Reddit Q&A - January 24th

Executive Producer, Chris Wynn sets aside some time to talk with the community each week. 

Hey everyone!

I am hoping to do these regularly going forward so that we can continue a conversation around what is happening with the game. For now we are going to be doing them sometimes on Twitter and sometimes on Reddit, Tuesday mornings at 11am Pacific. Here's a recap of our Q&A from today, January 24th.  - Chris Wynn

 

Q:

Is the desync being discussed at all in these QA meetings? What I see and what my teammate in a duo sees is sometimes very different. We occasionally collide cars when on our screens we are very far apart. If that is any indication, it likely means what I am also shooting at is very different than where the target truly is.

A:

Yes, we look at these and discuss them quite often. Here is how we are tackling the problem right now:

1. Implement a connection test to ensure high ping players are not exploiting games in other regions.
2. Implement an in-game ping indicator to help diagnose the videos that we watch and to help players diagnose their own connections.

After those two changes, we will then have a lot better information to help us diagnose issues that get sent to us and allow us to figure out what may be happening to cause that.

 

Q:

What about ranking system in DUOS and FIVES ? 2: When will be skirmishes again ?

A:

 We are in the process of designing a ranking system for duos and fives. No commitment to a date just yet.

We are working to get skirmishes running again as quickly as we can. Likely be in the next patch (not tomorrow, but the next large patch) unless something comes up that we need to react to.

 

Q:

1.How far away is spectator mode?

 2. The New/Improved infrastructure servers arriving soon? (for EU)

Eu servers have been exceptionally bad lately, we really need them to be bolstered, game was largely unplayable in EU this weekend. Thank you for taking your time to answer our questions.

A:

 Hard to commit to a date on spectate mode right now. We are working on improving it, but it is a pretty big undertaking to improve the jerkiness of the view of your teammates. In order to improve it we have to change code that is fairly fundamental. So that means we have to be really, really careful, which means it takes longer. We are committed to ensuring that it works well before pushing to live.

New servers, yes. We will be switching all of the EU games over to the new servers tonight as part of the patch going live.

 

Q:

Why has implementing spectate mode been such a difficult task? The initial showing of it was as i remember it at the 2015 invitational where it was stated that this was the base for spectate in how the game was being shown. Has staff that had the necessary skills and experience in this aspect of your coding left the development team?

A:

 Different systems. The spectate camera that we use in the invitational is a bit different than what we need to provide to every player across a spectrum of connection types. The last issue that we are looking to work out now is the smoothness of your teammates on your client as you are spectating. It is not as smooth as we would like it, so now we need to smooth it out which is actually a pretty complicated problem when you are dealing with latency and all of the other issues that come with network gameplay.

 

Q:

Is there any plans to add extra equipment to the game such as new vehicles, weapons or anything else?

A:

 Plans, yes. Nothing in progress right now though. We need to do some more work on what already exists in the game before expanding out and adding more.

Q:

Any plans to revamp the colors inside the buildings and houses, etc. so that they aren't all just gray and white?

A:

 The Arena is continuing to have more work done to it over the next few months. One of those items is a texture pass across the whole palette. Grass, leaves, walls, all of it. The current focus is some further optimizations, then we are going to look at the visual aesthetics.

 

Q:

Currently people can bail out of a vehicle at high speed to abuse lag and kill a target, will there be any change made so that people doing this will take damage when exiting the vehicle at speed?

A:

 Yes, we are going to change this. Internally we are testing a change that prevents a player from exiting a vehicle that above a set speed threshold. This makes it a bit tougher as you need to slow down first. We need to two more things to this before sending it live however.

1. Add some messaging so it is clear when you are above or below the speed threshold.
2. Address the desync issue of the player's location when they exit the vehicle so they do not warp to a new location quickly.

To be clear, with any changes to gameplay, we will promote all changes to the test server for player feedback before committing to the live servers.

 

Q:

Will private servers ever return?

The main reason I ask is because of groups like H1Z1 Drafts that attempt to get a large group of 5s teams into the same game but often fail. It would be great if organizations could control who can join a match and when it begins, much like the old private servers. 

