DDA downgrade for switch?

So how is this not a prevalent topic on the forum?  I assume the mods are all in full force deleting these topics.  But it seems they will destroy this game to make sure it can run on the switch for that sweet sweet eshop $$$.

Below is CG PTR statement June 17 2021 - form your own opinions.  

Before we get into everything else, we want to talk about Defense Rate changes. Through our development with the Switch, and throughout our certification process, our game was not able to perform with the speed at which towers were attacking, effectively making releasing on the Switch impossible (due to how towers calculate enemy positions, priorities, tons of AI tracking, VFX being played, damage calculations, etc.) because of how many resources they took to make those processes work. As a result, we’ve provided a cap for Defense Rate that caps most towers at 0.50 shots a second.

This brings in Defense Rate overflow. Basically what this means is when you pump Defense Rate into a tower, that stat is rolled over into Defense Power instead. This means that while some towers will be attacking slower than before, they will be hitting harder to compensate for the Defense Rate cap (so the stat is not wasted). This includes any Defense Rate increase that you would get from boosting a tower using Overcharge or Speedy Gemstone for example.

We had to act pretty fast on this to ensure we can release it on Nintendo Switch. We discussed having two different versions (a Switch version with the lowered rates), but that just isn’t possible for us to maintain with a team of our size. Balancing it and making it fair would be impossible, and there might be metas where playing certain content on one platform may be easier than others, which is something we want to avoid entirely.
 

Do you have any evidence that posts have been deleted?  I've been here on and off since PTR and from my observations I'd say this forum just isn't very active.  Additionally, when the forum is active, the tone is most often critical.

I personally haven't noticed any difference in gameplay from the defense rate cap.  It doesn't bother me at all and I think it's just not noticeable.  It seems much more likely to me that the reason there is no hot debate about defense rate is that not a lot of people are coming to an already quiet forum, to complain about something which hasn't had much of an effect on them, which was announced two months ago.

The discord is a lot more active if you're looking for more people to discuss this with.

I second Loppol. 

They made a promise to a lot of fans for the release of DDA on Switch. If the only way they could make that happen was to cap the defense rate of towers, but then also accommodate us by allowing excess stat to flow into defense power. They're working the best of both worlds.

Do I miss playing around with max arcane missile turrets just to watch the giant blue wave, a little. But it's not like that build was viable anyway.

CG working hard to ensure all players can defend dungeons equally. No harm in that, so of course they want the sweet eshop money. They still have to pay their employees to stay in business to provide more content updates for all of us.

Sorry for the copy+paste of this response, but it covers a bunch of areas that we want to make sure the community is aware of related to the attack rate change decisions. (Full disclosure, this was the same response we used on Steam to respond to another Defender with similar concerns.)

 

We understand your thoughts on this change, but there's more to it than just making it work better on the Nintendo Switch. Here are some of the reasons the attack rate change was made:

• For high end PCs, players were able to get to roughly 0.2 second attack rates (it was partially based on limitations of the player's PC). For anyone with any sort of performance dips (the amount of AI and calculations going on are incredibly high) would actually negatively affect your damage per second, due to hiccups in the game processing what's going on at those speeds. With the 0.5 second caps (a 0.3 second nerf), and giving additional power for attack rate overflow, all players are able to play without running into performance (and therefore DPS) dips in their gameplay.
• To improve performance on low end PCs, medium end PCs, and Xbox, not just Switch.
  • As noted in the first point, this provides consistent experiences for everyone.
• It was impossible to balance any future content, as there was not a consistent attack rate cap for all players, meaning you stayed attacking at impossible and inconsistent to control speeds.
• There was no way to give players the ability to play active combat if they chose to do so, because towers would just be too powerful late game to justify it if your PC was good enough.
• Adjusted damage and balanced it to make players stronger than before (this isn't including new item effects), and beef up the new content.
• The amount of VFX made active combat and seeing what was going on in the game very difficult to see what was going on for a lot of players.
• Comparable games to ours are similar in rate, if not lowered, due to these specific issues, and 0.5 second is still pretty fast.

