Greetings, Warriors!
This week we are introducing promised changes and fixes related to Sieges and the State of War. From now on, you are able to control the spawn of siege engines and set permissions that allow only people from your guild to use your tent. After a long and interesting discussion in the office, and as well on the suggestions channel on our official Discord, we also decided to update the way to deactivate weekly automatic tokens on guild castles and arrows regeneration for archers.
Thank you all for participating in the recent new engine test session! We received a lot of valuable feedback and positive opinions regarding game performance, as well as some good bug reports, so work on the update of the client-side of the game engine accelerated greatly.
As always, we also have for you many fixes and quality of life improvements! Check the details below and see you in battle!
The screenshot’s authors have been awarded. Siegbert, DoomCakes and Thory – check your Ambers!
Changelog v.0.9.6.3 Beta
State of War
Automatic Saturday tokens on Guild castles were introduced to the game to encourage players to actively attack and defend castles on the global map and create more opportunities for sieges and changing ownership of locations. But in the long run, it became a little overwhelming, according to your feedback. That is why the token deactivation feature has been introduced. Players were able to deactivate their automatic tokens by participating in the map events and killing world bosses.
But even with this workaround, our data shows that it is still too easy to hold the castle passively, with not playing the game almost at all, and some Guild Castles on various servers are being held for a long time by guilds that are logging in just to SoW’s and not playing the game besides that, what have bad impact on the game balance and is weakening activity of a whole nation.
We decided to transfer the deactivation more towards daily challenges, which will create a more fair environment for active players and limit relying on allied guilds passively. Those changes will have the lowest impact on players and guilds who are already active in the game but will open wider the endgame content of Guild Castles for them.
Let’s break the changes one by one:
- We go from deactivating tokens per alliance to deactivating them per guild. Each guild has to take part in activities if it does not want to have a Saturday SoW. This will promote active guilds more and limit relying on alliances.
- Completing one daily challenge will grant one point to the deactivation bar. Every player in the guild will be able to help his guild by just playing the game. To make it clear - from our analytics, players now do 7 daily challenges on average [with more active players doing 12 of them every day!].
- Amount of points needed to deactivate the token has been increased from 2000 to 3000. Since we are expanding the ways to gain points, this change is reasonable to keep the balance.
- We add a clamp for points per guild that can be gained for performing events – the guild can earn a max of 500 per day from events. Events that still are granting points for token deactivation are: Killing a Kargald Champion, Sea Wraiths, Volcano, Catacombs.
- In exchange for removing points from Ragi/Sirius/Brandon events, you can now get points from events on the nation links, for example: “The Cohort Strikes Back”, “Kill the traitors!”, “Rite of the Acolytes”, “Kill the Gold Griffins”, “Kill Lynxes”, “Kill River Hogs”, “Raiders’ Encampment” and “Secrets of Dundrum/Yestad/Serai”.
- The amount of points you can get for participating in SoW as an attacker and for daily challenges is unlimited.
We believe those are very fair and healthy changes for the community and servers, but we are open for your feedback and opinions after the first week of the new system presence on global servers. The numbers of points can be tweaked and we will gather further data and observe the situation during the following weeks to adjust the calculations if needed.
Siege Tents and Siege engines
During yesterday’s State of War we experienced some unexpected turn of events. We received many reports about potential design loopholes, and we moved to address such critical issues in our fashion - by uploading the fixes within the very next day. We are sorry for the inconveniences and thankful for numerous and detailed reproductions of the issues sent to us overnight that helped us to fix those problems right away.
In the edge case, when Siege Camp was built very close to the castle, the system was checking only the distance between Siege Camp and the place used to spawn the machine. From now we are checking the nation while the siege engine is deployed at the guild castle area - if it is an enemy, the siege engine is not deployed. This will not allow spawning machines right under walls or keep.
Second, we fixed the edge case way to bypass the limit of siege engines spawned at one time that could have been bypassed while using a siege tent by many players at one time.
Siege Tents received a new feature, suggested and requested by the Community. From now on you will be able to set up a guild limitation on your tent – so players who may be not mindful about their actions or trying to intentionally troll, will be not able to spawn siege engines and potentially spawn wrong machines and waste siege points.
Arrows regeneration
After a few weeks of gathering feedback about the new archery system from players, we decided to change the feature of regenerating arrows for killing blows. Indeed, it was something that could lead to frustration when a low health target has been killed by a melee fighter or ballista for example, and despite dealing 90% of damage to that target with our bow we did not receive an arrow regeneration boost for that kill. The system has been changed and now it is using an assist system to count archer contributions to the kills and regenerating adequate quiver percentage for every kill we helped to get.
This will remove from archers the need to target low health targets to regenerate arrows and reward them for dealing damage with well-aimed shots fairly.
Quality of Life
– According to the latest ingame questionnaire results (67% of players voted for "Rather Agree" or "Definitely Agree"), the Sea Wraiths event is from now on a non-loot event. We have closely checked all of your feedback, and most often negative feedback was related to worries about further expanding that rule to Volcano Event. This is not our plan
–Changed the respawn time of the quest resources nodes in the third line of questlines for every nation (Ismir questline: “Where is my husband?”, Midland “The Royal Huntsman”, and Sangmar: “The disappearance of Claretta”), from 500 to 30 seconds
– Changed the teleport time to observer Glory Arena from 15 to 30 seconds, and teleport to Global Arena from 20 to 30 seconds
– Changed teleport times from observing Glory Arena and Global Arena to Open World from 15 and 20 seconds to 5 seconds in both cases
Fixes
– Fixed 55 bugs in level design including terrain, models, and colliders in various locations and terrain
– Fixed teleporting points (which are used during the siege by the players who aren't members of the guild that captured the flag) on Lordly Haven on the last gate for each upgrade
– Fixed the navmesh in the wooden main keep building that could prevent guards from getting upstairs in some cases
– Fixed the issue causing face texture was clipping through Sons of War helmet chainmail
– Fixed the guard position in Greenport – one of the guards were spawning under the keep’s floor
– Fixed the missing translation in Bastion worker's interface
Hotfix 2021-02-26:
- From now on, enemy siege engines cannot be spawned in castles colliders basing on the same rules as siege tents are using
- Added log files gathering data about spawn and usage of siege engines
- We added a bonus way to collect token deactivation points by doing daily challenges. You can get more points by claiming the daily challenges tier rewards, respectively 2,4,8 and 16 for each tier of the reward