In regard to SBS needing to update their forums, they are aware and have been doing so gradually over the last couple of months. However, currently, they have a lot more important things to think about, like building the game.
In the meantime, we have several community ambassadors and community members that are always available and eager to answer newcomers questions.
In regard to SBS needing to update their forums, they are aware and have been doing so gradually over the last couple of months. I mean currently, they have a lot more important things to think about, like building the game.
In the meantime, we have several community ambassadors and community members that are always available and eager to answer newcomers questions.
SBS needs to do a lot of things, but If I had to chose between them focusing on making a game or updating the forums.. the forums can suck it.. just my feels.
Love how people piss on SBS about their progress and then fuss that need to do all kinds of for the most part frivolous BS things like forum updates and what have you, that take time and money.. and turn around and piss on them that they can't get it all done with their current funding.
Egotism is the anesthetic that dullens the pain of stupidity, this is why when I try to beat my head against the stupidity of other people, I only hurt myself.
In regard to SBS needing to update their forums, they are aware and have been doing so gradually over the last couple of months. I mean currently, they have a lot more important things to think about, like building the game.
In the meantime, we have several community ambassadors and community members that are always available and eager to answer newcomers questions.
SBS needs to do a lot of things, but If I had to chose between them focusing on making a game or updating the forums.. the forums can suck it.. just my feels.
Love how people piss on SBS about their progress and then fuss that need to do all kinds of for the most part frivolous BS things like forum updates and what have you, that take time and money.. and turn around and piss on them that they can't get it all done with their current funding.
They had 2 massive updates to their main website. It literally would take less than 5 minutes to update the FAQ.
You guys are funny sometimes. They can build this incredible game in record time with a tiny team, but simply updating 3 lines of text in 2 years is beyond them. I mean, these are the guys that were able to toss the half billion dollar backed SpatialOS and replace it with off the shelf stuff in a few weeks right?
You might think the inclusion of lootbox mechanics in their business model is "frivolous" but some might find it important. And such a simple thing as updating a few lines to explain it should not be such a huge burden as you infer.
All time classic MY NEW FAVORITE POST! (Keep laying those bricks)
"I should point out that no other company has shipped out a beta on a disc before this." - Official Mortal Online Lead Community Moderator
Proudly wearing the Harbinger badge since Dec 23, 2017.
Coined the phrase "Role-Playing a Development Team" January 2018
"Oddly Slap is the main reason I stay in these forums." - Mystichaze April 9th 2018
"Note: One important thing which is not effected by Tribe is lifespan lengths. In the early designs of the game we'd had a random lifespan between 10 and 14 months to account for differences in genetics. But we've since done away with that, and given everyone a standard 52 week lifespan, regardless of bloodline or tribe."
Once again I feel the need to correct Slapshot's misrepresentation of SBS. According to this post made on Jan 11, 2018. The decision to switch from SpatailOS wasn't one that was taken lightly or made within a few weeks time.
Of course, SpatialOS isn't a game engine, so while it provided a platform on which we could build our game, we were still responsible for writing all the systems of CoE. As we were developing those systems we discovered we could make headway faster, enable unique gameplay features, and leverage a large ecosystem of existing code by moving from C# to JavaScript/TypeScript as the primary language of our backend. Fortunately for us, as of SpatialOS 10.3 Improbable had an experimental JavaScript SDK, which meant we could continue to use SpatialOS along with our new chosen language and architecture. So in early spring we made the move from C# to JavaScript and, as a result, saw rapid improvements in the rate at which we could develop new features. This was also around the time we saw accelerated progress in the development of the VoxElyria client (formerly referred to as ElyriaMUD).
But, then we started encountering some issues. First, while SpatialOS provided load-balancing and fault tolerance for all our spatial workers, there were still many workers that were not spatial in nature. Workers such as our authentication and login server, our AI system, and our Procedural Story Engine. For these, we still needed our own load balancer, fault-tolerance, and cross-process communication. So, we began researching different technologies that, while not a single solution, would provide the scalability, reliability, storage, and communication benefits normally provided by SpatialOS.
Second, we started to have some concerns about the financial viability of SpatialOS for our needs. Whenever you use SpatialOS you're also signing up to have your game hosted by Improbable. That has the benefit of lowering operations costs, but has the drawback of passing all the hosting fees they pay to their cloud partner onto us. It also means we don't have the ability to choose a hosting partner - whether cloud, bare metal, or dedicated servers that meet our performance needs. And CoE has some very specific needs! In specific, our use of Offline Player Characters (OPCs), the extremely large size of our world, the vast number of entities in the world, and the way we divide our game server up into dozens of different worker types meant that SpatialOS was particularly expensive for our use-cases. Our philosophy has always been about keeping our hosting fees low so we could pass those savings onto you. With SpatialOS, our hosting fees would have been more expensive, which would have forced us to increase our prices - something we didn’t want to do.
