02/04/2008    |    Devlog    |    Rev    |    Discuss

Version 1.1 has been published to our Testbed server and will be coming to the live servers very soon. In this devlog I’m going to explain the improvements and changes made to Conquest in this build.

Bundle Unrest Supplies

Since the game launched, you have been able to create six different kinds of Bundle Unrest Supplies: Food, Luxuries, Metal, Textiles, Weapons, and Wood. But you couldn’t do anything with them!

In v1.1, this system is now fully implemented. Every Rebel Agent and Garrision Commander will now offer delivery missions where you can hand in one unit of any of the six bundle items. In return, you generate (Rebel Agent) or remove (Garrison Commander) 100 Unrest points at that port. (Because we have recently accelerated the rate of unrest gain, this will actually be 150 points.)

You also receive one Mark of Victory, the PvP reward which can be redeemed for special items.

You can do these missions as long as the port has not entered any of the PvP states. So you can use it to get a port from 0 Unrest to 5,000 Unrest, but once the Pirate PvP phase begins these missions (and other PvE Conquest missions) are no longer available.

Since all six types of bundles give the same reward, you can choose to produce whichever bundles best match your production lines.

Marks of Victory

These already exist in the game but need some explanation, as they are changing slightly in v1.1.

Marks of Victory are awarded whenever you defeat a player in PvP, as long as that player’s ship is at least 10th level. How many Marks of Victory should you get? That depends on the level of the ship you defeated:

10-19 1 Mark of Victory
20-29 2 Marks of Victory
30-39 3 Marks of Victory
40-49 4 Marks of Victory
50 5 Marks of Victory

Near the end of the Open Beta, we added Marks of Victory as rewards for completing the PvE Conquest missions offered by the Rebel Agent and the Garrison Commander. Prior to this, Marks of Victory were exclusively PvP rewards.

After the game launched, we soon found that this change had made Marks of Victory far too easy to obtain. They are meant to be a very big reward for contributing to Conquest, but when you can farm them endlessly it causes a lot of problems in game balance because of what you can swap them for. We did not intend farming Marks of Victory via Conquest missions to be core gameplay for players and this was our mistake.

For v1.1, we removed the Marks of Victory from all Conquest missions except for the new Unrest Bundle ones. Those missions each reward one Mark of Victory. Due to the problems caused by excessive farming of Marks of Victory, we accelerated the release of this change prior to the launch of v1.1 and it’s been live on the servers for several days. With the release of v1.1, we are making three more changes that we believe will make Marks of Victory work in a reasonable way.

First, we are making Marks of Victory tradeable. That means you can trade them between characters and buy and sell them in the auction houses. This is a very big change. It means that skilled PvP players can now make a steady source of income by defeating other players, earning Marks of Victory, and then selling them to players who don’t play a lot of PvP. From an economic perspective, it means players with lots of money (generally economy players who don’t lose ships often) will transfer wealth to players without a lot of money (generally PvP players who have high risk and high costs). The market will determine what Marks are worth.

In version 1.2, we will also be broadening the rewards you can get for turning in Marks of Victory. This will include faction improvement rewards and other things that are useful to a wider variety of players. So economic players will buy Marks of Victory to improve their faction, for example, and PvP players can earn cash this way to finance their PvP gameplay.

Second, Marks of Victory do not drop in PvP when you sink the player, only when you board them. This is a bug. You are supposed to get a Mark every single time you defeat a player and they lose a point of durability (although if you’re in a group, you’ll dice for who gets the Mark). We are fixing this bug in v1.1 so that Marks work the way we intended.

Third, in v1.1 we are removing the ability to convert Marks of Victory into Royal Commendations. The list of Royal Commendation rewards includes a 4th Rate SOL, the Mordaunt. That’s a really great reward but once you’re able to just buy Marks at will, it’s too unbalanced. Instead we are removing the Marks-to-Royals conversion. The conversions to lesser Commendations will remain.

Conclusion

That wraps up this installment! We’re very pleased to finally get the Bundle Unrest missions in the game, and we will be interested to see what the market does with Marks of Victory. As always, your feedback on the forums is very welcome.

Stay tuned for our next devlog on the cool stuff in v1.1. And dont forget to go try the new changes out for yourself on the Testbed server!

02/04/2008    |    Devlog    |    Rev    |    Discuss