A:

 Tonight's patch adds in our first version of what we are calling Hosted Games. This is ultimately the full replacement to private servers, but functionality will come in several phases. What they do is allow private (or public) games on a scheduled time. The first things that it enables is some of the community run tournaments that were being organized previously. In time, we will add spectate access here for shoutcasting, and eventually mod controls to have more control over the match. We are working with a few groups to start getting some of these games going again now that we have some support for it back.

 

Q:

1. any plans to bring back Z1 map as an alternative for matches? Or at least another (perhaps smaller) map?
2. will there be a deathmatch or objective mode in the future?
3. any plans to add more weapons? How about a shooting range?
4. any plans to add a "play again" button on the death screen to go directly back into queue?
5. are you fixing shotguns against helmet and chest armor?
6. are you nerfing hipfire and bunnyhopping? I noticed you mentioned crouch spam the other day.

 

A:

 I will tackle a few of these.

Z1 - No plans to bring back. Would be as much work as building a new map with how much things changed in the underlying code from Z1 to Z2.

Play Again button - Yes, but I don't want to add this quite yet. We are looking to shorten the queue times even further, once we get those down to essentially 0, then I think it makes sense to add a Play Again button.

Game balance - We are looking at everything right now and compiling a big list of balance changes that we will be diving into. Our first priority was to fix some client server issues that were plaguing our combat and gunplay. Those look to be behind us now, and we can turn our focus to balance and design.

 

Q:

Why is the development so slow and how can you take several months to fix simple bugs?

A:

 Complicated answer really because ultimately there are a ton of competing factors that make game dev difficult. We would love to spend 100% of our time just addressing the issues that we see get raised in the community. But we do have constraints to work around. Things like the size of the team, testing, difficulty in reproducing issues internally so we have to take time to track down the root causes. Each bug and issue is it's own special snowflake, and in our efforts to be thorough and clean, it can take more time to get through.

 

Q:

What about your upcoming patch tomorrow ?? When will go servers down and when up ?

A:

 Current plan is to bring them down at 12am(PST). We are expecting more downtime than normal with this one and are estimating 8 hours of downtime. Could be slightly longer in EU as we switch to all new hardware. We will have more info and exact specifics when we release the patch notes this afternoon.

 

Q:

Are there plans to put more than just one map in rotation?

A:

 No plans for a new map. We are getting skirmishes back up and running to provide that variety of gameplay.

Q:

Could we please get some sort of shooting range added? given how a match plays out it's very difficult for new players to get used to how the weapons work because they get killed and exit the match before having the chance to learn how the guns work, such as recoil, bullet speed, bullet drop, to know where to aim. The current training mode doesn't provide this as it can be hard to find a gun and people use it as a Death Match preventing new players from learning.

A:

 We have been discussing adding a shooting range. The current training mode isn't really providing what we would like it to, so we are currently talking about what to do there. The one consistent thing that keeps coming up is adding a shooting range with tracers on so you can learn how to compensate for the bullet dynamics.

 

Q:

So, last year we were promised the game for console during the Summer. Is that still a thing going this year or you just gave up on it?

A:

 We have not given up, no estimated timeframe to provide today. We are first and foremost committed to a quality release when we do decide to do it.

 

Q:

How are things going with the January patch? What do you anticipate to be the next priorities for the team after that patch? Thanks for all the hard work, love the game despite the bugs.

A:

 January patch looks pretty good. Had a sync with the team this morning, looks like there are no new known issues, so we are a go for tonight assuming something surprising doesn't happen in the next several hours.

We are lining up the next patch right now, biggest priorities are team spectate and skirmishes. Down from there we have a list of bugs that we are attacking. I don't yet know if spectate cam and skirmishes will make in time for the patch as we need to answer a few questions first, but that is the current goal.

 

Q:

Regarding the map, are there any there any changes or improvements coming to the map? For games placed on Z2 it's been suggested a lot on this sub reddit that the map is too large, that there is a lot of wasted space that people never get to, can we see more end locations to make more use of the map's interesting areas? perhaps the system could sometimes target in around a POI to use as the end point as there are lots of interesting ones most people never even see.

A:

 Yes. We have started some work that is actually quite a lot of work. But we plan on building the rings behind the scenes differently so that the final ring could end anywhere on the map, not just somewhere roughly with the center of it. This means we could have a final ring at the dam as an example. This will really open up the map and make it a lot dynamic than it currently is.