2016-08-16

Thanks to everyone who took part in our most recent Reddit AMA! Below is a compilation of everyone’s responses (with all the repeated questions/answers removed). You can see the full AMA over on the Reddit page here. TLDR: You asked some questions, we answered them What will the clans consist of in-game? Name, clan tag, members, more? #CLANS25TH Sergii: The clan functionality we’re launching @#CLANS25TH is basic clan functionality (like clan name or clan icon). This is to make it available ASAP. More on this closer to 25th on our site. Advanced clan functionality (like clan leaderboards) is for future, depending on how basic clan functionality does Do you have any plans to change how Electroplates work? Sergii: The cool thing about electoplates was that they have regen. Now, when everything regenerates, they definitely need some kind of change. Matter of priorities, as (almost) usual Why (in your opinion) do you think overall player’s perception of the Loot economy, across all community platforms (reddit, forum, steam comm, youtube etc.) is so negative, and Steamchart seems to drop steadily, despite the positive statistics recorded on your side? Mark: I think Loot Crates were received so negatively ultimately because they represented a huge nerf in the rate at which users acquired parts. The previous RP system allowed played to get everything in the game pretty quickly and with Epic Loot that changed fairly drastically for reasons explained in that link above. Over time we hope that through improving the game delivering the things that users want that sentiment will return to a positive one. Robocraft has always had an issue of new users passing by too quickly (we call that retention). Various improvements to the game since we launched it have improved these numbers a little, but not by much. We have approximately 5000 new registrations every day, so as you can imagine we are a lot more frustrated than you are that not enough of them stick around for the long haul. Epic Loot saw the biggest single increase in retention we’ve ever had but that was still a fairly small increase. Recent network issues and Battle for Earth lowered retention and we’ve been working hard on fixing various issues we’ve identified to recover that fall, so hopefully you will see numbers begin to rise again as those holes are plugged. Our thinking is that we’ve spent a lot of time and effort focused on new user retention but not enough on mid to long term retention and on getting players to play for longer each day, and to play each day. Our big social features drive with Chat, Party, Clans, Friends, etc. is a first step at focusing on features that will hopefully get users playing more often and for longer which should hopefully grow the steam chart in the end. Any plans to compensate for the progression mechanic loss during Epic Loot, such as 2x daily victory per bot or +5% per premium player in match? Mark: Currently we feel the rate at which players get the content is pretty fair, although we acknowledge that for users that were playing before the Epic Loot change it feels like a massive nerf. We’d be happy to do something to acknowledge all the support that the longer term player base like yourself have given us, but we don’t want to massively increase earning rates in game as that would mean new players would play for less time, and spend less money, which would surely hurt the overall game. What do you think about the current state of balance between Air and Non-mech Ground in high CPU? (especially after the recent buffs to (M)plasma) Mark: We’re fairly happy with the balance at the moment and feel the new Plasma damage mechanics worked quite well. Possibly MPlasma is still a bit OP atm. We’re looking closely at how effectively AA weapons are against air as something doesn’t feel quite right there atm. All in all we’re not planning any drastic balance changes in the near future. With the recent surge in supermassive weapons, Do you think the current meta too heavily favors movement parts with high carry capacity and strong self-correcting mechanic, speficially mechas and copters? Mark: Not really. Laser, Plasma and Rail are still by far the main weapons you see in battle. Super Massives are present everywhere but it’s not like they’ve replaced the old favourites. Sergii and I nearly always have Laser Wasps on board as a low Power high redundancy backup on our Robots. That said, I do think we’ve probably focused too much as the Super Massive end of the scale and need to put some more effort lower down. I think players like Mechs and Copters because they are forgiving and require less skill to be competitive. I think it’s good that the game has some things that require more skill to master than others. That said, Wheels and Tanks really need some love and we’re working on that now. Why do Aerorods gets to keep 2100 HP per kg and per CPU (full cube armor at 1/15th full cube weight), but every non-full armor cubes received a significant reduction in HP? Mark: Honestly we think that Aerorods are a bit OP in this respect, so we do agree with the point you are making here. Rods do have the downside of less connection points but they doesn’t really justify the health / mass they have. Sergii wants to nerf them back a bit, i’ve been worried about community anger Do you think that high CPU play is experiencing very heavy dependency on the Power Booster (for everyone but the tesla users basically)? Mark: Yes. It’s a shame that the Power booster is so critical here as it ultimately reduces creativity since it forces you to have one on board. We have big plans for Power in general that we will reveal on the forums etc. as we talk more about the future of Clans as it relates to that. Are we ever gonna see new cosmetic variants of existing parts (like the C6 stuff)? Mark: Yes. Of course. I was surprised that the recent community poll including ‘googly eyes’ rated cosmetics so low on the list. Players seem to desire more parts with function over cosmetic ones as we’ve got a small art team so focus on things that the community will desire the most first. Sprinter Legs are in production at the moment. May I ask your thoughts on these two things for early game players (and possibly retention) a) making a flyer start bot b) making weapons/new content, that are actually specifically designed for common and low rarity items, so that early to mid level play has exciting features that are fresh for new players. Mark: Making a flyer start bot. We’ve avoided that as we feel that being a flying Robot is aspirational and that new users will like to see them and think “I want one of those” and then play for a while trying to get the parts and figure out how. We also agree that we need to look at lower rarity functional items also. Will the Clan Update implement a customizeable Lobby, where only invited Players can join and switch teams to create structured Matches? And with the Clan System getting implemented, can we expect Robocraft to have some Tournament-Events with ingame