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I can take a crack at it!
1 - Why was ADS removed from jumping?
In PS2 bullets fire from the center of the screen and when we need them to be "inaccurate" for some reason we have to use a cone of fire. When players are moving, jumping, etc the cof kicks in to keep the bullets from going dead center. In order to give people some idea of where the bullets are likely to go in the CoF while they are ADS and can't see their CoF bounds, we made the reticule move off center a bit within the bounds of the cof in order to provide some feedback about the inaccuracy. You could see this really clearly when jumping while ADS - you had a massive COF, bullets flew everywhere, and the sight veered wildly all over the screen, so you had no real expectation of accuracy. Several months ago threads like this[1] started popping up with people questioning why the bullet isn't hitting where the reticule is at all times and saying it was unintuitive, based on this feedback we went about removing all the places where we were using ADS sway to simulate inaccuracy, so when you strafe now, the dot is significantly less offset, etc. The cleanest solution for jumping was to drop ADS while jumping. We discussed making bullets follow the sight line of the weapon instead of the center of the screen, but that was a several months long revamp of our entire projectiles system, so it wasn't a possibility.
| 2 - why harasser sucks?
The nerf was too harsh. We are doing a general balance update in April that will include a restoration of some of the Harasser's legendary maneuverability.
| 3 - population balance
We don't have a magic bullet for population balance, but we do have more and less subtle solutions. More subtle is things like XP bonuses, which really don't provide a huge motivation for joining a losing fight, less subtle would be things like respawn timing adjustments for heavily over populated empires - something we don't really want to institute and luckily haven't had to. Most suggestions we get here just straight up don't work, or punish paying players who want to play on a single account and do nothing to stop free players with multiple accounts. Right now population numbers are pretty cyclical, driven by factors like balance and tuning, and our plan is to keep addressing macro balance issues between empires to make sure they're all competitive. In terms of game systems, the resource revamp we've currently got scheduled in June is doing the most to try to provide a handicap to under popped empires, by dividing resources between the number of players on each empire, giving the smaller forces an advantage in resources and force multipliers. I'm excited to see how that works out, but I have some concerns about it's effect on moment-to-moment balance, especially for newer players.
| 5 - cap xp changes to help fix zergs
Setting up rewards so they better represent risk/reward is definitely something that many of us have been discussing. I don't have an exact answer for you right now, but it's something we've talked a lot about, and something that we're talking about potentially addressing with the 2nd phase of resources (Facility Power).
| 6 - rewards for platoon / squad leaders
I want to, we've discussed giving squad leaders some % bonus of all XP earned by their squad within a certain radius, but don't have a final plan yet except to say that this is something we want to address.
| 7 - ZOE isn't very good right now
Joshua and I were discussing the MAX abilities this morning, we want to fix them, and may make some tweaks in the April combat tuning update, but no promises yet (the changes we were discussing are probably too big to fit in for that update). We do agree that ZOE is a bit too limited right now (So is Lockdown, and to a lesser degree the riot shield) and want to improve all three of them.
| 8 - State of the Striker
The Striker is in a tough spot as a weapon. It's basically the opposite of what we want out of a great feeling gun in PS2, or at least it was before it got over-nerfed. That is, when you're playing against them it's impossible to deal with, when you're using one personally they're unsatisfying. We will have some buffs for the Striker in the April update, stay tuned.
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2014-03-04, 12:14 PM
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