Announcement: Memorial Day Holiday

A quick note from the Customer Service Team: Over-the-phone Technical Support for the United States will not be available next Monday, May 30, as they will be off for the Memorial Day holiday. U.S. Billing Support and all European phone support services will be available as normal that day, however.

Last Week's Question

Thanks to everyone who took time to respond to last week's question about the QA Test server. It seems a majority of you are thinking along the same lines the team is: separate installations and beginning at level one are both major hindrances to playing on QA Test.

While the character tools many of you mentioned would certainly assist in testing the game, I'm not sure that we'd ever be able to implement them on an external basis. However, I appreciate all the feedback on tools and incentives and will be looking into how we might be able to use your suggestions.

This Week's Question

This week, I'd like to focus on a touchy subject: bugs. We all know there are some annoying and, in some cases, long-standing bugs in the game right now. I want to hear about the most annoying ones you've encountered.

I'm not necessarily asking for the nastiest bugs, although they often take the top spot when it comes to items that get fixed. What I'd really like to know about are the bugs that you run into the most often or that just get on your nerves every time you come across them.

You can find this week's focus question here.

Stability Issues

This Sunday's patch caused several issues, the worst of which was a rash of stability problems. We've fixed some of the problems, but additional ones have cropped up in the meantime. Stability is our top concern and the team is working to resolve the additional issues as quickly as possible.

While this patch was tested for some time, somehow these errors made it into the live game. We can't be sure how they slipped by, but we are reviewing our current testing procedures. Hopefully we can find where the process failed in this case so we don't run into the same problem in the future. Bad patches happen--we can only work to minimize their occurrence and impact.

What is "Balance"?

Many of you asked for an answer from the team about what we consider "balanced" to mean. I posed that question to the designers and here's what they say:

There are a plethora of considerations we take into account when working on Discipline balance. There are hundreds of Abilities, which can be arranged in hundreds of configurations. Thus, we approach balance between the Disciplines in a subjective manner.

Mostly, we want avoid clear rock-paper-scissor comparisons. While there are certainly situations where one player will be dominant versus another player, one-sided fights mean 50% of the players aren't having fun. We'd rather see certain Disciplines having definite advantages over others, but not an automatic win of one over another. Advantages should not be overwhelming-ideally, power gaps should be small (like 60/40).

Our most recent changes have been focused on closing exploits and we obviously have more work to do in the overall balance of the Discipline trees. You probably won't believe it, but we hate it as much as you do when balancing requires significant impact on some loadouts. As unfortunate as these changes may be, they are necessary groundwork for improving overall gameplay-and we're already working on some important combat and ability improvements which should improve the game for all players.

New Patch Available on QA Test

The next large patch has been propped to QA Test world. This patch contains over 1,000 line-items worth of changes.

(Note: There was a version issue with the patch 7.4014 that required QA Test to be taken offline. The team was working on getting a new version up as I was writing this article Tuesday afternoon.)

What that means to you is that there have been a significant number of fixes and tweaks to the game, along with some new features. I'm still parsing through the list to figure out what is going to make a visible change to all of you, but one item (or rather several items about the same thing) stands out from the rest of the list.

New Discipline on QA Test

The first new Discipline of the game is available on the QA Test server right now. "Zen Master" branches from the Martial-Arts Initiate tree and combines Aikido with self-healing abilities. The Zen Master Discipline is currently made up of the following Abilities:

Technique: Provides a damage bonus when using Aikido and gives a bonus to Viral Deflection.
Balance: Provides a chance to self-heal while activated.
Purity: Provides a chance to remove negative states while activated.
Sweep the Floor: A damaging special attack with a chance to Disarm the target.
Spinning Flower: A damaging special attack with a chance to temporarily lower the target's Combat Tactics.
Zen Master: Provides a chance to regain IS when damaged while activated.

There's still a lot of balancing to do, but this is how the Zen Master stands in design right now.

Zen Master is only the first of three Disciplines being worked on by the designers right now. The other ones are Citadel Coder and Trojan Horse for the Coder and Hacker trees, respectively. The Citadel Coder is a master of creating immobile simulacra that dish out tons of damage during their short lifespans. The Trojan Horse trades her ability to launch damaging viruses for the ability to turn hostile code against her enemies.

As mentioned above, we're still working on evening out the balance of the current trees so these three new Disciplines may take quite a while to progress to the live game. Once we've taken care of problems current loadouts have, then we'll be ready to introduce these new Disciplines to the mix.

More About QA Test

I know many of you wanted more communication about what needs testing on the QA Test server, so I'll be getting some notes together on what else is new. I'm working with the team to improve our updating process for the QA Test world and will post an announcement to the QA Test World forums when I have something for you.

The past week has seen the whole spectrum of good and bad issues. With additional attention to the QA Test world, maybe we can come closer to the community's favorite buzzword: balance.

See you on the Other Side of the Looking Glass.

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Posted by The Matrix Online Team