Crimsonfury500

Thank you for all of your hard work in this community. I know sometimes it can be very difficult to balance the expectations of the player vs internal goals, and I’ve been a pretty outspoken critic on this sub of division for a few weeks now. TU6 is a big step in the right direction and I know I will play for a few weeks while the dust settles after the update. Could we please get some feedback on any possible changes to RNG and Stat Allocation systems in the near future ? Not asking for a change yet, maybe just a thread posted on this Sub by Massive with a view to collecting some ideas; I know a few good suggestions have been put forth by community members here with a view to completing builds without being at the mercy of RNG for months on end.

I am ok with waiting for new content as long as there is at least some info coming down the line!

Thanks again, sorry for the reply hijack

Changes to the RNG allocation of stats and the way that Gear Score 490 weapons for example can have higher damage output than Gear Score 500 weapons are currently something we are looking at but not something that will be coming any time soon.

It would mean a large overhaul of the system (from what I understand from my conversations with the dev team a complete revamp and therefore completely new "code") and it's not an easy feat.

That being said we also talk about it a lot internally and we know it's important to players so it's not something we don't want to do but rather something that will just take a lot of time and we will have to figure out how and when to do it.

sarsante

Thanks, maybe see y'all back in 2020. Until the raid I'll play destiny 2.

Enjoy! We'll make sure to keep the info about the raid coming when it's ready.

sarsante

Cool, let us know when we'll be able to farm gear for the raid. Because we know what we'll get tomorrow will be rebalanced at least once before the raid. So makes no sense to play now.

Edit: did you guys ever consider make something like seasons. So people would know what they're farming/building wont be nerfed to the ground next week? Like 3-4 months without refarm

That's fair. We'll try to give you as much of a heads-up as we can.

JokerUnique

we don't have maintenance scheduled yet - but it is probably the usual time 9:30 CEST for three hours and during that time the patch becomes available. This is usually announced later today.

It is! Current plan is to start our maintenance for TU6 tomorrow (Tuesday) at 9:30 AM CEST, 3:30 AM EDT, 12:30 AM PDT.

Zaytoven

So TU6 on Tuesday the 16th?

Tuesday, October 15th, yes. Title Update 6 and Episode 2 launch on that date. Narrative content, e.g. the new main missions, will launch with Early Access for Year 1 pass owners and then unlock for everybody on October 22nd.

So next week Tuesday:

• All the QoL, Gameplay and Balance changes on October 15th
• You will be able to unlock the new Specialization via the Special Field Research
• Kenly College returns with the new Mastery system for all players
• Early access for Year 1 pass owners to new missions, Classified Assignments and instant unlock of the Technician

On October 22nd:

• the new missions unlock for all players

Hey, sorry to hear you didn't have any keys drop from the 4 caches you got. We know that the streaks of bad RNG can be pretty frustrating, which is why we also added a new project that grants you 3 keys on completion for this event, so you have at least something you can do to get some keys reliably.

As we pointed out before, we're going to make changes for future events which will make getting a key more predictable and also have the game tell you when you did not get a key. It's often times confusing when you don't know if you got one or did not or why you did not get one.

Once we're closer to the next event we'll give you an update on how it will look and the main goal is to have keys be more predictable and lessen the frustration.

lmole

I have experienced lag and hit marker registration issues since day one. I play in Minnesota and have 275 download speeds with a 20 to 30 ping and latency is so bad I often want to quit. The new fix hasn't changed much. No better no worse from what I can tell, just bad. I notice that the same people always experience the latency and those that don't, hardly ever do. I am willing to bet the problem is geographic. On FB group I belong to the players that always seem to not know what lag is are from NYC area or the LA area. Those in the Midwest have the worst experience.

Thanks for the info. Have you played any Conflict matches lately? We made back-end changes last week Tuesday and if you've played and noticed anything being different that'd be great to know. If everything is still the same, also let us know. While this would mean nothing has improved for your case specifically, it also means nothing got worse which is something we can also work with.

gX-kiD

I'm not sure why you think I'm just here to do damage control.

