Star Citizen Live Q&A: Master Modes

8 March 202401:08:461,838 linesWatch on YouTube ↗

Transcript — every row opens the video at that moment

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and and recognitions that they've gotten over their time it I mean you could you do worse there's a lot of bands out there that are like I wish we were ni go back hi everybody Welcome to Star Citizen live had to think about the name of the show uh uh the master modes Q&A super Edition I'm your host uh uh uh Jared Huckaby and if you've never seen uh star live before uh it's where we take about an hour out the end of our week and we discuss the musical stylings of Canadian super group Nickelback while we wait for the countdown to go uh joining us on this show are four esteemed experts in the entire U of Nickelback uh we've got Yogi Rich Michael and Brent I don't know what order you're going to show up on T on Zoom here say hi
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everybody hi hello hello all right Yogi the camera stopped with you so we'll start with you Yogi every show is somebody's first show before we get into the questions let's take a few moments to introduce you tell you who who tell everybody who you are what you do for Star Citizen okay my name is Yogi uh I'm a principal V programmer and I I'm not the biggest Nickelback fan if that helps it's all right I wouldn't trust anybody who was uh Rich who are you what do you do I'm rich and I'm a really big Nickelback fan so we need to fix the TR issues Jared and I'm the lead game designer on the vehicle experience and when did you become a Force ghost very recently rich is is is is calling into
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us from from a conservatory which is a large glass enclosure with absolutely no way to block any of the light so yeah and we've actually got sunshine today which is very rare y it's all right tell me the ways of the force [Laughter] uh Michael tell us who you are and what you do for staris in I am Michael also known as beor I am the director of player experience what is the director of player experience do uh mixed bag of things so I run the live QA team in addition to the feedback collection team addition to player stats analyst uh lots of different things we basically were responsible for what is
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the game like in the public environment I really thought you were starting with like it's a mixed bag that's it uh and Brent uh your first time on on any of our shows I think tell everybody who you are and what you do yeah I'm uh Brent and I go by xlb um and I'm a live QA team lead uh working for live QA and I work the issue Council and fix up uh try to reproduce all your bugs from issue Council uh mavelli blue in the chat says Brent you're my fave so you know thank you you know it's just it's great when somebody's mom is in the chat uh now you said you are xlb uh you called it out uh Michael you're you're known online as beor uh Brent your xlb those are the names that uh uh
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folks who participate in evocati and our various test streams would recognize you but we were talking about before we got into Nickelback um you guys uh all of you have hidden aliases I mean I think most developers have have their developer accounts but you also have these hidden aliases that you'll be in the game playing as uh uh don't tell us who they are this not this kind of show but uh why do we have why do we run hidden Alis why what is the virtue of jumping into uh Arena Commander or the persistant universe or the or the test universe or evot or something without announcing who you are and being known what's that do for us so there's a couple of different reasons we do that uh part of it is our our job is to provide context for folks like Yogi and Rich uh when we see players say hey this
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particular feature isn't working as well or we see them talking about anything we need to get into game we need to test that but it doesn't create a fair test if we're on a cig account like say for instance if I go into Master mode Squadron battle and I'm on Bor you know- cig everyone's going to focus on me right they're immediately going to go oh my gosh the C person on when they go attack them that's not a player experience right that's not what what other people are seeing when they join those matches so it's important for us to go in on Incognito accounts and test that that way it's the whole you know you the scientist doesn't want to disturb the experiment kind of thing it's when you go in there uh your very presence skewers the results uh so so you you it's the prime directive is there what's we definitely
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go ahead not good I was just say we definitely see that especially in live QA um if we're on a server you know people are asking us questions but we get hunted down and so being on Incognito accounts we can go and reproduce the issues that you guys are having and that can even be with mess mes like uh Bor said with uh We join a match or something we get pounced on pretty quickly so when you do log in is Jared is my hero 69420 that's to collect the true and honest feedback correct yeah yeah just to get that experience we we want to get what players are seeing when they actually go into these modes so we want to use as authentic of an account as we can okay so the reason we bring this up at the beginning of this because this show uh if you haven't noticed yet we have a
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collection of our developers who have been working uh diligently on Master modes and all things flight experience for years and years and years and then we we also made an effort this week to bring in uh Michael and Brent from the player experience team another team that's been working for years to collect uh test verify uh and and expose potential biases and feedback you know in order to work with the developers to make sure that we you know collect not just it's not just collecting your feedback we have to test it and and and analyze it and verify its veracity that's not a good sentence uh you know before passing it on and making sure that aligns with you know the intentions of of of our developers and designers and stuff like this so we wanted to present as much of both sides of the situation as when we when we talk to the
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questions uh this month uh we have of course collected questions uh from the community via Spectrum which is our bespoke communication platform on robertsspaceindustries.com uh we let you guys vote up which ones you wanted to see answered most and then we pulled the ones uh that weren't either duplicates or or are just outside the the Mandate of the the master mode team like there were number of questions that you know tended a into Resource Network and stuff and we'll let th let those be handled by the resource I think we're still going to touch on it here and there from here but let's start in with the questions so the biggest question the first question the most obvious question the one that was repeated the most the one that we knew would come up when we were filming the interview uh Yogi can attest we scheduled this interview about 24 hours after we filmed for the master modes episode a week before we aired because we knew there would be questions
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and especially this question so we're just going to jump right into it uh given that most of the concentration has been on how Master modes works with combat minded ships how will Master modes have a substantial effect on how non-combat pilots and ships operate in the verse okay let's start with the big elephant so in general the um there is no difference between how we're treating combat ships and non-combat ships uh if you want to have a consistent gameplay system it needs to make sure that all the ships apply to the same rules or uh not apply it to to follow the same rules so although we have combat focus and non-combat focus ship we still need to make sure that the non-combat focus chips are basically fitting that scheme um and so the effect that Master mode brings for non combat ships let's just
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talk about maybe like Miners and salvagers is just the same you're going into Naf mode to travel somewhere and you're going into SCM mode to do whatever you need to do in your normal gameplay Loop so na navigation or Naf mode is just for traversal um and this does not mean that uh industrial ships are or easy F or something like that if we if we see some kind of imbalance uh in our in our um in our uh in our data then we usually react to that so if we have for example a Gladius that's fighting against an aurora the Aurora is of course not a fighter right but um it it will also not be as super easy for the for for a Gladius so what we usually do is like we we give it a little bit more health or bump up some some other defensive uh uh
