❓🤔 ​Q&A Alert! ​🤔​​❓

[Noacc]

 

Q&A Alert!

As promised, the next Q&A will happen on Tuesday, 27th 17:30 UTC+2 here on discord. There is no specific topic for this one and everyone is invited! We will discuss BDSM, studio plans and celebrations, and everything you are interested in!
Join Magrat and Rosso on Tuesday!
 

Note: The session will be in English and it will last 45 min. It will be in the voice channel, but it will be recorded for anyone who can't join. The #hh-questionandanswer will be open earlier on Tuesday so you can leave your questions there!

 

Discord link: https://discord.gg/A3txczdMwx

 

[Eexa]

I can only say one thing: the choice of background girl for this event is a mark of good taste 🤣

Please make her part of the Anniversary event!!!

[Pelinor]

I hope those who can get on discord do so. 

[Тёмный Властелин]

Well, the only question from me is this:

[Pelinor]

Okay, anyone make it to the Q&A? Do we have a vid or anything?

[Тёмный Властелин]

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1RqeZUIpdjrnppwUcn9s0ePlg8CkUX7gZ/view

[GeorgeMTO]

Thanks to Numbers for having the time to take notes.

Quote

Q: LC: Will they be in separate timezones?
A: Difficult from tech perspective. HH not big enough for regional player brackets.

Q: Why wasn't Mythic Items addressed after update to force the number of slots they take?
A: While we listen to negative feedback, we won't necessarily do everything the players demand. Feedback from the discord is very important but represents a minority of players. We have listened to the feedback and already applied what we thought was relevant. Opinions on what should be done with Mythic Items diverges. Current action plan: observe how BDSM affects the market, run a survey after a few weeks and review.

Follow up Q: Due to Mythic item being so expensive and taking up market slots, the value of market refreshes has also dropped, making the affection/XP deficit worse. What's the plan to address this?
A: Girl upgrades are going to change dramatically as more of BDSM gets released. There will be Ascensions, Awakenings, different paths, still in development, current ETA is Sept. Moving game in direction of more depth for upgrades of characters. Therefore more resources will be distributed.

Q: Pregnancy in the Haremverse, how does it work?
A: This will be explained in the story. (FAB: Pffft). We have been delicately avoiding this topic in the past, keeping it like a dream world, harem-focussed. Has to remain mystery for now.

Q: Too many events/increased time commitment required to complete events, any plans to change this?
A: Not thinking in these terms, focus is on giving much more content, so compared to how HH used to be, yes there is more of a time commitment if you want to experience everything. The way we see it is that more content is better. Completing events is not required to play the game.
Q: (Numbers' note: This question was incoherent, doing my best to work out what they were going for) On updates, adding the new battle system mid-league, and changing blessings mid-league makes the leagues much more difficult. It would be better if these changes happened on Tuesday (Numbers: Tuesday??!?)
(Numbers: I'm not sure why you'd lump these together? The former was bad because the scoring system change caused the overall scores to be completely inconsistent. The latter is clearly A Good Thing in order to add strategy to league...)
A: No answer for this, will take this to the team. The blessings are there to force you to make tactical decisions, that was intentional. Need to run this for a few more weeks to see how well it works in practice.

Q: Are there going to be changes differentiating HH from CxH?
(Numbers: Rosso initially misunderstood the question, not including the first answer for brevity)
A: No. Lesson learned from Hentai Clicker is that with our team being as small as it is, trying to develop 2 games on 2 completely different technologies isn't just 2x as difficult, it's more like 20x as difficult. We have decided to focus on really developing the HH core that's used in HH, GH and CxH. This improves the team's agility around dealing with bugs (even though we've been pretty bad at it the last 10 days, and we're sorry). We are a very small studio, so we have to make difficult choices like this. 

Aside: One of our top priorities is improving the experience on mobile for all 3 games.

