[AMA] Ask The Developer Anything - December 4th

When is Gree going to respond to the tickets sent in? When are we goi g to see compensation for Fronline hits not counting correctly, Fltq hits not counting over numerous events costing factions to miss out on rewards?

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Originally Posted by Kefa

1. Game Center: I have multiple Modern War characters (4) on multiple iOS devices, and all 4 devices share a common Game Center login for use with other games. It seems now that if I attempt to link my Modern War game to my Game Center account, it could/will potentially cause major problems for me and other players in my situation.
1a) is this correct? and, if so,
1b) how do I manage multiple Modern War game accounts when their respective devices share a single Game Center account? (I am not willing to create multiple Game Center accounts since the devices need to share one common Game Center account for other purposes)

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The account transfer feature, which requires Game Center or GooglePlay linking, is designed to allow you to link as many Modern War games as you have to one Game Center or GooglePlay account, and then access all your games from any device you have linked. (You will have to restart the game after you link each account to get them all to show up on all the devices, due to technical limitations of the linking system.) You will be able to access the account switching feature through the Settings menu. (There is also a cross-platform account transfer feature using codes, but in order to access multiple accounts on one device you will need to link both devices to either Game Center or GooglePlay).

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Originally Posted by Kefa

9. We know Apple takes time to approve uploads before they are released to the public, but when will 5.0 be uploaded from Gree to Apple?

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The build has been uploaded to Apple. We’re currently ensuring everything on the back end is fully ready to go. Barring any unexpected occurrences we expect to get this out to you next week.

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Originally Posted by Kefa

8. NPC target Partial Progress: When a target such as the Augmented Assassin at the Mountain Pass map requires 5 hits at 1,129 energy each (5,645 energy total) for one kill, and a player's energy capacity is only 3,000 (or less), does it make sense to not support partial progress for such a target when it cannot be defeated all at one time without spending gold on energy refills? Allot of players require as much as 30 hours just to generate enough energy to kill that one target, so when Gree say's, "we don't support pre-staging", isn't saying "progress may get reset" the same as saying, "You can't be allowed to kill this target without using gold"? I know Gree say's it doesn't support "prestaging", and we did see allot of partial progress get reset during this past FLTQ, but from our standpoint it really doesn't seem fair if partial progress on any target doesn't persist indefinitely.

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While we don't officially support progress made against NPCs before the event goes live (which is why we don't guarantee that any progress made during that time will be preserved), you shouldn't be seeing progress lost that was made during the official event time. If you do see that, please contact support ASAP so we can look into it.

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Originally Posted by Kefa

Thanks again. This sort of thing goes a long way to helping players feel like they are valued by the company they are supporting.

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You're welcome! Thanks for participating!

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Originally Posted by Jaded Fusion

Can we have a on/off button for events? Leader can turn off the fltq so no one can hit it but continues to run in the background.

Can we have a on/off button for ALL animations in game? Ie raiding, hitting npcs

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We currently don’t have any plans to allow leaders to disable faction events. Could you let us know more about why you’d like to see this?

We'll get to the animations in another response since a lot of people asked about it.

Who in their right mind decided a 7 Day WD was a good idea? We did not like it when it was 5 days and have repeatedly asked for shorter WDs. With division now in place, why not make it a tournament where the Top 5 from each divisions moves on.

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Originally Posted by DEWIN NUTTIN

1) Is it possible to eliminate the animations, or allow the player to choose to eliminate animations?

2) If someone is doing LTQ and is required to attack "Unkown Warrior" with a value of 10 a total of 100 times, thereby expending 1,000 energy, is it possible to just allow the player to simply allocate (or burn) 1,000 energy instead of being forced to tap, tap, tap 100 times?

3) You now schedule a WD event about every three weeks. The event runs three days. Why not schedule a WD event weekly and let it run two days? If you did schedule it to begin Saturday at 1:00 or 2:00AM, ending Monday at 3:00AM, you'd be running the event a total of 8 to 9 days each month, rather than the 3 or so you currently schedule the event.

