uh to help richard out i guess let's uh we would love to hear more just about the design process behind the mandos and like integrating with previously existing mandos you know we saw rebels kind of lose their mandalorians and get new ones whereas shadow collective stayed the same and like I'm sure there was a process there on how you decided who gets to keep stuff, who doesn't.

Absolutely.

The...

The ideology or methodology behind that was very much a shadow collective is a battle force, not a full faction in itself.

We've said that many times.

We still believe that.

That is still certainly true.

Honestly,

Speaking to triggers specifically, how do you come to conclusions design-wise on how much variance is too much variance when creating character triggers and updating characters for consistency? I'll start with Pagani on this one.

Yeah, so consistency is something that is always a question, right? And I think when it comes to things like Pursuit specifically on Angela versus, say, 2099 or something like that, it is what other things are on the character that a trigger could enable them to do, right? The original design of Angela was kind of Blades of Acre with the Pursuit was kind of her subversion of charge, right? This was how she was supposed to kind of get a sort of cheater-free move action, things like that.

And because it's a lower dice attack, a trigger is less consistent on things like that.

So the more dice you roll, the more likely you are to hit a trigger, right? So something that we could do to help her out a little bit on power level was to remove that inconsistency and allow her inconsistency to be in other places or things like that.

So like the triple results on Cleave, for example, for Heaven's Wrath is... a relatively high inconsistency for those kind of things.

So I think it just really depends on how integral to the character is that effect, and does the character currently function how we want it to function with that inconsistency, or is removing that inconsistency something that will sort of allow it to blossom a little bit more, whereas the current character inside of its threat band in terms of power level or things like that is all sort of considerations that go into that.

And Pagani can kind of take it from there and explain the the whole like road map that that got us to the point that we were at.

And it was a long and winding and unpleasant road that I think ended in a really good place.

So the question I wanted to ask or to tell people in the audience is, you know, tell us a bit about the internal effort that came with doing such a massive update.

Yeah, so the developers... sat down and identified a bunch of problems with the game.

Right? Which is things that were not behaving how we, as the people that wrote the game, Shaq and I, way, way back in the day, intended for it to be played or intended for interactions to go.

And they sat down, they...

I mean, I was there too.

So I guess we sat down and we did these things and we kind of created a big list of issues and problems that we wanted to try to fix inside the game.

And there was stuff that was...

yes, we nailed it,

in there.

We had a couple of the other character updates.

We knew we wanted to hit a couple of the top-end characters.

We wanted to hit as many of the lower-end characters as we could to bring them up into power level relevancy.

And then I actually think the hardest part of all of this was the layout of it.

Meaning taking the unit cards and things like that and putting them into the templates to create 235-ish character cards that are all in the same template and that kind of stuff.

Because that is just a huge undertaking.

but like i i love that she got that extra stamina buff and i would assume that that is because you guys basically assume she's going to take damage from her generate power thing and it's kind of a way to prevent a feels bad experience like i've had before where you know it's just she goes boom So I guess like that, that's kind of the question, right? It's like what broke that you ended up having a fix for like Clea getting that extra stamina that no one was expecting.

What were some of the, I guess, outside or additional changes considerations when it came to just removing a leadership from the game and not just changing it.

I mean, I think the Hulkbuster leadership has always been very niche, right? As you described it.

And that was kind of the goal for that leadership, right? Was to create a silver bullet situation where you can include Hulkbuster in your Avengers rosters.

And if your opponent just so happens to be playing something that has lots of throws.

Magneto is really the main one, I think, that comes here.

Though Magneto didn't exist when we were making Hulkbuster, if I remember correctly.

I don't remember the timeline.

Do you guys mind going into kind of the thought process behind that big change?

And how did this like time to kill concept come out here? And obviously we're going to transition to into the four threats and their kind of new role in the game.

Yeah, the situation that the game was in two-ish years ago was sort of a high damage output skewed sort of list build style kind of called the Kaiju meta, as it were.

And some people really enjoyed that version of the game.

But we found that a lot of people, especially on the casual sides, were not as excited about the game in that respect.

And we tried to identify what are the core problems that are going on in games where this is the predominant strategy.

And we came to a couple of conclusions.

One was just extreme offensive output from these larger threat characters.

been.

sounds rough.

Yeah, it was rough.

It was pretty rough.

We did things like dazed characters can still activate.

And they aren't KO'd until the end of the round if you KO them, right? We did some huge sweeping changes for these kind of things.

And what we ended up realizing when we were going through a lot of these very large change situations was we don't think this is... what we need, right? We think we can get away with something significantly less than this that will sort of maintain the current feel of the game with Peerless, so saying, hey, you can't really effectively play three characters.

I'm sure it's still possible, certainly it's on the lower threat levels, but it's going to push people hopefully into more four or five character squads so that you are bringing that floor up.

Now Pagani can take it away.

judge.

You call a judge and you say, hey... my opponent didn't put the right amount of damage on there, and there should be this much damage on there.

Or, hey, this guy's using cheater dice, and now he's trying to flush them down the toilet or something, but he's not using real dice, like that kind of thing, right? How is slow play any different than that? Slow playing is cheating.

If you are intentionally not playing the game, you are not playing the game.

And that is something that a TO or an organizer should be called over for and to adjudicate.

And I've had to do that plenty of times as someone who's run a bajillion events and all that kind of stuff.

And yeah, it's uncomfortable, but it's the same as anybody else who's cheating.

What upcoming character was the hardest to design? And also, which one are you most excited to see what people do with?