Hey everyone, can't believe we've already been live for about a fortnight,
First of all I'd like to thank you all for getting behind us during this launch period. It's been awesome to see the community jump on and get behind helping us iron out the issues in the map. Obviously not only being the first big update for the map in years but also being FRINCKLE"s first foray into figuring out all the code it was always going to be a little dicey - but I have to congratulate the vast majority of the community in being really pleasant about providing feedback.
In addition, it's been cool to see both maps co-exist and lobbies fill up for both. I was worried one with cannibalize the other or people would just give up on the beta and go back to release. It's cool to see the coexistence.
FRINCKLES has been hard at work uploading over 25 update pushes to the beta over the past fortnight trying to resolve glaring issues as they come up. Over the next short while we're going to try to triage a couple of systems based problems, the most glaring being:
- Charge system feedback being incorrect
- Certain roles not filling into the correct random slot (IE Escort still being protective not support).
I'll let him comment on where he's up to as far as bug fixing is concerned and how development is going.
On the Design side we've been keeping an eye on how the roles are being played.:
- We updated Oracle to be before kills on the OoO to see if it makes the role clarity a little better but it's still not really being utilized in a wide way. This might need another pass later as the beta proceeds.
- Elector has had very wild swings as far as power level. Some games they do nothing and others they sweep the game. This is very similar to judge. I think the 1 day between rig option actually balances the role a lot more than I thought. We're still thinking about making it unique and sharing a slot with the judge as when they both show up its chaos. That said, 2 electors in the game has made for some really funny shenanigans so we're still watching. I don't expect us to make nochanges but exactly what change to make is still being evaluated.
- Armorsmith and Enchantress we haven't got huge amount of data on because of a few charge bugs so nothing to report here yet.
- Actress seems to be misunderstood by a lot of people expecting the word "Copy" to mean get the ability. Currently the copy lasts for the night of the target and the following day. We think so far when people learn what it does it is having the desired impact. People aren't really playing around it yet so when they get a good copy in the graveyard it has destroyed role counting
- Poisoner has also been a bit of a contentious topic, even internally. We're trying something different with this role mandating a no immunity NK which has been polarizing. The fact that the kills were sometimes not firing as expected also didnt help perception of the role's strength. What we didn't want to do is make a SK analogue that just kills later in some kind of reverse power creep scenario and having a role list with increasingly more night immune targets artificially strengthens evils and prolongs games. Instead we went with a route where setups could have multiple NKs in a balanced way. Including and excluding roles is something that hosts should do to fit their individual setups. We have seen that in setups where poisoner is the only NK the town win percentage is a little higher than we'd like so we're going to investigate a couple of other changes later in the beta such as a Solo modular option. We still want to support the idea of the Multi Poisoner or as a sub NK setup (including allowing poisoners to win with other NKs. But we're not sure about that one yet).
- Party Host is way more of a smash hit than we predicted. We're seeing a fewtoo many in games but that could be exacerbated by the fact the town support random isn't functioning correctly yet. We probably want to see this role being used in setups where Spies are excluded so mafia actually talk - and the PHost only blocks this for one/two nights. Having PHosts in a game with Spies doesn't really change the dynamic cause the mafia team doesn't really talk.
We still have a few feature pushes to come as time allows between bug fix patches. such as Party Host track expansion, model fixes and a few others. We have selected a few more tracks to put into the PHost's repertoire soon including a couple we picked from the suggestion thread here. It's taken a little longer than we expected but please be patient :>. I would take this opportunity to spoil one track but we have a file with like 6-7 tracks and I don't know which one or two FRINCKLES is going to go with... so ask him.
I want to do a PHost Battle Royale with 16 tracks in 1v1 polls and the winner getting implemented. Maybe a little later.
To Close: I'm happy to announce @BankHacker and @theoneceko as the first two beta MVPs on the forum, and to provide their names with a nice glow.
Keep up the good reporting team :> -
