Survarium Q&A - March 2021
Greetings Survivors, we thought we'd share a little feedback from our team with some recent responses to some of your questions and suggestions. Most of these were selected from our official Discord and below you can see what we had to say.
Join our official Discord and submit your own suggestions if you'd like to see them answered. The ones with the most upvotes will be passed along to the devs whenever possible!
1. New maps for Search and Destroy mode.
There's many players who almost always play only Search and Destroy game mode. There's also many players voicing concerns about the already not so new Duga map. Add a part of Duga map or some other map to S&D mode and pump some fresh air for the part of the community that likes playing this mode. There's only 3 maps + 1 variation for this mode. Plus, players are forced to play it in Ranked.
Answer: S&D has always been the least popular game mode in Survarium after Battery Retrieval: both by percentage of total matches and the number of people playing in the mode. You might argue that's because there are not many maps, but actually S&D was not that popular from the start. So we won't spend effort by adding content for something that less than 10% of the player base enjoys.
In fact, we were thinking of disabling both S&D and Battery Retrieval because they are so unpopular just to speed up the matchmaking for other modes. But eventually decided that variety is more important, and you can choose other game modes when queuing to improve the matchmaking.
By the way, 25% of all S&D matches in the last month were played in Ranked mode. Also, 35% of all ranked matches are S&D. But it's only because it's easier to gather a 5v5 match. From this standpoint, perhaps it makes sense to add another map, but we'd rather buff the rewards for the mode. Still, would you guys play the mode outside of Ranked?
2. Menu tutorial for new players.
Huge majority of new players are very confused by the UI, the game does a poor job at explaining what can be done through the UI and where. For example, a lot of new players don’t know where to customize the weapon, how to change the faction, how to add more medkits… There needs to be an interactive tutorial for new players that highlights sections of the UI asking the player to take a look at it and explaining what can be done there via text box. This is pretty important as confusion very quickly turns into frustration and a bad first impression of the game. Everyone I ever told this game about has complained about this to me.
Many other games do this, and many players expect to either have a very self explanatory UI where nothing is hidden under subsections, or they at least expect the game to show them how to use it and where to find everything that is useful.
Answer: Unfortunately, the UI has never been a strong part of the game. And veteran players know that it's been reworked twice already. In fact, a few years ago we were going to tweak major parts of it again, but after estimating the amount of work that would require, we realized that the team simply doesn't have resources to do that.
Another huge issue is that the game is using Scaleform for the UI - a technology that was fine when the development started, but is outdated at the moment and is really hard to support. This is why it's so hard fixing some old bugs with the UI or changing even small parts of it.
And switching for another technology for the UI at this stage would take months, if not years, to recreate the UI we already have, so it's not an option.
3. Improving painkillers.
Right now they're meant to boost bleeding immunity. No one is really using them, so maybe it's time to buff them. The idea is to buff the bleeding immunity effect and add stopping power immunity. It has to be done with the corresponding skill in Survival Tree. Buff painkillers so much that with maxed skill they would provide 100 % stopping power immunity (player characters would not lose their speed and stamina after getting hit) and 75 % bleeding immunity. The effects would work for eg. 7 seconds. Base stats for it would be 50 % bleeding immunity and 75 % stopping power immunity. To achieve this, you would need to change the passive skill from multiplying to simple addictions, eg. 50 % + 5 % = 55 %.
Answer: We've been just thinking about buffing or changing rarely used character skills in all the trees. We can't tell anything specific at the moment (including release dates), but you can expect some skill rework in the future.
4. Improving the way fractures work with high explosive damage reduction.
In the current version of the game grenades are easily breaking legs, but the damage drop-off is just too significant to deal any damage. The players often find themselves crippled with less than 20 damage dealt. The same issue exists with C4 damage over distance. The idea is for grenades and C4 to deal much higher damage from up close but without causing fractures. Damage mechanics for mines are good so far, but hand grenades are extremely underpowered. To kill anyone, the grenade must explode under their butt and only if they have no explosive immunity, or you’d need to throw a second grenade.