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defenses but um in any case like you don't need to worry like the rule set is is the same for all ships um and I mean the other thing with Naf mode that that came up was whether or not you can always escape a situation so yes if your navigation mode is completely spooled and your Quantum Drive is ready you can usually quite quickly Escape whatever combat situation you're in unless there's some specialized ships that that snare you in some way or or or or keep you there but this is depend on the case by case basis um Al Rich want to add to something maybe so yeah so you know a big um a big thing with Master Mod is it's not just about combat you know we can keep saying this but it's not just about the combat ships we have re you know we have reworked every single ship in the game right now um you know and we've got a base archetype we use so
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there's a difference between archetype and role for us so archetype is something we use internally to start a Bas land with a ship but then as we move forward we start to look at the roller ship and what that you know kind of individuality of each ship means you know but yeah you know every single ship you know in the game is going to have a rework and feel different to what it has done in the past and there's been a big Focus not just on the combat side of things but you know what makes a good cargo ship you know and you know and what makes a bad cargo ship you know and and and to make sure that the overall balance between these ships is fair you know for everyone because we do realize that the players in our game there is some people that love combat um but there is people that don't really want to do combat so you know we've got to tune for an environment where it's fair for everyone playing the game and that's been a big focus of ours you know
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because we don't want people that don't want to do combat to feel like combat is always a threat you know it's just always something in the game you know there's always got to be something to kind of balance that out you know and you know it's going to be you know there's going to be a big learning process you know when it first goes out you know there's a good chance might not get it right there's a good you know there's definitely a good chance we'll make some changes you know and we'll definitely listen to the feedback you know and we'll start making you know iterational changes on these um but you know our overall goal is that the game is fair for everyone you know no matter what you know you come to St for yeah I want to we uh no nonan non Nona Nelson is like oh no they avoided that most uped question no we just didn't start with it we're one question in chill um you you mentioned that archetypes are
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not the same as rules and I it's this this was one of the bigger misunderstandings that came from uh uh the episode there archetypes are strictly Rel are not about the overall purpose and intention of the ship archetypes are about a flight profile it's it's it's just it's it's building out a number of flight profiles as a starting point as as as as as a as a as a first pass assumption on a vehicle before you go in and do individual specific tunings so we so yes the the archetypes tend to be combat FOC Focus because that's where you know the the the whole I don't want to say rock paper scissors but the the the the essence of balancing between the different fighter types is most important we don't need a minor ship and a a salvage ship to have
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individual flight characteristic archetypes you they will have their own individual tuning so they won't handle exactly the same but there doesn't need to be an entire archetype made for the way that all mining ships fly and turn so there was there was a big misconception here and I just want to make sure that we get this out that archetypes and rules are synonymous they are not they are not when when when we were referring to the Idris is this or that or whatever those were for the flight archetypes and yes some of the names match and some of the names don't because I mean I'm not going to lie I've been here 10 years we're not always the great the greatest at naming things here but it's important to noce know that archetypes are not the roles they're not the intent intended fun function of the ships they are simply a starting point for the flight profile uh that rich and
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his team and Yogi and all of them then go to drill down and balance from it's just a a start here then customize that's all that is so the reason how that came together is practically B on our day-to-day work right uh so in general the fighter gameplay is the most challenging one so naturally we're attaching um going for that first but we could have also like called a light fighter arcab a small wiggle ship type or something like that right but um it's but it's not as descriptive for us um so when we were focused on F we just called C called it Fighters we're also calling something like light fighter bombers which are not bombers they just for us internally describe something um just just like as Jared said like a a flight profile it does not mean that this describes the role yeah it it's hard what we struggle with we struggle this
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all the time this this is the thing that makes me look like this I mean come on I look like this I'm only 24 years old people this is what the job does uh is that don't show man is that we we share inter internal terminology externally uh and that is not always super clear and it's not always uh uh uh it's not always great for messaging just be right uh real honest with it uh yes if it would be better it would be better sometimes if we could take more time to to to figure out what the proper external version name of this is whatever it would would avoid some it would avoid confusion uh in our parts and we try we genuinely try sometimes we don't succeed uh in this one we let external we let let internal terminology go external
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without saying what I just said here and whatnot so that that's on me so uh apologize for the confusion but hope hoping we clear that up now and I'm hoping uh Nona Nelson knows why we did this question first before we go into the most voted question uh because this had the what I thought was the most important information we need to get out there out of people archetypes are not roles so now because Rich you mentioned Yogi you mentioned that you know nav mode is what helps players get away and stuff like this and how we're going to com combat that and stuff the most voted on question was can you explain in detail how Quantum dampeners and Quantum snares will work on ships in nav mode not yet um no the thing is like the um
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the um obviously like Quantum Quantum dampening and snaring and in general keeping or trapping players within the sem speed is uh something that makes uh or has a big impact on on combat itself but the thing is we don't have not specifically implemented that part yet it's on the to-do list for uh for 323 whether we're going to make it for 323 or not we don't know yet because there's a couple of things we still need to iron out for example do we simply say you cannot you cannot boost away do we need to take the size of the ship that wants to uh Escape into account do we just change the school timers these are all just small details which we haven't uh haven't tried out in internally tested yet um I mean this also leads to the question that at 3 to3 is is like not not The Full Experience for master modes right it's just the first step there
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there will be stuff missing um the ships will not be as varied as we would like them to have later so this will be like we will build on that work but exactly if quantum dampening and Etc will be there in on day one when Master mode releases I do not know yet it depends how well the normal work progress continues in the next few weeks we'll see yeah uh let let let's remember that there's a there's a there's a reason uh I've been referring to the first half of 2024 when I talk about when these features are arriving uh the the normal folks haven't figured some folks have figured it out some folks have the normal quarterly releasee Cadence doesn't really apply to a patch that's this big and whatnot 323 has enough content in it that would have covered three normal quarterly patches so since December and our the first conversations
