Howdy, fellow warriors!
A few weeks ago, we added lovely, yet static farm animals to the game world. Thanks to that, players are able to use them to gather specific resources. At the time, we also forecasted the upcoming system of buying farm animals, looking after them, and getting all the benefits of owning a farm animal for yourselves. Today is the day when we are introducing the first iteration of our new animal husbandry system.
We are also sharing a sneak peek from behind the scenes, where we are working on new skybox and weather systems for Gloria Victis. Check the video below and see how good the game looks on it!
As always, we are filling today's weekly update with other quality improvements and fixes to reported issues. Check the details below, and see you in battle!
The screenshot’s authors will be awarded. Esadur, Dojima Family, and Giroux – enjoy your Ambers!!
WIP insight – New skybox!
We are slowly finishing our work on the first iteration of the new skybox, day & night systems, which will significantly improve the visuals of the game. We are happy to show you a special sneak-peek of the work we have done, and you can expect these changes to land on global servers along with the reshaped game world, in about two weeks from now!
Changelog v.0.9.9.5.11 Beta
Animal Husbandry
The system introduces new NPCs located on farms assigned to Capital cities and claimable locations in game – Barn Managers. Players will be able to buy and safely store their animals in a Barn, similar to how the Stable works for horses.
Interacting with the Barn Manager opens a Barn window, where you can buy, inspect, and manage your animals. Each player starts with two empty slots for animals in their Barn, and the number of slots can be increased up to ten with special cards, purchasable for Contribution Points in Glory Shops and for Ambers in Supporter Shop.
There are five different animals you can have in the game now: Pigs, Sheep, Cows, Goats, and Chickens. By clicking a proper button in an empty barn slot, you can buy an animal for yourself to keep.
Each animal in your barn has three parameters:
Grooming – set to 50% as a base, its value informs us about the number of goods we will be able to gather from an animal. You can increase the grooming value by trading the animal energy during walking an animal (more about that below!). The grooming value diminishes by one percentage point for every hour without taking an animal for a walk after its energy reaches maximum.
Energy – this is a resource you can use to interact with the animal while walking it out. Energy replenishes over time (one point per five minutes) when an animal is staying in Barn.
Vitality – it is used to indicate the quantity and quality of materials obtained from the animal at its slaughter. Its value decreases with time (5% per day) and with the number of times in which we obtain raw materials from the animal (10% per collecting action). The low vitality value degrades the materials obtained at slaughter and ultimately leads to death.
Additionally, you can see the timer which tells you when you will be able to gather the raw materials from your animal: milk from cows and goats, eggs from chickens, and wool from sheep. Each animal, with an exception of pigs, can be “harvested” multiple times. Interacting with a pig after the time ends will slaughter it, and grant a lot of meat.
Walking out of an animal
You are able to place your animals around the Barn Manager in the open world, like horses, and they’ll wander around in a small area, giving you time to gather and tend to your lovely creatures. When in the Barn window, click the “Call” button next to the chosen animal, and it will spawn nearby. Animals need to have at least 5 energy to be walked out, and you can have only one animal outside of the Barn at a time.
Having the animal outside of the Barn automatically converts one energy point to one grooming point every minute, and also, once per minute, it is possible to perform an activity on the animal (interaction), which allows you to convert 5 points of energy into 5 points of grooming.
When the animal is out of the Barn, it is possible to slaughter the animal with a weapon swing (careful, one hit is enough!) or extract raw materials from it. When looking at the animal with your camera, you will be able to check the timer for the next harvest. We are aware that for now, your animal does not have an indicator above it (like horses) so you may have trouble finding your animal if there will be more than one walking out in the area. We will add it as soon as possible.
The personal farm animals will give much more resources than the current ones that can be met near every nation’s capital city, and by giving them proper care, you are able to improve your gain even further!
Quality of Life
Siege engines cooperation
Helping with moving the siege engine is a good example of cooperation, and players who do it are warmly treated by the community. To extend such possibilities, we are presenting an additional method of cooperation during the usage of siege engines - the possibility of loading the machine while it’s being moved with two operators. We also gave more meaning to moving siege engines with more players.