Because that is your job. Community Manager in this industry basically just means that you are part of the PR & marketing effort around this game. Compared to the first game it's quite obvious that your employer wanted to invest into someone who's likeable, which you definitely are, and who can spread some feelgood vibes around reddit to calm down the negativity. It's fairly obvious what your job is, apart from translating from and to the devs.

We receive a lot of feedback but, mostly due to the nature of how we as humans communicate with each other on Social Media, most feedback is pretty thin on details and doesn't really give us anything to act upon.

Act upon? You guys keep throwing around all these theories and explanations but the truth of the matter is that this has been an issue with the first game from day one, and it most likely will stay an issue for as long as this game stays online. Of course you can't admit to that, probably not even internally, so we all have to take part in this dance, pretending that we don't realize that the music is simply too quiet (or the servers too shaky).

Your constant negative attitude towards our communication doesn't really help us either. I understand there are frustrations with us, the game and other things but I'm also curious what drives you to reply like you do. As you say, it's fascinating to me and I'd love to learn more.

It's hardly negative as it's more realistic I'd say. This industry, your employer included, just can't be honest for the life of them. What exactly is "negative" about asking about drop chances for something that your players are investing thousands of hours into?

It's a very simple question but you simply can't and won't answer it because for your employer it's more important to manipulate players in a crass disrespect of their time and effort, than just being transparent for once.

What exactly is "negative" about holding your employer accountable for the promises that were made and broken?

This game has turned out to be an unfinished mess, again, and like so many other studios in this industry, you simply refuse to learn from players out of sheer arrogance. With how many drastic changes the LIVE game has seen already, I think it's safe to say that we are playing yet another Beta version of a game - one we were charged for unfortunately.

This industry has almost lost all the customer goodwill and respect there is because time and time again you decided for screwing players over, lying to them, or just ignore them when it's convenient.

And this is not only the opinion of an "entitled and toxic" gamer, even developers themselves start waking up to this.

Here, a statement from the Everspace devs about their sequel: "Finally, we have noticed that since our last Kickstarter, things have changed quite a bit. Due to broken promises from indie devs all the way to AAA publishers, it is probably no exaggeration to say that trust in developers is at an all-time low, especially in regards to Epic Games Store exclusives of titles that were originally (co)funded on Kickstarter."*

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/rockfishgames/everspace/posts/2644664

That speaks volumes, and the EGS part also partially applies to Ubisoft games.

Or let's look on your newest abomination, Ghost Recon:Breakpoint. I get it, you're already typing "Unfortunately I can't comment on what other teams are making" blabla, but in terms of greed and incompetence this game easily puts EA to shame. And you wonder why gamers are becoming more critical & skeptical?

It's because you guys know no shame anymore, and your public reputation is slowly settling somewhere between big pharma and big tobacco.

And you, Mr. Gansler, you're part of this machinery, with all your defenses, excuses, justifications, explanations, or just your "understanding".

I personally don't know how people like you sleep at night but I'm sure you have your internal justifications for what you do and who you're working for.

And now hit me with your feelgood lies about all the passion, inspiration, creativity, and customer focus you're experiencing at your employer.

Cheers

I think a lot of the frustration is understandable. That being said, it doesn't really explain to me why make the effort to respond to me then? If I'm just a Yes-saying marketing tool, why go through the effort?

All the other things you say I can understand and I even agree with some on a personal level. But what I don't get is the amount of effort put in to make it look like I'm just lying, instead of asking players for feedback because we can't verify things on our side.

I do apologize that you feel I'm not genuine and don't provide anything of value for your interaction with Massive.

Tikidave

I think the crux of it is quality control. The gaming industry has the luxury of a rabid fanbase that they can use to test the product. Also for two decades now, they realize they can release unfinished or poor quality products at full value with a promise to fix later. Imagine the anti trust lawsuits if car manufacturers acted as irresponsibly... although some have. Until gamers quit blindly buying every new release, I'm guilty as well with Division 2, we going to continue to get second rate service. Like with every decision in life, its about $$$.