Of course, we brought our concerns to Improbable, and over the last eight monthsthey’ve done a fantastic job working with us to try and bring the price down. Unfortunately, it remains an expensive solution for us. To make sure we were prepared, we began looking for alternative technology that could fill any gaps left behind if we were unable to use SpatialOS for any reason.
As we had already started leveraging Docker Swarm, a Container technology for load balancing and fault tolerance of our non-spatial services, we knew we could transition to a full Docker stack if necessary for our spatial services as well. When we realized we were going to need to communicate between our spatial services and non-spatial services, we integrated RabbitMQ into our back-end, a super fast routing and message protocol used to serve 10's of millions of requests by banks and other high-traffic websites across the internet each day. And because we needed persistent storage for all our non-spatial data, we integrated PostgreSQL into our backend. Fortunately, PostgreSQL supports SQL, NoSQL, and even spatial queries, enabling it to act as a backend and persistent storage for both our spatial and non-spatial data.
All of the above technologies were integrated into our backend to solve non-spatial related problems, but we made those choices because we knew we could lean on them if worst-came-to-worse. And then we encountered our third and final roadblock. In the most recent release of SpatialOS Improbable deprecated their JavaScript SDK and marked it as unsupported. This left us with our biggest challenge yet - we no longer had a good way to interact with the SpatialOS backend.
When this happened, the engineering guild and I spent several meetings exploring our options with respect to shimming an interop layer between SpatialOS and our JavaScript-based backend. But in the end, we realized that it would be too time-consuming and error-prone to try to continue to use SpatialOS when we already had an efficient routing and communication protocol, an architecture that allowed for scalability and fault tolerance, and a persistent storage solution that enabled us to track and update the state of the world. So, as of the end of 2017, Chronicles of Elyria is no longer using SpatialOS, and is entirely built on the Soulborn Engine. We really enjoyed working with the folks over at Improbable and we are still looking forward to how their platform impacts the online gaming industry as a whole. Their technology is still an extremely powerful solution for virtually all distributed simulations out there. But for our particular technology choices and game mechanics, it just wasn’t the ideal solution.
As you can see, our non-spatial services required a large part of 2017 to be spent getting our core stack set up and creating the necessary components to have our own, proprietary platform. And because we were concerned about how things would end up with SpatialOS, we continued to make progress on these areas within the Soulborn Engine throughout 2017. In fact, we went to PAX West this year and showed off our jousting demo. This was the first time we'd taken a multiplayer demo to PAX since our combat demo back in 2016, but unknown to many, the Joust Demo was running on a locally deployed version of the Soulborn Engine. This means that everyone who played the jousting demo at PAX West has already played on our new server stack.
And finally, in December 2017, we released Version 0.1.0 of Chronicles of Elyria to our “Friends and Family”. This was the first time offsite users were able to play Chronicles of Elyria. Again, the milestone was completed using an entirely Soulborn-based game engine. So, what does this all mean in a nutshell? It means that in 2017 we began by using SpatialOS, and ended with something that, while not a single solution, does everything SpatialOS did - ultimately providing us all the same functionality as SpatialOS, while allowing us to keep our operating costs low and providing us more control over our server performance. With the transition complete, we’re now ready to move forward with more core gameplay mechanics in 2018.
Those numbers are great and all, but it assumes your character lives a long, healthy life with no spirit loss. Unfortunately (or fortunately), we all know Elyria is a dangerous place. So let's talk briefly about spirit loss.
To begin with, the base spirit loss for a death is 2 real-life days of play, each time you are forced to Spirit Walk.
So that means that if you are someone who dies very rarely, maybe once per month, and would have otherwise lived an average lifespan of approximately 12 months, then at the 11 month mark you would have shaved off approximately 22 days of play time, ending your character's lifespan. Put differently, someone who dies on average once per month can expect to live an average of 11 months without needing to buy a new Spark of Life.
Now, let's assume you die a bit more frequently, maybe once per week. Each death would shave off the same 2 days of play time. As a result, every 7 days would actually count as 9 days of play time. If you divide the average of 354 by 9, you get approx. 39 weeks. So if you're someone who dies an average of once per week, you can expect to live approximately 8.75 months without needing to buy a new Spark of Life.
Continuing on with the same model, if you died an average of 2 or 3 times per week, you could expect to live for either 7.25 months, or 6 months (rounded to the nearest week) respectively.
