WWAUT - Initial Reports on Game Conductor and Live Update

[Yoshiro]

Hello everyone! Last week we updated the game to 1029 which allowed us to put the new Live Update system into play. This allowed us to quickly follow up 1029 with two sets of updates (toning down game conductor on the Hell on Earth difficulty as well as some Versus Survival balance changes).

I would like to show some before and after stats from player victories on Survival. This data represents teams playing the right difficulty for their level reaching the boss fight from before and after patch 1028.

Some key takeaways I want to highlight here:

• Winning is up across the board (except HoE on the chart above but I

 

[TheTCREngineer]

How common will live updates be?

 

[JoelFig]

Will PvP data be collected and presented like this in the future? I think having a baseline would dispel some of the biases picked up from first impressions i.e. humans are OP, ZEDs are OP, etc etc

 

[Yoshiro]

How common will live updates be?

As fast as we decide on what to change with good reasons why. Since the steps of making a build and testing it are not holding back these changes they should be seen more frequently overall.

Will PvP data be collected and presented like this in the future? I think having a baseline would dispel some of the biases picked up from first impressions i.e. humans are OP, ZEDs are OP, etc etc

I will try and get some data on this but we are still sorting much of what we are getting in into more presentable form. Some initial things we've picked up on are the Zeds are winning and we've made some tuning tweaks around that. Lower level perk players are taking the brunt of it and we are looking at some more tweaks there.

 

[xmrmeow]

lol hard was lower than suicidal

I can see that. I play HOE most of the time and every now and then I play a game or 2 of hard to chill out, and almost every time, multiple people die every wave, if not everybody except me, leaving me to kill the rest of the enemies by myself. Prob cause people on hard are usually <lv 10 and have no idea how rage works on large zeds. Most of them just shoot a scrake as soon as they see it instead of actually going about it with some kind of strategy, or they continuously shoot FPs, thus permanently putting them on rage mode.

Also lol @ that after game conductor HOE rate. Idk, I don't think upping spawn rates is really that big of an issue, but I guess the stats speak otherwise. Tbh I expected game conductor to change stuff like order of spawns rather than rate (e.g. if the team is getting wrecked, bump down the next large zed spawn on the spawn queue, or if the team is wrecking, bump up the next large zed spawn on the queue).

 

[Yoshiro]

Tbh I expected game conductor to change stuff like order of spawns rather than rate (e.g. if the team is getting wrecked, bump down the next large zed spawn on the spawn queue, or if the team is wrecking, bump up the next large zed spawn on the queue).

This is something we are looking into for the future as a possibility.

Its an interesting juggling act to over generalize it. KF has two competing communities (that mostly but not always tend to stick to a set of difficulties). One wants to kill zeds and feel like the world can't hold them back (Normal/Hard). The other wants the game to challenge them to the core and feel amazing when they overcome it (Suicidal/HoE).

Game Conductor was designed in mind to try and help both of those groups and their goals along.

 

[Rattler]

I don't see the point or the goal or whatever it is, to make the game to allow more teams to reach the boss if they suck. This takes out the skill requirement for Sui/HoE. I loved how in KF (in general, 1,2, the mod), most of the time the game ended with wiped team (on the higher diffs). This "balancing" of the game to make it possible for weaker/unxperienced players to push to the boss battle is kinda unnecessary. What's done is done of course but such balancing should be minimal to non existent on Sui/HoE. With such system it feels like the win was given to the players by the game. Like it had "mercy" on us. Oh you suck, I will give you a breather and let you reach the boss. Why we need that? If we get wiped out, it was our fault. The balance was fine, even with some of the broken mechanics (like the parry) HoE was manageable. I did all but 1 or 2 of the core maps on HoE (and all on Sui) with random players, not stacked deck team, and it was doable. Yes, my teams died a lot, we (random guys) tried a lot but we did it. We didn't need any mercy on us, we just got gud. And the fact I didn't beat the last map was because I couldn't find a populated HoE server for a long time but thats another story. I don't have that much time to play these days so I can't speak about all the new maps but recently I did prison on Sui and it was nice to see "runners" against me. It felt like a new challenge, so we were like bring it on, and a few waves after the zeds became a bit slower, or just back to normal, I can't tell for sure, this wasn't needed if they were slowed down. So yeah, tl;dr, my opinion is that on Sui/HoE the dynamic diff should only go higher and never bellow the standard setting. I think HoE is like that, but it should be the same on Sui. Again, thats just my opinion, but I am just a guy who likes challenge and loves the "we are getting overrun, holy **** thats it, we are dying now bro!" moments. Thats why I loved the mod, and the retail KF up until the major rebalance patch. Because they were hard and you die a lot, the victory on the higher diffs means a lot, like you did it, you survived, it was not like shooting range simulator, or whack a mole with one hole, or popping scrs/fps with 1 shot. I don't want KF2 to become that ^^

 

[Rafin The Red]

