Introduction
Captains,
Thanks to everyone who submitted questions for our first Dev Q+A! We had a great response from the community, and the team took the time to dig into as many of your questions as possible, from game balance and PvP changes to future plans.
We appreciate your passion, your feedback, and your ongoing support. We’re committed to continuing this kind of open communication moving forward, and we hope these answers help give you some insight into the world of Battle Pirates.
Let’s dive in!
Community Questions (And Answers)
1. Are you going to weight medal value, so a Diamond medal is worth more than a bronze one for the Alliance Leaderboard?
Answer: We are looking at various ways to balance the Alliance Medals Leaderboard; the leading solution is to weight medals by rank. We are also considering having different Alliance leaderboards by rank, i.e. you may have other members in different ranks. Lastly, we are considering only including the best performers in each rank, i.e. the top 10 in the Alliance in that rank. We may have all of the above!
2. Why can't we stack all chest and tokens that we earned in the game why must we be limited such as in the FM ship built tokens?
Answer: To maintain balance in the economy and ensure we can distribute tokens from as many different locations as possible to provide a level playing field.
3. Will there be additional shipyards added to the game to support building Conqueror fleets, Dreadnought ships, and regular ships?
Answer: There are currently no plans to add additional shipyards to the game. Ship build times are balanced around the existence of the Shipyards available to them.
4. Can you explain the perks of moving between PvP leagues (Bronze, Silver, Gold, Platinum, Diamond)? How many medals are required to stay in each league, and are there benefits to staying in a specific tier like Gold?
Answer: The primary perk is showing others that you are a superior PvP player! Additionally, the rewards will vary by rank and your position in a rank. There is no certain medal amount required to stay at a particular rank, instead, it is entirely based on your position within that rank. We will be sharing more information about the size of each rank and the leaderboard positions required to move up or down soon.
5. PvP currently feels like it's based on who can spend the most time online. Will there be any changes to introduce a penalty for failed base hits or losses, to make PvP more strategic and less about time investment?
Answer: Exciting news on that front shortly! But to summarise, we are adjusting pointings to better reward defense and discourage a high volume of low row medal attacks. In the upper ranks, there are fewer players to hit, as such, skill becomes increasingly relevant.
6. Why are changes to stats on fleets not made available in patch notes as they are in all other games?
Answer: We generally don’t change stats on ships or other components once they are live. If we do, we will announce it. If we’ve missed any let us know!
7. With the recent changes to medals, players feel there’s no longer an incentive to hit bases. Will there be any updates to introduce new rewards, such as earning gold for successful base hits?
Answer: The primary incentive to attack other players is still there—proving you are the superior PvP player! There will be a range of rewards for leaderboard ranking. More information on this soon!
8. With the new tier 14 hulls getting much more powerful and armor is insanely high, is this in a way of saying that Battle Pirates might be coming to the end of its run or are there more plans going forward?
Answer: Battle Pirates is still going strong, and we intend to continue to support it for a long time! Occasionally, when stats become unwieldy, we do a stat compression, which you may have seen a number of times over Battle Pirates' lifetime.
9. Why does the meta swing so drastically when a new ship is introduced? It often feels like bases are unbeatable for a week, then become too easy to defeat for several weeks after. Will future balancing aim to smooth out this experience?.
Answer: We’ve experimented with a range of different approaches to PvP, as there are quite a few different groups of players with different expectations—some players much prefer attacking, while some players focus primarily on defense. We’ve also found that perfect balance causes stagnation and boredom, and can leave many people in the situation of being unable to adequately attack or defend. Consequently, we constantly change the balance to shake up how players are attacking and defending (the meta). In general, we find the healthiest approach to keep things exciting is to alternate between defensive and offensive content, and ensure the baseline power of any piece of content is strong and therefore accessible to the largest possible audience. The focus is for the skill to lie in identifying the maximum potential of new content, and alternatively how to counter it, as opposed to identifying how to use the content in the first place. If things are too complicated or subtle, then it can become less accessible to players who struggle to understand it and while a more skilled player might be able to leveridge that content to attack successfully others are left waiting until the next attacking content to be able to attack effectively. Lastly, we try to avoid swinging things back and forth too quickly so that players have an opportunity to build and use the ships they have built, and there is opportunity to identify counters through experimentation and play. The good news is with the re-introduction of varying levels of stars and victory, we have more opportunity to get more granular in PvP without gating people out in a binary way, i.e. we can release content that has a more subtle effect or is best harnessed by the most skilled players without overly skewing things to defense or attack.
