Favure

Hi Chris!

I apologize if I came off a bit aggressive in the post (if you read it) as I am just a little upset at the current state of the game, and it just wasn’t what I was expecting for a brand new year with a brand new major expansion for one of my all time favorite game series. I am truly passionate about the Division and can’t even begin to tell you how many hours I’ve invested into both games over the years. Whenever I see you comment, or see you around the sub-reddit you seem very level headed, and the last thing I’d expect you to do is comment on every single front page post, so I do appreciate even seeing you pop up here.

But at the very least, I do hope this feedback is being relayed, one way or another, because I am far from the only person giving it. I watched the SotG today, and I guess you can say there was some good news, and some stuff that just throws me off. Good news is that they at least acknowledged that there is a problem with higher difficulties. But bad news: Why is that they need us to tell them that enemies are too spongey and that the problem with the combat is that it is just plain boring, as this feedback has been reported countless times throughout all the years since the Division 1 launched? Why is that they think difficulty means endless one shot mechanics, insanely aggressive enemies that force you out of cover leaving very little counter-play, and time and time again make the armor stat and any other blue attribute (outside of hazard protection) almost useless and would actually be 100% useless if blue core attributes didn’t scale up the shield. It honestly throws me off that the developers need to be told this again.

Either way, glad to see your name here, and want to say that I truly appreciate what you do, and hope you had the time to read everything through. Have a good one!

Hey, thanks for reaching out. It's a little difficult to answer your question as you make a lot of assumption of what is fun and what is not fun. For example you state that there is very little counter-play, which is odd. There's many things you can do, one of them is changing cover and run. But there are also other options, like CC with status effects, using traps or decoys.

One thing we struggle with as a team is to find out how we can make the game fun for as many people as possible, while also have something for the 1% hardcore fans that are currently already playing legendary missions.

As said yesterday on State of the Game, NPC health is something we know is off, nobody is claiming that you shouldn't be able to kill one dude within a magazine if all 4 players are focusing it (unless there's mechanics to prevent you from doing that, of course).

I have not been here for TD1 but I see a lot of players saying "oh they're making the same mistakes" and it is confusing for me. Nobod...

A_Man_Named_Jayne

Reading comprehension for the win.

Sorry, I should not have started with the Yes. In my head I replied to the "can you replay it" and then continued. As the Prime Target has the Skill Mod there will be an option to replay it afterwards but we haven't made the final decision on it.

SunstormGT

Think it is. Its basically free loot you dont have to do anything for. If it wasnt then people would start farming routes on heroic again just opening chests.

That's pretty much it, yes.

Mudokon_Tears

Hey man, just to speak on testing a bit, have you guys seen any reports about the last zone with the boss in the darpa labs mission? It is ABSOLUTELY INSANELY HARD. I roll a very good build solo and play challenging with heroic control points no problem, but only that last part of that mission feels impossible to beat on hard or higher. Spent the last two hours trying to clear it to no avail. Thanks.

Black Tusk missions are on our radar in general. There will be some separate adjustments on some of the units, like the Warhounds and the Support Station.

marrakoosh

Chris - kudos on the stream yesterday - but, can I only start the manhunt stuff once I've taken down Keenerino?

Yes, the Manhunt requires you to do something in the story to activate it. Don't worry though, all targets will be available until the end of the Season, which is in about 12 weeks from now.

uuuuno

Do you know if we can redo these special Prime Target mission even after the season is over?

Yes. As long as the Season is ongoing you can replay it as often as you want.

AgnosticCowboy

u/ChrisGansler: My highest respect to you personally for staying so calm all the time and providing your comments the way you do.

These days it seems like there're not many in this sub who understand the software development business and how complex it is.

I personally would have needed a truck load of punch bags to blow the steam of from reading all those blame comments.

Please keep up the good work - some (hopefully the majority) of us really appreciate your commitment to this game.

I appreciate your comment, means a lot! Thank you.