rewards, or maybe even in competitive E-Sports in the future? Sergii: What you’re talking is more about Custom games I feel. We’d like to have this kind of feature in Robocraft, but it’s not there yet. Mark: Our first focus is to provide a global way that Clans can compete and prove ‘who is the best Clan’, with a Clan leaderboard, etc. The initial launch off Roboclans Alpha is very soon and will not contain competitive functionality and will focus on the Clan setup and social side, but Clan competition will be our next focus after it’s initial launch. Specifically ‘custom / private games’ allowing you to play specific people / game modes / settings is something we’re thinking about but not working on right now. Would you fix the hit box of many items? Struts and Aerorods seem to have a buggy hit box, same goes for electroplates and masks. Mark: Do you mean the hit box when building? or when fighting? The systems used for each are very different. When in battle we summarise the shape of your Robot using an algorithm that reduces the separate cubes into a few composite shapes. This increases the performance as Unity doesn’t like thousands of colliders and prefers less. Ric: You are right, we do need to get more intelligent about how we create the collision boxes for the components, we only devote a small amount of Dev time to this process as we want to get the new cubes to the players as fast as possible. There is a process where by bugs are reported by players and filter back into the game development pipeline but we have to balance fixing collision against adding new content. Obviously we have room for improvement on this issue, duly noted Are you planning to add other method for getting robbits or items than crates? in curent situation maybe missions could be cool idea, but idk how it fits your vision of the game in the future. Mark: Yes, we’re planning to give a modest Robits reward at the end of battle also which will be higher if you’re playing in a Party, in a Clan, or if your Clan is progressing in Rank as well as other things. How do you guys feel if somebody in forum like insults you and stuff like that, and also how do you feel if somebody says something is wrong in game or points out some sort of mistake or something, but he uses legit arguments or examples? Mark: To be honest, we do take it too personally sometimes. We’re not a big corporation, we’re a small indie developer and we’re just normal guys who make (try to make) games. We do not mind criticism at all. We know we make mistakes and there are many very intelligent players in the Robocraft community that put forward incredibly smart arguments. We list to them all the time, and many many of the games changes have been influenced by the community. How are you planning on changing camera controls, particularly for flyers? Sergii: The general plan is to provide “camera controls steering” controls for all movement types. We decided to implement those who can strafe first (legs, hovers, rotors, thrusters), then those who can’t (tracks, wheels, wings/rudders). Also, AFAIK that tilt option for flyers is in development. Are new maps currently being worked on? If so, what theme do they have? Ric: Here is a cool SCOOP. Yes we are working on a new Earth map for BA,PIT and League modes as this was second highest voted item on the community vote a few weeks back. The new Map follows the basic principle of a post apocalyptic earth where factions are fighting for the natural resource “Protonium”. The new Map is centered around a space ship crash site, As you teleport down to the planet for the first time you will find yourself surrounded by debrit from the crashed vessel: huge girders, control panels and parts of the ship’s fuselage litter your spawn point. Glance to your right and you will see the nose of the ship rising out of the ground like a whale breaking the water to breath, glance to your left and you will see the mangled carcass of the aft section of the ship, huge ailerons pierce the sky and three huge thrusters dominate the view, the thrusters are extensively damaged and allow you access to the internal space within the ship, this is a very cool feeling as you drive through the thruster afterburner to access the middle Protonium tower. This link shows you an early Wip of the complete ship : http://d3tagfjj1pibwj.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/Robocraft_Ship_wip.jpg The ship was primarily an interstellar science and engineering facility, you can see multiple robot production bays along the side of the belly, the ship is designed for surface landing hence it’s semi aerodynamic shape and wing controls, the ship is designed to have a small fighter escort so it is lightly armored and is thus only equipped with two gargantuan K4 plasma cannons mid way along its body. The new map represents a step up in our development process. We are allowing alot more production time to each map and more people involved in the feedback loop. We have established a better production pipeline through increased iteration, now we have a nearly daily mass testing throughout the production of the new map. this allows us to encorperate a huge amount of playtesting feedback before you guys even see the map. Focal points: We are placing greater importance on key visual locations within the new map, this is to help players understand their position in the world instantly, eg there are a few points on the Spitzer Damn where you could misjudge your position on the map due to repetitive structures and very similar looking topography. Also having more distinctive locations within the map allows you to describe your position or strategy to team mates with more accuracy. On the map the front section of the ship is more intact, this is designed to provide more cover against flyers and allow players to traverse the level with some security from the air. it also provides a high altitude vantage point for the sly sniper among you, however the angles of the ship are carefully designed to leave you vulnerable if you become a nuisance How much donuts can each of you eat on a single day? I’m not talking about cheap ubertiny donuts, i mean the good stuff. LeftOfNever: I think I could probably eat a box of 12 Krispy Kreme ring donuts in a day – It would take a few hours; but quite manageable I think. Hello, there is lots of users playing Robocraft in non-English based countries(Korea, Japan, etc). Is there any plan to translate Robocraft to other languages? Ric: Robocraft is very popular around the world, our statistics show huge amounts of players in Asia, South America, and healthy community in New Zealand which is the furthest place from the UK. We have already started the process of localizing the game for all languages and we are planning a big launch to bring the entire Robocraft community together, at least in chat rooms and clans. Localisation is no small task but its happening soon thanks for your question I’m from Asia, Philippines. Just stopping by here to say no need to translate into our own