Twitchy Questioning 12: A Twitch of the Horsequestions

He did admit he didn't like the Sandstorm and he later made a funny snark about 'Oh why don't you use the Halberd ya jerk'. Weapon balance probably takes more than his say obviously.. He likes the Mattock and semi-autos and felt that they might've done it an injustice by not making it a gold card (so that it could be beefier).

I'd kill the entire Quarian Ark for a Klondike bar and a bucket of hockey pucks.  I hate those suit rats.

I'm hoping Batarians took over their Ark. The two we found were the real top dogs and they orchestrated waking up their people first on the Quark. Batarians would just be a cool enemy faction.. Hydras with 4 eyes instead of 3...

Bump. I am going to close the 'dot vote' early because the trends and clear and a few more responses aren't going to change anything.

Here are the total number of 'dots' for each question category. Recall that people had 4 'dots' to vote with and they could be spend 4-0, 1-1-1-1, or anything in between.



Perhaps unsurprisingly, Please For Mercy is by far the #1 'most dotted' category. There's also some consensus around the next three categories, Weapons, User Interface, and Enemy Behavior.

Therefor, these are the types of questions I will be focusing on for this week's Twitch stream. Assuming there is one and assuming Bioware is still willing to talk to us after the 'off-host headshot' debacle....

I will begin cleaning up the questions in preparation.

Thanks to everyone who voted! (list below)

Here's what I have for the top four categories. There are a couple of questions I need help with; see italics.

Also is there anything we actually liked about 1.09? I figure I can package some of these in a compliment sandwich.

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(stealth adjusted some of these since no feedback yet)

Pleas for Mercy

By far the #1 category: ‘pleas for mercy’ regarding the new loot. Can you explain your decision to expand the manifest to the extent you did? Particularly regarding the ability for players to obtain specific cards they want (vs. everything else), much less complete their manifests (which is important to some players)?

Have you considered any ways to alleviate some of the perceived ‘grind’? -- such as increased payouts (even beyond Apex / Plat), pack discounts or sales, higher double-card drop rates, packs that contain *only* characters or only weapons, etc.

Given that UR characters now have twice as many cards to unlock, would you be willing to reduce the MF price for the Random UR Character? (currently 960 MF)

Because of so many new cards, the chance to rank up a char. / wpn. you like is dwarfed by the chance to rank up one you don’t care about. Would you consider giving players more control over this, somehow?

For Mod Variants, would you add stronger explanations in-game/in-app that these can only be purchased with MF and won’t drop in packs? We’ve seen bug reports about it on BSN and reddit.

Some quick math shows it will take 6-12 mos at near max MF accumulation to have enough to purchase all the Mod Variants.
-- I think this includes Credit pack drop-able mods too, need to recheck…
-- also not sure what the question is, here

(MFunds math)
www.reddit.com/r/MECoOp/comments/6n8vgd/the_math_behind_why_it_is_going_to_take_you_more/

For the record: with 1.09, were there any changes to drop rates in Premium, Arsenal, or Reserves packs?

With so many more cards, the chance to get ammo as a booster is proportionally reduced. Can we please have a way to buy an 'ammo only' pack?

* question about unlocking first rank of new character / weapon vs. ranks 11-20 of already unlocked… assuming I can ever get data for this
-- I never did get any data but I believe the question was whether new stuff should only drop after you Rank X all the old stuff?

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Weapons

From 1.06 to 1.09, Assault Rifles received significant improvements, but semi-auto rifles are essentially all inferior to semi-auto pistols. For example: Why would you ever take a Mattock, Sandstorm, or Halberd over a Sidewinder?

Currently Valiant and Black Widow (URs) do not outpace the Shadow or Vanquisher (Rares) until much higher ranks... which are much harder to get to, now. Would you look at the UR SRs again, please?
-- is this question still true after Shadow nerf, BW buff??

Why do most SRs have a hipfire penalty? Shouldn’t SRs do the same damage regardless of whether you ADS or not?

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User Interface
-- only 3 questions in this category; anything else anyone wanted to ask?
Note: Lobby-specific questions were a separate category that didn’t get a lot of ‘dot votes’

Would you consider stronger / better sorting of weapons & boosters, now that there are so many different types?
Perhaps allow the user to ‘group by’ base weapon or base booster in addition to sort by rarity.

The ‘new stuff!’ exclamation points re-appear even after you clear them. For OCD’s sake, can you please look at this? Also can we have a *global* ‘mark all read’ button?
-- (similar to existing ‘mark all read’ button - where is it...)

Because we have so many weapons in the list now, would you consider a way to group the weapons in the selection list? Would make choosing one faster when in a lobby.

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Enemy Behavior

Enemies continue to spawn behind players; this is not our imagination nor being flanked. This feels unfair and makes smart map control impossible. Will you please revisit?

Enemy evasion behavior is unnaturally precise and fast, with apparently no cooldown on their dodges. “Infuriating” in one BSN-er’s words. Will you please revisit?

Enemies seem supernaturally aware of player approach (even under cloak) and also react instantly to acquire players rounding corners or peeking out of cover. Will you please revisit?

Sharpshooters are still annoying to fight due to their run speed, which is faster than players’ sprint even on-host, so not due to latency. Will you please revisit to make Sharpshooters less obnoxious?

(question about Observers, need to shorten it)
Observers (kinda on the list, but this is a new question!!11), their laz0rs of never-endiness, kinda... never end. A single observer can cut you through within seconds in higher difficulties, and has enough "juice" to switch to a different target and cut a bit more. Jesus fuck, can they be tuned down a notch?

They did remove some of their cheese in 1.08 when they added the tell-tale red light when they "charge" their laz0rs, but that's only a portion of the problem.

My only fear with this comparison is that it will lead to a pointless Sidewinder nerf rather than them actually looking at ARs.

(I say 'pointless' because the Sidewinder is just a fun pistol that people like because it looks cool and does decent damage. Nerfing the Sidewinder to make it worse than semi-auto ARs wouldn't affect the metagame at all; it would just annoy people and make me blame myself for using this example.)

"Would you consider allowing players the option (in U.I.) to skip weapon variants until base weapons are at X? This is important to some players."

Liked in 1.09: the new content, i.e. Platinum, Batarian Scrapper and Kishock.

Edit: also like the fact they could quickly turn SP maps into MP rotation. If possible we'd love to have more of them.

Replying to a few things...

Well, the #1 voted upon category was 'Pleas For Mercy' which is my clever (?) label for all the questions about the loot pool. So... we can ask!

(emphasis added)

That... is a great point. Thanks for noticing. I will drop the 'why' question and just start right in with the 'please help' questions.

Unfortunately the telemetry category ('Platinum Difficulty' in the survey) only got one vote, but I put your questions into the category for next time. I figure we can re-vote every week, so eventually telemetry might be of more interest to people, and feel free to lobby for it next time we vote.

That's a really good question that doesn't fit into any of the categories voted upon but I'm going to use my dictatorial powers to ask it anyway.

Great, thanks!

Yeah it would've been interesting to see the votes before the lootpocalypse happened, but it is only natural for people to vote for what is pressing to them at that moment in time. Hopefully by next week things will have calmed down regarding loot, and when people re-vote they can focus on other things.

Or not! We will see.

Maybe it's actually a cunning diversionary tactic. Bunch of stuff people are mad about that you can't immediately fix? Introduce something else people will get even more mad about instead.