Answer: The explosive damage was nerfed because many people complained that grenades were too powerful. If we remove fractures and increase damage again, the game will turn into grenade spam, especially on smaller locations (all Slaughter maps at the very least). We really doubt that's what the community wants.
One possible solution would be to decrease the number of grenades you can carry to one, maybe two. But the idea is that grenades and explosives in general are meant for crowd control, not making easy frags on smaller maps. So lower damage plus debuffs from explosives seems like a good solution to us.
5. Seeker and Executioner sets nerfs.
The Seeker set has the movement of a medium set while aiming and it’s basically a heavy set. Nerf “movement speed while aiming” from 2 % to 1 %. This is an issue because it makes you harder to hit in 1v1 fights no matter the range, by allowing you to move quicker to the sides.
Executioner set basically has the best bonuses and all of them together makes it overpowered. Time to activate medkit should be reduced from 20 % to 10 %.
Answer: These suggestions make sense, we will look into that.
5. Painkiller and antitoxine duration display in the UI.
Things like oxygen level in gas tanks and active artifact effect duration have a timer that displays how much their effect lasts, it’s located at the bottom near the medkits. But painkillers and antitoxins do not display any kind of info in regards to their duration, and their use is very much situational so it’s important to know when will the effect wear off.
Answer: Yes, we will consider displaying those in the UI. Hopefully this will be done in the next major update.
6. Clan wars system expansion
Survarium finally has clan wars again and soon, the first season of the Survarium Clan League will start. But are there plans to expand the clan system in the game? Will there ever be a clan ladder with perhaps exclusive prizes? Having to organize a tournament manually is very hard to do, as you have to individually manage between players and teams. There should exist a system with a built-in league where teams can click and sign up with their clan. Something similar to the Faction Challenge.
Answer: Yes, there are plans, but probably not a ladder. The whole idea behind Clan battles is to provide a tool allowing you to find out who is the best. So manual matchmaking was the idea right from the beginning to give you flexibility in choosing time and date of the battles. We think that no matter how VG tries to automate it, you will be unhappy - just the way you were when we had a Faction Wars event with a fixed schedule.
7. 2021 plans for Survarium
It’s no secret that the team always draws up an approximate plan of each update for the next 6 or 12 months and adjusts it along the way if needed. How did the COVID situation affect you with all of this? What plans did you have for 2020 that you were not able to implement in time and will we be able to see this in 2021? I.e., this question is asking for a small sneak peek of what we can expect and what’s not achievable with your current resources. Seasonal events with new camouflages are a given, but do you have something else up in the chamber?
Answer: Yes, we have, and some of it we already implemented this year, like the Paintball game mode, a bunch of new decals, and changes to the rules of Slaughter and TD modes.
One thing we've been discussing for a long time now is introducing a new anomaly with a new artifact, and also reworking existing anomalies and artifacts to make them more relevant. But we can't give you any dates, it's done when it's done.
Another thing is new rewards for Ranked tokens. And probably a new weapon. Also, more customization options (decals, camos) in general. And rework of the skill trees, as already mentioned above.
Covid affected us the same as the rest of gamedev: we mostly work from home, so some of the work processes have changed. But as you can see, the game gets updates all the same: Survarium received 5 major updates since Covid came to Europe a year ago, and we basically had the same update frequency as before (25 major updates in 5 years since 0.40).
9. Max level players.
Have you thought about new activities or things to do for those players who have been level 100 and Prestige level 10 in all factions for a very long time? Some kind of bonus, harder or unique missions, some kind of extra.
Answer: There are 274 people at the moment who have achieved all that, and the majority of them are still playing. We are grateful for long term support, but you have to understand we can't spend the team's resources to do something big for such a small part of the community. Maximum we could do is probably more prestige levels with some rewards. Perhaps some new achievements and decals. What do you think those rewards could be? What a player that achieved everything in the game could possibly want?
