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Relic Q&A, May 2009

By DanaEileithyia - 6th June 2009 - 13:28 PM

Thunder, Relic Entertainment's very own community manager agreed once more to answer some of the questions put forward by the GameReplays.org community regarding drop-hacking, patches and balancing, alongside a few of the more common concerns about gameplay and balance issues and the current state of the metagame! Without furthur ado, we present our May 2009 Relic Q&A Session! Enjoy!

GameReplays.org: What plans does Relic have to prevent drophacking in multiplayer games? Have such cheaters already been caught and if so, what consequences will they face?

Relic: There really is not way to prevent someone from pulling their internet connection or otherwise interfering with the game’s ability to communicate with other game clients. This has been a problem for every game I’ve worked on and is made worse in 1v1 games because the clients both see the other player as having disconnected. Figuring out who actually pulled the plug is not easy.

How does DOW II handle these situations? It’s handled with a behind the scenes arbitration system that uses a trust rating. Trust is a number associated with every player and reflects whether or not the reported outcome of the game should be taken into consideration or thrown out. A player who disconnects a lot will have a lower trust rating than a player who doesn’t and if such a game goes to arbitration the player with the higher rating is given the benefit of the doubt, and their game results are used to determine who gets the win. The system is designed to punish those who do disconnect from games to avoid a loss and reward those who do not. A player who continually disconnects will get a progressively lower trust rating and lose out in arbitration.

GameReplays.org: Could you tell us a bit about the procedures Relic use to balance the game? How many people are working on DoW2 balance issues? Do they work solely on balance or do they also have other tasks? Is Relic going to hire expert players with good community involvement as balance testers like they did with DoW1? When balancing the game, does Relic focus on satisfying the more casual player or do you aim at high-level competitive play balance?

Relic: We are playing the game a lot, looking at costs, statistics, and the forums to gather information. Our balance department is involved full time on balance along with our full team of designers and programmers who contribute to the process. We have some of the best RTS players out there involved in balancing the game with some members of our team having been attendees at the World Cyber Games. The entire DOW II crew will play games to try out new changes which we did recently with a build of 1.4. The whole team is committed to making DOW II balanced and fun to play.

We don’t currently have any positions open on our balance team, but when we are looking for balance testers the community is the first place we look.

GameReplays.org: Will we be looking at a balance patch next, due to the omission of balance changes from patch 1.3? Clint Tasker (TASK3R) mentioned in the Xfire chat that your logs showed the Ravener had a disproportionate win/loss ratio and that he has been addressed accordingly. What about other changes? Many complaints and balance changes from the community have centred around Ripper Swarms, due to their free reinforcement, their resilience to ranged fire and the added capping power they give a Tyranid player. Is this acknowledged by Relic and do they have any plans to correct this?

Relic: 1.4 definitely includes balance updates. I can’t go into the details of what it addresses right now but it is aimed at fixing bugs and balance issues like the ones you mention here. The balance team has been working very hard on this patch and I think you’ll be pretty happy with it.

GameReplays.org: Will any of the logs that you've been keeping be available for the public to view? Things like how often every race is played, what the win% of the race are or which heroes are used the most?

Relic: We do plan on sharing some more statistics in the future through our community site.

GameReplays.org: Does Relic have any plans to add observer slots, such as there were in DoW1?

Relic: We have some plans in this regard. Stay tuned for more info.

GameReplays.org: Not being able to select a hero depending on your enemies faction choice takes a toll on the strategy choices in ladder - can we hope for any changes in this system?

Relic: You’d want to know what faction your enemy is using and then choose a hero based on that in a ranked match? I can see arguments for and against that. One of the games I worked on there were players who would kill the game if they saw they were going to be matched against a faction or set of factions they didn’t like. We had to hide that information from players because it was having a detrimental effect on our matchmaking. I’m not saying that would be the case with DOW II, just that there may be some ways to exploit a system like that. Currently though, I don’t believe there are plans to change this part of our matching system.

GameReplays.org: There are a lot of complaints about abilities misfiring. Most of these are due to the fact that the particular abilities in question have a limited range and checks that range continuously while the animation for that ability is playing. For example, Assault Space Marine's Melta Bombs tends to fail against a Wraithlord if you simply target it with the ability while it is walking away: the Melta Bomb toss animation will start, determine that the Wraithlord has walked out of range which causes it to cancel before the Marines will take another step forward and repeat this cycle. Does Relic recognize this as a problem? Has Relic considered simply removing range checks on abilities once the animation begins? If not, what’s the reason for this?

Relic: We believe the Melta Bomb versus mobile targets issue that you mention (particularly walkers) is fixed in 1.4. The issue with abilities occasionally misfiring in general was sometimes related to another bug, an invisible cooldown timer, which we also worked to address in the coming patch.