Now let's assume you die very frequently. You're out adventuring every day doing extremely dangerous activities. Every day you die once. That means every day counts as three days of play time. The average of 354 divided by 3 is 118 days. That's 16 weeks, or approximately 3.75 months before you need to buy a new Spark of Life.
I know what you're thinking, "3.75 months! That sounds like a very short period of time!" It does sound like a short period of time. However, there's two things to remember. First, that number is if you die every day. If you even skip a day in between deaths, that increases all the way to 5.5 months. So if you don't play 7 days a week, but maybe just 4 or 5, if you die each time you play, or even twice each time you play, you're still looking at roughly 6 months of play.
The other thing to consider is the cost of a Spark of Life. If you only live 3.75 months, then for our currently estimated price of $29.99 per Spark of Life, it still means you're only paying approximately $7.99 per month. That's half the price of a WoW subscription! That's right. If you're an active, daring player who plays every single day and manages to die every single day... you can continue to play CoE for 1/2 the price of a WoW subscription.
When my guild was learning a new raid instance in WOW it was not uncommon to die quite often.
Even in regular PUGs I can recall wracking up 4 to 6 deaths in an evening.
PVP, the same, whether in DAOC, L1, L2, WAR, Aion, Tera, Shadowbane or even EVE on occasion, multiple deaths an evening were not uncommon.
Reading the above I almost have to wonder if the author (of the Dev blog) has ever actually played any MMORPGS in the past.
There is a difference in CoE between death and being knocked out. A player has to actually Coup de Grace you to be dead, which is against the law. But that is a subject for another thread. That was one of my biggest concerns regarding CoE when I was first looking into it.
Since I die quite often in conventional MMOs.
I want to see this in action. I think I already know how fellow players will react. Putting my money (buying a new spark) at another players discretion is a bad idea. I can easily imagine seeing thousands of Coup de Graces in any given evening (assuming they actually attract that many players). Laws mean nothing without punishment, and I've yet to see an effective in-game justice system that players respect.
Altruism doesn't cut the edge off emotions. Heads will roll as tempers flare. The determined defeated will bear the brunt of funding this game's operational phase.
Logic, my dear, merely enables one to be wrong with great authority.
In regard to the OP. These posts were made by Caspain in discord earlier this morning.
##3.24.2018#P2W# Caspian: @ Dro#4918 It really depends on how you look at it. If people choose to view the world in terms of P2W, then everything is P2W. You can't win at WoW unless you pay for a subscription. All CCGs are inherently P2W. Going to college is P2W because you're paying for an education so you can later get a better salary and win at life. Now - it's all about the mechanic. If every 5 packs contained a "rare and powerful" soul, and you knew it immediately, it would definitely train people to buy Soul Packs. That would feel like Loot Boxes, and it would seem like a counted upon business model and revenue stream. But - if "rare and powerful" souls show up maybe 1 in 100 packs, or 1 in 1,000 and it's not known it's a "rare and powerful" soul until 10 hours into playing it; then it's much easier to see it as a world and story-building tool. It's easy to see the intention - us having a desire to seed the world with random, powerful players for the purpose of story telling, while leveraging an existing mechanic of allowing people to purchase souls for increased selection and variety. There's nothing P2W about. In fact, in order for a game to be P2W there has to be a direct, measurable increase in "power," directly related to purchases. ie. the more you buy, the better you are. This isn't true in this case, as you could be 200 packs and never get anything, while someone else could buy 1 and get the soul of Anara Starsong. That's not P2W. It doesn't wreak of any of the typical systems that use P2W.(edited)
Caspian: @ Dro If you and I both want to be a blacksmith, and we both have the same resources, connections, and starting areas, and I somehow started with a soul that had 2 prior lives. Then I'm lucky. I'm one of those individuals who was given an advantage in order to create conflict in the world, and to provide a source of crafted items to the world to prepare for the larger conflicts. Now, whether or not that's a 10-year long advantage depends on this: * Do you and I develop precisely the same skills? If not, then any variation creates a deviation in skills making us different characters * Do I develop the skills as quickly as you. If I play less, then you may eventually out "level" my skills * Am I as good as you as a player. Crafting like combat requires player skill. So even if my character has more memory, you could still ultimately create better items.
##3.24.2018#Rare/Legendary items# Caspian: Ah. So here's the thing with the Rare/Legendary items..... they're there for story purposes. They create conflict, objectives, and goals. We WANT some players to have them at launch, because it creates gameplay opportunities. So we have a choice - we can either randomly give them away to players to seed the world with these rare items, or we can allow players to buy them. The play experience is the same in both cases. People will log in on launch day and try and discover who has the items and try to acquire them. The only difference is our ability to generate pre-launch revenue to fund development. Also, those who receive the rare/legendary items still have to learn how to activate them. That's an entire story-line/quest waiting to happen. Many will never even complete those quests, rendering the item useless until someone else takes it and completes the story.
