Survarium Q&A - January 2021
Greetings Survivors, we thought we'd share a little feedback from our team with some recent responses to some of your most pressing questions about current and future features. Below you can see what we had to say. If you have any questions you'd like to have answered in a future Q&A, feel free to leave them in the comments below and we'll do the best we can to answer as many of them as possible.
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Q: Ammo consumables (also known as Premium ammo). Combine all 3 ammo generation into 1. Make it work like boosters with 5000 silver per match if you do not have any. Add it as a 4th selectable booster item instead of being in inventory UI. It is not just about obtaining it, but about streamlining it.
VG: We've been thinking about removing these ammo consumables for a long time now because very few people actually use them, but it builds up to that P2W perception of the game some players seem to have. The only reason for not removing premium ammo is that it's not clear how we compensate for the ammo that some players have.
Q: Dismantling modules. Let us scrap gun modules for spare parts/gold (for modules that are bought with Gold) for 1/nth of the price. Module costs 200 spare parts to make? Get 20 spare parts for scrapping it. Module costs 100 gold? Get 10 gold for scrapping it.
VG: That's something we could do, but we need to think about what percentage that could be. In the examples above it's 10% of creation cost, are you all fine with it? Should it depend on the module quality (more for higher rarities)?
Q: Ammo sliders. Bring back the old ammo slider system inventory so the player can decide
how he wants to distribute his ammo between his weapons. Players miss it and are
constantly requesting it.
VG: When we removed the sliders, we reworked the amount of ammo available in the equipment preset. Essentially, these amounts now account for the fact that you cannot take more primary ammo, and it's not intended for the player to have more. If we were to bring the sliders back, we'd have to either decrease the default amounts for both primary and secondary weapons, or add other kinds of restrictions. This would only lead to more work for the development team and more confusion for the players.
Q: Ability to exclude up to 2 maps. Add 2 slots in the match search menu to be able to exclude up to two maps that we don't like playing. A lot of survivors don't like Duga (and this map is also badly optimized), so this shouldn't necessarily mean longer wait times if the majority disable it. In fact, I have Slaughter disabled because of some of its maps and I would enable it if I could ban them, meaning shorter time to find a match.
VG: If we introduced such a change, that would've actually increased matchmaking times. If every player disables a couple maps, those two would likely be different for every player. This is just a wild guess, of course, but we'd imagine that among 16 players of similar ELO looking for a match at the moment, there would be no one map suitable for all of them.
So we either have to start a match with fewer people on a map that is not disabled for those people (which makes matchmaking worse overall), or ignore some of the players' choices for restricted maps (i.e. putting them in a match on a map they disabled). Both solutions are bad.
You're probably expecting that all players would disable the same 2 maps (say, Duga in general or Vector in Slaughter), but numerous polls demonstrated that's not the case: even maps that are generally disliked by the community are still favorite ones for at least 5-10% of the players. So overall disabling/restricting maps is a bad idea. In fact, it's not done even in the game with significantly higher online.
What we could do, though, is timed map rotation like we did with game modes in ranked matches. What do you think?
Q: More than 2 decals. There are a lot of decals: from events, game achievements, gold. Would be nice if survivors could put more than 2 decals on vest and pants, or at least on vest to get all those bonuses. They would level up and grind faster thanks to those bonuses.
VG: Bonuses on decals are balanced keeping in mind that you can use only two of them. When creating new decals, we usually try to come up with a previously unavailable combination of bonuses. If we were to introduce an option to equip more decals, we'd have to rework the bonuses (decrease the majority of them).
The real question here is, we think, do you want more decals for the visuals? That is a more valid reason for adding more decal slots to the equipment, and we can totally do that. However, that would slightly increase match loading times (because all decals and camos are baked into one texture to display in a match).
Q: Random super rare drops (incentive). Add super rare drops that would give gold or spare parts or Premium, and make them extremely low chance to drop. These would drop from PVP matches, like stash maps or attachments do currently. For example: "gold ingot" 0.006 % drop chance, gives 500 gold. "bucket of spare parts" 0.01 % drop chance, gives 1000 spare parts. Or "golden ticket" 0.008 % drop chance, gives 7 days of premium. It adds anticipation and incentive to play more, and would even further reduce p2w claims. Yet the drop chance is so low that it wouldn’t really affect the income for VG.
VG: If they'd have an extremely low drop chance, how would that motivate you to play more? We'd think that daily missions and login rewards would incentivise the players to play more often, but even that (100% chance rewards) doesn't work if you don't want to play the game. Having said that, we'd like to concentrate on improving core gameplay instead of introducing more casino rewards to the game. However, an alternative solution would be awarding the player with some gold (say, 10) for completing all daily missions.
Q: More extended magazines. 30 round magazine weapons are receiving 40 round magazine variations. Please also do this with the weapons that have just 20 round magazines: MP7, AS Val, Groza, 9A-91… Having at least 30 round extended magazines would balance the difference. Also, AKM / AKMSU / Valmet Rk.62 were designed to use the same kind of extended magazines, please add the option for the same mags on Valmet.
VG: Yes, we are constantly adding more and more new modules. In fact, we have statistics of how popular and effective different weapons are, and use that to introduce balance changes (although you might think that some buffs and nerfs are totally random), new weapons and modules.
Q: Camouflage Preview. Make available previews for suits' camouflages. People can’t see how a camouflage would look like before spending their gold (for suits' camouflages) or Silver. Especially for suits' camouflages, because gold isn't something you get often in the game as a free player.
VG: Yes, that's been on the "to do" list for a long time, but there's always something more important (at least as we see it). Anyway, we will look into that.
Q: Crack of supersonic bullets. If enemy misses, you don't even hear the bullet whine, you only hear something if the bullet hits an object. Every gun with supersonic bullets (330+ m/s) should create a sound “crack”.
VG: But there's a sound when a bullet flies by your character. Do you need the crack for realism or to better understand that somebody is firing at you? If for realism, we'd like to remind this is still a videogame, and gameplay experience is more important. If for the latter, we had even bigger plans, i.e. some kind of a suppression effect when somebody is shooting at you, like in BF series. Still, we'd like to understand if is there a problem from a gameplay perspective, and then decide how we approach that.
Update: A developer has confirmed that there are sounds of bullets flying by, but they're not working. This will be fixed with 0.66.
Q: Foliage displacement. When survivors are moving through and sitting in foliage, they should be pushing the grass downwards. This would not only make the game visually more realistic, but also prevent people from just hiding in foliage, where they’ll be impossible to be seen in.
VG: We can only imagine how much work that would entail. Actually, we can only think of examples of how it's done in some AAA singleplayer games, and only for grass. For a multiplayer game, that means every foliage movement should not only be visualized, but also synchronized among all players in a match. We are not saying it's totally impossible, but it's certainly a hard task that would require significant changes to the game engine and network code. All that effort would be better spent elsewhere, for instance, adding a new game mode (wink-wink) and new content.
Q: Turn Premium Weapons Into Skins. Premium guns seem to serve one niche in the game, which is to give players instant access to a good gun. A lot guns are premium-exclusive, such as the VSS and Barret .50 cal. The problem should be obvious. As such, these guns should be unlockable and only obtainable through traditional methods, with premium giving major XP and silver boosts that allow players to glide through the tiers, which would give the weapons a niche, with good attachments and modifications by default like they already have, much like PAYDAY 2 skins.
VG: A lot of stuff is perceived as P2W. We also introduced an option to buy silver items for gold even if you don't have corresponding faction rep quite a while back. We always thought the community was generally fine with that. If we restrict it, it won't change the issue - instead they'd complain they can't buy it
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