Q: How do you feel about players mocking the team over changes/bugs/code issues/etc.?
A: Mostly grateful. Of course everyone wants to be praised, but honestly I prefer that people are expressing themselves and giving us feedback, which gives us a chance to improve. There's nothing worse than people silently quitting the game. I hope that we can work on changing your mind and satisfy you a bit later.
Q: Are Mythic Girls going to appear outside of MD/MDR?
(Numbers: Rosso mentions briefly potential technical constraints but does not feel confident answering this definitively himself and promises to take the question to the team.)

Q: Does the art team actually use #inspiration-art-nsfw for inspiration? If yes, are there examples?
Rosso: I don't know exactly what the team is doing with their eyes and hands. I'd prefer not to know. I guess they are looking, not sure
Magrat: I think they are. I think FAB is keeping an eye on most of the channels in both HH and GH.
Rosso: Again, we can't answer for the team, but we believe so.

Q: Is there a plan or some ideas on how to make :money_yemen: relevant again? In the current system, they're so abundant, the motivation to collect from the harem drops significantly.
(Numbers: This question was asked poorly and initially misunderstood. Original answer cut for brevity)
A: New currencies will be introduced as part of girl ascensions, there will be girl equipments and other new ways of using yemens.

Q: Is there any plans for features to be removed[sic] from the HH++ script to be added to the game some time this year?
A: Teams filter/sort is planned. (Numbers: No timeframe was provided)

Q: Will the 1* girls ever be useful in PvP?
A: Yes. The overall intention is for Epic/Legendary/Mythic girls to be roughly on par, with Mythic girls only having a slight edge, but with the introduction of active skills and passive skills, all girls should be able to contribute something to the team. Considering introducing event types in which only 1* girls can be used, for example. Not in the immediate future, though.
Q: Do you plan to change the leagues point system to have more outcomes than +3, +13, +15, +25?
(Numbers: Neither Rosso nor Magrat understood this question. Original asker clarifies that the question is about leagues. Rosso seems to have been unaware that this changed, will take the question back to the team.)

Aside: Reiteration that the league rewards are unbalanced and will be relanced, just not right now.
(Numbers: I think Rosso still misunderstood the question as talking about end results rather than individual fight points. This question will need to be re-asked with more clarity at another point)

Q: What are plans regarding last week's (BDSM change mid-league) and this week's (overfight bug abuse) leagues?
A: If there are bugs, we will fix them. (Numbers: Question wasn't really answered, but we've seen the answer since)

Q: With the latest update, the girls are much less powerful against champions, are there plans to address that?
A: I have not heard about this until now, but the team might already be aware. Let me check with the them and get back to you.

Aside: Again, very sorry about the state of the release of BDSM. The battle system was one of the oldest parts of the game. "We had to destroy it"

Q: This season has given us less kobans than before, is this a bug?
A: I'm not aware of that, will have to check.

Q: You mentioned PoPs giving books/aff can we expect to see them soon?
A: I hope. It's in-progress. Expect to have a new feature every other week. We're trying not to rush after the BDSM launch. e.g. New battle replay style next week, multiple teams the week after, elements the week after that. (Numbers: This is way too quick! You just said you weren't going to rush these things in!)
Q: Do you plan to expand the market in all games?
A: All we can say right now is the shop is going to change. Another old system. Will be introduced alongside new features for things like elemental equipment development, which has e.g. 24 different types of ingredients, equip set bonuses. We're open to suggestions with the market as well.