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of this Poston I've been very specific about speaking about the first half of 2023 we don't have a date to give you uh but for those I already see folks in chat like oh this comes out next week and they know haven't figured out no it doesn't come out next week uh still being worked on and like I said when we have an update I'm sure we'll share it with you um all right but now you know why we didn't start with that question uh with the new nav mode uh with the way nav mode has been described will we be able to stay in it and travel everywhere avoiding combat what are the plan limitations of nav mode so you will be able to always stay in na mode whether it's uh suitable for you to do that um is a different question you will just not be able to
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access certain operator modes from Naf mode so things like scanning for example you you can but the guns operator mode the missile operator mode um Mining and salvaging will not be will not be available in Naf mode so you can just go around but this also means like your Shields are not effective which means if you are unless you're currently Quantum traveling you're still vulnerable to to attacks so uh but when you're spooled and you are under attack you still have the option to I mean not not for now but later when the new Quantum travel experience comes online and you have Quantum booster can actually get out of this thing very fast um but still there's no like there is no clear no to this uh to the question whether or not you're invulnerable to combat you're you're not if you're flying around in normal space you can be attacked one way
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or another um I want po I want to poke poke in here uh still Tomo to I think I'm pronouncing that right uh going back to the previous question he goes goes you'd think uh Quantum interdiction stuff would be uh architected before all these Master mode changes Lama he says uh uh why why why why why is the Quantum in addiction stuff why is this a secondary consideration to all the other breath of work being done on Master modes uh I think this has more to do with the uh realities of how games are developed um things like Quantum interdiction speaks very strongly to uh the quantum T experience and um when we created Master modes um we did this roughly parallel with a new Quantum
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travel experience for squadron the thing is that although these things work together we're bringing them separately back to the Pu um so um and Quantum dampening is not a thing that that is of a big importance in in in in Squadron so that feature when in combination with Master modes was just not uh was just not ready but we're but the thing is if we if we don't move Tech that's ready over early then we're dragging a lot of like Legacy with with us all the time um so this basically for for master mode or for let's say for the for ifcs that means that we that large part of the codes is there doubl there because we know which parts we can throw away uh when Master mode is active and we know which parts we can uh keep but if we keep too much Legacy stuff around for a
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long time um it just increases the maintenance effort a lot so um and also the game is not finished um so this these things they just happen it's like engineering and game design is hard it's really really hard but that's a wonderful answer uh uh Yogi that uh uh that um our our friend still Tomo has has reduced to QD not important which is not at all what Yogi said but Yogi said is there aren't other players using QD and Squadron 42 and we're moving a squadron 42 feature over to the Pu so it wasn't in the original Master modes mandate because it wasn't necessary in quadrant 42 now it will be considered and now it will be addressed in the Pu is what he said he did not say it wasn't important that's you also it's also important to it's also important to
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consider that you know our team is part of these conversations pretty early on and we call out this stuff really early and it could be developed in a way that let's focus on Master mod and then figure this stuff out later but we mentioned these things earlier we mentioned how do you how do you tackle a ship how does the Mantis work in this context and Yogi and Rich are already thinking about that ahead of time even if they're not soling those problems right away they're like how how does this fit into overall picture anyway and so we already consider those things and we call those out extremely early in the process so that they are part of the overall design uh even if we don't get to them right away yeah and and now that and and now that CH we're just we're just proving that we're live it says it's live in the corner right now but folks I didn't say there was no QED in Squad 42 I said there were no other
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players there's no PVP QED I mean you can imagine a world where things might work work differently in single player than it would in a multiplayer Universe with PVP implications implications that's what we're referring to I don't have my zoom in camera I would stare for a while just imagine the camera's zooming in because I'm staring at you because you know better all right how do Master modes especially the nav Mode work in atmosphere we haven't talked about is there any reasonable change to how they work in atmosphere um nope so it's going to fly the same as it does currently so if you take a so if you take a ship um in nav mode into atmosphere you're going to suffer the same drag you know consequences of that and then if you switch to sem you're can to be limited to those
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speeds okay pretty simple uh this was a big one uh uh I've been wondering this one how are there any plans for the sem and nav mode transition times to differ between ships for example through engineering optimization either ship roll or even component archetype or tuning uh will it be the same prv ships or different talk to me about this uh no they're they're definitely different um so the the um the swap time is defined by two things one is a a value currently which we currently set per ship the other one is uh defined by the Quantum Drive that you're using because the Quantum Drive um when you go into Naf mode the Quantum Drive spools up and this is the thing that unlocks the high speeds um specifically uh like like I don't want to talk about engineer in
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gameplay because another team is handling that but but it is a value that can that can potentially be changed by I don't know tricking your your Quantum Drive as I said I don't want to talk specifically about this because this is not not my area um but in the initial um Master Mod release for 3 3 to3 the ships will have different uh values in terms of spool times um specifically between like Fighters or interceptors interceptors for example they they spol just faster because we want them to be fast and to actually work as interceptors uh when they need to um so yeah so the the difference there will definitely be different times um and specifically the larger the ship usually the longer the time uh becomes to to SPO to swap the modes yeah unless we create something hypers specialized you know like a that's designed for that
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kind of switch like this uh what was it dri drif Bosa says so pretty much they want to make this game single player drift B nobody else nobody no nobody else everybody else ear UPS I'm talking justed drift Bosa yes that's actually secretly what I'm actually saying you should go to Reddit go to Reddit and say I said that just you you're the only one who knows I'm telling you okay uh why is there no UI and Hut update coming with the master mode update in 323 that is not true uh but okay it's it's a little bit true so in general the uh the new mfds and so on and the new ship layouts and so on which you've seen in the C con presentation um they won't be in 323 what will come to 323 however is the visor based update which meaning