language, It’s actually harder for us locals to use an interface in Filipino. And that I want to ask for a Philippine flag Ric: please can you give us more information on why a Filipino interface is harder to use, also is English the second language for people in the Philippines ? What statistics show this (ED: popularity)? Wouldn’t this be reflected in matchmaking queues and such? Sorry, but this is incredibly hard to believe since you guys almost don’t advertise at all. If you aren’t willing to provide links to statistics, why do you willfully state claims like this? I’d like to mention that I love Robocraft as my favorite game right now, but it pisses me off to no end that you guys aren’t advertising to get more players involved. Ric: Its true though, I can bring up a data sheet now that tells me what country is playing Robocraft the most this very second. You cant get an idea of this by looking at our steam CCU, you can see when America is asleep the Asian counties followed by European counties pic up the slack. You must also consider than we have a large amount of player that do not play through Steam at all. Mark and Sergii have some cool plans to improve match making so you wont see long queue times very soon. We don’t advertise at all really, we don’t need to, we generate a large number of new players every day just through our presence on Steam and thanks to a few faithful youtubers. Advertising is an extremely expensive method of getting players, there are literally millions of other game trying to get your attention so advertising costs a lot because we fight for space against the big machines like EA etc.. remember 2.5 years ago there were only 5 of us Devs. Ultimately the state of the game determines its popularity, right now we have less players than when we launched but we keep the players we do have for longer, now its up to us to improve the game and with that more players will follow. Hi, Freejam. Let me just start by saying that Robocraft is one of my favorite games ever. I got into it at Unleashed, and every update since then has improved the game in my eyes, with the exception of the economy on two different occasions. Once, the RP payout was severely nerfed, and people were similarly upset as they were to Epic Loot, which was the second time the economy was negatively affected. The main difference here is that you have kept the economy in this state for far longer than the previous economy downgrade. So, with that being said… (originally typed this up as one long post, but I’ll break it out into different top-level comments) How long seems fair to you to grind for a new legendary weapon? Before Epic Loot, it took about 3 hours and some change, with no premium and no first win bonus. This felt like the sweet spot. I know you guys need to make money, but will you be doing anything to address this grind, which currently stands at about 10 hours and change on average? As it stands now, the economy tends to get in the way of the core gameplay loop of “Build. Drive. Fight.” by making it take too long to get back to the “Build” phase. Mark: Hi Gamelord, and thank you for your post. I wanted to answer your post first since I think it gets right to the point. I also want to answer it openly and honestly. You are right, the introduction of Epic Loot ultimately reduced the rate at which players got the parts they wanted (i.e. nerfed the rate of acquisition of Legendary components) fairly significantly, and this was intentional. Prior to that update we had done a lot of analysis of the core economy of Robocraft and when looking at it we discovered a couple of things. A) The majority of users who had been playing for a while had vast reserves of RP and everything in the game, in a relatively short space of time. B) Players would often play until they got everything, then get bored, then stop playing, often racking up 100 hours and never spending any money in game. We wanted to have new players play for longer, to spend longer getting all the parts in the game, and hopefully spend some money after playing for 100+ hours. Epic Loot was a huge success on these fronts. New players spend a lot longer in game now. On average we’ve doubled the % of players who are playing 30 days after installing the game. The % paying users has risen from 3% to 6% (so double), and all of that money has been used to both grow the team with the intention of improving Robocraft. On top of that new user overwhelmingly leave positive reviews. So the reason we have seemed very stubborn and not reverted the nerf to earnings is as it would mean players spending less time playing Robocraft and us monetising it less and this means we would be less able to improve the quality of the game. So, ultimately the ‘nerf’ to the economy affects the users that were playing prior to the update the most, and for that we are genuinely sorry. If there was a way that we could somehow reward or recognise the huge support we’ve had from the longer term player base for sticking with us, without massively increasing the rate of earning in game we would love to do it. To answer your question about time to get a legendary. I feel that 10 hours to get one of the most exciting and cool things in the game is fair. Now. That all said we are planning to add Robits as a reward on top of Crates at the end of battle. We are not going to increase the earning rate massively, but we will use this Robits reward to incentivise the social elements we will be adding to the game in the near future, so you will get more Robits for playing in Party’s, Clans, for progression your Clans rank, and for other things too. Wheel speed and handling, how goes the progress on this front? I still think Wheels have the potential to be the most fun movement part in the game. Mark: Yes, I agree they suck and I agree they could be very fun. We’ve decided to go back to the drawing board on both Tanks and Wheels. They were originally coded by me, and whilst I can code a bit, some the of Freejam coders are loads better than me. The guy that coded Mech Legs, Copters and recently added the camera steerings to parts is working on Tanks right now. He’s also adding strafing via keyboard controls to all parts too. Once he’s finished Tanks he’ll go straight onto Wheels. In the case of both Tanks and Wheels he’ll recode them from scratch discarding my dodgy code once and for all. How many Jammers like Pizza? Ric: ME ME, I want to answer this one If i’m honest, looking around the studio I cant see a single person that doesn’t like Pizza (40 odd people), however we have a few vegetarians, people with food allergies and Pizza purists like Seb that only eats pizza he has made himself at home with his own Italian hands, he has installed his own pizza oven ! much Robocraft love to my partner in pizza, mr TommyFoxy Andy: All of us! Perfect for testing parties! /u/Drognin has a weekly Nandos group as well every Tuesday! Mark: Noooo, burgers are best. Me and Ric love burgers. There is an awesome burger joint nearby called ‘FEED’ that does the best red chilli burgers ever, and fries with Celery salt on (weird but really nice). Is there ANY kind of fastfood Ric won’t eat? Ric: Yes – I wont eat donor Kebabs, honestly i like the smell but I hate to think what it is doing to my body so i cant bring myself to eat it 1) Clan higher archy ingame, how will that be setup? E.g like Owner, Officer, Member? 