Q: Are there any plans for more villainesses as haremettes?
A: Yes. Female villains are always special. Cannot say when or now. Every girl you see in the game is winnable at some point.
Q: Why are the devs forced to release features before they've had sufficient time to fix the bugs that have been identified on the test server? Several bugs with BDSM were identified, but not even touched before it was deployed to live, let alone being given time to add quality of life features like a filter in the battle team.
A: "The thing is that we are far from perfect and sometimes we believe that we've done the job, we believe that we've fixed the things. Of course, it might appear like we are just idiots doing random stuff and that we don't know our job, and probably we deserve it. I don't know. All I can say is that the team is very dedicated, and we are really really doing our best to be providing you with the best game possible in our capacities that are limited. And we are really dedicated. So, it doesn't mean that because we are dedicated and we are doing our best that we are always right, to always make the right decisions. I guess that if you guys have to be fair, in 5 years of the game, I think we've been pretty decent on HH. There's not been a lot of downtime. And yes, last week was a fuck-up, so we've apologised, we've compensated, I apologise again: sorry, it's not intended. Now, if you guys have to be really fair, and let's be fair, deeply fair, on everything, HH is a very stable game. We are giving you a lot of free entertainment, a lot of it. I would like to have the names of other games that are giving you so much free hentai to watch and to play with, because I'd like to play these games too. I play a lot of mobile games, and other games are fucking cheap. Most of them are animated and stuff, fair enough, but I think we are giving you a lot of cool stuff. You have the right to not be satisfied, you have the right to be wanting more, and thank you for that, it means you like it. I don't have- I cannot explain in a very simple way why we fucked it up last week, because it's a long technical explanation. We fucked it up for sure. No-one is happy with it in the team, and we are working on this type of stuff not happening again. I hope that tomorrow's release will be smooth. We are doing our best for it"
(Numbers: I'm including the full answer here verbatim, rather than a summary, because there is too much here to summarize. I will say I find this kind of answer concerning, particularly the implication that the players expect perfection every time. The point that was being raised was that major bugs such as the league overfight bug were raised while BDSM was still on the test server only, yet it was pushed live, regardless. Normally, such a bug being raised would mean a major change like this would be pushed back to the next release at the very earliest. So therefore, as players we're not left asking "why wasn't this perfect?", we're asking "why was this deployed with a known game-breaking bug?", "do Kinkoid even listen when bugs are raised in the test server channel?". My personal recommendation would be to make much heavier use of the test server; Don't just "think" you've fixed the things, show you've fixed the things on the test server first. As many minor bugs as there may be, confidence can still be built that the major bugs are squashed. As for the tangent about the volume of free content, of all the things I've seen said about HH, I can't say I've seen anyone complaining about a lack of content, or people complaining about a paywall (that actually know how to play the game properly). As identified above, we criticise because we love and care about it. The concern is that the team actually cares about the game as much as the players do.)

(End of wall of text, sorry that's so long)
 

 

[Kenrae]

If the number-related decisions are taken by another person, we'd like a Q&A with that person. It seems that Rosso doesn't know how his own game works and is just a marketing/management guy. Let us talk with someone who knows.

And I fully agree with Numbers comment at the end. For the love of the Creators, please, make more use of the test server.

[DvDivXXX]

On 7/28/2021 at 3:54 PM, Тёмный Властелин said:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1RqeZUIpdjrnppwUcn9s0ePlg8CkUX7gZ/view

Thanks a TON for this audio capture. I've learned so much by listening to it (that I wouldn't have even suspected had I only read the written notes George reposted here, even though I'm thankful for that too).

Crucial bits of knowledge I gathered from this:

1. There wasn't nearly enough participation (and/or people were too shy to ask questions out loud and/or it wasn't greatly organized) compared to what I expected or what would have been needed in my opinion. Some crucial points weren't made or even attempted, others were lost in translation.
    
2. There's a LOT of communication issues within Kinkoid and the official discord, and multiple layers of language barriers play a HUGE role in that. I've always known there were some, but I didn't suspect it was anywhere near that bad. A LOT of questions were asked but received a completely unrelated answer because they were "lost in translation" in real time. That is, Magrat has a pretty thick Eastern-European accent in English, which made it difficult to understand when she was reading some questions out loud, Rosso has a very thick French accent himself, most players who spoke out loud had their own accents, everyone made different mistakes in English, and as a result some questions were read and Rosso attempted to answer them, but he ended up answering something else entirely. This sheds some light on all the communication problems in the patch notes, announcements etc. as well as further confirming that Kinkoid staff themselves don't always communicate efficiently within themselves.
    
