Asphalt 9 Dev Chat (August - Clubs)

The August Dev Chat was the 1st Dev-Chat and was done on August 21, 2020, it was centered in discussing changes and improvements to the Clubs appart of other extra stuff.
==Full #Dev-Talk-Answer==
Chris718:
Hi, to start with thank you to everyone for taking time to come be involved in this Q&A.  We are going to try a different format from last time to see if it makes things a bit easier to follow and help us answer more of your questions as well as get your answers on some of ours. 
As mentioned the new format will be to split the questions and answers into 2 channels, I’ll be posting answers and dev question in 1 and you can use the other channel to ask your questions and give answers. Please be patient when asking/answering as it is hard work to keep up with everyone (The moderators and myself will try our best to cover as much as we can). If you don’t see your question answered immediately don’t worry we will do our best to answer them in groups of similar themed questions.
Before we begin let me provide everyone with a bit of background of what the design team is up to at the moment.As we approach the end of the year we are looking and starting to plan our upcoming features for the game (Yes it is August but it takes time to design, get art and build things so we need to plan ahead). One of the big areas we are looking at focusing on next year is clubs. Specifically How they work, what you can do with your club and the benefits/rewards of being part of a club. These Q&A session can be a great help to the team when designing and prioritizing the work as it gives us a chance to hear from you the players as to what you are interested in and would like to see.
So to kick us off, thank you to everyone who posted some early questions we have been reviewing them and have grouped them into 4 areas that we would like to talk about in rough order:
-Clubs in general-Trade system-Clan wars-Rewards 
Time allowing we will also try and answer any additional miscellaneous questions at the end (so please keep anything off topic till then).
And with that let start the engines and get ready to roll.
====Clubs in general====
Let’s start with talking about clubs in general. Before I go into what we are looking at I’d like to address a common question that has come up and was mentioned in the last Q&A about the club milestone rewards.
Many of you mentioned that the club milestone rewards feel like they are to high to achieve and it felt like you had to grind for way to long.  To address this we have changed the club reward progression milestones to reduce the total number of stages (but kept the same total amount of rewards you just now get more sooner) as well as reduced the amount of points you need to get to reach the final reward.  We will be seeing how these changes go in the next update and will keep balancing as needed.Ok so what are we looking at with clubs (this is a big topic so we won’t be able to cover all) and why.
Well firstly we are taking a look at clubs because we believe that they are an integral part of the game community. We want all the players to feel that the game is not just something they play because they are bored and want something fun to do but because we want them to become involved and feel like they have become part of a wider community of fans who enjoy the cars, racing and competition.
Now as part of that clubs help people meet other players, can help players help each other and provide a great area for fun competitionSo let me talk about some of the changes we are looking at (and no promises as to when and if any of these will make it into the final game as what seems simple can be very complicated to implement)
Firstly we have been discussing and looking at changing the size of clubs so that you can have more members.Currently clubs are capped at 20 players which is fine but at the same time can feel a bit limiting, imagine if you could only have 5 friends on a friends list but you had 6 it's not great if you have to tell 1 of them nope sorry. What we would like to do is increase this number, to what not sure yet.