We now distinguish the main and supportive operators of the siege engines. We are showing the number of slots on the siege engine UI and also showing the slot that we occupy, and which ones are occupied by allies. Taking the first slot makes us the main operator, and taking slots from second to fourth, depending on the type of engine, makes us a supportive operator. The main operator has more power in controlling siege equipment, as he is now able to drive it, see the speed and damage of the machine, and load and launch an attack. Supportive operators can drive the machine and see its speed and damage.
Additionally, from now on, the main operator (and only him) is able to load the machine while it's being moved by another operator. When the main operator tries to lead and push the machine at the same time, pushing has priority over the loading. If there is only one person inside the machine, there won't be a possibility to move and load at the same time.
We have also tweaked the movement of the siege engines, and now, each additional operator is boosting the speed of the led machine. The best results you will notice by filling all available operator slots for each siege engine.
Additional events
We like how the players behave after completing Brandon's event, as they make their way through other events (Sorcerers Tower/Otton Lair/Cohorts) and their content is not cut suddenly. In the case of Ragi and Sirius, there is no such path, because there are simply no events nearby that would fit to it. That's why we want to replicate those positives on other lines. So we added an event “Devil’s Lair” on the link between Seaclaw and Ulfgard. It is the equivalent of the Otton event on the Midland link, and we plan to add a similar event for Sangmar soon.
Added the cohort known from the church near Greenport to two new locations on Sang-Ismir and Mid-Ismir links. Thanks to that, all nations have access to the “Cohorts” type of event, having unique enemies - Scouts from the South - which are challenging but yield good loot.
Other Improvements
– AI NPC mobs can now Cleave their attacks. We are adding such a thing to make NPC behavior more natural and player-alike, and also, to make PVE a more interesting challenge, instead of bashing the enemies in groups.
– Adjusted the map zoom system. Changed the default zoom, and scale of focus to make the system more pleasant to use.
Fixes
– Fixed an issue where outpost enemy detection colliders were too small, allowing players to stay on outpost walls without triggering burning the flag.
– Fixed an issue with the “kill or defend the spy” event at the Ismir-Midland link. Due to the issue, the event was not available as often as it should.
– Fixed an issue causing it to be possible to move siege engines while riding the horse.
– Fixed the issue where one of the melee Giant attacks was only stunning, while it should also deal damage.
– Fixed the issue causing animations of our character to be unnatural while pushing siege engines.
– Fixed an issue where a player on a horse's back was spawned in our area but behind an obstacle or us could have a weird pose until he moved.
Increasing the roaming aspect of the game
As you know, when introducing guild technology that has an impact on the range of teleport to tents, we were trying to lower the possibility of jumping around on the map with teleports, as those are having a negative impact on the map balance and negated the meaningfulness of roaming around the world. We have asked you about possible improvements on that matter in an ingame questionnaire, and 58% of players voted "Rather Agree" or "Definitely Agree," to the question if we should implement cooldowns for unstuck and “move to tent” mechanics, as well as shorten the moving distance for the tents and the respawn on them.
It is worth mentioning that the votes were very polarized for the smaller, less populated servers, where using tents had the biggest impact on the gameplay and thus we took some additional time to identify the main issues people pointed out to us. In order to clear out some of the problems, we listed received doubts and provided some more explanation and insight into why they might have risen. You can find the whole article on our official Discord.
We all would agree that tents are a useful part of the game and the option to move to them is a much-needed feature, and we don’t want to completely prevent players from moving to tents and respawning at their locations. Some tweaks still need to be done and we are hoping for your understanding and trust on this. Here are the further changes regarding the matter:
– We fixed an error where unstuck and respawn from events like Frontier Pass, Catacombs, Sea Wraiths, and Volcano were moving players to the closest spawn point. From now on, performing those actions will always move to the Capital.
– Respawn to the tent is possible only when it is the nearest respawn point - regardless of its range. To get to your tent that is further away than the closest spawn, you need to respawn first and then teleport to the tent.
– Teleport to the tent is still possible with respect to the teleport range (which can be increased by guild technology) but now has a cooldown of 45 minutes. Unstuck to the closest location is applying the cooldown too. Cooldown is shared for unstuck and to-tent teleportation. Respawn on the tent, unstuck to Capital, and unstuck from Arena do not trigger this cooldown.
The main purpose of the changes we are introducing today is to prevent bypassing the level design barriers that should limit the accessibility of one of the nations to a given area, to make skirmishes and sieges more balanced.
