Greetings, fellow Captains!
It's Developer Diaries and it's time to tell you
about the work we've done to bring you Update 0.7.10.
But first, let's remember that the Royal Navy event is currently in full swing.
Complete its missions and you'll have an opportunity
to obtain British destroyers from Tier V to Tier VIII.
The remaining ships are undergoing final tests at the moment,
but they'll become available very soon.
Pay attention, because in the next update
you won't be able to earn Sovereigns anymore,
but you'll still have the opportunity to exchange them for very valuable rewards.
However, Guineas are going nowhere; keep accumulating them to get yourself
an excellent discount for the Premium Tier VIII destroyer Cossack.
It's no secret that in October we're going to release Halloween mode.
British destroyers, on the one hand,
and a new type of units, on the other hand.
What was the most important priority and how did we handle all this workload?
Let's go and ask the developers!
Developer Diaries 0.7.10
This year's Halloween event is looking splendid;
if you enjoyed its past events from 2016 and 2017,
or you heard others talk about them but never played them yourself,
we give you the opportunity to do so this year.
Halloween 2018 will bring you even more joy and surprises
because it holds new tricks from Rasputin,
a new unit type, and a new underwater dimension.
The best man to tell you about all of this is the designer
who has gone without sleeping or eating in the past three months,
and has been thinking only about Halloween and pumpkins.
He's now ready to talk about his work.
Danya, hello! Let me distract you from Halloween.
Are you playing it already?
Hi, no, I'm reading the feedback from the supertest.
And how is it?
It's good, in general.
Is it? Our Danya is the father of Halloween;
he's the man who has been developing Halloween mode for the last three years.
He even doesn't take a vacation in the summer,
because Halloween is in the autumn and it needs to be ready.
Could you explain our players what the peculiarity of Halloween is,
from a developer's point of view?
First of all, we have more freedom when working on it.
When we create usual operations or scenarios,
we are restricted by the historical setting,
but with Halloween we can get a little creative…
or even much more creative.
This year we're going to overwhelm our players
not with one or two Halloweens, but with…
Five.
We're bringing back our Operations from the previous years,
because they were a colossal success.
Those are Saving Transylvania and Sunray in the Darkness.
In addition, we'll give players the ability to try out the new unit type,
submarines, in the Terror of the Deep Operation.
Also, finally the Terror of the Deep and Sunray in the Darkness Operations
will be available both at normal…
Darker and darker…
…and increased difficulty.
That's why for those people who want to have an additional challenge,
they'll be able… To fully immerse…
To have a blast, yes.
This time we simultaneously developed an operation and a new unit type—
possibly, a new unit type.
How did you manage to combine the development
of a new unit type, its gameplay, and an operation?
In fact, the operation and the new type were designed at the same time.
We had very tight deadlines for these features,
so the work on them had to go in parallel.
On one hand,
when we understood that there was a change in the submarine development,
we adjusted the scenario to match this change;
on the other hand, while working on submarines
we always kept the scenario in mind
and thought about the abilities that it should be equipped with.
In my opinion, we managed to handle it all quite well.
To make Halloween truly scary and sinister,
with fear crawling under your skin, submarines are not enough.
It needs a special ambiance.
So now we've arrived to our level artists domain,
to learn how they created the underwater world,
populated it with monsters, and, basically, filled the game with terror.
We didn't stop at creating submarines,
we also needed to create an underwater world.
We have never done anything like it and, of course, we hit many hidden rocks.
We had to think it all through first,
to understand what we wanted to have under the water
and what we want to show our players.
Well, maybe they'll be so captivated by submarines
that they won't even notice their surroundings?
At some point, we got the idea
that we wanted to add something living to the underwater world.
There had to be something to evoke this sense of seamlessness for players.
So, the sense of presence…
Yes, the presence of some kind of underwater life.
We decided to make some sort of cocoons
that envelop these islands under the water
and prevent the things living and crawling under the islands from breaking free;
they protect players from these evil beings.