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RE 2: This is a great idea, and something we’ll consider in the future, although it’s not on our current development roadmap.

RE 3: We’ve definitely considered this, and will continue to keep the idea in mind. We’ve heard mixed reactions from the players on whether this would be welcomed or not. A lot of players have expressed to us that they enjoy having the full cycle building up to the big event, but other players have indicated they’d prefer more shorter events. It’s not currently in our plans, but if there was really positive player reaction to the idea we’d be more likely to do this.

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Originally Posted by AdamInToronto

Are there any plans to provide options to increase GUI performance on older devices (eg. disabling or reducing quality of raid animations)?

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We're always looking for ways to improve performance. The animation system touches many areas of the game, so we approach changes to it very cautiously, but I can ask the engineers to take a look. We're hoping that the account transfers feature will let players migrate to newer devices, if they have them available.

My picks of changes would love to see. Please comment if you intend any.

Co leader title

Easy wall purchase

Npc stacking issue, somehow solve to prevent wasted energy during fltq.

Fltq, allow team to work on and round of the event.

Gold use, help prevent accidents. A system I found great come from Simpsons tappd out game. When use gold you get 5 second count down timer with cancel button.

Data usage - needs work. Maybe you can create generic set of npc and building and display them if image has not been loaded instead of transferring over cell. Prompt uses when open app if they want to update content or wait till they are on wifi.

Min requirements, hope this will not be used as a way to force players to spend gold in order to get the reward. It really should be set by faction leaders.

Better information on teammates participation in each event. Total faction points don't work.

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Originally Posted by Petrol

I've been on MW since Dec 2011 and now I've been locked out of MW for several weeks. Both of the tickets I've logged have been closed as solved, yet I've had no definitive response to my issue. What will be done to improve your customer service? Reading the forums, reviewing replies on your Facebook page and listening to fellow faction members, there is considerable unrest, dissatisfaction, and general anger to the way your customers are being treated. I have invested far too much in this game to go a ayway quietly. Please improve your communication to your customers. Stop closing tickets without a proper understanding of what the issue is.

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We know that recently we’ve come up way short on a variety of fronts. We do realize that the recent issues have caused major, major damage to your trust in us. We really are throwing everything we can into making sure we can guarantee a stable and enjoyable experience for you going forward.

As far as our customer support, we’re always looking for ways to improve this, but please also realize that we have a very large number of players and the volume of tickets we receive at times can be quite large. In some cases, when the only possible resolution at the time is for the development team to fix the issue, CS may close tickets because the problem is being resolved on our end.

I really do understand how frustrating this is. I play other (non-GREE) mobile games and sometimes have to write in support tickets, and it’s infuriating to receive automated replies, have tickets closed without the issue resolved, etc. We absolutely want to do better than that, but like everyone else we’re trying to find the best way to balance the depth of our response with getting responses to tickets in a timely manner.

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Originally Posted by Evil Mastermind

What, if anything, has been done in V5.0 to decrease the amount of cellular data used by the Modern War app? To clarify, I'm not talking about space on my phone but rather the gigs of data on my data plan. I am consuming 2-3gigs per month using V4.4. When I tried v4.5, my data usage was over 5gigs in one month.

I don't play any other games or do anything else on my phone to consume any data, so it's all MW. If nothing has been done in V5.0 to correct this on-going issue, when will it be corrected?

Thank you.

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We’ve made several changes to reduce the amount of data usage by the app, so it should be much better now.

We don't necessarily recommend that you delete every time you reinstall unless there's a specific issue you're trying to fix, as that will cause high data usage while the game redownloads all the assets.

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Originally Posted by AdamInToronto

You said Ask Me Anything, so here's one that's more pointed... Was stat inflation supposed to give players attack and defense stats in the billions and tens-of-billions, or was that effect unintended?
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Bonus points: If intentional, why are there soo... many elipses in the game?