3. Rosso, if I understood correctly, is one of the original developers and founders of the game? Maybe the lead game designer or something similarly central? Unfortunately, it is EXTREMELY CLEAR from everything he said during that hour-long Q&A that he knows very little about how the game works right now from a player perspective. It's not just that he doesn't play the game (be it for testing or simply for the purpose of keeping in touch with his game and community). There are SO MANY THINGS he was either outright unaware of, or really unfamiliar with, including multiple essential aspects of the daily gaming experience on HH. To me, the most telling example was when someone asked if they intended to revert the scoring system in leagues back to the fairer and more intuitive system we've had since forever, after they've changed it out of the blue a couple weeks ago (without any explanation or even announcement). The person simply referred to the main problem that right now you can only score either 3  or 13 points for a loss, and either 15 or 25 points for a win (whereas before, we scored more precise and varied amounts of points, depending on how each specific battle went). ANYONE who played even a few matches in league recently should know what he was talking about. One would DEFINITELY expect one of the key DEVELOPERS to know what the question was about. Rosso didn't have a single clue. Neither did Magrat. Once someone explained it even further in excruciating details to them, Rosso finally understood what it was vaguely about, and he said it was "interesting" and that they would think about it. This means that he has no idea who changed this scoring system, when or why. From this and multiple other misunderstood questions, it seems pretty apparent that he's not keeping up with the game at all. That's TERRIFYING. You can't balance something if you're not familiar with it. And you SHOULD be extremely familiar with your own main product.
    
4. Despite this, it's also apparent that there is a passion, an excitement and a significant level of ambition in Rosso and likely the rest of the team. They are amateurs who succeeded (much to their own surprise, by his own admission) and want to carry on and improve their game. Which clashes very strongly with how out of touch with the player experience they are, and makes me sad. A lot of things I assumed could only be explained by incompetence and/or lack of interest actually seem to stem from the fact that they're focusing like crazy on very ambitious new features and improvements to parts of the game that are actually already okay, while being completely oblivious to a lot of MASSIVE ISSUES that we've had for years. The only saving grace is the fact that Rosso seems to at least be very aware of how outdated their User Interface and their code in general is, and how insanely laggy the game in general and the Harem in particular (and no, it's not just on mobile, man; it literally takes 30 to 60 seconds just to load the damn Harem page on my COMPUTER, just so you know, and I "only" have close to 700 girls) and he seems to understand that changing this and making the game run better, faster and smoother should be an absolute priority. I fully agree, as I've said many times. Unfortunately, for other equally terrible issues, mostly anything and everything having to do with GAME BALANCE, he doesn't have the first clue about what we're even talking about, so if that's representative of those in charge, then no wonder they not only haven't done anything to tweak balance issues in years, but way worse than that, they have no idea it's even a thing, let alone that their entire game economy and mechanics are biased and twisted by those issues, and that it should have been a priority for years...

Rosso also said multiple times that he's very open to difficult questions, and even thankful to those who give constructive feedback and even negative feedback. I do believe him, but short of having a couple of hours chat with him where I explain how leagues work, how the entire game equilibrium relies on them, and then what are the pressing issues he's unaware of, this openness is unfortunately wasted. This would be easily fixed if he forced himself to actually play his own game, which should be mandatory for anyone and everyone in the team. And not with dev test accounts in god mode, but with regular accounts they play as if they were just a random average player, to see how that feels and notice actual problems we're experiencing, so that they then know at the very least what we're talking about when we give them feedback.

