Hello warriors!
The new weekly update is live! We introduced the first iteration of the planned world balance improvements which we announced last week – Haddah Castle is now in a new pretty spot! There are also improvements to the “Valley of Death” PVP tournament, recently introduced siege preparations, balance tweaks and many bug fixes. Check them on your own!
Moreover, as expected, more nations received the experience boost thanks to the recent update of the nations autobalance algorithms, after which the boost for playing in the underdog faction is assigned in runtime, separately on each server. The boost was already applied on 2 servers, helping the underdog nations grow.
See you in battle!
Work in Progress:
We're working on another expansion of the siege engines system - movable battering rams. You can expect them to come within next 2 weeks!
Changelog v.0.8.8.4
Territory Control update:
This update brings the 1st iteration of the planned world balance improvements which we announced last week. Haddah Castle and its’ farm were moved to a new position in order to solve the problem of new players joining the Sangmar nation feeling “outplayed”, because even in case of a complete balance on the map, the Sangmar’s native territory was visually smaller than the other nations. Second, although the actual travel distance to Haddah Caste from the capital city was comparable to other nations’ castles, they appeared to be placed closer because of their flags’ position, causing concerns about the world PVP balance. In this update, Haddah Castle was moved to new position in order to help solve both these problems. There are also improvements to the guild control and recently introduced siege preparations:
– Updated position of Haddah Castle and Haddah Farm
– Moved the siege camp at Seaclaw to the South, placing it in between of Haddah Castle and Seaclaw
– Moved the siege camp South to the Haddah Castle to new position due to the castle’s position update
– Updated Eastern part of the Western traitors island due to the Haddah Castle’s position update
– Updated the /home command, adding possibility to move to each of the guild’s provinces by typing either /home 1 or /home 2 (numbers are assigned to the guild’s provinces order in the Guild window)
– From now on, siege preparations aren’t required to claim a guild province if it isn’t controlled by any guild
– From now on, if a guild didn’t complete the siege preparations before the server’s primetime ends, its’ token is being removed
– Added converting the server’s primetime to the player’s timezone in a notification displayed after attempting to claim a guild province out of the primetime
– Added updating the siege preparations progress for the guild owning a province
– Fixed an issue causing that the siege preparations were still displayed for the guild owning a province if the attackers cancelled preparations
“Valley of Death” PVP Tournament update:
– Removed NPC guards in the central part of the tournament’s map, leaving only the guards at spawnpoints
– Added randomizing the nations’ spawnpoints in the tournament
– Added colliders like in the duel arenas at the spawnpoints’ exits, which disappear after 20 seconds, in order to make sure that all nations will start the tournament at the same time (until now it heavily depended on the loading time)
"Balance Safeguard":
Ability to play outside the main server is one of our unique game features. It adds another layer of politics, allows players to play with their friends and – which is the most important thing – allows the growing nations to get help from their friends from other servers.
We were looking at the migrations of players very closely this month, and we didn't note any of migrations causing domination in terms of numbers for migrating nation (described as the most populated nation having at least 10% users more than the second nation). However, we wanted to make sure that it won't happen in future, so we introduced a system which will prevent it potentially happening once and forever.
First – players can move into the other server only if they set it as the main server (it has 7 days-long cooldown) or if they are trying to join another server as “guests” – the latter can’t be done if the player’s nation dominates in the selected server
Second – we know that this could be potentially abused by some "host" players logging off from their server to bring space for "guest" players – and for that reason, when the server will close for any further “guests” of given nation (so players can't jump from other servers to help a nation dominating in numbers) then, and only then – it will also bring a debuff for the most populated nation’s “guests”, which will trigger only for players inside the State Of War area.
These changes assure that the moving outside the main server will be used for its exact purposes, not to over-dominate any of the servers.
Combined with other restrictions brought to the game by “soft lock”, like not being able to loot players or plunder the storehouses in GCs, we believe that it all will work much better than any potential Server Lock. Since Gloria Victis is a skill-based game and an experienced player can reach the max level within just a few days, forcing players to create different characters for every server would only lead to increasing the negative effects of "server jumping", as those characters wouldn’t be restricted by anything they are restricted now.
TLDR; Switching servers for increasing domination of one nation should be impossible now (although it was barely happening in the past).
Quality of Life improvements:
– Added 14 new events for levels 20-50 in the surroundings of the Ismirean farms (L’Obart’s Farm and Mereley Farm), between Mereley Lumbermill and Basilea Mine and between Limetown and the Mines of Dunfen – 8 of them can be done by every nation, while the others are dedicated to Ismirs; these events were added to help low-level players – especially Ismirs – to progress, since there were very little events above level 20 in these areas
– Updated the crafting events, adding Sangmarian items to the requirements and removing tasks which weren’t profitable for players – the ones which required bringing top-tier items
– Improved display ranges of some player-spawned plants
– Updated the balance of low-tier 2-handed wooden bludgeoning weapons reducing their durability, since they are cheap to produce
– Updated statistics of the Pilgrim's Staff, slightly increasing its’ stamina cost and reducing damage because after reinforcing it could become too powerful compared to other, more expensive weapon types
– Added notifications informing about the siege engines’ chassis and durability status
– From now on, party and alliance invites are stored in the Notifications Center
– Removed the shop interface from NPCs without a shop
– Updated the “Inventory is full” notification in the system chat, adding information about required slots since there were problems with clarity of this notifications
Fixes:
– Fixed an issue causing rotating ballistas with their platforms
– Fixed an issue causing that one version of the Drowned Maid used to be invisible
– Fixed an issue causing that low-level participants of the “Sea Wraiths” world event couldn’t see the event’s progress
– Fixed an issue causing that Poor Barley Beer increased max stamina instead of stamina regeneration speed
– Fixed holes in models of the Weaponsmith's Workshops
– Fixed an edge-case issue causing that the non-looting zone would disappear immediately after the siege event’s end
– Fixed NPCs which had the dialog button but didn’t have any dialog
– Fixed displaying the player titles for crafting
– Fixed a visual bug causing that kicking could be displayed twice in edge cases if the character was switching legs while kicking – there was still only one single kick at a time but was displayed wrong
– Fixed displaying the “Deadly Harvest” score on 3440x1440 resolution – it displayed only 4 digits
– Improved visibility of the block indicator when a player successfully blocked an attack
– Fixed playing the other player’s damage sound effect for the killing attacks