April 15th Podcast Notes

The mods are auto-nuking my posts on the subreddit so I will use my blog.

These notes are rough. May clean them up later

Pestily podcast featuring Nikita. April 15 2020. Notes taken from phone. Could have errors.

Ultra-TL;DR:

• Wipe announcement next week
• The Raid Ep 4 coming early May
• Next patch 12.5 -- graphical post production settings, ** NVIDA filters will be disallowed**, 1911 pistol
• 50,000 bans in March -- battling "XXinese XXckers" (self censoring to avoid getting auto-nuked by mods/bots)
• Nikita will never "counter" RMT by adding microtransactions
• You will be able to report suspicious players, bugs, and nicknames (sometime in the future)
• The idea of being able to do everything in raid (loot, fight, profit) -- "one man army" -- is something BSG wants to get rid of. They want players to have to choose between things.
• Nikita doesn't necessarily like the ping limit but "it is what it is" in the fight against hackers. He hopes it will change.
• BSG is trying to balance their resources between technical fixes and content creation. Not simple or easy.
• Soft Skills being reworked -- first "tier" of changes coming in 12.7

Nikita thinks the tournaments are not representative of "true Tarkov" but something more for fun and entertainment

50,000 cheaters banned in March
Working daily with BattleEye

It isn't easy to close real money trader companies -- it isn't as simple as filing a lawsuit

Nikita will not help control RMT by providing their own in-game system -- he will not have microtransactions in EFT

"Why the hell are you blocking me? This cheat doesn't even work. I'm just baiting stupid people to give me money". -- a guy responding to Nikita reporting his cheating advertising stream

Daily tasks (based on the recent tournament task system) -- you will be able to complete quests hidden tasks. It will be in the game.

If there will be more participation of Twitch in these tournaments it will be higher quality. There will definitely be more tournaments. If Sigma has more tournaments we could integrate the task system

Pestily and guests suggesting tournament caster should come from the EFT community (streamers & content creators)

Nikita asks what they think of the current state of the game:

Pestily -- VSS meta

Slush -- Slick armor price made it meta

Ghost -- M995 no longer meta vs VSS

Slush -- only two meta weapons VSS & FAL. Buff 7.62 x 39 BP

Sigma -- Interchange extracts didn't help. Nikita said "that was just for fun". Ping kicking causes problems with playing with friends. Nikita doesn't like it but it is a "battle against those who are abusing this. Unfortunately it is what it is for now".

Nikita -- the world wide internet is kinda overloaded right now. We need to struggle with it and wait

Nik -- you will be able to report suspicious players, bug abuse, nicknames

Veritas -- risk/reward. Anything planned rewarding combat and survival? If you use the best ammo it is hard to profit. Anything planned to allow players to make money when using higher tier gear?

Nikita -- I can't answer this easily. I need to think about this. We are trying to simulate life. You want to make money and also fight and wipe the entire team so you are needing to be one-man army and it is kinda not realistic. But if you play with your friends you have roles-- one is point man fighter the other is a carrier or support who Carrie's the loot. It isn't an easy task and solution.

The idea of being able to do everything in raid (loot, fight, profit) is something we want to get rid of. We want players to have to choose between things.

Slush -- be able to drop off loot at extract and be able to stay in raid.

Nikita -- this is planned.

Nikita -- about rewarding PvP -- the main reward is loot from PvP. Not also being able to get more after. Maybe give more XP. It is not an easy task for me to talk about right now. I need to think about it. Like the Hatchling issues.

Veritas -- I'd like the profit when I use high tier ammo.

Nikita -- you are taking a profit position.

Slush -- chat suggests repair armor for dog tags.

Nikita -- sounds okay.

Pestily -- back to Interchange extracts. They aren't good. Maybe "dogtag extracts". Change Scav extracts to two Scavs to give Scavs a reason to cooperate (Pestily is against Sxav on Scav violence).

Sigma -- I think more of a chance that A.I. will cooperate with me to extract sooner than player Scav

Nikita -- Getting overwhelmed with the amount of technical work to be done -- bugs, etc. Right now we are trying to balance technical work with content production. Cheaters and bugs require a lot of time from programmers so they can't work on new content. Nikita would rather focus on content production and not just things that limit players like weight system.

We are doing a huge skill rework. We partially split the work into tiers and parts. First part in patch 12.7. Requires a lot of work. The struggle is the workflow -- how to keep it balanced between bug fixes and content. Nikita has a big list of community input that he wants to implement but just only so much time.

When should we release the game? At how much content? It will take years for us to complete the content for EFT? We want to do other games too. These are the things that visit me in the late night. Of course, we will continue no matter what. New features, controversial features that you will hate us but sometimes features will be delayed because we have to fix technical things. 12.5 and 12.6 will be mostly technical. 12.7 will be kinda half and half. New features always require us to stop and fix the bugs that have gathered.

Slush -- the FPS fix was amazing.

Nikita -- it was a really strange thi g in the development process. We were confused by Unity. We didn't think it worked with our Unity build so we had it disabled for a long time. This was our fault. It not only was switched off but it looked like it was on. We had to fix in the config. It was like a musical that something so easy to fix gave such performance. On the one hand good for performance boost but we are also like "how the hell did we miss this?".

I still speak with lowesisback more. We are testing more things with him. Will continue to test special builds just to test things. We are totally open to any kinds of suggestions.

Added by /u/nomiskomis

He said they can't replicate his newest "fix" (activating native graphics jobs, which doesn't work when using DirectX 11). -- "... he has other ideas, unfortunately for this moment we can't reproduce things that he are willing to send us"

Even unity engineers don't know certain things. It is a complicated engine. The production cycle of unity engine -- chaotic movement of engineers with handling old and new code. There is no such game as EFT on the Unity Engine and I don't think there will ever be another. Testing an experimental build for Unity 2019 just to see if/how it works.

Nikita has a nightmare that there is a config with a parameter that creates stutters.

Nikita -- Inventory lock up -- Unity has garbage collectors -- we decided to add one to purge when you close inventory because we figured it was the least dangerous time. It will be fixed and changed.

12.5 and 12.6 has fixes related to these lock ups and errors. It is the main part of work. For three months we re-added freezes that we had removed before because it isn't an easy thing to track conflicts etc

--stream DCed for a bit --

Pestily suggests changingnloot tables in Kiba and other areas of Interchange. Nikita made notes.

Merch stores delayed because of COVID

Steam audio -- 12.6 first iteration increased quality of sound positioning. It sounds pretty good but needs testing.

Map expansions -- which first? CTarkov. 12.62

Next new maps could be lighthouse or streets of tarkov.

Arena -- it is not soon. A longterm thing.

VOIP-- Nikita doesn't want it in the game since it will break immersion. He wants headset radios but not VOIP.

BEAR that speaks broken English will eventually be in the game.

Hotkey for quick-dropping bags is planned.

Kriss Vector -- not in 12.6 for sure. Most probably 12.7

1911 in 12.6.

UMP coming for sure.

Compass -- 12.7 or 12.8. Not sure "soon but not too soon"

Graphic post effects bundle coming in 12.5 and will be the end of NVIDA filters

Offline groups -- have to be careful because people will hack it and make private game. Will probably make it possible on additional servers that have no progression.

Scav boss on Shoreline - the doctor - you will see signs of it in upcoming patches.

Nikita has to go.

My notes will end here because I don't care about streamer talk without Nikita there to give official response.

Stay healthy everyone.