We're a small team, we don't have the luxury of a AAA team to throw dozens of programmers to find every optimization possible, though we do try our best to bring continued optimizations. This change made sense as our survey feedback showed that 90%+ of players were fine with the change in a gameplay sense, so we moved forward with it too make the game a better experience for all defenders and get the game to them as fast as well could.

We're sorry ultimately that you don't like this change, but we made sure to do what we could to retain player power (giving players more power as a result), appeal to the vast majority of our playerbase, and still provide the best experience we could for all players (while continuing to add free content and improved optimizations).

 

Here's my addition to this: We have not and will not delete forum posts that are critical of Dungeon Defenders: Awakened or CG. That's a super uncool thing to do and when our players are unhappy, we want to hear from them. Does it hurt to hear this criticism? Of course it does, but we only delete forum posts if they break specific guidelines, like using inappropriate language. Being critical of DDA or the  company are not part of those guidelines.

I legitimately cannot understand why 90%+ of people would respond positively to this change, other than a low participation in the PTR given the number of players still active in the game by the time it came out.

 

I really don't get it.  We have absolutely zero sense of progression now.  Now it's just stacking numbers to do bigger numbers.  No change to the gameplay, no actual mechanical changes to the towers.  Are people just addicted to the grind at this point?  Because I do not understand why this would be a positive change, to any degree.  I have nothing to work for now.  All of these new set bonuses are just "deal more damage" yet again.  Removing attack speed from DD2 was the exact moment I started losing interest in that game, and ultimately why I didn't stick with it.  How exactly is DDA unable to handle this load, yet its supposedly inferior DD1 is capable of handling it fine?  If you're going to take away something that's a beloved part of the game, something that I enjoyed getting to have, why has it not been replaced with something better?  Please, I'm being sincere here: what do I have to work towards now?  What value is there in doing bigger numbers?

 

I also find it difficult to understand why yet again this discussion of "active play" is being discussed again.  This is literally what you advertised Rifted mode as.  Is the problem that you made the gear far too valuable even for passive players?  I have....so many issues with this game now.  I don't even know if it's worth discussing at this point, because this seems to be the hill to die on.  I just can't understate how deflated this update has made me.  And I was absolutely ecstatic for it when the gear changes came up.  Here I was expecting something similar to all of the cool special effects DD2 gets with their gear and shards or whatever it uses now, but instead we just have "tower does more damage."  I think I'm done at this point.  And I hate saying this.  I bought this game for myself and four other friends, specifically because of what was being promised: this idea of DD1 done right.  A reimagining to what DD1 could have been, the potential we all saw in that game.  Now I can't help but feel like I wasted my money.

22 hours ago, Valthejean said:

Here I was expecting something similar to all of the cool special effects DD2 gets with their gear and shards or whatever it uses now, but instead we just have "tower does more damage." 

The idea is that they've laid the groundwork so future updates can add in cooler options.

22 hours ago, Valthejean said:

what do I have to work towards now?  What value is there in doing bigger numbers?

Personally, I tend to just work towards beating new content (i.e. the next map or a higher difficulty) and after that beating content with self-imposed restrictions.  Ultimately, tower defense games are puzzle games with multiple solutions, one of which is get big numbers and do much damage.  Instead of grinding to get that, it's more enjoyable for me to beat the game with only EV or see how well I could do with no walls.

I will miss the joy of getting the Magic Missile to shoot fast enough to become a beam, but DD1 still exists to go back and play.  Plus, the CDT even released the Redux update which adds tons of new content.

36 minutes ago, Batophobia said:

The idea is that they've laid the groundwork so future updates can add in cooler options.

