Concernant l'avenir des missions en coopération
Matt Morris, Lead Co-op Designer de Legacy of the Void, est revenu ces derniers jours dans ce message sur les missions en coopération. À la manière de David Kim pour le multijoueur, celui-ci transmettra régulièrement la voix de l'équipe aux joueurs concernant ce mode de jeu et ce sur quoi les développeurs travaillent. Vous pourrez également y partager vos avis et idées.
L'équipe a vu de nombreux messages sur le mode coopératif, confirme ici que ces derniers sont lus et vous encourage à partager vos retours sur les missions, les commandants, les unités, les capacités, les fonctionnalités ou toute autre chose dont vous souhaitez parler.
Pour ce premier sujet, Matt Morris revient sur la mise à jour 3.6, le contenu, sa variété, l'expérience, les récompenses, la difficulté, le matchmaking, la vitesse de jeu, les fonctionnalités sociales et la communication.
Hello everyone! My name is Matt Morris and I am the Lead Co-op Designer on StarCraft II: Legacy of the Void. I’ve been at the company for nearly 20 years now, having started my design career on Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos and then working on World of Warcraft before moving back to the StarCraft team to head up the single-player campaign for StarCraft II.
The Co-op dev team wants to thank everyone for their support of StarCraft II Co-op Missions! We are very pleased that so many people have been enjoying Legacy of the Void’s newest game mode. Your passion and enthusiasm have exceeded our wildest imagination, so thank you very much!
Now, this is way overdue, and we apologize for not bringing the Co-op dev team onto the forums sooner to engage with you. Dayvie has been doing this for the Multiplayer audience for a long time now, and we’d like Co-op Missions to have a similar voice. We’ll do our best moving forward to post regularly and discuss what we’re working on. But, more importantly, we want to open a conversation with you about your concerns with this game mode.
The first thing we want to say is: “we truly are listening.” There have been many, many forum posts about Co-op Missions and we promise that we’re reading them. Please continue to post your thoughts on the missions, commanders, units, abilities, systems, or anything else you want to talk about with Co-op Missions. We’ll be more active in the conversations and will help answer your questions and concerns.
The second thing we want to do is give a big shout out to “[SFP] TheSkunk.” It was the “Co-op: Content. Variety, Difficulty & More” post that really pushed us to reach out to you. So thank you, TheSkunk, for putting together that post. Almost everyone on the team was forwarded that post. We all read it, we liked it, and we were already reacting to the feedback internally, but then the StarCraft community team suggested that we open a dialogue with you. That way you can know where we stand with the issues that were presented.
Since this is our first time discussing Co-op Missions and a wide range of topics have been brought up, we’d like to focus on Patch 3.6 and TheSkunk’s post. We won’t be able to hit all the points today, but we will do our best to cover as much as we can.
Patch 3.6
Some very cool and exciting stuff came out last week for Co-op. We have a new commander, Alarak, Highlord of the Tal’darim. We’d love to hear your thoughts on what you’ve seen or played. What do you like about him? What don’t you like about him? Have you seen any issues with Alarak?
We also launched our newest Co-op Mission, Mist Opportunities. We’re super excited to hear your thoughts on this mission. And on Egon Stetmann!
We’ve also released a new Co-op Mission game mode! With Custom Mutators, our goal was really to:
We added some extra difficulty for highly skilled players who enjoy Co-op mode but find it on the easy side. But then, after adding mastery points, things got even easier for larger groups of players. We’d hoped the Weekly Mutation challenge would scratch the extra difficulty itch for people, and for the most part it has. However, players still want more challenges. Hopefully this helpsthough, as always, let us know your thoughts.
We also made several changes to commanders and missions, and even fixed a bunch of bugs. You can check out all the changes here.
Co-op: Content. Variety, Difficulty & More
Now let’s chat about TheSkunk’s recent post. We agree with almost everything that was discussed, and were already addressing some of the feedback, so let’s review in greater detail.
Content & Variety
More missions: This was something we identified from the start, and is something we are continuing to discuss, as to how we can get more content out faster. We want more too!
Achievements per mission: We didn’t go this route for a couple of reasons. We wanted a healthy match queue, so we were worried that too many people would queue for specific missions if we introduced individual mission achievements. We were also concerned with players leaving a mission earlythe moment they realized they couldn’t get the mission achievement. This would create a bad experience for your partner. This isn’t to say we don’t want “mission” recognition, it just means right now were not thinking achievements is the right direction . . . we’re still brainstorming ideas.
User-made content: We think community-created content is a good idea and we’re discussing ways to tackle the hurdles that will need to be tackled in order for this to happen. No promises, but we think this would be a good idea.
AI Variety: We’re looking into ways we can add mission variety, because we agree that it would make the Co-op experience better. Patch 3.1.3 improved things, but we can do more and we’re looking for ways to make missions feel fresh every time you play.
