Season 5 has launched!
Servers will go live in the next hour and the patch is available for download. While normally you would get patch notes, as we’ve said numerous times, S5 is a complete overhaul of the game. Nearly everything has changed. If you’re a returning player, consider that nothing you knew before is the same and keep an open mind! We’ve seen that people tend to catch on with the new mechanics much easier this way.
However, there are a few important housekeeping issues we want to touch on.
World Map and Soft Cap
A few months ago we talked about having a static map and some of the benefits that would give us for Season 5. The way the world map is designed will have a massive impact on the way Season 5 is played.
Rather than a top to bottom world map, the world map for Season 5 will be an inward facing doughnut. This means that all regions will be equidistant from one another, as you travel around the ring. PvE maps will be on the outside, with the higher tier and rarity maps populating inwards.
Most importantly, though, is our implementation of the soft cap. Soft caps will correlate with the rarity of the map. So Common maps (which are all PvE), will be set at a soft cap of 6, and ascending from there. (6/6/15/25/50 = Common/Uncommon/Rare/Epic/Legendary). As you can see, there are no longer any uncapped maps. This, along with blocking travel to full tiles in our new travel system, will hopefully alleviate tile cap issues.
PvP Base Raiding
If you’ve read any of our recent devblogs, you’ve seen the new collection of remote weapons we’ve created. While we think internal testing has wrung out most of the major issues, getting the balance right with respect to raiding player structures isn’t something we want to gamble on. For that reason, at the start of the season, we’ll be disabling PvP damage to bases.
We understand the pros and cons with this decision, but we simply don’t have the data we need to get the balance right. Enabling base raiding will be one of the major focuses of the week.
In-Game Behavior
As a result of the above change, our policy we laid out here will also apply to PvP maps until we enable player damage. This is specifically in reference to taking advantage of player damage being disabled on structures to degrade the gameplay experience of others. Spamming the server with building pieces, trying to prevent your opponents from being able to move around the map, etc. Ultimately, we don’t foresee this being an issue because of schematics, but if you have a question about what constitutes griefing, we can only say, “We know it when we see it.”
Performance
We’ve made some changes which should ideally improve performance. To monitor those changes we will be running a build with profiling tools, which ironically could make performance worse. But it will help us identify any major issues quickly. Once everything is stable, we'll disable these profiling tools and the servers will receive a nice boost of extra performance.
Private Servers
Hosting private servers from the technical side should be unchanged, with the exception of the ability to host an LO Classic branch, which is essentially the game as you can play it today in S4.
If you host an S5 server, you may find that you don’t have access to many of the configuration settings that apply to the new mechanics introduced in S5, and you will be limited in spawning or freebuilding to things available in the official servers. Just as we’re iterating to improve the public server throughout the season, we’ll be working with you to improve the tools available to those of you who host private servers.
Communication
For any in-game reports (cheating, bug reporting, PvE or PvP griefing) please continue to use feedback.lastoasis.gg
For feedback about gameplay, balance, etc, the best way to have your voice heard is on Discord in our S5 Suggestions channel.