Personally, I tend to just work towards beating new content (i.e. the next map or a higher difficulty) and after that beating content with self-imposed restrictions.  Ultimately, tower defense games are puzzle games with multiple solutions, one of which is get big numbers and do much damage.  Instead of grinding to get that, it's more enjoyable for me to beat the game with only EV or see how well I could do with no walls.

I will miss the joy of getting the Magic Missile to shoot fast enough to become a beam, but DD1 still exists to go back and play.  Plus, the CDT even released the Redux update which adds tons of new content.

I can respect that, the problem is that we've had something like a year of just laying groundwork with no real payoff.  There comes a time when they need to deliver on something.  It seems like every patch is just more and more reimagining without any particular direction, so we're always going back to square one. 

 

And it all bottles down to, essentially, the developers being very against the idea that this is a tower defense game.  They seem hellbent on "correcting" what they see as bad gameplay while diminishing the fun that existed in their current game.  First it was Sirens, but that didn't work so they went with rifted mode.  But that didn't work so now they're capping attack rate.  And now we have all of these unpleasant systems that don't mix well together and got nothing out of it.  We got a hero deck, great.  But then we got rifted mode which put us back to one tower per character.  We got these set bonuses, great.  Oh but rifted mode still exists so you still use fusion gear anyway.  The problem is that the game needs things to want to hunt for, things that change up the gameplay like the different powers in DD2 or pets that do unique things.  Pets became rather gutted this patch, there was already a very small selection of what pets were useful, but now it's even moreso.  The game is already immensely grindy, and grinding for grind's sake is a very long stick with no real carrot.

 

As far as DD1, it is true that it still exists, but I have my own issues with that.  The CDT wont be making anything that would address those issues for me.  I loved the game in its time, but it's not something I can enjoy the time investment for.  And that's what DDA is dangerously approaching.  It's a large time commitment with very little payoff.

 

Well I highly doubt that the cap on attack rate has anything to do with Sirens. They clearly explained why they had to cap it for it to work on the switch, and that they dont have the staff to maintain to strains of the game (ie one uncapped strand for pc, and 1 capped for the switch). 

 

I do feel they are a bit amateurish when it comes to the switch launch, but then again - they ARE newbies to the switch eco system. AFAIK this is the first title for the switch in their portfolio. 

As a customer, I am bummed. I purchased it, but it doesnt do me any good. Im not playing it until I get the patched version. 

On 8/9/2021 at 7:08 PM, [CG] Brittani said:

• For high end PCs, players were able to get to roughly 0.2 second attack rates (it was partially based on limitations of the player's PC). For anyone with any sort of performance dips (the amount of AI and calculations going on are incredibly high) would actually negatively affect your damage per second, due to hiccups in the game processing what's going on at those speeds. With the 0.5 second caps (a 0.3 second nerf), and giving additional power for attack rate overflow, all players are able to play without running into performance (and therefore DPS) dips in their gameplay.

I'm not bothered by DPS dips (if there were any). Having been with Trendy (now CG) for so long, I've been able to deduce that they're notoriously bad at math. It's highly unlikely there were any DPS dips going on. And I got the occasional performance dips (as I do with any game). 

On 8/9/2021 at 7:08 PM, [CG] Brittani said:

• To improve performance on low end PCs, medium end PCs, and Xbox, not just Switch.
  • As noted in the first point, this provides consistent experiences for everyone.

DD1 wasn't the most optimized game but everyone still played it. You could have the best graphics card and get single digits with certain builds on certain maps. You could also have a potato PC and still get low fps on the lowest settings. Regardless of the performance, you were likely to have a good time because the gameplay was good. Performance increases shouldn't come at the cost of gameplay. That's what buying better hardware is for and in this day and age, you can get a lot for your money with $50 - $200. Yeah, you're stuck with what you have on the Xbox One and Switch but both of these consoles are more powerful than their predecessors and DD1 ran just fine on the 360. Yes, it's on a new engine but with its increase in requirements should've also been more ways to optimize the game.