So yeah. PLAY YOUR OWN GAME! You'll be a million times more in line with your player base and its issues, concerns and priorities this way. It's very cool that you have big dreams for the future, but it's hard for us to share your enthusiasm when the present and the recent past have been miserable and you're not even aware of why and how, let alone actively working on improving on that BEFORE adding even more new features. Stop building new blocks on top of the shaky foundations. Fix the foundations and the existing Leaning Tower of Pisa over it FIRST.

@Noacc I'm not sure if you can, and sorry for the wall of text, but if you get the chance to pass some or all of this feedback to Rosso and the rest of the team, I would be very grateful. I know you play the game and you're in touch with the community, but if the devs aren't, it's a major problem imho. Thanks in advance, and please keep on rocking.

[FinderKeeper]

I want to add a few more points to the above summary.

• From KK point of view, they are in the process of rebuilding their game
  • Retouching on resourcing and balance is currently meaningless.
  • Tweaking existing mechanics and experience is very low priority now.
• KK has two perfect test environments (test and cxh), but guinea-pig-sense tells us, it will roll out on live. Some things are bound to go wrong. And so expect:
  • Occasional dips in functionality starting September.
  • Overall experience change with following outcries.
  • Dips in popularity.

Brace yourselves. And try to keep faith. It might turn out good afterall.

_____________________

As a single point of feedback:

We have a saying in russian: "Good is the enemy of Better". Meaning - you had a Good working thing, and then you start to rebuild it to be Better.

Beware. 

HH worked out. The most important question is WHY. In the history of gamedev almost every sequel screwed up because devs thought they knew the WHY.

[Fiel]

@00:42:47
This part is important. It proves developers have good intentions for low level players, but were misguided.
Below is a short summary of the problem, I hope developers get this info conveyed accurately to them.

Old system: easy for level 500 player to make 50 mistakes    =      level 480 players had possibility to win
New system: difficult for level 500 player to make mistakes   =      level 480 players have no chance to win            <--unfortunate consequence

This is why the new system works against the intention of developers.

@01:06:54
A French Q&A will be a good idea, it will remove the language barrier difficulty and make communication easier between many French players and developers..

Edited August 1, 2021 by Fiel

[DvDivXXX]

2 hours ago, Fiel said:

This is why the new system works against the intention of developers.

Not really, this is just a tiny part of what went wrong in Leagues with the recent updates. Furthermore, as you've described it, it's an aspect that only concerns a tiny tiny group of players, most of whom have been enjoying massive unfair advantages due to the inherent imbalance of how Kinkoid failed to design PvP at its core, so not the most relevant or important one to emphasize imho.

Much larger issues which affect a majority of players, especially those who have been minmaxing and persevering patiently for years in the old system to very slowly climb up the ladder (up to a point, the ceiling being top 15 in D3 for them) DESPITE constantly facing massively advantaged opponents due to the massive PvP design imbalance (for Rosso and the team I'll spell it out: in general, "the older account wins" rather than "the best player wins"):

1. No limits to the number of same-rarity girls you can have in your team of 7: whales and active veterans can have 7-mythic teams, gaining a massive advantage regardless of blessings or any other consideration. Competitive players who have neither an unfair koban generation advantage due to having started in 2017-18 nor have tons of real-life money to throw at every MD are suddenly a lot more behind than they used to. This could have been easily avoided (and can still be rectified) by adding restrictions like "NO MORE THAN 3 GIRLS OF THE SAME RARITY IN A TEAM". It would also have increased strategy opportunities rather than just making it easier for those who needed a boost the least and harder for everybody else.
    
2. 15 or 25 points only (new stealth nerf to the scoring system in league fights; I'll just focus on wins here, although defeats now giving 13 points frequently also has an impact): those who are already crushing most opponents thanks to the above get a majority of perfect 25-point victories. Those who used to be able to hang in there despite the massive imbalances already playing against them now have a vast majority of ridiculously punishing 15-point "wins". The gap increased so much it's now a gape, if you catch my drift... And not in a good way.
    