King4aVape

Hi Chris an thanks for the reply ,I'm level 40 and level 100 on conflict and all the rewards are purple caches, no matter what. I played more than 100 matches since WONY has launched and everytime was the same. I didn't notice if the other players were level 40 or not, but since I can only matchmake to do conflict, even if they were level 30, for me is impossibile to chose who to play with ...for the exp thing, Conflict had never gave us anything but conflict xp, so it's not a bug I'm experiencing, but it would be cool (since I'm level 100 and i cannot progress anymore) if we could get some shd points, so to be rewarded and keep up with pver's and darkzoners even if we choose to play only conflict for some time...Where i have to send you the screenshots you've requested, anyways?

Thanks for the details.

DogBt

I didnt expect it to be anything more than what they are and that's why I was pleased with it. Hopefully Jupiter will be more than a bounty though. Still not expecting much more, but more than a bounty would be nice. Like many, I've been a gamer most of my life (42 now) so I dont have huge expectations for seasonal stuff. I'm just pleased it's more things to do. Expansions and sequel games are where the major content comes from.

The Prime Target will be special, yes.

Puppy-love-420

I think you might underestimate how difficult the job is and how much changes by playing content over and over again while it's being developed. Also, using AI in this day and age is definitely not cutting corners.

I definitely don't underestimate it as I did QA work for years.

There are bugs in your update that are very easy to identify early on, and yet you just ship it anyway. Because the reality is that we are all your game testers, and we're even paying for it.

And that's not even addressing this ridiculously broken bullet sponge nonsense. AGAIN.

Either you guys don't test for shit, or nobody at Massive has a clue about anything. 4 years of utter incompetence, it's just laughable..

Maybe put some people in charge who really play the game, or games of this genre. It's no wonder some marketing hack with the ego of a child is f'in things up...

Don't know why you have to use insults in this conversation so I'm just going to remove myself from it.

Puppy-love-420

I understand the sentiment that we didn't do a perfect job this time around though, don't get me wrong.

This time around? This franchise is 4 years old and it feels like you still have absolutely no clue about what this game should be.

And I can't imagine that these changes have been play-tested by humans, you probably used your AI testing to cut some corners.

If I'm wrong and you did in fact test this with real human beings, I recommend you try to find some other, ideally less masochistic specimen.

Feel free to sign up to be a game tester with us. I think you might underestimate how difficult the job is and how much changes by playing content over and over again while it's being developed. Also, using AI in this day and age is definitely not cutting corners.

echof0xtrot

no, i understand, it just seemed that yannick was contradicting that sentiment. maybe it was just the way he phrased it, but saying "no one likes when things get harder" goes against the WoNY difficulty increase. i worry people will misunderstand. i was more calling out the contradiction in wording than intent.

thanks again for being so active in the community. there are a lot of disappointed players currently, but i have a suspicion most of them are here, and closer to that group you hinted at that wants heroic 4-man content rather than hard solo/duo content. i, for one, stick to hard with one other friend, and we're having a blast. i understand that doesn't mean changes shouldn't be made, but at least ill enjoy the time before and after they are.

lastly, were you the guy with the ohio shirt? nowhere in the stream did anyone but the host identify themselves lol. you gotta explain that t-shirt. as someone from ohio, im very curious.

Oh, I totally messed that up and should have introduced the guests. That what you get from me not hosting too regularly, sorry about that!

Drew Rechner is the "Ohio guy", he's an Associate Game Director in our studio and I believe he is from Ohio.

cfox0835

Just out of curiosity, what did those internal tests consist of? 4 man groups running missions on heroic or challenging difficulty? And what kind of stats were used on the gear and weapons that were equipped? All god rolls/dev build or gear rolls that are actually realistic for what players can expect to see in the game?

