[AMA] Ask The Developer Anything - December 4th

[Matt-Austin]

Will the LTB's from recent cycles be re offered for accounts that are locked out from the last updates?

[Talahaski]

Can u reorganize fltq so members can be working on different levels at same time and not have to wait for previous level to be complete. Would love event goals to be condensed like the wrapper for rb. Have one goal for prestige fltq, within that goal list each round and kills needed. So anybody can work on any kills and does not have to be done in order

[Kavoc]

Not really on topic but I mean how often do we get to ask people from gree actual questions.
Are you ever going to have support like that actually answer tickets properly and resolve things?
Rather than just computer generated responses and closing tickets.

[Captain Buck Slayer]

AMA is live

[Clementine]

Good Morning/Afternoon/Evening Everyone! The Developers are in the house and will begin answering questions beginning now!

[Little T]

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?

[RhythmNBruise]

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)

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).

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?

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.

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.

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.

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

You're welcome! Thanks for participating!

[Milburn Pennybags]

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

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.

[Web323]

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.

[Milburn Pennybags]

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.

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.

[RhythmNBruise]

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

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.

[Talahaski]

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.

[Milburn Pennybags]

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.

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.

[RhythmNBruise]

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.

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.

[Milburn Pennybags]

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?

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.