2) Will prominent / currently established clans be able to pre-reserve their clans prior to the update? If so how so? Mark: 1) Leader, Officer, Member initially. 2) Drognin is talking to Clan leaders atm to reserve clan names that are already prominent in the community. I will sell you Invictus Rex for $5 3) No plays for duel Clanship atm. You must be loyal to one and only one. You will be able to create custom persistent chat rooms as much as you like though and invite people to it. The Friends system is also being improved. 4) We’re overhauling the social UI. Chat, Clans, Friends, and eventually Party’s. The best reference I can give you is Heroes of the Storm. Will you give us the opportunity to purchase items with real-world currency, i.e $2.99 for a legendary SMG? If not, why not? Mark: We don’t have plans for this at the moment. Our main feeling was that adding Crates into the game as the main means of acquiring parts and then allowing players to buy the parts directly would feel a bit too ‘pay to win’. We felt that paying players ought to buy the things that free players earned over time (i.e. Crates) so it felt more like an indirect time saver than a direct ‘pay to get what you can’t get quickly for free’ thing. You said that previously only 3% of people spent money pre-Epic Noot and now 6% spend money. Which percentage accounts for the most money? 3% could be more depending on amount spent or size of group. Mark: 3% prior to Epic Loot and 6% after, with the total amount spent doubling. So we’re not trying to trick you with stats, simply players spend more money now and play for longer before stopping. Mainly we think this is due to players getting parts more slowly. Why did you spend so long ignoring the community while we complained about the economy? Mark: We didn’t ignore you guys, it’s just that we couldn’t give you what you really wanted. We did loads of improvements to the Crate system, but couldn’t remove Crates and revert the earning rate back to what it was as it would mean new players spending less time playing Robocraft and spending less money in game. We simply didn’t know how to please the longer standing community without hurting the game overall. We were between a rock and a hard place. You say player retention rates are ‘up’. Do you measure how long people stay logged in for? If so what are the figures? Are people just logging in for the daily crate and disappearing again? Mark: The industry uses a fairly standard way to measure retention. It counts 30 day retention as ‘What percentage of players who registered 30 days ago are log in today?’. With Epic Loot that percentage literally doubled. There are loads of factors to measure also, like ‘Average Session Length’ and ‘how often players play in a month’ etc. Recent updates, i.e. the new network technology and the Battle for Earth update reduced technical issues that have hurt the retention and we’re working really hard to sort those out. We have focused a lot on ‘new user retention’ but now we’re shifting focus to increasing ‘average session length’ and ‘how often players play’ with an initial focus on social features. We have an awesome new chat system, a new friends system and a new Clans system on the way. Who’s your favorite Spice Girl? Mark: We just had an argument about that. Drognin says Baby, LeftOfNever says Ginger, for me (Mark) it was always Posh. Is the new netcode paving the way for implementing a reconnect button? Mark: Yes. We will be implementing Reconnect soon. We also plan to be able to ‘in-fill’ leavers with those waiting in the queue to ensure matches remain full as much as possible. Are you considering a public issue tracker (like Bohemia has for their games) to allow your users to submit, track and comment on issues? It’s a two part system. One one end, you have the player view where they can submit new issues, search for issues, vote on them (for added visibility) and add comments. This side is usually mostly managed by some people from the community. Then there’s the other end for the devs, where you can pick an issue, have your own (private) comments on them, assign them to a person to deal with and set the status etc. This makes it so reporting issues becomes much easier for both sides, since users can check quickly whether an issue is already reported. Moderators from the community can also go through newly submitted issues and mark them as duplicates and whatnot if necessary. As a developer, you then can pick issues from the top and have all the information on a subject all in the same place. This also removes all time devoted to manually filing reports you currently get via the contact form. Drognin: Interesting, thanks for the rundown. From what you explained I think I can imagine how they’ve got it set up. My two areas of concern would be moderators and the public bug list. Moderators side, I have a few concerns. Firstly, making sure the mods are informed enough to know the difference between a duplicate and a similar issue. Secondly, making sure that all the mods involved are completely consistent with how they moderator the requests. Thirdly, making sure there are enough mods around who actually want to do it. Public bug list side, I’m always generally uneasy. I guess it comes down to implementation. Publicly visible bug lists bother me because generally there are far more bugs in a game than any one person will ever see. When you have a public bug list however, you expose anyone who sees it to all of them making the game seem a lot buggier than it actually is. It changes your opinion of the game. Kinda like how I used to enjoy Big Bang Theory until every nerd in existence decided they had to regularly publicly bash on the show. Now I can’t really enjoy it… I’m not against it overall. I think I’d like to actually check out Bohemia’s system. I also know that Dwarf Fortress has a public bug list and it’s helped me figure out what’s going on in more than one occasion. I guess the short answer for your question is “Not currently” but what you’ve shown me has increased the chance of it eventually happening. Basically a lot is planned in the future. Now there is one thing i’ve always wondered about. Will there ever be a pure PvE-Coop feature? Such as Invasion, Raid against AI bots? Sergii: To commit into it, we first need to prove it will be reasonably popular. First step in this direction would be to allow platoons to join AI TDM. Then, depending on how popular it is, we decide if co-op is good investment. Another unanswered question is how many players like building robots but hate PvP (and leave Robocraft because of this). With any proof that this number is high enough, coop