Greetings, Nomads!

We just wanted to take some time to give everyone a quick development update on Chapter 3.

GameFabric

We have been working on migrating over to Nitrado's new Game Fabric server management system. This system is a more modern system that offers us some additional flexibility in how we manage the servers. Many of you have asked whether it will result in better performance - the answer is that it might in some cases but we won't know for sure until we complete the transition. Most importantly, though, this transition is still in progress and requires quite a bit of testing still. So expect a few more weeks before a PTR with the goal to release Chapter 3 sometime in July.

Chapter 3 Changes

For Chapter 3 we decided to tackle two of the biggest and most consistent complaints. The first is the quality system. The system has a myriad of issues, so for Chapter 3 we will be removing quality until we can better stabilize the base game and then consider ways to add it back in later. To replace walker upgrading, we've repurposed the Ancient Crafting Site, which will spawn on event tiles. At the ACS you can craft a new resource - Walker Mount - which will be used in the place of quality for walker upgrades. We also took a minor pass over the areas where quality was providing significant QOL, such as chest storage, The second issue is related and that is linear progression.

When designing Season 6, we tried to tackle a few issues that we saw from previous iterations of Last Oasis, namely the tile system creating far too many tiles once you consider each map and clan cap, resulting in progressively decreasing density as the season went on. Our goal was that the normal common resource progression could be accomplished relatively easily by casual players and then quality progression would provide additional content for those who play more frequently, making it so that on average people thought the progression was moving along at an okay pace. Unfortunately that was not the case and most people found it either too fast, or too slow, and frustrated people on both ends.

We're going to try a bit of an experiment. It is not likely that it will stay like this forever, but it will help to inform future design decisions. Canyon and Cradle will exist like in previous Chapters, burning approximately every 2 weeks to make sure the servers stay clean. However, Sleeping Giants, Volcano, and Kali Spires will spawn as "long term" event maps that last a few days. This will help us to better manage population density, while hopefully alleviating the feeling of being "stuck" constantly.

There are many other changes coming with Chapter 3 so stay tuned for the full changelog that we'll release with the PTR!

- Donkey Crew