Developer Q&A

We recently talked to Auto Assault leads Brian Booker, Dan Russet, and Hermann Peterscheck with some common questions regarding the upcoming patch, what players can (and shouldn't) expect, and a lot more.

Brian "Storm" Booker, Lead Systems Designer

• This update includes the ability to respec characters. The first respec will be free. How much will the next respec cost? Will this fee scale upward with each subsequent respec?

  Respec is free at first then the next few are incredibly cheap, but the cost in clink to re-train your character does increase each time you do it. The re-training personnel find it difficult to teach the same character over and over and will charge extra each time you do it. The first 10 aren't very expensive, but if you re-train your character 20+ times, you will find the cost rises to 400 scrip and will remain fixed at that price. You can re-train any number of times, clink provided, but you can only re-train once every 48 hours.

• Will balance issues be addressed?

  At the end of beta - right before gold, we made a number of significant global balance passes. This brought DPS values, ranges, timing, damage, point costs, and overall combat balance of both player skills and equipment into a good overall balance. Since then, we have corrected a great number of individual player skills for both functionality and balance.

  Recently, we improved many stealth-related skills after introducing a delay that prevents immediate "restealthing." We feel the improvements made to all of the stealth-related skills balances with the newly-introduced time delays. In a second stage of improvements for the stealth system, we would also like to introduce a stealth detection system for both players and AI.

  We continue to evaluate server data logs, feedback from our forums, and our individual play experiences to tune both the PvE and PvP balance. This important work will continue over time with each new patch that we release.