04/10/2008    |    Devlog    |    fraxl    |    Discuss

Exchange Shops and Selling Personal Loot

You’ve probably read the devlogs by Kevin and Anna about the new exchange shops. They pretty much covered why adding these shops was so important, so I’ll cut to the pictures.

You can see which NPCs exchange items by the floating loot chest above their heads. For example, this lovely lady in the British Admiralty Office in Port Royal will exchange Marks of Victory (MoV) for all sorts of rewards…

Clicking on her will give you the Mark of Victory Exchange, where you can get details about all of those rewards. It looks like this:

In this screen, I have one MoV and I’m about to trade it in for Increased Standing with the Spanish Trade Union. I can also see that if I collect 20 MoVs, I’ll be able to get more cool stuff. I can select where items will be delivered – inventory, ship or warehouse. Some exchange shops also come with filters to make navigating all the options easier.

In addition to making the brand-new exchange shops, we also added the ability to sell personal loot items in all Swashbuckling Supply shops. Now, if you have personal loot you don’t want to sell on the auction house, you can sell it to the Swashbuckling Trainer for a few doubloons rather than just destroying it.

Mission Journal

The other big task the UI team had for this milestone was to improve the mission journal. From your feedback, we knew that the list of missions wasn’t giving players enough information to decide which missions to do and when. There were also a few sorting and color bugs that needed to be squished.

The first problem we wanted to address was how mission difficulty is shown. Lots of players have shared how frustrating it is to go on a mission meant for higher-level characters, only to fail the mission or worse, lose a ship. We also heard from quite a few people that the original color choices meant to show difficulty were hard to distinguish and pretty much useless for colorblind people. So, we improved the colors… but didn’t stop there!

We also had the content team take a look at mission difficulty and adjust when to file a mission as “easiest” or “hardest,” etc. The result is a much more accurate color-coding system. To make things even clearer, we also put the ideal level for the mission in its own sortable column. Hopefully this will give everyone a clearer picture of how hard a mission will be before they attempt it.

Another totally legitimate complaint people had about the old list was the teeny-tiny font used for mission names. The reason for this was because mission names needed enough room to accommodate localization, but couldn’t overflow on to another line. I think a smaller font is rarely the right answer to a problem like this, so we re-worked the list structure to allow for more than one line if a mission name requires it.

Fixing the mission names gave us room in the list to display other information about the missions, too. Players said they wanted to know about the mission type (solo-only, normal, group-recommended, RP, tutorial, or epic), what group members share the mission, and, of course, the distance to the mission start point. We added a column for each of those things so you can sort in lots of different ways. It looks a little something like this:

You might notice that the “Group Missions” tab is gone too. You’ll see group missions in your main list now, but you can filter them out anytime. How many group members have a mission is listed in a sortable column, with group members’ names in the tooltip and in the mission details below. The active group mission is also much more obvious (that white glow in the picture above) now. Additionally, there are special alert icons to tell you if you’re about to do a mission with your group that you won’t get credit for (the ! before the mission name).

You’ll notice a few other minor tweaks too, but that’s most of the new stuff for this patch. Next milestone, you can look forward to the implementation of SOE’s UChat system, a new character creation and selection screen, a brand-new economic unrest generation system and lots of other goodies. Until then, keep playing!

04/10/2008    |    Devlog    |    fraxl    |    Discuss