*This is mostly in Regards towards the Steam Release annoncement, while i understand the aim of trying to get new players into the game, there are some conciderations that should be taken into account. *

First off - The new players coming into Dreadnought are not going to be aware that there is a Discord server, or may not use Discord at all, So i would like to Suggest some sort of Squad, Team, Or Global VOIP in game (With the Option to Mute of Course so people don't have to deal with spam and various other spam through the Mic)

Secondly - I Think alot of people have been there and have ether just been annoyed or Frustrated by Unkillable Dreadnoughts due to "Tac Sphere's" (This is Mostly applying to the Medium and Heavy TAC's not so much Light TAC's) Which Triple Koscheis are a straight pain to break up and kill. Would it be Possible to get some form of Overheat Mechanic added to Tacs sp they Can't Infinately heal? or Change it to a Pulse beam or something? (Not suggesting an Outright Nerf just an Adjustment to make it more enjoyable and to Make it require more Skill to Use TAC cruisers)

Lastly - After looking at the Steam disscussions most of the Threads are about making changes to Match making to make it better for the new players. Would it be possible to change it from Teirs to Ranks or an MMR system? (Example Rank 1 ships, such as your starters can only be matched against other Rank 1's, Rank 2's can only be matched against other Rank 2's, Rank 3's VS rank 3's Ectera. This way players in Higher teir's aren't complaining about people using T2's in a Veteran Match.

Apologies if its Worded Poorly.

DrAgOnTemplar44#0203 posted (#post-220360) said: This way players in Higher teir's aren't complaining about people using T2's in a Veteran Match.

but you can't use t2 in vet fleet.... it's t3 and t4 only

On the topic of voice, for PC everyone says they want it. In reality, a tiny percentage (single digit if data from other devs we speak to are to be believed) of people use it and most people have their own preferred third party solution (Discord, Vent, TS) that their usual organizations choose.

There's a couple of improvments we could look at (and are discussing): 1. Deeper discord integration - Even before this is a thing, we will be highlighting discord much more prominently in the launcher and in-game. Whether or not we can do some deeper auto integration is for exploration later.. 2. Steam voice support - Fine if we're only ever only going to be on Steam, but that is a bit of an open discussion too. 3. Vivox - cross platfrom, but very expensive for us to use and host and almost never used on the games that have impiimented it.

In short, stay tuned, even if we do nothing more than better promote Discord (and I hope at some point we have some cycles to do more), it will get better.

On your overheat suggestion, 1.12.1 will have the first steps toward breaking the "heal ball". Some details are here but there will over time be many components to this effort that will once again cause the meta to evolve. Please don't view this as "we're nerfing healing" because we're not. Aside from revisiting some kep officer briefings and modules. We are planning some changes to beam weapons that will make them more interesting and more strategic than the role of tac cruisers have today. Our combat designers are planning some upcoming blogs to keep folks in the loop of the changes that are coming on these and other balance related fronts.

Matchmaking - as it stands today, players have a fleet rating, based upon the ships they have in their respective fleets which. Hard divisions between tiers will only serve to fragment what is already a relatively small matching pool (more than 70% of players online at any time are in a match, not eligible for matching). In short, we don't have the playerbase to support such a structure. A larger matchmaking pool in general (which Steam + more languages should get us) will help keep the real legendary players up in legendary (where the battle bonus is much larger), away from the real vets.

In any event, we intend to reevaluate matchmaking, hopefully taking into account more complex options, including geographic location, some time after the Steam launch (right now all of the people to do that work are working on getting our butts to Steam).

DN_Svenice#5360 posted (#post-220454) said:

On the topic of voice, for PC everyone says they want it. In reality, a tiny percentage (single digit if data from other devs we speak to are to be believed) of people use it and most people have their own preferred third party solution (Discord, Vent, TS) that their usual organizations choose.

I tend to disable open VoIP in games that have it because of the trolls, overexited teenagers, heavy breathers, etc. But it's nice when the game offers automatic VoIP for squads.

DN_Svenice#5360 posted (#post-220454) said:

In any event, we intend to reevaluate matchmaking, hopefully taking into account more complex options, including geographic location, some time after the Steam launch (right now all of the people to do that work are working on getting our butts to Steam).

Speaking of geographic location - the lag caused by the latency of the connection to your Texas server location is really atrocious for non-US players. Any plans for regional servers or at least to relocate your servers within the US (from the EU I'd have only 40% of the latency to the East Coast, for example)? If the Steam launchs brings more players you'll need to provide more server capacity, anyway, so that's as good a time as any to provide that in better locations for some of us.

Taking geography into account for matchmaking (e.g. spinning up regional battle servers) is on our roadmap post-Steam. We have the ability to spin up servers via regions anywhere in the world, but that would create hard coded regions which we desperately want to avoid (thus us remerging the PS4 regions this month).

The whole exercise here is to have smarter matchmaking that can group geographically similar folks, at the same fleet levels with a battle server that is "conveniently located". For us to do this cost effectively, we will also have to rewrite the servers to run on Linux (they don't currently). And lastly that also requires a complete matchmaking rewrite, which again, is on the books eventually.

