Interview with Slava Makarov (the brony guy) on Jove stream
Sorry for some confusing sentences, but some of his statements seemed weird. Maybe they’re out of context, but in any case not easy to translate.
– I played console and Blitz, and looking at the PC interface I’m in shock, not about everything of course but it’s different;
– After “Rubicon” we had hearings how it came to this, the leadership of Minsk’ development changed heavily. The lead left us, the designer lead did as well. Currently the decision was made to make me the creative director of tanks;
– “We don’t have such crap on consoles”;
– When we first added arty, we had a specific goal in mind which currently doesn’t work. We have to remake the class so it does. The experiment we made is first of all just an experiment to recieve results. We’re analyzing them and planning the next iteration;
– Balance has to be redone as a whole, maybe we have overdone the scale a bit during the first iteration, but we honestly promised to regard each and every tank, which we did;
– Murazor is helping really well, there is a significant contribution;
– Yes, there is such an term as pace of the game (turbo-wins/turbo-losses, e.g. 15:0, 0:15);
– 5-minute battles are delusions;
– I don’t catch Pokemon, that’s some kind of hell;
– I don’t know what’s happening to maps, I’ve wanted to talk to the programmers for a long time;
– Some new premiums are bad, first we have to make sure who did what exactly;
– Recently I was figuring out why historical battles didn’t work and the answer really surprised me;
– “Czechs are bloody imbalanced”. Here it’s clear who did what, we’ll have to change the approach at testing vehicles;
– I’ll try to explain (that’s my task now) to the mapmakers, designers, sound-makers, balancing department and many others what the general idea is and what we want to achieve, and then decompose this into parts. Which technology we need, which approach we need at mapmaking etc.
– I finally managed to return an old colleague from mapmaking. He made such maps as Himmelsdorf, Karelia and others;
– Redoing maps is really tedious, we’re thinking about it right now and there are no final decisions yet;
– The new matchmaker + rebalancing requires the appearance of tier 10 LT, they’re hard to implement and balance. If it so happens that they’ll be balanced according to old statistics and values, it’ll be really bad;
– We’re all self-educated, there are no fixed rules on how to balance tanks. But we now have Murazor who has some kind of intuition;
– The psychology of a player, how he will behave on a newly made map have to be considered, and that’s exactly where we have problems;
– Honestly – we’ll do something about premium ammo;
– The number of premium shells didn’t inflate much, the problem lies in a general inflation of armor penetration and view range, now everyone shoots across half the map [TN: imo, they have overlooked a slow but steady power creep which started somewhere when the French were introduced iirc and try to revert it with the Sandbox experiment];
– A part of economical desicions in China is made by KongZhong;
– I disagreed with Veider on many points;
– Feedback of players is really helping. We might’ve been living obviously thinking everything’s all right without it;
– When we searched for documentation on Japanese tanks, this was a hellish story. It went something like this: we know that this tank might have existed, now write to all Japanese historians and ask if there is anything on it. This was one of the hardest branches to make;
– Someone who was working but left is returning to marketing, along with Anton Pankov who recieved some authority on this matter;
– Next patch is targeted for September, currently being tested;
– There will be a bigger patch around New Year;
– How statistics are being treated is a story for itself, but that it’s not being treated quite correctly is one of the problems. I’ll try to fix that;
– I think at some point we dived too much into statistics, harming the subjective perception. Statistics are important, but shouldn’t be exclusive;
– Mikhail Zhivets (Storm) will be playing a less important role in the project. He’s still helping us currently, but he is very tired [TN: not surprising regarding how much retarded shit the RU playerbase was heaving at him];
– Personal missions have to be redone, we discussed this topic;
– Master of Orion turned out well;
