Welcome to the Campfire Checkpoint!
We’re back with another Campfire Checkpoint, bringing together some of the biggest topics from our latest Fellowship Roundtable. If you missed the stream, aren’t able to check out the VOD or just prefer written formats, check out all the information below!
For this Roundtable, I was joined by Game Designers Will and Ambjörn to talk through our latest patch, some of the thinking behind the changes, and what we’re currently exploring as we continue working towards Fellowship 1.0.
We also spent a big chunk of the stream answering questions from Discord and Twitch, covering everything from matchmaking and crafting to Pinnacle Dungeons, server stability, seasonal structure and what the team is looking at next. Unfortunately, due to the sheer number of questions and some of them just not having anything we could add to, we weren’t able to address every question that the community had. Since we’re aiming to do these streams more frequently, we’ll have more opportunities for all of you to throw your voice into the mix. We’ll be targeting another Roundtable in about 3 weeks and are excited to share our progress and continue to give you insight into how the team are pushing towards 1.0.
As always, a lot of what we talked about is still being explored and shouldn’t be taken as a concrete indication of how or when certain things will be added to the game; we’re just attempting to be as transparent with all of you as we can and give you a glimpse into how our brains are working.
Enough of that, let’s get into it.
Patch Notes Discussion
Hero Balance
One of the main focuses of the latest patch was Hero balance.
Following the fixes made in our previous update, we wanted to give things some time to settle before making further balance adjustments. This patch includes buffs for several Heroes, most notably Meiko, as we look to bring the roster closer together across different levels of play.
Balance is an ongoing process, particularly when trying to account for everything from the lower Leagues through to high Eternal. We’ll continue watching the data, following community discussion and making further adjustments where they’re needed.
Ambjörn mentioned that he’s working with Axel as they begin to look further ahead at Hero balance for 1.0, including which talents, abilities, playstyles and Legendaries players currently enjoy or avoid.
Performance and VFX Issues
The patch also includes a fix for an Aeona VFX issue that could cause performance to degrade over the course of a Dungeon.
This is part of a broader investigation into performance problems that crop up when large numbers of enemies, DoTs and other events are happening simultaneously.
Some of these issues can be relatively isolated, such as an effect not despawning correctly. Others are more complicated and may involve large numbers of events being processed at once.
QA is continuing to look for similar cases throughout the game but we’ve also had specific breakthroughs based on direct player reports (thanks for that!). If you notice something performing noticeably better or worse following this update, please keep letting us know.
More Items from Dungeon Chests
You may have also noticed that additional items can now drop from Dungeon chests at higher difficulties.
This was actually intended to already be active :/
While reviewing the progression tables, the team discovered that one particular setting controlling these additional drops had never been enabled. Thankfully, once identified, the fix itself was extremely simple.
These are both really satisfying for the team to fix (because they’re easy to implement and have a big impact) and equally annoying because it SHOULD HAVE ALREADY BEEN LIKE THIS! Sorry, it’s as frustrating for us as it is for you.
Matchmaking and Multi-League Queueing
One of the more experimental changes in this patch is the ability to queue across multiple Leagues. Think of this as just a small start to our major efforts to fix what is probably the biggest issue with Fellowship; matchmaking. You should expect that over the coming weeks and months that we continue to push changes to improve the overall system.
A major problem with our current structure is how many different ways players can become separated from one another. League, difficulty, Dungeon and role requirements can all create smaller matchmaking pools.
Our data shows situations where plenty of people are searching for groups at the same time, but are effectively missing one another because they’re divided across these different queues.
Multi-League queueing is an early experiment in reducing some of that separation.
In the longer term, we’re also looking at things like multi-role or multi-Hero queueing, which would allow players to make themselves available on several roles or Heroes and get into a Dungeon faster. At the end of the day, a lot of our players just want to be running a Dungeon so we need to do everything we can to get them in and playing.
Those features require considerably more development and UI work, so multi-League queueing gave us an opportunity to start testing one small part of our plans just a little bit sooner. It is by no means a solution to the whole issue.
We’re also interested in whether additional incentives could encourage players to help fill underrepresented roles, lower Leagues, backfill groups or other matchmaking needs.
The challenge is making those rewards useful without creating a system where the most efficient way to play becomes deliberately manipulating the matchmaking system to earn them.
For now, expect the team to continue experimenting.
Party Chat Improvements
Chat will now attempt to automatically switch you into Party Chat when you join a party.
The first implementation is a little rough around the edges, and we’ve already identified some cases that need another pass. For example, matchmaking can technically place you into a party before the rest of the party has actually been formed.
The overall goal is simple: if you’re playing with a group, Party Chat should be the most useful default without you having to manually switch channels every time.
Crafting
Crafting continues to be one of the systems we’re actively iterating on.
One of the biggest pieces of feedback we’ve heard is that the current system can be too punishing when players try to experiment with their gear (and we agree). Spending a large amount of resources only to effectively brick an item does not create the experience we want.
