This will kick-off the first in our irregular community roundups that will be published when there are enough smaller, yet news-worthy articles. Due to the nature of column, I cannot promise a regular delivery, that is to say, don't expect it every Saturday, but if three more small bit of information are released, I'll wrap them into one nice post. Today's post will cover some of the updates with DirtyCups.gg, the unscheduled update which was released on July 9, 2015, the community's ongoing reaction to Phantom, as well as Splash Damage's reaction to community issues.

DirtyCups.gg "soon."

The first piece of news is that the guys at DirtyCups.gg are planning something substantial, the details of which are still illusive, however, DirtyCups.gg Producer & Co-Founder, oen was spotted on reddit remarking:
Hey!

The plan was the announce something this week. Unfortunately, due to a few technical issues we were unable to do so. We're working as hard as we can and as fast as we can to take care of those issues so we can once more bring a competitive platform to the Dirty Bomb community. I'd hate to make another promise for it to be broken again but I'm still positive we can make the announcement early next week. Thanks for staying patient, I truly promise it will be worth the wait.

P.S. Start organizing your teams, ladies. You'll want to be ready for this.
Source.

Judging by this vague post, and considering that they have held a series of one-day cups that have accumulated in a final series which include the best teams, I suspect they may be producing a longer scheduled league, which will hopefully include an invite, and open division to avoid the sort of stomping we saw in the early stages of the Proving Grounds tournament.

Unschedule Update, Phantom & zfz.son!

The next item is the unscheduled maintenance update that occurred on July 9, 2015, which was apparently to fix issues that was "blocking players with uncommon ASCII characters in their Steam Name from joining servers." The 714 MB update caused a little bit of headache for players on the US north east, as it occurred around prime time playing hours. Much to the disdain of many fans, this update did not include any balance related changes to polarizing Phantom merc.

On the topic of the Phantom merc, I should quickly note a few things, first of all PlusForward will be having an interview/patch analysis with zfz.son! (sonbang) this weekend, which I hope is ready to be released early next week, and that a recent poll on the DirtyBomb official forums indicated that a whopping 90% of users want to see some sort of change to the merc, with two out of every five voters suggesting he needs a heavy, or major nerf.

Splash Damage Activity & Developer Stream

In dealing with these sort of community reactions, DirtyBomb game designer exedore has been quite active on the DirtyBomb subreddit, posting under the alias /u/thrmoptc. A couple of interesting points I found were that they do not want mercs to hard counter one another, and, his forthright remark that balance cannot always be calculate in a precise way.

On top of, DirtyBomb developer /u/smoothuk responded to the "aim-punch" debacle that seems to have put the community on tilt, remarking:

Hey all,

Since a few people have been mentioning this since the recent update, I thought I'd take some time to explain how view-kick works and why we have it.
View-kick (or aim-punch / pain-twitch if you prefer) has been part of Dirty Bomb since at least August 2012 and serves several purposes:
  • In no uncertain terms it lets you know you're taking damage
  • It gives players a defence against snipers, by means of suppressing fire
  • It puts a little more emphasis on anticipation, positioning, reaction time in by rewarding the first hit more
In the most recent update (Phantom) we made one simple change, heavier hits kicked up (and recovered down) in a much shorter amount of time.

It was actually in the Open Beta update (Kira & Rhino) that we scaled the AMOUNT at which view-kick jumps up based on damage received. The reason for this was so we could separate the impact of being shot with a super-fast-firing, low-damage SMG from a weapon with more power behind it. Before view-kick scaled up, the faster firing weapons disrupted player view significantly more than anything else.

The most recent change actually has the crosshair offset from 'zero' for less time than before, but because of the faster speed it is obviously more jarring to players. I'll be looking into tweaking this a little to see if we can make the values a little nicer, but functionality wise we'll want it to remain the same so that weaker fast-firing weapons don't have an advantage over the heavy-hitters.

Below is some designer art which hopefully explains it a little better. It shows how view-kick worked in the recent different versions, when the player received either a small of heavy damage hit.

Image

Source.

So it appears like the aim-punch effect has received a slight nerf in the most current patch, but in conjunction with the release of a particularity disliked class such as Phantom, the effects of the mechanic, which make it difficult for players to deal with the said class, have become more noticeable, and as a result drawn more criticism.

In our final piece of developer updates, /u/DOGpls was patient enough to write down all the juicy bits of information released on the most recent developer stream. It's at least re-assuring to note that the developers are listening to the community, and are attempting to respond without a polarizing knee-jerk reaction that would alienate them from their own community. They also have a clearly mature decision making process when it comes to balancing, and recognize that there needs to be time given to develop natural strategies for utilizing, and countering specific mercs before tweaking values such as health, movement speed, damage etc... I'm also hyped that there are more maps coming, the current set of maps are fun, however, they are quite limited, and I certainly understand due to the sheer size of the maps it must take quite a while to plan, and build them, especially one that would cater a competitive crowd. Related to that is the arrival of private servers ("soon" (tm)), it's great the DirtyCups.gg guys have access to them, but sometimes I'd like to just practice movement tricks with my friends, and nothing is more frustrating that people joining and just shooting you in the head over, and over again.

