FF #50: Robin Walker’d
This week: Jestr is on Vacation but he's got cover from Highstepper, BCarr, and Johnny Napalm as they join Mint to go over Robin Walker's answers to YOUR questions.
FF #50: Robin Walker'd
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- 1. A long while ago, we heard about the Pro-Beta. We’ve see some changes that seem like they might be a result of that, but haven’t heard much about it lately. Whatever happened to the Pro-Beta? (This one comes from our European Comp Correspondent, OgreSound)
- It's pretty much fallen by the wayside, sadly. It takes some time to keep it up-to-date, and we were too busy to do that at one point in time, and haven't recovered from that. Pretty much not a week goes by without one of us saying "Dammit, I'm going to get that thing up and running again". Now that we've finally got the Engineer update out, and our near term focus is on item balancing, we're probably going to try and get it up and running again.
- 2. Sort of a follow up: DustyGreen asks, What are you doing to try to make other classes more comp friendly?
- Over the last couple of months we've been slowly tuning the Pyro and Heavy, with a goal of increasing their skill depth. We were moving slower on this than we'd like, due to much of our time being focused on finishing up the Engineer update. We tend to think that the most useful things we can do for competitive play fall into one of two buckets: class changes aimed at increasing skill depth and broadening the range of viable tactical / strategic choices, and non-gameplay features that facilitate competition play (like improved server settings, Source TV, replays, and so on). As it turns out, we're always working on at least a couple of things in each of those buckets.
- 3. What's your favorite game to play online? Ok, Other than TF2, what's your favorite game to play online?
- I try to play a wide variety of games, which I think is useful for a game designer. It used to be that I could keep up with arrivals on Steam, so I'd spend some time with almost everything that we shipped, but now there's just too many. Lately I've been playing a lot of Spectromancer and Nethack, and before that I was having a bunch of fun with Metro 2033 and Battlefield BC2.
- 4. Here's a toughy: Name 1 thing that another Multiplayer FPS does better than TF2, and do you have plans to "address" that issue?
- There are lots of things that I think other multiplayer FPS games do better than TF2, but many of them are contain tradeoffs that don't make sense in TF2. I suspect the developers of those other FPS games would say the same thing about TF2. Any game designer will tell you that almost all decisions come with tradeoffs. So while we jealously eye the good design choices in other games, we know that TF2's current design would explode if we made them in TF2.
- 5. Seriously: How much longer till HL2:ep3!
- 6. Does the TF2 team consume the fan-media? IoW, read the (non-steam) blogs, listen to Friendly Fire, KritzKast, Etc.? If so, how much do those sources influence your priorities?
- We try to consume as much of it as we can, but there's just a huge amount of creative stuff being produced out there, which is one of the reasons we enjoy working on TF2 so much. To keep up, we rely on elements within the community to act as filtering mechanisms (TF2 web pages, gaming forums out there, podcasts, emails from players, and so on). All this information influences us a bunch: it's a key part of the way we measure the success of our work, and as a result, plays a large role in our prioritization of future work.
- 7. This one is really interesting to Mint personally: What's the monetization of TF2 at this point? How are you making money giving away so much content? I mean we're thrilled you're doing it but HOW? And how much longer can you keep it up before Valve realizes how much of their money you’re spending? =)
- Just don't send this question to Gabe, and we'll be fine.
- 8. Esbe brings up something some people have been griping about lately: It feels like damage in general has gone through the roof as of late, with almost all classes given the ability to crit or minicrit at will. That wouldn't be so bad if it didn't nudge a lot of already strong attacks into the "one-hit-kill" range. Will this be reined in any time soon, for instance with a global damage nerf? Part 2 of this would be: are you happy with the number of 1-shot kills currently in the game?
- This is a good question, and the answer is that we're not really sure. As in most design choices, we like to reserve judgement until we've got some good data. Our natural instinct is to make combat last longer, because at a coarse level it means the players involved have more chances to use skill to affect the outcome. One thing that pushes back on this instinct are several highly successful games with much more lethal combat that resolves far faster than ours. Something we're interested in trying is some extreme tests, where we dramatically increase/reduce the amount of health that players have across the board. We like to test these kinds of changes, not necessarily because we intend to make them in TF2, but because doing so can teach us about our other design choices within the overall system. Something we're working on right now is getting the TF2 beta up and running again, with a much larger audience, and running these kinds of tests.
- 9. Hyku asks: What do you think about the current class lineup that competitive players generally use (Soldiers, Scouts, Demo, Medic)? Is it inevitable that some classes will be used more? Do you think the scout, soldier, and demo are inherently more versatile or is it the extra rules of comp that unbalance them, like low player counts?
