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| 0s | We're definitely listening to feedback there and we can't always action on it very short term. |
|---|---|
| 4s | Something like the Faceless fight has a very long tail, takes a while to develop. The point I'm trying to make there is, w are listening to your feedback and we are 100% going to be incorporating that feedback into future Seasons. |
| 13s | So while you might not see immediate changes, we're listening. |
| 21s | Welcome to Forged in Aeternum where we talk about all-things New World. |
| 25s | Today I'm joined by Patrick, our Seasons Design Lead, and Katy, our Live Lead. |
| 30s | Today we got a fun topic. |
| 31s | We're gonna talk about the PTR and how it changes what we're developing, both in the short term and the long term. |
| 37s | Katy, why don't you start us off a little bit and talk about sort of like the timing of PTRs, the overall goals, what our main ideas are? |
| 44s | Yeah, so the PTR, the Public Test Realm, we release that ahead of all of our major releases moving forward. |
| 52s | That will be ahead of our Seasonal releases. |
| 55s | So it could be a varied amount of time, to be quite honest. |
| 59s | Sometimes we'll release it a month ahead of time, sometimes a few weeks ahead of time. |
| 66s | It just depends on what we specifically need from the players and we'll give them patch notes that say what we're looking for, what we change in case there's something interesting that they want to test. |
| 76s | But in general, what we're looking for in the Public Test Realm is, all those individual players - they have different styles, they have different things that they're interested in. |
| 84s | PVP or PVE or PVX if they're into both. |
| 87s | And so what we want is for them to join and play like they would normally play. |
| 91s | Just hop in there, give us a little bit of scale, but then mostly give us that piece that we don't know, which is how you specifically play. |
| 99s | And so that's what we're really looking for. |
| 101s | And like, is it fun? |
| 102s | That's like the main thing: did we make some choices that you like? |
| 107s | You won't agree with all of them, but we want to know that when you hop in there, you're having a good time in our game. |
| 112s | Yeah, that's great. |
| 113s | And there are specific threads on the forum that sort of asks, you know, about the parts that we want tested, right? |
| 118s | Yep. |
| 118s | Yep. |
| 119s | We open up specific threads. |
| 122s | Our Community Managers manage that. |
| 123s | They talk to our leads and they get specifically what the leads are looking for. |
| 128s | There may be a gap in knowledge or potentially a blind spot that we just want to make sure that we hit right. |
| 134s | So yeah, so those open up and you can you can post there, but you can also use the in-game reporting if you have something that you want to, you know, bug or something that you're miffed about in the PTR. |
| 144s | It goes to the same tool that we use for the live product, but we can obviously filter it to the PTR so you can get specifics that way. |
| 154s | Awesome. |
| 155s | Well, let's dig in on some specifics. |
| 156s | So a big part of the the last PTR was Seasons. |
| 160s | Now talk to me a little bit about progressing the Season Pass, how players felt about that, any changes we made with that. |
| 166s | Yeah, absolutely. |
| 167s | So we were really excited to get the Season Pass on the PTR with the last release, and like Katy said, we opened up a focus thread on the forums that gave players an opportunity to give their feedback and we got a lot of good feedback around the Pass as a whole. |
| 179s | Players liked it. |
| 180s | They liked the list of activities that they could go partake in in order to progress their Pass. |
| 185s | One of the areas, though, where we came up a little short was the ability to passively progress your Pass by doing other activities that you like. |
| 192s | So if you're a player who really likes 3v3 arenas, players wanted to be able to go in, hop into a 3v3 arena, earn a bit of a Season experience to progress it. |
| 201s | Initially, the only way you could get experience from something like a 3v3 arena was winning the entire match. |
| 206s | So all three rounds, based on our metrics. |
| 208s | You know, you have a 50/50 chance of winning any given match. |
| 211s | So there were a lot of matches where you weren't going to get a lot of experience. |
| 215s | So we took activities like Arenas, like Trials, Invasions, War and others, and we significantly increased the amount of Season experience they passively give. |
| 224s | So this means that all those activities you're doing on a daily basis are going to be a lot more rewarding. |
| 229s | That was one big change we made. |
| 230s | Another really big one was players wanted a general experience in literally every activity in the game to progress their Season Pass. |
| 237s | We're calling that just general passive experience. |
| 240s | How that works is any player experience you earn, you get 10,000 experience requests, for example - that now transitions over to Season experience. |
| 248s | Every 10,000 experience you hit, you get a bump of Season experience. |
| 251s | It's a great way to make yourself feel like you're progressing, doing anything you do. |
| 255s | That's a great change that we made directly, thanks to feedback from players on our PTR. |
| 258s | Yeah, and we had in one of the previous videos, we had mentioned that you could passively move through the Pass, that you didn't have to focus on all of the activities in the journey. |
| 270s | And so when they called that out in PTR we realized that we hadn't gotten as far as we needed to. |