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all gunary ad um gunary improvements Target brackets like all the 3D thing that is projected to whatever it needs to be projected to uh so at this appropriate distances that stuff um that stuff will make it in uh this also means like we're removing all this uh these old 2D uh based uh Sprites that you have on the on the aiming UI so uh so there's a par UI update for it and it should be noted that it's I mean as you'll see with all with other things it's impossible to work on everything all things at all times and the and many members of the UI team have a very have very important work with the Mobi glass the star map the internal maps all the work that's coming into 323 so it it stands to reason that there are some things that are going to have to be delayed and come later um one of the things that we talked about in the show
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and uh I Mike and Brent this is one of those ones I expect expect to hear from you quite on is the struggles with Master modes and one and 1 V one so let's talk about that for a bit uh what are the struggles uh with that Master we we we've all seen it internally even I've seen internally in these giant furballs of like Squadron Battle Master modes is fantastic it keeps the screen full of other ships and stuff and you really feel like you're you're in this huge epic space battle but that isn't translating as well as we'd like for one-on-one so talk to about what is the issue and then what are we thinking about pursuing as far as a solution go ahead actually no I was just going to say there's definitely a lot there um it can even just be on balancing whether it be the tuning of
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the ship how it handles or just even Health pools or even like the weapon Gunnery changes that are coming um I mean there's definitely a lot of things that can contribute to why 1 v1's sometimes don't feel the best but the the furball or the Squadron battle feels really good too B I think you have more on that too of like a couple I'll mention a couple of key observations that I think players are having with it uh because we limited the velocity space uh with Master modes you're seeing people get this locked in feeling where they're hitting these Max speeds and they can't go beyond that and their opponent is hitting a Max speeds and you get kind of stuck in a position where you can't get an advantage ory them uh that's that locked in feeling paused by the velocity space itself um
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in addition to you know a lot of one v1s are mirror matches what we call mirror matches where you're facing in the same ship so the most common is going to be Gladius versus Gladius right um and when you're facing the same Shipe you have the exact same performance characteristics so you can counterbalance one another pretty easily and you end up with a a head-on situation quite often and this is something we're observing uh a lot of when players are talking about it and you know we're we're advising Yogi advising Rich that this is something that we're seeing players are talking about it a lot and as for Solutions I'll kind of let Yogi and Rich talk about that a bit more but that's the information we're we're passing on okay okay so sorry right okay yeah so you know we do a lot of iterative testing here um on the vehicle team so you know we're constantly testing new
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things and you know M and his team did a really good job add the feedback and then we discussed that feedback but then we action that feedback in testing and we try and find out what causes it and and it's never just like oh just move this thing here I'll just move this thing here it's it's it's always like a really complicated combination of things that you know that are quite difficult to get sometimes and also difficult you know to basically Implement in the game you know because we've got very complex mathematics behind a lot of the systems in the game so isn't just a case of just tweaking one number here and there we've got to really break down and really understand the problem of what's causing it right you know I said we do a lot of you know we do a lot of play testing we get a lot of feedback at tle but we also do a lot you know a lot of spectum in the forums and everywhere else to get a lot of feedback to understand you know the way and why the combat is the way it
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is yeah it is extremely hard to like like the the feedback from Master modes was very very diverse like uh I mean just the just the comments on the on the YouTube video that that we had last time was very diverse and then I mean we're also like monitoring Discord and so on and like uh what I usually do is I I I I I I listen to the worries that the players have but I let like I I let Bay or and brand actually and like uh come up with actual uh proposal because for me it's very hard to to filter through um what is um what's actually actionable feedback um but in terms of like what we're trying so so we absolutely agree that the one we wants they're a little bit uh me at the moment but this is um this has to do exactly with the with the
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problem of the velocities right we want to we want to not go into high velocities because it just because going into high velocities just causes one thing and this is dragging out the fights more the only the only class that really benefited from high velocities were light Fighters um and in the in the Legacy systems there were not a lot lot of space for like light and medium Fighters um uh sorry uh for for medium and heavy Fighters so in terms of like what we're trying to make this more more more interesting and one be ons is like we're trying to break up that specific pattern where you have two ships circling each other and then they're feeling locked in like one of the tries that we that we did was actually adding um uh Dynamic more Dynamic rotational speeds so that when you hold boost your your Boost pool needs to spool up first before this is expanded and then it
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actually not just gives you higher accelerations it also gives you higher rotation rates and so on that that did a little bit but but not enough yet we do hope that um with other things like uh more in general like smoothing accelerations out a little bit more so you don't get like the like a super strong initial kick but rather like ramp them up that this will create enough like diversity in the in the maneuvering so that we're um so that we're getting like in a better place with the one we wants again um that said uh six degrees of freedom is is very hard to to balance like U Michael talked about the feeling of locked in another worry that always comes up is like the feeling of like of back strafing right so the back straing feeling itself is is just mathematically hard to endure because you need to you need to have an insane amount of
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acceleration to actually overcome a Target that is accelerating backwards on you just to get around by this right that's really really complicated so we're we're thinking about trying things out like like x-shaped velocity spaces so that you can for example not fly as fast backwards as you can fly forwards um but what this exactly does with the Dynamics is insanely hard to predict like even internally because even when when we're playing internally um it doesn't like it produces some some some results and sometimes we think oh yeah this might work or so but the actual test is only when we when we're playing with actual players and actually letting them play for a while um uh for for a couple of days or weeks so we can actually see if like the new changes are creating some dominant strategies that then can be not countered or something like that yeah you make you make a good point testing on this is not something
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that can happen in a single afternoon it's it's this is a thing even with then the experimental modes that are available in Arena Commander those can only show us Master modes working in a select and very limited number of environments and situations it's it's when it gets into the Pu you know when 323 comes out this is the next phase of testing and this is the next phase of information gathering this is the next phase of attempting Solutions when with 323 X or whatever whatever comes after that um and it's just it's it's just important I want to make sure that folks understand that Master modes is no different than any other feature we've developed for Star Citizen over our long history we'll put it in we'll test it we'll test it we'll test it we'll test
