Dear Raiders and Antagonists,
Welcome to the first State of the Game address. In this new section, the MercurySteam team would like to acknowledge the most candent topics shared by our community in Spacelords’ official forums, the game’s Steam forum, the unofficial Discord channel and our social media channels.
Previously this week, we released Spacelords’ Update 11.0, including many optimizations and upgrades to the game’s AI and Logic systems.
The feedback we are receiving is quite positive overall, but there are some topics our community is concerned about or would like to have a better understanding. Let’s have a look to the top 3.
1. MMR, game difficulty and disparate player levels.
With the new F2P model we have welcomed thousands of new players. These new users are very important for the future of game, and in time they will develop their skills and become really good players. We believe that, as more players enter the game, players will be better stratified between low, mid and high levels. Until we reach that sweet spot, though, we currently have new players mixed with dedicated veterans.
In an ideal world, matchmaking would flawlessly match players with absolute precision, and the system is designed to function with that goal in mind, but in real life time zones, geographical zones and connection speeds might affect the experience. Again, we keep working to minimize their impact.
Ideally, Spacelords matches players with compatible MMR, independently of their character level. It is entirely possible for a low-level player who recently joined the game to achieve a high MMR if he or she is skilled enough, having to face and Antagonist with a superior While Forge Level. We keep working on fine-tuning this system and improving the user experience.
2. Mentor Matches
This topic is related to the previous one. We implemented the mentor matches to support and reward veterans who give a helping hand to the players new to Spacelords. While the concept is sound, it is not pleasing a significant number of vets out there. We are aware that the system is not 100% fine-tuned, and we are thinking about ways to improve it, including increasing the rewards for the mentors, among many others.
3. Kuzmann’s levers in “In Shock”.
The latest patch included a small modification to the “In Shock” mission boss fight against the infamous Dr. Kuzmann. We felt the old "insta-use" levers incentivized suicidal manoeuvres a bit too much. With these new changes introduced in the game, we tried to encourage a safer and slower approach in order to solve the situation.
The solution, however, is not as fine-tuned as we hoped, resulting in a significant increase of the mission´s difficulty. We are amending this in an upcoming game update.
We hope you have found this State of the Game entry useful. We are immensely grateful for all the constructive criticism feedback. We take all the feedback received into account, and several ideas coming from the community have ended-up being implemented in the game. Of course, this process takes time from evaluation to execution, but our commitment to making the best game possible based on our fans’ preferences remains.
See you on the Broken Planet!