I don't see the point or the goal or whatever it is, to make the game to allow more teams to reach the boss if they suck. This takes out the skill requirement for Sui/HoE. I loved how in KF (in general, 1,2, the mod), most of the time the game ended with wiped team (on the higher diffs). This "balancing" of the game to make it possible for weaker/unxperienced players to push to the boss battle is kinda unnecessary. What's done is done of course but such balancing should be minimal to non existent on Sui/HoE. With such system it feels like the win was given to the players by the game. Like it had "mercy" on us. Oh you suck, I will give you a breather and let you reach the boss. Why we need that? If we get wiped out, it was our fault. The balance was fine, even with some of the broken mechanics (like the parry) HoE was manageable. I did all but 1 or 2 of the core maps on HoE (and all on Sui) with random players, not stacked deck team, and it was doable. Yes, my teams died a lot, we (random guys) tried a lot but we did it. We didn't need any mercy on us, we just got gud. And the fact I didn't beat the last map was because I couldn't find a populated HoE server for a long time but thats another story. I don't have that much time to play these days so I can't speak about all the new maps but recently I did prison on Sui and it was nice to see "runners" against me. It felt like a new challenge, so we were like bring it on, and a few waves after the zeds became a bit slower, or just back to normal, I can't tell for sure, this wasn't needed if they were slowed down. So yeah, tl;dr, my opinion is that on Sui/HoE the dynamic diff should only go higher and never bellow the standard setting. I think HoE is like that, but it should be the same on Sui. Again, thats just my opinion, but I am just a guy who likes challenge and loves the "we are getting overrun, holy **** thats it, we are dying now bro!" moments. Thats why I loved the mod, and the retail KF up until the major rebalance patch. Because they were hard and you die a lot, the victory on the higher diffs means a lot, like you did it, you survived, it was not like shooting range simulator, or whack a mole with one hole, or popping scrs/fps with 1 shot. I don't want KF2 to become that ^^

The more people win, the more people will play, the more games get sold (along with skins, etc), the more money that's made.

 

[jd641]

Is there any plans to make GC an option and not a forced feature on servers and solo?

 

[Ordalium]

This is something we are looking into for the future as a possibility.

Its an interesting juggling act to over generalize it. KF has two competing communities (that mostly but not always tend to stick to a set of difficulties). One wants to kill zeds and feel like the world can't hold them back (Normal/Hard). The other wants the game to challenge them to the core and feel amazing when they overcome it (Suicidal/HoE).

Game Conductor was designed in mind to try and help both of those groups and their goals along.

That's it - you just said that. If I want a challenge, I choose higher difficulty. GC only encourages you to play bad (if you do not want it to punish you all the way up) and I really wish I could turn it off. I don't have a need in any kind of "help" it deliveres and I don't need any punish for doing well (punish for playing good =/= challenge!).

If a difficulty exists - it must deliver what it deliveres. Not holding back and not destroying you, when it must not.

 

[Bartuc]

The more people win, the more people will play, the more games get sold (along with skins, etc), the more money that's made.

Dark Souls does not agree with you.

 

[Dr_Mozg]

What are the appropriate perk levels for different difficulties according to TWI?

 

[frostlink]

I understand how difficult it would be to balance for two interest groups but wouldn't it be better to just balance Normal/Hard and Sui/HoE with different directions entirely? Game conductor works well as a system for casual players on normal and hard difficulty because the experience level of the players in those difficulties can widely vary and (at the risk of sounding elitist) it appeals to players whose understanding of the the mechanics is less detailed than a long time player on HoE.

What you said about higher difficulty players is also very true; which is why in my opinion, maintaining consistency with the difficulty/ zed attributes/ spawning order would better accommodate a community that wants to learn and manipulate the game's mechanics and try different things. It should also make the balancing far easier for Sui/ HoE (Which arguably is where it is most important). This doesn't necessitate removing game conductor in its entirety but at the least it shouldn't change the zeds' behavior and mechanics.

...Game Conductor was designed in mind to try and help both of those groups and their goals along.

 

[frostlink]

Dark Souls does not agree with you.

Brilliant example. Filling a niche is far more important than trying to appeal to a very broad audience. It's the reason KF1 ended up being the success that it was

 

[ScrakeMorgendorffer]

Some key takeaways I want to highlight here:

• Winning is up across the board (except HoE on the chart above but I

 

[Yoshiro]

[/LIST]
Is there any chance of getting the winrate on all difficulties, split into two parts - those that have the Game Conductor tweaked up to accommodate their good play, and those that have the Game Conductor tweaked down from the original settings of the difficulty?

I think this would provide a more accurate depiction of how the Game Conductor influences the success of the team, and to provide a more accurate understanding of the state of the game with respect to what the Game Conductor has introduced.

In short, does it punish good play to the point where they lose? Or does it prop up poor play to the point where they reach the boss?

The conductor is very moment to moment and the data sample is much too large right now. We can monitor a game live using it however and for the most part it helps the flow of the game as players do well, with some small chances to recover if a team starts doing poorly before returning to the baseline and growing as needed depending on how the team is doing.

 

[tijolol]

Still 100% of unexperienced zerkwalling teams reach HoE AFAIK. Is game conductor going to fix that someday?

 

[Yoshiro]

Still 100% of unexperienced zerkwalling teams reach HoE AFAIK. Is game conductor going to fix that someday?

No, and it is not intended to. We are continuing to work on AI and perk balance to address issues such as this.

 

[sathenzar]

That's it - you just said that. If I want a challenge, I choose higher difficulty. GC only encourages you to play bad (if you do not want it to punish you all the way up) and I really wish I could turn it off. I don't have a need in any kind of "help" it deliveres and I don't need any punish for doing well (punish for playing good =/= challenge!).

If a difficulty exists - it must deliver what it deliveres. Not holding back and not destroying you, when it must not.

I don't agree with that point of view. HoE now has a higher skill cap of you want it. My team now has to work harder to win, which has been more enjoyable for us.

That's just my 2 cents,

P.S: the GC doesn't ramp down HoE, only up.

 

[Ordalium]

I don't agree with that point of view. HoE now has a higher skill cap of you want it. My team now has to work harder to win, which has been more enjoyable for us.

That's just my 2 cents,

P.S: the GC doesn't ramp down HoE, only up.

I would not mind it, if difficulty was consistant. Why just not add a new difficulty, which is more challenging for those reasons? I myself really appriciate a challenge, but only when it's fair and not changing the rules everytime (atleast not every second as it is on it's current stage).