Greetings all,
It’s been a couple weeks since the Demo and I’ve been addressing some major feedback points. This is a longer post, hence the Blog update 🙂
Here are some of the biggest changes:
- Points gained at the end of the game are now based on Contribution, and multiplied at the end of game based on the number of Enemy Waves and Bones completed. Just for clarity: Contribution is measured in the amount of damage dealt for a particular group of skills. So for example you may contribute 5,000 to Growth and 5,000 to Defense. At the end of the game, your points would be calculated as: (5,000 + 5,000) x Bone Multiplier x Wave Multiplier. Additionally, the type of Victory makes Contribution in the same category (E.g. defensive victory and defense contribution) worth double.
- Good, Great, Epic, and Legendary Chests now only drop 1 item. They are now more likely to drop an item of the corresponding Tier (II – V) and cannot drop an item of a Tier lower (Good Chest doesn’t drop T1 items).
- Items of higher Tiers now have dramatically reduced max charge. Charge per Tier is now: (60, 50, 40, 30, 20) for Tier I thru V respectively. T5 items have been fixed to have the correct stats 🙂
- There is now an indicator on screen at all times to show the current difficulty, and progress towards each win condition. There is now info in the Waiting Lobby about the Current/Next Dog.
- Projectile feedback has been made more consistent – e.g. petting now shoots at the Pet stacks, which then shoots tracers at the things Petting affects (Friendship, Golden Dog). I hope projectiles continue to be a helpful, visual aid, and not annoying.
- A new Damage Leaderboard UI has been added that shows the top players in each Contribution category as well as their current action. So even when the game gets hectic, you can still see who is contributing the most.
Also, this week we lost a number of recent Blog Posts after a ransomware attack on our hosting provider. More would have been lost had I not done any local backing up of the site, so that is fortunate. Since then I have chosen a new hosting provider to restore the site. No game data was affected. Maybe back up something valuable to you today 🙂
What isn’t going to be in this update?
Just as important as what is going in. As always, feel free to drop a line in the #feedback or #suggestions channel on Discord with your thoughts.
- There’s no reward for kicking in this update – except Skill Experience. Many of you saw this in the demo, but I just wanted to be extra clear. This update will focus on the PvE experience.
- There’s no gameplay effect for Prestige or Hero Level in this update – but it still awards cosmetic capes. Prestige used to grant extra Friendship on pet. The CAPE command, however, is being enhanced.
Login Changes: The update will support a maximum of 50 players
For performance reasons the game will not allow more than 50 players to login (Also, it just becomes a visual mess on screen).
There are additional changes to how login works, too. Though I have been testing often, it was a major, risky change to enforce a 50 player maximum. I don’t anticipate hitting 50 concurrent players anytime soon 🙂 but better to be prepared!
Here are some “Fun Login Facts”
- You no longer automatically login just by visiting the channel. You must enter something in chat to be logged in. Lurkers- rejoice!
- The login system is first-come-first-serve. A message will be emitted in chat periodically when the maximum player limit is reached. You will be able to check your login status with the LOGIN command.
- If you are idle for more than 10 minutes, you will be automatically logged out. This happens even when the game is not at capacity.
- If you are idle for 2 minutes, you are considered AFK (This can be seen as a Zzz icon in the damage leaderboard). Players who are AFK are logged out when the game is at capacity to make room for active players.
New Update Date Update: SoonTM edition
There is still a lot of work left to do. For example updating all the rules of the game everywhere because the game is very different now [heavy breathing]. It is at least another two weeks out. I hope we can all be playing together over Thanksgiving.
Thank you all for waiting~ I hope you find it to be worth the wait.
Raider