Hey everyone, sorry for the lack of replies in here recently - this update was pretty huge and even after the release it's been pretty busy at HVS. I'll try to be more active responding to folks across the forum now.
Firstly: we're aware many players are having issues with the game locking up on the end of fights. We're working on a solution to this and will hopefully have a 4.3.2 update ready to release soon that will fix it. Thanks for your patience while we work on this. This update will include fixes to some other known 4.3 bugs too, but I'll go into more detail on that closer to when it's getting primed for release.
Now to dive back into some replies!
I haven't answered every question because some were duplicates, or some were probably obvious once the update actually released and y'all had some time with the new modes. If you still want something answered, ping me and I'll try to get to it!
Prize Fight Character Restrictions:
This is upsetting.
The only way I could keep having fun in this game was by doing my own thing and only using cat-related fighters.
Now this update is telling me I can't do that anymore. It's just too restrictive, and forces players to play a certain way. RIP everyone who uses a character- or elemental-themed account.
I'm okay with deployments requesting certain characters and elements for bonus rewards, but something as elementary as gold prize fights now requiring a certain character is giving me the choice to either give up my gimmick or stop doing prize fights altogether.
Making Character requirments such an elementary feature of the game was actually one of the most important goals of this addition.
A long term goal for the game is that players will need a wide variety of Characters and Fighters to complete certain modes. Master Story in particular has very specific Character requirments to test your skill as a player with a wide variety of Characters, many of which are outside of players comfort zones. However, up until Master Difficulty, it's possible to just focus on a handful of Fighters and nothing else. Then players hit a brick wall when more specific requirements pop up.
Giving players a
very strong incentive to collect and work on at least one Fighter from every Character type is designed as a foundational piece to allow players a smoother experience later on where their collections will be more evened out and they'll hae experience with more Characters and Fighters.
An unfortunate side effect of this is that it affects players that restrict their collections like your Cat Only teams, however, for the general health of the game this was an important design change. (and remember, my triple Oh Mai team was one of the first Themed Teams, so this directly affects me - and I was one of the biggest supporters of the change when it was proposed!)
Prize Fight 10% Cutoffs
I like the change. It gets tiresome to see the same defense trio in every prize fight.
(a bigger problem for newbies is the ridiculous height 10% has skyrocketed to as people sharpen their collections. Good luck clearing 25 million every PF! A diamond PF is needed...)
The rising tide of Prize Fight score thresholds is definitely on our radar. No specifics yet, but it is something we are definitely working on a solution to address.
Fukua Relic Prices
Please tell me I didn't actually read that Fukua's relics are an extra 100 theonite.
Please tell me this is a joke.
You have already made the limited relics from which we can receive Fukua more expensive.
And now that her actual character relics are going to finally be introduced, you're going to increase the price on those, too?
Really disappointing, guys.
Serious buisness face time:
One of the most requested features (if not THE most requested feature) is producing new Characters for Skullgirls Mobile. We're finally going ahead with that later this year when we will release our first Brand New Character! However, it costs
hundreds of thousands of dollars to produce even one Character. To justify the
huge costs involved, we have to make sure any new Character added is financially successful, which means systems like this where new Characters release at a slightly higher price point. Eventually the Theonite costs of Doppelgänger Relics will even out to regular prices, but to start out with we have to make sure they're a little more exclusive and rare.
I know it sucks to talk about revenue and finances, but it's an unfortunate reality of producing the high quality animated content Skullgirls is famous for.
You can read a little more about this in an older post we released when Robo-Fortune was released:
https://forum.skullgirlsmobile.com/...une-release-and-possible-new-characters.5460/
Rift Base Specifics
How do new rifts decide how to present your defense?
Scenario 1: my base is presented to someone who is taking the week off on Monday. Is my base available to be attacked by other players?
scenario 2: someone enters a battle against my base and decides not to finish for the rest of the week. Is my base available to be attacked by other players?
when does your defense update? Is it set from Monday or can we change it any time? In other words, if I wanted to, could I submit a very weak base on Monday to tank my rift rating, save the tickets, then update my base later in the week and run a big winstreak to farm coins?