Army Customization: We like the idea of co-op customization, but we also want to preserve the core identity of each commander’s unique look and feel. We felt that mastery helps fill this customization need. Also, we are aware of some less desirable mastery options, and we’re currently in the process of testing these changes.
Random commander: This comes up from time to time. The idea of queuing up random sounds fun and we want to do it, but we’ll have to work through some design concerns first and can’t say when this will happen.
Time-pressured missions: Our original design philosophy was to create a mission that defeats the player at about the 25-minute mark if they do nothing. Players had to collaborate to not allow this to happen, and the AI’s job was to prevent the player from succeeding. Remember that commanders have a lot of power. If we allow players to just sit around and build up their bases, we’d never be able to create a mission that is engaging and challenging. Having that time pressure is what gets players to move out from their defenses and coordinate with their partner.
XP, Rewards, and Difficulty
Higher difficulty level: We believe this will happen one way or another. It might not come in the form of an additional difficulty level because we have concerns on our end about creating additional matchmaking queues. Players already become grumpy when matched with someone 2 difficulties lower, and adding an additional difficulty level would result in seeing this happen more frequently.
Individual commander bonus for Mutation Challenges: We’re concerned that players would feel obligated to grind each week with each commander, which could cause some fatigue. What we would love to do is encourage going wide without rewarding Bonus Experience and acknowledge the player for doing so.
24-hour Bonus: We agree, this is confusing; we’ll look into it.
Matchmaking & Game Speed
Game Speed: Internally, we are divided on this one as there are strong arguments in both directions. Our conclusion is we have no idea who this would impact negatively. We know that passionate co-op fans are vocal and would love to not decrease the game speed when matched with a Hard player. But there’s a very large group of players sitting between Normal and Hard difficulty and changing the game speed now would create a negative experience for some of them.
Social Features & Communication
Developer Forum: This post is the start of our plans for ongoing discussion around Co-op. We’re excited to get these conversations going on a regular basis.
Replays: These are coming soon. We would like to say next patch, but until we start ironing out bugs this potentially could take longer . . . hopefully it won’t take long.
Open Game Lobby: This ties back to community content. In a perfect world we would love to see an “Arcade”-like lobby for Co-op, and users could create fun missions. We’ll probably never allow these missions in the progression (case by case), but you would have fun opportunities to try something new with your favorite commander.
Okay, that’s a lot for our first post. We hope we can continue having these conversations going forward. As we forge onward, posts like these will get smaller and more directly focused on the current hot topic in Co-op. We hope what we’ve said resonates with you or at least starts additional conversations.
Talk to you soon,
Matt Morris
The Co-op dev team wants to thank everyone for their support of StarCraft II Co-op Missions! We are very pleased that so many people have been enjoying Legacy of the Void’s newest game mode. Your passion and enthusiasm have exceeded our wildest imagination, so thank you very much!
Now, this is way overdue, and we apologize for not bringing the Co-op dev team onto the forums sooner to engage with you. Dayvie has been doing this for the Multiplayer audience for a long time now, and we’d like Co-op Missions to have a similar voice. We’ll do our best moving forward to post regularly and discuss what we’re working on. But, more importantly, we want to open a conversation with you about your concerns with this game mode.
The first thing we want to say is: “we truly are listening.” There have been many, many forum posts about Co-op Missions and we promise that we’re reading them. Please continue to post your thoughts on the missions, commanders, units, abilities, systems, or anything else you want to talk about with Co-op Missions. We’ll be more active in the conversations and will help answer your questions and concerns.
The second thing we want to do is give a big shout out to “[SFP] TheSkunk.” It was the “Co-op: Content. Variety, Difficulty & More” post that really pushed us to reach out to you. So thank you, TheSkunk, for putting together that post. Almost everyone on the team was forwarded that post. We all read it, we liked it, and we were already reacting to the feedback internally, but then the StarCraft community team suggested that we open a dialogue with you. That way you can know where we stand with the issues that were presented.
Since this is our first time discussing Co-op Missions and a wide range of topics have been brought up, we’d like to focus on Patch 3.6 and TheSkunk’s post. We won’t be able to hit all the points today, but we will do our best to cover as much as we can.
Patch 3.6
Some very cool and exciting stuff came out last week for Co-op. We have a new commander, Alarak, Highlord of the Tal’darim. We’d love to hear your thoughts on what you’ve seen or played. What do you like about him? What don’t you like about him? Have you seen any issues with Alarak?
We also launched our newest Co-op Mission, Mist Opportunities. We’re super excited to hear your thoughts on this mission. And on Egon Stetmann!
