As announced, there will be a State of the Game at 17.00 CEST.
You can check it out on
TBA
The community has provided a lot of guides, tools, and lists: Link
just give me my Santa Hat for the upcoming event
Will do!
Thought Kenly College was due to back online 3rd December?
Still unavailable atm.
There was an issue with the schedule. We're doing another maintenance tomorrow to fix it. Sorry for the confusion!
so is the hardcore mode with hardcore difficulty or just "if you are dead, you are dead" ?
It's as if you were creating a new level 1 character, just that if it dies it's not respawning. You can access all difficulties when you enter WT5, as usual.
Can someone explain this hardcore mode thing, i came into the stream late so i missed what they said about this "hardcore" thing.
A new beta mode that comes out next week! You create a new agent and they only have one life, when you die you can't respawn.
I asked about heroic for every faction or legendary difficulty and a dev answered: It's something we're discussing but not an easy feat.
So there is hope but not a lot. Maybe if more people ask for it they'll have an incentive to work on it
It's not that we need more incentives to work on it. But it also needs to make sense. If we just make it harder it will cater towards the crowd that just want more difficult content. But if we don't also have rewards it only feels great to beat those harder difficulties a couple of times.
It has to be part of a bigger package that makes it good. Doesn't mean we can't start off with higher difficulties first, of course. We are definitely interested in doing harder content.
Considering how shittily cheap/broken this game can be sometimes despite how good you and your build are (whether it be due to bugs, mechanics, crappy design, etc. in general), that's a hard f**king pass from me.
Totally fine. We will continue to improve the game and have a bunch of fixes coming in TU6.1 next week. If you don't have 4 character slots used already, there's also no harm in just trying out Hardcore Mode.
I understand the concern though, dying because of bugs or game glitches is not great fun.
Thanks!
In NYC I didn't get my Santa Hat in the first year and all my friends had the hat and they said 'let's run Falcon Lost and scare those LMB and we all wear our Santa Hats..... oh sorry Lars how insensitive of us because you don't have the hat'
Those are some rude friends! :D You'll get the Holiday hat just for logging in, make sure to tell your friends (or don't and mock them later!).
@ChrisGansler Can you guys find a way to not make us give up a character to do this?
With the RNG of loot, new changes with unique talents, I’m having to hold on to too much loot that is “almost or maybe what I need” because I’m still waiting for that last piece and the rolls on it could change the rest. I can’t give up a fourth character for this. Especially with so many bugs that might kill me.
For now it's not going to change soon. But we hear your feedback. Generally we would rather fix having to hoard all that stuff, instead of adding more character slots you ask for to then not use in Hardcore Mode either and play more of the Hardhoarde Mode. ;)
Do you plan on having incentives for hardcore mode and though other than just funsies?
I don't mean to come across as completely negative, but I have spent over 600 hours getting to where I am. Risking a total loss of playtime due to just one trivial death regarding circumstances beyond my control (like ridiculously high explosives damage or enemies spawning from really odd places) just doesn't seem like a worthy investment unless I have a real chance at obtaining anything worthwhile.
Spending resources to work on that while so much remains to be balanced and optimized just seems odd. I mean you guys can obviously do whatever you want, but I would assume the majority of your player base consists of working adults just based on clan mates and friends who have a limited amount of playtime and just can't pour all that down the drain for just a sense of accomplishment.
Regardless of whether or not I choose to play that mode, I hope you can appreciate the appropriate high risk/ high reward scenario involved to keep your players engaged if the beta yields favorable results. Apart from a very small selection of DZ or raid only gear vs. total available items, there are currently no real incentives to engage in higher difficulty activities as it is, other than to just get a handful of more statistically inferior rolls. That too should change and evolve for regular content, but it REALLY needs to shine if players will be faced with permadeath.
Just to be clear, you can't convert existing characters to a Hardcore character. You start over with a brand new agent.
For the balance on the mode in general: We really enjoyed playing it internally and wanted to use this opportunity to try something new. We think this mode could be something we can develop more with the community than behind the curtain, so we're happy to hear what you think and how we could improve it.
How does the stash work? Separate stash for hardcore and softcore or shared stash between the two?
You do not have access to the Stash in the current Beta. I read a couple of comments of how Hardcore only Stash would be cool, so let us know what you think.
I presume no option for conflict for the hardcore character? What about dz?