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it we'll tweak it we'll test that we'll tweak that we'll test that and you know and and it'll either get to a point where we're happy with it or it'll get to a point where you know we need to make changes to it but it's it's this isn't I want to caution against a lot of the Doom and Gloom and the next question I have as from the chat is actually from toast Minster 45 hi toast Minster 45 uh he asks how do the devs feel about all the discourse surrounding Master modes on Spectrum YouTube Etc in the PVP Community um is does the Doom and Gloom from from a certain selection of them bring you down how do you how how do you how do you fight against this it I mean it doesn't really bring us down it's more we see as a you know we see as a challenge really to like you know kind of look at it you know because we take everyone's beinging on board you know
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and you know it's up to our job you know and working with the other teams to kind of analyze the feedback um you know and it's fine that players react in a certain way you know if they don't like it when they first play but you know we've also seen people that did like it and now they like it so it's important to be balanced with the general view on the feedback you know there's definitely some people that don't like it but there's definitely some people that do so it's about balance and you know we I I know I don't the you know kind of feedback personally and that's a really important thing is you know it's not personal it's you know it's you know it's about the feature itself and it's up to us to make that feature as good as possible so it kind of motivates me personally in a way I'm not sure how you memb of the team feel but that's way I feel about it classic Force ghost Force ghost response
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rich I definitely know that I I see a lot of the feedback whether it be negative or positive and it's definitely helpful when we get the constructive feedback back uh when people give us more like hey you know have you guys thought about this and it gives us a lot to think on versus just oh this is awful um so definitely keep that coming definitely keep all the good constructive stuff coming I do say though that like actually I mean ultimately um we need to decide what we're going to do with the game so just like even if you if you think that uh somebody else said what you think it's always important and sorry I'm talking to our player base here right please always put your feedback in write what you have what you feel like like the the feel is super important for us right because you can you can argue about like
00:35:35
you know speeds or whatever right but you can but but if you don't if you forget what the feeling is or to describe what your feeling is then then often it's for me harder to understand what's actually going on um but in general I was I I was very happy with the amount of uh of feedback and the the diversity of the feedback that we got even some of the negative feedback because AC mm or the master mode AC mode experimental mode we purposefully added some stuff in there just to try out how things feel and some of the feedback even when it was negative quite often it actually matched up with our expectations which also helps us to know that we're that we're on the right track right so um yeah yeah that's that's a fantastic point I don't want to I'm sorry for interrupting you I want to make I don't want to lose that sometimes you test a thing you think is bad it
00:36:26
it's like it's a it's this this is a this is an aspect of of our project and all of game development that sometimes I think gets lost like why would they put that out and sometimes it's like well we think it's might be bad we think maybe that's not the way we want to go we have a a mechanism in these experimental modes for arena Commander where we can test it it's like we don't have to guess we don't have to wonder if maybe that's not the way we can actually put it out for you know testing and then no like that so sometimes and you're going to see this as experimental modes continue as as as the as the uh what's the other PTU called experimental PTU or whatever it's called as that continues we're going to use it to test things we're uncertain about we're going to use it to test things that maybe even somebody's
00:37:13
like I don't really think this is the way to go but I know one way to find out and to put it out there so keep that keep that in mind keep that in mind sometimes when when you want to put out and I also want to say it would be very easy it would be very easy to write off a lot of the negative feedback as people don't just don't like change and I'm sure that applies to some percentage of folks out there I'm sure there are some percentage of folks out there who aren't giving get a chance because they just don't like but it would be naive and stupid and dishonest and it would not be effective for us to just handwave all of that feedback with that there are there are there are people people out there who simply liked and preferred the other way and that's valid that's a valid
00:38:03
point and it's one it's one that we take in it's one that I I heard like rich and all all of us were on the line for for a long time before the show started and you know and and we take that responsibility very seriously and I I just I want I'm speaking on their behalf right now because I just maybe it's easier if I do it but we know that this is a change and we know that there are people out there who genuinely liked the old way and stuff we believe this is better for the longevity and the on the lifespan of the game and so so we're we're trying this we're trying this right now we believe in it we've been talking about it since two citizen cons ago when we first introduced it so uh I would like to encourage you to uh stay the course keep trying it try it in the PTU try it in every other situation
00:38:50
allow us to continue tuning it allow us to continue developing it and everybody that I know everybody I've talked to here both on the show and off the show and whatnot is really excited about the potential of this so I hope you give it chance I want you to like playing Star Citizen so uh the next big feedback we're just in the feedback mode so let's do this what do you guys have to say to people who say that this is lowering the skill ceiling is this true is this false do you agree with it do you not agree with it does this make things easier oh that is a bit spicy um I would so I would agree that at the moment especially in the one we ones we have a
00:39:37
lower skill ceiling um but [Music] um at the same time we're also lowering the the entry like the uh what's it the skill floor the skill floor to actually do uh PVP or space combat in general right so I so I do think that for the long liity of the game uh the changes we do doing right now actually suitable um I think the the question towards whether the the skill ceiling is a little bit lower is the same is the same question in terms of like what can we do to make one V ons uh better right uh like it it it kind of steers in the same environment right um so basically for me from my point of view it goes back to just making the flight Dynamics a little bit more Dynamic and a little bit better so that people who are spending a lot of time in in their ships they learn what
00:40:26
the what the uh ships actually can do um and so that the maximum performance envelope of a ship is not directly always available but you have to work for it in order to get it um that's at least what what I weiz out of that okay uh let's see we we we're doing we're doing good let's cut through let's let's do some more of the big questions here we're we're we're in our big question era here in the center here so let's take on racing uh how will Master modes make racing viable when SCM speed is too slow and the ship ain't I'm just reading it ain't agile enough with nav Moda is that true this question came in in a couple different forms uh in in the question thread this is just the one I've chosen to read uh but talk to folks who think this is having a a detrimental effect on
00:41:17
racis okay so um I spoke with P about this what players mean by that because technically there is no difference between um the the what kind of like flat performance your ship has between SCM and Na and na is actually a little bit bigger because you have a wider um velocity space available to you so what we think that that is and Michael correct me if I'm wrong um is the absence of the overly G advantages you got through uh from Tri coding in the past um the problem with tri coding was always that um that you get more acceleration when you go forward left and up right because the accelerations on each Direction they actually accumulate the problem is that the more acceleration a ship already has and the more spheric tuning is that Advantage
00:42:04