To make this effect even stronger, we added underwater monsters.
How many?
At the moment, two types of creatures dwell in the sea—
a monstrous ray and another one that we lovingly call "a pregnant bone."
What new things will we see and what was re-used from previous designs?
Of course, we used a part of the existing content
to give players the impression that they are fighting on the same map.
We added a huge castle that players need to locate.
It will have very beautiful animation with claws grabbing at things
to make it all even more carnivorous and predatory.
Now, I'd like to ask you a question.
This year we prepared fantastic camouflages for Halloween,
they are simply astonishing. But in 2017 they were very cool too.
We want to know your opinion.
Come on, let's fill out a short survey right here
and learn which of the camouflages from 2017 you think was the best.
We usually pay a lot of attention to Halloween mode.
Why? It's one of the biggest events of the year for us, isn't it?
Events like this are not made just for fun,
we engineer them to fine-tune specific game mechanics.
This event being the most large-scale of them all,
we use it to perfect new features.
In addition, we’re introducing the underwater world
that we didn't previously have in the game. That's the reason.
All underwater technologies that we perfected here
will be likely transferred into real maps, which players will see in the game.
That’s if we decide that submarines fit well into our project.
Yes, you're right. And of course, in that case,
we'll have to rework the majority of the maps, if not all of them.
Naturally, Halloween is not our only focus,
we prepared a lot of different features for the new update.
Firstly, we solved the issue of excessive numbers of destroyers in battle.
Was it really an issue? What do our statistics show?
We're going to speak to Andrey Lysak now, he'll tell us more about it.
Let's speak about those little destroyers.
Players have constantly complained that there are too many of them in battles,
that they make it very hard to play on battleships
and have asked us to introduce a limit.
Can we deliver this? And, more importantly,
does the issue of having excessive numbers of destroyers in battle exist at all?
Well, not every battle, no.
Some battles happen when there are 5, 6 or more of them,
but such cases are rare, fortunately.
Well, let's say, hypothetically, we make an executive decision,
"The maximum number of destroyers in a battle is four."
What effect will it have?
It's called a strict limit, if we speak in matchmaking terms.
The strict limit will lead to quite bad consequences.
If the number of people who want to play is greater than this limit,
they will be put in the queue.
So, people will be stuck in queues, just waiting, and won’t be able to play.
This is because we're basically saying,
"We're sorry, you chose a destroyer, now wait until the end of times."
Yes, destroyers would have to wait for quite a long time,
not for eternity, of course,
but until the moment when an 8 vs 8 battle will be permitted.
And it will take several minutes.
After that, they will still get into a battle
where the above-mentioned battleships will be surrounded by destroyers.
So, it's not a solution.
But since there is a strict limit, there must be a soft limit,
and that's our solution, isn't it?
A soft limit is an approach when, at first,
we don't allow the matchmaker to begin a battle with this limit exceeded,
but if a situation occurs when there are more destroyers
that this soft limit and it persists for a long time, then this limit stretches
and starts to allow battles with a greater number of destroyers.
As it stands, we have set a soft limit of four destroyers.
This means that instead of several battles
where there are too many or too few destroyers,
you'll have several battles with an average number of destroyers.
This is because the soft limit allows us to smooth out the situations
when there too many of them or too few, too many or too few,
too many or too few, too many or too few…
The soft limit will distribute them more evenly between battles.
We made very thorough calculations and we believe that this solution
will not require any further adjustments in the foreseeable future.
Moreover, we slightly changed Ranked Battles by adding a new format,
so both newcomers and casual players
can now feel themselves kings of the hill and finally acquire the first rank.
It might not be that easy, but it will bring more enjoyment than usual.
In this update, we're changing the Ranked Battles format.
Now it's the tenth Ranked Season already,
so what are newcomers and casual players going to do?
We didn't want to leave them off-board, right?
We designed a new Ranked Battle format, Ranked Sprints.
