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Hey Ramm-Jaeger what happened to hero status & MkB42H/AVT40 being rare weapons?

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Ro1 had a learning curve, ro2 its just point and shoot but apparently most mainstream gamers have to learn to point and shoot. Maybe I should make a mod called heroes of stalingrad and implement heroes the way we were told they would be implemented.


That would be great Leo! Please do so!

Oh and my girl-friend can do PR for them, she's got a master in media com and looking for a job atm.
Interested TWI? PM me!
 
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Ok, now that I am back in the office I have time to answer this thread better (having actually talked with the design team and owners). This has been the main reason there hasn't been many "pr" updates is because of my absence this week. It also doesn't help that several owners and design team leaders also had a few days off this week (their first in nearly a year).
 
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1) Why don't we have a third party PR team or consultant.

Well the short answer to this is, we had one once. The long answer to this is, we had one once, and they didn't accomplish anything but consume money to no result. We since pulled our efforts in house and focus our efforts to where we see the greatest return.

This means we run our own PR list to talk to the media, and talk to our users via the forums and forms of social media (such as Facebook, Twitter and the Official Game Group on Steam).
 
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2) Why isn't the MKB/AVT as rare as John/Ramm originally stated?

I've talked with the design team and the answer is fairly simple (like it or not).

They changed their minds fairly late in development in the weeks running up to release on the system. As some of you have noticed we used to have an elite assault role as well as an elite rifleman role. The design team decided to remove this.

3 Assaults on combined arms maps (German and Allies)
4 Assaults on Infantry maps (for Germans, 6 for Allies)

This number is for 64 player counts and the potential amount of mkb's in play. The reason they might seem skewed with lower player counts is due to the way roles are unlocked and us wanting at least one of every role available (short of tanks, anti tank and engineer roles). Is this subject to change? Maybe. That all depends on civil community feedback of which you guys are providing much :)

Also, the ability for server owners to lock down these weapons/roles was not finished for launch and is high on our list of things to get implemented in game. This way server admins can choose to not have these except in Hero roles (or not even have hero roles at all). We feel this will go a long way to address this.
 
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3) What happened to User X (Lemon)

He as well as several other members could not be civil in their feedback and use of the forums. They received infractions and reached the state where enough infractions put them on Vacation from the forums. They will eventually clear and will be allowed back. If they still can't behave, their vacations might be made more permanent.

This thread is not the thread to talk about this subject. Take it to offtopic if you really must. And these signatures in support will also receive infractions. I don't need to put up with that crap. If you want to support those who break the forums rules, you can join them elsewhere.
 
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2) Why isn't the MKB/AVT as rare as John/Ramm originally stated?

I've talked with the design team and the answer is fairly simple (like it or not).

They changed their minds fairly late in development in the weeks running up to release on the system. As some of you have noticed we used to have an elite assault role as well as an elite rifleman role. The design team decided to remove this.

3 Assaults on combined arms maps
4 Assaults on Infantry maps (for Germans, 6 for Allies)

This number is for 64 player counts and the potential amount of mkb's in play. The reason they might seem skewed with lower player counts is due to the way roles are unlocked and us wanting at least one of every role available (short of tanks, anti tank and engineer roles). Is this subject to change? Maybe. That all depends on civil community feedback of which you guys are providing much :)

Also, the ability for server owners to lock down these weapons/roles was not finished for launch and is high on our list of things to get implemented in game. This way server admins can choose to not have these except in Hero roles (or not even have hero roles at all). We feel this will go a long way to address this.
Why removing the Elite Assault? It would probably solve the MKB/AVT issue. It's really stupid how the PPSh drum mag is rarer than the MKB.
 
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2) Why isn't the MKB/AVT as rare as John/Ramm originally stated?

I've talked with the design team and the answer is fairly simple (like it or not).

They changed their minds fairly late in development in the weeks running up to release on the system. As some of you have noticed we used to have an elite assault role as well as an elite rifleman role. The design team decided to remove this.