| 275s | I think this is really cool because you can use the Season Pass as either something that you can just play your normal way of playing and you still get credit for it. |
| 283s | Or if you join in, you're like, I don't know what to do today, open your Season Pass and now you can be directed to specific things in your activities, which I think 3v3s are in there as part of that too. |
| 295s | So you can get a little extra. |
| 296s | Yeah, it's a tough balancing act, right? |
| 298s | Because we want to provide directed goals, but also want to do passive. |
| 301s | So finding the right balance of those two is is is great to get feedback on. |
| 307s | What about the Activities Card, Patrick, any changes there based on feedback? |
| 311s | Just a few. |
| 312s | So we looked at the data that we got from PTR and player sentiment, and the biggest change we made was we adjusted the categories of a few activities. |
| 320s | So if you're not familiar with the Activity Card, there are different categories for different activities you can partake in, and when you complete that activity, you get to stamp your card. |
| 327s | So players found that this Season category, which encompasses pieces of content that we deliver with the Season, they found those activities really hard to complete because there weren't a ton of them. |
| 337s | So we went in and rearranged a few activities. |
| 339s | Things like completing the Empyrean Forge is now a Seasonal activity. |
| 342s | Killing Varangian Knights is also a Season activity. |
| 345s | What this means is, while doing something like Empyrean Forge, you might come out of that with three or four or five stamps, which is going to be a really good feeling and also makes completing that Activity Card a lot more doable for players. |
| 355s | So we're keeping our ear to the ground there on feedback. |
| 358s | Always looking to add more activities. |
| 360s | And please give us your feedback if you like to see anything else as an activity. |
| 364s | Speaking of Empyrean Forge getting, I think we got some feedback around gearing up for this Expedition. |
| 371s | Talk to me a little bit about that and some changes we may have made. |
| 374s | Yeah. |
| 374s | So we received feedback that this was another mixed ward Expedition for the bosses, and that didn't sit right with the players. |
| 385s | Even though we have, you know, gear set storage coming out, they didn't want to have to either mix wards or just have to deal with that in general, like the, you know, the trash mobs and the guys in the middle. |
| 397s | Those ones are not so worried about if that's, for instance, Angry Earth. |
| 401s | But when your actual bosses are a different element, then you get really bummed about it. |
| 407s | So what we did was, we changed Ifrit, which is the fire boss that you encounter first in Empyrean Forge, I believe used to be Angry Earth, and now we adjusted to human. |
| 418s | So you just need your one ward against the two big bosses and Empyrean Forge. |
| 422s | So I think that's a super good change and it's also something that we do in other Expeditions. |
| 429s | So I know that moving forward we're going to take that into consideration and we're also looking backwards, and we're going to see if there's any adjustments that we can make. |
| 438s | Obviously, no promises on when that's going to happen, but it is something that we are actively looking at for sure. |
| 444s | Yeah, it's great. |
| 446s | Well, talking about human wards, which are PVE only, right? |
| 450s | Yeah. |
| 451s | So these are new wards that are being introduced, especially for a lot of the new content. |
| 457s | Patrick, how do you get those? |
| 459s | That's with the Flame Cores right? |
| 460s | And I heard there's some feedback on the Flame Core mechanics. |
| 463s | Talk to us a little bit about that and what we're doing. |
| 465s | Yeah. |
| 465s | So Season One introduces the concept of Flame Cores - these are items coming from Empyrean Forge, Varangian enemies, elite chests in Varangian POIs, and regular chests in POIs. |
| 475s | They have a multitude of uses. |
| 477s | You can use them at the Flame Core forge to craft human bane and even ward items. |
| 482s | You can use them to craft your human bane trophies. |
| 484s | You can use them to craft your Season One Heart Gem Rune - the fire tornado kick. |
| 492s | Is that's the official name? |
| 495s | I don't think so - it's called the Fire Storm. |
| 496s | But you did a great job of describing what that looks like. |
| 499s | It looks really cool. |
| 500s | So you can use the Flame Cores for all of those items. |
| 503s | And our initial values were really high. |
| 504s | We got that feedback on Reddit, on the forums, on podcast. |
| 508s | I heard it everywhere. |
| 510s | It was an astronomical amount of Flame Cores you were going to need in order to craft those items. |
| 514s | So we went in and we reevaluated our quantities there. |
| 518s | So we've brought those all down across the board. |
| 520s | Things like the tier one trophy now no longer requires Flame Cores. |
| 523s | The Flame Core forge now requires ten cores down from 15. |
| 528s | The Heart Gem Rune requires tier 3 25 instead of 50. |
| 532s | So it's going to be a lot easier to get all of your gear with Flame Cores, But we still think they're going to have good value. |
| 538s | And on that note, one other change we made was we made them by non-equip instead of by non-pickup. |
| 542s | So previously, you had to go farm those yourselves. |
| 545s | Now you can go buy them on the Trading Post. |
| 547s | If you're sitting on a lot of gold or you and a group of friends can go farm them and funnel them to someone in particular, it should give you a lot more flexibility. |
| 554s | Nice. |