So my 1st question to all of you is
Question: what size clubs would you be interested in? 30,40,50 or even bigger?Check out the #dev-chat-vote channel to vote on your answer
Ok next thing we are looking at with clubs is  around how you search for & manage your club
We want to make it easier to search for and find a club, as part of this we also want to make it easier for officers to manage their club. For searching we want to add more criteria such as:
•    Set a minimum garage level•    Set a time zone or region of the club you are looking for (I know for me it's always more fun to be in the same time zone as my club mates).•    Ability to search for a club when already in a club (do you really want to leave your awesome club? or maybe just try and poach that person who beat you for your club)•    Option to auto accept an applicant or manually accept
And for managing and interacting with the club we are looking at ways that we can allow club members to:
•    See who is offline or active•    See player contributions in the season/week•    Adding a tag to player name to denote the club
Question is there anything else you would like to be able to do when searching or managing your club?Also I'll talk about club rewards in a bit so feel free to hold off on questions around that and trading as I might answer them saving you from having to ask So from the question above what I'm seeing so far is:
-More restrictions such as # of cars-Additional club officer role/ability to hand over club leader role
I'll talk about some of the other stuff in a second (races etc)As the next area we are looking at with clubs is to make them something both new players and veteran players want to join and be involved with, to help with this we are looking at making a number of changes to existing systems:
•    Add more maps for club races (we will be doing this incrementally as it is additional work to setup races for clubs)•    Look at how we can introduce different race types for club races so that clubs can create their own internal challenges (e.g. allow you to chose a track & set a time for people to beat)•    Improving club chato    Adding emoji’s into the chato    Direct messageso    Expanding club chat to other areas of the game (especially for club related activities)Basically is to slowly build on what we have currently for clubs by giving you more functionality and controlAlso we are looking at adding new features (this is where it gets interesting)so the 1st idea is to introduce an achievement based mechanic for clubs (that all members will contribute to) that will come in 2 forms:
•    A “club perk” mechanic unlocking these would give longer term tangible benefits of being part of a club e.g. bonus rep, able to have more options in club races etc as some early ideas.•    A club “task” that requires everyone in the club to work together and achieve something over a period of time (daily, weekly etc). Completion of these would earn not just the rewards of completion but a general reward for everyone in the club.The idea behind this is everyone in the club would help the club grow (gain XP increase in level etc) by performing activities that earn club pointsAs the club progresses you would unlock the perks getting permanent benefitsAdditionally the "task" would be a variation of the daily task idea which give solo rewards but instead everyone for a club could work together to complete these and earn something for the entire club.Now something that I'm sure has come up and people are aware of is the issue of club hoppingPersonally I find it annoying when a club I am in has worked hard to get a reward and someone joins at the last minute, collects it then moves onwe are looking at way's to discourage this sort of behaviour for instance you only get the rewards if you have contributed X% and/or been with the club for 1 season etcnot sure what the rules will be for it yet but it is something we will have. Since if we make clubs more important and give more rewards from them we don't want people exploiting itso Question and thoughts/comments about these new ideas? Another new feature we are looking to add is an internal club leaderboardthe idea behind this will be to rank everyone in the club based upon their contribution over a period of time (be it weekly or season length TBD).Based upon your rank we would then give out bonus rewards for the top X% e.g. top 1% get Y, 2- 20% get B etcas part of the leaderboard we would also look to expand the info on it so we could show more than just contribution potentially e.g. best time etc
@Mina will post a poll in the #dev-chat-vote for the 3 new ideas for you to like/dislikeOk let's move off clubs in general for a bit and talk about what seems to be everyone's favourite topic rewards
====Rewards====
This is 1 of the hardest things to discuss as it impacts the balance of the game and of course everyone always wants more and bigger rewards To give everyone a bit of context when it comes to rewards if we just look at cars (driving them is the core of the game after all) it is a complicated process involving not just the team building the cars (which takes time) but also ensuring we have a license for the car, getting sign off on how we have built the car, what it looks like, the colours, the decals basically everything.  Since this takes time it is a limit on how many we can do per updatebut naturally we want to make sure everyone gets something out of playing the gameso we have been having a number of internal discussions about what we could do to ensure we can give rewards with real value to you for the game without breaking the game, breaking our artists (trust me when I say the 3D team are some of the hardest working people you would ever meet) or totally watering down rewards so that they have no real valueAn idea that we have been discussing which I would love to get everyone's feedback on (we will put a like/dislike poll up for it in a minute) is the following:
Once you have a car maxed out you can “evolve it” into the legendary version. This would allow you to get even more out of the cars performance making it faster, handle better etc, so side by side a maxed out car and a legendary car the legendary would have better stats.this would work hypothetically (it is still early discussion) as some kind of hybrid between the current BP system and import partswe would look at having different UI for legendary cars, treat them as a second car in the garage (it's important so we can have races of legend vs. legend as well as not to keep things balanced) etc.The other idea we have been discussing, which could work with the legendary version or be by itself is to give you the players the ability to "tune" your carthe idea would be that  once you have maxed out a cars  you would unlock the ability to adjust the tuning on the car within a range of parameters so that it plays a bit more how you would like it. For instance reduce some speed on a Lamborghini but make it handle better etc.both systems would allow us to add more rewards to the game without adding more carsand as a bonus for those who have not already maxed out the cars it means we can also look at bringing in more ways for you to earn "old" (i.e. not the current updates cars) cars. I'll talk about these in a bit as it ties into Club wars (spoiler alert)ok looking at the votes on the 2 new ideas for rewards it seems they are not very popular is there any particular reason why?I should also clarify the idea behind the 2 rewards is that these are things you can earn from being involved with clubs and other areas of the game, not necessarily something you need to buy or compete heavily to getOk let's move on to the next topic
====Trade System====
since this question has come up a tonWe are looking at introducing a trade system for members within a clubthe idea would be to allow you to request and donate blueprints to other members of your club so as to help them improve their cars and garage level. Current discussions are to look at a system that:
•    Allows you to request BP based upon the cars you have and your garage level•    Donate BP based upon your garage level and the type of car BP you are donating•    Donations would earn a reward.what we don't want to do is introduce a free for all auction system as this will inevitably get exploited@Mina will put a poll to see if people like the concept or notand in the meantime is there anything else you would like to see in a trade system, please shout out in the discussion channel.  Keep in mind it will at least initially only be within a clubOk let's move onto the next big topic for the day
====Clan Wars/Club Wars====
I've seen a few mentions of wanting club vs. club racing in the discussion channel which ties in nicely with something the design team has been researching and thinking aboutwhich is to implement some sort of club war system for a bit now and the design team thinks this could be a great new feature allowing clubs to compete against each other for unique prizes as well as to find out which clubs are the best.Our current thoughts are to have the club wars work a bit like this:
•    Club signs up for a club war•    Matched with another club of the same size, average garage level etc.•    Each club then has a period of time to “capture” nodes and setup defences (Use your cars to set times to beat) while at the same time unlocking rewards and “boosts” to help them in the club war.•    After the initial time has passed the club would then try and defeat the other club’s nodes.•    At the end of this period of time the club with the most “points” would be declared the winner.•    This cycle could be repeated e.g. best of 3 to determine an overall winner or it could be a 1 or done. In any case rewards would be earned by both clubs and bonus rewards could be earned by reaching different “point thresholds” (so you can get even more rewards even if you technically lost).During both the capture and defeat we would be looking at methods by which not only do you use your own cars (free fuel so no cost to try again) but also have ways in which you can "help" your club matesby lending them cars etchowever to make it a bit more strategic and not just a spam the Jesko over and over eventyou would need to make decisions on which cars to use to capture and which to use to attackas we would lock "nodes" once they are in a set state so only that car can be usedadditionally who can attack a node will be limited (think multiple branching paths)so the club would need to work together to capture nodes that give the most points and boostswhile at the same time supporting each other to use the best cars in the right spotdoes this sound like something you would play/enjoy?
Put your votes over in the #dev-chat-vote channel for italso toss any questions about it in discussion
Ok next little bit about club wars and a question.  As most of you know the game currently runs on a season basiswe want club wars to be something that is continually ongoing e.g. you can do it at anytime.But we also want to use the club wars as a way for clubs to show off who is the best so we have the idea of a meta leaderboard. This leaderboard would run during the normal season and rank the clubs based upon win/loss record (so small clubs can compete against big ones) and as the mode will require strategic thought bots will not be easy to spot, eliminate or won't work (I'll talk more about bots in general at the end)ok looking at the voting it seems club wars is a popular idea  that's good to knowso last question for now on club wars
How long do you think a war should last? 3 days, 1 week, 1 month?go to #dev-chat-vote and cast your voteI felt a bit like Ryan Seacrest when I typed thatOk let's do a final wrap up with a few 
====Miscellaneous topics====
So things that I've seen come up in the discussion channel not directly touched on
=====Bots=====
everyone's favourite irritantSo no making any excuses (it will sound like it so I apologies) but bots are not just a pain for you the players they are also a nightmare for usWe have people dedicated to reviewing all complaints, banning, removing etc as fast as they canyet like a bad game of wack-a-mole they do keep coming upseveral things we are actively doing