3 Assaults on combined arms maps
4 Assaults on Infantry maps (for Germans, 6 for Allies)

This number is for 64 player counts and the potential amount of mkb's in play. The reason they might seem skewed with lower player counts is due to the way roles are unlocked and us wanting at least one of every role available (short of tanks, anti tank and engineer roles). Is this subject to change? Maybe. That all depends on civil community feedback of which you guys are providing much :)

Also, the ability for server owners to lock down these weapons/roles was not finished for launch and is high on our list of things to get implemented in game. This way server admins can choose to not have these except in Hero roles (or not even have hero roles at all). We feel this will go a long way to address this.

That personally made a lot more sense, less assaults on big combined arms maps meant for more riflemen or MGs which would of made game play more tactical and on infantry maps the Russians would get more PPSH users and it sounds like this would of personally solved a lot of balance issues. I think what you guys should do is try to change it back to this in the beta and have us test it to see how it works.

Thanks for posting why it was changed.
 
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3 Assaults on combined arms maps
4 Assaults on Infantry maps (for Germans, 6 for Allies)

This number is for 64 player counts and the potential amount of mkb's in play.

No, just checked cause I was certain this was wrong. It's 5 assault on combined arms and 6 on infantry maps (for Germans).

EDIT: After some checking your numbers seem to be for 32 players.
 
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First off, regarding my whereabouts and people saying "Ramm hasn't logged in to the forums for a week". I was on a well deserved vacation. And a lot of devs have been cycling through vacation starting last week. The dev team pulled a 6-8 month death march to get the game out. Some people (myself included) worked 12+ hour days for 6 months without a day off to get the game shipped. So we all sure as hell deserved a few days off. So unless you want mindless half asleep zombies doing bug fixes, updates, and new content for RO2, I highly suggest you stop harassing devs for getting some well needed rest :)

As Jared has said regarding the weapon loadouts, we changed our mind during the course of the development. The original way that we were planning to do it wasn't looking like it was going to fit in as well as we'd like. So we implemented it a different way. Given that Ostfront used STG44's in a similar amount (or more) I'm quite surprised at the outcry. There weren't any 100 page threads in Ostfront with tons of people in an uproar over having "too many assault rifles" in Danzig and similar maps. We designed RO2 with pretty close to the same realism measures that we did in RO1. We've always had some odd weapons in the game, and we've always done things where we abstracted functionality to make it fun to play. The question we always asked was "can this weapon have possibly been there". If the answer was yes, it was fair game to put it in there. Remember the PPD40 and the MP41? They were rare weapons, but were featured in almost every map. And yet there was almost never a mention of the PPD40, and just only a slight murmur over the use of the MP41.

Of course what is really funny is the cries of "RO2 is already dying", "look at the Steam stats, the player counts have dropped off". This is really funny for a few reasons. First off, it is the natural cycle of EVERY game to have a big peak around launch, and then the player counts taper off until they stabilize. Where was RO1 at this point after launch - about 1000-1200 players at peak. Where was Killing Floor at this point - less than 3,000 players at peak. So for RO2 to be at 3,000 players a few weeks after launch, with 10% less of a drop off than Killing Floor and 3x what RO1 had - I'd call that a good thing. KF actually dropped off down to 800-1000 a couple months after launch before the TWI free content cycle kicked in. After that the player counts climbed and never went back down to the same place after the updates. This summer KF was averaging peaks of 4000-5000 players. And of course right now EVERY game on Steam has taken a player count hit while everyone checks out the BF3 beta. So before everyone starts shouting "look RO2 is dying" you need to realize this is just part of the normal life cycle of the game.

We'll do the same thing we always do, grab a good core group of players at the outset. Then continue to build on that core group of players by supporting the game, adding free content, doing Steam promotions, etc. See it is a long cycle plan - not like the big publishers that spend a $100 million on marketing to get everyone to jump into the game at launch then burn them a year later with releasing next years version of the same game (or burn them every two months with $15 2 map DLC). Every game for us is a long term thing.

So in summary, I would like to ask you guys, especially you guys that have been around for a long time to try and be civil. We're never going to please EVERYONE, but polite, well thought out suggestions are a lot more likely to get our attention than flaming and dev bashing. If there are changes people want we'll look into them. But you're not going to get them "tommorow", so have some patience :)
 
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