I'm not sure how EVE Online currently distributes server load, but whatever they are doing is working great. Used to be when we had huge capital fights, the latency was so horrible that you couldn't view what was happening for several minutes at a time. In a dynamic fight this can be really bad for some people. And there used to be serious latency issues in general. They addressed these issues in some way, but I cannot remember right off the top of my head what that was.

Perhaps whatever method they are using might be benchmarked against for your own solution in the future?

DN_Svenice#5360 posted (#post-220461) said:

Taking geography into account for matchmaking (e.g. spinning up regional battle servers) is on our roadmap post-Steam. We have the ability to spin up servers via regions anywhere in the world, but that would create hard coded regions which we desperately want to avoid (thus us remerging the PS4 regions this month).

Servers in other locations doesn't equate to locked regions though. Us Europeans have been playing the on the US server for over 2 years now. There's nothing that says the US people cannot play on EU servers if you find say 10 EU players and 2 US players in the queue.

Remember, you don't just want to draw new players in, you also want to keep them.

Nexeroff#4718 posted (#post-220466) said:

I'm not sure how EVE Online currently distributes server load, but whatever they are doing is working great.

That isn't even comparable. EVE runs a 1 Hz tick rate, client latency is the least of their issues.

Snib#1627 posted (#post-220469) said:

DN_Svenice#5360 posted (#post-220461) said:

Taking geography into account for matchmaking (e.g. spinning up regional battle servers) is on our roadmap post-Steam. We have the ability to spin up servers via regions anywhere in the world, but that would create hard coded regions which we desperately want to avoid (thus us remerging the PS4 regions this month).

Servers in other locations doesn't equate to locked regions though. Us Europeans have been playing the on the US server for over 2 years now. There's nothing that says the US people cannot play on EU servers if you find say 10 EU players and 2 US players in the queue.

Remember, you don't just want to draw new players in, you also want to keep them.

Nexeroff#4718 posted (#post-220466) said:

I'm not sure how EVE Online currently distributes server load, but whatever they are doing is working great.

That isn't even comparable. EVE runs a 1 Hz tick rate, client latency is the least of their issues.

It's 1 tick per second, right! We use this to our advantage in EVE when insta locking.

Point is, EVE online is doing something right in this respect. Lag is very seldom if ever an issue, so however they are distributing the server load between European, Asian and American servers, works. I was suggesting that Greybox might use EVE online as a benchmark in this respect, and perhaps adapt what they learn from how EVE distributes workload over multinational servers, to their own servers.

I read someone they are planning on eventually moving to Linux, which begs the question what operating system are they currently using, and will the server OS make a difference in what people are experiencing now. I switched from a windows based plateform on my CNC mill, to a Linux platform and resolved the issues my system was having in communicating with the servos, partly because shielded wiring was an issue but the main issue was that windows has so many processes running in the background, that the resources required for computing plot points on the CNC mill was being disrupted to the point it was skipping steps.

Nexeroff#4718 posted (#post-220472) said:

Point is, EVE online is doing something right in this respect. Lag is very seldom if ever an issue, so however they are distributing the server load between European, Asian and American servers, works. I was suggesting that Greybox might use EVE online as a benchmark in this respect, and perhaps adapt what they learn from how EVE distributes workload over multinational servers, to their own servers.

As I said, EVE's infrastructure really has nothing at all to do with a game like Dreadnought. Have you ever even played EVE? Every EVE players should be well aware that there are no regional servers, the main selling point of EVE is the single server cluster, which is located in London, England. The challenges with that are not even remotely relevant to a lobby game like Dreadnought.

Nexeroff#4718 posted (#post-220472) said:

It's 1 tick per second, right! We use this to our advantage in EVE when insta locking.

Point is, EVE online is doing something right in this respect. Lag is very seldom if ever an issue, so however they are distributing the server load between European, Asian and American servers, works. I was suggesting that Greybox might use EVE online as a benchmark in this respect, and perhaps adapt what they learn from how EVE distributes workload over multinational servers, to their own servers.

It is not a workload problem. EvE is simply updating so slow that lag does not matter because the game waits longer than most latencies are. DN cannot do this. It needs to constantly update and check if you push a button for moving, some guns fire as fast as every 0.1255 seconds, in one second an Arty shot travels 7km, it needs to constantly do collision checks and send them to the clients, the "tick-rate" of DN is most likely at 60hz or higher. This means while EvE can send one data stream per second to keep everyone updated, DN has to send 60 or more in the same second. While the amount of data is no problem, the time it takes for this data to reach the servers and then you again is too long for DNs gameplay speed. For example with a 150ms "ping" (rough average for the EU) you see ships where they were, not are, 75ms ago, so if you aim at a moving target and shoot, you aim where the ship was 75ms ago and your shot will fire at the position another 75ms off, so total 150ms of lag. Which in extreme cases (Thrust Amp Vette/Vindicta) means you shoot behind the ship, at least for the server, although the shot was dead-center on your screen.

TL;DR: DN gameplay is too fast for a central server.