Game Update - 21 May 2021
May 21, 2021 22:54:10 GMT 1
stratosphere, Nishikienrai, and 2 more like this
Post by Belouch on May 21, 2021 22:54:10 GMT 1
Game Update - 21 May 2021
Game News
Cassowary Egg Hunt Recap & Numbers
Recently, we finished our annual Cassowary Egg hunt, where new and old players alike frolicked through the forests in search of tasty bird eggs because they wanted money. While players will get 1,000 gold per dozen eggs they turn in, we do not currently have normal leaderboard type rewards during this event, but we still want to post the highlights!
Kyri, 35 dozen turned in!
Aura, 26 dozen
Cube, 26 dozen
Bjorntorson, 21 dozen
Kurbads, 16 dozen
Harooka, 15 dozen
Long, 15 dozen
Carvery, 14 dozen
Psybar, 13 dozen
Dollar, 13 dozen
In total, at least 124 characters sold at least 1 dozen eggs, and overall 858 dozens (10,296 eggs!) were turned in!
Also, 85 poor Cassowary Hen mothers were killed (by 57 different characters) while they were trying to hide their eggs from predators and their mates!
Cube and Dagobert both killed 4 hens each, while Erin, Reigar, Lunatic, Bjorntorson, and Daimonlatvia killed 3 hens each. You're lucky, but you're monsters!
Admin Team News
As you may know, Dreadlock has left the dev team. He has been absolutely key in getting Agonia to where it is today. The game is fully stable, with all significant bugs solved, higher security, new smooth server, and some very important aspects like fight engine fully recoded. Thanks to him all future development work can now focus on new features, events and ingame material to make playing more fun. So a big big thanks to Dreadlock for all the time, efforts and headaches he dedicated for everyone to enjoy a stable and smooth-running game.
We still have a lot of ambitions for Agonia. As a result, we are happy to announce:
1) Emiliana is now a full-access admin. She has been a great source of help since the very first day of Agonia (for example 95% of the Guide is from her in case you don't know). Lately she has been providing us with tons of propositions for ingame material (quests, items, etc), ideas for rush server, etc... but we were a bit too busy to really implement them. Now she will be able to implement and test all her crazy ideas herself, as well as help Belouch manage the routine admin aspects of the game.
2) Dspe is back on the coding frontline! However his time is precious and his coding skills a million times better than Belouch's, so he will focus on the very high-level / difficult stuff only. One of those priorities, as massively requested by players, is the creation of the backend technologies needed for us to host and manage rush servers alongside Agonia. Please do not contact him about any issue, let him focus on those high level tasks, if anything needs his action specifically we will relay it to him.
Save the date - 1st June: PvP Event
Our next new event is aiming to be a highly PvP combat focused event, but maybe with some big potentially fun twists. We hope to see a lot of teamplay and tactics.
New unique items will be obtainable from the event.
We'll post a specific forum thread to go into all the details soon.
Game Updates
New Player Bonus
As always, we want to update the boosts that new players can take advantage of to become stronger in shorter time and approach the rest of the community.
We are raising the bonus EXP multiplier to:
Month 1: 60% chance for double exp
Month 2: 50% chance for double exp
Month 3: 40% chance for double exp
Month 4: 30% chance for double exp
Month 5: 20% chance for double exp
Month 6: 10% chance for double exp
Characters that are young enough to get these bonuses can view their status and remaining times on their main pages.
New Player Bonus II: Softcap exemption
On top of the above bonus increase, we are adding an exemption to the softcap experience reduction for characters in their first 4 months. Then, during their 5th and 6th months, they will have a smaller penalty than the normal softcap reduction (their softcap weapon EXP will be divided by 2, instead of 3.)
This change is focused on a few things, obviously the first of which is to get young characters to hardcap quicker and with less frustration so their power values are comparable to veterans for group PVP. However, because of the climbing hardcap players are focusing on higher and higher tier monsters to train on, and obviously the young characters do not have the base combat stats yet to train against them as effectively.
