Greetings Survivors, we wanted to share a little feedback from our team with some recent responses to your concerns and suggestions in Survarium 0.66. Some of these were selected from our official Discord and the rest are general concerns about current balance. We had omitted the toxic suggestions and the ones about modules (we already have 300+ of them in the game) unless there were specific issues, like with silencers for pistols. Below you can see what we had to say.
Join our official Discord and submit your own suggestions if you'd like to see them answered. The ones with the most upvotes will be passed along to the devs whenever possible!
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1. Playerbase division caused by current branching, ordering, and weighting of passive skills in the skill trees. Speed (movement speed and action speed) and stamina delta (Δ) between low/medium level players with few skill points and veteran players with many skill points is too great. This encourages campy gameplay in low level players and hackusations against high level players.
Meta skills are inaccessible to most players due to being placed in the final branch of the trees, which gives a small group of players the ability to dominate everyone else. Boring for veterans, frustrating for everyone else. Meta skills should be close to the start of the tree, with diminishing returns approaching the last branches of the tree. Like this, players wouldn’t feel that they are wasting skill points on useless skills just to reach the useful ones, especially in the last 2 skill trees due to them requiring 10+10 more points just to unlock the final branches.
ADS (“aim-down-sights”) speed delta can be on the order of 4-5x if the correct gear set, passive skills, weapon modules and modifications are employed. Reload time reduction can be 55 %, or more if you mix the sets. This is a massively unfair advantage. The difference in ADS speed, reload speed, movement speed should be no more than 1.3x between basic and fully minmaxed. This would be more in line with other non-p2w games.
We are actually reworking many skills (and adding new ones), coming in 0.67!
We are also thinking about giving new players some skill points right from the start. One idea is to give 10 points on the first level, but don't give skill points on levels 10, 20, etc (now that the players get decals on those levels). So with this approach nothing changes for veterans, but new players would have more skill points to experiment with. What do you think?
Another option to explore is to make the stacking effect of similar modifiers smaller. Either by diminishing returns or by changing the formula. However, this requires a lot of research, testing and fine-tuning. Don't expect this to come soon, though, as by introducing these changes without much thinking could only make the things worse.
2. Players who don’t leave the base. Maps are designed in such a way that enemies can be killed without leaving your base.This was acknowledged over one year ago in the Duga map interview (available in RU/UA), but progress hasn’t been made to alleviate this and, in fact, the developers have recently said that “working on locations takes a lot of effort, even if the changes seem small”.
If it’s not possible to modify maps like London or Cologne (people just sit at the back of their base on top of the rails, a train or a balcony) by simply obstructing the view, then you need to approach this in a different way. Don’t let them deal damage from inside the base spawn or make them start receiving damage for staying in the base, because they don’t care about the objective.
Nobody likes campers, but punishing the players for staying at the base seems wrong, especially if the enemy team is pushing hard and forces you to stay at respawn. This applies to both dealing damage to them or not letting them attack. There's got to be another solution to that.
Having said that, we'll think about what can be done to make the bases less sniper friendly (regardless of whether that team is winning or losing).
3. Headshot multiplier. Too many deaths are instant because of easy headshots. It has been a controversial topic in the game for the last 2 years. I personally know players who stopped playing because of this.
For example, the lowest damage carbine, can kill the heaviest armor helmet in the game with one shot. And most of the ARs kill it with 2 shots. What’s the point of improving armor if you still get obliterated?
With lower HS multiplier, the lightest masks/helmets could take one hit to the head and they would die to the next bullet. Headgear with medium armor would require 2 shots, which would feel instant... but you could decide to wear heavy armor and it would require 3 shots in the head to kill you. Your skill would have a much greater role in 1v1, and hitting consecutive headshots would be rewarded with a fast kill.
We increased headshot damage multiplayer due to community requests in the first place. But due to requests, we'll decrease it to x2.5 down from x3 in the next balancing update, likely with 0.67. In general, there shouldn't be other changes to TTK, so decreasing headshot multiplier would lead to less one shots and increased TTK on average.