Honestly, the scaling is fine for groups of two, but any more than that and the enemies get scaled waaaaay too high in terms of armour and damage output. Also, that bug regarding the AI thinking that the player has lower armour than they actually do and thus causing them to rush us is back, which makes taking cover extremely difficult on the higher difficulties because even with good positioning and strategy, you get rushed and pushed out of cover because the enemies can face tank hundreds of rounds as they run at you. I know you guys have already acknowledged this issue and fixed in it a past update, but it is back in full force with WONY.

I'm not going to lie and say I think the expansion sucks or you guys did a bad job; I'm really enjoying the majority of the changes made, especially to the gear 2.0 system, and the narrative content from the expansion itself was phenomenal. And I think seasons are the best thing that's been added to the game yet! But the fact that the few underlying issues that do exist are so prominent in pretty much every area of the game, it really brings down the entire experience as a whole. If you guys can just fine tune the group scaling to be a bit more reasonable, and clear up all of the old bugs and glitches that were brought back with TU8, I think I can speak for most of the community here when I say we would all be a lot happier.

I can't speak for the whole testing process as I'm not involved in that. But we have teams that basically play every build we have, so a lot of early builds, builds in progress. We then also do tests specifics for missions, areas and other things. Then there are also a lot of math and theory things that I have super no clue about. I do participate in balance meetings and bring player feedback to these but I also often times don't understand all the things that are being discussed. I then sit down with the people making the changes to get terms and explanations that are easier to understand and presentable to players.

I understand that many feel we didn't do a good enough job on testing all this and it's honestly not something we don't talk about here. But we also invite players under NDA to come and playtest things here, even players that have never played The Division or The Division 2.

cfox0835

Notice how theres no "Massive Reply" on this one? We know you guys see this u/ChrisGansler, will we get an acknowledgement?

This is why I actually dislike the "Massive Reply" tag because people expect us to reply to everything to "acknowledge". We read on here every day and a front page thread with several Silver and Gold awards would be difficult to miss even if we only went on here once.

This will be changed, might be in for next Tuesday.

Fr0zB1te

So, badically, there will be activity requiring speedrun heroic, but even challenging speedrun not for everyone? What the hell?!

Which is why there are other activities in the Leagues that do not require you to speed run. Leagues are going to be for competitive players, while Global Events have something most players will be able to complete.

Sleepingtide

Are we addressing the problem with season resets related to joining others games or changing world settings?

Yes we are.

eternal70200

"If we fix the game, it'll be unclear to a lot of players that we fixed it, so we're going to leave it broken."

Sound logic.

I think you purposefully try to be antagonistic about something that is not that complicated. If you are a player that is not as engaged on reddit or the forums you will miss the changes. If something gets easier it doesn't really make a bit difference. But if something then gets harder for "no reason" it's going to cause frustration.

Carcinog3n

I understand mistakes can be made but why are the same mistakes being made over and over and over across years of supposedly listening to community?

Because we don't stop trying to make things happen. We wanted to make the game harder, we made changes, we tested them internally and we rolled them out so that players can enjoy more challenges.

Our experience in the studio and from our testers are often different from players and that means we can make mistakes. Does not mean we shouldn't try to make the game better. And again: We definitely agree that this hasn't gone as smooth as we wanted it to be and that's on us, not on our players.

opinions_unpopular

You’re really missing the problem. At level 30 WT 4 I am experiencing on NORMAL 1 shots taking 100% armor and 70% health. That’s not right and it’s not just Heroic. Armor seems useless. The scaling and pacing make no sense.

Discuss having a PTR for PC at least to weed out these issues sooner.

It's highly unlikely that we would've gotten any WT4 data on a PTS. While we can use the PTS to find bugs, balance is very hard to come by, just due to the low amount of numbers. Even with encouraging players with rewards it's nowhere near as much data as we would need. I'm talking from experience in both Blizzard and Ubisoft. Test Servers can be useful but they are nowhere near as powerful as some players might think.

I don't believe we mentioned it on the show but we are looking into the leveling difficulties as well. They were not meant to be extremely hard so it might be a separate issue.