may have a chance. Mark: We were pretty pleased with the new Single Player TDM vs. AI Bots. An obvious thing would be to allow that to be co-op first and then expand upon it allowing players to co-op with friends and test themselves against increasingly difficult opponents, or custom game modes such as those that you suggest. Currently in AI Bots mode your PC does all the AI and the Physics for all the Robots. We’d need to put this onto a server first and then co-op would be easier. We definitely like the idea of it. Need to finish all the social, Clans stuff first and see how that goes before planning our next steps. what about a more social game ? I mean, i’m a french robocraft mod in game, and, the french communty is very big. I have see, you want translate the game, good idea, but, what about help fan site of the game ? For exemple, if people is on french chat, add a flux with all news translated in french, on the french blog. Because like i have see, not many french member know there is a french discord, and a french website for news :c Mark: We are localising the game at the moment, translating it into French, German, Spanish, and Portuguese first. When that is live we will translate into many other languages including Chinese, Japanese and Russian. Re. social features in game. We’re adding a new Chat system with much more functionality. We’re reworking the Friends, Party and Clan systems also. We really are working hard to improve social features within Robocraft now with a focus on trying to increase the overall time that players who love Robocraft spend in game. Would a moddable open source offline version of the current build of robocraft be too much to ask for? this could make it much easier for players to build and test new content they want in the game. Mark: As a F2P title Robocraft currently relies on a large audience playing against each other with it taking time to acquire the parts to compete in order for some users to spend money which is critical to Robocraft growing and improving. A fully modable version of RC with all parts available would probably bypass this and therefore make it less viable to keep it all going. Will Hellion Crater be improved??? Sergii: We’re not happy with Hellion Crater being so open and agree that it should be addressed. Hey guys, I love Robocraft and it inspired me to develop my own game (which hasn’t left me much time to play ): )! Is their any wisdom you wish you had earlier in development? Sergii: Make it simple. No, even simpler! The wisdom is to complicate things only when it actually makes the product better, not to complicate it by default then see if it does any harm Mark: OMG, there is so many things we have learnt along the way. One thing is that the Lean Startup has been a wonderful means of developing software – https://www.amazon.co.uk/Lean-Startup-Innovation-Successful-Businesses/dp/0670921602/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1471278173&sr=8-1&keywords=the+lean+start-up But, Lean dev comes with a price as when you have an established community and audience large scale ‘pivots’ or changes in search of a better product can often come with a lot of frustration from your existing users. Juggling the requirements of the existing player base with the requirement to change your game to make it better in sometimes significant ways is a constant challenge and very difficult. I also learned that ‘I love working with my friends in a studio of our own on our own games’ and I also learned that ‘monetising players in free-to-play is hard’ Will there be a option to sell bots only to friends or clanmembers in the CRF? Sergii: Not in the initial clans release, but we would love to have an option like this. So some best builders in the game may choose to join some top clan and only share their precious robot designs inside the clan. Mech legs : Why are you letting them be this good ? WHY ? and most of all, are you gonna do something ? Sergii: We want to fix the existing issues with other movement parts (tracks, wheels, …) so they can be just as cool as Mech Legs. The recent tweaks of tracks were just a first step. Even if you fix existing issues with tracks and wheels, they will never reach the same level that the utility from mechas’s jump provide them. In a meta dominated by plasma and other form of burst damage, being able to instantly change your position is the most valuable tool in the game, while other movement parts, including hovers, require a crippling acceleration period (which is to also point out that Mech legs have the fastest 0-100 speed of any movement even outside of the jump, including drones). The jump should be heavily restricted with high cooldown, energy cost or be outright removed (tied to a cheap, mech exclusive module that enables it), if you ever want wheels and tank to be viable. Tanks already have 2100 hp per cpu, but even that is pointless given how vulnerable they are to AoE damage. Sergii: One idea we have is to implement “recover animation” after a jump, to make mechs more vulnerable after a jump. What were the previous percentages of purchases with older models such as Garage bays, old premium, and cosmetics? Mark: On nearly all previous monetisation methods we monetised approximately 3% of the audience. With Epic Loot we pretty much doubled it. That said, we still only take a modest amount of money for Robocraft and we invest all of it in making the game better. We’ve recently grown the team to do just that. How are the percentages of sales now between the crates themselves and premium as it is now? Mark: The revenue split is about 60% Crates and 40% Premium. We are looking at ways to improve Premium, but we also want to remove the pay wall locking out the two extra Platoon slots as we no longer want to have any barriers to allowing players to play together. Epic loots riled up the fan base a fair bit and feedback on the loot crates has been pouring in, Will we be seeing any changes made to coincide with that feedback? Mark: We are honestly reading all the feedback and looking for ways to improve the economy. We are planing to add Robits rewards, especially rewarding players who play in Clans and Partys. We’re not planning on increasing the earning rate massively though. Now that our options are limited between Premium and Lootcrates, is there any chance of premium being changed so it no longer ticks down while you’re offline? Premium’s the only thing I feel comfortable with purchasing at the moment but knowing that it counts off even when I’m not online feels like I’m just throwing money away for no reason, especially given all of Premiums features like painting. Mark: We’re going to improve the Daily Crate system. It’s a simple crude system we implemented quickly. We want to replace it with more rewards but ask you to do things to get them that vary each day (think Daily Quests in Hearthstone or HOTS). The taunting for lootcrates… Why must you use actual rewards that you’ve “earned” for it? Mark: Are you referring to the Premium row in