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When the decision was made a few years ago to start pushing up the value of rewards I’m not sure any of the people around thought the game would last this long! I wasn’t here at that time, so unfortunately I can’t ask them whether it was supposed to lead to stats in the billions. That being said, players may not realize this, but the inflation of stats in percentage terms has been extremely consistent (a few short accelerations and slowdowns aside) for the past few years, so ultimately, the inflation of stats was a predictable outcome of the prizes we were awarding for our events. We should have done a better job planning ahead for some of the user interface issues that occurred and keeping a better handle on the progression.

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Originally Posted by Kefa

Questions for new release "AMA":
5. New Battle Mechanic: Will it be possible at all to determine with any percentage of confidence whether a player will be able to win an attack against a target or rival prior to blindly attacking, or is it going to be a matter of having to spend health just to find out, trusting that the system must be correct in its calculations regardless of what I can see?

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The old battle mechanic had a random factor in each battle (in real life, the outcome of battle is not guaranteed), but this will occurs less under the new system.

The actual calculation is a bit complex. Overall, in each category your attack versus their defense is the most important part of the calculation. Your army strength is 50% of the battle outcome, army equipment is 30%, and soldier equipment strength is 20%. Each portion of the calculation (army strength, army equipment strength, soldier strength) is computed separately so functions more like a ratio. For example, if you’re 20% stronger on the army and 10% weaker on soldier and army equipment you should win the battle; however, if you’re 20% stronger on the army and 50% weaker on soldier and army equipment you should lose the battle.

The new system seems easy for players to eyeball and understand the battle results, but we are always looking at ways to improve new features.

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Originally Posted by Milburn Pennybags

We currently don’t have any plans to allow leaders to disable faction events. Could you let us know more about why you’d like to see this?

We'll get to the animations in another response since a lot of people asked about it.

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There can be alot of movement of members in & out of factions. If a leader could turn off goals we wouldn't have members missing out on prizes by accident. For example - doing a FLTQ a member could have a low level account as their main but doesn't use it hit faction goals, instead they bring in a old high level account to do kills.

with the movement people can sometimes get lost in transition taking time to come back. Or goal finishes before their main gets back in.

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Originally Posted by AdamInToronto

For how long will version 4.x clients (apps) be supported once version 5.0 is released? In other words, how long before I'm forced to update? Hours? Days? Weeks? Months?

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Due to changes in the backend and how battles work, we are probably going to make 5.0 a required upgrade pretty soon. We are going to release it as a non-forced upgrade to make sure that there aren't any unpleasant surprises and then switch it to a forced upgrade. We strongly recommend that you upgrade ASAP, though, to take advantage of account transfers, recycle, and soldier equip!

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Originally Posted by Kefa

Questions for new release "AMA":
6. Will the old "skill points" that we've already allocated now affect the outcome of a) PvP attacks? b) PvP Raids? c) WD Attacks?
If so, how and how much?
If so, also, will we be able to see our rival's skill point values in the rival profile prior to attacking/raiding? Will we see this number in raid results?
If so, also, how soon will we be able to reallocate our skill points, since we have as many as 900 skill points that have already been alocated with strategy that will no longer apply since it's been changed? (personally, if skill points do apply, and we are not allowed to re-allocate prior to them applying, isn't that pretty unfair?)

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We did not change the way skill points work in the battle calculation at this time. We likely will increase their importance (which players have correctly guessed has eroded over time due to inflation in overall stats) once we have the ability to allow players to reallocate their stat points.

1) After the new update, what exactly will determine winning/loosing, what will be the % effect of each category that has an effect on the outcome of the battle, and will we be able to see all of these factors in the battle results popup?
2) What will be the new factors on how many points you receive from a single hit during WD, and in what % do these have an effect on the points?
3) Is there also a % random factor added to the above questions?

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Originally Posted by NO_BS

With the stats inflation, it makes it very difficult to read without any separator or abbreviation. Do you have any plan to address this?

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We think the more elegant solution is something like 1.23B instead of 1,230,000,000. We do plan on doing some work to clean up the displays.

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Originally Posted by SiaoNam

Everybody like nice good graphic. Nice good graphic unit.
But in view of the data storage over in device, and the time taken to reinstall due to G of data.
Please consider to reduce the number of maps or make it a simple map that do not hold too much data.
Not forgetting, there are many OLD maps that most do not bother to check in.