Join our official Discord and submit your own suggestions if you'd like to see them answered. The ones with the most upvotes will be passed along to the devs whenever possible!
1. New maps for Search and Destroy mode.
There's many players who almost always play only Search and Destroy game mode. There's also many players voicing concerns about the already not so new Duga map. Add a part of Duga map or some other map to S&D mode and pump some fresh air for the part of the community that likes playing this mode. There's only 3 maps + 1 variation for this mode. Plus, players are forced to play it in Ranked.
Answer: S&D has always been the least popular game mode in Survarium after Battery Retrieval: both by percentage of total matches and the number of people playing in the mode. You might argue that's because there are not many maps, but actually S&D was not that popular from the start. So we won't spend effort by adding content for something that less than 10% of the player base enjoys.
In fact, we were thinking of disabling both S&D and Battery Retrieval because they are so unpopular just to speed up the matchmaking for other modes. But eventually decided that variety is more important, and you can choose other game modes when queuing to improve the matchmaking.
By the way, 25% of all S&D matches in the last month were played in Ranked mode. Also, 35% of all ranked matches are S&D. But it's only because it's easier to gather a 5v5 match. From this standpoint, perhaps it makes sense to add another map, but we'd rather buff the rewards for the mode. Still, would you guys play the mode outside of Ranked?
2. Menu tutorial for new players.
Huge majority of new players are very confused by the UI, the game does a poor job at explaining what can be done through the UI and where. For example, a lot of new players don’t know where to customize the weapon, how to change the faction, how to add more medkits… There needs to be an interactive tutorial for new players that highlights sections of the UI asking the player to take a look at it and explaining what can be done there via text box. This is pretty important as confusion very quickly turns into frustration and a bad first impression of the game. Everyone I ever told this game about has complained about this to me.
Many other games do this, and many players expect to either have a very self explanatory UI where nothing is hidden under subsections, or they at least expect the game to show them how to use it and where to find everything that is useful.
Answer: Unfortunately, the UI has never been a strong part of the game. And veteran players know that it's been reworked twice already. In fact, a few years ago we were going to tweak major parts of it again, but after estimating the amount of work that would require, we realized that the team simply doesn't have resources to do that.
Another huge issue is that the game is using Scaleform for the UI - a technology that was fine when the development started, but is outdated at the moment and is really hard to support. This is why it's so hard fixing some old bugs with the UI or changing even small parts of it.
And switching for another technology for the UI at this stage would take months, if not years, to recreate the UI we already have, so it's not an option.
3. Improving painkillers.
Right now they're meant to boost bleeding immunity. No one is really using them, so maybe it's time to buff them. The idea is to buff the bleeding immunity effect and add stopping power immunity. It has to be done with the corresponding skill in Survival Tree. Buff painkillers so much that with maxed skill they would provide 100 % stopping power immunity (player characters would not lose their speed and stamina after getting hit) and 75 % bleeding immunity. The effects would work for eg. 7 seconds. Base stats for it would be 50 % bleeding immunity and 75 % stopping power immunity. To achieve this, you would need to change the passive skill from multiplying to simple addictions, eg. 50 % + 5 % = 55 %.
Answer: We've been just thinking about buffing or changing rarely used character skills in all the trees. We can't tell anything specific at the moment (including release dates), but you can expect some skill rework in the future.
4. Improving the way fractures work with high explosive damage reduction.
In the current version of the game grenades are easily breaking legs, but the damage drop-off is just too significant to deal any damage. The players often find themselves crippled with less than 20 damage dealt. The same issue exists with C4 damage over distance. The idea is for grenades and C4 to deal much higher damage from up close but without causing fractures. Damage mechanics for mines are good so far, but hand grenades are extremely underpowered. To kill anyone, the grenade must explode under their butt and only if they have no explosive immunity, or you’d need to throw a second grenade.
