Feedback Friday 30 May 2008

Welcome to this week’s Feedback Friday. Currently, we are in the second week of working on Deployment 10 and adding our final touches to Deployment 9 (which should be on PTS soon!). In this week’s Feedback Friday we’ll talk about a new map on PTS, Clan Lockboxes, and a good old-fashion patch note preview.

Test Map: Control Point Wargame
There’s been tons of bloodshed and carnage here at the Destination Games office. Department against Department, bosses against employees, Red versus Blue – it’s an all out war! Lucky for us, this destruction has been contained to our new Control Point Wargame test map provided by the Classes and Combat Team. This map will be coming to you on the Public Test Server in Deployment 9.

Interested in a little Red vs. Blue action yourself? Use the following information to access this new map on PTS:

• You remember the dropship you flew in from Bootcamp right? The one in Alia Das located up the hill behind the command tent. Step into that Dropship to be transported to the map’s “staging area”.
• Once you’re in, you’ll see several helpful npcs to provide you with levels, training, respecs, grey market items – pretty much anything you’ll need for a fight.
• When you’re ready to brawl, head north towards the field. The red and blue teleporters are how you will choose your alliance. Step through whichever side you want to be, Red or Blue.Once your side it chosen, your avatar will be highlighted with a red or blue glow matching your team color as well as making it easy to tell who to attack. Just so you know, players on the same team cannot hurt each other. Also, while you are on the same team it helps to group up in a squad to take advantage of squad-based effects and abilities.
• Each team owns a fortress containing a Control Point. The fortresses face each other across a battlefield. If one team takes the other’s Control Point, the losing team is imprisoned and the winning team can humiliate them briefly, before the map resets.

We plan to keep the Control Point Wargame Map on the Public Test Server at this time in order to help us identify issues with gameplay and optimization of future Control Point content. This map is still undergoing design changes and bug fixes, a lot of which are fixed internally and will be available for the public in a later build. We’d love to hear your feedback on this new Control Point test map as well as general gameplay feedback via the Feedback Form.

Clan Lockboxes
A few Feedback Friday’s ago, we mentioned Clan Lockboxes as part of the new Clan Owned Control Points feature. In Deployment 9, we’re adding two Clan Lockboxes to the Public Test Server for testing. You can find these lockboxes in Twin Pillars and Fort Defiance in front of the Barracks that hold your personal footlocker. All tradable items, prestige, and credits can be stored and accessed by clan members. Future functionality of this feature include restricted access to the clan lockbox set by your clan leader and a clan log tab at the bottom of the lockbox window that will show a list of those who deposited or removed items from the clan lockbox. You must be in a clan to access the Clan Lockboxes.

Please note that the clan lockbox feature will stay on PTS only with Deployment 9. Once the Clan, PvP, and Control Point’s Team is happy with their testing results, they will be moved onto the live servers, (most likely Deployment 10).

Patch Note Preview – Deployment 9
The Classes and Combat Team have also made improvements to several abilities based on play testing and player feedback. Along with making combat more fun, one of the goals for the team is to make combat faster and dynamic. In the spirit of that goal, the following abilities have had their casting times decreased.

• Tectonic Strike
• Scatterbombs
• Resistance
• Cure
• Bioaugmentation
• Reconstruction

Also, to give you an idea of some changes you just might be seeing in the future patches – we’re currently testing how several abilities work if you were able to cast them while you are moving. With this change in place, players would not stop to cast and could use other tactics while casting. In addition, the Classes and Combat Team is increasing the duration times on abilities such as Spotter and Create Clone so that recasting doesn’t become a chore. We’ll make sure to update you as we test out these changes and more information becomes available.