There will be two seasons one coming after the other,
and each season lasts for two weeks.
Their main difference is just the number of players…
We also introduced a tier limit.
Yes, Ranked Sprints will be played on Tier V ships.
Did you have any doubts?
That maybe we should use higher- tier ships? Tier VI, for example?
Initially, we thought about using Tier IV ships,
but then, after some proper thought, we decided that Tier IV is way too low.
That's why we ended up on Tier V ships.
In future, depending on the feedback from Ranked Battles,
we'll try to arrange for ships of other tiers.
What will be the rewards?
They will be signal sets, credits, and Coal for acquiring the first rank.
Tell us please, what is the main feature
that makes the Ranked Sprints a far cry from the larger Ranked Seasons?
We decided to implement a new feature
that allows players to form Divisions of two ships for Ranked Sprints.
That's why the first and second seasons
will be played 6 vs. 6 and 8 vs. 8, with even numbers.
In other words, teams can be fully made up from friends.
There are just two features left to be discussed,
but Update 0.7.10 wouldn't be complete without them.
These are: a reworked torpedo indicator
and completely new feature, we call it Calendar,
but players will know it as Daily Shipments.
Colleagues, do you have any comments on the topic?
Oleg, when you criticize, please provide your suggestions first.
Well, I suppose we'd better visit the developers
and discuss the subject with them.
In this update, we're implementing a new feature called Daily Shipments,
with its working name as Calendar.
Almost every game has a calendar, what will be the difference of ours?
Why did we implement it in the first place?
We created it with the intention of making it
more enjoyable for players to enter the game.
Players enter the game today and collect their gifts,
and they will enter the game tomorrow and collect their gifts again.
We're launching one calendar for newcomers,
for those who just created their account;
it will help to provide them a small head start in the game,
so they can get familiar with it a little bit sooner.
Update 0.7.10 is Halloween, and we're making a calendar for Halloween too.
It's probable that we'll add more calendars in future,
but that goes beyond Update 0.7.10 already.
Did you experience any difficulties at the development stage?
The deadline was very short, especially when taking into account
that after we prepared the first design,
we found that it wasn't as good as we wanted.
It wasn't in vain that we neglected a typical idea
that you can find in many other games—
when you can see all these numerous rewards right away.
We decided to highlight today's and tomorrow's rewards,
so they'll look more appealing. That's why we changed the design.
We wanted to make the animation beautiful,
and to stress that this a daily event,
so that's why we made the effect of a calendar page turning.
So we need to enter the game every day now, don't we?
What happens if I skip a day?
Every player chooses how often they would like to enter the game
and the corresponding set of bonuses and gifts respectively.
Of course, players, who enter the game often and regularly,
receive everything including the more valuable items
which await every one of them at the very end of the calendar.
Now we get to torpedoes. What have you done to them?
Right, this time we've made some changes to torpedoes.
They had several problems that we wanted to resolve.
Firstly, torpedo alarms went off way too often,
and secondly, deepwater torpedoes were displayed as threats to targets
which they in fact couldn't damage.
Now the game takes into account both the speed and travel direction of ships.
If a ship isn't going to cross paths with a torpedo,
the torpedo alarm won't go off.
Thanks to that, we greatly reduced the number of false torpedo alarms.
We also divided the torpedo alarms into two states
with the corresponding indicators:
yellow information alarm indicator and red alarm indicator.
The yellow indicator is just a warning
that a torpedo is traveling in your direction.
It won’t necessarily hit you, but you should be careful.
The red indicator means that a torpedo can hit you,
and if you don't react accordingly, that's exactly what's going to happen.
Dear friends, the episode has come to an end,
and we hope that you feel intrigued and impatient for Halloween to arrive.
If you want to know more details and nuances
on how to play on submarines and not lose,
wait for the special episode fully dedicated to Halloween.
Subscribe to our channel, click the bell, and follow the news. Bye!