Thanks to a Christmas miracle, I managed to finally fix all the issues plaguing adding in any items, just in time to add snowballs and Santa hats to cRPG for the holidays. So, thankfully now all the nasty business caused in 0.5.1.2 and 0.5.1.3 has been put to rest. I've also heard that Santa came by and gave all the good players out there a holiday present, a generous one at that. made more generous by my incompetence Although I haven't yet released them, we have another batch of items ready to add into the mod. Given their unique nature (South American items), the super-elite dev/admin team will discuss whether they are appropriate to add into the mod. Worry not, even if they are deemed not worthy, there are still some items from Vikingr that I plan to add as well. By the end of the year, we'll have a few more items to play around with.
The big topic lately has been ranged, especially xbows, how it is overpowered, etc, etc, etc. It turns out that the rather large damage done was the result of incorrect game values for WSE2. So, you should all notice Armor Soak(ing up melee player's tears), which has been increased. This will correspond to greater survivability of players from all forms of damage. However, please note that the current values are not here to stay. They are the values that it should have been at, and will need to be tested/reviewed to further improve balance. Also, it turns out that other variables as well, such as fall damage, and horse charge damage were incorrect, so those were changed as well.
Alright, that's enough news for now. Here's the patchnotes:
0.5.1.8 (still)
What was planned:
-Fix issues with adding items (done)
-Happy hour
-Small siege tower
-Ladder bugs
-Balancing stuff (progress made)
Plans for future
People are indeed working on the bugs with small siege tower and ladders. Now that items can again be added, and the issues behind balancing have been found, I can focus back onto this, and hopefully us code monkeys can get a solution by next week
Similarly, I'll also look into fixing happy hour, and I'll also be looking into changing the current multiplier system. As of now, it is horrendous for new players to get any XP on battle. Given that it will take me time to (elegantly) mash the multiplier system together with the old XP barn system (another thing I intend to bring back), for now I will just improve the multiplier system.
Of course, balance is still going to need a lot of work. It's hard to know how it is right now, but in time, with testing and feedback, we can figure out what needs to happen next to provide better balance.
As a side note, for those who may be confused, balance does not mean nerfing a class into the ground, or buffing a class to unfair levels.
A strat reset is planned sometime in the future. Although I have heard of growing calls for one to happen immediately, I'd like to hold off for a bit longer. Considering that an average cRPG player is drowning in gold, it might be prudent to couple this strat reset with some form of a wipe to gold. The subject of a wipe has been a testy topic, but as far as I can tell, wiping (not all, but some amount) of gold is a better place to start. I'm still not sure whether I want to do this, so it'll take some time to mull it over. But, the strat reset will be no later than say, February. that means no later than 11:59 PST on February 28th. It'll probably be earlier
Also, to combat the current state of gold, I'll be reducing gold gains. I attempted this on DTV, but oddly enough my code was rejected and ignored by the engine. Additionally, the Iron Bank of Calradia is aware of this problem, and as a countermeasure will begin the biweekly (or weekly) auction of a heirloom point soonTM.
Lastly, this past week, we had an explosion in player count, hitting 500+, even over 600 online players, throughout each day. I'm frankly shocked (in a good way), and am so happy to see the mod doing well once again. It's been a bit of a bumpy road for the past while, but things are looking up now. Thanks for bearing with my incompetence and sticking it out. I'm learning, I swear.