Removing the softcap experience reduction for young characters means they won't have to fight in as many battles against those high tier monsters to level up compared to veterans, meaning they should use far less resources than before (like healing), which will be even more effective if they choose to camp with other players. Even if they opt to avoid the highest tier training, this change still greatly benefits their training speed in areas they feel more comfortable with.
Next, when we added the "softcap quests", they were equally benefitting everyone, new and old character alike. Now they will be benefitting young characters going through softcap more which was the intent behind them, yet they will still be a nice bonus for old characters when a new one is added.
Also, this change helps young characters who may be killed in PvP or by high tier monsters, as their death penalty is lessened because they are not losing "full" softcap skill levels yet.
With this change, we hope young characters no longer feel as pressured to focus only on efficient evolution during their entire new player bonus period (therefore avoiding softcap / getting to higher weapon skills or hardcap), though the baseline desires for certain things are still there. Early evolution still helps your character a lot, and you will still want a decent chunk of Strength, Agility, and Health to make fighting high tier monsters easier, and you need a certain amount of Strength and Agility to equip tier 3 and 4 equipment, but we think those hurdles will be lessened enough by the above higher bonus EXP multipliers. We feel that 4-6 months is enough time for them to get a little of everything in (learning the game's ropes, questing, gaining some evolution, training generals with masters, and leveling their main weapon) and we want to start from there.
New Infrastructure Maintenance System
The backend work for managing and altering infrastructure is complete, and infrastructure features now have their own page.
Moving forward, instead of paying an upkeep in gold coins from the faction treasury, roads and bridges will require maintenance over time to keep them in usable condition, and will lose 1% condition per day (specifically it happens in .01% intervals with a random factor but the average rate is 1% per day), and of course have up to 100% condition.
As of today, all existing structures are at 75% condition. An infrastructure that falls to 0% health is now broken beyond repair and can not be fixed, it will need to be rebuilt from scratch.
You can restore condition to a piece of infrastructure with the following actions in the new page dedicated to them, and you will receive standard stoneworking crafting experience per turn spent.
+10% Condition to a Road, spending 2 turns, and using 1 Limestone Powder, 5 Paving Stones.
+10% Condition to a Bridge, spending 10 turns, and using 5 Limestone Powder, 25 Paving Stones, 30 Planks.
You can access the Infrastructure Page from the Main Page in the 'Environment' box.
We'll be keeping an eye on all of these figures, the availability of limestone, and how players handle it, along with the ease of management and viewing the information of this new system. We don't want to destroy your hard work on roads so far so we'll ease into it with you, but this is the direction we want to head with infrastructure.
Eventually, this backend system and dedicated page will be able to tackle validating the completion of terraforming projects and new infrastructure, and allow the mayor and helpers to directly permit these changes and additions in-game.
It will allow us to do much more with new infrastructure moving forward, such as the often suggested faction watchtowers, or mines for examples. Any other idea is welcome!
Automated Monthly City Budget Deposits
Until now, the taxes paid to the faction budget were deposited manually by Belouch every month. Now that we no longer need to manually curate the amount of roads, road ends, bridges, and other infrastructure a faction has, and how much those upkeep fees are reducing your monthly deposit, the full tax amount will be automatically added to the capital treasuries.
Order and Forsaken capital treasuries will now receive 25,000 gold automatically on the 1st of every month.
Pants! Trousers! Kilts! Oh my!
We'll miss the jokes as much as you, but the day is finally upon us, players will have to cover up. We'll be adding equipment for the leg armor slot, which to begin with are similar to body armors but just smaller, cheaper, and not as many tiers. Players will be able to customize their damage taken just a slight bit more, however, currently pants will not be able to be runed.
The recipes to craft them will be open after the PvP event (we don't want to create a pants panic).
Mythos and Norsk passive perks
-The previously revealed Mythos tribe 15% fleeing bonus is now active.