Correct, Conflict is not accessible for Hardcore Mode characters. You can venture in the DZ once you have them unlocked for now. I say for now because I already saw somebody suggesting that you can immediately go in and maybe that's something people would enjoy?
Did you actually think that this mode is what your dwindling player base wanted or ever asked for? Actually give us some decent content or survival/underground that we keep asking for. Your killing off the player base with this garbage. 🙄
As we said on State of the Game, this is something we did on the side, played it internally and had a lot of fun with it. This is not meant to be a mode that will scratch the itch for everybody.
While Survival and Underground are mentioned a lot, we also have the data from the first game that shows us that those modes had a very dedicated player base but it wasn't huge. So just copy / pasting these modes (and this is extremely simplified and doesn't reflect at all how much work this would be) might not even be the answer to some of the requests.
As Yannick and Drew pointed out, we want will add some more content to the game that draws some inspiration from what other modes made popular.
I think games like Diablo, PoE, Torchlight, Grim Dawn etc all have hardcore mode and there are plenty of glitch/bug deaths. It's a way that you'll build your character to survive those moments.
Are hardcore in a separate instance to the standard players? Or do they share the same world?
If not, they should be. It would be nice to create games and matchmake (even if it's less players overall) that are doing hardcore. Would REALLY make the DZ a high risk zone to go in as well, but would suck to have a softcore player that has nothing to lose kill you.
Some games have PvP modes (like conflict in TD2) where hardcore players can PvP with no death consequence. But keep something like DZ perma death. Would almost be an insane level of hardcore.
Then having leaderboards for stuff on hardcore performance would be nice. Longest character life (in combat would be the best metric for this as you could ask in BoO), most extractions, most rogue kills, etc.
Also, like PoE when you die... You get converted to the softcore pool, so you don't entirely loose your character. Would be an interesting thing where people feel they don't lose what they farmed.
Hardcore players have their own sandbox to play in and won't match with normal characters. Thanks for all the feedback on what you like and what other games do well. It's always appreciated and helps inspire us!
Any chance for adding additional slot for Hardcore mode? I don't want to delete any of my character after I spent so long levelling them up.
I mentioned it somewhere else, it's totally something we can look into. What we want to avoid is to add additional character slots that then are only used as more mules. We'd rather fix the inventory "game" as well, so you don't feel the need to have 4 characters will full inventories.
What could have possibly made you guys decide that adding a permadeath mode to this game was necessary or even wanted by even the smallest fraction of the playerbase? Genuinely curious, because I see this community giving you guys a TON of extremely relevant and useful feedback as to what we would like to see in this game, and not once, at any point in the past 9 months this game has been out, have I seen a single person even so much as mention or hint at the idea of permadeath being a thing in Division 2.
How do you explain the disconnect between the community and the development team in terms of responding to our feedback/adding content to the game that players actually want to see?
And dont even get me started on the whole fact that the only incentive to even make a hardcore character is some crappy hat. I love the game and appreciate the work you guys have put into it thus far (for the most part), but I mean, come on... seriously Chris?
We think it's fun and that's why we made it. Player feedback is awesome and we want to incorporate some of it when we plan ahead, always. But that doesn't mean we need to stop doing something we think is fun.
This was done on the side by a small team, we tested it internally and we enjoyed it lots. We're releasing it early in a Beta mode so players can tell us what we can do better and we can develop it with player feedback.
And lastly, as I pointed out in another comment, while we see players comment a lot about Survival and Underground, the numbers of players who regularly participated in those modes were not that high.
So moving forward we'd love to incorporate some of the things people love about other modes (maybe even other games) and then create something that is fun, exciting and rewarding that hopefully not only scratches that itch for these modes but also makes players actually want to play them. Appreciate the feedback.
For those of us with 4 characters already, what if the 5th character slot is dedicated for hardcore characters only? That would at least solve the hoarding abuse of an extra character slot that you mentioned.
Yep, that's a possible solution but I don't know right now if it's something that is easy to setup. The character creation wasn't planned with Hardcore Mode in mind, so we also have to learn some things internally. We totally hear the feedback about character slots though!
Change the recalibration model so we don't have to keep all the trash just for the single attribute to put on a decent piece. Without that trash in the stash we'd have a tonne of free space. It is high time you realize how bad the current recalibration system is for the game and that's besides wasting a tonne of space. It has all the wrong incentives for players because it promotes a conservative approach to build improvements.