I can see that point for sure, we launched with bugs that had impact on the overall experience for sure. The thing is, we try to fix everything we can reproduce and there's no reason for us to try to slither around these things.

We require player input because players are experiencing these things and millions of players playing will just ultimately always have more hours played than our QC teams, just by sheer numbers.

That doesn't mean we're not testing these things or are not experiencing any bugs. We do and we fix them. But some things we can't reproduce and that's where player input is just super valuable and can help us fix things.

A simple example is one of the sound issues that arose early after launch. Only after players told us they were using specific headsets with a specific software we could identify the issue, buy the headsets, install the software and fix the bug.

gX-kiD

One question, out of curiosity:

Do you actually believe what you are writing? Or in other words, are you really left in the dark by your backend team about your shitty servers and they make you collect all this feedback each time the issue comes up again for no real reason other than to keep up the facade that this is a mysterious problem and not just Ubisoft being stingy as always with their servers?

Or are you fully aware of the fact that your job here is basically just damage control to create the illusion of an investigation when in reality every Division veteran knows that this problem will never be fixed?

Or do you not even try to justify any of this crap to yourself and just collect your paycheck?

I always find it fascinating to learn more about the games industry so I hope you can share some insight on that.

I'm not sure why you think I'm just here to do damage control. We made changes to Conflict and want to know if these changes are positive (or at least not negative). We can make changes to the Conflict servers without affecting the other areas of the game, which makes testing quite safe while still have a larger population than on the PTS (where we also tested the changes).

The OP here states clear problems he had since we made the changes which might mean we do not want to apply them to the rest of the game at all, while we initially want to do so with TU6.

We receive a lot of feedback but, mostly due to the nature of how we as humans communicate with each other on Social Media, most feedback is pretty thin on details and doesn't really give us anything to act upon.

Your constant negative attitude towards our communication doesn't really help us either. I understand there are frustrations with us, the game and other things but I'm also curious what drives you to reply like you do...

Thanks for sending over that feedback. As OP mentioned, we made some changes to the Conflict servers to see if these improvements will help with latency and hit registration issues.

If you could be a little more specific on the feedback it would be greatly appreciated. Where possible video footage would be awesome. If that's not possible still try to add as many details as possible. When were you playing, what platform, what region, did you queue in a group, solo, etc.

The more you can add in terms of details the easier it is for us to check what's happening and make further improvements.

Venom_is_an_ace

you could also make a separate XP bar for the event so people know how close they are to unlocking a Key instead of having god awful rng

Something like that, yes. We're not 100% certain what it'll look like yet but it should give you a clear info on when you can expect a key, basically.

Hello! We agree with your feedback about the stretches of bad RNG where it can take a lot of Field Proficiency or Dark Zone Caches before you get another Apparel Event Cache key. We know it can be frustrating when you don’t get a key, and the game does not provide you with this feedback or tells you if and when you'll get a key next.

For future events, we’re currently looking at solutions which would allow you to have a more predictable path to acquire event keys and better feedback from the games' UI.

ntgoten

Thank you.

The first bug fix didn't work, which is why it didn't make it into 5.2. We now have one that is going into Episode 2 / TU6 that has fixed it in our tests.

ntgoten

Will this https://www.reddit.com/r/thedivision/comments/cvb46p/a_possible_new_bug_released_in_the_latest_patch/

be fixed finally?

I'll double check, I think it is in TU6. Thanks for sending it over again.

gX-kiD

especially when they can feel lackluster even if we try.

Sorry but how exactly are you "trying"? While your player base was eroding you guys just went on summer vacation for 6 weeks, then canceled the first SotG after the vacation was supposed to be over, and now you're not even sticking to the roadmap of announcments you've laid out yourself.

If that's your definition of trying, please stop.

"Do, or do not. There is no try"

Only Siths deal in absolutes. We try and we'll continue to try. I understand it's frustrating at times but we will do better.

