Steam Playtest #5: Summary & future plans

Dear friends!

As always, we’d like to thank you for your participation, bug reports, and feedback that you gave us! We are definitely going to tackle all the shortcomings that we faced during PT #5.

The Russian part of the community was the first to deal with some of them:

failure of backend services, which prevented players from transferring from the Tutorial to the Starting Island and other servers;
losing items from inventory when transferring between servers or different zones, characters getting thrown back to levels 1.1, etc.;
servers not getting information about mob loot drops from the database, and so on;

Some knew what the reason was, since at that time other services in Russia went off one by one. At the same time, in the period between 29/09 and 03/10, there were no updates that could have such consequences.

In the evening of 03/10, the team urgently implemented an unfinished and long-since put-off system of direct communication between servers that brought along an error that allowed players to duplicate items using real estate chests (don’t worry, dupers, we can see you. It was especially amusing to read your reports about missing items you had duped ;).

It is a pretty complex problem since no one’s immune from such situations in the future. Our server stack for this PT consisted of the following:

Backend: London;
East and Island instance for east: Moscow;
Hubs, taverns, and Island instance for west - Falkenstein;
The connection between Moscow and London was at least uncertain ;)

To insure ourselves against such things happening in the future, we added a mirrored backend between different locations and decided against a unified backend in the neutral zone.

The second problem that hit out online was issues with loading the client. During this PT, only 26% of those who applied actually downloaded and launched the client, compared to the average 70% that did that during the previous ones.

Now it’s time to talk about our plans (with some commentary) for the near future, especially since they echo the feedback:

Weapon/magic balance: here’re some numbers for basic understanding:RD

(commentary) all powders are weaker than melee weapons (OOO) by an average of 21%, to say nothing of heavy 2H weapons and weapon enchantments, i.e., in actuality, even a 1H shortsword (KKK) with a moderate enchantment will have an attack value at least 43% greater than an average magic spell. Bearing in mind the non-linear damage formula, these 43% will grant over 50% of advantage;
(commentary) magic has already been considerably nerfed in terms of speed and distance during PT #4;
(commentary) the main problem was that mages could craft powders of levels up to 9, while fighters could only get weapons of levels up to 3;
Magic:

(plan) nerfing Fire and its crits;
(plan) buff buffs by 15–35%;
(plan) increasing powder requirements;

1H + Shield:

(plan) 1H weapons: damage buff;
(plan) 1H RMB attack: buffing the bonus to be comparable to that of powder heating;
(plan) shield: -more defence, less energy depletion;
(commentary) making the shield experience more comfortable: sprinting with tower shields, attacks while blocking, double attacks (shield bash followed by sword slash), running blocks, quicker guarding, interruption attacks with raising the shield, ignoring CDs—these are all the abilities that we plan to implement;

Crossbow:

(commentary) currently, the game only features the lightest version of the crossbow, and there’s risk that we won’t have time to implement at least medium crossbow that would be a more stable reflection of melee claymore;
(plan) either buffing crossbow damage or adding new types of crossbow that would have the same models and animations;
(commentary) no time to add different types of ammo by the start of EA;

Dodges:

(commentary) our animations for holding items and dodges have never been meant to be blended together because both of them use the same slots and so blending them causes all sorts of visual artifacts, not to mention the dissyncronization between the character body and their attack animation;
(plan) making dodges viable by any means possible;

Items available:

(plan) cutting available powers to level 6 and adding items from levels 6;

A firewall of mobs in Dwarrhan for those who’ve just left the Island:

(commentary) levels of mobs that spawn around Harbur are already not any higher than those that spawn on the north of the Island;
(commentary) the main problem was different: after mobs were no longer ‘tied’ to their spawners, some higher-level mobs (12–16) strayed closer to the hub, posing deadly threat to poor low-level players who’s just teleported from the island;
(completed) after killing their target mobs, return to their initial spots;
(plan) all T1 villages have:

in 1 km radius, mobs of levels like in the central region of the Island;
in1-2 км - levels of the northern part of the Island;

Character development, levels:

(plan) mobs will give more or less experience based on how hard they are to kill for players;
(plan) resistances to different types of damage will proportionally decrease XP gained when using these types of weapons;
(plan) killing blows will give more XP;
(plan) adding penalties for imbalance towards Physical or Magical levels;
(plan) adding the item that allows to decrease character level;

Game items:

(completed) quality system now has the bonus/malus scope from -15 to 15% bonus for base stats and requirements;
(in progress) resources, plants, or mob loot that don’t have quality are going to have their durability turned off to make it more convenient to store them in the inventory;

Durability and item wear:

(in progress) disabling time wear for items that only lose durability with usage: cauldrons, tools, recipes;

Mobs:

(in progress) we are already working on magic and abilities that can affect mob aggro to enable proper tanking strategies
(plan) humanoid enemies, including those for mines and spruce lumber camps;

Common mob loot:

(in progress) low probability of dropping blanks or recipes of the entire quality range from ordinary mobs;
(completed) bugs have been corrected with skins that, when processing leather and wool, yield more weight than the weight of the pelt itself;

Bosses:

(in progress) bosses in T1 county are divided into 3 groups: level 15/20/25 versus the current 12/20;

15: 2x Swamp Troll, 20: 2x Golem, 1x Troll Warlord, 25: 1x Golem, 1x Troll Warlord;

(plan) resistance to magic has been increased and the amount of HP has been buffed;

Boss loot:

(in progress) level 4 items and recipes for levels 4-6 for lvl 25 bosses;
(in progress) dividing the drop of items into sets and recipes into groups and gravitating loot from one or another boss to its own group of items or recipes;
(in progress) increasing the chance of dropping recipes by 2-3 times;
(in progress) improving the quality of blanks and recipes from bosses;

Resources, herbs:

(completed) 100% drop chance upon death of raw materials collected from spawners in all zones except safe (green) zones, incl. pelts;
(completed) plant spawners are divided: some for herbs, others for mushrooms for a more even distribution;

Crafting and enchantment:

(in progress) different ingredient requirements for enchanting different levels of items;
(in progress) reducing the durability of crafting recipes to 5 units and 10 for enchanting recipes;
(in progress) rebalancing enchantment recipes (including Solidity, Dragon);

Quests:

(plan) a significant increase in quest rewards so that 80% of the reward roll is more profitable than selling to vendors;
(plan) chains of quests and their requirements for professions (2, 3 levels) and abilities (1-3) levels instead of test ones for PTs;
(plan) distribution of additive abilities by vocations;
(plan) changing the location of quest givers;
(plan) quests for the development of attributes;

Economy:

(plan) updating outdated prices (karma, guild registration, guild management);
(plan) increase in prices for herbs;
(plan) bringing the “gold veins” for earnings back to normal;

Castles:

(plan) finalization of the visuals of capturing points and burning forts;
(plan) balance of castle mobs;
(commentary) we will try to keep up with the land tax and work with the treasury;

Information about other players, ears:

(plan) information window when hovering and pressing F;
(plan) correction of the ear tooltip;
(commentary) we will try to make ear threads according to the criteria: karma, profession, guild and their use in quests, especially for professions and abilities;

Technical:

(in progress) fixing the problem with falling under the landscape in Dwarrhan when starting the client from the HDD;
(plan) increasing invulnerability timers when teleporting to open areas, except for castle zones;
(in progress) in-game rewards for pre-ordering;
(in progress) falling objects that support themselves during a seamless transition;
and many other errors from reports;

UI/UX, visuals:

(in progress) rework of the processing, crafting, and enchanting windows to fully inform the player about what is happening;
(in progress) refinement of the inventory UI to inform the player about items with a non-standard chance of dropping items as part of their character’s karma;
a large number of cosmetic fixes (brightness effects, sounds, etc.);

There will be separate news about the number of counties, their content, the availability of continents outside these counties, and their content.

In the end, we will add that even though it is very late, we have finally begun preparations to promote the project within the bounds of available resources. The first steps will not take long to take place.

ROG’oms Up!