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A few questions for TW

DreaderVII

Grizzled Veteran
Nov 25, 2015
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I hold no hope that these questions will be answered now or at all, but they're on my mind since the update gone live and furious posts calling for immediate rollback at worst and other appealing to TW's love of their fans, lies at the bottom of it. I never seen the community more agitated or divided (During the resistance debacle we were not divided to this extent).

So the questions I have that I generally want answered by TWI or others who know the answer (Not just assumptions or accusations, please):

1: Was the idea of the Upgrade System from within TW, or was it partly TW and partly fan suggestions that birthed it?
2: Was the Upgrade System ever meant for Endless or Survival exclusively?
3: Did TW consider the potential backlash against EDAR's upon inception?
4: Was there ideas to make them ZEDs and not robots?
5: The method of performing Reload Cancelling that was made unavailable in the update, what was the reasoning behind the "fix"? Why was it "fixed"?
6: How much of this update is considered "Completed-in-time"?

Personally I like the EDARs, does not mind the RC being made unavailable and wish for the Upgrade system to begone from Survival. But I also want to understand the reasoning behind this update.

Thank you for reading.
/DreaderVII
 
I'm not an employee at Tripwire, but I can say that people have been asking for weapon upgrades since the firs game came out. That's almost 10 years ago! I don't know what prompted them to add it to the game, but there were a lot of other things that people were asking for over the years which made it into the game with mixed reception (lmg, versus mode, etc). This appears to be one of those scenarios.
 
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imnrk;n2321165 said:
I'm not an employee at Tripwire, but I can say that people have been asking for weapon upgrades since the firs game came out. That's almost 10 years ago! I don't know what prompted them to add it to the game, but there were a lot of other things that people were asking for over the years which made it into the game with mixed reception (lmg, versus mode, etc). This appears to be one of those scenarios.

The concept was fine, just the wave of nerfs to compensate for them was too much. The railgun basically costs 3000 dosh now, and the husk cannon and eviscerator got nerfed to the ground.

If the weapons kept their base values and got improved it would be fine, but it feels like most weapons we are "upgrading" them to where they started and some still feel worse.




Although weapons that got buffed like the M4 have become really good.
 
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imnrk;n2321165 said:
I'm not an employee at Tripwire, but I can say that people have been asking for weapon upgrades since the firs game came out.

I think when people said they want upgrades they was talking about attachments system like in Battlefield 3-4. If it would be like that - everyone would adore it.

LazerOfDensity;n2321169 said:
The concept was fine, just the wave of nerfs to compensate for them was too much. The railgun basically costs 3000 dosh now, and the husk cannon and eviscerator got nerfed to the ground.

If the weapons kept their base values and got improved it would be fine, but it feels like most weapons we are "upgrading" them to where they started and some still feel worse.

Yes. Most upgraded weapons became worse than they were before update (which should be opposite).
 
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I'm just really disappointed with this update. Killing Floor games have always been about having fun in increasingly awkward waves and it has always been a largely good community with little grief. This update has done a lot to ruin that; introducing weapon upgrades (so people don't share dosh, at all, ever), adding prestige (so people only care about their XP rather than the benefit of the team) and, worse of all, introducing a poorly thought out series of nerfs which drastically altered the play style for a lot of people.

In my worthless opinion, the game has tried to take itself too seriously and failed.
 
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I haven't spoken to the designers about the changes, but as a general rule, games changes are driven by data, reports and observation of the largest number of players. Designers use what you say here, but also the collected analytics data of what players do in the game, because most players never post. Our responsibility is to the broadest set of players. At times it may seem like we do not hear your one voice, but the truth is we hear many voices and that informs decisions.
 
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Foster Parent;n2321213 said:
I haven't spoken to the designers about the changes, but as a general rule, games changes are driven by data, reports and observation of the largest number of players. Designers use what you say here, but also the collected analytics data of what players do in the game, because most players never post. Our responsibility is to the broadest set of players. At times it may seem like we do not hear your one voice, but the truth is we hear many voices and that informs decisions.

Ofcourse, otherwise the game would be looking very different. And I don't worry about not being heard I know that I am, if not directly by TW, by other fans and players.

It's these specific additions to the game that I wonder about, but I understand that they cannot be answered easily or at all and that's fine. Much like the "Designer notes" described the thought behind the changes in Beta 2, I would have liked to know the thought behind the updates' content.

Thanks for the answer tho, take care!
 
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1. This was both. Over time, we have received feedback that our gameplay loop can feel stale quickly because it was the same path to the high tier weapons. So you begin a game, work yourself up to your final tier, and then you're done. A lot of our weapons have good feel but we can't bring them all to the final waves. Along with players requests, we introduced the Upgrade System as a way to promote a better gameplay diversification and add something fresh to the game loop. It also let's us expand out weapon gameplay depending on what we choose to upgrade on them, and we do have plans to add more knobs other than damage, heal recharge rate, and weight.

2. At one point, it was thought to be something just for Endless because it made sense having a system that can promote weapons alongside the high influx of dosh you can potentially receive with Endless. It also works alongside the increased difficulty. That was the initial design, but once we got to implementing it, we wanted to try incorporating it into Survival as well as a way to broaden the weapon gameplay for it too. We playtested it here and found it to be a neat way to expand weapon loadouts, so we decided to keep it for all game modes.

3/ 4. We were thinking about new range gameplay they could bring to add new challenges for players to confront. Robots / Evil DARs were chosen to go along with some lore not yet revealed.

5. We started looking into ways to address it because it was creating a lot of uninteded affects. It became too difficult to balance around and gauge it's influence, so we decided to remove it. Initially we left it because some players liked it but over time we started to see how much it was being used and how much it negated features and normal balance. We are still looking at options at how to best handle it.

6. There is always more we want to do and improve upon!
 
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