Across the Vast Divide

 
Aluvians

Gharu'ndim

Sho

Viamontians

Ispar History

Auberean History

Texts

Rumors

Event Teaser - From the Turbine Site

“In the course of our travels to other worlds, it has become apparent that we are not the only entities that are aware of the place that exists between these worlds. It can be theorized that we are not the first race to pass through these portal wells, nor will we be the last.” – Asheron Realaidain, Master of the Lyceum at Knorr

Wails grew louder and the little figured looked backward, tripped on a root, and tumbled into the thick muck of the Blackmire Swamp. Though the nights were warmer than they had been only weeks before, the night air was still wintry. The creature’s muscles stiffened and his blood became as viscous as the winter swamp about him. Another wail sounded and the mosswart clapped his yellow-green hands over his ears and met the sound with a scream of his own. His breath came in short gasps and his saucer eyes looked about wildly.

“Dead all!” the little thing howled into the night. Crying and whimpering, he grasped the roots of the nearby banyan tree and struggled to his feet. The wail echoed through the swamp again, the sound of hundreds of claws drawing across slate in perfect unison. Chills ran down the mosswart’s spine and he pushed away from the tree and launched into a full sprint. His wide feet sent the filth of the Blackmire into the air as he ran southeast from his home.

For hours Grearrk ran. Squealing, scampering, tumbling, running, covered in filth and blood, driven by the panic and fear that had crept into his heart as he slept and the horror that had nearly drained his soul when he woke. He ran through the swamp, northwest toward the humans. They would help. The Banderlings were as much an enemy to them as they were to the Mosswarts. When the torches of Sawato became visible the panic in Grearrk’s heart began to subside. He was filled with hope and pressed his little form even harder.

Ite Kenzen had stepped out of his tavern to enjoy the first of what he hoped would be several warm nights in Wintersebb, when he saw the yellow-brown form charging toward him with large wild eyes. He yelped and tried to roll to his right as the mosswart sprung upon him and toppled him to the ground.

“Help won’t you, Grearrk! Help won’t you!” The mosswart screamed again and again. Its little voice sounded hoarse. The creature lifted Ite to a sitting position and then slid behind him, cowering and using his body as a shield. Ite felt a wave of panic wash over him -- the mosswart was fleeing from something and he was being used as a shield. As the creature’s voice fell to a whimper, Ite began to scan the outskirts of the town for signs of what happened. A patron came from the tavern and drew a sword. The mosswart screeched and scurried beneath the steps of the establishment, bawling and begging in broken Roulean.

Ite, free of the creature’s grasp, stood and held a hand up toward the adventurer. He shook his head and then spoke to the mosswart in a gentle tone.

“What happened?”

“Wanga, without warning comes Wanga. Machine of screams is hidden in home. Banderlings bring Wanga in screams. Very bad is new magic! Dead all, dead all! Grearrk escape only. Help won’t you Grearrk?” The little creature crouched on all fours and shifted left and right, wary that the sword-wielding human would lash out him.

Ite looked at the frightened creature and turned to adventurer. “Fetch a guard for me.”

“Hurt no, Grearrk. No weapons he brings. Hurt no, Grearrk,” the creature sobbed.

“I am going to help you, Grearrk.”

*****

Ulgrim staggered along the roadside and smiled as he saw the broken lifestone in the distance. Taking another pull from his ale he made his way up the short incline and stared at the shards of blue. He dropped his stein to ground. It landed with a thud and miraculously did not spill a drop. From within the folds of his robe he produced a wand and started an incantation. In the middle of the casting a belch escaped his lips and a scent of burning hair was all that remained of the mage. Fortunately, he had grabbed his brew.

*****

“I am sorry, Aulakhe, I have not heard from Lord Asheron in several weeks.” Elysa sat beside the crouching Tumerok and spoke softly, trying to console him. “If the place where the atua ngamaru are keeping Aun Tanua has become unstable, I am sure that many will come to investigate.” The tumerok bowed his head and shook it in agreement once.

“Thank you, Ispar Elysatah. I will do my best to strengthen the will of those in my akiekie.” He rose and turned to leave but stopped short as he heard footsteps coming to the door.

Antius pushed the door open and gave a half-bow and salute to Aun Aulakhe, then turned his attention to Elysa.

“It is true. The mosswart’s name is Grearrk. He’s resting now just outside of Sawato. We looked over the structures he directed us to between Sawato and the ruins of Yanshi.” He smiled lightly. “We found that there were several mosswarts who were not attacked, but he spoke true. His hovel looked like a massacre had taken place.” He passed Aulakhe and sat beside Elysa. The Tumerok lightly beat the drum at his waist. “We searched the area briefly; aside from the stench we could see nothing out of the ordinary.”

“We shall see what the morning light brings,” Elysa said calmly and nodded her head as she placed her hand atop Antius’.

“Ispar Elysatah, Ispar Antiusnua, the spirits are agitated. Their words warn of a terrible kah that comes to us all. They know fear,” Aun Aulakeh said in a quiet tone.

“Whatever that is, Aulakhe, we shall stand against it and set the spirits to ease once again. Our Xuta’s will be strong, together.” Elysa smiled to reassure the young Tumerok leader.

*****

As the sun began to rise over the Blackmire, a thin vine reached through the surface of the swamp and promptly perished.

Exclusive Teaser Pics
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Maggie

Vault

Stratics

Warcry

Mystics
 
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Roll Out Article - From the Turbine Site

The sound of porous bone drawn across supple flesh presages the appearance of blood-soaked words. There is no quill writing upon the page, nor is there light in this chamber, far removed from the surface of the world. No footfalls in the hallways, no being working over the tome, only a whisper of a woman’s voice endlessly speaking, followed by the sound of bone carving the flesh of the book. So it has been since the coming of the dark ones, since the world grew cold and darkness consumed darkness while the light whimpered and watched its children fall.

The sun rises each morning. The moons come each night. Words ceaselessly appear on the pages of this book. Auberean has survived by way of these constants. But what happens to creation if the words one day…stop?

The Ongoing Saga

Dangers seem to be everywhere in Dereth these days. Zharalim working for the Queen have gone rogue, and statues of the Hopeslayer have appeared in towns, calling to Isparians to shrug off Asheron’s Protection.

In the town of Sawato, near the Blackmire, a terrified mosswart fled some unknown threat. Those who investigated found a massacre, with no hint as to what could have caused such destruction. What new danger lurks just below the surface of the fetid swamp?

Many of this month’s changes have already been described in detail in the Letter to the Players and the Follow-Up. There are three more topics that we’d like to mention in detail.

Portalspace and the Invoker

This month, we’ve updated the Portalspace quest, including the Buadren and the Invoker. The changes are intended to make the quest less confusing and less likely to result in players getting stuck and unable to complete it. The quest and the rewards have also been rebalanced. Here are the most important changes:

  • Players who have become stuck in the past – generally through loss of the Ember – should now be able to complete the quest successfully.
  • There is no longer a timer on creating a Buadren.
  • All of the Buadren parts have been renamed and moved onto new monsters. Since this is a simple name change, if you currently have any Buadren part in your possession, you can still use it to create a Buadren.
  • None of the items required to create a Buadren are Attuned or Bonded anymore, although the Buadren itself is still Bonded and Attuned.
  • The Portalspace / Invoker part of the quest is now restricted to 70+.
    You no longer have to attempt Portalspace within a month after having created a Buadren. Aun Aulakhe will always remember that you’ve created a Buadren.
  • Getting an Invoker is now repeatable.
  • The Invoker has been upgraded. If you have an old Invoker, it will not be automatically changed. However, you can trade it for a new Invoker by giving it to Aun Saritea. If you trade for a new Invoker, you can never get the old Invoker back.
  • The Portalspace dungeon has seen considerable changes.

Yaraq

The other content revision this month is to the town of Yaraq. Yaraq has been revised in the same way that Shoushi was in January, and Holtburg will be in April. Portal drops and Lifestones have been moved, and the surrounding content has been revised.

In Concept / In Development

We’re working on a better means of keeping you up-to-date on our development activities. We don’t expect to give the full status on each topic in each month’s Letter to the Players, we’d prefer to let you know which topics have been changed or updated. We’ll most likely be adding permanent In Concept and In Development pages to the official Asheron’s Call website.


Developer's Notes - From the Turbine Site

New Functionality and Content

  • We’ve revised the Portal Space/Invoker Quest and made some improvements to the city of Yaraq.
  • Phase two of the ongoing Treasure revisions has been introduced.
  • Life Magic transfer spells have been adjusted, with transfer caps and improved efficiency for the lower-level versions of the spells.
  • It is now possible to cast Item Magic spells directly on the chest area of a player if you have that player targeted.
  • Crafting Confirmation is a new option allowing players to find out their chances of success prior to completing of a crafting interaction.
  • There are new Character Options for choosing to display various facts about your character to players who identify you.
  • It’s Spring, and the snow has melted!

    Miscellaneous Changes and Improvements
  • The formula for Arc spells has been adjusted.
  • Those weapons with Biting Strike or Crushing Blow now display these previously hidden properties.
  • The Character Options panel has been reorganized.
  • Auto-enforcement for speed-altering program violations is now active on all eight worlds.
  • Multi-strike weapons now display as such in a special property when they are identified.
  • As part of our ongoing town revisions, rumors sold in towns will be color-coded to reflect the intended level range of the associated content. Light Blue notes are for 1–10, Blue are for 10–20, Green are for 20–40, and Orange are for 60–80. For March, the town rumors to receive these updates are those in Yaraq and Shoushi.
  • Allegiance chat is now bright orange.
  • If you use the @allegiance on/off command, you will no longer get an error message advising you to type @help allegiance.
  • The "Tell to Selected" and "Tell to Allegiance" chat options work properly.
  • You can now separate wrapped bundles of barbed arrowheads, greater barbed arrowheads, and deadly barbed arrowheads.
  • The starter town Archmages now sell all 9 starter town portal gems, which have a reduced cost of 500 pyreal.
  • They will also sell a gem to open a portal to Xarabydun.
  • The Empty Soul (Jojii's Adherent) quest now has a correct minimum level of 35, and two of the notes have more accurate directions.
  • You should no longer be able to get stuck in the Arcane Pedestal quest in a situation where you can't get a new imaging crystal from Slithe Traditor.
  • Celcynd will no longer keep Aluvian stamped letters
  • The Creepy Statues no longer appear as portals on radar, and are easier to see from a distance.
  • Cultists and Zharalim no longer use spell words when they cast spells.
  • The armor on the Pyreal Target Drudge has been increased.
  • The sign at East Sawato Settlement is now correct, and East Sawato Cottages have been renamed to West Sawato Cottages as they are, in fact, west of Sawato.
  • The burden panel will scroll when necessary.
  • Also to improve graphical performance, red steam vents are seen less frequently in volcanic areas.
  • The icons for spells which affect entire fellowships no longer appear as though they are Self spells.
  • Weight of Eternity now overrides player-cast Weakness spells
  • The first chest in the Academy now spawns multiple Application Forms
  • New Gharu'ndim characters start with bread instead of cheese; this is to prevent a situation in which a starting Gharu'ndim crossbow character could end up without any bolts due to burden.

    Minor Details
  • The Ice Badge and Olthoi Sollerets are now hookable.
  • Bowls now do bludgeoning damage.
  • The look of the Olthoi Mutilator head has been adjusted.
  • Olthoi Heads floor and wall-hook properly.
  • The Weeping Bow now looks correct when it is hooked, as do Bouquets.
  • Margul are slightly louder when they cast spells.
  • The Puppeteer's Skull no longer hovers over your hand.
  • Brother Gonun the Scribe in Shoushi no longer sells rumors; look for these rumors with the two barkeeps in town.
  • The Stamped Society letters no longer have "A" in front of their names.
  • A typo in the name of the Crucible with Quicksilver has been corrected.
  • Some typos in Scroll names have been corrected.
  • A typo in the text of the Aluvian society agents has been corrected.

March Letter to the Players  - From the Turbine Site

Welcome to the March 2004 Letter to the Players! This letter was initially intended for Monday, March 1st, but we held it so that we could include additional comments regarding the treasure changes.

In Dereth, we were reminded that not all threats to civilization need come from outside. Near Zaikhal, an entire force of Zharalim fell to corruption and madness, and strange small statues were found in several towns, encouraging the citizens of Dereth to refuse Asheron’s protection and battle one another.

Now let’s take a look at some of the changes coming in the March event.
 

Treasure

Last month, we introduced the first part of sweeping changes to our treasure system, and we received a great deal of negative feedback.

One thing that the feedback made clear is that we failed to properly prepare you for both the long-term and short-term impacts of the change. In addition, your feedback has alerted us to a number of issues with the change that we are working to resolve.

What is the long-term goal of these changes? Essentially, it is to resolve a number of limitations in our loot system. The old loot system had a number of issues. There were four generic levels of loot that we could give to creatures intended for characters below level 50, but only two levels of loot for characters above level 50. This made balancing loot for the most uber characters very difficult – almost anything that we added for the most difficult monsters would start appearing in monsters intended for all 50+ characters. This was the largest flaw, but there were other issues across the board.

Our goal is that creatures intended for a specific level range should be more likely to drop loot that is useful for that level range. For example, newbie characters should not find 325 wield req weapons that they can’t use, and Uber characters should not find weapons with no wield req. Also, there should be no creatures that always drop “useless loot”. There will always be a range of loot, but that range should be more reasonable than it has been in the past.

The first phase of our changes tied the six levels of loot directly to the six target levels of characters that have existed in the game for some time: Newbie (1-20), Low (20-40), Mid (40-60), High (60-80), Extreme (80+), and Uber (100+). Creatures intended for characters in a specific level range should drop loot appropriate for characters in that level range. This improved loot overall for many creatures – many Tuskers are a good example – but also decreased the average quality of loot found on other creatures – such as many Olthoi. Many types of Olthoi had been given loot well above their target level. This was good for players who just wanted to loot a lot of peas easily, but was annoying for the players who were intended to fight these Olthoi. These low-level players tended to get weapons and items as loot that they wouldn’t be able to use for some time.

How do you know where to find creatures for your level? The best place to look is at our Creature Distribution Map, which can be found on our Download page. This map shows how the creatures were laid out during the landscape redistribution last year. The levels given are suggested player levels, so that gives you a place to start hunting and see how it feels.

Now, just to be very clear about this – AC is a skill-based game, not a level-based game. The ranges on that map are suggestions based on assumptions we have made about average skill levels and hunting styles. We suggest that you start with the range that that corresponds to your level and see how you like it. If you've pumped more XP into your combat skills, or if you like to live life out on the edge, you may want to go up a range and see how that feels. If you have spread your experience out more, or you're a more conservative sort, you may be happiest trying out the range below your actual level. Our goal with this map was merely to make some useful suggestions about where to start.