With the new PvP, expecting a lots of data from rival. These data into device will surely occupy device storage space.
How is the device going to store it? And will it be removed after leaving rival base?

In view of some events, most player will hit at very last minutes, which resulted in huge flow of data exchange into server.
Will this be rectify and allow a smooth flow of data exchange?

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We have made several changes to the most recent version to reduce the amount of game data used. As noted above, not deleting your old version when you install the new one will also reduce data usage because you won't have to redownload the game assets.

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Originally Posted by SiaoNam

How is the changes of events make know to players? Via forum or Game?

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We try very hard to make sure that all changes in the game are explained clearly in the game. While we greatly appreciate our forum members, we understand that not every MW player is on the forums, and we don’t want people who aren’t reading them to be left out of the fun! Of course, we can put more information on the forums, and we do try to encourage people to check in here when there are big changes.

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Originally Posted by AdamInToronto

Will the defense offered by defensive buildings be updated to provide defense under todays billion-point attacks? For some reason, they were not affected by inflation.

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All buildings have a defense against raiding and the new ltq buildings have appropriate defense for the currrent stat inflation. We are working on surfacing this in game in upcoming releases. This is on our radar to update the building defense in the near future. :)

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Originally Posted by AdamInToronto

I've read elsewhere on this forum that every building, including both always available and limited availability income buildings, provides some kind of defense. Is this true?
If so, does 5.0 advertise building defense anywhere?
If not, to which buildings does the 'Building Defense' boost apply?

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All buildings have a basic defense against raiding, but we haven’t changed the way raiding works in 5.0, nor the way buildings are shown. We are thinking of ways to improve this in future releases.

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Originally Posted by Paisthecoolest

When can I expect to be able to log into my game? I was on an iPad 2. Newest mw update. iOS 8.1.1. I transferred it to an iPad mini. Newest mw update. iOS 8.1.1. Both could download and play a new mw game, but neither can play my level-300 account.

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We are working on getting 5.0 out to the players which should address stability issues people are experiencing. If you still experience these issues, please submit a ticket to CS with specific problems so we can address them.

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Originally Posted by Jaded Fusion

There can be alot of movement of members in & out of factions. If a leader could turn off goals we wouldn't have members missing out on prizes by accident. For example - doing a FLTQ a member could have a low level account as their main but doesn't use it hit faction goals, instead they bring in a old high level account to do kills.

with the movement people can sometimes get lost in transition taking time to come back. Or goal finishes before their main gets back in.

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Thanks for the clarification. That makes a lot of sense, and it's something we'll look into.

Will there be any consideration ('I apologize Tank', energy packs, etc..) given to players who have been locked out of their game for the past 2-4 weeks?

Will selling old LE sets or gold units be rewarded with extra valor to get some compensation for these now useless units in our inventories.

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Originally Posted by Cody21(DockbotSupport)2.0

1) After the new update, what exactly will determine winning/loosing, what will be the % effect of each category that has an effect on the outcome of the battle, and will we be able to see all of these factors in the battle results popup?
2) What will be the new factors on how many points you receive from a single hit during WD, and in what % do these have an effect on the points?
3) Is there also a % random factor added to the above questions?

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Points 1 and 3 of your question are hopefully answered by my colleague CrazyNerdGirl.

As far as the points in WD, we haven't changed how these work currently. However, we do feel like there are some improvements possible in the future, in particular to reduce the feeling that players are penalized for leveling up. We will definitely let you know well in advance before we go changing something like this, since we know it would impact the way you choose to approach the game.

I merged the questions in posts 27 and 28, since they're on the same topic.

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Originally Posted by HellRaizer

Beta testing..

I have been beta testing since the time that WDs were introduced. The level of response to issues as dropped quite considerably.

