Love Live! School Idol Festival Panel with KLabGames Development Producer Kota Kusunoki

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  • KLabGames Development Producer for Love Live! School Idol Festival Kota Kusunoki answers question from the community.
  • Announcements for Love Live! School Idol Festival including Rhythm Carnival and new Campaigns!

In a surprise panel at Anime Expo 2019, KLabGames Development Producer Mr. Kota Kusunoki answers questions and makes some exciting new announcements for Love Live! School Idol Festival! 

Q&A with Kusunoki san

I'm extremely grateful for the opportunity to speak here today. There haven’t been many opportunities in the history of Love Live! School Idol Festival to talk about the game directly with the players. However, I'm always looking for more communication with our overseas user base, so I was really looking forward to today. Thank you for having me!

Love Live! School Idol Festival was released worldwide except for Japan, China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Korea on May 12th, 2014. On the 23rd of the same month, the traditional Chinese version was released in Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan on Android. After that traditional Chinese iOS version, simplified Chinese iOS version, Korean versions were successfully released.

One year later, the number of worldwide users surpassed 15 million, with 30 million worldwide players as of September 2016, and 45 million as of October of last year, more and more players around the globe have come to enjoy the game.

I'm surprised that it's already been five years, but we're extremely grateful that now more than ever, even more players are enjoying the game.

What's the biggest impression on you over the last five years?

There were so many things that left a deep impression on me. I'm trying to choose just one, and I did bring this here with me today.

Oh, what is that?

We invited the users of the Global version to the Tokyo Game Show 2017 and 2018. They brought with them something made by the players, and this is just one of them.

We've been through a lot of trials to bring worldwide enjoyment for Love Live! School Idol Festival, and it was super encouraging to actually experience their happy voices and feelings.

One of the biggest reasons we wanted to be here today was to express our feelings for them.

Thank you so much. Of course this scrapbook isn't just special to me, the development staff team also has access to it, and sometimes they take a look through the gorgeous handmade book and get inspiration and encouragement. That's why I came here today.

loveLiveScrapbook

That's why you came!

The first concept we’d like to bring up is service closely catered to our players. This is a really pressing issue being all the way in Japan - it can be tough to hear what everyone's saying. When it was decided that you would be here today, we thought of collecting a lot of questions and comments from everyone and answering as many as we could. Starting from about a month ago we started gathering the questions from everyone in the game, and this was the result.

Even though it's just a short period of 11 days we saw over 60,000 questions.  The breakdown for each language region is as follows with 60% English, 25% Traditional Chinese, and Korean 15%.

When I saw the numbers, I was honestly shocked, with a happy feeling, and at the same time felt the pressure of presenting here today.

Which feeling was most prevalent?

Definitely happiness of course, but a lot of the matters of concern and interest surrounding Love Live! School Festival are brought together, along with tough questions, and that included some encouragement to further present something for our players to enjoy the game.

Question Session

I'm sure we're looking forward to that as well. Well then let's take a look at the breakdown of questions.

These are the most common questions. The top questions concern Members, Scouting, then Lives.

It will be difficult to answer all questions here. Today we are thinking about posting a summary, as well as answer questions that will be fully available through the official site on the later date.

Let's go on one by one for the most common question then.

 

These are the most common questions from the biggest category about members: Will there be any more opportunities to obtain limited UR members, any opportunity of obtaining some team members from the past? I'm sure everyone in the audience has thought about that.

As member scouting and live shows are major elements of Love Live! School Idol Festival, we were certainly expecting to receive a large number of questions concerning them.

How about event distributed members?

Limited UR members can either be obtained through distribution or sales through scouting with Love Gems. Players who join after the distribution date can also obtain those members. We do things like include them in the Sticker Shop. It's not something that's done all the time. We'd like to consider the frequency more, after hearing everyone's opinions.

We plan on continuing to reintroduce limited UR members that were previously included in scouting. The time of this will be in accordance with the season and the theme of the limited UR members.

Thank you very much. The next most common question is about the scouting function. Additions are slow compared to the Japanese version, but are there any plans to speed them up? Are there any plans to increase the UR rate?

As for obtaining event distributed members, it's still possible to get them through scouting, but there aren't currently any other methods of doing so. In case you're scouting them, it's relatively harder to get them compared to the time of the event, so we are considering opportunities other than scouting.

We want to respect the efforts of the players who did their best during the event to obtain them. We are exploring other ways to implement this system.

Thank you very much. The next most common question about scouting - scout additions are still slow compared to Japan. But are there any plans to speed them up? Or are there any plans to increase the UR rate? This seems like a tough question, can we hear your answer?

Thank you very much. The next most common question about scouting - scout additions are still slow compared to Japan. But are there any plans to speed them up? Or are there any plans to increase the UR rate? This seems like a tough question, can we hear your answer?