can get up to up to 70% in in in the in the worst case right um so that's why we cut down on these accelerations and this basically deprived Racers and um uh High skilled PVP players of their of the capabilities to quickly evade because they couldn't they couldn't access that access uh uh acceleration anymore so I believe it is that is part of the um of the question why why it is perceived that you're less agile in uh in racing would you agree Michael I I would and it's really an important question to understand our process a little bit because we we see comments like that and it's easy to go well that's just wrong and then just go well we should just dismiss that but in reality what we do
00:42:52
is what why are they saying that let's look into the process understand the context of what they're saying and figure out what exactly is going on Yogi is exactly right it's it's the triing issue you got a lot more acceleration from that and it's much more noticeable if you're going faster so it seems like when you're in nav mode you have less control even if necessarily the accelerations aren different between n and SCM so we we don't dismiss feedack even if it has sort of the the wrong statements in it we try to understand that context understand what is that are they getting out what could they do that they can't do anymore and try to figure out if there's a problem there that we can address I also I have to imagine that every racetrack that's in the Pu and created now was done with the old
00:43:40
flight model in mind and that there might be need to be some revisiting of some of the racetracks uh for the new flight mode yeah I mean this is like also absolutely true the thing is like when you go fast uh the scale of things that you see around you is also changing because the feeling of speed is not based on how fast you are but it is relatively how close things come by you right like like uh so if you um strictly speaking if you if you have a racetrack which you can fly decently well with 1200 meters per second you can have an equally challenging uh racetrack for the SC speed envelope that has just much narrower tracks as an example right so um so yeah the um I mean the the racing community in general was pretty critical
00:44:30
about uh sem um uh about master modes and it also encouraged us to um triak a little bit the um the tri cording limites that we added uh and so on but I do think that uh in order to allow better racing we should probably look at different kinds of tracks um at this point we are also not sure exactly how we're going to treat or treat the um post speed space in general um but but this is um still like a a future topic but all these things they can they can still like change and like when these things change and we think it's better for the game then some other parts have to change or be adapted as well that said I would say the best race tracks that I could imagine is one where you actually need to where you need to swap um swap between the modes so that you have like um areas where you're supposed to like using your your cornering speed
00:45:20
much more than than other cases right like and then I don't know you come around the corner you see oh the next Target is like I don't know 20 kilm kilom away swap to na go we could even think about racing tracks later when we have the quantum boost uh mechanic to actually that that require to boost between I don't know a planet and the space station or whatever right like there's a lot of things we can do um the main thing is just like racing is just like racing will always work um however the tracks they might just be they might just be look different than now um lots of questions both in the chat and the in the uh Spectrum tread about ma about how Master modes works with multiplayer and stuff uh what is the intended effect of changing to nav mode with respect to other players in a multi
00:46:09
Cru ship uh for instance the entire crew of a master mode Hammerhead is unable to do anything while the pilot is in nav mode yeah when the pilot is in nav mode the Hammerhead is traveling from A to B and the Hamad is either either escaping from combat or just simply going to another position there's nothing to do for the turret Gunners in that case so um when when we're talking about like crew roles in the future this would be the perfect time to I don't know swap out fuses or or stuff like that and doing all the maintenance on your ship that you want to do yeah and let's not forget that multi crew gameplay is not the the full bread of M of the intended multi crew experience that we're trying that we want to build is not limited to just being turet gunters this is one of the principal reasons uh the Addis even even if the address were our complet complet and it's not our complete but
00:46:56
even if they just were our complete why it's not we don't just dump it into the Precision Universe there there's there's a there will be a time and a period where the eye of the the focusing eye of development will turn to you know all the multi-crew gameplay necessary for for these ships and stuff like this Resource Network is the next big part of that and stuff and you will begin to find more and more uses for multi crew people than just sitting and firing in turrets we all want that very much and Resource Network is the next big the next big push on that uh and then there will be many others after that how does the power triangle relate to master modes as an example nav mode does not even have weapons or Shields available so does the power triangle
00:47:45
just not do anything in nav mode it does um actually it this there's a misconception that the Shields and weapons are powered off they are powered on because while you're on N mode there's still re generating they're just not effective or active so to speak right so when you're in N mode nah you're always active uh so as I said like uh the only thing that we currently have in is that when you're NF mod the Regeneration rates of your weapons and shields are a little bit lower um but whether we keep that or not is a different question um so your your guns they still regenerate ammunition your Shields are actually not they're not regenerating in your Shield phases they're regenerating into a buffer but when you swapping B back from uh nafo to sem that buffer is then filling up the shield phases quite quickly and it cannot be um and when this happens uh
00:48:34
that process cannot be interrupted by any hits so when you come out um and your SPO time is over you have the full available Shield strength to you uh will we be able to use counter measures in nav mode at the moment not um we're honestly I'm not to or shall I say the team we we don't know yet if we're keeping this or not uh I think it's actually behind the sear um at the moment we don't see any reason to actually allow that because we're really fast and we would like at least the opportunity that the counter gameplay against missiles has more to do with your maneuvering and Naf mode than just uh putting out some um uh putting out some counter measures actually uh maybe U Brenton Bayo could you maybe talk about how this is currently being used in the uh in the arena modes Arena
00:49:22
Commander modes uh sure uh what we see is that people are using missiles to counter someone moving into nav mode so typically when somebody is moving into nav mode there's a spool up period And if you're paying attention to the signature you can actually see an em Spike on the ship uh when they go into nav mode and so people who are skilled and understand what that looks like can already start to spool up their missiles to sort of counter that or they can watch the speeds they can rck the rate of closure or the rate of Separation that they seeing which is available on the UI and they can start to walk on a missile and launch one to sort of counter that and force them either to drop out of dab mode to launch counter measures or to figure out a manual way to evading or take a hit from a missile um there's some balanced things I think we can probably talk about in the future
00:50:09
to figure out you know how to get that to work a little bit better but it is interesting gameplay and it does add a little more spice to the use of missiles than we had before and I think it just some of the Behavior I've seen and again I haven't seen a fraction of what you've seen some folks dropping and then jumping and then switching into nav mode uh which is a tactic that's viable because the chaff can't be fired in nav mode and I want to clear just I'm also I'm seeing the live chat here uh you know you're saying that you know right now the thought is that it's not usable in nav mode that doesn't mean that some very compelling argument can't be made and yeah change your minds that it's it's I don't know I don't know how many times we can we can say this through the the course