I cannot overemphasize the fact that the changes to creatures are not done yet. Due to the size and scope of these changes, it was not possible to make all of them in one month. As we mentioned in last month’s Rollout Article, there are still a number of issues. Some of these issues will be resolved in this month; others are pending for April and later.

The following issues will be resolved in the March event:

  • Spell scrolls: The scrolls dropped by creatures haven’t been on-target for some time now, but the February changes really exacerbated this issue. For March, we have adjusted the scroll drops on creatures and in treasure – you should now find scrolls that are appropriate for your level. Our goal is that you should be able to find most of your scrolls for your next level before you need to buy them.

    Does this mean that there is a chance to find level 7 scrolls on creatures and in loot?

    Yes. Yes it does.

  • Spells on items: As we said in the Rollout Article, spell levels on creatures intended for 80+ characters were out of whack. After receiving your feedback on this issue, we realized that the problem was more widespread. For March, we’ve adjusted the spells on items upwards for all creatures and chests intended for characters higher than 20.

    Does this mean that there is a chance to find level 7 spells on loot items?

    Sorry, not at this time.

  • Chests: Last month, we concentrated primarily on creatures. This month, we’re turning our attention to chests. Chests should now, in general, spawn items useful for characters in the level range for which they are intended.

    In addition, some chests have been adjusted so that they have a chance of providing better loot than other sources within the same target level range. Runed Chests and the Virindi Troves are good examples of this.

    The Singularity Trove deserves its own comment. The Singularity Trove used to be in the class with the best possible loot in the game – but the troves and keys could be found by characters at a lower level. The Singularity Trove is now in the 80+ target range of loot.

    At the moment though, the 80+ and the 100+ ranges have a lot of overlap. In addition, many of the issues that were reported with Singularity Troves in February – such as scroll levels and weapon modifiers – will be resolved this month.

  • Offense and Defense Modifiers: In all cases, we’ve increased the average offense and defense modifier on melee weapons. We’ve also increased the maximum mod that can be found at each level – except the top level, which was already the maximum possible. This change was made primarily as a result of player feedback.

The following issue should be resolved in the April event:

  • Border Creatures: Right now, if a creature is intended for level 60 characters, it will have loot for level 40-60. This can make it very challenging to “break in” to the next level of creatures – you can’t fight stronger creatures without getting better equipment, but you can’t get better equipment without fighting stronger creatures!

    Starting in April, creatures that are designed for characters within 5 levels of a difficulty break will have the treasure intended for the next highest difficulty. For example, creatures that are intended to be fought by level 36 characters will have loot intended for characters from 40 to 60.

    In addition, some creatures that are completely outside the system will be brought in, and other creatures will be adjusted as necessary.

    It is important to remember that a creature’s level is not a direct correlation to the level of character that should be fighting it. In general, you should be able to take on creatures that are higher level than you are. When we rebalanced creatures last year we tried to line up the display level so that there is an obvious relationship between that and difficulty – so that a level 110 monster is harder than a level 100 monster. However, some creatures are easier for one type of character – mages, say – and harder for another – melee, say. So if you're a melee, a level 100 mage-oriented creature may be tougher for you than a level 110 melee-oriented creature.

The following issue will be resolved in a future update:

  • Armor: The type and qualities of armor found in the various levels of loot are out of whack. This is one of the reasons why you’re finding AL20 leather at much higher creature levels than you would expect. We’re aware of this issue and are working on it, but the changes will not be in March, nor are they likely for April.

    Does balancing armor include introducing new types of armor?

    Probably, yes.

Another issue that has resulted in a great deal of feedback is the value of items – many players have reported difficulty in making enough pyreals through hunting to pay for their components, mana charges, and other consumables. We are watching the situation closely, but at this time we have no plans to directly change the value of loot items. Many of the other changes that we are making – both in treasure and elsewhere – may change the situation considerably. In particular, the scroll changes may resolve the issues reported with mages not being able to afford scrolls that they needed.

We understand that a large number of you were very surprised and upset by these changes. We believe that this was caused by two main factors. The first is that the changes are not complete, and you are seeing an incomplete system at work. The second is that I personally did not properly explain the goals and phases of these changes – I hope that this letter explains things to your satisfaction.
 

Armor Buffing, Transfer Spells, and Arcs

What do these topics have in common? The two changes are being made primarily from a PvP point of view, but they also impact NPK players.

Armor Buffing

In the past, there has been no means of buffing or debuffing another player’s armor.  Negative armor Item Enchantment spells such as Lures or Brittlemail were only useful on a target wielding a shield.  PK and PKL players have never had a means of countering, or “breaking through,” the positive effects cast upon an opposing player’s armor. Starting in March, you will now be able to do so – with some limitations.

Beginning in March, Item Enchantment armor buffs or debuffs cast upon a player who is not wielding a shield will redirect to whatever armor is worn on that player’s chest. If the player is not wearing armor, the spell will fail. Clothing, such as a shirt or Asheron’s Raiment, does not count in this situation – but robes do, as they are considered armor. When cast on a player wielding a shield, these spells will redirect to his or shield, as they have for several months now.

This allows for several new options for players. NPK players can assist a friend with armor buffing, so long as their friend is not wielding a shield. However, we expect these changes will be most useful to PKs and PKLs, who can now debuff the armor of their opponents.

It is important to note that the dynamics associated with buffing or debuffing a target’s armor will work similarly to that of a target’s shield or weapon.  If the targeted item is not wielded at the time the spell is cast, the spell will fail.  If the targeted item is unenchantable, the spell will also fail.

This change is intended to provide a method to directly counter the ability to debuff another player’s weaponry.  Without the ability to negate a player’s positive armor Item Enchantment spells, it was often very difficult for a melee or missile attacker to inflict meaningful damage on an opponent. A player could always debuff a weapon, tilting the combat advantage in his or her favor – yet the player using a physical attack had no equivalent tactic available.

Transfer Spells

For some time, the low-level transfer spells have been unbalanced at high levels, and not as effective as hoped at the low levels for which they were designed. For example, a high level mage can often cast Stamina to Health I and restore almost all – if not all – of his health. This seems inappropriate for a first-level spell. Why is it so much better than Heal Self I, for example?

Let us define what is meant by Life Magic transfer spells:  Health to Mana, Health to Stamina, Mana to Stamina, Mana to Health, Stamina to Health, and Stamina to Mana are all of the spells that we consider to be part of the Life Magic transfer class of spells.  These spells traditionally take a portion of one secondary attribute (health, mana, or stamina), and convert some amount of that portion into a different secondary attribute.

Starting in March, the first three levels of transfer spells will have their percentage returned increased, to improve their value for low-level characters. In addition, to reduce the imbalance issue, the first four levels of transfer spells will have their maximum transfer capped.

Please see the table below – bold numbers represent new values:

Level of Transfer Spell

Percentage Drained

Old Percentage Converted

New Percentage Converted

Old Maximum Transfer

New Maximum Transfer

I

50%

75%

90%

None

50

II

50%

90%

100%

None

100

III

50%

105%

110%

None

150

IV

50%

120%

120%

None

200

V

50%

135%

135%

None

None

VI

50%

150%

150%

None

None

VII

50%

175%

175%

None

None

“Maximum Transfer” refers to the maximum value either drained or converted. For example, Stamina to Health I, when cast by a character with 150 Stamina, used to drain 75 points of Stamina and provide 56 points of Health. Now, it will only drain 50 points of Stamina, and provide 45 points of Health. No level I transfer spell will drain or provide more than 50 points of any pool. 

This change is intended to increase the value and usage of low-level transfer spells for low-level characters, while decreasing their power when used by high-level characters.

Arc Spell Words

Since their introduction, arc spells have used the same spell words as bolt spells, due to the fact that they use the same components when not using Foci. For example, both Flame Bolt and Flame Arc use the words Zojak Quaguz.

In today’s PvP arena, this means that one aspect of player skill – knowing what the spell words mean so you can know what your opponent is casting at you – cannot be used when trying to distinguish Bolts from Arcs.

Starting in March, Arcs will have a different formula – they will use Amaranth instead of Hawthorn. Players who use Foci will not notice a difference – they will still use prismatic tapers and scarabs – but the spells will now have Kedrack as their first word instead of Zojak. If you aren’t using the War Magic Foci, you will need to buy Amaranth before you will be able to cast Arc spells.

So now, if you see your opponent say Zojak Quaguz, you will know that he’s casting a bolt and not an arc.

Additional PvP Concerns for the Future

As we stated in the February Letter to the Players, we are taking a closer look at a number of PK and PKL issues. In the near future, you may see changes to:

  • The lack of an Aegis-like ability for archers.
  • The balance of dispels – dispel spells, gems, and potions.
  • The Jumpspin issue – how can we prevent players from using our physics code to guarantee escape from sticky melee, and yet still provide a means for skilled players to get away from the melee that is targeting them?
  • Melee weapon damage over time in PvP – specifically, bringing more diversity to melee beyond “if you’re not sword, you’re out of luck”.
  • “Loot Weapons” vs. “Quest Weapons” – Re-examining PK-oriented quest weapon suites to provide viable choices between the different types of weaponry
  • New/Improved pathing choices for missile attacks, similar to the arc/bolt choice for War Magic

I can’t provide a specific ETA for any of these changes, but we want to let you know what we are working on. The feedback threads that we’ve run on our forums have given us a lot of great information about what you do and don’t like about PvP combat in Asheron’s Call. We’ll be using that information to make PvP better for the folks who play it most.
 

Content Revisions

In March we are continuing our ongoing process of updating out-of-date quests and areas. This month, you’ll see Yaraq and its surroundings receive an update similar to Shoushi’s update in January. The Invoker, or Portalspace, quest will also be updated.
 

Fellowships and Quests

One of the new quests this month has as a key part of it a quest dynamic that you’ve not seen before – fellowship quests and “locked” fellowships. A fellowship quest means that your whole fellowship is on the quest, not just an individual. If you drop out of the fellowship, you will not be able to complete the quest. A “locked” fellowship is one in which new members cannot be recruited for the length of the quest. Fellowship members who leave the group have 15 minutes to get back in before they are unable to rejoin.

Please, don’t take these changes as an indication that we are removing Asheron’s Call’s soloability! The ability to advance while playing alone is one of Asheron’s Call’s strengths, and we have no intention of removing it. However, in certain special circumstances or for specific quests, we may use these new features to ensure that the quest be tackled by a group of players.
 

Our Next Story Arc

As we’ve hinted at elsewhere, March is the first month of our next exciting story arc: The Shattered Coil. What danger now menaces Dereth? Only time – and your adventures and explorations – will tell.


Letter to the Players Follow-Up - From the Turbine Site

In listening to the feedback received since posting the Letter to the Players, we’ve realized that there are some gaps in our communication process. One of the largest of these is that frequently players are not advised of changes included in an upcoming month until the Letter to the Players for that month is posted. Because of our schedule, this means that by the time we are seeing your reaction to planned changes, we are already in a freeze state in which altering or reverting those changes are very difficult.

I’d like to apologize for not taking further steps to prevent all of you from being blindsided by some of our upcoming changes. More to the point, we’re making some big changes to the way we release information about upcoming updates. We’ll be releasing information farther ahead of time, which will allow us to listen to your feedback and discuss these concepts and ideas with you long before we begin development on them.

In addition to this article, we plan to provide in-depth articles regarding several large-scale systems and our visions for them. The first of these, regarding PvP combat, should be posted early next week. The second will be regarding the Treasure changes and will follow a week or so later. The third will talk about our plans to improve the buffing process and will probably follow a week after the Treasure article.

Each Letter to the Players will now have three sections. The first section is going to contain information about the upcoming month. The second section, “In Development,” will contain information about what we are working on for the next month. The third section, “In Concept,” is going to contain information about changes that we are working on for later updates. This will give you more information about future changes and more opportunity to provide feedback on these changes before we even write a single line of code. Only changes to existing game systems will be included in these updates; in general we will not release information about upcoming content.

It is important to stress that nothing in the "In Development" or "In Concept" is final. These are all works in progress. Nothing in either section is guaranteed to go into the game in the form described, or even at all. The purpose of these sections is to find out how you feel about these topics before they are final.

Rather than explain in further detail, you can see exactly what I mean below. We wanted to get this information about April and beyond up as soon as possible, as many of the changes you’ll see below directly impact many of the concerns that were raised regarding the March Letter to the Players.

Coming in March

(These are items that are coming in the March event. In the past, we would have saved this information for the March Rollout Article. Under the new communication system, they are appropriate for the Letter to the Players.)

“Hidden” Properties No Longer Hidden

There are several quest weapons, such as the Quadruple-Bladed Axe, that have what we’ve referred to in the past as a “hidden property”. Starting in March, these properties will appear when you ID such an item.

An item that is described as having the Biting Strike property has a greater chance of a critical hit in combat. An item that is described as having the Crushing Blow property has a greater than normal critical multiplier – it is likely to do more damage in a critical hit.

Unlike imbues, these properties do not scale with your skill; they are set to a specific level.

Character Options

Over the years, we’ve added several options to the Character Options panel. The grouping of these options was, well, counterintuitive at times. Starting in March, the options will be grouped under the following headers: User Interface Behavior, User Interface Display, Grouping, Other Players, Character Behavior, and Chat.

In addition, we’re adding several new options – Character Display Options, and Crafting Confirmation.

Character Display Options

These options will be found under Other Players and control what other players can see if they successfully assess you. The different pieces of information that you can toggle on or off are:

  • Your real-time date of birth.
  • Your in-game age.
  • Your chess rank.
  • Your fishing skill.
  • Your number of deaths.

All of these options are toggled off by default.

Crafting Confirmation

This is something that has been requested several times, and we’re happy to be able to provide it. Starting in March, there will be a new option in the Character Options panel under User Interface Display: “Crafting Chance of Success Dialog.”

This option is unchecked by default. If you leave it unchecked, all crafting interactions, including Tinkering, behave as they have in the past. Most interactions simply either succeed or fail, while some interactions – mostly Tinkering – have a warning in advance.

If you check this option, any existing warnings will not be shown. Instead, you will make the “clapping” motion and the following will occur:

  • If you have a 100% chance of success in this craft interaction, it will succeed.
  • If you have a 0% chance of success in this craft interaction, it will automatically abort and you will receive the message, “You cannot possibly succeed” in the upper-left.
  • If your odds of success are somewhere between 0% and 100%, you will receive a dialog box stating your odds and asking you if you want to continue. If you choose to continue, the interaction will either succeed or fail as it has in the past. If you choose not to continue, the craft interaction will abort and you will receive the message, “You chicken out” in the upper-left.