Crates, i.e. showing you the item you got but locking it behind Premium. Honestly, this is designed to push some users over the line to spend money. Remember 94% of the player base never spends money and often plays for 100′s of hours so any way we can get players ‘over the line’ without being too aggressive we have to otherwise we cannot grow and improve Robocraft. that said, the ‘Premium row’ is right on the line of something we’re comfortable. We’d love to take it away, but it is often the thing that gets players to spend money for the first time so we don’t want to remove it at the moment. When we’ve improved the game and have players playing for longer and grown the user base post coming out of Early Access we can hopefully remove some of these more ‘up front’ mechanisms for enticing players to spend. Can we please have measures such as “more than just one of a lower rarity part for recycle fodder” mechanic somewhere around the 70’s-90’s as a halfway point to support those with larger CPU budgets to work with? Mark: I will take a closer look at possible mechanisms for improving the Loot experience for players who have many of the lower rarity parts. We’ll have to do any changes without increasing earning rates massively though. It would be nice to improve the experience for those users though. Will we see any other means of supporting the game? Mark: Not sure what you mean? You provide your best support by playing and being part of the community. I noticed that the EMP module was fairly behind in usage and the Disc sheild module following behind closely, during the parts that players use whilst entering battles. Is there any chance to perhaps adjust them? Some modules are great conceptually but some are simply better than others and deserve “legendary” more whilst others could afford getting knocked down a peg or two in terms of Cpu/ rarity to coincide with how beneficial they are. Mark: Yes, I think there is room to improve the DSM and EMP. EMP was released fairly recently so we need to wait a bit to see if it’s simply a factor of there being less in circulation. We’ll first aim to improve them. As we release new parts we always look at the rarity of older parts and adjust them by lowering their rarity. Any chance of a heavy/ weighted block (counter to struts/ aerorods) that we can have for ground vehicles such as wheels to compensate for larger weapons? Mark: We can take a look at weight blocks. I’ll discuss it with Sergii and we’ll think about it. Do you have any plans to change how speed works? A lot of players don’t like how all bots with the same movement part have the same top speed regardless of weight. Mark: Yes, we are looking at this at the moment. I can’t really say much on this as we plan to talk to the community about this first on the forums as it forms part of changes associated with the future of competitive Clans. I know that doesn’t make much sense (how does Clans relate to speed) but it’s complicated so you’ll have to stay tuned to the forums and we’ll explain more in the coming month. What is the ETA on scrollable chat and other chat features? Mark: Next Thursday. other events : Like armorgeddon, but for other things, like changing auto-heal mechanic, adding life/energy-steal to psk, etc… Mark: Definitely We have an event coming very very soon (i.e. this weekend). Details will be announced. plasma speed : why do small plasmas have a slower RoF than bigger ones ? Shouldn’t they fire faster in exchange for their smaller damage ? Sergii: Being smaller is an advantage on it’s own. Smaller weapons are harder to hit, you can fit more of them so it’s harder to degun, etc. To compensate, their alpha strike is weaker. Can clan names have symbols in them to make them unique? like “-AC-” and stuff like that? Sergii: The plan is to use account name restrictions for clan names as you said you intend to localize the game, why not let local-language-speakers translate the game if they know how to speak english ? For example, I and rafyfou (I’m pretty sure of it, and maybe FRjhracing) both speak French and a good english (I’m french, but not sure about rafy) so we could help translating the game, not sure about voice acting tho… Andy: Comms Manager, Andy here. Localisation is in my wheelhouse so I’ll take this one. We play on adding more language support for Robocraft over the coming months including lots more European languages than just English. We’ve been working with a few localisation agencies to help us with this work and things are continuing well on that front. When we launch the localised builds we’ll absolutely need you guys to give us your feedback on the quality of the translation e.g. highlighting grammatical errors, wrong user of terminology, UI issues etc. Localising any game is a HUGE undertaking, especially one which is as added too as often as Robocraft, and it’s one we want to do right. Now that megabots are gone, would it be possible to revert some of the changes to the maps made in full spectrum combat? Many areas used to be very “sharp” but now those areas are incredibly flat. Like the area with the middle fusion tower on tharsis rift. It used to be on the cliffs, and accessible by bridge, but now it is on an extremely flat area which is kinda boring. I’m sure some of them can’t be undone, like one of the fusion towers on tharsis rift. I’m sure that one was moved for balance. Mark: Firstly, we’d love to provide options for larger Robots in future, but we’ll probably not get quite as large as Megabots, but hope to increase the size options quite a bit. We’re aiming to work on all maps to bring them up to the quality of Birmingham Power Plant. As who do so we’ll be making them semmetrical and addressing issues like the one you point out above. A tiny question: on some maps, there are tall, mushroom shaped white structures. Is there any explanation or lore for their existence? (Also, it seems like they used to have a blue, red, or yellow stripe on them, but now it is only really light blue. When was this changed, is it a bug, or are my graphics settings just weird.) Mark: Not really. We added them very early on when we needed some art to differentiate strategic points. Birmingham has lore though and we’re adding more lore into all the map reworks and new maps. Whistsles/Horns when? Mark: You want to annoy the hell out of everyone in battle, why? Could we have less punishing/limiting buildboxes? Such as those involving electroplates, thrusters, skis, legs… Mark: Yes, they are in our bug database and we work though them steadily. Vehicle underlighting when? Mark: Lol, that would be cool. Nice idea. Will clans have Alliance functionality? (Multiple clans banding together with an alliance chat etc) Mark: That isn’t in the plan at the moment, no. Although there are ways in which Clans who work together or affiliate with each other can indicate they are related in game. Lebanese Holoflag when? Mark: We’re always adding new flags. We don’t have many Lebanese players, but we’ll definitely add it in at some point. Why do skis