Post by Belouch on Mar 6, 2023 17:20:32 GMT 1
Game Update - 6 March 2023
Game Updates
-Movement Spawns
-5x Explore and Patrol actions
-Softcap waivers
-XP and intel curve
-Fixes to newcomers and XP bonuses
-Special monsters on map
We recently conducted a player-wide survey in regards to daily in-game time investment. About 1/3 of players said the daily game time was just right, and a minority said they would like it increased, but the majority of players expressed that they would appreciate to see some level of reduction in the daily playtime. We also know that with the sills increasing, the 50 skill softcap grind is becoming a serious deterrent for players who have had a period of inactivity or who wish to change their main weapon. Most changes in this Game Update were focused around these key issues, as well as some quality-of-life improvements for players.
Alleviation of Daily In-game Time Investment
Let us preface this by saying that all adjustments to any system will be compensated appropriately to bring about, as closely as possible and erring on the side of buffs, the same base rates of XP income and important item drop rates.
Movement Spawns
This is the main measure to reduce daily in-game time investment. Up until now, a step of movement generated encounters at 1/2 the rate of exploring, and this is now lowered to 1/4 the rate of explores.
Intended effects of this are:
To adapt/offset the effect on other aspects:
5x Explore
Second, we are implementing a new 5x Explore action, allowing you to attempt to explore up to 5 times in a row with a single click. This will sequentially trigger them, searching for a monster and items each time. If you find a monster, the sequence will stop early, preserving your turns and triggering your fight. This mainly saves you some annoyance and page loads currently, but we will be listening to player feedback and experimenting with other ways this can work (such as always spending the full 5 turns, and 100% chance of finding 1 fight). Any items you find during this action will be tallied up and presented to you all at once, you should not miss any item find announcements. This action will not stop early if a tile reaches exhausted fertility, or is already exhausted. You will need to manage your item finds on your own, or use the old Explore action. This is not meant to fully replace the old action, after all.
Patrol
Lastly, we will be adding a new action for finding monster encounters, called Patrol. This new action allows you to spend 5 steps worth of movement points on your current tile to find fights, but unlike the new 5x Explore, it will not trigger them sequentially, or stop early if you 'find a fight'. On initial implementation, it will process like a single explore does, using 5x your movement cost for the tile you're on and giving you a ~25% chance to find a fight. Patrol allows you to avoid many clicks and movement concerns in crowded training areas, while also allowing players to more easily generate more movement point fights on training camps, as half of your spawns will no longer be off to the side of a standard XP camp. Theoretically, XP camps could all move together in the past and not lose any XP from movements, but this lowers the bar for how accessible that is in regards to organization and online time.
That said, while it is now easier to use movement for training, remember that movement training is now less important, representing a smaller portion of your combat XP income per day (45% down to 29% proportionally, IF used optimally). We hope that players feel they are less penalized for spending movement points on various other interactions like raiding, mining, or trading.
Softcap Waivers
Another issue raised by players is the long grind to go from softcap to hardcap. While new players have a natural waiver for the first 4 months (then partial waiver until 6 months), this was often a big issue for older players, either after returning from a period of inactivity, or blocking players from changing main and forcing them to stick with one that isn't making them happy.
Starting today, players can make a one-time purchase granting them a 6-week immunity from the softcap penalties. While this has a high cost, it has an incredibly large impact and XP value.
-The cost of the waiver scales depending on how far from hardcap you are on your highest weapon, from 25,000 gold at hardcap, to 50,000 gold at 50 below hardcap. This is to give a benefit to having already done some softcap training.
-Players will gain 3/3 XP instead of 1/3 XP, fully ignoring the softcap penalty for 6 weeks, starting at the moment of purchase. This applies to ALL weapons.
-This can currently be purchased only once per character.
-This can be accessed through a link that will appear on your Evolution page, if your character is over 6 months of age. Characters younger than 6 months already have softcap waiver from newbie bonuses.
All specifics of this will be under routine review and feedback is welcome.
Alleviation of Long-Term accelerating XP Requirements
Since the onset of Agonia, player skill maximums have increased quite a bit! From 350 hardcap, now all the way over 550. This alone accounts for an over 400% increase in the amount of XP players needed to level up, and without the equal counter-measures to fully offset the climb. While we cannot allow intelligence or training XP incomes to do it alone due to balance issues, we can soften the curve's growth equally across the board.
Starting today, you will notice a slight reduction in the amount of additional XP needed for each skill, starting at 560. It's not much at first, because its function is to only fight the compounding growth effect. In a few weeks, you will start to see hundreds of XP cut off of the requirements. XP required for 600 in the old system vs. the new is only down by about 14%, but at 650, it is down by 27%. After many weeks, it will cut off thousands and thousands of XP required.
On the flipside of this, the growth in XP needed will now be much more fully covered by increases in XP rewards from increasing in fauna difficulty tiers. The aim of these changes is to lock the time investment per week for hardcap at the 520-540 mark (as far as character effort:skill level goes) and then to tackle the leftover in-game time investment in other ways. If we were to do our other methods of playtime-reduction, but leave this massively ballooning XP requirement in the game, it would have gotten really weird!