Obviously, few crafters will leave the option permanently checked or unchecked. If you’re making flour and your odds are, say, 95%, you probably want to leave it unchecked. On the other hand, if you’re tinkering your best weapon with Black Garnet, you probably want to check the option so you have an idea what your odds are.

Ulgrim

We want to warn you in advance that Ulgrim won’t be found in his house immediately after the March event. Don’t worry, he’s not gone for good! He’s just run into a bit of trouble – see the teaser. You’ll be seeing more of Ulgrim later in the month, and you’ll be able to complete the quest in his house again before the month is over.

In Development

(These are the game changes that we are working on for the April event. None of these items are guaranteed to be added for April, as scheduling and priorities can change. Once the process has matured over the next two months or so, In Development will contain items from the In Concept section that we’ve discussed with you and decided to put in the development pipeline. There is no set schedule for In Development items to go into an episode; this section only notes that they are being worked on.

As this is the first month for this section, it contains the work for April and your feedback on these topics would be particularly valuable.)

Settlement Portals

For some time, the Settlement Portal Hubs have been found outside almost all of the towns and cities of Dereth. These Hubs provided fast transportation all across Dereth, but many players have complained that... well, they just look ugly.

In April, we are planning to introduce the first phase of a two-phase process to remove the Settlement Portals. The first phase is the creation of portal summoning gems for all of the Settlements that are currently linked to the Hubs. Each Settlement will have a vendor who will sell that Settlement’s gem.

The second phase, currently planned for May, is the removal of the Settlement Portal Hubs entirely.

The goal of these changes is to remove the ugliness of the Hubs, as well as encourage exploration and travel through Dereth’s wilderness. If there are several Settlements that you visit regularly, you have the opportunity to purchase gems for these Settlements in the month of April, before the Hubs are removed. If you wish to visit your friend’s home, you can ask you friend to purchase that Settlement’s gem for you. We would not be surprised to see gems for particularly popular Settlement destinations being traded in the Marketplace!

Content Revisions

We plan to revise two towns and two quests in April. Holtburg will be revised in the same way that Shoushi was in January and Yaraq will be in March. The portal drops and Lifestone locations will be made more convenient, and the surrounding content will be adjusted for balance.

The second town that we are planning to revise is the Lugian fortress of Linvak Tukal. It will be getting a Lifestone and direct portal access, without the need to fight through the entryway.

Along with Linvak Tukal, we plan to revise the Arm, Heart, Mind quest. Confusing aspects of the quest timing will be fixed, and the quest rewards will be adjusted.

The second quest to be revised is the Little Green Seeds quest. Terese’s interactions and the Swamp Garden will be revised, and new types of seeds for higher-level creatures will be introduced. This doesn’t mean new colors of dye, however.

Vendor Buy-Sell Rates

Ever since the creature spawn changes, there have been some disparities between the difficult of hunting around certain towns and the buy-sell rates of the vendors inside those towns. In April, we plan to adjust the vendor buy-sell rates in several towns to better reflect the surrounding area.

In addition, to give each town some unique flavor, each town will have one or two vendors who have better buy/sell rates than the rest of the town.

Dispel Revisions

For some time, the dispel gems have been considerably better than any of the dispel spells or dispel potions. Dispel gems could remove all of your debuffs in one shot, they only removed negative spells, and they could remove level VII spells.

To improve the situation and create more versatility and usefulness for dispels, we are planning to add level VIIs to spells and potions, and decrease the power of gems:

  • Dispel spells: There will be level VII versions of Item, Creature, and Life dispels, both Self and Other. These spells will remove a random number of negative spells from the target when successfully cast, and will not remove positive spells.
  • Dispel potions: There will be level VI and VII player-craftable dispel potions, which will be created in a process similar to the existing dispel potions. One option we are considering is the removal of the two lowest levels of dispel potions and shifting the entire crafting process “down” two steps. For example, the process that currently results in a level V dispel potion would now create a level VII dispel potion.

    These potions will remove a random number of negative spells from the user, and will not remove positive spells.

  • Dispel gems: These gems will have their power reduced. They will no longer remove all negative spells from the user, they will instead remove a random number. We are also looking at the possibility of making them stackable.

In general, when I write, “a random number” above, the final random range has not yet been finalized. We’re looking at a range of or near 1-6 spells for each dispel.

Buffing Improvements

The Buffing Changes article that will be following will provide information on all of our planned buffing improvements and how they fit together. The first of these, faster self-buffs, is planned for April.

In April, we plan to make all Creature and Life Self buffs cast at the same speed as a level I spell, no matter what their level. This should cut down on the amount of time spent preparing for battle for players who cast their own buffs.

Why the Self spells and not Others? We believe that training a skill yourself should always have some advantage over relying on others who have trained the skill.

What about Banes? As there are no “Self” or “Other” versions of these spells, we need to be a bit more careful about our changes to them. You’ll see some information regarding our plans for Banes in the In Concept section below, as well as in the coming Buffing Changes article.

House Purchase Timer

An issue that has resulted in a great deal of feedback is that of players camping houses solely for the purpose of resale and a profit.

After receiving all of your feedback, we've come at this issue from a different angle. If we can prevent these players from being able to quickly unload these houses and purchase new ones, it will impede their ability to tie up the entire housing market.

To that end, we would like to introduce a one month timer on purchasing cottages, villas, and mansions. Residential Quarters will be exempt from this timer. This timer is per account, not per character. The timer would not extend across worlds.

What does this mean? All players, whether they own a house or not, would have a field in their housing panel stating the last time that they purchased a house (for these purposes a "house" is a cottage, villa, or mansion) and when they can purchase another one. You cannot purchase a house until 30 days after the last time that you purchased a house.

It is important to note that this has nothing to do with when you lose a house, either through @house abandon or failure to pay maintenance. If you have owned a house for several months and abandon it, you will be able to purchase another house immediately. What you cannot do is purchase a house, abandon it less than 30 days later, and then purchase another house immediately.

Purchasing an apartment in the Residential Quarters does not change this at all. You could buy a house, immediately abandon it, and then immediately purchase an apartment. However you would still have to wait the 30 days before you could purchase another house.

There is a feedback thread on this specific proposal here.

Treasure Changes, Phase 3

We’ve already mentioned several of the ongoing Treasure changes coming in April in the March Letter to the Players, such as adjustments to border creatures. In addition, we plan to make the following changes:

  • Attack and Defense modifiers will appear more frequently on weapons. In March, we’re adjusting the minimum, maximum, and average modifiers that are found – in April, you will find these modifiers more frequently in general.
  • Mana Conversion modifiers will also appear more frequently on casters. At high levels of loot, you will no longer be able to find casters that don’t have a Mana Conversion modifier. In addition, the average Mana Conversion modifier will adjusted upwards.
  • New Defense Modifiers. In April, you will be able to find Melee Defense modifiers on casting items, and Missile Defense and Magic Defense modifiers on all weapons and casting items. Casters will now be able to have Defender cast on them, as well as be tinkered with Brass. At some point in the future we may create equivalent spells and tinkers for Missile Defense and Magic Defense modifiers on weapons and casters.
  • Casting items will have the ability to generate with Defender due to the above change, and will also have the ability to generate with the Hermetic Link spell or cantrips for any of the spells that can be found on them.

“Second-class” Weapons Get Upgrades

In the past, some weapons within a weapon class were just plain undesirable. For example, if you were a Mace user and you wanted maximum damage, there was no reason to look at anything other than a Morningstar. You turned up your nose at a Kasrullah.

In April, we’ll be making changes to bring the low-end damage weapons closer to par with the maximum damage weapons in each class. This is similar to the changes we made to bows and crossbows last year; however we are not necessarily giving all weapons within a class the same maximum damage. In many weapon classes there will still be weapons that have a lower maximum than others, but the difference will be much smaller.

No weapon class is having its maximum damage increased, and some classes are being changed more than others. For example, all three types of Unarmed Combat weapons had the same maximum damage, so they will not be touched. Weapons that are considered to be a “secondary damage type” – Rapiers, Spiked Clubs, Naginatas, and Warhammers – are not being changed, and we are taking into account the differences between hiltable and non-hiltable Swords and Daggers.

Fellowship Spells

As we have hinted in the past, we are introducing spells that can be cast on all members of a fellowship simultaneously. The first of these spells are planned for April. We are taking it slow with these – they are only attribute buffs, and no more powerful than existing spells.

Envoy Policy Changes

Katahdin is working with the Dev Team to help the Envoy team better assist you, our players. Here are two of the ideas that we are currently considering:

  • Inscriptions. While their primary responsibility would always to be handle calls that are in the Help or Abuse queues, Envoys could make themselves available to uninscribe items upon request. There would also be scheduled times and places on each world where you could find an Envoy to uninscribe your item. We’re still working on many of the details and are interested in your thoughts on this topic.
  • The Marketplace. On some worlds, trade bots are not placed in the outlying rooms and instead cluster in the primary portal drop room. This can create graphical lag and issues for players who are portaling in to the Marketplace.

The Envoy team would like to encourage players to move their bots into the outer rooms of the Marketplace. In addition, players need to ensure that the speech that they are having their trade bots use is not offensive. We are considering removing offensive or badly-placed trade bots from the Marketplace. These bots would not be banned or booted, but would be removed to isolated rooms until their owners return.

Tell us what you think of the ideas In Development!

In Concept

(These are the game additions and changes that we are thinking about for May and beyond. We cannot guarantee that any of these additions and changes will be added to the game. The whole purpose of this section is to let you know what we’re thinking about doing, give you a chance to comment and to have a dialogue with us about them.

I can’t stress strongly enough – it is entirely possible that none of the changes listed below will ever make it into the game. We are going to be carefully watching what you post about these concepts.)

Content Revisions

In the future, we would like to revisit all towns in the same fashion that Shoushi has been revisited, and Yaraq and Holtburg will be revised in March and April respectively.

We also would like to revise the difficulty and rewards of Marae Lassel, Aerlinthe, and the Vesayens in the same way that we revised the Singularity Caul. In each case the island and associated quests would be revised for new (not necessarily higher) target levels.

We would like to revise the following quests: Palenqual’s Living Weapons, Singularity Weapons, the “Three Crystals Quests” (aka the Fenmalain, Caulnalain, and Shendolain Vaults), the Quiddity Weapons, and the Composite Bow and Crossbow.

Better Weapons

In discussing the Treasure changes, we’ve mentioned that one of the reasons that the changes were necessary was to allow us to add cool new loot at the top end. What are we thinking of? We’re thinking of higher wield-req melee and missile weapons and wield-req casting items. To prevent these new items from throwing off existing damage-over-time balance, as well as PvP balance, we are looking at possibilities other than simply increased damage. One possibility is new, special imbue effects that cannot be added through tinkering, or – for the missile weapons and casters – special bonuses to specific types of elemental damage.

New Loot Armor

Right now the loot system has some rather obvious flaws when it comes to armor, such as when a high-level creature drops AL20 leather. We have held off on adjusting the armor drop system as we are looking at a complete revamp of it including new types of armor. We’re looking at adding a new class of armor for each of the three races. These new types would not be considerably better than existing armor, but would mix up the existing racial armor stereotypes. For example, perhaps the new Aluvian armor has metal protections like Celdon, but is a two-piece set like Amuli? These questions are still being investigated.

If it appears that we will have to delay the introduction of the new armor, we can look at adjusting the armor drop tables without them. We would prefer not to, but we understand that you would prefer to stop finding AL20 armor in non-low-level loot as soon as possible.

Rares

Rares would be an entirely new type of loot drop, separate from existing loot and trophies. Rares would have an extremely small chance of dropping from any creature, at any time – you would be just as likely to find a Rare on a Drudge Prowler as you would on a Virindi Profatrix.

Rares would be designed to be useful to almost any character, but not better in way that could be unbalancing. For example, we are considering a Rare form of healing kit that has interesting properties with regards to chances of healing and the amount healed. We would probably not consider a Rare sword that has a base damage triple existing swords.

Rares are intended to be exciting and interesting semi-unique items. When you find a Rare, we want your reaction to immediately be, “Cool!” no matter which Rare it is.

One interesting note – to help us determine what the drop rate on Rares might be, we decided to find out exactly how many creatures are killed by our players in a given month. We added code to the game that would count this for us! In the time between the January and February events, here are how many creatures each world killed:

Darktide: 13.5 million
Harvestgain: 10.4 million
Frostfell: 10.1 million
Wintersebb: 9.2 million
Leafcull: 8.9 million
Solclaim: 8.8 million
Thistledown: 8.8 million
Morningthaw: 8.4 million

We won’t be doing these counts every month, but it’s some interesting information to think about!

More information on the above three Treasure topics may be found in the upcoming Treasure article.

Further Buffing Improvements

In addition to accelerated self buffs and Fellowship spells, we are looking at introducing spells that buff multiple attributes simultaneously. These spells could be introduced for Life, Creature, and/or Item Magic. The exact details of these spells – how do you learn them, what is the cost, how many attributes do they buff simultaneously – are still in development.

More information on this topic will be in the upcoming Buffing Improvements article.

Missile Attack Improvements

We are investigating two improvements for Bow, Crossbow, and Thrown Weapons characters:

  • Recalibrating the accuracy/speed slider. Currently setting the slider to the far left allows you to fire at maximum speed, but penalizes your skill by 50%. Likewise, setting the slider to the far right gives you a 50% bonus to your skill, but fires at the slowest rate.

    We are investigating the possibility of adjusting this slider to allow for fastest speed with a smaller penalty – or no penalty – without changing the bonus given at slowest speed.

  • A new pathing type for missile attacks. War Mages have the ability to choose between Bolts and Arcs for the purposes of targeting, whereas missile users have only one option. We are investigating the possibility of giving archers a pathing option. This would likely be either through some sort of option in the attack bar, or through a new form of ammunition.

Town Improvements

We are investigating several ideas to increase the appeal of towns and increase the number of players that can be found in towns at any given time. Some of these ideas include some form of crafting bonus that can only be found in towns, or some form of capture-and-hold dynamic to appeal to PK and PKL players.

Allegiance Improvements

We’re investigating a number of improvements to Allegiances in general. Some of these include allegiance officers with titles, more controls on who can and cannot enter an allegiance (such as account bans), better chat functions and controls, and the ability to name your Allegiance.

Mansion Improvements

We’re well aware that many players feel that Mansions are not worth their maintenance cost, and we are working on several ideas to make Mansions more valuable. Most of these are special hookable objects similar to Jojii’s Font.