- We think it's inevitable that some classes are going to be used more. Classes are designed with different types of players in mind, including players of varying skills. So it's logical that there'd be a higher use of some classes in competitive matches, and lower usage of others, compared to non-competitive TF2 games. We don't think this is a weakness, it's just something we need to keep in mind as we tinker with things. As I mentioned above, we try to broaden the less used classes a little, while still keeping them useful to the player type they're designed for. I agree that Scout, Soldier, and Demoman are more versatile, and classes like Sniper and Engineer are less so. This is visible in the way that competitive teams apply the less versatile utility classes at key moments in matches, and then flip back to the generally applicable combat classes afterwards.
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- 10. Do you feel that the classes are appropriately balanced for 12v12 vanilla tf2 in your eyes? If not, then how do you go about increasing the skill ceiling of some classes without unbalancing them for people just getting into the game?
- I think we've been reasonably successful on the balance side of things, but it's not really something that I think we'll ever be done with. Every change we make to fix an issue has cascading effects that won't be seen until the community has had enough time to find the edge cases in the new system. Sometimes the edge cases are found early, other times they take months. There's no real magic to it, we just need to be rigorous, and give the community enough time to explore and provide feedback.
- 11. Following up on that, the recent changes to the heavy have made him a beast (but not unstoppable). Are you happy with what you’re seeing as the results of that, or do you feel you’ve made him a little too strong (or not strong enough)?
- We think Natascha's a little too powerful right now, but we think that's largely a local issue with that weapon. The spin up/down time and movement changes increased the Heavy's versatility a bit, but those alone don't seem to have been enough to suddenly cause competitive teams to adopt him wholesale. Almost all the Heavy complaints we get are focused on Natascha.
- 12. Jason wants to know: The competitive community has by and large shunned the use of the new, random drop and community weapons. How can Valve encourage the 6v6'ers to legalise these weapons in their rulesets? (Forgive his spelling of “legalize”, he’s a Brit…)
- Unfortunately for Jason, my slow process of answering interviews seems to have worked in my favor here, because since he wrote the question tournaments have been opening up their item adoptions a bit, with bans mostly focusing on Natascha, The Wrangler, and The Sandman. It'd be nice if we could get people using the Wrangler a bit more so we can get useful competitive feedback on it, but overall we're pretty happy with this level of adoption. (btw, Jason's correct, it's spelled legalize. There's something wrong with your spellchecker)
- 13. The King (thankya very much) wonders about the drop system: Speaking of the drop system, are you satisfied with the drop and crafting system? Any hints on future changes or is it in “final form”?
- The next step is trading, which will finally arrive in the next major update.
- 14. We’ve seen a LOT of new weapons and items coming out. How do you decide what items need to have alternatives created and what effects they have?
- Through a long and painful process of trying lots of things. The important part of any experimentation is how you're measuring it, and that's something we need to get better at. It's one of the main reasons behind getting the TF2 beta going again.
- 15. What’s YOUR favorite hat?
- They're all my favorites! Lately I've been digging the Grenadier's Softcap that'll be in Larolaro’s ‘Tank Buster’ set in the Polycount Pack. I'm trying to convince the artists to make a golden wrench hat for me. Think about it - if the golden wrenches are desired as much as they are, imagine how much respect you'd command if you furnished your dome with one?
- 16. What were the reasons behind dropping the equip command? Any chance of it being reinstated?
- We dropped it because it didn't work after the underlying item system moved onto the steam backend. Prior to that we were kind of faking items based on what achievements you had. The "Loadout Quickswitch" key was the replacement for it.
- 17. Mint and Jestr are both Mac users. Launching TF2 on the Mac was awesome. How does it look from Valve’s side? And any news on fixing the performace issues with OS X 10.6.4?
- The Mac side of things is neatly abstracted away from those of us on the actual game teams, so we're not that involved. I know the team there is aware of the performance issues, and is actively working with both Apple and the GPU vendors to close the gap with Windows.
- 18. Your story folks are amazingly talented. Who would have really thought about “lore” for an FPS? Can you introduce us to the people that come up with these awesome stories, comics, videos, and artwork? And give them our most sincere thanks!
- Like most things at Valve, it's produced by a collaborative process. As a result, it's hard to single out specific people. There's a lot of cross pollination between the various disciplines. The comics have influenced the game design, level design has influenced our fictitious blog posts, the update web pages and Meet the X movies have influenced weapon designs, and so on. This is why our goal is to have the TF2 team itself be responsible for creating as much of it as possible, so that it's all connected properly.
- 19. Seriously, dude, how are we coming with the “Meet the…” videos for Medic and Pyro? Please? Pretty please?
- Sweet nelly, does this interview ever end? I feel like I've been typing for hours.
- 20. And finally: Any thoughts for TF3 or are we going to hook TF2 up to the same machine as Blutarch and Redmond Mann?
This week: Jestr is on Vacation but he's got cover from Highstepper, BCarr, and Johnny Napalm as they join Mint to go over Robin Walker's answers to YOUR questions.
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Nice interview. We’ll be sure to be talking about it on our next podcast too. Just one thing, can you change question 6 so as to have spelt our name correctly.
Thanks
Agro
KritzKast Presenter
Nice…
Done. Sorry about that!