The tents made it easy to jump from the center of the map to the links, overcoming the barriers of mountains and water in a minute there and back. Usually in Europe, such actions did not happen on a large scale, so these features were rather perceived as an excuse to search for PvP, but on other servers or outside primetime, groups using this tactic could be literally everywhere in no time. If it was the strongest or the biggest group on the server, they were winning every fight and it was not possible to defeat them, break them, conduct diversions or simply find another opponent.
Such a case works against the design intentions and had a bad impact on PVP. This change is aimed at choosing a front on which we want to fight. It will still be possible to change the front quickly, but we are not allowed to be in several places at the same time. The stronger nation, wanting to hunt other nations, will be encouraged to divide, which will give a chance to counterattack to the weaker nations.
We have thought off and listed a short FAQ about those changes, and if anything seems unreasonable for you, we believe that those bullet points will clear it out:
Why are we implementing the cooldown for to-tent teleportation and unstuck?
To limit jumping between links, and sides of the map, bypassing level design barriers and cutting other nations from content.
Why are we taking the possibility to choose a respawn point if the tent is in range, but not the closest spawn?
Because then respawn in the tent would also have to hammer CD 45 min, which would make it a one-time mechanic, and that's not desired.
Why does a tent become a respawn point like a flag?
Because in most cases it is used as it, and it is a desirable case, useful for SoWs, or fighting on the fronts. This will allow us not to implement the CD on respawn which will give us the ability to use it multiple times.
Why does unstuck to the nearest point get a cooldown?
Because it was also used to bypass level design barriers and move from place to place very fast. Leaving unstuck without cooldown will be just half of the solution to something that badly impacts the balance of the game.
Why does unstuck to the Capital not have a cooldown?
Because this is a form of retreat, there is no point in doing a cooldown there and punishing a player who got stuck somewhere. It would immediately force some kind of abuse in the style of jumping into the arena or would force in some cases logging out of the game.
Why unstuck to the nearest point from Arenas has no cooldown?
Because someone who is focused on different parts of the game not having an impact on the game balance could accidentally apply a cooldown.
As we noted and carefully processed your feedback we already were able to find the most common doubts in your comments, and we are happy to explain them once again to prevent any misunderstandings:
The cooldown for /u and “move to tent” should not be implemented — Why this issue has arisen has two main sources. One of them was players who thought that moving to capital will result in the same cooldown as unstucking to a location — which is not how this would work in the proposed system. Moving to capital would still be free of any cooldown.
The second source would be the players who just don’t like the idea of having a cooldown on unstuck command or moving to the tent. There is no direct answer for that second source, as the proposed tent cooldown mechanic needs at least a 30-minute cooldown in order to work properly because shorter times would still enable a well-organized group to jump back and forth between two events. However, it is important to remember that the cooldown will be counted from the moment the teleportation/unstuck occurred, thus it would be totally possible to roam around the map, and when the situation requires it, move to a tent at, for example, Pilgrim’s Rock, defend the location, replace a tent and go back to roaming to soon have the cooldown run out.
Implementing these changes will result in us “killing the PvP” — While it is true that some players are currently using tents as their main means of getting PvP, the overall PvP experience on the map is much more complex. The main thing that makes people want to join PvP is the feeling of power and the chance to win. If a group is constantly being wiped by the very same group of players that (in most cases) use tents to quickly move around the map to kill all the enemies, those players will become disheartened and lose their will to go out into the open to have some PvP. Giving this smaller, less skilled group a chance to start a siege against a smaller number of defenders will enable them to feel empowered and stay for longer, which would still enable everyone to get to the location. Either by mount (the time to travel to some key locations was tested some time ago by one of our Community members Shimmering:
Tents shouldn’t be nerfed directly, but rather by changing their price or materials — While we understand that for some players, increasing the price of a tent would lower their demand, thus lowering the overall tent usage on the map, but it doesn’t quite fix the problem. Such a change would only nerf tents for the ‘middle class of players, as they will be the ones experiencing the harshest effects of a price rise. For veterans and rich players, even doubling or tripling the cost of a tent would not pose a big economical threat, especially as the possible gain could be much greater. On the other hand, raising the price of a tent would absolutely restrict new players from using them, which is not a much-welcomed effect. This is one of the reasons why the changes need to be done to the tent mechanics themselves.
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