CommunityDeveloper
Hey everyone! It’s Steve from Redlynx, and I’m back for another weekly Developer Update. Unfortunately, this one came a bit late as we were waiting to confirm the roll-out date for the next update. In this update, we’ll talk about this week’s Challenge event that started yesterday, talk about this weekend’s event, the update coming next week, and a brand new Beta initiative that we will be rolling out in the future!
THIS WEEK
CHALLENGE MODE
As you’ve probably discovered by now, we have a brand new Challenge this week called Ultra Zap. Your New Kid will be extra userful this week, as they have 2x zap range in addition to 1.5x zap damage. While there are already a lot of strategies circulating, if you’re having trouble dealing with the added range and damage of the New Kid zap, you may want to consider rolling with some heavy units (such as tanks, or other units with high health) then building on your push with Assassins or Fighters once the New Kid zap has locked onto the tank, in order to protect them from damage!
The rewards and retry costs are also the same as in last week’s challenge.
BOUNTY HUNTER KYLE
This weekend, the Epic Bounty Hunter Kyle will make his return! You’ll have a chance to earn extra copies of Bounty Hunter Kyle, in order to help you level him up! This event will be a token collection event. This means you’ll need to collect tokens from PvP packs and PvP lockers in order to gain points, and open those event packs. As usual, there will be both Solo and Team packs to open. Please make sure you join your team before the event starts (which is usually 12 UTC), in order to be able to claim those team packs.
This weekend’s event will run from Friday(~12 UTC) to Monday(~12 UTC).
The point requirements are as follows:
SOLO REWARDS
Reward Tier Points Required 1 10 2 40 3 90 4 170 5 260 6 410 7 600 8 925
TEAM REWARDS
Reward Tier Points Required 1 330 2 950 3 4125 4 9000 5 15000 6 22500
We’ve also got a bit of news about some of the newest cards. We’ll be adding Terrance and Phillip, Imp Tweek and Youth Pastor Craig to PvP packs and lockers at the start of the event, so if you missed the chance to get them during their events (or just need some more copies to level them up), you’ll have the chance, starting on Friday! There will also be a few adjustments to the “Arena” ranks required for Imp Tweek and Youth Pastor Craig. Imp Tweek will now be available at PvP-Rank 30 and Youth Pastor Craig will be available from PvP-Rank 35.
DEVELOPER STREAM
There will be no Developer Stream this week, as our RedLynx stream team, is hosting a special Trials Rising - Closed Beta stream during our normal stream time, the Closed Beta opens today, so huge congratulations to the Trials team on that one!
NEXT WEEK AND BEYOND
On Monday, September 17th, we’ll have a short server maintenance starting at 9AM UTC. This is scheduled to last 30 to 45 minutes. It will unfortunately need to be conducted during the event, but extra time will be added to compensate for this. Keep an eye on our Twitter (https://twitter.com/SouthParkPhone) for more information!
Our Next Update
We’re also putting the finishing touches on our next update, which is currently scheduled to be available on Tuesday, September 18th.
During the last several months, most of our development team has been busy working on entirely rebuilding our PvP architecture to be fully server authoritative, and developing our team vs. team feature. However, we have also been focusing on improving and expanding the capabilities of Challenges, improving under-the-hood performance, improving visuals and some parts of our UI, and fixing various bugs and issues. Here are some of the highlights for the next update:
Challenge Mode
- In order to access Challenge mode players must have completed the Adventure PvE Story and reach New Kid level 10
This decision came because we noticed that players with lower skill or progress were getting demolished in Challenges early, and probably not enjoying that. While we can’t lower the skill bar, we can make it so that players who take part are more nuanced in their understanding of the game, or more experienced.
- Matchmaking (for the first 4 wins) will now be based on lifetime win rate in Challenges to give players more even matches in the early parts of the Challenge
Again, this goes back to making things a bit more evenly levelled, and helping players take on players of a similar skill level for a more even matchmaking experience. After the first 4 wins, matchmaking will resume as normal, meaning that you’ll be matched with players with the same amount of Wins as you in the current Challenge.
- We’re adding the ability to use custom “Designer Decks”, which will include decks built for specific Challenges and can include new/unreleased cards, or cards that you may not own - this will also give us the ability to place them at specific levels in order to show you what they can do
This is also an area where we’d like to work with community members and content creators in the near future to have their very own Challenge decks in game for other players to try. One example being that the community may be able to build or vote on decks with a specific thematic element here on the Ubisoft Forums, in order to have those decks included in a Challenge. We hope to do the first Challenge like this in October, so be on the lookout for more info soon.
