Hello Warriors!
This week we are introducing some big changes in response to our Community’s voice.
Being a niche game gives great opportunities of being close to our players, but still – we have been lacking a tool which would give us very wide, and so unbiased opinions.
Last month we added an in-game Questionnaires system, which we already used 5 times to ask you important questions about the way we shape the Gloria Victis game.
Read below for details, and see you in battle!
Changelog v.0.9.4.4
The screenshot's author has been rewarded. J U S T O V I A – check your Ambers!
Traitor system changes:
One of the last questionnaires was related to the players playing traitor characters. We knew that the very most of the traitor-like behaviors were done by players using their alt accounts – and those very toxic behaviours implified any potential balancing issues, since the underdog nations were the easiest prey to those players.
The Questionnaire question was:
Should we do everything we can to prevent people from griefing other players from the same nation, making the traitor life much harder and non-profitable, making sure there will still remain possibilities to use that system to get rid of trolls/griefers?
It was the most voted, and top rated poll so far. 82% of players answered that they want us to do that. And more than that, many of the players who voted against did it with feedback that they would vote yes if there would be additional voting system – like the one we’ve just implemented in this update.
We decided that if the Community wanted the change so urgent, we should do it as soon as possible, especially as we were burning so much time for moderating such users.
Traitor system tweaks:
We do know that the very most of “traitors” were playing the way when they were not tagged by the system as traitors. We did changes below to make such a gameplay much less viable, as this was our community will.
– Traitor, wanted and crime counter buffs are now account wide, if players will be using alts traitoring, on the moderators action all of the accounts of such users might get account wide semi-permanent traitor tags.
– Users below 40 level cannot trigger the Friendly Fire button now.
– Triggering the Friendly Fire button now will have a 30 seconds delay before Friendly Fire will enable. Meantime, all of the players nearby will see a new icon above that player indicator and get a chat message of that player turning Friendly Fire.
– Players reputation cap has been narrowed to from -10000 to 10000 Reputation (before it was -30000 to 30000), as it allowed the highly reputed traitor players to do lots of harm before getting below 0 reputation
– Modified reputation gained from capping flags related to the flag type
– Decreased daily reputation gain cap from 1500 into 150 (Cap still doesn’t trigger for negative reputation cases)
– Reputation received for outlaw island events decreased from 80 to 25
– Crime counter (the buff which increases further reputation losses of player, but doesn’t mean traitor status by itself) is now not only added for kills, but also for looting our nation players, except the traitors.
Voting system:
We do know that getting rid of players who are trolling around, while avoiding the traitor status, was the biggest pain for players, and our moderators couldn’t always settle those cases “live”. For that reason we have added an voting system – all of the votes will be logged out and additionally get to our moderators, and players who will be abusing that system will be receiving traitors themselves, lifetime voting block on their account and/or bans.
To proceed voting, players need to write “ /VoteSpy Nickname”, after that the system will ask about the reason, and send it directly to our mods and every nearby player will receive information about the potential voting start.
If at least 5 players, including the initiator, will agree for the voting, all of the players nearby will receive the option to vote for that player's guilt and the accused player will receive information that voting has started for his reason.
If 80% or more nearby players will agree to the voting (the percentage is subject to future change), the player will be informed that within 2 minutes he needs to leave the area or he will get the Wanted debuff, allowing ally players to kill that player without consequences (but not to loot).
Of course we will be closely observing how this feature is being used and adjusting it, if that won’t be enough to get rid of toxic behaviours of that kind.
Balance Change:
Balance between nations is the most important thing for us – in case of extreme disbalance, in the long term the dominating players leave the game due to boredom and lack of challenges, and those outplayed for a long time leave the game due to frustration.
During that year, we’ve done many deep changes related to balance. As a result, at this moment the players receive more than 15 different bonuses for joining and playing any underdog nation. But we have already seen a few times that almost every time when the servers’ balance improves, an “exodus” of players from the underdog nations happens as they’re being invited, or even given the Nation Change scrolls – which in the end is the worst case possible.
For that reason, we’ve decided to remove the Nation Change scrolls from our game, at least temporarily, and of course to refund them to everyone who has an unused one at their characters. Refunds – for the full price, even if the Nation Change scroll was bought with a discount – will take place at the moment of applying this update.
The free nation change to underdog nation of course stays in game (a reminder, to avoid exploits this option triggers off for players switching their main server, and is only available on their main server), also a free nation change for account with greenleaf status also stays in-game. Only way to change a nation other than underdog for “grown” accounts is to remove characters and recreate them in the other nation.
Season End:
Even though the results of our in-game Questionnaire show that the most of players are fine with postponing the Season End further to apply it in-game with Freebuilding overhaul together, we realized that we’ have to expand it a bit too long, and that would be a bad thing to happen. Finally we’ve come to an agreement that the Season should end by the end of this month, so the last day of this Ranking Season will be September 30th.
Also, today’s update also introduces a much better ranking exploit detection system, and we would like to remind that trying to abuse the rankings can lead to account suspensions.
Engine Upgrade:
For the last 5 days, the EU server has been using a new engine build without any regression reported. For that reason, we’ll finally be moving all of our servers to the new engine version which will help us a lot with increasing the servers performance in the long term. Same time, we are very close to bringing an upgraded test client version.
We are very happy about that, as it gives us a lot of new opportunities of improving the Gloria Victis further and faster.
Other Changes:
Market window filters:
– Due to many false-positive reports regarding issues with displaying the items available in the market, all filters automatically reset to default when the Market window is opened again
– Similarly, changing the tab resets the tag filter and search engine
– Limited the possibility of spamming the Market with requests sent by the client
– Advanced filters don’t filter the My Offers and Completed tabs
– Advanced filters don’t show the "Apply" button if the same filters are set (i.e. if, for example, you uncheck the prescription checkbox, it will show the button, but if you select it again, the button will disappear, because the new request would not differ from the last one sent)
New questline
We introduced a new questline for the Midland players – it adds 1.5 hour of quests gameplay to let new players better get known with Gloria Victis world and mechanics. It contains overall 51 tasks divided into 5 quests – 5 rewards to take!
The story begins inside the capital - Dunfen. As a known warrior, you get an offer to participate in the mission of regaining stolen royal treasure - but this time all need to happen unofficially. The whole action requires a group of specialized people, so your first task will base on gathering the members in the city. As always, not everything may go easily, so you meet many obstacles – during the questline, appear themes such as treason, imprisonment or duels to the death and life. Also, you will meet the side plot about preparing the wedding and missing bridegroom!
Soon we’ll add an adequate questline for Ismirs!
Also, along with the questline we've added a brand new event "Secrets of Dundrum", dedicated for the higher level players. The event asks you to infiltrate the bandit's hideout in the dungeon, clear the area of danger, and retrieve their loot. The event is designed for small, so it's a good way to take a break from the most intense action during the day.
Fixes:
– Fixed a bug causing displaying the date of sending the chat message above the other players’ heads
– Several fixes to the bugs reported by players using the in-game reporting system