-improving our bot detection both automatic (find and hammer) as well as manual-Putting in more reporting tools for you the players to report them (see last update)looking at ways we can modify the game so bots cannot run easily (this is the trickiest part)
Next question I've seen a bunch is
=====Fuel in Club Races=====
currently as club races give rep they also cost fuelwe can look at removing the fuel from the club races however to keep things balanced we would also then need to remove or lower the repotherwise you guessed it we have an exploit were players just grind it for rep (or we get even more bots)now having said that 1 thing can look at is a "practice mode"the idea behind this is that a club leader creates a practice track -> sets a time by racing themself (or a designated person)this track is then free cost for club members to race onbasically a club mode allowing you to teach new members the best path etc
And next one
=====Account sharing=====
this is a tough one for usas it is virtually impossible for us to tell if you are sharing an account (hand your phone to your friend who is a good  racer and we cannot tell easily)so how do we solve it? again not an easy solution we can look at checking ipetcdoesn't always work and is annoying1 thing we do and are improving is checking concurencyso if people do share an account we can catch them if they are both logged on at the same timewhich does help reduce it a bitAlright back to more fun topics 
=====Filters on Club Races.=====
To elaborate on what I mentioned earlier as part of improving the overall club experience we want to give the clubs more control over setting up their own races and internal competitionspart of this is not just adding more of the tracks to choose from (which we are doing slowly) but also adding more options you can set when setting up a club racefor instance filters to set slipstream  + ghosting, or no KD etcthe idea is in the end to make most of the controls that we have for creating our events available to you to create your own club events (maybe even up to allowing clubs to setup their own prize pools)
Next one was different club ranks
Now this has 2 answers depending on who asks the question Club ranks in the sense of founder,officer,member etcare something we are looking at adding. (I'll call these club roles)ranks as in level 1, 2,3,100is something that we would be looking to have as part of the club progression system I mentioned beforewere a club at different "level" would unlock different perks and benefits
And last but probably not least
=====Checking out other players garage=====
this is a bit more of an in depth topic but I'll give you a snapshot of what we have been looking atFirstly we are looking at the player profile and seeing what could be added to this to give you more info when you inspect another player (e.g. garage level, highest rated car, best time etc)We are also looking at a "garage collection" feature which would allow you to sort your cars based upon different filters so you can easily see which cars you, don't have and wantas part of this we are considering allowing other players (be it anyone, club mates or even friends (and yes we are thinking about friends lists)) view thiskind of like showing off your sticker book to your friends
Ok going to wrap it up for now. Thank you everyone for coming along and being involved. I hope you enjoyed it and got something out of it, it is certainly great for me to hear from everyone, see your reactions and have got some great feedback from it.We want to keep doing these once a month and will have a think about the next topic and get it posted as soon as we can (or feel free to suggest an area you would like to discuss)Before we close it off we will put a vote up in the #dev-chat-vote on how you found this format as it is different then the last one and we look to improve this each time.
Thanks everyone, and have a good weekend
==#Dev-Chat-Vote==
Mina:
=====1st Vote=====
Question what size clubs would you be interested in? 30,40,50 or even bigger?
30 / 40 / 50 / Bigger
The most voted one was 30
=====2nd Vote=====
A “club perk” mechanic unlocking these would give longer term tangible benefits of being part of a club e.g. bonus rep, able to have more options in club races etc as some early ideas. 
Vote with ThumbUp if you like this idea and with ThumbDown if you don't
A club “task” that requires everyone in the club to work together and achieve something over a period of time (daily, weekly etc). Completion of these would earn not just the rewards of completion but a general reward for everyone in the club.The idea behind this is everyone in the club would help the club grow (gain XP increase in level etc) by performing activities that earn club pointsAs the club progresses you would unlock the perks getting permanent benefitsAdditionally the "task" would be a variation of the daily task idea which give solo rewards but instead everyone for a club could work together to complete these and earn something for the entire club.
Another new feature we are looking to add is an internal club leaderboard - t he idea behind this will be to rank everyone in the club based upon their contribution over a period of time (be it weekly or season length TBD). Based upon your rank we would then give out bonus rewards for the top X% e.g. top 1% get Y, 2- 20% get B etc. as part of the leaderboard we would also look to expand the info on it so we could show more than just contribution potentially e.g. best time etc.
These ideas were highly accepted by the Players.
=====3rd Vote=====
RewardsReward idea 1: Once you have a car maxed out you can “evolve it” into the legendary version. This would allow you to get even more out of the cars performance making it faster, handle better etc, so side by side a maxed out car and a legendary car the legendary would have better stats.
We would look at having different UI for legendary cars, treat them as a second car in the garage (it's important so we can have races of legend vs. legend as well as not to keep things balanced) etc.