Bug Fixes and New Stuff
- Added a new set of Wendy Emotes to go along with the existing Cartman emotes
- Made matchmaking improvements (Details below)
- Fixed a bug where mind-controlled units would disappear when using C O C K Magic
- Fixed an issue where units would be unable to charge their ability after being affected by Enforcer Jimmy’s aura
- Fixed an issue where users could get stuck at 100% loading after opening lockers in PvP
- Added text to display the size of asset bundle downloads
- Various bug fixes and under-the-hood improvements
Matchmaking Modifications to Combat Deranking
It most definitely hasn’t escaped our attention that deranking has been one of the most critical areas of community concern - and rightly so. With that in mind, we have also seen that our previous steps to combat this were not enough. We recently discussed that we would be implementing changes to matchmaking in order to combat deranking. These modifications have now been completed, and we’ll be rolling them out with our next update. After the next update, players should find that they are less likely to encounter vast disparities of skill/progress between themselves and their opponents. We will also be continuing to look at what can be done to disincentivize or prevent deranking in the future.
Server-Side PVP
We mentioned in the Spring that we had begun the monumental task of completely rebuilding our PvP architecture in order to make it entirely server authoritative. This has been our primary area of development for the last several months, and has been no small task. Now, server-side PVP is nearing the end of its development cycle. The team will then be moving into the testing phase in order to ensure that our solution is as robust and bug free as possible, and make needed fixes before rolling this out to all of you. As this system is significantly complicated and will lay out a foundation on which we build further features, this may take some time. We’ll have more info on this as it progresses.
Beta Program
In order to better involve our players and community in the development process in the future, we will soon begin rolling out a closed beta program, wherein players can apply to participate, and receive early access to testing builds. This will allow us to better gather information and feedback from players, and use it to inform our development team, better the game, and bug-hunt.
We’re still working on specific technical and administrative details around this initiative, but we will open an application/sign-up form in the near future.
Welcome To Legendary/Community Appreciation Gift
The “Welcome Back to Legendary” pack will be going on out on Friday, as the event starts! Any players who are already in Legendary will get a special pack for their efforts and non-Legendary players will have a limited time to make their way up to claim the pack.
One last thing! We’re planning a gift for this weekend’s event, as a way to kick off the new season and as a “Thank You!” to our awesome community! The gift will contain 150 Cash, 2000 coins and 100 assorted upgrade items. This should be available on Friday, when the event starts. Thanks again for playing Phone Destroyer, and for all your passion!
That’s all the news we have for now. As usual, if you have any questions or comments, please feel free to share them with us. We love hearing from our players!
Until next time, we’ll see you on the streets of South Park!
Love,
Your Community Team,
Steve🚀, Buck🦌, and Toller🐶
Member
You mentioned changes to matchmaking. Can you tell us what changes have actually been made and at least a rough idea of how the new algorithm works? My main concern (mentioned in another thread) is if upgrading a wide range of cards (rather than increasing fewer cards to higher levels) can hurt me with any such changes?
Liked reading about new deck slots those will be very useful.
CommunityDeveloper
Hey, Lister!
While I can't mention the specifics (it might allow derankers to theorize on how this solution works) I can say we are trying extremely hard to avoid any extra strain on players who are (for example) on a losing streak, or maybe not as skilled as others. These changes will be most noticeable by those who are actively attempting to heavily derank, and much less noticeable by those who are playing fairly.
Member
CommunityDeveloper
Junior Member
Suggestions to improve the legendary and keep players from wanting to drop out:
1. If you are going to pull a character card from locker, then the minimum for each tier (accounting for the change in meta) should be as follows:
4x common, 3x rare, 2x epic, 1 legendary.
(eliminate the chance to get 1 common and 1 rare. It’s a slap in the face... I could have stayed in silver shield if I wanted crappy lockers...)
2. Allow legendary players to open 1 or 2 additional lockers.
3. Do a weekly stimulus pack of about 20 random upgrade materials for legendary rank only.
A suggestion to improve player morale:
These “deals” are whack... they all start at 2000 cartman cash or $20.00 US. Toss some $1.99 - $4.99 deals out there more often.
I probably wasted my time typing this, but at least I tried.
CommunityDeveloper
Junior Member
Senior Member
Thank you for the update, I like the new emotes, only the magic fart one made me cringe. Anyways, you guys really need to add the option to enter challenges for a cheaper fee even if it means less rewards, that way I can at least enjoy challenges more, and people who lose too don't hesitate to rejoin.
I hope you can bring a challenge with a draft mode, where we are given a few seconds to choose a card and give the other to the opponent, this for half the deck so 6 cards and the rest are unknown to the opponent and random.
Member