have a thrust effect? They’re supposed to be the ground version of helium. They should be completely thrust-less not including the steering effect on turning skis. Mark: We need to have another look at Ski’s. We wanted to allow them to give you a bit more control than normal cubes sliding around. For what reason were Nanodisruptors changed from multi-continuous fire mode to the current round robin mode? It suites neither the concept, model, lore, nor projectile visuals even. It feels lazy, it looks lazy. I feel all weapons are just the same, there’s no diversity. Everything has become a fire rate weapon. That’s boring Sergii: The Great Weapon Rework (power bar, different fire rates in one weapon type, etc) was huge already, and we had to cut that special beam code for nanos. Also, it allows to make different sizes of nanos to feel more distinct (because of different fire rate). High alpha weapons tend to dominate lower cpu matches, and alpha tends to increase with rarity, making it a problem for new players. I am obviously limited to very little data, but have you noticed the same trend? Sergii: Yes, we noticed it, this is why we implemented that “smaller robots have less power” mechanics. Big burst weapons were too good at low CPU, so we decided to address it through power. Will “cases” delete from RC absolutely or partially, or will you try improve it? Mark: Loot Crates will remain. We will always aim to improve it. We will be adding some Robits rewards also, but these will be modest. Are you going to add crafting system to the game? (Like you get parts from the crates, you use theese parts to craft modules) It’d be a lot cooler than buying items from shop. Mark: It doesn’t really make sense. Normally in ‘crafting’ games you use minerals and craft parts from the raw resource. It’s a bit weird to Craft a EMP from say 5 Geotrain Wheels and 3 Rail Erazers? I had some minor experience on designing maps for different games, and I’m curious. How do you design your maps? Ric: 1. Map design is a much more organic experience than most players might think. 2.We usually start off with a broad idea of what would be cool in the Lore of the game. 3. We create a paper design and iterate this many many times in group discussions this is usually based on a formula for the level balancing objectives, travel times, focal points, symmetry, pinch points, cover points, height, AB alternative routes, and many other parameters. 4. quickly we move to a very greybox mesh and export some crude geometric shapes into Unity and drive around them getting a feel for the map. 5. the next step is very touchy freely process and requires huge amounts of iteration, weeks are spent subtlety moving blocks, re-positioning cover points, balancing all weapon types, providing cover from flyers and for flyers, resculpting the floor and topography etc etc. 6. mass testing throughout this process allows much faster feedback loops on the level design and allows players unfamiliar with the design to give their first impressions. 7. the remaining steps are basically art focused and involve making final assets, sculpting the environments and creating focal points highlighted in the design process. Do you guys plan on modifying some of the current maps to have hazzards? (i.e. long fall death crevices, damaging terrain) Ric: Hazzards – Not at this time, i don’t think that hazards work well in our current selection of game modes because there are already so many simultaneous dangers to consider, that’s not to say new game modes might benefit greatly from having dynamic hazards Do you have any plans to buff the radar stuff? E.g radar jammer increasing LomL lock time? Sergii: We’re not entirely happy with radar stuff and want to rework it. Big problem is that the radar parts are in that vicious relationship: “why use radar – they may jam it / why use jammers – there may be no radars in enemy team / why use receivers – there may be no radars in my team”. We would like to make them useful on their own, not when stars align What will the in game clan member limit be? Sergii: Currently the member limit is 50. Our thinking is: according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number, “humans can comfortably maintain only 150 stable relationships” (c). So for clans to be full of people you actually care about,they should be less than 150 (because social relationships in Robocraft aren’t only social relationships for most players). So 1/3 of 150 is healthy number, and many games prove it with their clan systems also having 50 members limit Are there any more plans for graphics improvement (SSAO, HDR lighting, advanced graphics menu, and most importantly the frame cap)? Ric: Oh yes (rubs hands together while ginning like a cat) We are waiting for an important update by Unity which will allow us to bake lighting (performance increase) with a blended dynamic shadow, it will also allow us to add Radiosity and authentic Ambient occlusion to the maps HDR lighting is already available to us but currently switched off while we wait for the Unity update. I will turn this on for higher GFX settings in due course. PBR Physics based rendering has been used on the crates screen to great effect so we will gradually introduce this to cubes and environments where performance allows. we are about to introduce a new SSAO too, it looks create and will give us way more control than the default Unity AO Yes we can add more control over the settings in a more advanced graphics menu in the future, we always had plans to do this but new content was a higher priority. I have a bunch of other things i want to add to the visuals but I’m going to keep them under my hat for now so that you don’t beat me with it if for some reason it doesn’t happen How long you spend on your hair when you wake up? Drognin: Roughly 0 seconds. I’m this sexy from the moment my eyes open. In the short time the feature “Rotors tilt forwards and backwards when using the ‘Camera Controls Steering’ option” was present I learned to love it quickly.” So it’s a shame you removed this feature. Please add it back as Option! It does really not seem to be complicated to add it as an option… When will you do that? Even if that isn’t a feature that would win QoL surveys, I think removed features should always take precedence over new ones. Sergii: This option is in development. Should be somewhere soon. Can’t promise the exact date Do you plan on creating a NON-Scaling User Interface system that will allow me to play at 1080 or greater resolutions, without the font in the game being extremely small? Player names, Currency amounts, Score board, Forge, Recycle, Tool tips… I completely understand if the resolution is lowered to potato quality, the font becomes larger, this is due to scaling UI, can we make a change? Ric: This is a good question, as there are no questions about my hair style yet I will answer this one You can see the more recent game mode selection screen is exactly as you describe, adaptive at all resolutions. This is how I would like