-The previously unrevealed Norsk tribe +15% passive Cold Resistance was activated. Don't laugh, elemental resistance will be more important in the future and that means Norsk can pretty much reach 75% res with lvl2 runes instead of lvl3s.
These bonuses are small, but these tribes sacrifice the lowest evo purchasing efficiency for them (0.5%), compared to some other spells/perks (up to 15%).
Inactivity script and masters
The inactive script teleports inactive characters to a location outside the island to not overload the capitals. Following requests from players, two modifications were made:
-The inactivity script will no longer teleport players who are older than 5000 turns. This should keep your valuable masters and friends available in the capital, while still reducing the lag of having too many characters nearby.
-Every inactive over 5,000 turns has been teleported back to their home capital.
Other Changes
These update posts are mostly summaries of changes over the last 1-3 months, as many changes are made as soon as they are ready, instead of us waiting to add them during one gigantic update in one day.
Recently:
-Rune damage values after being compared to target resistances are now rounded up, instead of rounded down. This helps low level runes and "rainbow" rune layouts remain relevant.
-South Island Capital was made a resurrection spot for everyone and it received basic capital city features (a safe no-combat tile, bank, marketplace). There is no mayor, no ban list, and no treasury.
-We changed how a requested character name change affects the horror hall and kill lists, all kills and deaths are now properly carried over to the new name.
Rush Server
The rush server is something we have in the pipeline since a long time, but never really focused on it due to many more important priorities. Lately it has been requested massively by the player-base, for many very valid reason.
We are happy to say that we are now full steam on this project.
Some important steps were achieved the past two weeks:
-We now have a map for it
-The map import script has been adjusted
-The full database has been created and is now hosted alongside Agonia's
-The backend is almost ready
It is impossible to give an ETA yet, but the progress is very very promising. As soon as the backend works we will start populating the world with monsters, explores, quests etc, while working on the code aspects in parallel.
---
We'll share more about where Agonia is going soon in a post that will cover our updated roadmap of planned backend and code updates, events, game content, and the rush server!
Bel & Em & Dspe
Game News
Cassowary Egg Hunt Recap & Numbers
Recently, we finished our annual Cassowary Egg hunt, where new and old players alike frolicked through the forests in search of tasty bird eggs because they wanted money. While players will get 1,000 gold per dozen eggs they turn in, we do not currently have normal leaderboard type rewards during this event, but we still want to post the highlights!
Kyri, 35 dozen turned in!
Aura, 26 dozen
Cube, 26 dozen
Bjorntorson, 21 dozen
Kurbads, 16 dozen
Harooka, 15 dozen
Long, 15 dozen
Carvery, 14 dozen
Psybar, 13 dozen
Dollar, 13 dozen
In total, at least 124 characters sold at least 1 dozen eggs, and overall 858 dozens (10,296 eggs!) were turned in!
Also, 85 poor Cassowary Hen mothers were killed (by 57 different characters) while they were trying to hide their eggs from predators and their mates!
Cube and Dagobert both killed 4 hens each, while Erin, Reigar, Lunatic, Bjorntorson, and Daimonlatvia killed 3 hens each. You're lucky, but you're monsters!
Admin Team News
As you may know, Dreadlock has left the dev team. He has been absolutely key in getting Agonia to where it is today. The game is fully stable, with all significant bugs solved, higher security, new smooth server, and some very important aspects like fight engine fully recoded. Thanks to him all future development work can now focus on new features, events and ingame material to make playing more fun. So a big big thanks to Dreadlock for all the time, efforts and headaches he dedicated for everyone to enjoy a stable and smooth-running game.
We still have a lot of ambitions for Agonia. As a result, we are happy to announce:
1) Emiliana is now a full-access admin. She has been a great source of help since the very first day of Agonia (for example 95% of the Guide is from her in case you don't know). Lately she has been providing us with tons of propositions for ingame material (quests, items, etc), ideas for rush server, etc... but we were a bit too busy to really implement them. Now she will be able to implement and test all her crazy ideas herself, as well as help Belouch manage the routine admin aspects of the game.
