[AMA] Ask The Developer Anything - December 4th

[Clementine]

Please join us Thursday, December 4th, at 10am PST for our next Developer Ask Me Anything! Please join us in discussing and asking questions about upcoming features and updates, particularly those related to update 5.0.

Representatives from the Development Team:

CrazyNerdGirl: Lead Game Designer
RhythmNBruise: Producer
Milburn Pennybags: General Manager

This time we are trying something new so as to allow those in other time zones to participate and this thread will be unlocked Wednesday at 5pm PST so that you may post your questions in advance. The Developers will arrive Thursday morning at 10am sharp and will be answering questions here for an hour! The thread will then be locked at at the conclusion of the AMA. We'll answer as many questions as possible.

Remember any posts that violate the Forum Code of Conduct will be removed. Furthermore, any post that attacks, insults, implies insults, harasses the Development Team will result in an immediate and permanent ban. Please keep everything on topic and constructive.

[Clementine]

You may now begin posting your questions for the team to answer tomorrow at 10:00am PST! Please remember to follow our Code of Conduct and Terms of Service, and please keep this thread limited to questions only, not discussion.

Additionally please try and be specific in your questions, and if someone else has already posted your same question, please be aware of that! Questions about Customer Support or of that nature will not be answered here, as these folks are not part of that team.

[Kefa]

Questions for new release "AMA":

Thank you so much for doing this. I do still hope that you will consider doing another live Q&A on day 2 or 3 of the extended WD event so that players can ask relevant questions as they come up during the event, when they count most. I also still suggest that you consider doing a live Q&A room on Groupme during a full day of the WD event with a knowledgable individual available during business hours to answer live quesions, since that is a venue where a large percentage of players communicate. You will need to coordinate a day in advance, though, in order to get a room expanded large enough to accomodate the number of people you would want to allow in the room.

Here are my questions from what I've seen/read so far:

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)

2. Army Attack / Defense: Will we be able to see our rival's total Army atk/def strength in the rival profile prior to attacking/raiding? Will we see this number in raid results?

3. Equipment your soldier isn't using: Will we be able to see our rival's total Equipment atk/def strength equipped by their army in the rival profile prior to attacking/raiding? Will we see this number in raid results?

4. Soldier Power Attack/Defense: Will we be able to see our rival's Soldier total atk/def strength including equipment in the rival profile prior to attacking/raiding? Will we see this number in raid results?

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?


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?)

7. Unit Recycling: When I tested the inventory recycle feature, it didn't work correctly. The units were successfully removed from inventory, but the cash was never credited. Has this been addressed?

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?

Old/Other Business:

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.


10. I have what I believe are some good ideas for making the game more fun for the players without removing the monetization value. Where can I submit these ideas other than the public forum, where someone might actually glance at them to consider whether they are worth exploring?

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

[AdamInToronto]

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

[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

[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.

[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.

[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?

[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.

[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?

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

[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?

[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.

[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?

[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.

[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?