Answer: The explosive damage was nerfed because many people complained that grenades were too powerful. If we remove fractures and increase damage again, the game will turn into grenade spam, especially on smaller locations (all Slaughter maps at the very least). We really doubt that's what the community wants.
One possible solution would be to decrease the number of grenades you can carry to one, maybe two. But the idea is that grenades and explosives in general are meant for crowd control, not making easy frags on smaller maps. So lower damage plus debuffs from explosives seems like a good solution to us.
5. Seeker and Executioner sets nerfs.
The Seeker set has the movement of a medium set while aiming and it’s basically a heavy set. Nerf “movement speed while aiming” from 2 % to 1 %. This is an issue because it makes you harder to hit in 1v1 fights no matter the range, by allowing you to move quicker to the sides.
Executioner set basically has the best bonuses and all of them together makes it overpowered. Time to activate medkit should be reduced from 20 % to 10 %.
Answer: These suggestions make sense, we will look into that.
5. Painkiller and antitoxine duration display in the UI.
Things like oxygen level in gas tanks and active artifact effect duration have a timer that displays how much their effect lasts, it’s located at the bottom near the medkits. But painkillers and antitoxins do not display any kind of info in regards to their duration, and their use is very much situational so it’s important to know when will the effect wear off.
Answer: Yes, we will consider displaying those in the UI. Hopefully this will be done in the next major update.
6. Clan wars system expansion
Survarium finally has clan wars again and soon, the first season of the Survarium Clan League will start. But are there plans to expand the clan system in the game? Will there ever be a clan ladder with perhaps exclusive prizes? Having to organize a tournament manually is very hard to do, as you have to individually manage between players and teams. There should exist a system with a built-in league where teams can click and sign up with their clan. Something similar to the Faction Challenge.
Answer: Yes, there are plans, but probably not a ladder. The whole idea behind Clan battles is to provide a tool allowing you to find out who is the best. So manual matchmaking was the idea right from the beginning to give you flexibility in choosing time and date of the battles. We think that no matter how VG tries to automate it, you will be unhappy - just the way you were when we had a Faction Wars event with a fixed schedule.
7. 2021 plans for Survarium
It’s no secret that the team always draws up an approximate plan of each update for the next 6 or 12 months and adjusts it along the way if needed. How did the COVID situation affect you with all of this? What plans did you have for 2020 that you were not able to implement in time and will we be able to see this in 2021? I.e., this question is asking for a small sneak peek of what we can expect and what’s not achievable with your current resources. Seasonal events with new camouflages are a given, but do you have something else up in the chamber?
Answer: Yes, we have, and some of it we already implemented this year, like the Paintball game mode, a bunch of new decals, and changes to the rules of Slaughter and TD modes.
One thing we've been discussing for a long time now is introducing a new anomaly with a new artifact, and also reworking existing anomalies and artifacts to make them more relevant. But we can't give you any dates, it's done when it's done.
Another thing is new rewards for Ranked tokens. And probably a new weapon. Also, more customization options (decals, camos) in general. And rework of the skill trees, as already mentioned above.
Covid affected us the same as the rest of gamedev: we mostly work from home, so some of the work processes have changed. But as you can see, the game gets updates all the same: Survarium received 5 major updates since Covid came to Europe a year ago, and we basically had the same update frequency as before (25 major updates in 5 years since 0.40).
9. Max level players.
Have you thought about new activities or things to do for those players who have been level 100 and Prestige level 10 in all factions for a very long time? Some kind of bonus, harder or unique missions, some kind of extra.
Answer: There are 274 people at the moment who have achieved all that, and the majority of them are still playing. We are grateful for long term support, but you have to understand we can't spend the team's resources to do something big for such a small part of the community. Maximum we could do is probably more prestige levels with some rewards. Perhaps some new achievements and decals. What do you think those rewards could be? What a player that achieved everything in the game could possibly want?