Reward idea 2: For maxed out cars allow you to “tune the car”. The idea is to allow players to adjust the tuning on the car within a range of parameters so that it plays a bit more how you would like it. For instance reduce some speed on a Lamborghini but make it handle better etc.
Both ideas were highly rejected by the Players, having both the biggest ammount of ThumbsDown.
=====4th Vote=====
Trade SystemWe are looking at introducing a trade system for members within a club - the idea would be to allow you to request and donate blueprints to other members of your club so as to help them improve their cars and garage level. Current discussions are to look at a system that:
•    Allows you to request BP based upon the cars you have and your garage level•    Donate BP based upon your garage level and the type of car BP you are donating•    Donations would earn a reward.what we don't want to do is introduce a free for all auction system as this will inevitably get exploited.
This idea was Highly accepted by the Players, in fact, its the Idea with the biggest ammount of ThumbsUp (at the moment)
This idea was highly accepted by the Players, in fact, its the idea with the biggest ammount of ThumbsUp.
How long do you think a club war should last?3 days / 1 week / 2 weeks
The most voted one was 1 week.
=====5th Vote=====
One final question for today. Do you like this format of the DevChat? (1 - I do not like it at all, 5  - I love it)
Most of the Players loved this DevChat format.
=====6th Vote=====
What topic would you like to discuss next?- Special Events- Grand Prix- Career Mode
Special Events was the most voted one.
==Resume of the Dev-Talk==
The first Topic was about Clubs In General, where the Devs were trying to improve Clubs Milestones by decressing the required Reputation for the Rewards and readjusting the Rewards to balance it as much as possible, Increasing the number of members allowed in a Club, making the management of Club easier by adding Filters and looking at the contributions of the Player before let him/her join, adding more maps for the Club Races, introducing different types of Club Races, Improving the Club Chat, Adding Club "Perks" and "Tasks" to get a Bonus for participating in the Club and an Internal Club Leaderboard which will be based on the contribution a player has given to the Club and will give a Bonus depending on how much you contributed.
The next topic was about the Rewards, Where the Devs were trying to give the Rewards more value without breaking the Game, Their Artists or Totally watering down rewards so that they don't have real Value. The first idea the gave was to Evolve a Maxed car into a Legendary version to make it have a better speed or handling, giving it a different UI. the other idea that was discussed was to give the ability to "Tune" the cars, so once you have a Maxed car, you can Tune it to have Less Speed, but More Handling or Vice-versa.
The next topic was about the Trading System, Where the Devs were trying to introduce a Trade System for members within a Club, to donate Blueprints to other members by allowing to request or donating BPs upon the cars and club level you have and donating will earn Rewards
The next topic and the biggest of the Dev-Talk was about Clan Wars/Club Wars, Where the Devs were trying to introduce a Club Vs. Club mode which will allow the Club to compete with each others, matching with Clubs with similar Cars and Garage Level, giving a time to "capture" Nodes and setup Defenses, the club with the most points would be declared the Winner and the Cycle could be repeated to determinate an Overall Winner or it could be a 1 or not. In any case rewards would be earned by both clubs and bonus rewards could be earned by reaching different "point threshold", so you can get even more rewards even if you technically lost. They will also look at methods to not only use your cars, but also helping other clubmates by lending them cars and to be more strategic and not spam Jesko over and over again during the Event, you would need to make decision on which car use to capture and which to attack, as they would lock "nodes" once they are in a set state so only that car can be used and additionally who can attack the nodes will be limited so the club would have to work together to capture the nodes and give the most points and boosts
The lastest part of the Dev-Talk was a bunch of Miscellaneous Topics, like Bots, where Devs were trying to Improve the Bots detection and giving more option to the Report System, Account Sharing, the toughest topic, giving more control on Club Races, like setting up Filters, so the Players can do Club races with Sliptstream, No KD or Ghosting, giving different Ranks in the Club, like Founder, Officer, Member, Etc, Giving the club Levels (like 1, 2, 3, 100) where a club at different "level" will unlock different perks and benefits and as the last topic, checking other players Garage, they are looking to adding more info to the players profile (like Garage Level, Highest rated Car, Best Time, Etc), a "Garage Collection" feature which will allow the players to sort your cars based upon different filters so they can easily see which car they have, which don't and want, as part of this they are considering allowing other players (be it anyone, clubmates, or even friends) view this.
Category:Asphalt 9 Dev Chats