[AMA] Ask The Developer Anything - December 4th

[CrazyNerdyGirl]

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?

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.

[Jaded Fusion]

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.

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.

[RhythmNBruise]

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?

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!

[CrazyNerdyGirl]

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?)

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.

[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?

[Milburn Pennybags]

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

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.

[RhythmNBruise]

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?

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.

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

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.

[CrazyNerdyGirl]

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.

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.

[CrazyNerdyGirl]

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?

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.

[CrazyNerdyGirl]

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.

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.

[Milburn Pennybags]

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.

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

[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?

[Zoltarov]

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.

[Milburn Pennybags]

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?

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.

[RhythmNBruise]

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

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?

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.