Attention War Mages:
Thank you all for your feedback and participation in the OMDU open beta! Over the first day, we’ve collected a lot of great data and feedback (thanks). Based on what we’ve been seeing, some changes were rolled out this afternoon at roughly 5 p.m. CST on the North American Service.
Survival Matchmaking
We allow a large span of account levels to match together and the random level selection has freedom to pick maps from above or below the average level of the party. This is causing a number of games where higher level players get matched with lower level players and then end up defending against hordes of orcs far below their level. A lot of players have commented about not feeling challenged when this happens.
- We have lowered the allowed range, which will mean more players of similar levels get matched together.
- We have allowed survival games to match with fewer than five players instead of putting players with very different levels together just to make a five player group. (The difficulty adjusts, so if you get in a three player group, you’re fighting attackers meant for a three player group.)
- We have changed the maps that can be selected to exclude maps below the average party account level. You’ll always get something at or slightly higher than the party’s average account level.
Siege Matchmaking
As far as we can tell, everyone on the planet hates getting games with bots (not the good kind, I mean). We did this, and also had two matchmaking buckets, to try to give new players a better introductory experience. But, what we’re seeing and hearing makes us think we’re doing more harm than good.
We have killed the buckets and the bots along with them and test how this plays out. So (for the time being) -- everyone looking for a siege game will search together and you will never get bots.
Rift Embers
Everyone wants to earn the heroes they don’t have. This requires rift embers. You can get rift embers in a lot of different ways, but only a few of these are guaranteed. That makes working toward a hero frustrating. We have a number of improvements in the works to allow earning materials and such to be more guided but we wanted to get a change in for this quickly.
For now we've dropped all other rewards for the quests aside from skulls and rift embers. There were a lot of other rewards there before – all of them except for skulls and embers will go away. This means that, for heroes, players will always have a guaranteed way to make progress.
This is not ideal or the full solution, but this change can be made right now and will make things better (we hope). Note – if you already have quests, they’ll remain with the old rewards. If you decline these quests(the “x” in the upper right), you’ll get new ones with the skull or ember rewards. (You can only decline one quest per day.)
Thanks again for all of the games, data, feedback, chats,emails, and so on – we’re cranking on a lot of things that will make you happy.
OMDU is currently in Open Beta. We’re listening to you. Please check out our forums and let us know how we can make the game better for you.