many key screens to end up, however its not as easy as it sounds: a general rule of thumb simply wont work for all screens, for example our new Chat interface takes up more than half the screen at 800×600, if we reduced the text it would become unreadable and conversely you wouldn’t want chat to occupy 50% of your screen at 4k Resolution. So yes I want to move towards adaptive screens but I do want to manage the screen real-estate intelligently at all resolutions. I’m very curious on future armor design. The struts, new aero rods were a very great and welcomed features. I would say the struts were one of the most successful new features from a “needing a fix” point of view. However- why armor armor options like TX-1, LMHX, and other alternatives not part of the project scope? Even with the new “horizontal” design, what are your thoughts about more armor options in the future? Sergii: My thinking on TX-1/LMH is that it is in conflict with paint gun. We had this issue while developing Full Spectrum Combat: we can’t distinguish armor tiewrs by color any more, and texture isn’t enough (unless it’s overdone). Say, TX-1 had that nice texture, but being colored it was too hard to notice. Yet, if I think about fulfilling that niche, I’d say that what we need is Helium rework into something like Anti Gravity Cube. Because LMH is actually about “I can choose to pay more CPU for better armor”. So if current armor is Heavy type for 1 CPU and say Light armor could be like 3 CPU, same health but light – it’s much easier to achieve the same with Anti Gravity Cube. You pay some extra CPU, you make your robot lighter, no problems with armor types being undistinguishable. Another issue here is armor shapes. Personally, I believe what we should do is to multiply CPU limit and all CPU costs by 20, except for armor cubes. Then, full armor cube CPU is also multiplied by 20 and it’s health remains the same, and all other armor shapes have their CPU cost proportional to volume (like Edge is 10 CPU and Corner Slope is 1 CPU), and their health and weight should be proportional to CPU as well. This would allow to get rid of all those balance issues surrounding different armor shapes, and would make it so armor shapes will not look like LMH replacement. The reason why we haven’t implemented it already is because it is huge risky change that may do more bad than good. There are any plans to remove or change autoheal mechanic ? Mark: Overall we are really happy with autoheal. We’ll possibly do an event involving this feature, but in general we think the game is more fun when you don’t spend half the time unable to move. Can there be multiple clanleaders? Sergii: No. But officers have big part of privileges Leader have, and Leader can pass his title to an officer. HUB, what about it? Can we expect custom lobbies anytime soon? Mark: OK, HUB. First, a game mode where players can ‘hang out’ would require solid physics collision resolution between Robots as players will likely try to ram / lift each others etc. To do good physics collisions we need to move physics to the server. We will do that as it will provide some major changes to battles too (pushing people around etc.) and the guy that will do that is working on Wheels, Tanks and Aerofoils first. So it’s quite a long way off i’m afraid. Hopefully you’ll agree with the priority order though? Custom lobbies is something we’re thinking about. We do want to provide options like this, but need to finish our Clan and social features first. I’d ordinarily be upset over the fact that platoons limit 2 of the 5 slots to premium members. Not only is this a feature that literally no other game I can think of charges for, but it’s not even something I get to keep forever once I pay for it. I’ve been willing to overlook it thus far because platoons always felt like a band-aid solution for a proper party system with friends. Will the paywall for platoons go away once a proper party system is implemented? Will we be able to fill an 8-player or 10-player team with friends once such a system is implemented? (How successful do you think League of Legends would have been, after all, if free players could only play with two of their friends at a time and couldn’t fill a full team?) Also, colors and custom avatars are a similarly strange (and semi-gross) thing to charge for on a temporary basis, but at least they don’t affect gameplay. Maybe a small one-time fee for both colors and custom avatars would suffice? Mark: I agree with you that the Platoon slots in Premium is an issue. For a long time i’ve been uncomfortable with this. For me it places a contradiction, i.e. you think players playing socially together will play for longer, and in turn that will create more revenue, but you put a social element behind a pay wall and discourage players from playing together?!? With that, we’re planning to remove paid Platoon slots when we introduce the new updated ‘Party’ (4-6 weeks) for good. We ned to figure out a nice way to compensate players who purchased Premium for this reason at the same time. We’d love to support bigger Platoons / Party’s for the same reason, i.e. if players are playing together there more likely to play the game for longer and more often. We are figuring out a way to match-make larger Party’s at the moment. I have some questions not about clans, but about Fan Art and suggestions made by community. -How are you reviewing things submitted in Things you’d love to see in Robocraft ? How they influence the future of the game or ideas you have ? -Are you proud of the ideas created by the community, or do you just ignore them ? -Why do you don’t take the time to answer to the most interesting (most replied and beautiful) and complete ideas on forums ? Just by lack of time ? I don’t think so because you have now a Community manager plus there are not that much good suggestions. LeftOfNever: Hi amimox, Thanks for your questions. We are incredibly proud of the ideas and artwork submitted by the community; the game is driven by the community through their creativity both in the game and also through the number of art designs for weapons/modules through our social spaces. We often share these ideas with our fans through a retweet or a post on our Facebook page. We’ve even shared humorous videos produced by our community (check out Sheep_Weilder’s Monty Python parodies on YouTube). You may have seen that we have recently started hosting artbot competitions on our forums and the players have been submitting lots of great designs and we absolutely love them! We’re also going to be launching a new feature on the website soon – the Robocraft ArtBot Creator Profile. The regular feature will be a simple Q&A format post; each one focussing on one of our fantastic ArtBot creators. Why don’t we respond to the most beautiful etc on our forums? The simple answer is TIME; there just isn’t enough of it. There are two community managers on the team now, but the Robocraft community is a lot bigger

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