Dev Diary 25 :: 2016 :: December

[Ray]

Ola...

It has been a really nice year weather-wise but winter has finally settled in. Grey-day Schedule:  Monday to Sunday. Nothing but gloom.

I have mentioned it before in discord, but i'll mention it again. I'm one of those weird people that are completely and utterly affected by the weather, and winter throws me into a pretty big ball of depression and lethargy. I tried to be around as much as I could to respond to people throughout the weekend but my work-efforts on development since Friday were pretty minimal as I felt like I needed to take a bit of a break and try to adjust to the fact that the next few months are just going to be cold and gloomy.

I still have a few things to discuss for the last week and what's going on this week.

1. Expedition System
   I'm working out the starting UI still, as there's quite a bit going on for this system. I can tell you now though that there are 67 challenge ships set up (took forever) that I have utilized commercial assets for. These will NOT be daily task challenges, but one-time completions. Once you defeat the challenge ship, you will receive nice rewards to upgrade your ship[s] (among other rewards) and get to anticipate the next ship. I'm comfortable with the fact that players may never ever defeat the 67th ship. I feel like some systems need that piece of anticipation to defeat something no one else ever has, whether it takes 3 months or a year to move forward.
   
   As for PvP, people are definitely anxious about this. Since it's not in testing yet, it is very subject to change, but let me describe the plans:
   -You can battle ~10 players a day around your rank
   -Defeating a player above your rank places you at their rank and sets them 1 rank below you
   -The battles will be PvPAI (Player vs Player AI)
   -The strategy is your build, as you will not make in-combat decisions, as this will allow you to skip previewing the battle if you don't care and just want to see the result. I don't want this new mode to be a time consuming grind
   -Each battle will yield resource rewards, so win or lose you aren't at a complete loss.
   -There will be rewards every <x> period based on your rank (once every 1-2 weeks?) with new resources for upgrading your ship, and I'm looking at having resources that you can use to craft non-expedition upgrades (such as a new idle damage bonus).
   
   The rewards will likely be milestone based, where the top 25 receive TIER 1, the top 26-100 receive TIER 2, the 101-250 receive tier 3, etc.
   
   My goal for this system is for it to be fun and allow players to compete without too much concern over the rewards, as they'll just be a nice boost to resources that you should otherwise be able to obtain via expeditions. This is aimed to be a nice test-run with the PvP and once we see how it sits with the community we can scale it to an appropriate level.
   
   While I suspect we'll have much of this running by xmas, it could be in testing for a while depending on the outlook from testers. 
2. Legendary System
   A great discussion was held in discord regarding level 1000+, and how players have been penalized time and time again for reaching high levels with new hindrances yet no new content. The first end-game based feature will be released in January, parallel to the community vote, giving top players and those under 1k something to actually look forward to, and give purpose to leveling once again.
   
   Aside from that we'd like to look at existing upgrades at some point to give players level 200+ something better to invest into again.
3. Challenge Lag
   I keep making massive optimization changes, but it hasn't affected challenges positively. I have gone through so many reviews of this that I'm going to tazmanian devil my last grey hairs out.
   
   I think I discovered something interesting tonight though that debunked a lot of my theories. It appears that the lag affects high-end players far more significantly. Players who have insane speed with nothing but a screenful of attacks non-stop. I was not able to reproduce the lag on a lower level character. I also wasn't able to reproduce the severity of lag that players were experiencing, on their characters, on the exact same server. This tells me almost for a fact that this is related to the amount of data and the frequency of it hitting the clients, as during these lag spikes the servers load was optimal (honestly, there was no delay in the processing whatsoever during these challenge tests)
   
   Tonight I made a pretty big optimization to how packets are built and sent on the server that may or may not help the situation, but beyond that I'm looking at creating a speed-limit restriction on attacks (auto, idle, pet).
   
   Before you freak out, Yin / Yang (and Chang, but he wasn't invited...). The idea would be to increase your damage output by the same rate that we slow down your attacks to attempt to keep the output as equal as possible. I think this will resolve a lot of issues for euro (and other non NA players), along with resolve the challenge lag for many.
   

I haven't included everything going on (such as CDN progress, linux progress [for more powerful servers at the same cost in preparations for global features ahead], bingo, etc), but contrary to my slight slow down the last few days, things are still moving.

Cheers,
Ray