Again, the return was cancelled to me being out sick. If I had a choice in it I wouldn't have been lying in my bed trying to stop the room from spinning but it's not always a possibility even with meds.

And we're working on a live game which means sometimes things shift around. It makes working on the communication more challenging and sometimes we just make mistakes. Doesn't mean we don't get frustrated by that or just brush it off.

mastergaming234

Thanks for responding Chris because I do want continue this discussion with you. So what your telling is content wise for episode 2 cant be communicated because not ready? But you guys have been hyping it up going on 2 weeks now. Do you guys really need to have a developer in the room for them to repeat the same information that been posted on the subreddit and the official forum. 5 hours is stretching it, only way it would take that long if you guys keep repeating information that is already know which you guys currently do with the current run time of stog. People just want to know the content that you guys have been hyping up all the way up until now. No one expecting you guys to drop information of when survival or underground is coming to division 2 they want to know what coming in episode 2. Which then you guys get everyone expectations up only for it followed with disappointment. I am sorry I just don't see the challenges you guys are facing, indie studios smaller then you do not have this much trouble with communication. If the developers are causing this much confusion then do not have on STOG anymore plain and simple. Just have them email the information a week prior not the week of STOG.Really how many teams do you guys need to announce (example)the 3 missions are coming in the next update? Looking at the bigger picture itshows that you guys are really disorganized and instead of taking a minute to gather yourselves you keep unnecessary pressing foward thinking no one will noticed. To be honest it feels like none of this was planned out and you guys are making this up as you go.

indie studios smaller then you do not have this much trouble with communication

I think this perfectly sums up the situation and what causes frustration. We are not an indie studio so our communication goes through way more internal channels. That also means we sometimes are less flexible than we want to be and it can show.

Really how many teams do you guys need to announce (example)the 3 missions are coming in the next update?

Without presenting the details, more than you think. We have to make sure everybody who's going to use this information agrees on when it's used. We have to make sure we present the content in the best possible way and also consider it to be localized. It's not as simple as me going to the guy who developed (this is extremely simplified, please don't believe one guy makes a mission) the mission and ask him if it's ok to show it on State of the Game.

It boils down to us not delivering content (as in the show, not game stuff) on State of the Game as often...

mastergaming234

Just make STOG longer. I dont see the issue with that isn't that you guys job to communicate with the community? Just label it as special STOG where talk about everything coming in title update 6, content, balances, and patches. Then you can have normal state of the games to go into more detail about certain topic of the patch.You guys can come up with excuses quickly of why you cant do something but never come up with the actual answer. Make me wonder do you guys see how bad the situation your game is in right now when it comes to player wise? Borderlands just drop and has content coming out next month, destiny is fin to drop shadow keep next month as well. Time to stop with all the secrets and living in a fantasy world where division fun for the whole entire family.

We're splitting up the content and started with the gameplay updates as these were ready to be communicated on and were also something many agents in the community have asked about. Just making it a 5 hour State of the Game doesn't solve all challenges in announcing a new update. In an ideal scenario everybody gets every piece of content they are looking for whenever they are looking for it.

It's not something we can deliver every time (maybe never?) and if our current communication is frustrating for some players we apologize. Again, we work with several teams and announcing any new content is a larger challenge than it might look like from the outside. That doesn't help with the frustration but I do want to mention it.

iPeluche

Thanks for answer. Really appreciate it.

I can totally accept and i agree with the fact that an entire and large update needs to be presented, tested and discussed. And i'm, somehow i'm disappointed at the moment, excited to look for more and have Episode 2 between my hands.

But, please, keep in mind that i'm (and i'm probably not the only one) worried about the future of The Division 2 and we need some news about what we can expect in the coming month. Not only about Episode 2 and Episode 3 but some small news with what we can expect in Year 2 will be appreciate as 2020 will certainly be a great year in Video Game industry.

Appreciate the feedback. We'll talk to the teams here and look what we can do better in the future.

BDrizz307

Cool Cool

:)