Asphalt 9 Dev Chat (January 2021 - Multiplayer)

The January 2021 Dev Chat was the 5th Dev-Chat and was done on January 22, 2021, it was centered in discussing changes and improvements to the Multiplayer mode appart of other extra stuff.
== Full #Dev-Chat-Answer ==
Ok let's get rolling.. or should that be trolling?
nah it's not April 1st yet
Welcome everyone to the 1st Devchat of the year.
As it is a new year and some people are joining us for the 1st time let me do a quick rundown etc of what we are doing (or more specifically what I'm doing)
==== Explanation for new people ====
We will be trying to hold these once a month (probably towards the end of each month, but don't hold us to specific dates). and the idea is out great CM's will ask the community for topics for suggestions (generally a vote from a list to keep it focused) and then once decided we take questions, comments, random sentences (really some odd ones this time round) etc from the community
I then spend a bunch of time reading through all of these (and yes I read all of them even ones that were just a single letter) and from this we do the devchat. I've combed through and put together the most common topic areas and will be talking about most of them, so while a specific question might not be answered hopefully I will cover most of the big ones. depending on the topic, time etc we also look at the #🗣-dev-chat-discussions channel and I'll try and answer some one off there, but as the questions come flying in at light speed it can be hard to do on the fly (as we found out the in the 1st chat we did, hence we use this format now)
So if you question isn't answered I apologies if it was an on topic one and I didn't get to it and if it was an off topic one well (ask again when that topic comes round )
So hopefully clear? if not doesn't matter as lets start with the 1st topic of today
==== New Seasons and Rewards ====
Last seasons MP, League rewards and Rush 2.0
Rush is a popular MP mode from way way back in time, it has been brought up multiple times that people want it back. last year we made a change to MP (roughly middle of the year) that changed MP to move away from the old rush system which was a very long event with a huge score milestone based reward system were all you had to do is race over and over and over to eventually got the rewards. 
now before this 1st MP change we had a ton of feedback from players saying they did not like it as it was boring, to long etc. So it was changed to make it shorter and have 2 types of reward system.
the 1st reward system which mirrored rush (but on a smaller scale as shorter period of time) is the series score rewards. This works by giving you a score based upon your position in a race that accumulates over time and at set milestones you unlock a reward, anyone can get them all you need to do is play.
The other reward is the league rewards. This is based on an ELO system which has you gain or lose rating points based upon where you come in a race and who you race against (very important factor) if you beat better players you got more points and if you lose to better players (higher rating) you would lose less points etc, at the end of a season you would get your league reward based upon the league you finally ended up in. this system is inherently competitive because you can go up/down a league, many people don't like the competitive side and on the other hand many people do
so we have both of these systems to try and address both types of players. Competitive players can race it out to move up leagues and get the bonus rewards for doing so. non-competitive players don't need to worry about it and just race to get the series score reward.
So prior to the last update everyone was clammering for us to bring back rush. We wanted to try bringing it back without spending a ton of code time (which we didn't have due to other stuff) so we looked at our current system and removed the league prizes (we did keep a series score multiplier which isn't shown so leagues still made a difference) and put all the rewards into the series score (this increased it from 30K at the top to 70K as we added more rewards).
Now as you might have heard this wasn't very popular, so what are we doing about it?
Well 1st things for the next update league rewards are back. in addition to being back we looked at the rewards themselves and some of the community feedback and the suggestion to give "cumulative" league rewards was considered, without going into specifics we are rewarding you with league rewards that will also take into account the tiers you pass through
so if you end up in bronze you get reward A but if you get to gold you will get not just "better" rewards in the case of BP etc you will also get more rewards as you will get some of the rewards you would get from lower league tiers, overall this means the higher the league you end up in the better the reward and the more you get. now what about the series score? Naturally were not getting rid of this (remember we want to also address non-competitive players)We have reset all the reward and series score milestones for the next update.