We’ve also released a new Co-op Mission game mode! With Custom Mutators, our goal was really to:
- Increase mission difficulty
- Add more unique play experiences
We added some extra difficulty for highly skilled players who enjoy Co-op mode but find it on the easy side. But then, after adding mastery points, things got even easier for larger groups of players. We’d hoped the Weekly Mutation challenge would scratch the extra difficulty itch for people, and for the most part it has. However, players still want more challenges. Hopefully this helpsthough, as always, let us know your thoughts.
We also made several changes to commanders and missions, and even fixed a bunch of bugs. You can check out all the changes here.
Co-op: Content. Variety, Difficulty & More
Now let’s chat about TheSkunk’s recent post. We agree with almost everything that was discussed, and were already addressing some of the feedback, so let’s review in greater detail.
Content & Variety
More missions: This was something we identified from the start, and is something we are continuing to discuss, as to how we can get more content out faster. We want more too!
Achievements per mission: We didn’t go this route for a couple of reasons. We wanted a healthy match queue, so we were worried that too many people would queue for specific missions if we introduced individual mission achievements. We were also concerned with players leaving a mission earlythe moment they realized they couldn’t get the mission achievement. This would create a bad experience for your partner. This isn’t to say we don’t want “mission” recognition, it just means right now were not thinking achievements is the right direction . . . we’re still brainstorming ideas.
User-made content: We think community-created content is a good idea and we’re discussing ways to tackle the hurdles that will need to be tackled in order for this to happen. No promises, but we think this would be a good idea.
AI Variety: We’re looking into ways we can add mission variety, because we agree that it would make the Co-op experience better. Patch 3.1.3 improved things, but we can do more and we’re looking for ways to make missions feel fresh every time you play.
Army Customization: We like the idea of co-op customization, but we also want to preserve the core identity of each commander’s unique look and feel. We felt that mastery helps fill this customization need. Also, we are aware of some less desirable mastery options, and we’re currently in the process of testing these changes.
Random commander: This comes up from time to time. The idea of queuing up random sounds fun and we want to do it, but we’ll have to work through some design concerns first and can’t say when this will happen.
Time-pressured missions: Our original design philosophy was to create a mission that defeats the player at about the 25-minute mark if they do nothing. Players had to collaborate to not allow this to happen, and the AI’s job was to prevent the player from succeeding. Remember that commanders have a lot of power. If we allow players to just sit around and build up their bases, we’d never be able to create a mission that is engaging and challenging. Having that time pressure is what gets players to move out from their defenses and coordinate with their partner.
XP, Rewards, and Difficulty
Higher difficulty level: We believe this will happen one way or another. It might not come in the form of an additional difficulty level because we have concerns on our end about creating additional matchmaking queues. Players already become grumpy when matched with someone 2 difficulties lower, and adding an additional difficulty level would result in seeing this happen more frequently.
- A better case scenario would be to do a difficulty revamp and smooth out the difficulty tiers. Meaning Hard would become a bit harder and Brutal a lot harder. We’re concerned that the climb may become too steep when a player moves up in difficulty, so we can’t make any promises.
- Does Custom Mutators scratch that itch for higher difficulty?
Individual commander bonus for Mutation Challenges: We’re concerned that players would feel obligated to grind each week with each commander, which could cause some fatigue. What we would love to do is encourage going wide without rewarding Bonus Experience and acknowledge the player for doing so.
- Do you have any suggestions that don’t encourage players to feel like they need to play each challenge “X” number of times each week?
24-hour Bonus: We agree, this is confusing; we’ll look into it.
Matchmaking & Game Speed
Game Speed: Internally, we are divided on this one as there are strong arguments in both directions. Our conclusion is we have no idea who this would impact negatively. We know that passionate co-op fans are vocal and would love to not decrease the game speed when matched with a Hard player. But there’s a very large group of players sitting between Normal and Hard difficulty and changing the game speed now would create a negative experience for some of them.
- That being said, we are discussing ideas where “Groups” can increase their game speed. But Matchmaking will stay as-is . . . for now.
Social Features & Communication
Developer Forum: This post is the start of our plans for ongoing discussion around Co-op. We’re excited to get these conversations going on a regular basis.
Replays: These are coming soon. We would like to say next patch, but until we start ironing out bugs this potentially could take longer . . . hopefully it won’t take long.
Open Game Lobby: This ties back to community content. In a perfect world we would love to see an “Arcade”-like lobby for Co-op, and users could create fun missions. We’ll probably never allow these missions in the progression (case by case), but you would have fun opportunities to try something new with your favorite commander.
Okay, that’s a lot for our first post. We hope we can continue having these conversations going forward. As we forge onward, posts like these will get smaller and more directly focused on the current hot topic in Co-op. We hope what we’ve said resonates with you or at least starts additional conversations.
Talk to you soon,
Matt Morris
Discord