Update 2.5 - Official Discussion Thread

JavierGaroz · May 2017

Warlord said:
@Teeceezy Take this for what’s it worth from one IT guy (app developer, manager) to another and I admit that with some reluctance after the embarrassment that was the 2.5 upgrade. I fully understand what you guys are going through; push out the shiny new toys (upgrades) as quickly as possible (reduce investment costs) to drive more revenue and anything else (fixing bugs, cleaning up cumbersome logic, etc.) is a very low priority as they don’t add revenue. All businesses suffer from this to one extent or another. However, now that you are (or soon to be) a publicly traded company, your investors will not be happy if you lose a lot of your active players every time you roll out poor updates.

Issues:
1) Stop tweaking stuff!!! If you set a value wrong, live with it. Let me introduce you to a programming concept called the IF THEN ELSE statement. IF player _level >= 59, use new revised logic/value ELSE use old screwed up logic/value. Issues are eventually weeded out with no one the wiser.
2) “Nerfing” is a sign of poor planning, poor design and poor testing along with bruised egos. Invest a little more time in this and realize there are smarter people than you that play this game and we won’t play it exactly like you want it played.
3) Effective communication: answering questions about the problems during the 2.5 update was communicating with us, which is good but it is NOT effective. Having your users wade through 20 odd pages of forum material to try to understand what was going on was disrespectful. I doubt you made NG management do the same. An announcement should have been posted within the first 30 minutes with a general description of the issue and updated periodically with a list of issues and each issue's status. If you weren’t doing the same internally for management, you guys have problems. There should also be a "Known Issue" thread listing every single one that affects game play. Be open and honest with your customers.
4) Not sure why game companies don’t include details for updates. If your change specs are like your update postings, no wonder there are so many problems. There is absolutely NO VALID reason you can’t put more detail in the update notes. You guys treat the updates of your game like a list of salaries or nuclear launch codes when it becomes common knowledge after its pushed.
5) Your devs have some serious testing and source control issues. It has been posted in this thread that we should expect bugs with updates. Unless it is for specific hardware (all iPhone 6s for example), that is completely WRONG! There is NO excuse for "unintended" changes or "work in progress values" being included in the production release. 20+ years of app development and I have NEVER had either of these issues. We are all human and make mistakes, but "unintended" changes and using "work in progress values" are controllable through standardized practices, oversight, and professionalism. Testing in production is not a valid testing strategy for apps such as this game. Regression testing and testing to break should be standard test methods in addition to unit testing.

There is a ton of potential for this game and, based on these forums, a highly passionate user base. Don't abuse it and work with us.

My two cents on some changes I would like to see:
1) Fix the carryover damage with Freeman and eliminate this logic for partial green bars: Damage done = (Freeman Green Bar Remaining Health – 1). A Daryl with 2339 damage doing 483 on a crit because the Freeman Bruiser had only 484 left on the green bar!?! Same Daryl doing 79 on a body shot after doing 2174 and 2400 the first two attacks?
2) Now that you have watered down heroes by making 20 of them, make all token drops in challenge event only hero tokens.
3) Ability to level up weapons. I will NEVER buy a weapon package because of this and I am sure I am not the only one thinking this.
4) Add “IF player_level = current_max_level AND player_supplies = current_max_supplies THEN” add items for sale in trade shop for cans.
5) Add “IF player_level = current_max_level AND player_supplies = current_max_supplies THEN” convert supply crates to xp crates for end of mission rewards.
6) Get rid of the 250 TG penalty for 50 packs of tokens. It should be 3750 if 8 cost 600.
7) Each day of the week should have a different category of weapons/armor for sale for TG and cans. Mon – Assault, Tuesday – Scout, Wednesday – Warrior, etc. Sunday could be random.
8) Now with 20 heroes (and who knows if that is the end), consider changing the process from individual hero tokens to hero class tokens like we have for survivors.
9) Logic needs fixed where Freeman should always attack the closest walker/survivor. Tired of seeing Freeman in the middle of walker packs run out of them and attack a survivor. Freeman should always attack the closest enemy, period.
10) Ability to shut off “cover” logic during a move. There are times when I want to move to a location but I can’t because the cover logic takes over. This applies to ranged survivors when trying to keep enemies at a distance.
11) Fix move logic where when a survivor is moving east to west from point A to point B, the movement path immediately dips down towards walkers to the south and alongside the line of walkers until point B is reached instead of the LOGICAL path of keeping a one movement space between the survivor and the walkers until reaching point B
12) Add a new dimension to maps by being able to climb up on half height items. Would be equivalent of moving 3 spaces and walkers would be unable to damage you.
13) Walker pit max walker level = training grounds level + 3.
14) Add spike, goo, and explosive walkers to walker pit.
15) Get rid of 1 and 2 star equipment drops. Worthless and you take an XP penalty compared to XP crates.
16) Open up completed chapters
17) Now that the war has started on TWD, consider having real time fights between guilds. Due to some guilds being global, set it to 5 to 10 participants and each person would get one of their survivors. Open this up for that period in between challenges and allow guilds to have multiple fights per day.
18) Eliminate the "cutesy" graphic stuff like survivors walking through camp and animated chests opening. Just eats processing power and every time stuff like that is added, players with older devices suffer. Especially when one considers this type of "background stuff" is normally tuned out after seeing it the first couple of times.
19) Go through and revamp the code with everything you guys have learned to eliminate all of the little nagging bugs that we may have not noticed and allow you guys to enhance the game faster in the future. That is probably wishful thinking for it to happen but considering the number of updates we've had since the beginning, its probably sorely needed.
20) Damage/health indicator for survivors.
Edit 21) For tents, outpost, and farm plot: holds max = production * 9. Get rid of the fixed value that you have to adjust manually and let it progress automatically as production increases.
Edit 22) Token crate rewards: Hero tokens in crate = Round(current challenge level * (((Random number from 1 to 100)/100) + .8)). So, you would get anywhere from .8 to 1.8 times the current challenge level you are on in hero tokens.
Edit 23) Fix maps such as the art not matching up with what we can see/shoot or not see/shoot. Unless you are three feet tall, cars shouldn't block line of sight. Walk out into a parking lot if you don't believe me.
Edit 24) Instead of only using current characters from TWD for heroes, why not some of the ones from the past? I would like Shane and Meryl more than Eugene or Gabriel. The Governor would be great too. If you do though, go back to #8 above.

All these things should be in the next update!!!

GreyDixon · May 2017

Here's an idea to improve the weekly challenges. Set a min level to play in the challenge. Say maybe players under lvl 10 can't compete in the challenges yet. This would give those lower levels incentive to upgrade and join the challenges, and wouldn't be terribly unfair since it only takes a few weeks of serious play to get to that level. Then, start everyone out at lvl 10 in the challenge regardless of their level after that. That would get rid of some of the low level grinding, while keeping it from screwing everyone like this new system is doing. The new system offers little incentive to upgrade. Working twice as hard to get the same number of stars as you got at the lower level?? Bad move imo.