| 555s | It's like every time you start talking about something like, "And another thing and another thing." That's awesome. |
| 562s | One more thing then. |
| 564s | So we tested another one of our events, The Fury of the Spriggin. |
| 570s | This time there was something live going on - The Legacy of Crassus. |
| 573s | Did that affect our thinking in terms of this event at all? |
| 576s | Yeah, for sure. |
| 576s | So Legacy of Crassus was the first time that we had like a daily limit of our main reward that you were going to get. |
| 587s | And then we had some secondary prizes, rewards for taking part. |
| 592s | And what we heard was that the secondary rewards were just - they weren't even secondary. |
| 596s | They just did not feel good. |
| 598s | I know that there was a bug at the start where it was pulling from a really big loot pool too, so that didn't feel great. |
| 604s | But even when we drove that down to a smaller pool, it still didn't feel great to players. |
| 610s | And so they would do it once and then they were bummed about the rest of it. |
| 615s | So for Fury of the Spriggin, we have taken that into consideration. |
| 618s | And so the secondary rewards are going to be good. |
| 621s | They are something to chase so you can continue - like, after you get your obsidian gypsum or whatever - our main one's going to be - so whenever you get that, you can continue to take your friends, take your company members, take randoms, take new level 60s through the Fury of the Spriggin event and still feel rewarded. |
| 638s | Yup. |
| 639s | It's awesome. |
| 640s | Yeah, it mainly takes time to find that right balance for rewards. |
| 643s | I like the dailies now to give people a reason to come back, but got to just sort of figure it out. |
| 649s | So we talked a lot about short-term changes. |
| 651s | Patrick, has anything from the PTR sort of effected our longer term thinking on Season? |
| 655s | Yeah, absolutely. |
| 657s | So back to those focused threads on the forums. |
| 659s | One of them was on the Silver Crows storyline and we got a lot of great feedback from our players about that. |
| 664s | In particular, things like the Faceless fight at the end of the Season storyline. |
| 667s | Players wanted more there. |
| 668s | They felt that encounters like Brother Umberto and Apophis, where you were in a solo instance and fighting a really epic boss fight, they really like those and resonated with that. |
| 677s | Faceless they didn't feel was up to that bar. |
| 679s | So feedback like that we really take to heart. |
| 681s | And for Season Two and beyond, we're 100% going to be looking at fights like Brother Umberto and making sure it lives up to that bar. |
| 688s | So we're definitely listening to feedback there and we can't always action on it very short term. |
| 692s | Something like the Faceless fight has a very long tail, takes a while to develop, and changing that entirely in a PTR lifecycle - not super doable, although we can fix bugs and tuning here and there. |
| 702s | Re-writing the entire fight is a lot of work. |
| 705s | So, the point I'm trying to make. |
| 706s | There is we are listening to your feedback and we're 100% going to be incorporating that feedback into future Seasons. |
| 711s | So while you might not see immediate changes, we're listening. |
| 715s | Awesome. |
| 715s | That's super exciting. |
| 716s | Speaking of listening, I've heard a lot of players complain that, man, it's hard to test on the PTR. |
| 722s | Any changes we made recently to sort of help that? |
| 726s | Yeah. |
| 726s | One of the ones that I was super excited about was - let me take it back for anybody who hasn't participated or who has participated only recently, didn't participate back in the day - you used to get just like a hundred boxes that you had to open and it would weigh you down and you couldn't drop at all if you didn't need all of that because you can only hold, you know, 100 or a thousand in that bag. |
| 752s | And then you were still encumbered. |
| 753s | And it was just a bummer. |
| 755s | So my favorite thing that we have changed moving forward is the simple loadout. |
| 760s | So you open the simple loadout and you get to choose, you know, Focus, Intelligence, Constitution, you choose what you want to be. |
| 767s | You just open that one and it has everything that you need for a simple character, but you also still have the customizable character, which is also simplified from what we used to have, but it's one that you can customize to be more aligned with crafting or if you want to pick your own gear or whatever, you can still do that. |
| 785s | But for those that just want to get it and they want to play and they want to test, we have the simple loadout. |
| 789s | I'm super excited about that. |
| 790s | Simple and it's great. |
| 791s | And on the backstory front, this last PTR introduced an upgraded backstory that gave players a lot of new items that they could craft with, things like weapon mods are now in those boxes and a lot easier to find. |
| 802s | So we're continuing to listen to feedback there. |
| 804s | And I know one of the sore points was when we introduced those, we only introduced 250 of each mod, which is like ten scarab rolls. |
| 810s | So we're going to be significantly increasing that number, too, for the next beta. |
| 813s | Yeah. So for players, they should continue giving us that feedback because we are listening. |
| 819s | So when you know there's something with the backstory, definitely let us know, right? |
| 825s | Because we're listening. |
| 826s | We do have a Community Question today to sort of go on that last question. |
| 830s | What are any ideas you all have on how we might make testing in the PTR more effective or easier? |
| 836s | Let us know on the comments. |
| 838s | Thanks. |