2) Dspe is back on the coding frontline! However his time is precious and his coding skills a million times better than Belouch's, so he will focus on the very high-level / difficult stuff only. One of those priorities, as massively requested by players, is the creation of the backend technologies needed for us to host and manage rush servers alongside Agonia. Please do not contact him about any issue, let him focus on those high level tasks, if anything needs his action specifically we will relay it to him.
Save the date - 1st June: PvP Event
Our next new event is aiming to be a highly PvP combat focused event, but maybe with some big potentially fun twists. We hope to see a lot of teamplay and tactics.
New unique items will be obtainable from the event.
We'll post a specific forum thread to go into all the details soon.
Game Updates
New Player Bonus
As always, we want to update the boosts that new players can take advantage of to become stronger in shorter time and approach the rest of the community.
We are raising the bonus EXP multiplier to:
Month 1: 60% chance for double exp
Month 2: 50% chance for double exp
Month 3: 40% chance for double exp
Month 4: 30% chance for double exp
Month 5: 20% chance for double exp
Month 6: 10% chance for double exp
Characters that are young enough to get these bonuses can view their status and remaining times on their main pages.
New Player Bonus II: Softcap exemption
On top of the above bonus increase, we are adding an exemption to the softcap experience reduction for characters in their first 4 months. Then, during their 5th and 6th months, they will have a smaller penalty than the normal softcap reduction (their softcap weapon EXP will be divided by 2, instead of 3.)
This change is focused on a few things, obviously the first of which is to get young characters to hardcap quicker and with less frustration so their power values are comparable to veterans for group PVP. However, because of the climbing hardcap players are focusing on higher and higher tier monsters to train on, and obviously the young characters do not have the base combat stats yet to train against them as effectively.
Removing the softcap experience reduction for young characters means they won't have to fight in as many battles against those high tier monsters to level up compared to veterans, meaning they should use far less resources than before (like healing), which will be even more effective if they choose to camp with other players. Even if they opt to avoid the highest tier training, this change still greatly benefits their training speed in areas they feel more comfortable with.
Next, when we added the "softcap quests", they were equally benefitting everyone, new and old character alike. Now they will be benefitting young characters going through softcap more which was the intent behind them, yet they will still be a nice bonus for old characters when a new one is added.
Also, this change helps young characters who may be killed in PvP or by high tier monsters, as their death penalty is lessened because they are not losing "full" softcap skill levels yet.
With this change, we hope young characters no longer feel as pressured to focus only on efficient evolution during their entire new player bonus period (therefore avoiding softcap / getting to higher weapon skills or hardcap), though the baseline desires for certain things are still there. Early evolution still helps your character a lot, and you will still want a decent chunk of Strength, Agility, and Health to make fighting high tier monsters easier, and you need a certain amount of Strength and Agility to equip tier 3 and 4 equipment, but we think those hurdles will be lessened enough by the above higher bonus EXP multipliers. We feel that 4-6 months is enough time for them to get a little of everything in (learning the game's ropes, questing, gaining some evolution, training generals with masters, and leveling their main weapon) and we want to start from there.
New Infrastructure Maintenance System
The backend work for managing and altering infrastructure is complete, and infrastructure features now have their own page.
Moving forward, instead of paying an upkeep in gold coins from the faction treasury, roads and bridges will require maintenance over time to keep them in usable condition, and will lose 1% condition per day (specifically it happens in .01% intervals with a random factor but the average rate is 1% per day), and of course have up to 100% condition.
As of today, all existing structures are at 75% condition. An infrastructure that falls to 0% health is now broken beyond repair and can not be fixed, it will need to be rebuilt from scratch.
You can restore condition to a piece of infrastructure with the following actions in the new page dedicated to them, and you will receive standard stoneworking crafting experience per turn spent.
