Pixonic's New Year's Resolutions

Fellow Pilots,

Happy New Year from War Robots University! We will be adding some new professors in 2018, and we remain resolved to give you an academic perspective on the game. It is our hope that you have a great year, playing a great game. The U got a nice "shout-out" from Mech Spectrum's Dredd77, which you can see here.

Firstly, in the name of science, I decided not to spin any black market chests during the December season. I concluded with about 1500 keys, and here was the result:



I don't know why, but I received no Nashorns, Molots, or Pins (not to denigrate any of them, I have plenty of conventional stuff). For a player looking to acquire new gear, I have to cautiously recommend NOT spinning the chests.

As you might guess from the title of this post, the U isn't the only institution with resolutions! Pixonic has a number of forward-looking articles posted now on their new web page. More to the point for THIS post, however, was a Discord chat between community content creators like Adrian(nnnnnn) Chong, Foggy Gaming, yours truly, and Anatoly, one of the game's developers. With Pixonic's permission, I have posted some of the highlights below. Spelling has been corrected, but syntax is unchanged. I have edited order simply to prioritize some of the information.

Professor Yat: Would Pix be interested in making it more difficult to “tank,” or drop levels quickly to club seals? One way to do this: like Wikipedia. You are probably familiar with the early problems it had with online vandalism. People would put stupid stuff in articles because it was easy to do. The solution turns out to be making repair easy, and vandalism hard. At Wikipedia, you get more trust the more peers approve of your work, and when the vandal writes on your page you can just revert to an earlier version. It makes fixing the vandalism much easier than doing it. If, in War Robots, it was much harder to tank, fewer people would do it. I posted a few screenshots of a guy I watched go down by thousands of points in a single day. To avoid the levers queue, he would eject four robots, and then get his last one killed. His win rate was 25 percent, and he was in the bottom position, falling by about 20 points per bottle. He could fall as many as 1000 points in 50-70 battles, and he was only playing in each for a minute or less. BUT if the rating system was more stable, it would be much harder to drop. Maybe if the top three on a team went up by one, two, and three points respectively, and the bottom three on the losing team dropped by maybe one or two. In other words, the system could view the bottom three winners and the top three losers as essentially playing a draw and awarding zero points toward the rating. Thus, it would be very, very difficult to fall significantly. It would take 500 matches to fell 1000 points instead of 50 matches. Combined with the new incentives, far fewer people might do the grind to get down into low leagues.

Anatoly: ATM we're working on Battle Chests and Regular Chests (you've heard about them as Supply Line and Battle Rewards). We're making those rewards more beautiful as players grows in leagues. Like it won't be profitable to drop some games. I have direct numbers and can speak about them, but - they will appear in our community sources in a very near future.

Community: Will the battle chests and rewards be rewards enough to stop people from tanking? One can earn a lot by tanking, will these effectively outstrip the benefits?

Anatoly: Silver payouts will certainly be increased. Shards [components] inside regular and battle chest will be changed in regular basis (like every month or so) so every mid- to high-tier player guarantee achieve it inside this time scope ... let me show you battle chests numbers
["soft" = silver]:



Community: Why not to move to hangar-based MM, where most of the issues could've been solved?

Anatoly: Because hangar power doesnt take an account of player's skill.

We learned early in the chat that Anatoly doesn't make decisions about what to bring to the game, its balance, or its cost. It is my understanding that his job was to take the decisions made by those responsible, and make them in-game reality. His comment on his responsibilities was:

Anatoly: I've joined Pixonic 4 month ago, and in that time we've managed to work all way to release (ok, not release, but QA testing) Regular and Battle chests, designed new clan system (like clans 2.0), designed and started to implements battle UI features (like power difference indicator, armor bars, allies bars and so on) ...

Community: Could you elaborate on the test drive hangar decks?

Anatoly: We're going to add to custom matches option to play at "Pixonic" preset, that is build by our community and doesn't have any connections to player's hangars. And we're going to change this test-drive hangar on regular basis based on our community activities, with polls and stuff like that.

Community: >Is it possible to give a feature to see the damage breakdown of each of our bots? What bots scored what damage ?

Anatoly: We're have something similar at early stages atm. Let me show you:
Community: > Can you tell us something about the events in 2018? How will they be different and exciting than the ones now?

Anatoly: We're always come with something handy for our birthday event. Besides that, we're thinking about event game mods. And skins. And boosters. And multipliers. And themed weeks. Do you really want to spoil all the fun?
Community: Yes.

Anatoly: We're going to add encrypted messages to the game itself and surrounding media for players to pick different letters on post, youtube videos and game maps, combining them together and receiving some in-game reward for it. We're going to add new game mods, like King of the Hill and Free For All, and tie them to events. We're going to buff honor income on this events. We're going to buff certain drop chances on this event, like in HoMMIII "week of griffins". Enough?

Concept artwork for Griffin redesign:

Concept artwork for Natasha redesign:



More to follow, and HAPPY NEW YEAR!
Your humble servant,
Dr. Where y'at?, phD

Faculty Notes

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Until the introduction of the Greek bots, Pixonic provided component items to War Robots University's professors/pilots for review.  The content of War Robots U is created and edited by its authors exclusively.  For an explanation of the relationship between Pixonic and the U, read this post!

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