4. Shotguns in version 0.66. Update 0.66 increased the number of pellets in each shot from 8 to 12. There’s less randomness, pellets are distributed more evenly. In long-range fights, hits are more common, and although these pellets deal less damage, it’s irrelevant when the rate of fire is faster than on carbines and can kill targets even on mid-range fights (imagine across the School gym distances). There needs to be more overall dispersion (less shot grouping) for maxed-out shotguns, they can’t be the only choice for close quarter maps.
Please also take a look at Vepr-12 reload speed when fully minmaxed. Jackhammer dispersion from the hip also needs to be revised, as there’s no need to aim down sights with that shotgun. As an extra, it’s not possible to buy a pump-action shotgun for Silver, all are behind Treasure Hunt or Gold.
Shotguns, by definition, are the best choice for close quarters. And Jackhammer is the only fully automatic shotgun in the game, and it's tier 5, of course it's a strong option for close to mid distances.
Another point to consider is this: when you think something is too strong or too weak, you are judging by your subjective opinion, and we rely on statistics. And statistics show that on tier 5 Jackhammer is far less popular than assault rifles and SMGs. Not only that, it's also less effective (based on K/D ratio with the weapon). And in general, shotguns are much less used than any other weapon class other than pistols.
So, if someone is good at exploiting a weapon's strengths, you think it warrants a nerf? But maybe we'll make the hipfire less accurate.
Regardless, armor and weapon balancing changes will be coming soon. We just can't promise we will nerf shotguns or any other weapon class, for that matter.
5. Diminishing teammate nicks. It has been suggested in the past to make the nicks hide if they’re far away or behind a wall when the option “always display teammate nicks and health bars” is enabled, but that hasn’t been implemented for unknown reasons. Objective icon opacity (in Research, Batteries, S&D…) is reduced while aiming down sights, so please at least implement the same but for teammate nicks to avoid situations where they are right behind the enemy and you die because you thought it was a friendly.
6. Friendly marker/tag colorization (Discord suggestion). There should be an option to choose friendly marker/tag colors. The small white marker arrow or even full white name text can easily be washed out from the environment lighting for a few moments leading to unintended friendly fire. More tag color variety should help reduce friendly fire overall and make them more noticeable for each individual's needs. If it's not possible to add such a feature, then friendly tags should at least have a black outline around the white text, making it visible in any situation.
So one question is about making teammates' nicknames less visible, and the next one is about making them more visible? We don't know how we should react.
But ok, we will see if we can implement the suggestions: reduce opacity when aiming down sights and add a black border around the white text.
7. Rage inducing spots on London map. There is one place in London that is particularly used when stealing batteries to safely get away from the enemy base. This is the spot in question: https://i.imgur.com/0vrr4TV.jpg The problem here is that the ceiling on the left is too low for the character to jump across, and the first box is too high to jump on it. Normally by using the sprinting mechanic to get on things this wouldn’t be a problem, but it’s not possible when carrying a battery. Put the first box in the same angle as the second one to create a type of ramp and you’ll easily solve this problem.
We'll see what we can do.
8. Spectator mode in custom matches and clan wars (Discord suggestion). Ability to watch the match as a flying camera in private lobbies. This was a very requested feature during the successful Survarium Clan League (SCL, season 1), where it became apparent that there is no way to view the matches live to commentate them like in other competitive games. A player can record or stream the match, but it will only be seen from his point of view.
Survarium was never intended to be a cybersport discipline, so effort was not put into creating a spectator mode. Alas, at this point it's unrealistic. Moreover, this feature can be used to gain an advantage in a match, so we'd have to introduce some kind of delay for spectators. And it's also not easy to do.
9. Killcam duration. Killcam duration in TDM is about 13 seconds because it is the respawn timer. Killcam should be shorter to give instructions better to the teammates. There’s no need to see what the killer was doing before starting to shoot. Play the killcam first and then do the respawn timer, don’t link them to one another.