Say you find a nice 10% weapon damage roll on the backpack. Do you put it on a current backpack that's decent but due to insane RNG on the backpacks still quite a distance from ideal backpack? Since nice weapon damage rolls are rare what are you going to put on a better backpack when you might find it if you use it on a current one? The same roll from the current backpack? That destroys the current backpack that wasn't ideal but still nice and which fitted a different build than the better backpack you just found. So to avoid having to destroy a nice backpack or be out of a roll for the nicer one when it eventually drops, you stash your best roll and wait for a suitable recipient.
Or say your pretty much perfect favorite mask has 45% DTE and then you find a 50% DTE roll. If you put it on, you just wasted an inferior but still nice 45% DTE roll. You are also relatively likely to find a roll over 50% DTE sometimes in the near future so if you slap 50% on now, are you then stuck with this roll on your best mask, or do you waste 50% as well to change it to 54% when you find that one? So you again wait in order to not make a hasty recalibration you might come to regret.
One more example to hopefully get through to you. Now you have a very nice vest and you'd like to decide whether to roll headshot damage on it or chc. If you put a low roll of either to test you won't get usable feedback because the low roll won't have enough of an impact. But if you put a high roll on, well then you're either stuck with that one and can't try the other, or you're going to destroy it just to try the other which might then even turn out to be the subpar choice in your specific case. And yes the specific case is relevant because on a different vest, with different talents and different other rolls a different choice might work better. So again instead of promoting experimentation and playing around with your builds (which I assume is something you'd want to promote) your system acts as a break because the material to work with is rare, its acquisition supremely unreliable due to RNG and all the changes are destructive.
I know many players with these and other considerations that cause them to play it safe, to use a wait and see approach and thus stash many of their best rolls which then aren't doing them any good. All because of the flawed recalibration system you came up with that is in no way an improvement over the one you have in TD1.
Recalibration is something the team is currently investigating and seeing what we can do better. There are a bunch of suggestions players have made we really like and we're testing what can be made viable. It's a longer process as it will probably mean we need to change the system quite significantly. Improving the inventory is definitely one of the things that Recalibration can help with.
This requires an empty character slot in the main game? Or does it have its own server or Test server, etc?
It's going to be on the live game and you'll need a slot on your account there, yes.
It's hard to say. On one hand, being able to access the dz immediately reduces the frustration of someone that has to do several mission plus the recon mission to then be killed by a camper as soon as they enter the dz. On the other hand, i don't think a lot of players will venture in the dz right from the start,so it makes no difference. For example, I would like to go in the dz as close to the threshold as possible (30 or when reaching wt5).
I didn't watch the SOTG, so sorry if it was said, but do you plan on having leaderboards for the hardcore mode?
Leader boards are interesting for sure and if players want them we don't see a reason not to include them.
Time and effort wasted by your small team. And we all know how well your internal testing goes. Did you think kenly college was fun too? I heard this is leftover ideas from Div1 where you wanted to even lock people out for 12 / 24 hours. LMAO.
Yes, there are people who had lots of fun with Kenly College. Doesn't mean it's something everybody will agree on and we heard your feedback on Expeditions. That will not stop us trying out new things and the first test will always be internal.
Thanks for taking the time to express yourself!
I find it a little worrisome that your dev teams thought Kenly was fun or even had any repeatability to it. It's starting to look like you guys don't know where to take this and you're just throwing things against the wall to see what sticks. Hopefully its not too long for the new raid
We also thought the raid was fun and it seems like you agreed. :) I understand that there are some things players don't like and some things we thought that would be fun. Doesn't mean we should stop trying to do new things. Hardcore Mode didn't take us long to make, we think it'll be interesting for a part of our community and we can easily add to it if it's popular.
Other things will come, we're working on the second raid, we're working on Episode 3 and more to come. When you like things we do share it, if you don't continue to share. Thanks again!
Feels like an awful decision to shut people out like that, especially when you're offering rewards for participating. You certainly don't need all four slots filled to be a fan but it's a safe guess that only fans of the game have taken the time to fill the four slots with WT5 characters. "Rewarding" them for their time and effort by telling them they have to either delete one or miss out feels like a weird decision.
Totally agreed. It's one reason we are releasing this in Beta, to sort out some of the kinks together with you. Character slots not being available is clearly something a bunch of players will need to have sorted out to even play. We'll look into what we can do short-term.
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