Our long-term goal is to move crafting towards being more deterministic without completely removing the excitement of finding and rolling a great item.
That likely means keeping some randomness around the initial item drop while giving players increasingly targeted ways to refine the item afterwards.
We’ve already begun moving in that direction with more targeted rerolling, increased resource availability and bad-luck protection, but we’ve got a long way to go on this.
Importantly, we want the loot and crafting experience to be in a strong place before testing any larger changes to progression or resets. If we want to properly evaluate a different progression structure for 1.0, it needs to be sitting on top of a loot system that already feels good.
Community Q&A
Will there be less RNG in loot?
That’s the direction we’re moving towards.
There will probably always be some randomness involved in getting the item itself. We still want getting a great drop to feel exciting.
Once you have the item, we want players to have better tools for targeting particular variables and fine-tuning their gear rather than repeatedly rolling against layers of completely uncontrolled RNG.
What’s the future of Pinnacle Dungeons?
Pinnacle Dungeons are interesting because the team really enjoyed making them and they can provide a meaningful aspirational target for high-level players.
Though, the harsh reality is that we need to be aware that they’re also very expensive to produce relative to the number of players who ultimately engage with them.
For 1.0, our focus is much more heavily weighted towards improving Fellowship’s overall systems and player experience rather than producing another Pinnacle Dungeon.
We currently expect the existing Pinnacle Dungeon to remain available in some form, potentially as legacy content, rather than removing content that players still enjoy.
However, we are not currently planning a new Pinnacle Dungeon for 1.0.
If we return to Pinnacle Dungeons in the future, we’d rather give them the time and attention they deserve than create a smaller version simply to fill that slot.
How does the team feel about Loot 2.0?
There are parts of Loot 2.0 that we think work well.
Progressing through the Leagues and into early Eternal can feel really good, but some of the weaknesses become much more apparent once players reach the point where they’re heavily optimizing their gear.
That’s where repeated rerolling and some of the frustrations with particular stats or item combinations become much more noticeable.
So the foundation has things we like, but there’s clearly more work to do on the endgame optimization experience.
When is Fellowship 1.0?
We don’t have a release date to announce yet.
There’s no secret date we’re deliberately holding back. When we’re confident enough in the plan to tell everyone when 1.0 is coming, we will.
Could we see more player surveys?
Yes.
We’d like to use more targeted surveys as we move closer to 1.0, particularly once some of the changes currently being worked on have had time to settle.
That gives us an opportunity to ask players directly whether those changes have actually improved the experience and what areas they believe should be prioritized next.
We’re also interested in potentially targeting surveys based on player behaviour during tests, allowing us to ask more relevant questions to people who have actually spent time interacting with a particular system. That type of targeted survey is something we can do through FirstLook if we decide to use that to run tests in the future.
What are you doing about server stability for 1.0?
Testing is a huge part of it.
One lesson from previous updates is how dramatically seemingly small changes can scale once thousands of players are making requests to the backend simultaneously. The most recent example of that for us were the in-game Seasonal Challenges that were a big issue for our servers around the most recent update.
So, we’re looking at even more robust testing, less last-minute changes from our admittedly excitable team but also at changing how Fellowship itself is updated and managed in a live environment.
One idea we’re looking at right now relates to how patches get pushed. Ideally we’d love to allow players already inside a Dungeon to finish their run before being required to update their client.
We’re also looking at moving more number-based data away from the game client so certain changes can be made server-side without requiring a full patch. This would mean we have more flexibility on when to push changes and limiting the downtime for everyone.
All of this should give us more ways to react quickly when something goes wrong.
Will previous Seasonal events return?
Hopefully, yes.
Halloween will also mark roughly one year since Fellowship entered Early Access, and we know there are players who weren’t around to collect some of the original event rewards.
Those events couldn’t simply return exactly as they were because some of their challenges were connected to systems that no longer exist, but we’d like to find ways to mark those occasions and potentially give players another opportunity to get their hands on some of those rewards.
Could we change talents and gear after entering a Dungeon?
We think that would be useful, particularly alongside multi-Hero queueing.
If you enter a Dungeon and discover you need to adjust your build for the group you’ve been matched with, being able to change the gear already in your inventory or modify your talents could make a lot of sense.
The question is how much additional UI, UX and engineering work comes with implementing it. It also quickly leads into related ideas such as saved loadouts.
It’s something we like, but we still need to determine where it sits amongst our other priorities.
What about rotating Curses?
This is something we’ve discussed.
Rotating Curses could create more variety, shake up the meta and give players a reason to approach familiar Dungeons differently. It’s a double-edged sword though; the downside is their impact on competitive play and Leaderboards.
If one week is considerably easier than another, it can create situations where leaderboard performance becomes heavily dependent on when you happened to push.
We think there’s something interesting here, but we need to find the right balance between variety for players who want a changing experience and consistency for players who care about competitive integrity.
Can we restart a Dungeon without returning to the Stronghold?
This is currently being worked on.
