Salutations SUPERVIVERS!
Whenever we shipped a patch in Open Beta or pre-alpha, we’d often spend time on Discord discussing the changes with players in a megathread. Now that we’ve hit 1.0(!) we’re looking for more ways to bring that experience to a wider audience, so we’re going to test writing our thoughts here on Steam. Let us know if you like the format or have any additional things you’d like to see.
OK! Let’s talk about that 1.0 release! We just pushed out our first hotfix - you can read those notes here if you’re just looking for the changes without so much of the blathering.
Starting off with the big one. We know there’s a ton of player discussion about the Armory - it’s a big shift in how you earn equipment, customize your Hunters, and upgrade gear over the course of a season. We appreciate everyone who’s shared their feedback and critiques throughout the first few days of launch. Let’s cover a couple of the topics we’re seeing raised most frequently and what we’re doing about them.
One of the most common criticisms we’re seeing of the Armory is that there’s too much randomness in how you unlock items. We think this feedback is fair, and we are discussing both short and long-term ways to improve agency. In the short term, we’ve reduced the Prisma crafting cost of daily & weekly specials in the Forge to 1000 Prisma each, as well as increasing the number of items on offer. Our goal with these specials was to appeal to players looking for more agency, but their previous crafting cost was too expensive relative to capsules - and they weren’t really feeling like viable options. For anyone who crafted items from the Forge before the price reductions, we’ll be refunding you the difference via the in-game mailbox (just…give us a few days, there’s a lot going on lol).
In the long-term, we want to give you more ways to chase equipment or invest into certain ones to power up, rather than relying purely on the RNG gods. We’re still in early prototypes for these systems, but we'll share more information as we get further along.
We’re also improving a poor experience on the capsule side, by adding “bad-luck protection” to make sure no one can go too long without rolling a legendary capsule.
Another thing we’re seeing is discussion about overall Prisma earn rates and concerns of falling behind the average player (and then not being able to compete). We’re just a few days into the start of the season, but there’s a few changes we’re looking to implement.
One system we haven’t talked about before is in-world equipment drops - specifically, how items you find in-game have their star level determined. In every game, we take the average star and rarity rating of the lobby's Armory, and then apply that average to the strength of Relics found in vaults and random drops in the world (in summary: random gear drops match the lobby’s progression).
Up until now, equipment was dropping so rarely in-game that this was difficult to notice. We’d like for Vaults to be a more reliable source of in-game equipment, so we’ve adjusted all Vaults to guarantee at least one grip or relic. These vault equipment drops have a base 20% chance to be 2 star, and as the season goes on, you’ll start to see 2 or 3 star equipment drop in the world more frequently. We know this isn’t a complete solution, but it should give you another avenue to get Relics of equivalent power to the lobby you're playing in, even if you haven't made as much progress in your personal Armory.
Besides in-game equipment, we have a few additional catch-up mechanics in the game - like having a significant amount of Prisma rewards in daily quests, weekly quests, and the Weekly Bounty - so even an infrequent player still has access to sources of prisma. (Speaking of - the first Weekly Bounty is available to open tomorrow, and at higher tiers, includes a choice between 3 legendary relics). But we’re hearing from you that these still don’t feel like enough. In the short-term, we’ve increased the rewards from daily quests from 100 prisma each to 400 prisma each, while in the longer-term, we’re exploring ways to make sure players who join later in the season don’t feel far behind the curve.
Playing well in SUPERVIVE should come with additional rewards, but looking at the numbers from our first week, it’s clear the current balance is skewed way too heavily toward first place. Sometimes the top-placing team earns more Prisma than the rest of the lobby put together! We’ve got a suite of changes to make this a little less extreme, so winning is still the best way to earn Prisma, but not at the cost of everyone else getting so little.
We’ve buffed the overall Prisma gains from both PvE and PvP interactions
We’ve reduced the amount of Prisma you drop per death from 50% >>> 33%
We’ve increased the minimum amount of Prisma received from kills from 8 >>> 15 (this is a guaranteed amount, even if the killed player had less)
We’ve slightly decreased the Prisma multiplier for top 3 lobby placement, and increased the multiplier for placing 5th or 6th
In combination with the additional Prisma in daily quests, the end result of all these changes should be that everyone is earning more Prisma over time, and the Prisma reward for Ws still feels good without leaving the rest of the lobby with scraps.
Though most players choose Breach as their main mode, Arena has always had a loyal following. With 1.0, we’ve seen many Arena players tell us that they feel neglected - especially with Arena games not earning Prisma. This is something that we were hoping to get in for a later patch, but we’ve been able to pull it forward to this hotfix. As a caveat: our goal isn’t to make Arena the most efficient way to grind Prisma, but we do want it be something that respects players time.
And, more good news for Arena players! We’ve got some visual upgrades planned for the near future. We’re excited to give these maps some more love.
The biggest balance area we’re keeping an eye on right now is characters with dunking abilities. With the updated glider and map layout, several of our resident dunkers are starting to feel more oppressive - especially in heavy abyss endgames. We’re exploring some wider changes that include making dunks feel a little less binary and addressing unintended glider momentum optimizations (slightly), which we plan to ship in a later patch.
We’re also keeping an eye on individual Hunter winrates across different MMRs to see how everyone’s adjusting to their best 1.0 selves. We only have a few days of data to work with, but there are some outliers that we’re looking to fix before resuming our biweekly balance cadence. Brall and Shiv received some nerfs earlier over the weekend, and we’re making some additional adjustments to Wukong and Jin’s movement so their LMBs don’t make them quite so slippery.
Throughout SUPERVIVE’s alpha and beta, we’ve always valued player feedback as one of the main inputs for us to make the game better - that’s not changing now that we’re in 1.0. We’ll be back next week with our first (real) patch, along with a rocking new Hunter. See you there!
~ the ViV team