00:50:55
of the decade I've been doing this one it's it's it's everything you see and everything you hear in ISC and incl is work in progress It's where the thing is now at the moment we're having this conversation uh there are things in ISC that change the day after the show goes out the show goes out and then they're like oh by the way we changed this and I'm like you couldn't have that information just 4 days earlier that would have been cool you know it happens it's part of why it's part of doing all of this Outreach in the middle of our development it's part and partial uh we have a phrase where we stick we call the the truth of the moment uh we're always presenting the truth of that moment while leaving room for a better idea to come later on so uh keep that in mind yeah you know and that's really good point it's like this is about the now
00:51:42
you know it's when we talk we're talking about the now but nothing you know we don't sit here and go we're never going to do this or we're never going to do that you know we've you know we've made certain you know we've made certain decisions based upon things we've learned and you know things seen along the way but those things change and you know so we're definitely not afraid of you know changing that rule you know in that circumstances you know it's one of the things that's open you know we you know thought it might work that way but if it doesn't work that way in game and the feedback is otherwise we'll just you know we can change it yeah there there's there's a bit here we focused a lot on the on the native because part of what we're here to do is to address you know some of some of those concerns and stuff like this but there is there's been a very healthy a groundwell of of of of positive feedback about master modes it's one of the
00:52:29
reasons we're so excited about putting it out in 323 and seeing the more testing um Mike you mentioned you know being being able to check the EM readings and stuff the next question I have here is are there any changes to O generalized stealth mechanics uh with Master modes besides being able to tell when they're switching are there any other changes to how people will work in missions Yogi um yeah might be question for Yogi we have put in changes recently not specifically to master modes uh people might have noticed them actually in 3221 broadly uh there's been some changes to signature readouts and how those work uh thanks to some of the you know the communication between uh my team and Yogi and Rich Rich's team uh to
00:53:17
be able to kind of go over that but there's been some changes and those have been inherited into the master mode stuff as well um what role if anything does the component rework the the Resource Network like like like again we don't want to go into the the full breadth of the Resource Network and stuff but is there I think there were a number of questions number probably only three but of of people who are wondering if this work is completely separate from Resource Network uh or if or if this work overwrites like does the does the archetype mean we can no longer tune our components we can no longer change change the performance profiles of our ships because they have an assigned archetype now because of Master modes uh are these exclusive or these complimentary
00:54:04
features um I think they're definitely going to compliment each you know we're definitely W to Sy with each other on what these features mean for the flight you know and you know I don't think you're going to see anything taken away you know I think you're going to get more out of this you know you're Canna be able to move your Shi and your components in more directions in the future um you know which will kind of strengthen what that means you know depend on the choices you make for that ship um you know and it's critical to the flight it's critical to the combat performance um you know and it's critical to that moment in time you know so if you know so if you've made certain choices it's going to mean certain things you know let's say you know your signature and heat goes up you know in syn you know it's going to you know make you more you know kind of rable and stuff like that so the players GNA have more Choice um in the future so um some of what you've said about you know nav
00:54:55
mode being intended to you know help you escape and stuff has obviously made some players who dream about being a bounty hunter you know kind of nervous it's it's like oh well you know if if the mode switch is designed to help people you know be able to get away um obviously we're going to have to do something to uh to help with folks who want to pursue a bounty hunting profession um I know Yogi you already said we're you know a lot of the QD QED work and stuff is still to be decided and stuff but what are your initial thoughts what are your initial thoughts on on on what we can do to make Master modes work for players who specifically want to catch up and capture uh their prey when we've created a mode designed to help them get away well I mean it it still boils down that uh to that you cannot just like like if somebody wants
00:55:43
to escape and he has the better equipment to do that and he has more experience and skill or she then that ship might Escape but if you want to work as a bounty hunter you are reliant on having very dedicated equipment anyways um one of the things we're thinking about here is the importance of um Distortion weapons uh since the um Quantum Drive is the thing that allows the uh velocity advantages or speed advantages in N mode uh we were thinking about making the Quantum Drive for example very susceptible to Distortion damage but being susceptible to Distortion damage means that the attacker needs to bring either a a EMP device or they need to bring or swapping out some of their of their hard pounds which actually Distortion weapons and
00:56:29
Distortion weapons are always going to be less effective as in taking down shields in fact in 32 3221 we actually did a pretty big change to the Distortion system so that Shields are very resistance against Distortion damage so you need to bring energy weapons to actually bring them down which um again goes a little bit more in the direction of like as a player you being forced just to bring specialized equipment but if you have specialized equipment then you are absolutely still able to uh to do your bounty hunting stuff um a little bit of an equation is uh or part of the equation is there how big are the ships that you can that you can trap and snare right but that's also something we need to have yet to answer internally because there are some some situations where oh there's a tiny little ship why can I not jump away with my 890 right and so on so and it's not a and it's not a discussion that is
00:57:18
exclusively for you and your team obvious there it will also involve gameplay designers you know the people who are assigned to build out the bounty hunting career will obviously have a say and and that kind of stuff and and what kind of tools and and uh methods uh we can make available to them to uh work within the master mode system to still achieve your stuff it's the the bounty hunting dream the Bounty Hunter dream is core you know it's one of those it's one of those core things we've talked about it forever uh it's it's it's it's a it's a I can speak if I'm allowed to speak for CR here it's it's something he's very very interested and interested and always has been and stuff so so while we may not have you know specific answers or details for it now when it comes time when when for Bounty Hunter V2 or whatever version we're on I honestly
00:58:05
can't remember the name now uh you can expect to learn more information about it when that time comes um all right so we're we're technically at time but I I want to I want to do if I can I want to do two more questions can I do two more questions guys before I let you go yes let's go I asked you I asked you live so that you can't say no without looking like a jerk so um these are questions more about balance uh this question came in it says what are your red lines in terms of balance are there any parameters that you're simply unwilling to adjust like sem speeds or ifcs slowdown is there is there anything off the table right now it's like no the it's this we won't even listen to this we won't even consider this uh maybe another
00:58:55