PvP Changes

A number of the above topics touch on PvP combat, but there are other topics that are specifically focused on PvP:

  • Adjustments to the damage-over-time of the PvP weapon suites: Hollow weapons, Phantom weapons, and Weeping weapons. These adjustments would be intended to improve the viability of non-sword melee classes, as well as improve balance overall.
  • A resolution to the Jumpspin issue. There should be a way for skilled players to, in some way, get away from a melee that is “stuck” to them. However the ability to indefinitely jump and spin, throwing off the melee’s client prediction, is not the answer. The final solution on this issue should also resolve the PvP jumping stamina penalty issues.
  • Housing barriers on Darktide. We are investigating possibilities regarding this issue. Some of these include removing all housing barriers, removing only mansion and villa barriers, or applying the PK timer to the house barrier in some way. Other suggestions, such as allowing the barrier to be temporarily destroyed in some way, appear to be too difficult to implement in the foreseeable future.
  • Points, areas, locations, or the like to fight over. The first attempt at this was found in the February event, and we are watching the feedback carefully. This may also be tied to town improvements, as mentioned above.

More information on our vision and goals for PvP will be found in the PvP article early next week.

Web Integration

Once we finish the billing transition, currently scheduled for this summer, we can begin looking at tying the Asheron’s Call website more tightly to the game. Some of the features we are considering include a single login to both the game and the forums, the ability to view your character or allegiance statistics on the web, and ranking or ladder systems.

Tell us what you think of the ideas In Concept!

Conclusion

Wow! That’s a lot of information to throw at you all at once. Again, it’s important to remember that these are all things we are working on (In Development) or thinking about (In Concept). Only the Coming in March items are going to be in the game. But now you have almost as much information as we do about our goals for the game in the coming year and beyond.

In addition, I should note that just because something isn’t on the current list of In Development and In Concept items, that doesn’t mean we won’t do it. There are always bug fixes and changes that can come up late in the development cycle. We’ll work hard to let you know of these changes as soon as we know they’re coming.

Your feedback on all of these topics will be extremely valuable, as will your feedback on this new level of communication. Tell us what you think!
 


The Future of PvP - From the Turbine Site

We’ve recently made or proposed a number of changes to the world of PK and PKL combat, and we’d like to take this time to provide more information on where we are, where we’re going, and how we feel about the state of Asheron’s Call’s PvP.

Much of the information in this document comes directly from the feedback we requested on our forums. Some of the changes were not taken directly from the feedback, but are part of our overall vision for PvP.

It’s important to note that what we describe below is not set in stone. While we feel strongly about many of the gameplay changes we suggest, we want to hear your feedback on them. The enormous amount of negative feedback regarding the March PvP changes reminded us of exactly what happens when we don’t come to the PvP community before implementing these changes.

The Current Status

The current state of Asheron’s Call PvP is, in our opinion, very good, but nowhere near perfect. While there are a number of issues that need to be resolved, we believe that our PvP combat is as good as, if not better than, the PvP that you’ll find in any other fantasy MMP. What makes AC’s PvP so good?

  • The animation and physics system. Projectiles are real objects that can be dodged. You have the ability to maneuver in combat, and your movement choices have real consequences.
  • Character choices. The skill system, the vast amount of varied equipment in the game, and the ability to prepare for different opponents creates a number of different tactics and strategies for players.
  • Player skill matters. While numbers – such as number of levels and number of opponents – are very important, they are not necessarily the deciding factor. A skilled player can defeat a more powerful unskilled player, although it may be difficult.
  • Speed. One mistake in PvP combat – just one – can cost you your life. Combat can happen at any time.
  • Very few safe zones on Darktide. One of the hallmarks of Darktide is the knowledge that nowhere is “safe”. You can be attacked anywhere, at any time. The housing system has thrown a bit of a wrench in this, however.

However there are a number of factors that prevent AC’s PvP from being as great as it could. Some of these factors are:

  • Balance issues. While Mage / Sword balance is very tight, the other melee classes and archers are currently less competitive. There is still a wide gap between the Weeping Weapons and all other weapons and weapon classes in PvP combat.

  • Animation issues. The same system that makes AC’s combat feel realistic has a number of problems. Jump-spin, “godmoding” potions and other consumables, fastcasting, slidecasting... these are just the top issues. This has been exacerbated by varied Dev Team response and a lack of communication regarding which, if any, of these actions are “acceptable” and which are “exploits”.

  • Time spent preparing. Since you can be attacked at any time, you must be at maximum readiness at almost all times. This results in a great deal of time spent buffing and not fighting.

  • Lack of meaningful fights. By this we mean battles that have consequences, whether that is control of a location or resource, or some sort of recognizable achievement such as placement on a PK ladder. Left with this void, players on Darktide have created their own resources to fight over – macroing locations.

All of the above issues need to be handled in order to make AC’s PvP all it can be.

Our Goals for the Future

Our vision for AC’s PvP can be summed up in one sentence: Improve upon the positive and eliminate the negative. We want to take those features mentioned in the first bullet-point group above and add to them, while resolving the issues in the second bullet-point group.

When designing for PvP combat, the first group that we must always consider is Darktide. Darktide is the home of the majority of our most loyal and experienced PvP players, and any changes we make to PvP combat should be done to improve their gameplay first and foremost.

One goal that we strive for is balanced group combat. There is a considerable difference between, say, PKL dueling and a Darktide raid. In the former, the two opponents can set rules and guidelines, such as, “No debuffing,” or “No gems”. In the latter, you have no way of knowing which tactics your opponents may be ready to use against you.

In addition, we want to have an environment in which a diverse group will tend to be more powerful than a group of similar characters. For example, two melees and a mage should have an edge over three melees of a similar level. This edge should not be overwhelming – the three melees may be skilled enough to defeat their opponents – but we want to encourage diversity.

We want to increase the number of options and tactics in PvP combat. To give you an example of what we’re trying to avoid, think of a typical arcade fighting game. When your opponent picks his character, you know – in general – what to expect and how best to try and counter it. While player skill is extremely important, you know the type of attacks that will be coming as soon as you see which character your opponent selected.

This is what we don’t want in Asheron’s Call. When you are attacked by a mixed group, you should not be able to know ahead of time exactly which tactics they will be using. There should be multiple equally effective tactical options, and each option should have an effective counter. This last paragraph speaks to a number of recent changes – banes should be able to be countered with an appropriate lure, and Blood Drinker should be able to be countered with Blood Loather. Negative spells should be able to be countered with dispels.

Specific Proposals

I’d like to take the bullet points above and speak specifically on what our plans are to emphasize, or resolve, each one.

Animation and Physics

Most of the issues here will be touched on under resolving the negatives. It is important to stress that we want to keep the ability to move in combat.

Character Choices and Player Skill

Some of our more controversial recent changes have been towards increasing the number of options available to players in combat. These include the ability to debuff Weeping weapons and player worn armor, the planned changes to dispel gems, and the changes to Arc spell words. We seek to increase the number of choices available to players in combat, and to make multiple viable responses to the choices made by their opponents.

In the case of Arcs, we want to continue to reward players who recognize the spell words used by their opponents and adjust accordingly. In the case of the Dispels, we wanted to create the option of dispelling level VII spells through a means other than gems, and then balance gems alongside these new methods. We are still considering much of the feedback that we’ve received on this topic, such as timers, speed of spellcasting, and stacking the gems.

Other planned changes include the upgrades to “second-class” weapons and adjustments to the damage-over-time of the PvP weapon suites. We are also looking at the possibility of creating PvP-specific imbues for loot weapons. It is our goal that, for example, a melee who wants to take part in PvP combat has options beyond “Weeping Sword or nothing”. To that end, we plan to adjust the Weeping, Hollow, and Phantom weapons.

We are looking at ways to improve the low-end weapons in PvP, as well as improve the Hollow and Phantom weapons, without significantly impacting their balance in PvM play. The goal is for Hollow and Phantom weapons to be viable alternatives to Weeping weapons, and for other melee weapon groups to be viable alternatives to Sword. Sword will still be strongest, but the gap between it and the other weapon groups will be decreased.

It needs to be stated plainly: It may be necessary to decrease the damage of the Weeping Sword. Our current damage-over-time charts, as well as in-game experiences, indicate that it may be slightly stronger than intended.

Speed

The most important goal with regard to speed is that we not change the current situation. While we may introduce further “countermeasure” equipment such as the Aegis shield, this equipment should have drawbacks in group combat. In addition, tactics that decrease a player’s damage should be able to be countered through spell or dispel.

Safe Zones

This brings us to the topic of housing barriers on Darktide. There is strong feedback to do something about them, but the best solution may not be technically feasible for some time. We are looking at removing them altogether, only removing barriers from villas or mansions, or introducing some form of PK timer on the ability to pass through friendly barriers. One feature which we’ve seen requested – the ability to temporarily destroy a hostile housing barrier – is most likely not something we can add to the game anytime in the near future.

This issue is still in discussion internally, and we value any feedback that you may have.

Balance Issues

Many of the topics mentioned under Character Choices and Player Skill apply equally to Balance. We have also tackled other balance issues recently, such as the imbalance in the low-level life transfer spells.

There are a few topics for the future that are quite specific to Balance, primarily the state of missile characters in PvP. We currently have three ideas in concept to improve the state of PvP missile characters.

  • Aegis-like equipment. Our current design is an item that could be used on any loot missile weapon to add a Magic Absorbing property to it. This property would be similar to the Aegis Shield and would scale based on the wielder’s Magic Defense. The downside is that the missile weapon would lose any melee defense adjustment that it might possess. Also, obviously, one would need to choose between this weapon and one’s Weeping Bow, Crossbow, or Atlatl.

We are also looking at the possibility of creating similar equipment for casting objects, in order to give mages a choice similar to the choice we are giving missile users.

  • Pathing options. We would like to introduce a new pathing type for missile attacks. War Mages have the ability to choose between Bolts and Arcs for the purposes of targeting, whereas missile users have only one option. Any new option would likely be either through some sort of option in the attack bar, or through a new form of ammunition
     

  • Speed vs. accuracy. Currently setting the speed/accuracy slider to the far left allows you to fire at maximum speed, but penalizes your skill by 50%. Likewise, setting the slider to the far right gives you a 50% bonus to your skill, but fires at the slowest rate.

We are investigating the possibility of adjusting this slider to allow for fastest speed with a smaller penalty – or no penalty – without changing the bonus given at slowest speed.

These ideas are still in the design process and your feedback would be useful.

We are working to ensure that many of the topics listed in the March Letter to the Players Follow-Up, such as higher wield-req weapons, do not negatively impact PvP balance.

Animation Issues

Right off the bat, we’d like to differentiate between animation issues that we now consider to be legitimate player tactics, and animation issues that we plan to resolve.

Legitimate Tactics:

  • Player-controlled casting times – the current “fastcasting” and “delay casting”. However if a new form of fastcasting emerges that would allow players to rapid-fire spells beyond that which is currently seen, it would likely be considered an issue to resolve.

  • Slide-casting within the current movement limits.

Issues to Resolve:

  • Jump-Spin. More on this below.

  • “Godmoding” potions and food.

  • Getting around the PK jumping stamina loss. (The Jump-Spin resolution may make this a non-issue.)

  • Animation-breaking issues not listed above. This is the catch-all for lesser-used animation-breaking actions or ones not discovered or reported yet.

Jump-Spin deserves its own paragraph, if not more. One the one hand, it seems unfair that a player should be able to so badly throw off his opponent’s client simply by jumping and spinning mid-jump that it breaks sticky melee and allows the player to run away. On the other hand, if that is the only means of escaping from a melee, what else do we expect that player to do?

We are still working on solutions to this issue. We have previously considered solutions such as restricting movement while jumping, only to find that they did not resolve the issue. Currently we are designing and testing several other solutions, such as adding a PK jump timer (which would allow you to jump-spin, but not as frequently) or improving client prediction such that a target jump-spinning does not throw off sticky.

We are also investigating the relationship of the Run skill to sticky melee. Perhaps a character with a high Run skill should have a chance to break sticky from a slower opponent? These are questions that require research, both into whether we can do this, and whether or not we should.

Time Spent Preparing

A number of topics in the Letter to the Players Follow-Up touch on this directly, from faster self buffs to multi-stat buffs and fellowship spells. In general we want to decrease the amount of time you spend preparing for a fight, and increase the time you spend actually fighting.

Lack of Meaningful Fights

This is perhaps the most long-term issue to resolve. It is clear that the PvP community, Darktide in particular, wants something to fight over. We have just scratched the surface with our town revisions (putting Lifestones in towns) and the PK battle dungeons in the February event. We would like to add more things to fight over, with better and more tangible rewards.

However, it is in our best interests to resolve the other issues listed above before we create meaningful combat goals and rewards. So this may be one of the last issues we resolve. As we work on it, we will ask you for your feedback on our ideas and proposals.

Lag

A frequently mentioned issue for the Darktide community is the subject of lag. We receive frequent reports that lag on Darktide is worse than on any other server. We are always working to resolve any server-side lag issues that we find, in addition we are working on adding improved performance monitoring to our servers. When this is completed our ability to diagnose and resolve any server-side issues should be greatly improved.

Conclusion

Asheron’s Call’s PvP players are some of our most dedicated, passionate, and vocal. Many of you know the guts of this game as well as we do, and we respect that. We want to improve our communication with you so that you can help us make Asheron’s Call’s PvP as great as we all know it can be.

We hope that this article has been helpful in understand the Dev Team’s goals for PvP. As I wrote earlier, the proposals that I’ve listed above are not set in stone. Your feedback will help us prioritize and update these ideas to better match what it is that you want to see in AC.

In the end, we want PvP in AC to be fun. If it’s fun, we’ll enjoy designing for it, and we’ll all enjoy playing it. Thanks for taking the time to read this, and let us know what you think!

 


PvP Dev Chat - March 4, 2004

<@Uzi> before we begin thanks to jessica for doing this

<@Inhuman> were going to pause for a few minutes here

<@Uzi> thanks to s/divine one and inhuman for the idea and thanks to all the moderators for their hard work

<@[twisti]> seems alex isnt home yet, but he said he would try to come if traffic allows

<@shadowcouncil> thank you

<@Uzi> and also thanks to everyone on darktide for doing this and shadow council for getting jessica with us. we're going to pause for a few min while we discuss questions that have been asked

<+Jessica> AFK to get coffee

<@Inhuman> If anyone has a question they would like to submit, please do so to #dt-mods now

<@shadowcouncil> to reitterate what I said earlier ONLY MRCH PATCH QUESTIONS everything else will be handled at a later meeting if this one goes well

<@[twisti]> Jessica, you know why we invited you here most of all, the debuffable armor issue. i'm certain turbine has already seen the huge uproad that announcement caused. any word on preliminary thoughts you already came up with, turbine-internal ?