3. Seemingly no balance-oriented thinking behind the design and distribution of Blessings. There shouldn't be one for Mythics, it adds insult to injury and defeats the purpose of Blessings supposedly making weaker girls temporarily stronger. On top of that, the Mythic blessing we happened to get right from the start on HeH was +40%, the largest bonus we've seen from Blessings so far. This shows Kinkoid devs have virtually no notion of what PvP balance even is.

2 hours ago, Fiel said:

A French Q&A will be a good idea, it will remove the language barrier difficulty and make communication easier between many French players and developers..

Yeah, I'm contemplating showing up. The EN Discord sub-community and myself don't go together well, but the FR Discord might be okay. My main concern is that, unless Rosso reads this thread and brushes up on the meta game a bit beforehand, every crucial question will need to be introduced by educating him on what we're even talking about first. Which will take a lot of time and energy I'm not sure I have right now (to make up for something he should already be doing routinely as part of his job, and even more so in order to prepare for a Q&A session).

[Shorty-er]

On 7/31/2021 at 2:00 PM, DvDivXXX said:

Despite this, it's also apparent that there is a passion, an excitement and a significant level of ambition in Rosso and likely the rest of the team. They are amateurs who succeeded (much to their own surprise, by his own admission) and want to carry on and improve their game.

I thought they were all professionals before they started KK, but yes everything KK does is extremely amateurish.

I've been in software development my whole professional life and owned a small (5 people) software company. It is painful to see KK repeat the same mistakes over and over. The current mess in the anniversary is absolutely typical for KK. We've all seen literally the same thing happen before and girls not showing up on their intended bosses. Have that happen once is an issue. Have the same thing happen again and again shows there are issues in the way they work.

The single most important thing they need to realize, is that quality is not a product of good intentions and committing of a lot of time. Quality is the result of running procedures and processes. Quality is the result of repeatable work habits.

They also have an extremely useful resource that they don't use enough: the community! A test server isn't just some silly thing you go through before you ignore the outcome and dump your bugs on a production environment. Imagine how much the game would improve if:

• KK actually listed all the changes released on Test, instead of having patch notes written up by marketing staff trained in double-speak;
• KK actually listened to the feedback on Test and acted on it;
• KK actually released the fixed version on Test for more testing.

I ignore the test environment because time and again I see KK ignore the feedback. 

[Fiel]

4 hours ago, DvDivXXX said:

Furthermore, as you've described it, it's an aspect that only concerns a tiny tiny group of players

No. level 500 vs level 480 is just one example to make post short and getting it across the language barrier.
Other leagues have the top player being level 480, and his level 460 competitors fave the same issue.

Low level players are not supposed to win the leagues. But the players who are close to the highest level player used to have a realistic chance, which is now changed to no chance.

[blaa]

I really appreciate a lot of the answers, they are pointing out the problems i see myself. The Q&As were revelatory. More Test-Server-Using and Listening but also trying to understand how the own game works would be two big steps in the right direction, IMO. Also: They could just try to gather a small round of trusted players (from every level) and talk some things through with them. It seems to me that just an sheet with suggestions isnt enough, since they dont really now what people actullay mean with that - there has to be some sort of face-to-face-communication.

edit: maybe they could also fire one of the 10 devs, slow the development of new features down and hire somebody for intern and extern communication - or give the people that are already here at least some sort of professional development in this regard. It's not good enough anymore, to say everytime 'we handle it better next time' or 'that was the best way we could handle it'.

Edited August 2, 2021 by blaa

[HentaiHero]

Quote

Current action plan: observe how BDSM affects the market, run a survey after a few weeks and review.

Don't you worry guys, everything will be fixed, resolved and balanced after upcoming survey where we can express our opinion and concerns by answering questions like

"How do you feel about the new BSDM system?"

a) I like it!

b) I love it!

c) Glad you destroyed the old boring imbalanced battle system!

d) 7 is better than 3!