10. Is there any chance the pace of the game could be slowed down? With multiple new ships releasing quickly, there’s not enough time to build and refit fleets using only one shipyard. Could the Conquest Yard be opened up for more general use, or could the labs be reintroduced for builds? Also, will there be more support for new or returning players who don’t have access to key blueprints required for current builds?
Answer: The pace of the game hasn’t significantly changed in years. We carefully monitor and balance the build/upgrade times, tokens etc., to ensure players can make strategic choices about where to invest their resources. For returning players, and new players, we’re working on creating a path for those players to catch up.
11. Will there be a shift back toward a more PvP-focused experience? Many players feel the game has become too PvE-heavy, moving away from its original player-versus-player roots.
Answer: We’re big fans of PvP, which is why we’ve added two PvP-focused events in Conquest and Vengeance, as well as revitalized Shipwrecks and Interceptors, and are actively working with the community on optimizing the PvP ranking system!
12. Several players, including myself, have requested older specials to be added to prize lists during events, but only some of these requests seem to be granted. Why do some players' requests get fulfilled while others don’t? It feels a bit unfair—can you explain how these decisions are made?
Answer: It depends on the nature of the prizes requested. Some prizes are only intended to be available in certain events or TLCs. We’re also cautious about overloading a prize pool and having players feel like they must achieve even more points in a single event. For legacy content that is broadly useful to players we add it to the lower tiers of the FM as that activity is almost constantly available. We are working on updating the Blueprints available there now.
13. Why are new hulls being released so quickly, like the Dreadnought coming out a month early? It’s making it hard for players to keep up, and many are quitting. There’s also a lack of clear communication around changes. Would the team consider providing quarterly updates to share upcoming plans and help players stay informed and engaged?.
Answer: We haven’t changed the release cadence of the Dreadnoughts or hull since the start of Blackwater in July last year. Additionally, in the new 3 month season cadence there is the exact same number of hulls as the previous 2 month cadence -> 4 hulls every 6 months. Part of the move to the new cadence was to extend the primary use case of hulls as well as reduce the build pressure spike caused by the introduction of the Garrison hull every 6 months, while still continuing to provide a range of different targets for players to solve so there was less battling the same target over and over.
14. Why can't I retaliate against lower-level players who hit my base and earn 3 stars? If they’re able to attack higher-level players, shouldn’t the same rule apply in reverse?
Answer: You are able to attack lower rank players and earn 3 stars, you just don’t get medals for it. This is explicitly to prevent people farming low levels to sit on top of the medal leaderboard.
15. The fun of defending a base feels lost when attackers can retreat once they know they’re going to lose, preventing the base from earning anything. Could this be changed? Maybe awarding medals for destroyed ships or key buildings might help, though it’s still not fair since attackers can simply rocket a building. Would the team consider adjustments to make base defense more rewarding?
Answer: If the attacker retreats, they also do not get any medals, but the damage to their fleet persists while the damage to the defender does not. Because bases can have different layouts and you must attack a base to scout it out, we don’t want to overly penalize an attacker or reward the defender for what is simply scouting. That said, we are changing things for the next season, and we have more information about that coming soon!
16. I’ve been at level 199 since June 24th, 2022, and finished it on September 11th, 2022—almost three years ago! Can the level cap be removed? More players are reaching level 199, and with my current Lifetime XP, I should be around level 230. It seems like removing the cap shouldn’t be too difficult.
Answer: Congratulations on reaching such a high level! We will look into extending it.
17. When will the new base defense technology be released to address the imbalance caused by the new Exodus hull? The current defense options feel ineffective against it.
Answer: New defensive content was just released in Vengeance!
18. Why are ship builds out of order? I have a Defiance ship but no armor, and none of it is available in the Raid. There seem to be many inconsistencies with builds and equipment. Could the team organize things more logically to make the build process simpler?
Answer: The armors are always the first to be released, and they show up in the FM, then the main hull and its components in the Raid, followed by the Dreadnought and its components in the Strike.
Thanks for submitting, and thanks for reading!