<@shadowcouncil> First I would liek to thank Inhuman Uzi Doomgaze Som and everyone else that made this meetnig possible and the ability to show turbine we have adult players here

<+Jessica> sure...  let me preface the answer with something we discussed today... I was trolling the boards last night and reading the, uh, outrage over the debuff issue... in the middle of that, shadowcouncil's PM arrived... so we started communicating and one thing led to another... once we were schedule, I had a meeting with some of the team at Turbine... to go over this whole issue. Pretty much the first thing said was, "If they knew what was coming in April, they wouldn't be so mad!" At which point, someone lese said, "Uh... should we tell them" It was a real Doh! moment for us. The esson there was, we should have come to you much sooner... with our complete thoughts on what we wanted to do with PvP...
Sometime early next week, Ibn will post a full explanation... however, the debuffs were only one part of this. Another part, scheduled for April, were level7 dispells

<+Ibn> Hi folks, sorry I'm late.

<+Jessica> Hey, Ibn  Anyway, the upshot is, in erfect hndsight, we probably should have implemented the debuffs separately from the dispell changes. er, SHOULDN'T HAVE implemented, I meant

<@Inhuman> Ok, the first question comes from Solarch Arcar of the Fremen Knights. Why do the devs expect us to adapt to such an extreme change. This is comparable to asking humans to adapt to an asteroid hitting earth. Sure we can survive but how many really will still be around? This is also like bringing nukes to the 12th century. So my question i guess is, why change something so drastic that threatens to leave your only PvP server practically empty?

<+Jessica> Good question. As I mentioned just a bit ago, we borked the communication on the PvP changes... f we had come out sooner with the full thought for your evaluation and comment... we wouldn;t be here today, wih me falling on my sword and bleeding all over the floor. So, yeah, it looks drastic... until you look at the whole of it.... and then it starts to mesh up. But you're right, it is a big change... and we should have been out here sooner, beating the bushes for comments and ideas. Thazt answer the question well enough?

<+Ibn> I'd also like to say If I may

<+Jessica> and pardon my spelling; I'm typing fast and taking no prisoners.

<+Ibn> Jessica is not the only one falling on her sword here. Communication with you is my responsibility And I should have presented this information a long time ago, when it first came up, rather than springing it on y'all like this. It won't happen again.

<@Inhuman> Next questions is a follow up from Ainvar of Og. Even if you have wonderful plans for pvp in the long run...the short term effects may prove to be too much to bear for a few months. Wouldn't it be better to leave them in testing until you can complete the full plan, instead of putting a few changes in, that screw some ppl over?

<@shadowcouncil> Ibn to be honsest I think you have gona above and beyond trying to get answers especially after all of teh personal attacks on you on ac boards. You've given 110% and b eing here proves that

<+Jessica> Another good wquestion...  first, I don't necessarily agree that anyone is getting screwed over by the change...

<+Ainvar[Og]> anyone not playing a melee char might disagree ;/

<+Jessica> but I don't expect a lot of sympoathy here for that view, In a perfect world, we would just run it in the dev track for the two-three months necessary to complete it all... In this case, that wasn't possible for a number of reasons... the main one being, we would probably have had to split out the builds into two tracks... and that would have just sucked royally. The devs here can testify how ugly that can get... and not just ours, bt any developer. If we'd done our communication on this correctly, it would have been livable and caused far less comment... springing it on you exacerbates the situation. Now, when were five days before the launch of the episode... it isn't even possible to revert without delaying the launch for a week, maybe two. It isn't as simple as just reverting to an older version (trust me on this one, we could argue it all night)... So the lesson for us here is, again: get the info out to you MUCH sooner...

@[twisti]> Flash of DT asks: Why not leave the changes you are talking about, and allow no movement fizzle? That way, mages can have *skill* again, and melees can have a chance at 1v1 (considering you now have massive stamina loss when jumping so the historical godmode wouldnt be possible either way)

<+Jessica> Let me ask srand about that... we'd hve to break code freeze and probably delay the prop, but I'll ask her for an opinion on that.

<@Inhuman> Next question is from Doomgaze of KoC. In the march letter to the players, it hints around new armor types, could you elaborate on this more? Perhaps if you make this more clear then the whole concept of lures/brittlemail would be less extreme?

<+Ibn> I can grab this one. We'll be revealing more information on this in a post tomorrow, but I can talk about it now as well. One of the reasons that we did a treasure revamp is so that we could add more interesting things at the top end Such as new types of armor, as one example. You'll notice that right now the treasure drops in loot are *weird*, like getting AL20 leather off creatures in the Direlands. This is because we are working on the armor aspect of loot along with this new armor. However the new armor is probably not coming in April, it looks like May or later, so we'll be tweaking the armor in loot to adjust. In the long term I would not expect this armor to be considerably better than what you can get now with maxed AL and tinkering. But as it is still in development, this can change. One thing that is being particularly looked at is to get away from the Aluvian=lots of pieces, Gharu=2 pieces, Sho is inbetween model. So you may end up with a 2 piece armor set that has metal prots like Celdon. As I said, this is all a ways out. I am not sure that this directly impacts the lure/brittlemail issue, but that's the answer. *done*

<@Inhuman> Next question is from Addiction of Blood-Elite. Currently in pvp, if someone recieves a Blood Loather 6, they will fight with the loathered weapon rather then stop, and cast a dispell that consumes all their mana and a good portion of time. What makes you feel dispells will be viable in PVP in april, when they realistically have not been thus far?

<+Jessica> I'll let Ibn answer that one, Me, I'm the ignorant one.

<+Ibn> The main problem with a lot of the existing dispels -- other than gems, unless I'm forgetting something -- is that they can remove positive spells, AND there's no 7 version. We're fixing both of these issues. There will be a level 7 item dispel, and it will only remove negative spells. Not ALL negative spells, but a random number. The issue of time and mana are good ones -- I will make sure to relay to the team that we need to look at the mana cost and time spent casting dispels. This is why it's good to bring these things up earlier -- I think we would have thought of the mana and casting time, but it never hurts to have a reminder. Does that answer the question?

<@Uzi> yup

@Inhuman> Next question is from Uzi of Shadow Council. Will all dispells soon be removing only negative enchantments, or will this apply to only item enchantment?

<+Ibn> All dispels. Spells, gems, and potions. Also, while we're on the topic I should bring this up. Right now gems remove all negatives, again unless I'm misremembering, while spells and potions do not.  We will be decreasing gems such that they also only remove a random # of debuffs, not all. Spells and potions will have a slightly higher chance of removing more debuffs than gems.  This is not set in stone, however, And there will be both self and other versions of the dispell spells, I believe (don't have the spec in front of me unfortunately)

<+Ibn> oh wait! sorry, one last thing... you'll be able to craft dispel potions and level 6 and 7. I think to do that we're pulling the lower levels as they are rarely used. OK, now I'm done

<@Inhuman> Next question is from Misadventure of Art of War. Even then, people can still just use 3-5 gems, depending on the number of spells removed, and their debuffs and vulns will be gone. Why not just put a timer on them?

<+Ibn> I'm actually not sure that we *can* put a timer on them.

<+Jessica> And I;m not sure a timer provides more or less oportunity fir strategy

<+Ibn> But I will suggest looking into it

<+Jessica> We could probably do new tech for a timer, but it wouldn;t be an immediate thing.

<+Ibn> I don't believe that "You have to wait x seconds before you can do that" is a particularly popular message to get in the heat of battle. Sometimes a timer is the best solution, but not always. *done*

<@Inhuman> Next question is from Solarch Arcar of The Fremen Knights. If i may ask about the life magic changes. Many people not only mages(but majority) use stamina to health 1 as a quick way to regain health in the heat of battle. The changes being made seem to limit the ability to have great and long lasting fights. What made you guys decide or encouraged you to change the current setup of these spells?

<+Ibn> It was a hard decision. But what you said -- many people use it. Across the board, at high levels. But it's not intended for that -- this is supposed to be the *weakest* Stam-to-Health, the one you in general *least* want to use at high levels. This wasn't done specifically for PvP. It was also used by folks on the white worlds when playing PvM. When we see a level 1 spell being used frequently by level 126s to the exclusion of higher-powered versions of the spells, we have to investigate whether that spell is perhaps a bit too useful

<+Jessica> In other words...
ok, what he said.

<+Ibn> heh

<+Jessica> It didn't make a lot of sense.

<@Inhuman> Next question is from Storm of Blood. Why not make lvl 7 stam2health cast as fast and in same manner as level 1 does now?

<@[twisti]> kinda like streaks


<@Inhuman> in essence, a level 7 'streak'

<@Uzi> it's necessary in pvp to cast that spell fast, otherwise your chances of suriving are low


<+Ibn> so the penalty is in the increased difficulty, chance to burn a plat, and increased mana cost? it's something I can suggest to the team

<+Jessica> We no doubt could, but doesn't it seem like higher level spells should take more effort and time? Just asking.

<+Ibn> I can't personally say "sure, good idea!" or "no way" without consulting the devs

<@Inhuman> The penalty is the length of the spell, much of the fighting on DT is up close and personal, not alot of room to move.

<@[twisti]> the only reason to use the spell is because it is fast, and the "penalty" is the stamina loss that usually has to be followed by two casts of revit 7

<@Uzi> it is similar to streaks, when someone is low on health its necessary to fire a quick shot at them to finish them


<+Ibn> We can certainly discuss it. Some of our other spells will be getting faster in April, not sure if Jessica mentioned that before I got here.

<@Uzi> the same thing applies when you're low, you need to be able to heal fast

<+Jessica> OK, I've cut and pasted that into the word doc of questions. We'll discuss it and get you an answer.
Nope, didn't get around to it yet (re: faster spells)

<+Ibn> Ah, OK. Well, I've let the cat out of the bag, I might as well explain, since this will be posted tomorrow at any rate. Life and creature self buffs will all be at level 1 speed in April.

<@Lotusx[OG]> That doesn't affect pvp at all though Ibn does it?

<+Ibn> Well, only in that it'll be faster to buff before a fight, and that we're not opposed on principle to making spells faster. Specific spells need to be looked at on an individual basis. *done*

<@Inhuman> Next question is from Xantcha of Art of War. We feel that identical spell words for arcs and bolts makes combat more interesting and skillful, and that changing this will lead to longer and less tactical fights. What do you feel are the benefits of such a change?

<+Jessica> As it turns out... I asked srand the same question earlier today... her answer was: Arcs were the only spells in the game that shared spell words with another type of spell. The only reason this is important is because different types of spells need to be dodged in different ways. So if you know your spellwords, you know what the mage is about to fire at you and you know which way to dodge. But this didn't work for arcs or bolts, because you never knew which type of spell the mage was about to fire.

<@Xantcha[AoW]> That's exactly the functionality that we want.

<+Jessica> From the mage viewpoint, this makes it easier to hit the melee. From the melee viewpoint, this removes all the skill of knowing the spellwords and knowing how to react to each type of spell. (bear with me. You can beat me up when I'm done, ) Since PK balance favors the mage in general, we felt that restoring this minor bit of skill to the melee tactics was useful and not unbalancing. OK, that was the answer she gave me. Did that answer your question on our raationale, at least?

<@Inhuman> To some extent

<+Jessica> follow up?

<@Xantcha[AoW]> We understand the rationale, we simply feel that it takes a lot of the skill out of mage combat.

<@Inhuman> From KTV of SUN

<@Inhuman> just a note: many players also believe spellwards had more skill to the game since players have to adapt and react depending on what is casted.

<@Xantcha[AoW]> The arc/bolt issue is also important in mage-only fights.


<+Jessica> OK, please do this: Inhuman, would you write up the objection and email it to me? The more detailed, the better. And we'll take a second look at it.

<@Inhuman> absolutely, were getting quite a few counterpoints on it

<+Jessica> No promises, but we WILL discuss it. I'll PM you the email address. If we still aren't convinced, we'll have another chat about it with you.

<@Inhuman> Next question is from Darken Soul. Would you every consider giving DarkTide its own set of rules? It is a different environment. For example, UCMs can be killed on Darktide. Why ban them? If you aren't able to kill it it isn't bothering you, because anyone can kill a UCM if they see it?

<+Jessica> In some things, no. Let me explain... While it is tempting to allow Darktide to enforce the CoC on it's own.... the problem we have is that we want to have a level playing field, and a sense that any player can get justice within the COC and TOS...

<@Inhuman> I believe most DT'ers are more worried about UCM, and not the CoC in general

<+Jessica> to do thay, we have to be consistent in our enforcement... and that means the CoC has to be consistently enforced across all worlds.

<@Doomgaze[KoC]> I'd like to add something here. I think the UCM banning would be a fine concept on darktide if it were enforced fairly. Instead we have 3 players banned per month

<+Jessica> If a player in DT reports apossible UCM that is hogging a Tusker hunting area, for example... are we to ignore him? Suince Monday, we have banned at least 15 players for UCM. Should we post these numbers daily? or weekly?

<@Doomgaze[KoC]> is the hall of shame still used?

<+Ibn> The Hall of Shame is being revamped.

@Inhuman> The most asked question right now is why not ignore him? UCM's are incapable of fighting back, if its really a UCM he could just kill the character

<+Ibn> I'm working with Katahdin and her team to get good metrics posted, but the final form of those metrics hasn't yet been decided.

<@Doomgaze[KoC]> in responce to what you just said up above jess... you mentioned a senario of a ucm hogging a tusker spawn. that's whY i feel ucm's reports aren't taken seriously on darktride because simply put, ucms don't hog spawns here, they log off or get killed.

<+Jessica> I understand, it was just an example

<+Ibn> There are other aspects to UCM than just hogging spawns

<@Doomgaze[KoC]> it's allright, this was about the march issues, we'll stick to that. inhuman's going to continue now.

<+Jessica> OK, last quesion for tonight...

<@Inhuman> From the majority of darktide on this one. A lot of darktiders feel that the devs just don't understand what group fights on Darktide are like. Currently, once more than 1 melee targets a mage, the mage has to run and be healed just to stay alive. If you add in the decreased effectivness on stam to health, plus the luring/brittle, and the decrease in war magic effectivness against skilled players because of the spell words, mages will be as good as dead in group fights.

<+Jessica> but we will do this again in 4 to 6 weeks.

<@Inhuman> There simply is no way that a mages fellowship can heal him, gem him, item dispell him and keep him alive vs multiple melees.

<+Jessica> OK, I'm going to punt this one... to our PvP expert on the Dev Team... i b n, and get a response from him tomorrow. he is a High level mage with War and Life spec'd, everything else (including missile defense and healing) trained. so he should have an opinion on this one.

<@Justinian[Blood]> anyone being attacked by multiple melees; it just happens that it's a mage nine times out of ten

<+Jessica> I've cut and pasted it into the question doc. OK, that isit for tonight, folks

<@[twisti]> who's your pvp expert ?