The idea sounds simple, but restarting a Dungeon session without completely destroying and rebuilding the server session turned out to involve considerably more technical work than you might expect.
The good news is that we recently got an early version working.
We’re also thinking beyond simply pressing “run it back”.
At the end of a successful Dungeon, we’d like to explore allowing the party to choose another Dungeon and continue playing together without returning to the Stronghold at all.
Getting a good group together can be one of the hardest parts of the game. Once you’ve found one, we’d like Fellowship to give you more reasons to keep that group together.
Are UI improvements like nameplates, focus frames and party cooldowns etc. being considered?
Yes.
There’s a broader list of UI improvements we’d like to work through, including things such as:
Nameplate improvements
Friendly nameplates
Party frame scaling
Health bar scaling
Boss and enemy frame improvements
Cursor scaling
Scaling everything 😀
Better debuff tracking
Focus frames
Additional cooldown information
We aren’t confirming that every one of those will be ready for 1.0, but we agree there’s plenty of room to give players more control over how gameplay information is presented.
Will there be new Heroes in 1.0?
No new Heroes are currently planned for 1.0.
Our focus for 1.0 is much more about systems, structure, polish and improving the overall Fellowship experience.
We absolutely want to return to creating new Heroes in the future, but right now we think getting the underlying game into the strongest possible state is more important.
That’s especially important when we think about bringing new players into Fellowship. We still have a Steam Free Weekend available to us, for example, and before using opportunities like that we need to make sure the experience those new players encounter is as polished as possible.
Could crafting get a proper tutorial?
This is something we need to consider.
Loot 2.0 and crafting have become fairly complicated systems and we currently don’t do a particularly good job of explaining them to a new player.
Improving the system itself is one part of the problem, but once we’re happy with how it works, we also need to make sure players can actually understand it.
Any news on account-wide Gems?
Nothing concrete yet, but improving the experience of playing alts is high on our list.
Once Crafting is in a better place, we want to spend more time looking at what makes playing multiple Heroes unnecessarily difficult.
Greater access to materials across your account is one of the ideas we’re interested in exploring as part of that.
What about Odd Comp becoming competitively required at high Eternal?
We’re aware of the discussion around players using Odd Comp to reach the Blood Shard requirements needed to access higher difficulties before switching back to a Holy Trinity composition.
That isn’t an ideal situation.
Simply disabling Odd Comp above a particular level creates a different problem for people who genuinely enjoy playing that way, so there isn’t an obvious one-line solution.
It’s something we need to address as part of our broader look at Eternal progression.
Will Seasonal titles and rewards change?
Probably on a case-by-case basis.
Some rewards make sense as permanent additions that all players should continue to have access to across different Seasons.
Others are strongly connected to a particular Season, theme or moment in Fellowship’s history, and there’s value in allowing those rewards to show that a player was there during that Season.
We’re also interested in proper end-of-Season rewards for highly ranked players.
That’s something we’d rather establish clearly at the beginning of a future Season rather than suddenly adding retrospective rewards after players have already competed under a different set of expectations.
Could Seasons be shorter without requiring entirely new content?
Short answer, yes. This is an area we’re actively exploring.
We know engagement naturally slows as a Season goes on, and creating an entirely new collection of Heroes, Dungeons and other major content every six to eight weeks isn’t realistic.
But a reset doesn’t necessarily need to mean an enormous content drop.
We’ve been discussing possibilities such as cycling Curses, Dungeon changes, rejigged routes, fresh Leaderboards or softer progression resets that could refresh the experience using the content already in the game.
The goal would be to create a meaningful reason to come back and start pushing again without resetting so aggressively or so frequently that players feel like their progress doesn’t matter.
We’ve only recently started mapping out what that structure could look like, so there’s plenty more work to do here.
What’s Next?
With this patch now out in the wild, the team is beginning to spend more time on some of the larger questions we need to answer for 1.0.
For Will, that means digging deeper into the overall Seasonal structure, progression curves and what Fellowship needs to do differently for more casual players.
We think those players are underserved by the current game, particularly within the lower League structure, but addressing that properly could require much more fundamental changes than we can make in a normal patch. Specifically, Will mentioned the “chainsaw approach” might be appropriate here.
Ambjörn will be looking more closely at Hero balance and potential reworks, including gathering feedback on talents, abilities, Legendaries and playstyles that players currently don’t enjoy.
He’s also working on designs for multi-Hero queueing and taking a look at the possibility of bringing more group-finding functionality directly into Fellowship rather than requiring players to leave the game and use Discord.
There’s a lot being explored, and over the next few weeks some of those ideas should start becoming much more concrete.
Thanks again to everyone who joined us for this Roundtable and threw questions our way. We wish we’d had more time to address even more questions but we’ll be back with another opportunity in a few weeks!
We’ll keep talking openly about what we’re working on, what we’re experimenting with and, importantly, what we learn when some of those experiments don’t work.
See you in the Stronghold!
- Chief Rebel Devs