On 8/9/2021 at 7:08 PM, [CG] Brittani said:

• It was impossible to balance any future content, as there was not a consistent attack rate cap for all players, meaning you stayed attacking at impossible and inconsistent to control speeds.

Two words: diminishing returns. DD1 had it but you guys replaced it in favor of slower soft caps in this game. Then you got rid of the soft caps altogether and replaced them with slower hard caps. If you understood the concept of diminished returns, you wouldn't have any impossibilities. I absolutely wouldn't mind squeezing out an extra 0.02s of attack rate below .1s from 2000 additional stat points - that's what you call a controlled end-game. And inconsistency is one of the charms of the first game: that's something known as diversity. Making everyone and all defenses equal isn't fun; you're just turning it into a cookie-cutter experience.

Also, your reasoning is contradictory of your actions: you mention you want consistency, yet you nerfed Deadly Strike Towers to fire twice as slow as most towers fire now. Where's the consistency in that?

On 8/9/2021 at 7:08 PM, [CG] Brittani said:

• There was no way to give players the ability to play active combat if they chose to do so, because towers would just be too powerful late game to justify it if your PC was good enough.

This statement doesn't even make any sense. Am I to understand that we didn't have an option to be part of combat because our PCs were powerful enough to handle our builds? Then what of DD1, DDE and DD2? In all those games, peoples' machines were powerful enough to handle builds and yet people still were a very active part of combat. And also, what of Massacre? I've yet to experience a Massacre Survival match that I can afk my way through.

On 8/9/2021 at 7:08 PM, [CG] Brittani said:

• Adjusted damage and balanced it to make players stronger than before (this isn't including new item effects), and beef up the new content.

This is a reason to change defense speed? Sounds more like a reason to mitigate the actions of hard capping defense speed.

On 8/9/2021 at 7:08 PM, [CG] Brittani said:

• The amount of VFX made active combat and seeing what was going on in the game very difficult to see what was going on for a lot of players.

Where are your statistics? This had no effect on me. It was probably based off the experience of testing the Switch and/or Xbox One. In all the time I played prior to Episode 1 on my previous setup, everything worked as it should. I even jacked the settings up to 4460x2560 resolution and maxed everything out. My fps was crap but I still saw things as they should've appeared. For reference, my relevant PC specs during that time were:

CPU: i7-4790K, GPU: Watercooled R9 290X (4GB), RAM: 16GB (4x4GB) G.SKILL RipJaws DDR3-2133MHz CAS 9, SSD: 256GB 850 Pro

Since upgrading to the 6800 XT a couple months ago, I've been able to play on max settings at 4460x2560 resolution just fine with 60 fps. Besides a small visual fidelity improvement, I didn't notice any changes with combat pre-Episode 1.

On 8/9/2021 at 7:08 PM, [CG] Brittani said:

• Comparable games to ours are similar in rate, if not lowered, due to these specific issues, and 0.5 second is still pretty fast.

I didn't start playing Dungeon Defenders so I could compare it to other games. I played it because it was unlike anything I've ever seen. Sure, 0.5 seconds is decently fast but not anywhere near as fast as .1s or lower with diminishing returns. We're talking a 5x difference (or greater) in speed. When I went from beating the campaign in DD1 with my friend to joining the online community, I immediately saw fast attacking defenses like streams of harpoons and 0.08s Electric Auras. I found that amazing and it's what kept me ensnared in the game. It wasn't getting super strong defense power with moderately fast defense speed. If I wanted that, I'd just play Plants vs Zombies or any of the other tower defense games out there.

On 8/9/2021 at 7:08 PM, [CG] Brittani said:

We're a small team, we don't have the luxury of a AAA team to throw dozens of programmers to find every optimization possible, though we do try our best to bring continued optimizations.

You know who else has a really small team? Hello Games and look how far they've come in polishing their game. They didn't completely change the foundation of their game either since its inception. Over the years, they added a lot of the promised content missing on release and different content people didn't expect. In your original Kickstarter campaign, you said you were going to bring back the core gameplay of Dungeon Defenders and that this would be far from a repeat of Eternity. Well, so far, Eternity was a better game and more like the first Dungeon Defenders in every way. It's really only after you added Light/Dark armor to that game that it started changing for the worse.

