User blog:Sim533/Another few questions and answers

Today another thread on the LMB's showed up posted by Community Manager Tomium. The thread contains questions and answers related to the recent changes of the game and upcoming content coming to the game.

'''Q: What happened to the brick plates we had? I want all red!'''

A: The brick system design had a pretty important flaw. Everyone wanted all red! The customization options it provided were being completely ignored in the pursuit of more damage, because damage is perceived to be the most powerful stat. One of the reasons why we decided to remove the brick system was because nobody was really using it anyways (everyone was going all red). It simply added a layer of complexity that didn't contribute to the game's fun.

We've seen a lot of comments in the forums about the game becoming harder after the "removal of all bricks". There's a lot of math and a wee bit of magic involved, but it boils down to this: we didn't simply remove all bricks, we distributed the existing power you could get from bricks equally across all colors and baked them into the internal minifigure and monster stats. In other words, every minifigure is basically running an even spread of red, blue and yellow bricks behind the curtain.

Q: Why is Lost Creations SOOOooo hard?

A: In short: Lost Creations is meant to be a challenge. The first few levels of LC should be easy and doable by any player that has made it to level 30. But to make it to the higher levels, you have to find strategies and team compositions that work well together and you have to become good at the little nuances of the game. Knowing when to dodge and when to attack. Knowing how to control the position of mobs. When to fight, or run, or stop to build.

Also, Lost Creations is meant to be done as a team. You can make progress alone, but at some point you're going to get overrun by monsters and you won't be able to make as much progress alone as you could do in a team. I encourage all players that are having difficulty doing LC alone to simply get a team together and try it that way. You don't need super-skilled stellar players, just grab a couple of random players looking for a group and go in as a group and you will notice how much stronger you are as a team. Over time, you can also develop the group tactics that the best groups use to beat the highest levels of Lost Creations.

Now, like with everything else in game design, there is a fine line between difficulty and frustration. It is possible that LC is just too hard, period. We are monitoring the LC progress and if we see that we need to tweak stuff, we will.

'''Q:What is coming up for LMO? Do we get a new place to do battle?'''

A: As we briefly touched on in the Ask the Devs feature, we are almost ready to release our next content feature, which we call the Monster Trials. The Monster Trials are a short sequence of playfields, much in the light of what you'd find in Lost Creations, but with a couple of new surprises.

The idea with the Monster Trials is to have a bit of randomly generated content to break the pace or hunt minifigures alongside the Story progression of the game. The content of the Trials automatically scales to your level, so you can do them at any time regardless of how far into the story you are! The level of difficulty of the Monster Trials is tuned to be lower than that of Lost Creations. We hope that this content will also help bridge the gap between the normal story content and what you'll find once you tackle the challenges of Lost Creations.

The entrance to the Monster Trials can be found at the LEGO Center but to enter you will need to spend a Ticket. You get 3 Tickets with every S14 minifigure bag code you redeem or you can find them as random loot by completing Area Quests, Dungeons or defeating Champions in the open World.

We hope you like what we've prepared for you in the Monster Trials and all the content around them!

'''Q:Wow! That sounds great! Who do we get to take there?'''

A: Monster Trials will be the prime spot to obtain Series 14 minifigures in game. Series 14 has a variety of great, charismatic new minifigures, ranging from the Monster Scientist with his wicked experiments (which happens to be hosting the Monster Trials.. hmm, suspicious!) to an ancient Spectre or a gnarly Plant Monster! You might have spotted a recurring theme here! Yes, the S14 minifigures could all be monsters, if they weren't so helpful and adventurous! Oh and there's zombies of course, looots of zombies!

'''Q:This is sure to get a lot of people excited! Do you have a favorite Series 14 Minifigure?'''

A: The Fly Monster is one of my favourites (and I already have a specific minifigure combo in mind for him), but I really like the Wolf Guy as well. Can I pick two? Oh, wait, there's also the Monster Rocker... Can I pick three? Oh wait!...

Q:Why do the Scientists glare at me so much? A: One or more of the answers below are correct. Pick one, but choose wisely! A) We're too busy checking out the new S14 minifigures.    B) You stood in front of the screen and we lost against the Monster Trial's final boss. C) We're busy fighting a zombie invasion.    D) 42

Thanks Tomium for having that chat with the "blue" scientist (and now let him work again so we get that Monster Trials fast) :p

Source: https://community.lego.com/t5/MINIFIGURES-ONLINE/The-Blue-Scientist-asked-me-to-come-over-to-their-lab/m-p/12975994#U12975994