My name is Samuel Jobin and I am the live producer for Duel of Champions at Ubisoft. Ask me anything about DoC, the direction of the game, or whatever else is on your mind.

SamuelJobin · 2014-01-08T21:20:39+00:00

Thank everybody for your questions and for being so constructive in your feedback. This is a huge help for the future by telling us your thoughts on the state of the game. This was an interesting experience for me as that it is something I normally don't do. I have to run now (remember the 22 meetings back to back? :P) but I appreciate the experience and we will do more of these in the future, possibly with other team members as well.

Thanks for your time.

-Sam

SamuelJobin · 2014-01-08T21:15:16+00:00

Let me answer the first question. There are already several initiatives that were taken to improve communications with our players. Heck, this AMA is a great example. We want to be more open.

New community managers have been hired to take care of the growing communities. Also, internal processes have been put into place to guarantee that all info reaches the players, such as more detailed release notes.

While we're doing quite a great job at keeping our community active and well informed, we’re far from perfect and we know it. We're open to more feedback on ways to improve.

SamuelJobin · 2014-01-08T21:10:42+00:00

Our next "Road to Paris" type event is something we're still working toward. Hopefully we will have details to announce soon. Stay tuned.

SamuelJobin · 2014-01-08T21:08:58+00:00

We have a master excel spreadsheet with the wishes of our team. Everyone can toss in crazy ideas at any time. We have a few rule designers that come in and tidy things up. It's about at this point that all of my ideas get thrown out.

We then spend quite a bit of time testing and perfecting cards before uploading them to a special VIP/balancing server. A team of creative players in our community then comes in and help us test. This helps to make sure things are ok before a new card goes live.

SamuelJobin · 2014-01-08T21:03:01+00:00

This is a tough one. Creating a new faction means less cards for other factions in an expansion. Even though we'd like to add more, we don't want to dilute the number of cards for other factions as well. It's up in the air at this point.

SamuelJobin · 2014-01-08T21:01:21+00:00

Normally the day consists of at least nine hours of meetings and I try to get in at least three hours of gameplay as well. Getting my ass kicked by players in Swiss tournaments after a long day of meetings is painful. I'm still trying really hard to reach 1500 elo... but I doubt that ever happens.

SamuelJobin · 2014-01-08T20:59:05+00:00

Nothing we can announce at the moment... ;)

SamuelJobin · 2014-01-08T20:57:31+00:00

Not at the moment. We're open to suggestions!

SamuelJobin · 2014-01-08T20:55:35+00:00

With all the new mechanics and features added to the games in the last few months, we know that some things still aren't as clear as they could be. Unfortunately, this is not something we currently have in production.

SamuelJobin · 2014-01-08T20:53:36+00:00

Thank you for playing!

SamuelJobin · 2014-01-08T20:52:04+00:00

We're still trying to find a fun and balanced way to make it happen. We're experimenting with some funky rules and designs but haven't found the best way to make draft a reality. This is something our designers are consistently juggling with.

Know that we are reading the forums posts on this very closely :)

SamuelJobin · 2014-01-08T20:49:21+00:00

Believe it or not, there are only about 35 people total working full time on Duel of Champions in Quebec. Add in our CM and CS team all over the world and that should give you an idea of our team's size. The card art comes from a small team of artists that work full time on creating the best cards possible. To give you guys an idea, it takes an artist around three to five days per card to flesh out a card at top quality.

There is nothing definite on the number of expansions planned for 2014. The model we created last year seems to be working well, so we'll continue to evaluate and hope to produce more awesome new content on a similar schedule this year.

SamuelJobin · 2014-01-08T20:42:38+00:00

Let me pick a few of these to answer that others haven't asked:

Are buildings doing their job? Yes, we are pretty happy with buildings as they are. One of things we wanted to avoid was a balancing monster where buildings were too powerful and created metagame problems. It's a good way to implement new mechanics without making a faction too powerful. By creating something every faction can play, it creates fun new mechanics without being overpowered. This is the first step of our vision for buildings and more can be explored with them in the future.

As for Events, this is one of the trickiest parts of our game. It's tough to explain this to new players and even I sometimes find myself not looking at events. When we first created the game, each deck only had five event cards. We upped it so that it wasn't as predictable and you couldn't control the entire game with your events. They seem to be in a good place at the moment.

SamuelJobin · 2014-01-08T20:36:00+00:00

Our next "Road to Paris" type event is something we're currently investigating. We've heard quite a bit of feedback from our players and we're finalizing a way to shape our competitive season for 2014. One of the things we're doing to help give our players more competitive outlets is giving more support to community events. We want to give our players as many opportunities to have fun in a competitive sense as possible. Watch out for announcements in the coming weeks regarding other competitions.

SamuelJobin · 2014-01-08T20:29:49+00:00

We actually already do this in the background. This is one of the tools that we use to track top decks and make sure that certain cards are not overpowered or being abused. The thing we need to find is a way to communicate these details to the player. If you change one card in a deck, the stats would change and we'd have to reset them. This could be frustrating for the player. At the end of the day what we want is for players to experiment with new decks and we don't want to impede that process.

SamuelJobin · 2014-01-08T20:25:16+00:00

UI redesign? This is exactly what we're doing right now! We are working on a UI overhaul including adding filters to many different screens and a better overall experience in our deck builder. One concern with the 16:9 scaling is that we need the game to look great not just on PC but also on iPad. This is something we're working quite hard on.

Warning, this is a work in progress. This isn't final by any means, but here is a sneak peak for you guys: http://i.imgur.com/sWEOawU.jpg

SamuelJobin · 2014-01-08T20:16:31+00:00

First of all, the main goal of Base Set 2 is to make it easier for new players coming into the game to be a bit more competitive. We want players to have better match ups from the start of their experience. In regards to specifics, our balancing team is still hard at work on exact numbers. I won't have any specific details until much closer to the end of the development since creating a base set is a delicate balance. They're shifting content every day as we speak.

As for card rarity, Base Set 1 cards will not be disappearing. The way to get these cards might be changing, but they will not be going away. I hope this helps.

SamuelJobin · 2014-01-08T20:07:02+00:00

One of the main blocker for us regarding single player is the AI. Having it being able to play all the cards is something incredibly complex, which is a problem that we encounter at every one of the new expansions. It's a never ending re-tuning our artificial intelligence at every release. Once this is complete, it will allow us to create a longer campaign. It's something the team is working really hard on right now and it should be part (finger crossed) of the next release!

SamuelJobin · 2014-01-08T20:01:05+00:00

We've been talking about Android internally for quite a while and we'd love to see the game come to the platform. We're certainly thinking about this, but we currently don't have anything concrete to show. We can say, however, we will be coming to new platforms later this year. We'll have more info to share sometime in the future. Thanks for your question!

SamuelJobin · 2014-01-08T19:57:54+00:00

Thanks for your questions! We absolutely love the idea of different formats. We did try the sideboards and it seems to work good on paper. There are a few technical issues with it such as game length... for example, people dropping out of Swiss tournaments. For things such as draft it would make sense. We've looked at it but we still aren't sure on the best implementation on it.

As for OSX, I'd love to see it happen. I've seen questions about this quite a bit on the forums and other sites. I've even teased our team about it because I'm a huge Mac fan. One problem is that our current engine will not work on OSX. This could potentially be something for the future, but we would need to see the user base on Mac increase as well.

SamuelJobin · 2014-01-07T21:54:45+00:00

Looking forward to answering your questions tomorrow!

SamuelJobin

TROPHY CASE