Firstly, scout additions are something that we've been receiving a lot of requests about for a while now. We understand that it's not limited to scouting, we're currently striving to advance the recently released features and events from the Japanese version worldwide, as quickly as possible.

As part of that, we've been speeding up the pace of updates for Scouting, as everyone noticed. However, because in adding new members of the Global Version, certain preparation such as translations are regularly necessary, we need a certain amount of time to carry that out. We kindly ask for your understanding in this.

We don't just want to speed this process up from the start, and we've been wanting to release more content to both the Japanese and the global versions at the same time, concurrently. As we currently do with content during special times, such as birthdays, we would like to add more content released concurrently.

Not only parts like that but campaigns, too, such as last year's 45 Million Downloads Campaign. We plan on releasing more campaigns that Global Version players can enjoy along with the Japanese version.

What about the rate for UR members?

That's a little harder.

I think this question is based on the difficulty of obtaining desired members. Currently, we present certain opportunities such as rate increases to create an environment in which players can obtain their desired members more easily and events [to do this, too]. There have been a lot of questions about this, but we are also going to consider other methods of doing so.

So you're putting forward policies to creating more ways to get desired members more easily, minimizing the time lag between scout additions, and increasing the number of campaigns released worldwide.

This is our second major point of interest. We are definitely committed to the policy of advancing content from the Japanese version as quickly as possible.

Questions about live shows, will you be adding more Master difficulty songs? Are there more events coming up? I mean after five years it's definitely been become a staple, and I understand we're itching for something new. What's in store?

As for the Master difficulty, there are always master songs being released in Japanese version, and they are also being continually added to the Global version as well. We are looking to shorten the gap between those releases, so please look forward to that.

To add to this, we believe this question is also an expression of the desire for new ways to enjoy playing live shows. In line with that we are doing things like adding swings notes to Expert Mode, as we hear everyone's reactions we want to continue adding new ways of enjoying the game.

What about new events?

Firstly, we think the number one priority is for the players to have fun and we are considering new events as an option to fulfill that goal.

The key point is making live shows even more fun, and from here on out making sure interesting updates for the game continue to be implemented.

Not limited to the Global Version, this is a direction for Love Live! School Idol Festival worldwide, we will continue to aim for a policy of expanding the variety of play with the game.

Announcements from Kusunoki-san

We're running out of time so let's get right into the announcements.

Summer of Love Live! Campaign. This is new info isn't it? What are some of the highlights?

I would like everyone to look forward to this event! We'll be happy to have Japanese and Global players enjoy the campaign together at the same time. In addition, URs distributed on birthdays will have made their rounds this July, from August and onwards birthdays will be celebrated together with the Japanese version.

This is one of the things you meant when you talked about the concurrent campaigns earlier.

Along with bringing the service closer to the players, and speeding up the release of content from the Japanese version, and projects based on the Global Version, these are all our objectives. These three objectives, we are hoping everyone will look forward to it.

Alright, let's see the next announcement:

The ninth anniversary campaign, this has already begun right? What kind of campaign is it?

This is also something stemming from the Global version, what's cool is the Global version players can participate in the event together, earn points and receive increasing rewards.

loveLiveSummer

That sounds really fun, is everyone doing their best for this campaign?

We're involved in the planning of this event.

By the way, a lot of people here have given their time and gathered here today and you know what they'd like you to say...

(Translator-kun)  I don't know if I want to translate that... He just thought of it on the spot and to show his gratitude, he would like to give a gift of 100 points to everyone for coming today.

Seems like he'll be making an announcement later on so check out Love Live! School Idol Festival!

Next announcement, the new event coming up is the Rhythmic Carnival. What's this about?

This is a new event. It's kind of like the 100 player score matches that you guys played. Very similar to it. But this is a feature you play along with 100 players. Rather than competing with each other, it's more like a cooperative effort. You work together and basically to aim for a super high score.

This game mode actually is a cooperative game, so everyone will be able to obtain scores higher than any score that you've seen before. We hope players are super excited to cooperate and play together.

Well, that's definitely a massive score, 2.6 billion points.  When will we be able to play?

You will be able to enjoy this in October. Please look forward to that!

Many of us here definitely will be looking forward to this. Today we talked about service more closely catered to players, speeding up the release content from the Japanese version, and increasing plans for the Global version.

In particular, to realize the goal of more closely catered to the players, we want to increase opportunities like today's event. There haven't been too many of them in the past. However, we always want to hear from everyone on a regular basis.

 

For this time, we collected questions from everyone at the website. But if you have any questions, yes, please send it over in the game app. It is true that we might not be able to answer everything, but I see everything individually. We look through everything and use it as a reference to improve the game, so please continue sending the questions!

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