Why Are We Moving to a New Mission Selection System?
With the release of 0.7.0, upon entering the game, players will be introduced to a new UI and Mission Selection Screen. The goal with the new system is to funnel active players into fewer, fuller matches at times when the player population count is low. Starship Troopers: Extermination is best played with a full server of 16 players and this system will take a lot of the guesswork out of matchmaking and also really help low player count parties find each other.
The new selection process gives players the ability to pick their game modes and difficulty, but critically it also allows for the player to choose their destination planet.
We always want to promote an increasing amount of choices to the player, but as we do so (and as we add even more content in the future), the danger will be in dividing the community more and more, making it harder to find active, full matches. This curated system is a tradeoff between player choice and funneling the active players into matches together.
Generally (but this is subject to change with player feedback and game telemetry), available missions will include:
- AAS missions with difficulties Easy, Medium and Hard
- ARC missions with difficulties Medium or Hard
- Horde missions with difficulties Medium or Hard
- Hive Hunt missions with difficulties Easy or Medium. Hard will make a return soon.
We also have removed the terminology of Recruit, Trooper and Veteran from how we named difficulty Tiers. We did this to improve the accessibility and understanding of our difficulty tiers for the average player; no more guessing what Trooper meant for difficulty. Once we add difficulties past Hard we will introduce more in-universe names for our difficulties.
Now that we have a more controlled and predictable mission curation system, we have improved, simplified and re-introduced the Quick Play feature.
In our previous system of Players selecting any mission type, it was entirely possible for the player base to spin up very low population matches. Quickplay and matchmaking services in general are very complex, and we had a lot of reports of Quickplay not being able to find optimal matches for players.
Now that the Mission combinations are more limited, we are re-introducing the feature and we hope that the Player experience will be improved.
Those with a keen eye might have also noticed that mutators are back for now mutators will return in the Normal difficulty mode. We are experimenting with different combinations now that we have the Reinforcement feature and more frequent high-player count matches.
As mentioned above, this mission configuration can change depending on telemetry and feedback and we’ll be closely monitoring how the feature plays out and seek to adjust it accordingly.
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That is all for this dev blog we hope you liked seeing the new Mission Select and are eager to deploy as part of the Federation in exterminating those pesky bugs!
We’d love to hear your thoughts on it all and we may be looking for some loyal troopers to aid in trying out all these new features coming to ST:E so if that interests you, please come join the ST:E Community Discord!