I don’t have the costs or the chances on additional stuff & don’t want to post that info even if I did have it (being pre beta it’s not worth the effort to type up).
I was asleep when the accidental viewing of Hero Academy was available and quickly patched so didn’t interact it with myself so am just going on the screenshot I have seen from another which consists of a pop-up screen listing all the HOTM available from “Level 10: Train Legendary Heroes including Heroes of the Month from Old Heroes”. Above the pop up it can just be made out that Level 6 is “Train Rare Troops”.
That and obviously it’s all subject to change anyway…
However on the very little I’ve seen so far I really don’t see anything that has warranted the length of delay we have seen with Hero Academy. What was visible was teased way back in the AMA early last year and doesn’t appear to be any surprises so quite what the delay was for is questionable and would be hard to argue against the “they’ve delayed it so people buy more storage to stockpile heroes” conspiracy theories that occasionally pop up but anyway it might have completely changed by the time beta sees it properly.
If we want tin-foil hat time, they want to delay it until after early may, so people spend $$$$$$ on GM before realizing that GM will be available in the HA
Yeah, I was rolling my eyes a bit there, but if there’s a TC19 version of uncommon hero training, I wouldn’t mind it; fast, cheap feeders would be nice.
That seriously doesn’t require a year’s pondering to come up with and besides think even that would be redundant what with the Trainer Hero level.
Frankly they can do away with “common hero” and “uncommon hero” for a start and have a re-jiggle and slip in a Trade in duplicate Epic hero for its Costume (just costume and not underlying hero) and a similar one for Legendary.
I will say also that what we thought we could no longer have may be a possibility again, if the conceptual tiers hold. Regardless, I’m excited for it, and look forward to @zephyr1’s Beta Beat content.
In terms of actual programming the game and coming up with ideas, I don’t think it would take very long at all for anything; like, s3 could be done in a week if they wanted.
I think they’re just slow-dripping these things to keep the game “fresh”, not overwhelm players with too many new things all the time, and also prevent players from expecting new features every single week.
I respectfully disagree with this sentiment. I think we should treat other players like adults (most of them are) and let them decide what to do for themselves rather than babysit everyone and decide what’s good for them.
There are enough disclaimers out there for people to understand that it is very much still subject to change; whether they want to base their decisions on that should completely be up to themselves, IMO.
As an actual software developer myself I’m gonna have to stop you right there. There is absolutely no way they could have done season 3 in a week. It’s very easy for users who’ve never had to put together a major software project to say oh just doing X or y must be simple when really when you get down to it certain things that look simple really are not and even when modifying one thing the number of other things that can go wrong which makes “99 bugs in the code,” song so resonant for those who’ve been in that situation.
For an idea into how something that to an ordinary person may seem simple can spiral into ever more complexity I’m just gonna link to this video here which is a warning to any developer thinking about adding timezone functionality themselves to a project is no big deal… https://youtu.be/-5wpm-gesOY
But anyway getting off point a bit the number of new effects some of these specials have and how they interact with other similar concepts in game would mean season 3 would definitely have taken much longer to do, yes they are drip feeding it so we don’t go through it all at once but they certainly haven’t got it all completed. They’ll be just a few months ahead.
Indeed Season 2 showed this a bit as initially Mitsuko was going to be a Dark Hero but then inexplicably in beta she was made into a Fire hero with little explanation. Now that we know of Ursena I reckon it’s a reasonable bet that they switched Mitsuko as at the time they were trying to decide on a concept for Ursena and decided to make the switch then.
So whilst I reckon Season 3 is an on-going process and that it is likely even some of the hero designs for the last few provinces may not even have a specific special assigned to them let alone programmed I would be quite confident in saying that given there doesn’t appear to be much material changes between what we saw briefly and what was teased in the AMA doesn’t take this long to produce which does raise another possible consideration and that we aren’t just seeing something close to what they’re going to put in beta but could actually just be where they left off from when they said they would shift to other things to see how Hunters Lodge and Alchemy Lab did and that it was only just briefly available as they’re starting work on it and so therefore there could potentially be major changes still in which case @zephyr1’s disclaimer could very well hold more weight. It could be they’re just starting changes that completely transforms it…
The specials of the heroes appearing at the end of levels that have unique skills like Norns are not simple re-skins and as the recent tweaks to direct mana reduction and mana stealing that affected how Seshat was affected by the likes of Hansel and Gretel’s status effect shows simple tweaks can be bigger problems than they appear.
Well, I was referring to “map season 3” as opposed to “s3 heroes”; I view heroes completely separately, because yeah, it’s very hard to balance heroes and also the way they interact with previous skills as well as priority issues on which command to execute first etc; yeah, heroes are tough, which is why in those other threads, I keep saying that people who want perfect balance are being way too idealistic. It’s just next to impossible to have perfectly balanced heroes with freshness every single month.
But that’s off tangent… in terms of features like the POV, a new building, a new map etc, these don’t alter previously designed systems, they’re just essentially some new objects, I don’t see what’s so difficult about them both in terms of conceptualizing and in terms of actualizing.
I mean, they could have had a change of heart and completely scratched an idea, but even then, coming up with new ideas really doesn’t take that long.
Except they’re not separate where they are bosses for levels within those map stages. Otherwise you’d be releasing levels without their bosses which would be incomplete. Furthermore the balancing the hero people can get is beside the point. Take a look at Gadeirus and Atomos near the end of Atlantis or any of the healers in class quests. The amount they heal is significantly different to the amount they actually heal as heroes you can obtain. The “balancing” of the numbers for released heroes is no big deal for the programming as it is just plugging in different numbers. The issue is building the mechanics that implements the skill/allows it to function at whatever value which is independent of balancing.
Anyway it is getting off topic so best leave it all there and return to discussing Hero Academy exclusively.
The problem is that those disclaimers don’t survive intact when the information is spread.
I’m sure that someone is already sharing a screenshot of @Guvnor’s post on Line, Discord, or Facebook without any explanation that it’s known to be from an accidental build that wasn’t finished.
It’s not really beside the point, I obviously understand that tweaking numbers is nothing from a programming perspective; again I studied computer science…
The point is that balance is difficult in addition to implementation, which is why heroes take much longer than anything else, and IMO balance probably takes more time than implementation.
And balance isn’t just about numbers, sometimes there are questions as to whether a certain mechanic can be balanced in the first place, like how they briefly completely changed the direction of Malosi’s special because there was a lot of debate on how to balance him and it wasn’t clear.
If it was a pure implementation task, and if they were really incentivized to complete it as fast as possible, I’m pretty sure it wouldn’t take longer than a week, given the amount of resources SG has available.
And for HA, i don’t think there’s any difficulty in terms of implementation and mechanics any way you slice it, unless they came up with some drastically different game mechanic for it. Which… I guess is what you were expecting, given the amount of time it took from them coming up with the concept to possibly having it come out in the near future?
it’s not their duty at all, of course, and I appreciate every bit of info they share and all of the effort they put into all of the information threads; but it’s not just the mods, it just seems like everyone is in on this super secret thing and not telling everyone else just going “I saw this screen shot, but I’m not gonna tell you about it ” and it kinda feels bad to be left out, you know?
I have no evidence of this, but I feel like the secrecy contributes to people’s expectations and misinformation; if everything is freely openly available, there wouldn’t be secret screen shots floating around without proper warnings or images of heroes with stats that have been changed 6 iterations ago.
” and it kinda feels bad to be left out, you know?