The idea is that the killcam shows you how your character was killed (which is especially useful to new players), but also does that with a slight delay, so it's harder to exploit that (like you say,
let the teammates know). We think it's fine as it is.
10. Map variations in custom matches (Discord suggestion). When creating custom matches or clan matches, you can select spawn sides or a server, but the map variation is random. It may happen that one of the teams, despite a change of sides, still has an advantage over the opponent because the map variation has changed. It can be seen very clearly on Rudnya or London, where Research mode objectives are distributed in different places quite often. Therefore, it should be possible to choose a variation in the lobby.
That's a good point, we'll do that in 0.67.
11. “Tournament rules” for custom matches. Clan wars are played without a killcam and with no hit markers, but it’s not possible to disable them in custom matches. This would be useful when practicing against your own clan members, or for teams who, like it happened during SCL, had more than 2 line-ups for the tournament and were forced to play custom matches against each other with different rules and a “gentlemen” agreement to disable killcam and hit markers.
We'll see if we can add an option to toggle killcam and hitmarkers for custom matches.
12. Option to choose the default color scheme on Premium sets (Discord suggestion). The Premium sets are some kind of crazy survivor's nightmare. Why are they so bright? Are we going to a party? How to hide with a red, orange or blue flashy set with all the greenery around? Some say that even if they had all the money in the world, they would not buy these sets even with 90 % discount. So, just like how with premium weapons you can choose the default skin, the same should be allowed for Premium sets by simply adding the "camouflage" button.
When the sets were first created, it was believed that the players would want something shiny in this post-apoc world, and the artists didn't think about making it possible to easily recolor the textures. So to change the set colors, we'd have to essentially retexture them from scratch. It's a long and expensive process. We already discussed it with the team, and decided that it's not worth the effort.
However, it might be possible to enable models from common (silver) equipment for the identical premium items. We'll see how and if that can be done.
And frankly, with 90% discount the sets would be a great deal simply because of the premium weapon included. But we don't force you to buy them, with discount or now, as there's plenty of other equipment in the game which is free.
13. Chemical plant issues with sniper campers. In old versions of the game there was one anomaly that made this map balanced, but when it was removed, this map became unbalanced. The water spill area near A flag once had a toxic field that made it impossible for people to be there for long periods of time without an oxygen tank or high anomaly protection. This area is now full of sniper rats that usually manage to kill a lot of players before dying, because they have a very good view of the enemy base and are hidden by the grass, and there are very few ways to get close to them to kill them (one of them involves going from behind, through the enemy base, across the whole map). It seems only logical to bring back this type of anomaly to such a strategic spot, to keep the sniper presence limited.
Yes, one of the teams has a 59.3% average win-rate on this map (that's really a lot!), and on all other maps it's much closer to 50%/50% split. We'll see what we can do to balance it better and remove that spot.
14. Recoil value in the shop view of a weapon (Discord suggestion). Right now the current recoil value of a weapon can only be checked in the workshop, please make the standard recoil value also visible in the simplified shop view of a weapon with all the other characteristics. Would make it easier to compare weapons for beginners who don't have millions of Silver to purchase every weapon.
We doubt showing numbers will be useful to beginners. Testing weapons in the shooting range (before buying) seems like a better option, and you already can do that in the game (you can press RMB on any weapon in the shop and there's an option to test it in the shooting range). We'll think about how we can promote that feature better.
15. Pistol suppressor sights (Discord suggestion). Iron sights get obscured by the suppressor when it’s used on any pistol in the game, forcing the player to use collimators or no suppressor, and pistols like Mauser don’t have access to collimators to solve this issue. In real life, a thing called “elevated iron sights” exists to solve this issue. This attachment can apply to all pistols and expand game content. Pictures for reference: https://i.imgur.com/XG9d4NH.png and https://i.imgur.com/UPaHr5I.png
Not sure if something like that can be easily added without tweaking camera and attachment placements. But we'll look into that, as well as into making hip fire more accurate for pistols.