game company person would never ask this developers this but I'm I want to see I want to know talk to these people is there is there anything that's actually off the table okay so nothing is off the table of course we're somewhat more resistance towards certain things than others uh like uh obviously like the sem speed limits were are a couple of uh like was brought up by the community quite a lot um but then again uh we're getting a lot of like advantages from that um so we will try to address the worries uh that that we have for example like in usually when people say oh the speeds are too slow um this means either they cannot go fast from A to B or it means they're not evasive enough right but these can these problems can be solved in a different way so concerning the speeds we will try to be rather
00:59:44
conservative with changes it does not mean that we're fixed right if we if our gameplay tests with the community show ah we should just add like 100 100 meters per second more fine we'll do it right um but it needs to be going through a proper process internally um because like it's it's just not something that we can right away promise but nothing and I mean nothing nothing is ever fixed right yeah you know and you know and I do I think it's point to say that you know like with you know any kind of virus that we're tuning you we're always open to trying different things but we've set out a framework of what we think works and in the end it comes down to a choice you know because before we had a lot you know you know we had a lot higher speed and that wasn't always positive so we've made the decision based upon certain factors that a lower speed works better but it doesn't mean that you know moving to a low speed
01:00:34
means it never has any negatives because there choices end the day you know we've made that choice to go slower you know and we do think you know overall it's going to be better than the speeds we had before but you know it's never going to be 100% 10 out of 10 you know it solves every single problem you know that we have in the game you know for example because we based in certain physical realities of flight you know and the you know kind of power performance and stuff like that so we you know we're a little bit kind of tied to kind of physical realities more than kind of saying we're not going to change these numbers yeah yeah but rich I want to I want to be able to do everything I want to do at any time I want to do it and be the only one who can do so I don't want anybody else to be able to do that too so that I can
01:01:22
win that's all I'm asking it sounds like you need to start your own games company all right sounds like he's trying to be Luke Skywalker there yeah no no no no no no no Han Solo is the best pilot in Star Wars don't even I'm sorry what did I say Han Solo that's trash Lando kisian is the best pilot oh s sorry Lando I'm sorry Lando I besched you and said Han Solo this is the best pilot in Star Wars this dude took out a death star in a frighter not a little Trench with open air where you can go in out in a tunnel didn't know where the power supply was log on the power source it should be the main reactor didn't know where it was going had to do it in a freighter did it without the force did it with a shield around and a whole freaking Armada Luke Skywalker the best pilot which one of you said that drop
01:02:12
off the call bye Brent that's a red line that's a red line yeah you flustered me so much you made me say Han Solo was the best pilot what the hell all right it's the last question hold my safety Lando um so after release after 323 goes live what metrics will you be watching to determine which portions of Master modes are successful and which may still need additional tuning tuning this is I want people this isn't this is not a comprehensive list I'm not going to say that these are the only things we're listening to just give us some example of after 323 these are this is the kind of feedback we're looking for that this
01:02:59
is what we're looking to see positive and negative results on what what are we looking at afterwards so usually what I'm looking for to pass on to Yogi and rich is ways to deepen what we have so I what I what I see what we created is a framework and so now once we have a framework we need to find ways to add depth to it later to add individuality to these individual archetypes and these individual ships and so that's the kind of feedback I'm looking for uh is you know somebody specifically talking about hey I'm trying to use my my car to all my santaki and I'm finding it not very effective in these specific ways and it doesn't match the role that as described I'm looking to pass that kind of
01:03:47
information off or I'm using you know my my vulture and it's basically impossible for me to get out of a combat scenario area I never do I'm always trapped into it you know those kinds of things where players are presenting problems that I can then pass off to the team with context and go okay this is what we're seeing players observing does this match the design we're going for maybe we need to make some adjustments there um and it's it's that deepening how can we add further depth how can we add further skill checks how can we actually make this a little bit better of a a skill curve a little deeper all that kind of stuff that's usually what I'm looking for you lost me after you said somebody was flying the car to allall I'm like I knew you were lying after that I fly the car to allall all the time from the back
01:04:36
seat o provocative oh I'm tangled up on my ear provocative all right but just to add on that right there there was some more to it though right because what we're also getting for Michael teams are sometimes uh recordings of actual flight combat that happens which we can then analyze and go forth and back uh we're getting we're getting kdr graphs and so on so sometimes we see that something is wrong in the data there's a lots of there's a lot of stuff sorry there's a lot of stuff that is going on uh like it's it's it's it's it's not just like the the qu the qualitative stuff that that Michael just described it's also it's also uh quantitative data um yeah that's an important part of I I do want to mention that we don't just look at Spectrum and Reddit or YouTube videos and go this is how it is um we compare that what people
01:05:26
are saying with what we observe in the the data from our Behavior analytics too we look at kill to death ratios we look at accuracy values and we combine that with our own observations in the game so sometimes people might be like you know multi- crew ships are terrible then we'll look at the kill death ratios and we'll go well looks like they're doing really well and then we'll go into the game and look you know and go wow everyone just avoids them uh and like that's provides that kind of context we don't ever look at a singular piece of information and go this is the the you know the truth of the the of the experience we look at everything we possibly can to provide all of that context unless they're a unless they're a content creator in which their opinion weighs 10 times more than everybody else nope
01:06:15
cont you cut away I was I was really trying to keep a straight face with that one you cut away I wanted them to see just how strong a straight face I could keep when I said that that's it that's our show everybody thank you for sitting through another episode of Star Citizen life our our our our weekly live stream at the end of our week this is Lando and I'm still thinking about that Luke Skywalker comment um if you haven't checked out this week's ISC uh it was a wonderful episode about many of the FPS improvements that are coming online in the coming Alpha 323 uh not all of them uh uh but some of them uh we'll be back next week uh forcl with the members of the FPS team there all those folks you
01:07:03
saw there we we'll see if we can't get Zack to bring his Shades and a shotgun with him he literally showed up to the interview with Shades and a shotgun and I'm like you're not getting away with that we're put we made his mom very proud anyway uh and then of course uh next week's ISC uh is a big one uh that I know a lot of folks have been waiting for uh it's the character customiz in Alpha 323 uh in in much of its Glory uh still a work in progress but um just what we're already seeing is some some cool stuff you may have seen some sneak peeks in this week's uh show um it it's going to be a good day for for for truly taking ownership of your character going forward so I'm really excited about that uh yeah we're going to raid somebody I think we're raiding is is it still PC at 101 I think we're still rating PC 101
01:07:51
that should show up above the above the chat there um if you want to uh go raid pc101 or whoever whomever it ends up being uh be nice uh be respectful uh and uh when you wipe your feet and say uh we love you John crew uh when you're there so thanks a lot take care everybody that was Yogi uh that was Richard that was Michael that was Brent I'm Jared I can remember names and we'll see you next week everybody take care

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