On 8/9/2021 at 7:08 PM, [CG] Brittani said:

This change made sense as our survey feedback showed that 90%+ of players were fine with the change in a gameplay sense, so we moved forward with it too make the game a better experience for all defenders and get the game to them as fast as well could.

We're sorry ultimately that you don't like this change, but we made sure to do what we could to retain player power (giving players more power as a result), appeal to the vast majority of our playerbase, and still provide the best experience we could for all players (while continuing to add free content and improved optimizations).

Not sure if you're aware of this but at the time of the PTR testing, only a small fraction of your original community was online. Of the 11,343 players who backed your Kickstarter campaign + the variable amount that purchased the game off Steam, only ~200 - 300 people were playing during the time of the PTR. If even 25% of those players participated in the PTR, we're looking at ~50 - 75 players. Assuming even 50% participated; that's still only 100 - 150 people. 90% of that would be 90 - 135 players.

That's not a very significant testing pool to assume that the remaining 99% of those 11,343+ players missing are on-board. What you should've done was release the Episode 1 update first (without the defense speed changes). Then release a PTR with those changes soon after once the hype train came rolling in. Why, you might ask? Because people usually take breaks from games when they exhaust the current content. Only after a major content update do they usually come back.

On 8/10/2021 at 1:08 AM, [CG] Brittani said:

We're a small team, we don't have the luxury of a AAA team to throw dozens of programmers to find every optimization possible, though we do try our best to bring continued optimizations

We are all aware of this and no one reproaches you for it, and at least here everyone shows a lot of patience and understanding. But I hope you can also understand that for us all these 180° turns with each major patch are frustrating and tiring.

Items
Deletion of stats: A good idea below the line, balancing technically a nightmare as a player too much with too many "dead" stats.
New set bonuses:
A very good idea but so far unimaginative, +dmg after rep/upgrade is certainly a nice features during leveling, in the endgame unfortunately useless.
I would like to see more interesting bonuses like e.g.
+ dmg against Enemy Y
+ dmg depending on distance
dmg reduce against Y
etc. you have actually proven in the past that you are more creative.
The existing new set bonuses look quite interesting but since they can't be on Rifted Armor most of them will never know and remain a nice leveling feature.
I see some good ideas and approaches but it seems like you've screwed yourselves up with the rifted mode/gear.

Menu
For a PC player definitely a downgrade, I think I speak for every PC player when I say: "I don't buy a game for the PC to have a console optimized control/menu".
Please improve and bring back the old keybindings.
and to the last and biggest point

Towers/Attack Speed etc.

you can like it or not, it is now as it is and it will not change, personally I would have made other sacrifices for the switch or just let it be, but I can understand why you have ventured into these unknown fields even if I can not endorse it, after this patch.
The problem behind all the reworks and the cap introduction is balancing/diversity.
I can only agree with Valthejean it lacks variety and "puzzle fun". 
I think you have made a good step with the combo mechanics of the Sludge Launcher and I would before I put valuable work time in the balancing of the old tower me think about how I can usefull implement this combo mechanics in old towers. 
Ex.
-Cannonball explodes when it hits burning targets, or when it is hit by the harpoon.
-Arcane Missile marks/weakens the enemy which lowers their resistance to fire/electricity.
etc the possibilities are almost endless
Target Priority:
On one side i think its nice on other side bad, how about adding an option in the spellbook where you can choose between priority System
- Highest danger (DST Standard Priority)
- closest enemy
and last but not least
Can it be that with the last minute change of the attack rate cap for huntress a bug has crept in it seems to be impossible to reach the speed cap

PS: Nice work with outpost and the keep for me currently the best maps

Edited August 12, 2021 by Saruzius