Developer Q&A VI

This is the sixth Developer Questions and Answers Threads taken from the Official Playdom Forums.

Note: please  do not  ask your question intended for the Developer Q&A at the comments below. Marvel: Avengers Alliance Wikia is not owned by Playdom. Please leave your questions at the Developer Q&A Forums.

Dev Q&A VI - April 2014
Hey everyone,

Been a while since we've done this due to our presence on Twitter and the live Q&A's we've done. However, we still want to periodically do these because they're a lot of fun for both the devs and the fans. Let's dive right in.

Will Synthetic Cube be re-released?
Re-releasing weapons this powerful is something we have commonly done. While we don’t have anything to announce right now, it’s very possible we may consider re-releasing the Cube some day. Having said that, this item was released relatively recently, so we couldn’t say when that might be.

There are heroes and villains from different countries; do you plan to add more from other locations?
Our current roster of heroes is 87 as of this writing. They represent a wide variety of countries including the United States, Japan, the United Kingdom, Canada, Greece, Africa, future timelines, other planets, alternate dimensions, and more. We will continue to offer up an incredibly diverse roster of heroes and villains in MAA and we have plans to represent other locations in the future.

You created some game-only content (Circle of Eight, P5 Phoenix, Horsemen alts). Do you have plans for a game-only hero?
While we would love to do a game-specific hero in conjunction with Marvel, there are no plans for this as of now. However, more content such as the items you pointed out is on the way.

Will expired lockbox heroes be re-released?
Lockboxes may be made available again, but we do not currently have plans to sell the heroes themselves for straight CP or gold. Our system wasn’t designed to support this.

Will Scarlet Witch get a good re-vamp with her costume release?
Our feeling is that Scarlet Witch is a pretty great character as she is, so she is not likely to get any major changes.

Are there any plans to re-release expired Spec Ops?
No, but we will continue to make the heroes from past spec ops available after some time has passed.

Are there any plans to increase the silver gain?
There is a new feature launching soon called The Simulator which will give silver out as one of the rewards, but it will not be grindable. Flight Deck remote operations and Group Bosses (when available) are meant to be the major grindable sources of silver. We do not have a plan to change this right now.

Any plans for new levels for jets and the option to change their looks?
Unfortunately not right now as we are focusing on other areas of need such as PVP.

Can we have the ability to have a friendly battle with our own allies and ourselves (counting as a practice battle) to test our defensive setup?
It is something we have considered but we do not have anything like this in development currently.

Do you have any plans for a second or third agent? (similar to having alts in MMOs)
We strongly believe that this would reduce the importance of superheroes, which the Marvel Universe is focused and based on. We do not plan to ever implement a feature like this.

When will Wasp have an alternate costume?
We would like to point out that we can not answer questions about release dates for content due to the variability of our schedule. This is true of the Dev Q&A section as well as our various twitter accounts.

Will Armless Tiger Man be a playable villain in-game given the promo involving him?
Many people have figured out why we chose the villains we did for that promo. Ask around and you’ll probably figure out the answer to this question.

Is Emma Frost going to remain the main “translator” for Black Bolt?
Theoretically any psychically-inclined hero could do this job.

Any plans to add a seventh character to represent the orange colored ISO?
You mean Planet Eater class? In all seriousness, we have no plans to add additional classes. The current rock-paper-scissors system is pretty tight as it is, and there is no room for an additional variable in this equation.

Mechanics
===With Hogun and Fandral the two-class heroes came into the game. Is this a characteristics only for the Warrior’s Three or will more follow? How will they react to Rogue’s Absorb or Mockingbird’s Mock?=== We currently have no plans for additional dual-class heroes, but it is now a feature we have available for future characters that would work well with the system. Because we just released 3 heroes with this feature, we will probably give it some time for it to become fresh again. As for Rogue’s Absorb and Mockingbird’s Mock Combat (as well as Taskmaster’s Photographic Reflexes), these each will only trigger one of the two classes.

