08/19/2008    |    Devlog    |    fraxl    |    Discuss

Last weekend’s Testbed event was a ton of fun and we got lots of great feedback about the new 1.7 features. Thank you to everyone who played and gave us constructive criticism! With all the discussion these changes have sparked, we knew we’d have to tweak the new systems to incorporate your feedback. I have the pleasure of writing this devlog to let you know exactly what we’re doing.

There were two main areas of concern for players on Testbed – new rules for PvP battles on the Open Sea and the new camera behavior. I’ll talk about PvP rules first. We’ve made four adjustments to the system based on your input.

PvP Open Sea Battle Revisions

First, you were concerned that battles would go on forever and become annoyingly imbalanced because they never close. To address this, we’ve decided to make battles close after 10 minutes. After that point, no more reinforcements can join. Its enough time to call nearby allies for help, but not so long that youll have ships coming from Bridgetown to a fight outside Tampico.

Another good point players made was that they wanted to be able to have 1v1 battles without having a bunch of reinforcements join in. We definitely want to support that kind of gameplay, so now battles with one ship on each side will be locked at the end of the battle start timer. No reinforcements will be able to enter after that time.

We decided not to lock other battles with even sides (2v2, 3v3, etc.) in an effort to keep the system as simple as possible and to close off opportunities for exploitation. Additionally, when battles are involving small groups, even in equal numbers, those are the scenarios we want to see expand – especially with multi-sided battles coming soon.

Finally, we changed the way outnumbered battles work. Triggering the outnumbered battle state will be harder and the effect will be less severe. Previously, if your side was outnumbered by two ships, your side could be reinforced up to a total of 10 participants – this number has been reduced to nine. Additionally, you now have to be outnumbered by three, rather than two, to trigger the extra reinforcements.

There is one other change that won’t make it to Testbed right away, but will be in when we this patch goes to the live servers. We’re adding supporting documentation about the new system to clear up some of the confusion about it. Any Port Captain will have text explaining how open sea PvP battles work. Eventually you’ll be able to get this information in the F1 help as well.

After these changes, we think the new rules will work out pretty well. They bring diversity and excitement to PvP that wasn’t there before. They’re also the first step towards implementing 4-sided battles and other improvements coming down the pipeline. We hope youll log on to Testbed this week and give us your thoughts on these revisions!

Camera Revisions

The other feature we knew we’d have to test before taking it live was the new camera. Our intention was to replace the old camera with a much more cinematic one. We wanted the camera to showcase the beauty of the game better, both at sea and on land, and we succeeded at that. Of course, no feature is really complete until we’ve received feedback from real players. What we learned after 1.7 went to testbed was that the camera had a few rough edges remaining.

If you’re the type of player who runs around town using your mouse, you probably had a tough time with the camera changes. We had reports that some people were getting headaches and others just having a hard time controlling their view as avatars. To fix this, we tightened up the camera movement to make it more directly responsive to the mouse.

We also fixed a few bugs people discovered:
-  Once you targeted a ship, you couldn’t move the camera away from that ship.
-  The 0 key didn’t reset your camera position like it was supposed to.
-  You had to re-position your camera after every loading screen.

All of these improvements will be on Testbed for you to play with later this week. To give you some extra incentive to log on and tell us what you think, we’re having another event on Thursday at 3:00pm PST. You can read more about it (and how Snap, Taelorn, Rhaegar and I are going to get thoroughly sunk) over here.

08/19/2008    |    Devlog    |    fraxl    |    Discuss