Dev Diary 23 :: 2016 :: September

[Ray]

Hey folks,

I won't be around for the first Sunday of September, so i'll be releasing the full monthly dev blog early.

We are getting overwhelmed with so many different aspects of development, but it's getting more and more exciting to think about the improvements we can accomplish ahead now.

We don't have anything overly exciting gameplay-wise with the patch coming this week, but I think our plans ahead are something to look forward to.

The New UI
This is being released in the upcoming patch. Please note:: THIS IS A FIRST PASS! It is expected that many changes and further improvements (including further complete rehauls to many windows) will occur. Most of the work has been done with a kit by myself, and i'm quite terrible with UI lol. The arthouse will be focusing on each separate window as time passes.

For example, the World Select is getting some very early draft work done (This isn't ready nor being included in the upcoming patch yet):




There will probably be some inconsistencies or oversights in some of the first-pass rehauls. Feel free to offer some feedback on second-pass improvements in the meantime

We will also be releasing 1 planet of complete rehauled monsters/backgrounds frequently very very soon. I even anticipate the first world release in the next week.


The bugs/issues
Pet Arena NO-AP Record - We're aware of this. This should be completely fixed in the patch this week. We have been releasing many resets in the meantime.

Challenge Lag - We aren't 100% sure what is occurring with this, but we have made some pretty big improvements in the backend, and have some higher scale improvements planned in the next 1-2 months that should resolve an assortment of issues related to challenge lag, and the diminishing quality of rooms over time.

Party Breaking - There has been some occurrences for parties where they get stuck at loading character data. I think we have caught this issue and it should clean up in the next patch. I appreciate the reports on this as it has helped us locate a couple problems with room shutdowns.

Offline Gains - This may still be a work in progress. Jay is on this issue, so if you have any helpful information please toss some information his way. A couple issues were fixed, but without a larger scale test group it's difficult to know whether it's fixed or not.

We will be continuing to look at improving stability in parties and fixing other annoying issues that may have plagued some players for a while now. I truly apologize if you are one of the groups that have been running into the party/offline issues.

Upcoming Patch
As mentioned, this patch contains a lot of UI change, and it has been a LOT of work. This will be a long-term work-in-progress.

We have also rebalanced tiny pack trading costs. Please note, we have no plans of allowing the trading of any other pack type...I have seen several mentions of people claiming to be waiting for such a feature, but it isn't something we are looking at.

Chat - I've added the ability to chat while in a challenge queue to the other players in the queue. We have also implemented a new broadcasting system which should allow for some pretty nifty features in the future. Currently it supports global chat, however we may wait before releasing global chat until mid-september, when I return as to avoid spam and to give us time to implement moderation features.

Leeching - We turned back a bit in regards to limiting gains, for now, but have worked to fix the ability to go to higher inferno difficulty tiers until you reach level 200.

We have found and fixed quite a few backend bugs during this patch as well.

Plans Ahead
We have so many plans ahead, but we are looking at reorganizing some priorities again due to community feedback/complaints.

1. Fishing - We understand this is a rather annoying daily grind, especially when it fails if you get disconnected to continue fishing. We will be looking at adding internal values to auto-fish, including the ability to auto-fish while performing other tasks within the game.
2. Cohorts - This may not see the light of day until late September or early Ooctober to give us time to clean up some other features.
3. Upgrade Map Resets - We are looking at changing the way resets work by allowing codes or purchases of resets to allow you to reset your build as many times as you like for a few hours, as opposed to a single reset. I also understand people want distribution saves for fast switching but this just isn't possible at this time until we work out some compression methods on account data.
4. Bingo - This was revamped yet again using our new broadcasting system. It's about ready but we felt like we needed to add more rewards to it, and wait until the global chat is working before this feature can be pushed out. While we keep procrastinating its release due to so many changes, I think testing will begin very soon.
5. Level-up Reward System - This is something we started working on, to make milestones a little more exciting, but it probably won't see itself in testing until later in September, or early October so we can better design this feature.
6. Trophies - We would like to look at trophies and completely revamp this system as a growing priority. Let us clean up some features and get things rolling...from there we can start pushing this as a high priority and make achievements a lot more fun to work towards again.
7. Guilds - I'm going to give more information below on this....
   

Guild Plans
Guild Beast / Challenges - First off, with the new UI changes with party members listed at the bottom of the screen, and plans to significantly optimize how attacks are handled in larger groups, I think guild challenges are something we can start looking at finally. 

Guild Buildings - We have a rather insane rehaul planned for buildings.....
In the current system, no matter how many buildings we add, there just is never going to be a way to keep it balanced, or something that is fun to invest into. That being said, here are some of the ideas we're contemplating:

• Buildings get a level-cap of 100, and further investments start giving other smaller passive bonuses
• Investments activate a bonus for everyone in the guild for <x> amount of time, up to 48 hours. Every investment adds 60 minutes to this bonus.
• Players who invest get a personal bonus from the building for each investment, to motivate and reward those who perform these investments.
• Buildings still to hold passive bonuses (for a smaller amount) based on their level. However continuous investments will activate the global and personal bonuses for even further bonuses.
  

Now comes the dirty details:

• We are looking at refunding everyones stone since the beginning of the game. We have a record of all the stone you ever accumulated. Many players have lost stone from changing guilds, failed investments, etc. This would give players their total stone back to re-invest as they like.
• Since the rehaul of buildings is so significant and different, guild building levels would be reset.
• This new system would allow for a more robust variation of new buildings in the future, without hard caps
• The bank would no longer be necessary (perhaps still an option)
  

This is a rather crazy idea, and i'm not sure how the community will take it, but I feel such a rehaul is required to make investments have a purpose in the long-run. The current system became unbalanced, and there's no clean way to truly improve upon the current setup without a clean rehaul.

We are also thinking about different ways to improve buildings with different resources which would come from expeditions (after that rehaul) to tie in these systems together. 

I would like to see some feedback on this idea in the forum!

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This is probably the last true development blog for two weeks as a heads up. I'll still be around here and there for discussion, and might have another post in regards to other topics.

Cheers,
Ray