The major issues currently, where raised during beta testing.. A number of other beta testers where getting crashes, unable to log in, long log in times. This info was fed back but didn't seem to be acknowledged. When raised on a thread, Admin said that "different" issues had been raised

I don't what to place blame historically but could we consider the following:

- Beta Testing is in affect User Acceptance testing (as we are the end users)
- When issues are raised, we get an email after testing, saying thank you for your feedback ... what would be better is:
-- Have a summary of all issues raised (by everyone)
-- List which issues will be resolved / ignore for that version
-- Release a second round of beta testing and ask for the corrected issues to be tested (currently this only seems to happen in extreme circumstances)

Beta testing again -

On a number of occasions the information has been lacking regarding the new fetaures.

- Bug fixes (what bug fixes?)
- Improvements (what improvements?)
- (an example.. Big Guns issue.. we were never told what it was)

The information appears to be the same info that is place on the app store for a new version.

If possible could we have much more detailed information about what is being tested. Especially if a new feature is being rolled out. I assume that the new feature will already have a requirements doc and hopefully a technical doc as well as user documentation. Could these be forwarded on, or at least a detailed summary?

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We have made some changes to our beta process recently - the biggest is that we're now running the betas on a new server setup, which allows us to give our beta testers lots of new items to play with without being unfair to non-beta-testers during the beta test period. We're hoping to update the process further (in ways that show more to our actual testers), and these are really useful suggestions, thanks!

About release notes: one of the things we're testing in our betas is whether we have enough information about how features work in the actual game itself for people to understand how it works without any more input from us. Sadly, giving you guys more extensive release notes would make that much harder, since you'd know what to look for and where. I know that sounds like a cop-out, but when it comes out, take a look at how much we added to make Soldier Equip easier to understand between the beta and release.

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Originally Posted by I Will Merc You

Will there be any consideration ('I apologize Tank', energy packs, etc..) given to players who have been locked out of their game for the past 2-4 weeks?

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Those particular items through the popup will still be available once our new fixes go live. We're continuing to investigate what else we can do to improve things. We know that this has been a really trying time for a lot of players, and we really do understand why you're upset.

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Originally Posted by AdamInToronto

The descriptions of the new Battle Calculation and the new Soldier Equipment features make many references to ones 'Army' and 'Soldiers'. Does this mean only Infantry units benefit from the new equipment?
Also, PvP Equipment Hints states:

Each ally you add allows you to bring 4 extra units to battle
Each army unit can bring 6 unused equipment items to battle

Could you clarify how units will be chosen from one's inventory of Air, Sea, Ground and Infantry to form each battle, and, in particular, if 'Soldier Equipment' is applied before or after determining which units are chosen?

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Quick run down of the definitions and what they mean regarding soldier equip:

Your Army: These units are all of the items you have collected so far. This includes the ground, sea, air, and infantry units.
Your Solider: This is your current avatar in game. We are adding the ability to equip 6 items to your avatar. The unit types are Head, Weapon 1, Weapon 2, Armor, Feet, and Accessory.
Your Army Equipment: All army units that you bring into battle automatically equip up to 6 items (if you have extra items to equip)

As you can see, all units in the army benefit from the new equipment.

In regards to the PvP help text, the text is updated to reflect the new 5.0 changes. Overall it works the same way, except all of the army units you bring into battle can now have up to 6 items equipped.

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Originally Posted by HellRaizer

How to management currently decide what to introduce next.. bit of a leading question here..

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Rather than the Admin picking Mods, could the community not pick the mods (those whosubmit an application).. What we need are a few players who can relay information directly back to yourselves.. What we don't need is "yes (wo)men" who think that everything is wonderful and because of that they are made mods.. eg someone responding "heck yeah" when asked about a 7 day WD.

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When evaluating what features to put in next, we consider both the development cost of the feature and the likelihood that the players will actually want to use it. Much-requested features like chat are really expensive in terms of development cost -- we have to build a back-end system to support synchronous communications, then build a chat system on top of that, then QA it across a number of different platforms, network connections, and on-device keyboards. So that’s much less likely than, say, a gold confirmation popup, which is much less difficult, requiring only one engineer, some UI designer time, and a whole lot of QA to make sure it shows up everywhere.

