We are not able to release an update this week, since our current dev cycle is taking a bit longer. However, we will still be wiping the official servers this morning. It is community servers choice whether they want to wipe or not.
Our team is currently working on porting Reign of Kings to Unity5. Currently, the game runs on Unity 4.6, so this process is a bit of work and takes time to finish, we started this work early last month. The reason we are upgrading the engine is due to performance concerns. While there are visual improvements that will come naturally from the upgrade, the performance on the physics engine (now multithreaded), and performance for big bases (runs much better), are the main drivers for the upgrade. So we look forward to finishing our work on the upgrade, and hope that it will result in a smoother play experience for you.
We thought we'd also give everyone a general timeline on when to expect updates going into the future. We feel that 2-3 weeks in-between updates will work best for the studio. While we indeed updated once a week since launch, that type of cycle was better for short term goals, and can be very taxing on the team, which may lead to more bugs due to not as much time given to properly test the new features.
As for server wipes, we plan on wiping the servers about once a week, whether there is update or not. This is needed to keep the game running well. We hope to extend the time in-between wipes even further apart as we develop the game. As we mentioned above, performance is very important to us, and that is the reason we are switching to Unity5. The performance benefits from that, and our own work over the next months will help extend the time between wipes. RoK is a dynamic game with no constraints, this means players can build as much as they want, so eventually servers will hit some performance caps and have to be cleaned up. This is similar to other games that have dynamic building with no constraints.
We are also thinking of ways that players can also salvage up all the old buildings/bases on the server that no one uses anymore (old raided bases long forgotten with no crests). Possibly even allowing players to torch old buildings that have no crests. Things like this will go a long way in helping to extend time between wipes aside from our performance and optimization improvements.
While it would be nice to have no wipes in theory (although maps would become extremely crowded), its just not possible with today's computer hardware, an infinite amount of building and object placing will eventually build up and tax the hardware. You may also wonder why other games like MMO's don't require wipes, well simply put, RoK is just a different style of game, where players are building cities and placing structures everywhere as much as they please with no limits. If we didn't have the player made buildings, or placing structures, and all buildings on server were static and there forever, then we wouldn't need to wipe in an extremely long time. So it's best to think of wipes like other games think of a match (StarCraft 2, Natural Selection 2), in that they wipe their level/server after each 2-4 hr match, we wipe after an 150 - 200hr "match", and hope to extend that time of play beyond 150hr - 200hr into the future. We think its best to share this so people can go all out towards the end of the play on our official servers. We will keep everyone updated when we extend the period between wipes.
As for combat balancing, we understand that most were not happy with the movement slowdown in combat, so we've decided to take a step back from that and try and think of some better solutions for making combat more robust.
There is also balancing being done on the siege & repairing front. We plan to make it so you can no longer collect blocks/objects under 90% health and instead have to repair them before picking them up. Repairing will also take resources now. As well, when you are under siege, you cannot build blocks in your crest area for a period of about 5 minutes from when the last treb stone hit your territory. Treb stones will also be doing much less damage, and we are going to be increasing the health on the stone teir blocks. Ballistas are getting a damage reduction from 500 down to 50. Guild crests will be getting more health, and will have an upgrade system within instead of forcing players to take old one down & place new one to upgrade.These efforts will hopefully help make sieges last much longer, and become more strategic.
We are also working on a sawmill, which will refine lumber from wood which can then be used to make furniture. There are also some costumes coming, and a spinning wheel to produce costumes at. Aside from that, and Unity5 upgrade, the team will mainly be focusing on our bug list which has grown since the engine switch. So to summarize, our main focus in the near term is Unity5 upgrade, performance, hack prevention, & bug fixing.
- The Code}{atch Team