Why can’t the Warriors Three access both their class E-Iso?
The Warriors Three do not really have 2 classes. They have a true class and the benefits of a second class, but are not actually considered to be both of those classes. This was done on purpose to help balance things such as the PVP bonus given.

Why doesn’t Wasp get the “Flirt” team-up bonus? It’s so much more a part of her character than other heroes it is applied to.
There are so many team-ups that could be applied to so many more characters than they currently are. We generally start with all the ones that come to mind then brainstorm them with the rest of the team. The result is the list in the game now, even if its missing a few of your favorite members. We could literally have somebody trying to perfect the team-ups for the game and they would never be done!

How does Accuracy and Evasion figure into hit and crit? (How do these stats work?)
Put simply, the more accuracy a player has, the higher their chance to hit and crit. Similarly, the more Evasion a character has, the less chance they have to be hit or crit.

As you can see, when the attacker’s accuracy grows to double the defender’s evasion, the miss chance falls to effectively 0, while the crit chance grows to around 50%. If the defender’s evasion were twice the attacker’s accuracy, the dodge chance would be around 50%, and the crit chance basically 0.

Some moves have a modifier that increases or decreases the hit (miss) and crit chance independently. This works by modifying the attacker’s accuracy for the purposes of this check. An attack must still hit in order for it to crit, so a move with 100% crit chance can still miss.

How is damage from dots (and static charge) calculated in PvP?
Most damage over time effects use an “average” health percentage for calculation. This creates a single benchmark for all heroes. That way a character with more health doesn’t take more damage from DOTs. This also helps DOTs do consistent damage against bosses and group bosses.

In PVP, the amount of health gained or lost is adjusted based on PVP bonuses so that damage from statuses scales accordingly. If statuses did the same damage regardless of PVP bonuses, they would barely do any damage in end tier PVP where characters have several times more health than in PVE.

Some heals and specific damage statuses use a character’s current HP or max HP in order to do this calculation instead. In these cases it works independent of any PVP bonuses and simply looks at the current character’s actual health values.

Will Mental Anguish work properly when an enemy attacks on of their teammates? Currently, if an enemy has disoriented and Mental Anguish and they attack their teammate, Mental Anguish goes away.
We’ll look at fixing that bug in an upcoming patch. Thank you.

Vision’s third ability removes him from Phased, is there a plan to fix this?
We’ll look at fixing that bug in an upcoming patch. Thank you.

How do you evaluate whether an update has gone well or badly? Do you look at the forums, support tickets, or elsewhere?
We actually spend a lot of time listening to the community via the forums and @MAAInsiders on twitter.

Have you stopped releasing new content on Friday evenings?
I’m pretty sure we did just the other week.

How much time do you spend QA testing new features/heroes?
It really depends on the feature and hero. Some are less complicated and work the way they say on the design specifications near the beginning. Others are very complicated or large and take a lot of time to get through. These take a lot more time in test and we give them more time than a single hero release because of this.

How far ahead do you plan SOs (concept, reward heroes, weapon sets, etc)?
On @MAAInsiders the other day, Producer Justin Woods revealed he had recently submitted concepts to Marvel for Spec Ops all the way through Spec Op 28. No reason he stopped at 28 other than being at the office really late that night. He’ll get to concepting for Spec Op 29 soon, but for now we think he’s bought himself a break from Spec Op concepts so he can do other things.

Do patch notes contain ALL changes/fixes? There are many undocumented changes to the game so is there a reason not all updates are made public?
We never omit things from the patch notes on purpose. Many times we lose track of a change because it’s discussed in-person between the designers/programmers and our QA staff and it doesn’t get written into the patch notes. This isn’t intentional and we apologize for any fixes that seem “stealth” in nature.

===The passive for Classic Storm alt is translated as “Wind Shear” (the same as her new E-Iso) in other languages. Was this a translation error or was it planned to be released in her alt and then it changed?=== Many times translations can be very similar when the words in English have a very similar meaning. This is likely one of those cases.