Caspian: I think the main problem is that people are still living in the mentality that you have to be "the best" at something in Elyria to gain value from it. They're thinking about the race to level cap, and whether having pre-existing memories gives them a head start. CoE doesn't work that way. The world is so vast, and the needs so great, the game is enjoyable even for new crafters. We worked hard to make crafting useful at all experience levels. We want CoE to be about the process - the journey; not the destination
Once again I feel the need to correct Slapshot's misrepresentation of SBS. According to this post made on Jan 11, 2018. The decision to switch from SpatailOS wasn't one that was taken lightly or made within a few weeks time.
As proven repeatedly, in October he said SpatialOS was working fine and doing what they needed. So between Oct and Jan they did a lot of work Those were his words.. live.. in a video Q&A.
I'm currently reading some interesting comments on Lootboxes and Soulpacks from him. It looks like he agrees they are lootboxes and compares them to card packs in games like Magic the Gathering. He thinks those are different from other lootboxes, I guess like Fortnite.
Will read more when I am not on a phone.
PROGRESS! Once that basic concept is agree to at least you can have a valid discussion about the extent or impact.
All time classic MY NEW FAVORITE POST! (Keep laying those bricks)
"I should point out that no other company has shipped out a beta on a disc before this." - Official Mortal Online Lead Community Moderator
Proudly wearing the Harbinger badge since Dec 23, 2017.
Coined the phrase "Role-Playing a Development Team" January 2018
"Oddly Slap is the main reason I stay in these forums." - Mystichaze April 9th 2018
Those numbers are great and all, but it assumes your character lives a long, healthy life with no spirit loss. Unfortunately (or fortunately), we all know Elyria is a dangerous place. So let's talk briefly about spirit loss.
To begin with, the base spirit loss for a death is 2 real-life days of play, each time you are forced to Spirit Walk.
So that means that if you are someone who dies very rarely, maybe once per month, and would have otherwise lived an average lifespan of approximately 12 months, then at the 11 month mark you would have shaved off approximately 22 days of play time, ending your character's lifespan. Put differently, someone who dies on average once per month can expect to live an average of 11 months without needing to buy a new Spark of Life.
Now, let's assume you die a bit more frequently, maybe once per week. Each death would shave off the same 2 days of play time. As a result, every 7 days would actually count as 9 days of play time. If you divide the average of 354 by 9, you get approx. 39 weeks. So if you're someone who dies an average of once per week, you can expect to live approximately 8.75 months without needing to buy a new Spark of Life.
Continuing on with the same model, if you died an average of 2 or 3 times per week, you could expect to live for either 7.25 months, or 6 months (rounded to the nearest week) respectively.
Now let's assume you die very frequently. You're out adventuring every day doing extremely dangerous activities. Every day you die once. That means every day counts as three days of play time. The average of 354 divided by 3 is 118 days. That's 16 weeks, or approximately 3.75 months before you need to buy a new Spark of Life.
I know what you're thinking, "3.75 months! That sounds like a very short period of time!" It does sound like a short period of time. However, there's two things to remember. First, that number is if you die every day. If you even skip a day in between deaths, that increases all the way to 5.5 months. So if you don't play 7 days a week, but maybe just 4 or 5, if you die each time you play, or even twice each time you play, you're still looking at roughly 6 months of play.
The other thing to consider is the cost of a Spark of Life. If you only live 3.75 months, then for our currently estimated price of $29.99 per Spark of Life, it still means you're only paying approximately $7.99 per month. That's half the price of a WoW subscription! That's right. If you're an active, daring player who plays every single day and manages to die every single day... you can continue to play CoE for 1/2 the price of a WoW subscription.
When my guild was learning a new raid instance in WOW it was not uncommon to die quite often.
Even in regular PUGs I can recall wracking up 4 to 6 deaths in an evening.
PVP, the same, whether in DAOC, L1, L2, WAR, Aion, Tera, Shadowbane or even EVE on occasion, multiple deaths an evening were not uncommon.
Reading the above I almost have to wonder if the author (of the Dev blog) has ever actually played any MMORPGS in the past.
Actually it is a PvP game. People do get griefed a dozen times or more in a row in PvP games and if you are in like a guild war I can see someone dying say 30 times in a day. So yes, sparks will probably last quite a bit less than a year for many people. Possibly only a month or two in a high end PvP guild. Of course that is outside the scope of souls.
