNG systems, but it's hard to feel good about a rare random chance of something happening after a string of failures.

People tend to think about the worse case scenario, for example players had a strong reaction to Hunter Requisitions. The weekly allowance was generous, and now people see they aren't using them in the way they thought they would. The new upgrade will be similar.

People may think we are here to screw them over, but we're not. We're here to give you guys a great experience, but at the end of it we do need to get paid.

Early on in the design there was discussions about destroying a weapon if it failed to upgrade, this was rejected.

PC players are used to hovering over things and seeing tooltips explaining them. The UI has sacrificed a lot of information to cater for consoles.

Some players don't think we understand them. We do understand them better than they think we do.

Although we do recognise that there are some things we don't know about so as well as playing a lot ourselves we hear how people in our clans play and we observe people playing.

15 Day Patron Pass Cost

The reason that the 15 day Patron Pass price was reduced was because of inconsistent pricing. Most subscriptions give discounts for the longer term and 15 day was 50% of the 30 day. It was either take out 15 day or increase the price by 100 bits. 

They saw a number of people going for the 15 day one instead of the 30 day, and it was gaming the system. They would like to see players going for the longer term ones but admit any time there is a change to the money aspect we expect to see some resistance.

I would have liked to show the exact cost on the store, but it would be a large change. The reason why it is designed that way is because of the way consoles charge money.

The Future

They've seen over the past few months the game become more stable and add additional content. In the future would like to see more work on progression but acknowledges the team is small and tasks have to be prioritised.

My biggest goal right now is to make it more like a MMO, it's always been a online shooter that was multiplayer, had social aspects but didn't have what you expected in a MMO.

Highlighting that the instanced events are for a small amount of players, and that players are interested in larger scale events.

They first started putting supremes in 9 months ago, that's how long it has taken to get the system where they are happy with rolls and guns at the high levels.

Gamescom Code Giveaway

This week we will open a giveaway for several Jager Prime and ... and Taxes codes for people who create guides on Defiance Data during the time period.

Prizes

• 8x Jager Prime 
• 7x ... and Taxes 

One reward per winner, rewards will be random either Jager Prime or and Taxes, you can't request one specifically. Only one submission will count as an entry, rewards will be delivered by the Defiance Data mail system.

Dates

• Wednesday, August 12 to Friday, August 21

For more specific countdowns please see the calendar on the top of the website.

Topics

Guides can be on any Defiance topic that you feel we don't cover, or have out of date information for. 

Eligibility

Any legitimate submission is eligible, we'll obviously remove blank guides or ones with little to no content.

Creating a Guide

Visit the Guides section from the navigation bar at the top of the site, Community->Guides, you need to be signed in with a Defiance Data account to create a guide.

If you have any suggestions as to how to improve the guide creation process, or the design of the pages, just send me a mail.