Newsletter du producteur de BGO

Producer Newsletter #1
par Battlestar Galactica Online, jeudi 27 octobre 2011, 19:38

Hello pilots,

I want to start writing a monthly newsletter to keep the community better in the loop with regard to upcoming features and to address your concerns in a more organized manner than replying to individual forum posts.

Since this is the first newsletter, I wanted to address a couple of topics that are the most important to you: balance and stability. You may not believe it, but these things are also the most important to the development team. I intend to make sure BSGO has some serious legs, and the best way to kill it would be to ignore the issues around server stability and faction balance. We’ve been hard at work on a plan to improve both.



Faction Balance

On the surface, our game is perfectly balanced. The Cylon and Colonial ships and modules are effectively mirrors of one another. The imbalance you are all experiencing arises from the player population. On most of the servers, Cylons are significantly outnumbered by Colonial players. Also on most of the servers, the Cylons tend to be more high-level players. What we have is the classic Horde-Alliance problem, wherein the more casual players choose the faction they more closely identify with, while the hardcore players side with the underdogs.

The initial strategy for faction balance had been to give starting bonuses to the underperforming faction based on population numbers alone, aiming to recruit more new players to that side. When the imbalance becomes too severe, we initiate a limited-time, one-way faction switch period to move some existing players over as well. The problem (which you have no doubt noticed) is that when you base the decision on pure population count, you end up with too many high-powered players, shifting the balance just as severely toward the opposite side.

Our new plan is to make these decisions based on average galaxy control percentages. This should alleviate the worst of the problems, but it is still a very manual process because every server has a different population. If the small-but-elite Cylon faction on Canceron is trouncing the Colonial fleet, we’ll switch the bonus. If the Colonials outnumber their enemies four to one on Scorpia, trapping them in their starting sector, that will be addressed differently. And if the numbers are just as crazy on Caprica, but the outpost count is pretty much even, we will turn off the starting bonuses altogether.

This change is the easiest to make since it is just procedural, so you’ll see it first. We know, though, that faction switching and starting bonuses are just a bandage on the inherent problem that control of the galaxy can swing wildly in either direction, ruining the gameplay experience for the side not in control. Toward the goal of fixing this, here is a brief list of features we will be adding in the coming months:

Block off a greater number of starting/low-level sectors.
Add police bots to protect players in low-level systems.
Make it harder to create outposts in sectors near the opposing faction.
Spawn high-value gameplay well behind the front lines of the winning faction. This has the double bonus of encouraging the controlling faction to retreat a bit, while also encouraging the other faction to push forward.
Scale cost of capital ship rental based on galaxy control (number of outposts).

Please note that some of these features, notably anything involving more sophisticated AI, will take a while to develop properly. I didn’t want to leave the community in the dark, though. We are definitely working on these.



Stability

It has been a bumpy road rolling a brand new development team onto an existing project. Any MMO qualifies as a gigantic piece of moving machinery, and BSGO has its share of unique challenges (Erlang, anyone?). We have been iterating on our development processes and tools in the last few weeks to make sure we keep the game in good health (the developers, too – hotfixes are no fun!).

Here’s a checklist of things that we’re working on to improve stability:

Hire a top-notch project manager to make sure our team stays on-task as it continues to grow. (Done! Look for Kendricke in the forums)
Hire more QA testers. We’ve got a few new recruits, and continue to staff up to make sure we get as much internal coverage as we need.
Allocate a new internal QA server, and repurpose Kobol as a public Beta server. Since many of our stability issues only occur at high load, this will a) help us diagnose and fix the existing issues, and b) give us a chance to soak new product updates for a period before releasing them to the Live servers. As a bonus, you get a sneak peek at upcoming features! Our hardware is all set up, and we are just about ready to make the switch. Look for details in the coming days.
Alternate our updates between large feature updates and small content updates. By dividing the team, we will have more time to devote to making sure new gameplay is well vetted, and not released until it is ready.

Bonus Topic – Communication!

As I noted before, I wanted to start a monthly newsletter direct from me to you. I’ll be paying attention to common themes in the boards and responding to your ideas/concerns/devotion. I will also occasionally mix things up and bring a guest to post along with me!

This is just a small slice of what we are working on. I don’t want to give away too much, but….



(P.S. Carriers! and Tournaments!)



Ellipsis

Producer

Battlestar Galactica Online