Minor Patch 7th April
The plan this week was primarily to enable some of the quest content and elite mobs in the Ice Kingdom.
We'd quietly enabled full xp sharing when we launched Ice Kingdom to see how it changed player behaviour and for the most part, we were pleased with what was happening. The system however was easily exploited, and we had large amounts of experience being gained from positions of complete safety. Reverting from shared experience back to split experience was all we could do in the short term but we diverted resource this week into adding some layers of protection against common afk farming mechanisms to enable us to return to xp sharing.
As such this patch is mainly about bringing shared experience back online and we've pushed the content into next week.
We will be monitoring how much xp gain explodes again (some of our metrics looked very crazy last weekend!) and hopefully this will be enough to mitigate the issues we saw whilst also feeling a lot better for non-afk parties.
[Xp Changes]
Every member of parties now receive 100% of xp from creatures killed within a small area around the monster.
To be eligible for sharing a number of conditions must be met, which for the most part should happen fine when people are just playing together.
Inactivity now disables Xp Gain and the ability to pick up items. You can tell you're currently inactive by the Zzz icon over your class icon, and you can tell someone else I by the AFK on their name. Moving away from the area is the quickest way to return to an active state.
Xp award is now reduced to players in significantly higher level areas then their character.
Shrines of the Kami now require adventurer levels to be high enough to interact with dependent on the zone’s level.
The curve of reduced xp from mobs as the player’s adventurer level increases has been sharpened.
[Misc Changes]
Most monsters around the Ice Kingdom have had their base damage reduced.
Reduced the power level bonus Ghosts gain for each level they spawn with (they would generally be strong enough to ignore your armour completely)
Heavy armour now provides +2.5% resistance to all three physical damage types for each piece worn (this is applied after power level calculations)
Skeleton summons now have slightly improved health scaling, mana regeneration and resistances.