back down to the 30k mark. in addition going forward as a strategy we will be adding more series score rewards incrementally, this means the current amounts up to 30k will stay as is. if and when we add these will be new rewards added on top, we will be looking to do these based upon how many people are actually getting all of the series score rewards, so if only (and i'm making up numbers as an example) 2% of players get all the series score reward we won't add more. but if say 10% do then we would add 1 more set above, with each set of course being better than previous etc, so in someways how high and far the series score milestones will go is up to the community.
if you are racing and getting them we will keep adding
Let me also talk about a few other changes we are doing for next update around these 2 things
1 thing we have heard is people complain about how punishing elo loss is at times, now elo is a competitive system so there has to be some penalty (no risk no reward and no value in achieving something if you don't have to work for it), so we are putting in place a cap for the max ELO loss. this cap works in 2 ways
the 1st cap will stop you losing any ELO initially (basically bronze league)
the 2nd cap will stop you losing more than 20pts once you are based an initial "protection" threshold. the idea behind this is to make it less punishing as you progress and early on help people progress
The other change we are doing is to series score, Currently depending on how many players are in a race if you come last you could end up with a series score reward of 0. this was done to help discourage bots and idle racers who tend to come last from farming
we have data that shows that it did accomplish this however it is a bit harsh especially in higher leagues where you might end up in races with only 3 people and the effort to race is the same as a lower one but you got 0 reward
so we have updated this and you will now get a score even in last places assuming there are at least 5 people in the race (this covers a big chunk of races in higher leagues). If there are more than 5 people in the race last place can still get you 0
If you want to maximize your rewards from MP you should 
* Finish the races to get the series score 
* Try to move up the leagues to not only get league rewards at end of the season but each league has a multiplier that is applied to the series score for races in that league 
* Win (obviously coming 1st gets most ELO and series score)
Quick comment @Speedster more rewards does not necessarily mean more import parts I won't mention specific rewards but it will increase overall BP
Changing topics slightly
==== Blueprints in Rewards ====
let me talk about the BP in the rewards
so we have 3 "types" of MP in the game we have the world series (classic, ghost, ghost slipstream etc) we have limited series and trial series, they each have a different purpose and goal in the game when it comes to rewards, MP series is intended for everyone to play and compete and the rewards here tend to be more varied and yes the Targa has been around for a bit and many players might have it
it is something we are conscious of and we are looking to add more variation in the rewards over this year. However it is not something we will be changing between every series or even every update as it takes time to setup and we want players to have a chance to collect these BP. Limited series is a different beast as these change all the time as they are themed rewards based upon specific cars and groups of cars
Trial series is all about trying out cars (kind goes with the name) so the rewards here will vary but will tend to most likely be focused on credits and tokens (not always). Because this is the series were if you want to see what it's like to race with a maxed out car you have the chance to do so
Let me cover a few other bits and pieces quickly before the next topci
We got a bunch of feedback about issues around collisions at start of the race, so one change we are making is extending the "ghost" or no-collision time at the start of a race (obviously only for those events were it applies) to give you more time at the start, hopefully this will help the start of the races be a bit smoother
We had a request to show drop rate of BP in the MP rewards. Really good suggestion, we do it in the store so no reason we can't do it for MP rewards (and in fact rewards everywhere) so have added it into our backlog so we can try and work out when we can add it.
==== Small Topics ====
===== Club Vs. Club MP =====
a saw a few comments around this
I'll talk about something sort of related in a minute but let me remind everyone we did a club devchat a while ago and 1 of the things we talked about was club vs. club competition, we have something (that I think) will be pretty exciting and awesome coming later this year that will allow clubs to compete against each other (it will also encourage and reward you to use a variety of cars). so check out the old devchat and we will post an article or something as we get closer (and when we have pretty pictures) @⚡ Mina don't let me forget
===== Jungle MP =====
Ok next topic
There was a suggestion about a hunted mode in MP and I've seen some comments about jungle MP and bringing it back
So Jungle MP was a special (at the time) 1 off for the anniversary, there is no reason we cannot look to bring it back if it is popular enough, we can look at polling the community and seeing.