Our community managers are actually paid GREE employees, and they do relay information back from you guys to the devs. Seriously, all the time, every day. But every time a dev comes on the forums, that’s time that they could be spending working on fixing bugs and building features, and we think you’d really rather they did those things?

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Originally Posted by MW Flake

Will all current broken things be fixed before more things are added to bog down an already overtaxed game engine

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We appreciate your frustration and want to let you know that the stability, performance and correct behavior is our top priority for future releases.

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Originally Posted by HellRaizer

With people being locked out of the game so often, or people simply not being able to participate at times. Could we please have a CO Leader option. This is something that has been asked for for a long time. Having one person in charge of a faction creates a problem should something happen to the leader, which in turns raises more tickets

Alternatively have a new function within the faction.. Maybe a level that has all the features of the leader... Kick, purchases boosts , build walls (essential), promote/demote (officers)... but can't kick the leader

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These are great ideas. Adding this functionality is definitely something we'd like to do. We can't give you a timeline at this time, but just wanted to let you know that we do think these are good ideas.

Will the current system still be in place regarding one ally=6 units/soldiers into battle?
Meaning with 500 allies we take 3,000 soldiers which would means 3,000 x 6 items (18.006) including your avatar.
Will we win equipment items in events?will we have a building to "manufacture" items or do we just buy from store with cash/valour?

Why is epic boss being changed from using army stats? Everything people have spent a lot of time and working towards you are now making useless

Are you thinking of adding new faction bonus?

Why can't our stat bonuses count during the raid boss?

Can we please fix the problem with NPC spawning in on top of each other? I have to reload the map many times to spread them. This can't be "random" because it happens all to often.

Also, would it kill you to give us events we can finish with little or no money. Less than 100 a cycle and still improve our game? The money you demand would allow us all to buy game systems WITH games and extra controller.

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Originally Posted by HellRaizer

Splash screen when first logging in.

Two fold here

1. New LE units, this screen appears in invariably has a purchase option. IOt is possible to click the purchase button before the screen as even fully loaded from booting up the game. Therefore can this be removed (see for alternative suggestion below)

New events. A number of new events come out together.. eg .. normal, prestige, masters, maybe crate or raid boss.. but only one splash screen appears, for what seems to be one of the events randomly. What decides which events will be show on the splash screen?

2. Rewards since the last log in time.. I think that if your faction does a lot while you are not logged on, the game actually crashes when building up a list of all the splash screens.. just a hunch but it feels like it..


Possible solutions

Add an additional tab to the news feed. In here provide a link to every splash screen that is currently applicable. Therefore when people log in:
1. they can see the final prize for each event and
2. they can also see what they have been awarded since their last log in..

I hope this shouldn't be too difficult

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Thanks for the suggestions.
1. I am guessing you are on iOS because Android has most of the functionality you are talking about. We are looking into porting it over to iOS, but other development priorities have come up. This is on our radar to port over to iOS.

2. This is something we can look into. Please write into CS with more detailed information like your device model and issues you are experiencing and CS will pass it on to the developers.

Possible Solutions Section: We know this is an issue and we have started brainstorming ways to present this information per event.

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Originally Posted by HellRaizer

Will there ever be android Beta testing?

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There already is Android beta testing. We ran a very successful Android beta for 5.0 over the week of Thanksgiving. (Thank you so much to all our testers who really came through for us before the holiday!)

As part of our changes to the beta program, we'll probably be looking for new beta testers soon, and we'll post here when we're ready for that.

I would be interested in beta testing

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Originally Posted by HellRaizer

Are the Modern War developers the same developers that work on Kingdom age and Crime City. My reasoning behind this is. Do the games still use the same underlying code and evolve in the same way. Something that we notice a lot is that features get rolled out in other games first and quite often they aren't appreciated. This then gives a negative vibe in our community because we know that same change could be coming

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The games are actually three separate teams, but we do often work together on really big features and put them into all three games. Although we can’t always roll out every feature to all the games simultaneously, we do listen to feedback from the players who see it first and try to improve it for the ones rolling out later if we have time.

Many players have reached lvl 300. It would be nice if you raise this max lvl till 400 or 500