Horatio

The ability to have your difficulty slider affect your Task Forces and Strike Forces has been temporarily disabled. This was done to prevent people from running through a TF/SF with the difficulty set at -1 level in order to more easily get the “Master Of...” Badge. We know that many of you enjoy the challenge of running the higher-end TFs/SFs at increased levels of difficulty and we are looking at solutions that will allow you to do that once again. .

We apologize for the inconvenience.

--Horatio

Thank you for the posts in the topic. We appreciate all of the comments. It’s really not our intentions to try to slip changes past the players; we want to be as up front and transparent with you all as we can. We want to make sure that every change appears in the patch notes so you know what’s going on with the game.

Occasionally, we slip up, and that’s what happened with the Hess Task Force. As Positron has mentioned in the past, we are generally working an issue or two ahead of the current issue. This means we maintain multiple code and data branches, to make sure that stuff from the future issues doesn’t creep into the current issue (though that has happened from time to time.) Due to changes in our internal processes (to make this kind of error less likely in the future) a number of incomplete changes slipped through. Since this was not intentional they were pushed to live with no notice (and no testing). In short, we screwed up. For that, I apologize. We’re sweeping through the old data to make sure there isn’t anything else that fell between those same cracks. If there is, we’ll fix it and put it in the patch notes.

We also have a lot of processes in place to test what we’re doing before it gets out to PTS and to the live server. We want to make sure that what we’re giving you works, and our QA departments do their best to catch bugs before they become a problem on live. However, an MMORPG is a complex game, with lots of moving parts. We do not have the ability to test everything every issue. If we aren’t making changes to something, we have to assume it still functions. We do perform regression testing, but, as I said, we just can’t do regression on every item in the game. Not if we want to actually ship an issue. The bug to Katie’s ability to follow the heroes came about because of change to something else in the game. We didn’t run into any other problems with escort missions breaking and we didn’t come across the problem with Katie and the witches until you guys found it. We’re sorry it affected your game play and we’re working to find and fix the problem as quickly as possible. We’re adding the problem with the Katie TF to the known issues list and we’ll let you know – via the patch notes – when it is fixed.

Again, I’m really sorry this happened. It is really important to us that our patch notes are complete and describe all of the changes and fixes that are in the patch. We will do our best to make certain that this type of thing doesn’t happen again.

--Horatio

[ QUOTE ]
Just one little additional comment because I've said plenty about canon and the TF already: the original Axis America troops looked like this and they aren't in the game any more. The unlockable Axis America critters in the Mission Architect are wrong. They're just the Council Empire models, with human faces instead of Fifth Column masks.

Please bring back Original Flavour Axis America.

[/ QUOTE ]

The original Axis America mobs don’t have a lot of variety to them – there’s basically four minions (the rifle, rocket, grenade, and flamethrower), one lieutenant, and one boss in the group. That’s not enough variety to provide interesting encounters for an entire story arc. While it would have been very cool to use them, we didn’t have the resources available to expand the group in a way that would let us use them for the missions.

I’d like to see the original Axis America troops available in Mission Architect, and I’ll look into that. No promises, but if we can make it happen, I’ll try to see that it does.

--Horatio

Hi, I’m Bruce Harlick, aka Horatio, the guy who was in charge of the Reichsman Task Force and Strike Force. Thank you for the comments and feedback on the TF & SF. I’d like to take the opportunity to respond to some of them and let you know our some of our intended responses.

To start, there is a difference in the challenge of the final fight in the SF and TF. The TF fight is much trickier and takes longer. We didn’t address that when assigning the initial merit values for the SF. We will be increasing the merit award for the Strike Force to 30 merits later this week. As time goes by and we collect more data on how long it takes groups to complete these arcs, we’ll likely be adjusting the merit rewards further.

There seems to be some confusion as to the use of the dimensional ground ray in the final fight of the Task Force. Before Reichsman’s hit by the ray, he is in a phased state and is running a rather nasty debuffing aura. When he is hit by the ray, it “grounds out” some of his power and he returns to a normal state and his aura is shut down. This will persist for the duration of the fight. The dimensional grounding ray isn’t intended to be used at specific points in the fight; it should be used early on, and one hit will do.

On the villain side of things, our intent was to try to do something a bit different for the end fight. As has been previously stated, we wanted to do a “gadget” fight; something that was more than just hit the bad guy until he fell over. And we wanted to encourage teams to include different ATs, to help shake up some standard team compositions. Certainly, the end fight is more difficult without having each of the appropriate ATs on the team, but it is still doable. Each of the temp powers is intended to make stages of the fight easier. There is no one “golden solution” to solving the fight; by including some or all of the ATs that can take advantage of the various temp powers, you can approach this battle using different tactics.

The Mastermind temp power is not working at this time; Castle has fixed that, but his fix did not go out with the release due to some build issues. This power should be working in a patch this week.

Switching voices, I am aware of the canon issues with the story. The problems are purely my fault; when I came up with the original flow for the story I was under some mistaken impressions on some events in the game’s history. While I did make some adjustments to the story due to the feedback from the training room, I didn’t get all the details nailed down as best I could. Due to a tight translation deadline, I was unable to get final text passes into the build that was going to the Live servers, but rest assured I’ll be doing my best to address them over the next week or so to bring the story of Reichsman’s return in line with the existing history of the 5th Column.

I’ll certainly be reading this (and the other) threads for any other comments you have on the issue. Please feel free to PM me with your comments and concerns if you’d like. I’ll do my best to respond to them in a timely fashion.

-------
-Horatio