With this curve change, we are confident in managing the hardcap XP playstyle for a very long time ahead, without any taxing increases to weekly character investment as it grows over time. This hopefully alleviates the dread of looking towards the future and needing to spend more and more days per week training hardcap to keep up, as this simply should not happen with the new XP requirements. From here, we can start to look at decreasing how long it takes to meaningfully do your combat training per day.
Some tweaks were also made to the intel curve, this is why your needed XP could be 1-3% off from what it used to be.
Note: For crafters who have already passed the 561 mark, they will be compensated the XP difference (in the next 24h) and will probably notice an increase in their skill level.
Fixes to Newcomer and XP Bonuses
Previously, our XP bonus system did not account for a singular instance of over +100% XP. With our yearly assessment of newcomer bonus increase coming up soon, and us already tweaking XP systems for the accessibility changes, we needed to get this fixed.
How it works now:
When an individual instance of character XP bonus reaches over +100%, such as a newbie bonus being +110%:
If base XP gain was 4:
100% Chance to gain the base 4 XP
+100% Chance to gain an additional +4 XP (total 8)
+10% Chance to gain another additional +4 XP (total 12)
Effectively they would have 90% chance to gain double XP, and 10% chance to gain triple XP, making the overall XP income 210% of normal, which is correct. This is only the logic for a singular step of the bonus calculation, when combining all steps together and the stars aligning, you can still get multiple doubles compounding when considering things like Newbie Bonus, Double XP weekend, Tribal Weapon Bonuses, Strength Modifier, the new global fight modifier, and so on. If the stars aligned and you had all those bonuses, you could get a 48x XP hit, but that would happen incredibly rarely. Getting 4x or even 8x XP hits will now be more commonplace, for everyone.
---
Special monsters on map
This was another strong request from players, especially after the Mastotermite Queen hunting. Certain monster types will now appear distinct with red font on the main page and look around page.
---
Bel & Em & Dspe
Game Updates
-Movement Spawns
-5x Explore and Patrol actions
-Softcap waivers
-XP and intel curve
-Fixes to newcomers and XP bonuses
-Special monsters on map
We recently conducted a player-wide survey in regards to daily in-game time investment. About 1/3 of players said the daily game time was just right, and a minority said they would like it increased, but the majority of players expressed that they would appreciate to see some level of reduction in the daily playtime. We also know that with the sills increasing, the 50 skill softcap grind is becoming a serious deterrent for players who have had a period of inactivity or who wish to change their main weapon. Most changes in this Game Update were focused around these key issues, as well as some quality-of-life improvements for players.
Alleviation of Daily In-game Time Investment
Let us preface this by saying that all adjustments to any system will be compensated appropriately to bring about, as closely as possible and erring on the side of buffs, the same base rates of XP income and important item drop rates.
Movement Spawns
This is the main measure to reduce daily in-game time investment. Up until now, a step of movement generated encounters at 1/2 the rate of exploring, and this is now lowered to 1/4 the rate of explores.
Intended effects of this are:
- Reduced daily grinding time by 23%
- Lesser importance of movement in the training, meaning players are more inclined to use movement for other purposes like traveling, exploring, trading, raiding, etc.
- Traveling is less time consuming and frustrating as you'll find less fights on the way, thereby encouraging even more movement across the map
- More traffic in and out of caps
To adapt/offset the effect on other aspects:
- Players will naturally find a large chunk less encounters per day, and will be earning equivalently more XP in the remaining encounters to compensate for this.
- Certain monster drop rates will be adjusted so that you will have the same average item income per day for high end loot like Silk, Ivory, and Acid Glands. Other items, like bones, guts, and hides, are already very common and players will also need less heals per day now that they are finding less encounters, so we will not be auditing those drop rates as deeply at this time.
- This change has a different effect on each terrain (it boosts high movecost terrains). To compensate for this, the natural spawn rate on mountain lvl1, mountain lvl2 and snow (terrains where the minimum move is not 18) have been slightly reduced so that the we safeguard the XP balance of the different areas and terrains
5x Explore
Second, we are implementing a new 5x Explore action, allowing you to attempt to explore up to 5 times in a row with a single click. This will sequentially trigger them, searching for a monster and items each time. If you find a monster, the sequence will stop early, preserving your turns and triggering your fight. This mainly saves you some annoyance and page loads currently, but we will be listening to player feedback and experimenting with other ways this can work (such as always spending the full 5 turns, and 100% chance of finding 1 fight). Any items you find during this action will be tallied up and presented to you all at once, you should not miss any item find announcements. This action will not stop early if a tile reaches exhausted fertility, or is already exhausted. You will need to manage your item finds on your own, or use the old Explore action. This is not meant to fully replace the old action, after all.