<@Doomgaze[KoC]> One last thing i'd like to bring up.
There's 221 people in this room, making it the largest room on this irc network currently. knowing all these people showed up cause of their concerns with the march patch

<+Jessica> I want to thank you for inviting us in.

<@Justinian[Blood]> well jessica, it's been a pleasure having you once again our humble thanks for hearing us out

<+Ibn> Yes, thank you all -- this has been very well-run and organized.

<@[twisti]> thanks a lot for coming here tonight and sacrificing your time jessica, ibn, it means a lot to most of us

<@Justinian[Blood]> thanks to you too ibn


<+Jessica> I'm a little dazed. I wasn't called a freak bitch even once. I may faint.

<@shadowcouncil> =D

<@[twisti]> jessica we've been filtering


<@Doomgaze[KoC]> I hope you realize how serious we feel about this...
<@shadowcouncil> I told ya we would be serious about this =D
<@Justinian[Blood]> ibn, don't be so hard on yourself either
<@Justinian[Blood]> like shadow said before

<+Ibn> We definitely realize how serious you feel about that -- the activity spike on our forms says enough.
We definitely appreciate how passionately you all feel about our game. It's humbling in many ways.

<+Jessica> Doomgaze: Yep, we do, that is why we are here. to open the lines of communication.

<@Doomgaze[KoC]> well then you have my thanks for at least listening...

<+Ibn> Speaking of communication.
There's one topic that I'd like bring up, while you are all here. Question for the moderators -- can you folks temporarily make the forum open to all for speaking after I ask a question? Say for 5 minutes while I log the varied responses?

<+Jessica> Please, all; read the doc on PvP that Ibn will post, and discuss it with us on the forums.

<@shadowcouncil> Well problem is soemtimes some of our older players have a temper issue. It helps after the emotions die down to get you in touch witht eh peopel who could form coherant thgouths withotuhaveing to attack anyoen personally

<@Justinian[Blood]> even though they can't type
<@Justinian[Blood]> :P

<@Inhuman> Let Ibn continue for a second here

<@Xantcha[AoW]> are you quite sure you want to do that?

<@Justinian[Blood]> HEH

<@Telsa[Og]> LOL

<@Lotusx[OG]> lol. no we dont want to do taht,
You wouldn't want us to do that :P

<@Justinian[Blood]> well, if ibn wants to
we can let em loose

<@Inhuman> Ibn are you sure? I mean we can..

* shadowcouncil hides

<@Lotusx[OG]> ibn darktide (like other servers) has its share of 11 year olds


<+Ibn> I had to think about it, but I really want to get an immediate reaction. I can filter any nastyness out of the log. OK, here's the question: All mansion, villa, and housing barriers on Darktide drop tomorrow. Nothing else changes. WHAT HAPPENS, and is it good for Darktide?

<@[twisti]> oh boy, thisll ruin the positive view they had of DT

<+Ibn> GO.

<@[twisti]> EXCELLENT IDEA

<@Justinian[Blood]> get rid of it

<@Uzi> well you can see positive responses
from tons of people.

<@Xantcha[AoW]> leave it off uzi

<+Ibn> OK I think that was enough For a gut reaction

<@Uzi> you get the idea  =]

<+Ibn> Yeah. Thanks for that, I just wanted to see what the reaction would be. And again, thank you all for coming. I have to get going. Sorry I can't answer all of your direct messages. All I can say on that is that we know you guys want things to fight over Getting them to you is, unfortunately, more difficult than we'd hoped But we want to give you things to fight over And on that note -- "we want to give you thinsg to fight over" -- I'm out. G'night all! Thanks again!

<@shadowcouncil> =)
 


March 18 Patch - Reverting PK Changes

(posted by srand on March 15, 2004)

You were right; we were wrong. We made a mistake with the recent PK changes.

We introduced several new dynamics in March that were primarily aimed at the PK audience, including spell redirection to chest armor and changes to the spell words of arc spells. Our intention was to add more elements of optional tactics to PK combat, but the feedback that we have received since the March update -- as well as our own observations in game -- have shown us that these dynamics are not playing out the way we had hoped that they would. The majority of feedback we have received is not happy with these changes -- and since PK is one area of the game in which parity, fun, player opinion, and player demand are so delicately balanced, it behooves us to listen carefully. We've said that we're going to communicate with you more, and listen to you better, and this is an excellent opportunity for us to put our money where our mouth is. We were wrong about these changes, and we're going to revert them.

So later this week, we will be bringing down the servers to patch the following PK-related functionality:
- Item enchantment spells cast on a player will not redirect to the chest armor of a player. They will still redirect to a shield if one is wielded, but if no shield is wielded the spell will fail (as they did prior to the March update).
- The spell words for all arc spells will once again be identical to the spell words for the corresponding bolt spell.
- PK/PKL players will no longer be able to use @die at the very last minute in a PK/PKL battle to protect their corpse.
- Weeping weapons will once again resist all magic cast on them.

This last PK bullet point may surprise you, since Weepings have been debuffable since last December. The feedback we have received, however, indicates to us that this is where we started to go wrong with our PK changes -- a lot of players were beginning to see a plausible, workable balance before these changes. So that is what we need to return to before we can go forward. And we will be going forward -- but only after talking more about what you want out of PK and discussing the options with you.

In addition to those changes, we will also be fixing a few important bugs at the same time:
- The hookable portal from the Temple of Ixir Zi will no longer be able to be hooked on non-mansion housing. Existing portals hooked on non-mansions will remain where they are, but once they are unhooked you will only be able to re-hook them on a mansion. This portal will also look correct when hooked, although you will need to rehook it to see that change.
- The spell issues on the Crown of Anointed Blood -- spells that affected the wrong attribute, or had the wrong magnitude of effect -- will be fixed.
- The golems in the Knorr quest will once again be willing to tell players their riddles.

This patch is tentatively scheduled for Thursday, 3/18 at 9:00 AM EST. If that date needs to change for any reason, we will inform you as soon as possible.

 


Treasure in Asheron's Call - from the Turbine Site (3-23-03)

Introduction

The treasure system is perhaps one of the best gameplay systems in AC. It’s exciting, it’s flexible, it’s addictive, and it integrates well with other aspects of the game. But after four years and a lot of plastering, patching and mending, it was beginning to show its age. So recently we started on a multi-month project to reinvigorate the treasure system.

This effort has raised a lot of questions with players. It’s not intuitively obvious to you what we’re doing to treasure or why we want to do it – or what benefit you’re going to get out of it. And changes of this scope are understandably a bit discomfiting. So we’ve written this article to tell you a bit about where we want to go with treasure and how we plan to get there. And, of course, we’d like your feedback on our plans. After all, this treasure is meant for you.

Background

Before we start talking about the changes to treasure and our goals for the future, it’s going to be necessary to tell you a good bit about how treasure in Asheron’s Call works.

All treasure generators in AC – both creatures and chests – figure out what treasure they will actually generate based on a treasure profile. This profile controls treasure generation in fairly broad strokes. For instance, it specifies how many items can be generated – perhaps 3 to 5, or 5 to 15. It also specifies what types of items can be generated and how likely each type is to generate. For example, an Olthoi might drop pretty much anything, but an Elemental might drop more gems, and no lockpicks at all.

It is important to understand, however, that the types of items that the profile can specify are very general. For instance, the profile might specify that a chest generates mostly armor and weapons with perhaps a few gems thrown in, but not which kinds of weapons, armor, or gems.

(Interesting fact: With very few exceptions, trophy items like crystal shards and little green seeds are not handled by the treasure system at all, but by another system entirely. This can occasionally make things rather confusing. The wall spells in a Steel Chest, for instance, are actually handled by the trophy system, while the bolts and arc spells are handled by the treasure system. That’s because the treasure system requires that a spell exist for all 7 levels, and that’s not true for wall spells.)

Perhaps the most important property that the profile specifies is the wealth rating. There are six wealth ratings – from 1 to 6. (In the past we’ve also called these ‘loot levels’, but considering how many levels we have to talk about these days – player levels and creature levels and skill levels and loot levels – it seems best to stick with ‘wealth ratings’ for now.) The wealth rating of a profile is used in two distinct ways during treasure generation. First, it is used in selection to select the exact item that is going to be generated; and secondly it is used in mutation to determine how that item is going to be changed by the treasure system.

Let’s look at an example. The treasure profile used by the Broken Fragment says that when the creature dies, it’s going to create 3 to 5 items. One of those items is going to be either a healing kit (15% chance) or a mana stone (15% chance) or a scarab (70% chance). The profile also says that this is going to be an item with a wealth rating of 1. So when the fragment dies, it rolls a random number – and let’s say that it decides that one item is going to be a healing kit. Then it checks a table for the possible healing kits that can occur in wealth rating 1, and determines that the healing kit can be either a crude kit (75% chance) or a poor kit (25%) chance. It rolls again to decide exactly which kit it will generate.

That’s how the profile and the wealth rating control selection, but what about mutation? Well, all crude healing kits are just crude healing kits, but for something like a dirk the selection of the item is only the first step. Once we know that we’re generating a dirk, we still need to figure out all sort of things about it: how much damage it will do, its attack and melee defense modifiers, its speed, its burden, what item enchantments are on it, what creature endowments it casts, if it has cantrips, how much mana it has, its wield requirements, its skill and heritage requirements, etc. Each of these properties is assigned by mutation, and for each of these properties, we are going to consult a table that is organized by wealth rating.

For example, if the profile has a wealth rating of 1, then a dirk generated by this profile has a 10% chance to have a base damage of 7, a 15% chance to have a base damage of 8, a 25% chance to have a base damage of 9, and so forth. A dirk from a wealth rating 2 profile will have different possible damages and different chances to get those damages. Mutation is one of the most complicated – and one of the coolest – parts of the treasure system, and there are hundreds of data tables devoted to describing this behavior. These examples just give you a taste of the system.

So now you know in general terms how the treasure profile controls the types of loot that you find. And you know that the wealth rating is probably the most important property of the profile because it controls the fine-grained selection of treasure items as well as their mutation. With that knowledge under our belt, let’s talk some about how treasure has worked historically in Asheron’s Call.

Where We Were

Although the basic structure of the treasure system has remained the same for the past four years, the way that we use that structure has changed. The best example of this is the way that we use wealth ratings.

Wealth ratings were originally intended to control the quality of treasure – the higher the wealth rating, the better the loot, period. There was no notion of treasure being best for a particular level of player, because the higher treasure was always going to be better for everyone. You can see this philosophy in many places still today – a peerless healing kit is always better in all ways for all characters than an excellent healing kit, an excellent healing kit is always better than a good healing kit, and so forth.

This was originally true for weapons and armor as well, but that all changed with the addition of wield requirements at the beginning of 2002. Wield requirements are controlled by the wealth rating of the treasure profile, so in a sense they correlate to the quality of the treasure. But wield requirements also define brackets of treasure that corresponded (roughly) to character levels rather than to simple quality. In other words, a 325-wield sword is just not as useful to a newbie sword character as a no-wield sword, and so you can’t really judge the quality of the two swords on the same scale for all characters.

As a measure of quality, wealth ratings have suffered from somewhat random assignment to creatures over the years. Asheron’s Call has always had exactly six wealth ratings, but when the game first shipped, only the first five were commonly available to players. The lowest wealth ratings were assigned to the low level creatures; wealth rating 4 was assigned to the high level creatures; and wealth rating 5 was assigned only to very special creatures like Olthoi nobles. Keep in mind, however, that the high level creatures at the time were aimed at characters of perhaps level 20 or 30.

Later on, as players reached higher levels and higher quality treasure became more widespread, the middle wealth ratings were pushed both down into lower level creatures (in an attempt to keep lower level players interested in treasure) and up into higher level creatures (in an attempt to keep from running out of wealth ratings). After a year or two, wealth rating 6 was made more available to players through Singularity Troves, which helped the high level issue temporarily, but then the addition of wield requirements confused the issue – because wield requirement weapons occurred at relatively high wealth ratings, but realistically lower level players needed more access to those weapons. And finally, creature rebalancing and redistribution came through like a whirlwind last year and shredded whatever tatters of rhyme or reason may have remained in the assignment of wealth ratings.

This lead to a situation in which the wealth ratings were all bunched up at the low end and spread terribly thin at the high end, with some just being completely out of whack. We might have gone on this way for years, if not for two factors: 1) a desire to bring new players into Dereth, and 2) the growing issue of high level players.

New players want a consistent world to play in and live in, and they probably aren’t going to understand offhand why all the treasure they are finding just plain sucks and that they should go hunt Olthoi Harvesters. High level players, on the other hand, need high level content and high level content should drop high level loot, and the fact was that once you were past level 60 or so you were pretty much looking at the same treasure for the rest of your character’s lifetime was just not exciting to us, or to you. So somehow, we needed to straighten the system out.

It didn’t help matters that traditionally each creature and each chest had its own individually named treasure profile and so any changes to treasure would need to modify over a thousand data files. That may sound good on paper – each creature has its own unique profile – but in practice it didn’t quite work out the way you might think. The main difference between two particular golem profiles, for instance, was that one had a 67% chance to drop a gem, and the other had a 70% chance to drop a gem. Unfortunately, the sheer number of data files involved meant that slow, step-by-step change was not feasible for the treasure system – we were really looking at a second creature rebalancing.

Our Goals

So between the changing game environment and the maturing of the players themselves, you can see how the treasure system was stuck in a hard place. In order to grow, it first had to change. But how did we want to grow the treasure system?

Well, as we said in the February Rollout Article, our goals for treasure are pretty simple: we want treasure to be useful and interesting. To expand on that a bit, we want creatures in a particular level range to drop loot that could be useful to characters in that level range. Now mind you, that doesn’t mean that every single piece of treasure will be the best you’ve ever seen – that might be useful, but it would very soon stop being interesting. But it does mean that you should have a good chance of finding something pretty darned useful. We want everyone to have good reason to check the corpse of every creature they kill, because they might just find something fantastic.

Where We Are Now

February

In February, we started the laborious process of cleaning up the treasure system. First, we defined a set of generic profiles for use with all creatures. By limiting the number of profiles that creatures used, we made the entire system easier to work with and we ensured that further changes to treasure would be more feasible and easier to test.

Now, some players were worried that standardizing the treasure profiles would rob the treasure system of a lot of its richness and flexibility. This is an understandable worry, but in context … Well, you have to understand the scale here. We started with approximately 1200 treasure profiles – roughly one for each creature and each chest. There are approximately 500 treasure profiles in use today, and ideally we’d like to reduce this a bit further, say to 250 profiles. But even 250 different treasure profiles still gives us an awful lot of flexibility and opportunities for individuality among different creatures.

We also wrote a tool to help us set the treasure profiles for every creature in the game. The tool helped us quite a bit, but because of the sheer number of changes involved we still only managed to get about 2/3 of the creatures done for February. Most of the rest will be changed with the April update, but we’ll probably be dealing with stragglers – quest creatures, mostly – for another several months.