 
Full Notes
  • On Phantom: They knew he'd be a polarizing character given his unique ability but they have no plans on changing his fuctionality at this moment.
  • They DO have QA and internal testing, but what testing they do can't compare to that of the 6000- 10,000 people playing at any given time.
  • Exedore believes that the question "Is Phantom balanced" can't be a yes or no question. Balancing is an ongoing process that will never be complete. A game will never achieve perfect balance in his opinion. Every character will get tweaked one way or another in the lifetime of the game, the question is who will be tweaked before others and how soon.
  • Exedore says there are no plans to revert aim punch.
  • They will not be adding more parkour or "Brink" elements to the game. Brink was made on a different engine and they do not have the resources to implement such a system to get it done in a timely manner.
  • Exedore does not know when ranked will be added to South America.
  • No plans on buffing Aura, but he said he would look into it.
  • No plans on adding melee headshots back into the game. They had them before and they sucked according to Exedore.
  • No new Stopwatch and Objective maps are coming out anytime soon. It's a large and difficult process to make massive maps that are actually good.
  • On the subject of private servers: You'll be able to set up a lobby and it will be able to reserve you one of their servers that give you more control of the game. Running your own server that you control every aspect of is not a near term goal of theirs. They don't want to give away their server code as it would kill any chance they have at getting rid of cheaters.
  • On the subject of rerolling or breaking down cards: They can't give specifics but they have ideas on what they want to do with cards. They want to change how Trading Up works in general making it more intuitive.
  • Exedore was unpleasantly surprised that Phantom can run through gas tunnels. He's not supposed to do that. Will be changed.
  • On Phantom's shield: they don't think they have the tuning right. It was meant to be a support thing to coincide with the new human shield exp implemented in the new patch. It's supposed to be used as a selfless thing but obviously isn't working. They have ideas on how to fix it.
  • Next update will have Phantom tweaks
  • They won't be in such a rush to bring out a new Merc this time.
  • In game reporting is being worked on now. They are working on their back end.
  • On why there is often only one good loadout card for each Merc: Exedore mentions the Competitive vs. Pub argument in how some cards/characters are better in pubs than they are in competitive and vice versa. They want to strive to balance things out. It's an ongoing process.
  • Plans soon to release a "series 2 edition" of loadout cards. Plans to add new cards or remove cards entirely (not removed from your inventory).
  • Exedore as lead designer is the person that chooses which Mercs are placed in free rotation.
  • Exedore takes decisions behind keeping the game from being p2win very seriously.
  • They plan on adding more melee weapons to the game
  • There are concept designs for an actual bonesaw melee weapon for Sawbonez
  • Main focus is to make the game as best as possible for PC. Not working too hard on console version at the moment.
  • They want to implement a solo gym or shooting range. Putting staff resources on a new tutorial would take away from resources for making new maps and things so there is no plans on making a new tutorial.
  • "Maybe" plans on adding purchasable cosmetic items.
  • Discussions on Dirty Bomb merch, nothing concrete.
  • It's low priority, but Exedore would love to add a sliding mechanic. (Would not knock people over like in Brink)
  • VAC does not work well in F2P games, but they are in testing for something else.
  • They are not reworking the leveling system. Might change threshold as to what you get at certain levels.
  • You'll never get obsidian cards again, but there will be more exclusive sets of cards like seasonal ones.
  • The way cards like the Alienware ones work: SD takes a series of bronze loadout cards and gives them different cosmetic character changes and then they get a new weapon skin indicative of the style of the manufacturer or season. Alienware one is blue with hexagons on them. You CANNOT TRADE SPECIAL CARDS UP.
  • Would like to create a new version of founders cards like a version 2 but will never ever release the originals.
  • Wants to create a healthy ecosystem for players who play a ton but most effort is being put towards rewarding new players and getting them "caught up".
  • User map creation is an inevitability. It needs to be in the game for Dirty Bomb to thrive however, it's currently just another feature on their huge to-do list
  • No plans on adding a pause feature for competitive games
  • They want to add more primary weapons to the game but didn't want to reveal too much
  • Currently debugging the HuD to fix the FPS stuttering issue. Thanks the community for helping them narrowing it down to the mini map
  • Wants to bring clans and banners into the game eventually
  • There's a lot of functionality that they can add to the mini map but Exedore doesn't want people relying too hard on the map.
  • Probably won't have ADS sensitivity slider. Makes things much harder to balance. High potential for abuse.

Source.

Links: icon_db DirtyBomb Official Website, icon_db DirtyCups.gg