Patrol
Lastly, we will be adding a new action for finding monster encounters, called Patrol. This new action allows you to spend 5 steps worth of movement points on your current tile to find fights, but unlike the new 5x Explore, it will not trigger them sequentially, or stop early if you 'find a fight'. On initial implementation, it will process like a single explore does, using 5x your movement cost for the tile you're on and giving you a ~25% chance to find a fight. Patrol allows you to avoid many clicks and movement concerns in crowded training areas, while also allowing players to more easily generate more movement point fights on training camps, as half of your spawns will no longer be off to the side of a standard XP camp. Theoretically, XP camps could all move together in the past and not lose any XP from movements, but this lowers the bar for how accessible that is in regards to organization and online time.
That said, while it is now easier to use movement for training, remember that movement training is now less important, representing a smaller portion of your combat XP income per day (45% down to 29% proportionally, IF used optimally). We hope that players feel they are less penalized for spending movement points on various other interactions like raiding, mining, or trading.
Softcap Waivers
Another issue raised by players is the long grind to go from softcap to hardcap. While new players have a natural waiver for the first 4 months (then partial waiver until 6 months), this was often a big issue for older players, either after returning from a period of inactivity, or blocking players from changing main and forcing them to stick with one that isn't making them happy.
Starting today, players can make a one-time purchase granting them a 6-week immunity from the softcap penalties. While this has a high cost, it has an incredibly large impact and XP value.
-The cost of the waiver scales depending on how far from hardcap you are on your highest weapon, from 25,000 gold at hardcap, to 50,000 gold at 50 below hardcap. This is to give a benefit to having already done some softcap training.
-Players will gain 3/3 XP instead of 1/3 XP, fully ignoring the softcap penalty for 6 weeks, starting at the moment of purchase. This applies to ALL weapons.
-This can currently be purchased only once per character.
-This can be accessed through a link that will appear on your Evolution page, if your character is over 6 months of age. Characters younger than 6 months already have softcap waiver from newbie bonuses.
All specifics of this will be under routine review and feedback is welcome.
Alleviation of Long-Term accelerating XP Requirements
Since the onset of Agonia, player skill maximums have increased quite a bit! From 350 hardcap, now all the way over 550. This alone accounts for an over 400% increase in the amount of XP players needed to level up, and without the equal counter-measures to fully offset the climb. While we cannot allow intelligence or training XP incomes to do it alone due to balance issues, we can soften the curve's growth equally across the board.
Starting today, you will notice a slight reduction in the amount of additional XP needed for each skill, starting at 560. It's not much at first, because its function is to only fight the compounding growth effect. In a few weeks, you will start to see hundreds of XP cut off of the requirements. XP required for 600 in the old system vs. the new is only down by about 14%, but at 650, it is down by 27%. After many weeks, it will cut off thousands and thousands of XP required.
On the flipside of this, the growth in XP needed will now be much more fully covered by increases in XP rewards from increasing in fauna difficulty tiers. The aim of these changes is to lock the time investment per week for hardcap at the 520-540 mark (as far as character effort:skill level goes) and then to tackle the leftover in-game time investment in other ways. If we were to do our other methods of playtime-reduction, but leave this massively ballooning XP requirement in the game, it would have gotten really weird!
With this curve change, we are confident in managing the hardcap XP playstyle for a very long time ahead, without any taxing increases to weekly character investment as it grows over time. This hopefully alleviates the dread of looking towards the future and needing to spend more and more days per week training hardcap to keep up, as this simply should not happen with the new XP requirements. From here, we can start to look at decreasing how long it takes to meaningfully do your combat training per day.
Some tweaks were also made to the intel curve, this is why your needed XP could be 1-3% off from what it used to be.
Note: For crafters who have already passed the 561 mark, they will be compensated the XP difference (in the next 24h) and will probably notice an increase in their skill level.
Fixes to Newcomer and XP Bonuses
Previously, our XP bonus system did not account for a singular instance of over +100% XP. With our yearly assessment of newcomer bonus increase coming up soon, and us already tweaking XP systems for the accessibility changes, we needed to get this fixed.
How it works now:
When an individual instance of character XP bonus reaches over +100%, such as a newbie bonus being +110%:
If base XP gain was 4:
100% Chance to gain the base 4 XP
+100% Chance to gain an additional +4 XP (total 8)
+10% Chance to gain another additional +4 XP (total 12)
Effectively they would have 90% chance to gain double XP, and 10% chance to gain triple XP, making the overall XP income 210% of normal, which is correct. This is only the logic for a singular step of the bonus calculation, when combining all steps together and the stars aligning, you can still get multiple doubles compounding when considering things like Newbie Bonus, Double XP weekend, Tribal Weapon Bonuses, Strength Modifier, the new global fight modifier, and so on. If the stars aligned and you had all those bonuses, you could get a 48x XP hit, but that would happen incredibly rarely. Getting 4x or even 8x XP hits will now be more commonplace, for everyone.
---
Special monsters on map
This was another strong request from players, especially after the Mastotermite Queen hunting. Certain monster types will now appear distinct with red font on the main page and look around page.
---
Bel & Em & Dspe