While
most of the crew is packing off to E3, I'll be minding the store
and watching Aether run around finishing preparations for The Hunt for
Morpheus. After
seeing everything going into the game to support this event, I can
say it should be a blast. Anyway, here are the hot topics around
the house this week.
Character Migration
I'm beginning this week
with a reminder that, if you're interested
in moving a character to another server, you've got until this Sunday,
May 22 to submit a petition for a free move. We don't have any current
plans to do this on a regular basis yet, so make sure you take advantage
of this one-time opportunity if you want your character on a different
world.
Full details on the character
migration are available here.
Focus Questions
As I mentioned in Friday's
dev chat on IGN, we're going to take a different track on Focus Groups
than we did in beta. Instead of gathering a small group of players
to discuss specific aspects of the game, we'll be posing questions
to Broadcast
Depth on a weekly basis to gather feedback on.
Like the discussions on Spy issues and Hacker
balancing, information from these threads
will be gathered and passed on to the team.
This information along with what comes from
the Feedback petitions and general forums
reading will help the dev team in their continuing
work on the game.
While we may pull smaller groups aside at
times to get more directed feedback, we want
to make sure the entire community has the
chance to speak up about issues the dev team
is looking into.
The first question we're asking is: What
would get you to play on the QA Test server
on a regular basis? Is the draw of seeing
future updates to the game enough? Would you
be more likely to playtest if you weren't
starting over with a brand new character?
For those of you who have been so helpful
finding bugs, reporting exploits, and suggesting
changes; we want to know what would get you
to playtest on the QA Test server regularly.
You can reply to this week's topic here.
The Next Patch
The next patch is being tested right now for deployment later this week. While
there are many changes specifically for this weekend's live event and the
advancing storyline, many other items concerning the community have been
addressed as well. Here's a list of some of the top items in the upcoming
patch:
- Deadly Aim, Clear Mind, and Siphon Data Node will cost the correct (reduced)
amount to level up.
- Taunt now has a chance to draw aggro from any NPC within 4m of the player,
regardless of whether the player is using Taunt in free attack or Interlock.
When Taunt is used, it will perform a check Combat Tactics check for success.
- Bug allowing players to create an unbreakable Evade Combat shield has
been fixed.
- Bug causing ranged weapons to have excessive Damage Over Time (DoT)
enhancements has been fixed.
- The Metro World Atlas will be available in game. (Hotkey: ";")
- Live Events team members will have the ability to restrict entry to
areas by Organization.
These are just some of the top items. Make sure to check out the patch
notes when the update goes live for more details.
Movement Changes
In the continued quest to fix game balance,
the designers are making some significant
changes to movement speed. As many of you have noted, the top end of
the possible movement speed bonus is ridiculously high. Not only is
it out of proportion with other MMOs, but you can literally move so
fast the game engine can't keep up with your character.
The first major change will be a reduction
in the overall movement speed cap to 160%
of normal running speed. This both puts it in line with other MMOs
and gives the designers some wiggle-room to increase it at a later
date if they find reason to.
Many items with movement enhancements will have to be replaced with items
that have more reasonable or different buffs. Movement enhancements will
also be restricted to footwear only, so non-footwear clothing items with
movement buffs will be replaced as well. Code structures (recipes) you have
for items that are being changed will point to the items created to replace
them.
Movement Abilities have also been adjusted to take into account the new
movement cap. In most cases, this means a reduced speed enhancement, but
an increased duration. In the case of Movement Accelerator 2 and 3, there's
also an increase to movement speed while using a stealth Ability.
| Ability |
Bonus |
Duration |
| Hyper Sprint |
+15 |
25 IS every 5 seconds |
| Hyper Speed |
+0.6 per level |
600 seconds |
| Desperate Speed |
+60 |
15 seconds |
| Movement Accelerator 1 |
+15 |
600 seconds |
| Movement Accelerator 2 |
+25 (+5 while stealthed) |
720 seconds |
| Movement Accelerator 3 |
+45 (+10 while stealthed) |
960 seconds |
Hacker Statistic-Modification Caps
Due to some modifications to how the game handles statistic-modification
caps (how much a single item/Ability can increase an overall statistic),
some Hacker Abilities have been adjusted. Most of these changes are
actually only on the backend and have no gameplay effect. However,
one visible adjustment has been made:
- Advanced Damage Resistance, Effective
Code, Repel Combat, Clear Mind, Total Dedication, Infection Immunity,
Attack Programming, and Supreme Damage Resistance: Bonuses will
be based on the Ability level, not the character level
Note: This information has been corrected
from yesterday's post. For those of you who read about changes
to Hacker Abilities yesterday: The caps are actually the same as
they always have been. The only adjustment has been to Abilities
whose effects were based on character level, which are now based
on the Ability level. I apologize for any confusion. - Walrus
Other Balancing Changes
-
Karate Focus, Aikido Redirection, and Kung Fu Perfection
now only increase damage when using the associated style (not
all Melee Damage)
-
Martial Arts Initiate now gives a bonus to Melee Combat Tactics,
not general Combat Tactics
-
Maximum per-level bonus for Invisibility and Disguise has
been increased from 0.5 to 3.0
-
Bug allowing a Sneak, Invisibility, or Disguise effect to
remain after taking damage has been fixed
-
Spinning Backsweep now does 200 points of damage
We continue
balancing the trees so we can
eventually add some cool features
we're looking into. Without
a better overall balance, some
of what we'd like to do would
simply break the game. So everyone
is going to feel a bit of the pain
and, hopefully, get a little
love back in return.
Future Developments
I'm working with the design team to get more information about
features being investigated for future implementation. They've
been spending a good deal of time working out improvements
to current systems, so there's nothing I can talk about yet.
However, given the ideas I've heard being tossed about, I'll
be working to extract some details from them for an upcoming
article.
No wonder they're all are sneaking off to E3 this week.
Who's going to screw in the light bulbs around here now?
See you next week on The Other Side of the Looking Glass.
Want to chat about this article? Head over to Broadcast
Depth. |