In order to assign profiles to creatures in a rational fashion, we correlated each wealth rating with a target level range. Initially, each wealth rating lined up exactly with the main level ranges on the creature distribution map: newbie, low, mid, high, extreme, and uber. However, after reading a good bit of player feedback we realized that we needed to tweak the ranges down a bit, so that you can start collecting equipment for the next level range before you actually get there. These tweaks will go live with the April update, and you can see the effects of these tweaks in Table 4 below in the April section.

Of course, changing the treasure profiles on creatures had a lot of side effects. Some creatures saw changes in the types of items or in the number of items they dropped. But the biggest side effects were tied to changes in the wealth rating, and these included both changes in selection and mutation.

In terms of selections, for example, a creature that previously used a wealth rating 3 profile would have previously dropped mostly good healing kits. If after the realignment, however, their profile had a wealth rating of 2, they would now drop primarily poor healing kits. Likewise, selection changes also affected what types of weapons (tungi vs. silifi), what kinds of armor (leather vs. yoroi), what kinds of gems, which healing kits and lockpicks, and what levels of spell scrolls you might find on a particular creature.

We knew that all of these areas would need to be addressed eventually – and some sooner than others – but we also knew that it wasn’t feasible to address them all at once. Spell scrolls we addressed in March, armor types will be addressed in April, and the others we hope to address in the near future.

But we felt it was more important for us to address the some of the nastier mutation side effects immediately. A good example of this can be seen with the wield requirements on missile weapons. Before February, you could only find 250-wield missile weapons at wealth rating 4 or above. Had we left this unchanged when we adjusted the profiles, you wouldn’t have had any chance to find 250-wield missile weapons until around character level 60. So it was important for us to adjust the wield requirement mutations, as well as other mutations, to account for the wealth rating changes. Table 1 shows the distribution of wield requirements for weapons after the change.

Table 1: Weapon Wield Requirements
 
Wealth Rating Melee Weapon Wield Requirements Missile Weapon Wield Requirements
1 0 0
2 0, 250 0, 250
3 250, 300 250, 270
4 250, 300, 325 250, 270, 290
5 250, 300, 325 250, 270, 290
6 250, 300, 325 250, 270, 290

One thing you may notice here is that the top three wealth ratings are all identical. In actual practice, your chances of finding each level of wield requirement are different, but the range of possibilities is the same. This is one area in which we have plans for the future.

(Incidentally, please keep in mind when you are looking at these tables that because some creatures have not yet gotten their new treasure profiles, you may occasionally run across treasure that doesn’t fit neatly into these tables. Feel free to tell us about it, and we’ll get it fixed.)

In addition to weapon wield requirements, we also adjusted the mutation of weapon variance, adding more possible levels of mutation and smoothing out the curves so that the best mutations were not so rare. We increased the maximum damage mutations for the racial weapons, which were falling rather behind in terms of damage over time, and we raised the maximum damage modifier for the crossbow slightly for the same reason. Finally, we broke the possible damage modifiers for all the missile weapons down into smaller chunks. All of these actions supported our goal, presented above, of providing more diversity in treasure.

One mutation that we did not adjust – but which we should have – was that of the offense and melee defense modifiers on weapons. Because the frequency and magnitude of these mutations depends on the wealth rating of the treasure profile, weapons in February were generating with fewer and lower modifiers than players were expecting. In March we adjusted the magnitude of the modifiers, and in April we will adjust the frequency.

As you can see, we concentrated mostly on weapon mutation and did not adjust the mutation of armor. In retrospect this was a mistake, but at the time we were hoping that we could update the entire armor system in March at the same time as we incorporated our new racial armors. That wasn’t ultimately feasible, and so we are making interim adjustments to correct the mutation issues with armor in April.

Another major mutation change in February involved the levels of enchantments that can be found on items, and the wealth ratings at which you can find major and minor cantrips. After player feedback, we adjusted these spell levels again in March.

Finally, we adjusted the treasure profiles on a number of special chests. Generic chests we tackled in March, but in February we changed the wealth ratings of chests like the Virindi Troves, Runed Chests, VoD chests and the like to bring them into line with the target character levels.

March

Due to some peculiarities in our schedule, the March update took place only two weeks after the February update. Because of this, the treasure changes in March were generally more subtle than the February changes.

First, we updated the profiles of the generic chests – you know, those plain old treasure chests that hang out in dungeons but aren’t special or part of any particular quest. This actually left us with an interesting problem for the future: because the content designers were well aware that the old chests had low quality treasure, they would often place only wealth rating 3 and 4 chests in their dungeons, regardless of the target level of the area. Now, of course, this means that a lot of those chests are out of whack and need to be revisited, but there are an awful lot of them and it’s going to take us months to find them all.

As part of this change, we also added a new treasure profile for the lowest level of Runed chests and adjusted the existing Runed chests in places like Holtburg and Yaraq – those Runed chests should no longer try to give newbies 325 wield requirement weapons!

Secondly, we fixed scrolls drops. Previously, you could only find scrolls of one level in each wealth rating, but with some clever hackery in the treasure code we diversified scroll drops and brought them down where they were more useful to players. The following table illustrates exactly what we did.

Table 2: Scroll Levels
 
Wealth Rating Scroll Levels – Previous Scroll Levels – March
1 2 1, 2, 3
2 3 3, 4, 5
3 4 5, 6, 7 
4 5 6, 7
5 6 7
6 7 7

At the same time, we also adjusted the levels of the spells that you can find on items. We had done the first pass of this in February, but we weren’t satisfied with how the levels played out, and neither were you. So in March we adjusted them, as the following table shows.

Table 3: Item Spell Levels
 
Wealth Rating Item Spell Levels – February Item Spell Levels – March
1 1, 2, 3 1, 2, 3
2 2, 3, 4 3, 4, 5
3 3, 4, 5 4, 5, 6 + minors
4 4, 5, 6 + minors 5, 6 + minors, majors
5 5, 6 + minors, majors 5, 6 + minors, majors
6 5, 6 + minors, majors 5, 6 + minors, majors

One thing you may notice here is that the top three wealth ratings are all identical. In actual practice, your chances of finding each level of spell are different, but the range of possibilities is the same. This is one area in which we may want to expand in the future, possibly by adding level 7 spells to treasure or possibly by adding some new sort of cantrip-like spell effect.

Lastly, we made some adjustments to the mutation of offense and melee defense modifiers. We had overlooked these in February – an unintentional nerf – and so we wanted to get them in somewhat better shape as soon as possible. We ended up adjusting them again in April, however, so see that section for more details about the final state of these modifiers.

There was one other very important – but fairly subtle – treasure change in March. At the beginning of this article we talked a bit about how wealth ratings used to indicate quality but are now used to indicate target character level. That leaves us without a handy way to indicate quality, however – and one aspect of our treasure system that we would like to maintain is the notion that some creatures and some chests and just better for loot. So in March we added a new ‘quality’ property to treasure profiles that indicates their quality level.

Now ‘quality’ operates within the wealth rating, but it means that treasure produced by that profile is more likely to be near the maximum that that wealth rating can produce. For instance, a high quality profile of wealth rating 3 cannot produce major cantrips, but it is a lot more likely to produce minor cantrips. Likewise, a high quality profile of wealth rating 1 will still produce spells of levels 1, 2, and 3, but it’s a lot more likely to produce a lot of level 3 spells and rather few level 1 spells.

This new property only appears in a few profiles in March – namely in the Virindi Troves, Runed Chests, the Golden Gambling Chests, some VoD chests, and a few special quest chests – but in April it will also appear on special creatures

April

The April update isn’t live yet, of course, and as I write this we have another week of implementation followed by a week of polish. So some of the information presented here may change before the April update.

As we mentioned in the February section, one major change in April involves tweaking the target character level for each wealth rating, so that you can start collecting equipment for the next level range before you actually get there. Table 4 illustrates this tweak.

Table 4: Wealth Ratings and Target Player Levels
 
Wealth Rating Target Character Level – February Target Character Level – March
1 1-20 1-15
2 20-40 16-35
3 40-60 36-55
4 60-80 56-75
5 80+ 76+
6 100+ 96+


In addition, we are extending the new ‘quality’ property to a host of creatures, including randomly spawning boss monsters like the Lord of Decay and Plaguefang, as well as creatures like Crystal Golem and Reedshark Slasher. We also added larger treasure profiles to group-oriented creatures so that they drop more pieces of loot.

Many of the other April changes have already been discussed in the March Letter to the Players Follow-Up, but we’ll list them again here in short form as well:

  • Offense, melee defense, and mana conversion modifiers will be more common at all wealth ratings. In fact, at higher wealth ratings items will almost always have these modifiers.
  • Magic casting ‘weapons’ such as wands, orbs, and magic staffs will generate with melee defense modifiers just like missile and melee weapons do. Magic casters will use the same mutation tables as the other weapons, so the chance to get a modifier and the maximum possible modifiers will be the same for all three types of items.
  • In conjunction with this, magic casters can be enchanted with Defender and Lure Blade spells, and tinkered with brass.
  • Magic casters will also have the chance to generate with appropriate item enchantment spells (Defender and Hermetic Link) and with appropriate major and minor cantrips (including skill cantrips for things like alchemy, but not for things like sword).
  • All weapon types – magic, melee, and missile – will have a small chance to generate with very small bonus modifiers to magic defense and missile defense. To begin with, these modifiers will have a maximum of 2.5% and they will not be able to be enchanted or tinkered in any way. We’re excited about these new modifiers because they offer some really neat new options for weapons of all types, but because of the balance implications, we want to start off slow.
  • Some ‘second-class’ melee weapons such as jittes and shou onos – weapons that are far behind the more popular weapons that use the same skill – will get a small boost to their damage in order to make them more attractive to characters of all levels.

In addition to these changes, we are also addressing many of the issues with armor in April. First, we are adjusting the selection phase – what kinds of armor you can find at various levels. The following table illustrates the difference. Note that ‘plate’ refers to platemail, scalemail, and yoroi, and that ‘heritage’ refers to Amuli, Koujia, and Celdon.

Table 5: Armor Selection

Wealth Rating Armor Types – Previous Armor Types – April
1 Common:
Leather, Studded Leather
Common:
Leather, Studded Leather, Chain
2 Common:
Leather, Studded Leather
Common:
Leather, Studded Leather, Chain, Plate
3 Common:
Chain

Rare:
Leather, Studded Leather

Common:
Leather, Studded Leather, Chain, Plate,

Rare:
Heritage, Covenant

4 Common:
Chain

Rare:
Leather, Studded Leather, Plate, Heritage

Common:
Leather, Studded Leather, Chain, Plate, Heritage, Covenant
5 Common:
Chain, Plate, Heritage, Covenant

Rare:
Leather, Studded Leather

Common:
Leather, Studded Leather, Chain, Plate, Heritage, Covenant

Rare:
New Heritage Armor

6 Common:
Chain, Plate, Heritage,  Covenant

Rare:
Leather, Studded Leather

Common:
Leather, Studded Leather, Chain, Plate, Heritage, Covenant

Rare:
New Heritage Armor

You’ll notice that in wealth rating 5 and 6 there is a listing for ‘New Heritage Armor’. The artwork for these is still in production, so they may not make it into the April update. But the plan is for these new armors to be very similar to Amuli, Koujia, and Celdon – except that they will look much cooler.

We are also addressing many of the concerns about the mutation of treasure armor in April. The main change is that all treasure armor will mutate – which means no more AL 20 armor in the Valley of Death. We are also adjusting the magnitude of armor level mutations so that the distribution will better match the distribution that you were used to before February. In addition, some of the lower types of armor – like leather – may end up with higher maximum armor levels than they could achieve before.

Finally, we will also be updating Covenant Armor. Previously, Covenant armor used a mathematical formula to determine its wield requirement based on its armor level. In other words, if you had a piece of Covenant armor with AL 213 and a melee defense requirement, then that melee defense requirement was going to be about 208. This wield requirement might also be increased more if the piece mutated its protections.

In April, however, the wield requirements on Covenant armor will work much more like the wield requirements on weapons: if the piece has an armor level between 300 and 350 and a melee defense requirement, then that requirement is going to be 300 regardless of the exact armor level or the protections. The following two tables describe this behavior.

Table 6: Covenant Armor – Wield Requirements vs. Armor Level
 

Profile (Used in Table 7) AL Range Melee Defense Requirement Missile Defense Requirement Magic Defense Requirement
1 100 - 200 200 160 145
2 200 - 300 250 205 185
3 300 - 350 300 245 225
4 350 - 400 325 270 245
5* 400 - 440 350 290 265
6* 440 - 470 370 305 280
7* 470 - 500 400 330 300

* Shields do not occur with these profiles.

Table 7: Covenant Armor Mutation
 
Wealth Rating Profiles (from Table 6)
1 N/A
2 N/A
3 1, 2, 3
4 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
5 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6
6 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7

Two important things to note: Covenant armor will be able to occur with a magic defense wield requirement as well as melee and missile defense requirements. In addition, most pieces of Covenant armor will be available with higher wield requirements and higher armor levels than previously. We wanted the best Covenant armor to be able to compete with fully tinkered non-Covenant armor in terms of armor level. The one exception is Covenant shields, which for balance reasons we have limited to lower armor levels.

The Future

Going forward, we still have a number of changes that need to be made in order to meet our goals for the treasure system. We also have a lot of cool new treasure features that we’d like to add.

We need to revisit a lot of the selection tables for supplies like healing kits, lockpicks, mana stones, scarabs, potions, food, etc. One option that we are considering is removing most of these items from creature treasure and instead making them more available at vendors. Another option is to change these items so that items from higher wealth ratings are not always better than items from lower wealth ratings in all situations.

For instance, healing kits have two important properties – a skill bonus that increases your effective healing skill, and a healing boost that increases the maximum amount that you can heal. Right now, healing kits from higher treasure have both a higher skill bonus and a higher healing boost than kits from lower treasure – they are just better in every way. But perhaps we should change that so that kits from lower treasure tend to have a higher skill bonus, while kits from higher treasure have a higher healing boost. In this way, lower level kits would presumably be more useful for lower level characters.

Another area that we’d like to revisit is arcane lore, and in particular how arcane lore requirements are affected by rank and skill requirements. This may fit in well with adding level 7 spells to treasure items, if and when we do that.

In terms of cool new features, we’re considering adding higher level wield requirements to missile and melee weapons, and adding wield requirements to magic casters at high levels. For melee weapons, it would be sufficient to increase the damage of these weapons, but for missile weapons and magic casters we have a slightly different idea in mind. In short, missile weapons would get a flat damage bonus (similar to the bonus from Blood Drinker) *only* when the damage type of the arrow in use matched the damage type of the bonus. Similarly, magic casters might have a damage bonus multiplier that worked the same way – applying the modifier only when the damage of the war spell matched the damage type of the bonus.