+10% Condition to a Road, spending 2 turns, and using 1 Limestone Powder, 5 Paving Stones.
+10% Condition to a Bridge, spending 10 turns, and using 5 Limestone Powder, 25 Paving Stones, 30 Planks.
You can access the Infrastructure Page from the Main Page in the 'Environment' box.
We'll be keeping an eye on all of these figures, the availability of limestone, and how players handle it, along with the ease of management and viewing the information of this new system. We don't want to destroy your hard work on roads so far so we'll ease into it with you, but this is the direction we want to head with infrastructure.
Eventually, this backend system and dedicated page will be able to tackle validating the completion of terraforming projects and new infrastructure, and allow the mayor and helpers to directly permit these changes and additions in-game.
It will allow us to do much more with new infrastructure moving forward, such as the often suggested faction watchtowers, or mines for examples. Any other idea is welcome!
Automated Monthly City Budget Deposits
Until now, the taxes paid to the faction budget were deposited manually by Belouch every month. Now that we no longer need to manually curate the amount of roads, road ends, bridges, and other infrastructure a faction has, and how much those upkeep fees are reducing your monthly deposit, the full tax amount will be automatically added to the capital treasuries.
Order and Forsaken capital treasuries will now receive 25,000 gold automatically on the 1st of every month.
Pants! Trousers! Kilts! Oh my!
We'll miss the jokes as much as you, but the day is finally upon us, players will have to cover up. We'll be adding equipment for the leg armor slot, which to begin with are similar to body armors but just smaller, cheaper, and not as many tiers. Players will be able to customize their damage taken just a slight bit more, however, currently pants will not be able to be runed.
The recipes to craft them will be open after the PvP event (we don't want to create a pants panic).
Mythos and Norsk passive perks
-The previously revealed Mythos tribe 15% fleeing bonus is now active.
-The previously unrevealed Norsk tribe +15% passive Cold Resistance was activated. Don't laugh, elemental resistance will be more important in the future and that means Norsk can pretty much reach 75% res with lvl2 runes instead of lvl3s.
These bonuses are small, but these tribes sacrifice the lowest evo purchasing efficiency for them (0.5%), compared to some other spells/perks (up to 15%).
Inactivity script and masters
The inactive script teleports inactive characters to a location outside the island to not overload the capitals. Following requests from players, two modifications were made:
-The inactivity script will no longer teleport players who are older than 5000 turns. This should keep your valuable masters and friends available in the capital, while still reducing the lag of having too many characters nearby.
-Every inactive over 5,000 turns has been teleported back to their home capital.
Other Changes
These update posts are mostly summaries of changes over the last 1-3 months, as many changes are made as soon as they are ready, instead of us waiting to add them during one gigantic update in one day.
Recently:
-Rune damage values after being compared to target resistances are now rounded up, instead of rounded down. This helps low level runes and "rainbow" rune layouts remain relevant.
-South Island Capital was made a resurrection spot for everyone and it received basic capital city features (a safe no-combat tile, bank, marketplace). There is no mayor, no ban list, and no treasury.
-We changed how a requested character name change affects the horror hall and kill lists, all kills and deaths are now properly carried over to the new name.
Rush Server
The rush server is something we have in the pipeline since a long time, but never really focused on it due to many more important priorities. Lately it has been requested massively by the player-base, for many very valid reason.
We are happy to say that we are now full steam on this project.
Some important steps were achieved the past two weeks:
-We now have a map for it
-The map import script has been adjusted
-The full database has been created and is now hosted alongside Agonia's
-The backend is almost ready
It is impossible to give an ETA yet, but the progress is very very promising. As soon as the backend works we will start populating the world with monsters, explores, quests etc, while working on the code aspects in parallel.
---
We'll share more about where Agonia is going soon in a post that will cover our updated roadmap of planned backend and code updates, events, game content, and the rush server!
Bel & Em & Dspe