Some of this you've probably figured out from playing by now, but your base is always available for other players to fight, just like in Prize Fights. Multiple players can be paired up against it. Your Base can't be 'locked' by having abother player sit on it.
Even if you take a week off, your Base can still be attacked. However, it doesn't matter, because your Rift Rating will be reset to 1000 every week anyway!
You can change your Defense setup at any time. When an opponent is given your Base as one of their choices, that's when your Rift Base is locked for that player.
Gift Adjustments
And what will be in the gifts moving forward? It would be nice to have a list somewhere.
Fukua is available in all standard Relics, yep.
We haven't made a full list of Gift Contents yet because we already did that once, then we altered the contents in a previous update, and then we altered the contents
again in 4.3. Giving out too much information like that when it may be changed in a future update causes more problems than it solves. Once Gifts have stabilized we may publish a more exact list of their contents. I promise we're not trying to obfuscate the contents for nefarious reasons.
Why did we reduce the contents of Gifts anyway? Gifts add a HUGE amount of resources into the game economy and we have to monitor them carefully or they can cause wide rippling problems for the game. It may only seem like it's a small amount of free resources, but as a quick example, Rift Coins are supposed to be mainly accessible only through Rift Battles. When we first released Gifts, some players reported they completely quit playing Rift anymore because Gifts gave such a steady supply. That's obviously not healthy or desired, and had to be adjusted.
(That is a
very simplified example of a very large and complicated balancing act when it comes to in-game economy)
Rift Ranks
I share your concern because I was also only playing the minimum 5 up til end of rift 1.0. Wasn't one of the motivations for the rift rework to make it less of a stressful experience? Yes, by taking away the realtime head-to-head nature and the 2hr limit the per-battle experience is a littler easier, but on a weekly basis I don't see much hope of us keeping rank if we only play the minimum threshold (that is, unless you're an elite player or have extremely good luck with defense-building or matchmaking). IMO this puts the stress right back into the system for non-elite players.
Would it be possible to add a feature whereby we could see our realtime ranking in rift, e.g. if we're ranked 127 and there're 4000 rifters we'll see 127/4000) ? If we know where we currently sit we'll be able to better plan how much more effort to commit for the rest of the week. Obviously this is another stressor and may inflate the rank cutoff scores, so not sure it it's a good idea.
Making it so players can't just sit on their ranks for months on end by doing the bare minimum of fights was actually one of the core decisions about this mode. Using those low/mid players as an example, it was literally impossible for them to ever really rank up because all of the upper ranks were filled with players who can very easily maintain their positions.
Now if you want to win big rewards, you have to actually engage with the mode - a big difference though is that now a Rift takes only 10 or 15 minutes to play. Before it could take over an hour of uninterrupted play just to clear a map. If you can't or choose not to enter Rift Battle on a given week your rank will not be affected, because everyone is back to 1000.
As for showing your current positioning on the Ranks, I don't think we have plans for anything like that. As you say it would cause massive inflation to the score cutoffs as players would have more info about them. It would also be grossly unreliable. Ecample: if you check it 10 minutes before the end of a Season and see you're in a safe place for Diamond Rank, then 20,000 players all finish Rifts in those 10 minutes you could end up in a much lower rank than you'd expected. Without making an extremely complicated set of restrictions and unintuitive locking mechanisms, displaying live-updated Ranks generally just make things
more confusing in the long term.
Not impossible, but not currently planned.
Catalog Bugs
Another question concerning the catalog. It only shows the fighters I have, not the cumulative fighters I have ever had. Also, if I evolved a fighter it does not consider it to be in my collection. Are these intentional?
There is a known issue with the Catalog that it is only showing Fighters players have collected since 4.3. We're working on a solution so that it will correctly show your entire collection.
Deployment Bonus Chance
I've been experimenting with the bonus threshold on deployments, and it seems even high percentages are still chancy. At least the XP is guaranteed!
Sorry, this is my bad on a poor word choice. What I meant was that the Tier 3 Deployment Bonus Reward Chance is always guaranteed to be a Character Relic. Tier 1 and Tier 2 Deployments have a variety of different Bonus Chance Rewards, but Tier 3s are
always a Character Relic.