The following table presents our current thoughts on the skill levels we would like to see in the future for wield requirement. Note that magic casters come in at a higher level, because below that level the spell levels provide an effective scale of damage.

Table 8: Future Weapon Wield Requirements
 
Melee Weapons Missile Weapons Magic Casters
0 0 --
250 250 --
300 270 --
325 290 290
350 315 310
370 335 330
405 360 355

This is only one option we are looking at for higher level wield requirements on weapons, but we are pretty certain that we want to add them in some fashion. Some players have expressed concerns already that higher level wield requirements will further encourage a ‘min-max’ mentality, and that more well-rounded characters will be left behind. For this reason, we want to design these higher weapons so that they provide only a negligible benefit in terms of damage but function more as a status symbol for high level characters.

We would also like to revise and expand our armor system in the future, both by adding more types of armor and by possibly adding more types of wield restricted armor. These are the most tentative of our plans right now, however.

Conclusion

So there you have it – a detailed explanation of how the treasure system works, why we wanted to change it, where we want to go with it, how we’ve changed things so far, what’s in store for the near future, and some ideas we have for the far future. Hopefully you’ve managed to stay awake all through this article, and it’s answered some of the questions you may have had. As always, we are extremely interested in your feedback, so let us know what you think!
 


Dispell Spells - from the Turbine Site (3-23-03)

Dispel Spells

As we mentioned in the recent March Letter to the Players Follow-Up, one our near-term projects is to increase the usefulness and versatility of the dispel spells. After reviewing your feedback from the Letter and discussing the options in a number of team meetings, we’ve come to a consensus on the following plan. Now we’d like to present it to you and get some final feedback before we put this plan into action.

Player-Cast Dispels

Dispels Remove Only Negative Spells:


Dispels that are cast by players currently remove both negative and positive enchantments. Because of this, an NPK player could not use a dispel on a fellow NPK player – because they would dispel the other player’s buffs. Player-Killers could however use dispels to remove both positive and negative enchantments from their target – an effect that was not entirely desirable for either friend or enemy. To address these issues, we are planning to change all dispel spells cast by players to remove negative spells only. This will affect both existing and newly-learned spells: all dispel spells currently in a player's spell book will change to spells that remove negative enchantments only, and all newly-learned dispels will also remove negative enchantments only.

Level 7 Dispels:

Dispels that are cast by players are currently only available up to and including level 6. We will be expanding to include level 7 dispels for each of the three schools that currently have them (Creature, Item, and Life). The level 7 dispel spells will follow the same “double-scarab” pattern found in other dispels, using Platinum and Diamond scarabs.

Mana Usage:

Dispel spells currently require a substantial amount of mana to cast, starting at 50 mana for the level I versions. We feel that the mana cost is slightly too high for these spells, so we are considering adjusting them downwards. The following table shows current mana costs for dispels, and our possible new mana costs.
 

Spell Level

Current Mana Cost

New Mana Cost

I

50

40

II

100

80

III

150

120

IV

200

160

V

250

200

VI

300

240

VII

--

280

Number of Spells Removed:

Dispels that are cast by players currently remove up to 3 spells for the lower levels (level 1 and 2); up to 4 spells for the mid levels (level 3 and 4), and up to 6 spells for the highest levels (level 5 and 6). We would like to increase the number of spells removed for the lower-level dispels. The following table shows the current number of spells removed per level, and our possible new number of spells removed per level.
 

Spell Level

Current # of spells removed

New # of spells removed

I

1-3

3-6

II

1-3

3-6

III

2-4

3-6

IV

2-4

3-6

V

2-6

3-6

VI

2-6

3-6

VII

--

3-6

Learning the Spells:

Currently, the scrolls for dispel spells are found in Steel Chests exclusively, and all levels of dispel spells are found in Steel Chests. Our plans include the ability to find all levels of dispel scrolls in creature treasure and in chests. Creatures of all level ranges that can currently drop spell scrolls will have the chance to drop dispel scrolls. And Level 7 dispels will occur in Steel Chests. Scriveners will not sell these spells.

Gems, Potions, and Magic Casters with Dispel Ability

Dispel gems, dispel potions, and magic casters with an inherent dispel spell (such as the Awakener and the Attenuated Awakener) are very similar, but in the past they have rather different behavior in terms of what kinds of spells they dispel and how many spells they dispel. Going forward, however, we propose to give them all the same behavior in these areas.

Dispels Remove Only Negative Spells:

Dispel potions currently remove both positive and negative enchantments which we feel reduces the usefulness of these craft items. Our plans include changing dispel potions to remove negative enchantments only. Dispel potions will use the same type of dispel spells used for both dispel gems and magic casters with dispel ability.

Level 7 Dispels:

It is only possible to create dispel potions up to level 5 currently. Our plans include the ability to craft level 6 and 7 dispel potions using techniques similar to the current dispel potion crafting processes. In addition, the lower gems –which current dispel level 4 and 5 spells – will dispel level 5 and 6 spells respectively.

Number of Spells Removed:

Dispel gems and the Awakener and the Attenuated Awakener currently have no maximum limit on the number of negative spells they will remove when used. This behavior will not change, but dispel potions will gain the same behavior to bring them into line. In other words, dispel potions will also dispel every negative spell on the player.

Stacking:

In order to increase the convenience of dispel gems and dispel potions, these items will now stack to 25.

Other Important Issues

Layered Spells:

We had originally discussed removing the ability for dispel gems to remove all negative spells. One issue with this however is the fact that creatures will frequently cast the same negative spell on a player multiple times, creating multiple “layers” of the same spell. Many players voiced their concern that removing the ability of dispel gems to remove all negative spells would result in a situation where they could only remove several layers of a spell, and not all layers. This issue could also impact magic casters with dispel abilities. In response to these concerns, we have decided to hold off on removing the ability for gems to dispel all negative spells while we investigate solutions that would prevent the layering effect from occurring.

Creature-Cast Dispels:

Due to the planned changes in dispels, we will also be removing the ability for most creatures to cast dispel spells on players. Traps, however, will keep this ability (as will very special ‘creatures’ such as Asheron himself).

PK Timer:

Many Player-Killers have expressed concern over the current use of dispel gems and dispel items in PK combat. With the coming dispel updates and additional dispelling options, Player-Killers foresee the current, relatively moderate issue with dispels and dispel items quickly degrading into a perpetual dispel-debuff-dispel stalemate. We are investigating the issues involved in tying the use of dispel spells, dispel gems, and other dispel items to the 20-second PK combat timer. This is one area in which we would particularly like to hear more of your opinions.

Feedback

These changes impact PvM combat and PvP combat in very different ways. Because of this, we've created two separate feedback threads: one for PvM and one for PvP.

 


Buffing Improvements - from the Turbine Site (3-25-03)

Hunting in Asheron’s Call requires certain safety precautions: a skill that allows you to kill your foes, the defensive skills to avoid harm from your foes and powerful magic to lessen the damage that your foes can do. As we have added more difficult challenges and creatures to the game we have introduced higher-level spells and increased spell durations on critical buffs. These changes, while positive, did nothing to lessen the amount of time that was taken for hunt preparation. In fact, the inclusion of harder-hitting monsters and more powerful spells increased the amount of spells that some felt was necessary for hunting; as a result, Item spells were added to buffing queues and the wind up time on level seven spells lengthened the buffing process. Based on our analysis as well as player feedback, we’ve realized that something indeed needs to change. Thus, we have come up with the following document to present the future of buffing to all Asheron’s Call players.
 

Instant-Cast Self Buffs

The first major change comes in April’s update. Self-cast Creature and Life Magic spells have had casting timers shortened, they will now cast as if they were a level one spells at all levels. There are a couple of reasons for this change:

  • Increase the value of having the magic school trained.
  • Remove the tedium from buffing your character to start hunting.

This change is currently in testing for release in the April update.

While this change will decrease the overall time that it takes to prepare for hunting it does not address the need to go through the keystroke motions necessary to cast spells. Changes to reduce that tedium will continue to be worked towards for the future.
 

Fellowship Spells

The second big change is the inclusion of Fellowship spells. These will be released over time and will be a boon to players that enjoy hunting and buffing in groups. The current plan is to introduce Fellowship Spells for all Creature and Life spells, with the possibility of some Item spells as well.

The difficulty for fellowship spells is 25 higher than the corresponding non-fellowship spell. The base mana cost for each fellowship spell is the same as that of the corresponding non-fellowship spell, but each additional target costs an extra 10 mana. So if you cast a level 7 spell on a fellowship of 8, it will cost 140 mana (before conversion).

So how will I be able to learn these new spells? Good question.

Fellowship spells are slated to be released over time and will eventually include all Life and Creature Buff spells and possibly Item Magic buff spells, including portal spells. At the moment, the thought is to release these slowly through quests rather than include then as part of the random loot generator, as they are more specialized spells. They will all have unique names and will likely only be made available for level four through seven spells.

There is a possibility that we’ll also be introducing Fellowship healing spells at some point, but we need to take the proper time to balance such spells as they could have serious negative impact in Player vs. Player play.

Portal spells are also under consideration, though it is too early to tell what existing portal sending spells will be given a fellowship variant.
 

Multi-Stat Spells

Multi-Stat spells are spells that affect multiple character statistics at once.

With these spells it would be possible to increase up to three statistics at any one time. Thus you could cast a spell that would affect your Endurance, Strength and Quickness with just one spell.

Our current design includes these spells for level one through seven spells and is currently restricted to Creature and Life Magic schools. There are considerations being made for Item Magic, see the section on Item Magic later in this document.

The charts below show the proposed difficulty and mana usage for casting Multi-Stat Spells:

Multi-Stat Spells: Difficulty
Spell Level
Normal Spell Difficulty
Multi-Stat Spell (2 spells)
Multi-Stat Spell (3 Spells)
Level 1
0
25
28
Level 2
50
75
83
Level 3
100
125
138
Level 4
150
175
193
Level 5
200
225
248
Level 6
250
275
303
Level 7
300
325
358

Multi-Stat Spells: Mana Costs
Spell Level
Normal Mana Costs
Multi-Stat Spell (2 spells)
Multi-Stat Spell (3 Spells)
Level 1
10
15
20
Level 2
20
30
40
Level 3
30
45
60
Level 4
40
60
80
Level 5
50
75
100
Level 6
60
90
120
Level 7
70
105
140

The second hurdle with Multi-stat spells is that we need to group the spells together effectively. Do we create spells that affect Life Magic and Sword together in one spell? Or do we keep Sword grouped with Melee Defense? Conceptually we have several spells grouped already.

Here are some examples of our current design: (these currently only include Creature Enchantment spells)

Attributes
Multi-Stat Spell (2 spells)
Multi-Stat Spell (3 Spells)
Strength and Endurance
Strength, Endurance and Quickness
Coordination and Quickness
Coordination, Focus and Self
Focus and Self  

Hunting Skills
Multi-Stat Spell (2 spells)
Multi-Stat Spell (3 Spells)
Weapon and Melee Defense
Weapon, Melee Defense, and Missile Defense

Magic Skills
Multi-Stat Spell (2 spells)
Multi-Stat Spell (3 Spells)
Life Magic and War Magic
Life and War Magic with Mana Conversion
Creature Enchantment and Item Enchantment
Creature and Item with Mana Conversion

Defensive/Secondary Hunting Skills
Multi-Stat Spell (2 spells)
Multi-Stat Spell (3 Spells)
Melee Defense and Missile Defense
Melee Defense, Missile Defense and Magic Defense
Healing and Arcane Lore
Healing, Arcane Lore and Mana Conversion
Mana Conversion and Magic Defense  

Because these are only being conceptualized at the moment there is still a lot of room for change to occur.

The second major question with Multi-Stat spells is the distribution and acquisition of the new spells. We want to see these spells integrated into world safely and quickly, we also know that players will want to craft their own spells for use.  As a result we’re currently considering two options.

The first options would place spell scrolls into the loot system. These would be found as part of normal scroll distribution across all levels of loot. The second option is to place them in sturdy chests that currently have level seven spells. This option would give some value back to the Sturdy Iron Keys.

You’ll simply need to use the scroll after finding it and, if your magic skill is high enough, the spell will be added to your spellbook and you will be able to cast it yourself. Regardless of the distribution process, three-spell variants will be rarer than the two-spell variants.

Multi-Stat spells will be most likely be added sometime this year. They will probably be created only for self spells first, with the possibility of other spells in the distant future.
 

Item Enchantment

Baning. With the possibility of nine separate armor pieces to buff, ten if you have a shield, it is possible that you are casting eighty Item protection spells per hunting session. That’s a long time to be standing around and pressing a sequence of buttons over and over. So what are we planning on doing about Item Enchantment?

First and foremost, we want to curb the length of time that it takes people buff. To state that more clearly, we want to reduce the amount of time it takes for self-buffing players to complete their buff cycle. The emphasis is on improving buffing for those players with access to these spell schools. It is important to remember that this is the primary goal of buff improvements when evaluating this section, as the following improvements are all only considerations at this point.

Our first consideration is to make all Item Enchantment spells fast cast, as we are doing for Creature and Life Magic spells. This would go a long way to curb the length of time that people buff.

The second option is to extend multi-stat spells to Item Enchantment. This would allow players to cover several banes at once and therefore cut down on the number of spells that are being cast as part of their buffing cycle. While this option alone would not completely alleviate the length of time that it takes to buff oneself for hunting, it would be another avenue to alleviate the tedium.

 Lastly, we are considering the option to allow Item Enchantment to spread to all valid targets on a player. This would mean you could target yourself, cast Impenetrability and it would spread to all of the possible targets on your character. This would cut the spell count down to eight, sixteen with a shield, and really speed the process along.

There is a possibility that we’ll combine some options together, when we solidify design plans we’ll let you know what options were chosen.
 

Conclusion

It’s going to be an interesting year. There are several changes that are coming to buffing and spell casting in general. The overall goal of the buffing changes is to allow players to get into the heat of battle more quickly, and with the changes that we currently have on our plate we think that we can achieve that goal.

Your feedback on these topics will be very valuable as we continue working on these designs and prioritize which ones will go into the game first. Which of these ideas do you like or dislike? Which do you like or dislike most?

Thanks for reading, and we look forward to hearing from you.


 
Contents

Event Teaser
Roll Out Article
Build Notes

Letter to the Players
Lttp Follow-Up
The Future of PvP
PvP Dev Chat
PK Reversion
Treasure in AC
Dispell Spells
Buffing Improvemts
Town Crier Rumors
Patch Page

 


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