Having said that we are looking at bringing 1 new type of MP this year. By new type I mean new format of racing so changing up conditions etc.
Current front runner is to look at bringing the infection mode from A8 across for use in SE and MP
===== Cheaters in MP =====
specifically someone raised the issue about a club in windows who are all cheaters and sit at the top
I'd like to quote one of our anti-hacking team here when I asked about it as I think it is an awesome comment: “I have made it a personal mission to get rid of them, they have all been banned and will keep an eye out for them and ban again if they create new accounts”.
please keep reporting cheats and hackers and we will keep trying to do our best to detect and ban
the anti-hacking team who review the reports (both submitted and manually reported ones) do multiple passes each week to get rid of individuals and players. 
I should mention that bots and cheaters are treated the same, as both are accounts that get banned, bots we tend to detect via automated systems, cheaters it is a mix
Matchmaking was something else that came up a bit, so currently we matchmake based upon the league tier you are in as league tiers = cars that can be used, in the past we have tried a variety of different systems none of which made anyone really happy. Matchmaking by car rank meant either a really wide range (so basically ends up being class) or a narrow range (limits players) doing matchmaking by a specific car or group of cars also has it's problem as it limits pool of players and in the end what we want is to have as many people be able to match as possible, while at the same time keep it competitive
so by league and elo within league has tended to be the best. it does mean however we have scenarios were everyone just wants to use car X because it is best which isn't ideal, so how do we solve it? well I don't have a good solution at this point in time. we are looking at doing some changes for things like trying to match manual vs. manual and touch vs touch 1st before going cross control scheme
we are also looking at how we group our cars up to potentially move away from class filters to be more "pools" of cars, so a competitive class A might be in the same group as a class S because they can compete.
===== MP Challenges =====
ok let me talk about MP challenges.
so it is coming back in next update with some changes, first and biggest change is no entry fee
second change is we are looking to take it from a 2 lap race to a 1 lap race
this means you should be able to do more races in the same period of time and if you win get more rewards from it.
MP challenges has been an experiment were we have adjusted it each release and will keep doing so
==== Question & Answers ====
@Speedster I would love cross platform, sadly every time I raise it with the code team they reach for weapons and threaten to kill me In all seriousness it would be great unfortunately there are huge technical hurdles that need to be solved for it to work so it is not a simple thing to do.
@Pro™ | gⒶlactiiic winners get series score points. The amount of points you get is based upon position and total number of players in the race. As for higher leagues getting a lower score than when in same position but lower league it is something we are looking at
Another question that came up a bunch was about making it unlimited fuel in MP2 (limited series), there is a reason why it is not unlimited fuel. We found in the past that when it was unlimited fuel those modes became full of bots and idle drivers (which defeats the whole purpose), when we added the fuel limitation it removed most of these. Hence the fuel is limited.
@Queen nope no entry fee 1v1 does not change the rewards at all
I'm seeing a bunch of comments about series were you chose cars then match based upon them, these are great ideas, but something to consider which we always have to factor in is how many people can you match against
i'm sure you would all agree that it sucks to want to go and play MP and then not find a match at all, so whatever changes we do with matchmaking our #1 consideration has to be will enough people be able to get a match
@Pixielight ok I'll touch that flame and talk about LP exclusive. so making it LP exclusive or giving LP a bonus is something we could look at (I'd go with bonus not exclusive), we want to give our LP holders more value (hence access to the divo SE which will come back for others so don't flame me)
@Donline don't have a concrete answer for it as we are still looking into the design.
Ok going to end this chat for this month. We have another 1 next month (buggered if I remember the topic). Thanks everyone for participating I'll take some more time and go through the 🗣-dev-chat-discussions to see those I missed (am doing this with discord in 2 windows to try and keep up)
@Dom several people raised it and it is something I'll take a look at
== Dev-Chat-Vote ==
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Category:Asphalt 9 Dev Chats