Jimmy

So much this. Testing and feedback is super important at every stage of development, and we really do value it and listen to it when, y'know, actual testing is involved. We don't, however, put much stock in hot takes, and historically it's been pretty easy to tell when posters haven't tested the changes they are posting feedback on. If you have concerns about Titan Weapons, etc, then you need to spend some time actually testing the changes once they hit the public test server and posting your feedback. Decisions are made by those who show up.

That's actually exactly the point. Most of what you mention is from before the snap - Blasters had a heavily unfinished balance pass in the i24 beta which has required quite a lot of follow-up to get right.

Halloween Atlas Park has received a Halloween makeover The Halloween event has been enabled (on Shadow only)

Not until it hits test. And that's not because we're trying to hide them, it's just not convenient at all to post something like that on the forum (try using the tables.. it's not fun). If there's a specific number you're after I can look it up. ehm It's in Page 6.

Willpower has a good one too! I agree, though. Rad is the example to look at (but we also wouldn't want them all to be clones).

This has been discussed a little bit and is definitely something people are interested in looking at, but we've not currently got any plans (as there's a lot of things on the list of things people are interested in looking at 🙂 ). Take a look through the live patch notes and tell me where we've made characters useless. I'm not interested in hearing about your experiences with nerfs on live, because obviously we didn't have anything to do with that. Don't worry, we're well aware that most players don't post on the forums, and we're also well aware when posts are all bluster and no substance. This is crucial IMO - but it cuts both ways. It's pretty difficult to feel super when one team member can solo the entire mission without breaking a sweat.

Please don’t make comments like this. It completely undermines anything of substance you might have to say. Feedback is important, but ultimately it’s up to the volunteers to decide which projects they spend their time on. Just dial it down a bit, ok? 🙂

There, it's yellow. Now let's not turn this into a thread discussing font choices 🙂

Hello everyone! Page 6 is almost ready for public testing, so it’s probably time to start talking about what’s in store. Today we’ve got a look at a new powerset, a discussion about our goals for game balance, and a developer diary from Piecemeal discussing the upcoming story arcs. New Powerset: Sonic Manipulation A new sonic-themed Blaster secondary with fairly well-rounded capabilities. It also features a Migraine mechanic, with many powers in the set having a small chance to inflict a short hold. This chance can be dramatically increased by using Sound Booster, the build up power of the set. T1: Sonic Thrust (Melee, Minor DMG(Smashing/Energy), Foe Knockback) A focused attack of intense sonic power that violently sends a nearby foe flying. Deals minimal damage, but can be very effective. Recharge: Fast T2: Strident Echo (Melee, Moderate DMG(Smashing/Energy), chance for Hold) Strident Echo deals minor damage over time. It has a low chance of causing a migraine, leaving the target shaking in pain and helpless. Recharge: Slow T3: Echo Chamber (Ranged, Minor DMG(Energy), Foe Hold) Encases the target in a field of sonic waves, dealing energy damage and holding them in place. Recharge: Slow T4: Sound Booster (Self +DMG, +To Hit, +Special) Greatly boosts your attacks for a few seconds. Slightly increases chance to hit. Moderately increases the duration of mez effects. Moderately increases the chance for Sound Manipulation powers to induce migraines. Recharge: Long T5: Deafening Wave (Melee (AoE), High DMG(Smashing/Energy), chance for Hold) You create a large field of sonic waves, causing damage to all foes around you. It has a moderate chance of causing migraines, leaving them shaking in pain and helpless. Recharge: Slow T6: Sound Barrier (Toggle: Self +Absorb, +Recovery, +Res(Smashing, Energy, Sleep)) Creates a barrier around the caster which reduces incoming energy and smashing damage, provides protection against sleep effects and grants an absorption shield. Recovery is also increased. Recharge: Moderate T7: Disruption Aura (Toggle: Foe -Res) You emit a constant wave of sonic energy around yourself, weakening the Damage Resistance of all nearby foes. Recharge: Moderate T8: Sound Cannon (Ranged (Cone), Foe Stun, Knockback) You generate a powerful sonic wave that will knock back and disorient foes in front of you for a short time. Recharge: Long T9: Earsplitter (Melee, Heavy DMG(Smashing/Energy), chance for Hold) You generate an Earsplitting sound wave right in the face of your foe, inflicting great damage. It has a good chance of causing a migraine, leaving them shaking in pain and helpless. Recharge: Slow Sonic Manipulation also comes alongside a set of changes to Blaster Manipulation sets. We’ve made a standardization pass on the strength of Blaster crowd control effects whilst also shoring up the damage and survivability of some lower performing sets. Game Balance & The Endgame Next up: We’re commonly asked what our goals are when it comes to game balance, so we’ve written a post explaining our goals, both for page 6 and the future. Check out the post here! Dev Diary - Piecemeal's Workshop of Horrors You may have seen Piecemeal skulking about the forum, posting cryptic messages and poems… Well, now it’s finally time for them to introduce themselves and what they’ve been working on. Head on over to this post for a peek inside their head - reader beware, they've got a very active imagination... And that’s not all! Page 6 has several more features coming with it, including… - The Homecoming Team

