Steam Playtest #3: Summary

Dear friends,

Before we start, we want to thank all the participants for their bug reports and feedback.

All in all, we received over 100 unique bug reports, the most critical of which were immediately addressed by our team during the tests.

Hosting the testing session, fixing bugs, and adding new content proved to be even harder than just preparing for the test. That’s why, during PT #4, we’ll concentrate on bug fixing.

From the technical perspective:

We think that the tests have been successful. As a result of the work we did after them, we were able to improve server stability, fix some rare crashes that were caused by cheating players, and address a number of other issues that were related to the visual part of the game.

Speaking of the performance issues, they were caused by our attempts to seek out certain bugs during the second half of the tests. We were experimenting with collisions, increasing the number of AIs, adding new mechanics, and excessive logging. Some of those might have caused the issues with performance.

Reports and questions (by popularity and seriousness):

Manual and guides

(EA) there were many questions and bug reports related to players not being able to grasp some of the game’s mechanics; for that reason we are currently working on a game “wiki” that would look like an in-game journal;
(EA) encountering some mechanics for the first time (in case this is the first character and “hints” option is turned on) will bring up a pop-up notification clicking on which will open a corresponding “wiki” page;

Quests

(?!) they were the biggest troublemaker being responsible for most bug reports, because they prevented player from joining Vocations, getting additive abilities, and were also vulnerable to being abused (even unintentional);
(PT#4) this mechanics leaves us no choice except to completely refactor it, changing the architecture and rejecting the idea of storing the quests in the DB;

Vocations

(?!) aside from quests, the biggest cause of issues were Vocations. They brought so many problems that we even had to refrain from implementing additive abilities;
(?!) unfortunately, PT #3 only offered a superficial view of Vocations, due to insufficient attribute and stat bonuses;
(PT #4) we’ll pay through attention to the number of additive abilities, so that every profession would have several of them;

Character progression

(?!) noticeable slowdown of character progression with leveling PvE abuses;
(PT #3) decrease the amount of XP gained from training dummies, amount of XP gained from bosses was also cut down;
(PT #3, Patch #4) average character DPS was increased by 30-50% by the means of more dramatic stat growth between the items of levels 1, 2, and 3.;
(PT #4) amount of XP gained from receiving damage in PvE was decreased considerably;
(PT #4) reaching level 10.10 on a twink character should take no more than 30 mins, while for levels 16.15/15.16 it is around 2 hours;
(PT #4) we will add powders that give a tech buff, that causes the XP gained for one attribute to be transferred to another attribute with a small penalty;
(?!) insufficient XP bonus for being in party and “progression conflict” causes by party members leveling different stats;
(PT #4) redistribution of attributes points within one growth direction will be done using Tabula Rasa, while between different growth directions it’ll be accomplished with the use of the abovementioned powders;

Content

(?!) visual lack of new content on the continent in comparison with Rivulet Island;
Rivulet Island was added before PT #1 and was filled with existing biomes in order to introduce the players to the mechanics that Dwarrhan would offer in a safe and friendly environment;
(PT #4) we will add more kill, fetch, and collect quests;
(EA) more additions to the quest system: RNG for rewards and objectives, more variations of rewards, repeatability, etc.;
(EA) we will add caches/treasure chest found during exploration with a system of keys that grant access to them;

Economy

(?!) player activity was poorly rewarded and the ratio between the prices of goods and NPC service prices was dumb;
(PT #4) dramatic overhaul of all kinds of prices, including a noticeable change in the growth of prices for items of different levels;
(PT #4) greater quest rewards and stricter DQB rules in Dwarrhan;

(?!) abuse of named mobs (bosses);
(PT #4) as part of the necessary spawner refactor, there will also be more detailed customization of areas for navigation within each spawner;
(PT #4) changing craters;
(PT #4) adding partial/full immunity to various weapons/elements;

Magic

(?!) the casual physics of magic had a significant impact on its relevance, especially in terms of characteristics (they were underestimated);
(PT #3, Patch #4) fundamental changes were made to the approach in order to collect feedback on it. The main direction is to increase damage and complicate physics;
(PT #4) adding strong "shooters" for earth/fire/water, similar to the air's Big Shock powder and AOE magic for all elements;
(EA) revision towards increasing passive HP / MP regen depending on the satiety of the character, which should reduce the number of actions of players, especially in slow PvE;

Melee weapon

(?!) the first received feedback and statistics showed the need for rebalancing and a certain simplification in the management of some types of weapons;
(?!) the second, but more significant problem is the discomfort due to the need for the client to wait for information from the server to play VFX / SFX tricks, which creates a clunkiness when having ping, above average;
(PT #3, Patch #4) weapon control was simplified, the bonus in characteristics for less comfortable types of weapons was increased;
(PT #4) this problem will be solved by PT #4 with the help of prediction;

Ranged weapons

(?!) casuality of physics;
(PT #3, Patch #4) as part of the testing, cardinal changes were made - a slowdown in speed and a decrease in flatness;
(EA) adding different types of expendable ammunition (bolts) for the crossbow, affecting physics / damage;

Abusing and farming talers in the tutorial level, etc.

(?!) all currently known dupe paths have 2 directions: the ability to access a character until it is removed from the world, and differences in the approach to saving homogeneous data types in the database (quests) in different mechanics;
(PT #4) the “online” status for characters will not allow access to them until they are deleted from the world and saved to the database;
(PT #4) saving of bankers, questgivers will take place absolutely synchronously with the saving of the character's inventory in the database with additional checks;
(PT #4) 1st character will receive 100% of the starting money, the second – 50%, the third will get 25%, and 4th+ characters receive 0 talers at the start;
(PT #4) We also include here the situation with the characters who were duping recipes (the record is 600+ items). The inventory will be sent to the client in several packages, depending on the number of items on the character;
(EA) the “online” status for the account will not allow you to re-enter it using simple actions with Steam on this account;

Inventory

(?!) clunkiness in all possible ways;
(PT #4) it will be revised: the inventory weight of items and its correspondence to the crafted weight, the number of slots in recipe books/token boxes and pouches will be increased (the main restrictions will be shifted to its carrying capacity);
(PT #4) changed the approach to the numbers in stacks;

UI/UX

(PT #3, Patch #4) the approach to UI / UX in the context of the main hood (the main screen in the first person) was changed;
(PT #4) Rejection of nameplates/HP bars over characters/AI with the ability to enable “classic mode” in the settings;
(PT #4) work with inventory:
(EA) refactoring the player notification system using VFXs;

All of the above does not concern the content that we have been planning to add for PT #4. It is simply our summary gathered from the feedback and bug reports from the participants of PT #3

We intend to host PT #4 in the first ten days of June. Given the short amount of time remaining, we will focus our efforts on addressing the issues mentioned above rather than adding the content planned previously.

ROG’oms Up!