As a heads up: The root cause of this issue hasn't been fixed (and is somewhat low on the priority list). Use of the /gmailclaim command can still lock you out until the next maintenance window. We advise claiming items the normal way 🙂

Page 6 may change your mind. how's that for a prediction

Hey, at least we make it known in advance which day the donations are opening! (I only just managed to get my pre-order in)

I think you're getting a bit confused here. Let me try to explain. The number of player-facing shards (or servers) isn't actually that big of a deal when it comes to costs. Each one requires a database, but (up to a limit) those can share hardware. The thing that actually costs more is the mapservers, those are the physical boxes you're actually playing on. Those directly scale with the number of players, which is why our costs are dramatically higher than the budgets of other groups. In the nicest possible way - their player counts are dwarfed by ours. They are able to host everything on one or two boxes. And that's fine for them, but obviously isn't practical for us. We also have incredibly high standards when it comes to redundancy, security and backups, which obviously aren't free to adhere to. It's why we were able to quickly adapt to the datacenter outages we faced a few months back, and why we've never had any issues with rollbacks, etc. Stability is very important to us. The amount donated has nothing to do with development capacity. Developers aren't paid anything (in fact, nobody at Homecoming is - we only have external costs like hosting, legal fees, etc). The only impact I suppose it has is making some hardware available for developers for testing, but that's all using shared capacity so the real cost there is minimal. There's a few reasons why our development is slower, but it generally comes down to limited time and a high quality bar. Most of the explanation in this post still applies. I'd also encourage you to read this highly informative post from Telephone regarding some of our infrastructure.

Everything else aside - your posts are a very good example of level-headed criticism, so thank you for that. We'll try to do better. Something that's probably important to point out is that a lot of the issues we're facing right now (2020 in general, NC talks being very time consuming, etc) are temporary ones, which is maybe something we could've done a better job at communicating.

haha My hints in this thread are completely unimportant and irrelevant. I was trying to stay on topic!

Something I should point out is that the clues / riddles aren't instead of a more comprehensive post. One of the developers simply wanted to have a little fun whilst working on their project.

I need to add a thumbs down reaction to the forum just for you @EmmySky.

Barring something catastrophic, yes. But this is 2020 so don't hold your breath...

A few smaller things have already been pulled out, yes. There's not much else we'd be able to pull out that would really speed stuff up at this point.

Firstly, from the CoC: So I'm not going to comment on any specific case. And beyond my comment below, I won't be discussing this any further as there isn't any more I can say without talking about a specific case. What I will say is that if they were simply engaging in normal roleplaying with a character that happened to be sixteen, then that's not against the Code of Conduct. Comic books have sixteen-year-olds in them. This is a comic book game. However, if they were engaging in... behaviour that actually violated the Code of Conduct? Then, yeah, they would've been smacked. We take those reports very, very seriously.

Honestly, you're right. We went for the whole structure of doing small pages instead of big issues specifically so we could have more frequent updates, as we just wouldn't be able to put bigger updates out frequently with the limited resources we have available if we wanted to maintain the quality bar we've set. Unfortunately though a crapton of stuff has happened this year to slow everything down. The stars all aligned in really bad ways. Getting a good, stable release out relies on a window of sustained, simultaneous availability from several people in order to prepare for and then make good use of the public testing cycle (if we iterate too slowly during the public testing window, interest wanes and bug reports slow down - this happened with Page 5 4). That's just not been possible for a big chunk of this year, but it does have the silver lining of a large amount of stuff piling up over the last few months. It's probably going to be our biggest release yet for that reason. In the future I think we'd all like to see smaller more frequent updates. I remember thinking that after Page 5 - that got a bit big and slow as well.

See also:

Not many people noticed, but this billboard was defaced for a while. Those were some dark days. Anyway, allow me to assist with your predictions: The letter Q (currently) appears in the patch notes 9 times. The word cartographer appears once. Only one genre of music is referenced. I hope you have found this helpful.

That's how they win. We don't fear their evil. We're stronger than that.

We will be touring the bases. That's why the screenshots are optional and the base passcode is required 🙂