Once again I feel the need to correct Slapshot's misrepresentation of SBS. According to this post made on Jan 11, 2018. The decision to switch from SpatailOS wasn't one that was taken lightly or made within a few weeks time.
As proven repeatedly, in October he said SpatialOS was working fine and doing what they needed. So between Oct and Jan they did a lot of work Those were his words.. live.. in a video Q&A.
Perhaps they hadn't made a definite decision in Oct and didn't see the need to raise question until they had made a firm decision. So nothing is proven except the fact that they weren't yet ready to share the information with the public in Oct.
Funny how you left out the most pertinent part of his conversation:
Regarding Soul Packs - They are "loot boxes" in the same way CCGs are "Loot boxes."
Ill post more when I'm not on my phone. Like I said, progress!
If something was left out, it wasn't fault of mine. I simply copied the information from the Soul Chamber. So once again, you assume.
Yeah... you linked stuff on the periphery and not the answer to the question the thread posed. That’s OK I found it for you and posted it.
Caspien admits SoulPacks are like CCG lootbox card packs.
At least we got past that part! Now we just need him to take the 5 minutes needed to update his FAQ so customers can make an informed decision. Pro or Con lootbox, at least people should know what they are getting in to.
All time classic MY NEW FAVORITE POST! (Keep laying those bricks)
"I should point out that no other company has shipped out a beta on a disc before this." - Official Mortal Online Lead Community Moderator
Proudly wearing the Harbinger badge since Dec 23, 2017.
Coined the phrase "Role-Playing a Development Team" January 2018
"Oddly Slap is the main reason I stay in these forums." - Mystichaze April 9th 2018
"But - if "rare and powerful" souls show up maybe 1 in 100 packs, or 1 in 1,000 and it's not known it's a "rare and powerful" soul until 10 hours into playing it; then it's much easier to see it as a world and story-building tool."
Indeed Caspian, it also means that those "rare souls" will fetch a handsome price on EBay, lol
Since I have been accused of leaving things out and after searching through the morning posts here are a few more posts of Caspian's I found. What is here is the extent of what I could find regarding the OP. If I have missed something it certainly wasn't intentional.
Caspian: Soul packs are post-launch as well. But they are the only thing we plan to sell aside from Sparks post-launch. If you want a specific type of soul, there's likely a themed pack for it. You can't desire a specific soul, because giving people the ability to pay more to get the specific soul they want WOULD BE P2W. It would limit the most interesting souls to only those who can afford it IRL. We're fine with that pre-launch, as it helps fund the studio and set the world up for a good starting place. But that's not what we want the business model to be post-launch, and anything that is purchased pre-launch can (and will) be lost post-launch eventually.
Caspian: If you put a nickle into a slot machine and 99 out of 100 times get a nickle back, it's not gambling. Also, gambling requires that you be able to get nothing back - or something of less value than you put in. When you always get something back of equal or higher value than what you put in, it's not gambling. Not by any definition of the word.
The most forgiving use of the word would call that lottery.
Caspian: Honestly, we don't think Soul Packs will be utilized much. They're simply there for people who want a bit more starting choices.
Caspian: @Esoba What I mean is - we expect most players to find a soul they like, and then repeatedly play that life after life. So while people may initially buy a soul pack or two - we don't expect that to be something they do ever again. Or at least, not before every incarnation.
Capsian: @Dro I guess the takeaway should be this.... No matter how much you've thought about CoE game mechanics, I've thought about them longer - YEARS longer. That doesn't mean I'm always going to be right. But it does mean none of our decisions are flippant, and all have been given serious thought to the immediate and long-term goals of the game.
Caspian: Soul packs are post-launch as well. But they are the only thing we plan to sell aside from Sparks post-launch. If you want a specific type of soul, there's likely a themed pack for it. You can't desire a specific soul, because giving people the ability to pay more to get the specific soul they want WOULD BE P2W. It would limit the most interesting souls to only those who can afford it IRL. We're fine with that pre-launch, as it helps fund the studio and set the world up for a good starting place. But that's not what we want the business model to be post-launch, and anything that is purchased pre-launch can (and will) be lost post-launch eventually
Caspian:@Dro If you're talking about wanting a specific type of Soul, then as others have said, the packs are themed. 3 Souls with a range of attributes and skills that focus on a single archetype.
Caspian: @iSagan Tentatively, you can only have 5 Sparked character on a server, per account. We may lower that to 3.
"But - if "rare and powerful" souls show up maybe 1 in 100 packs, or 1 in 1,000 and it's not known it's a "rare and powerful" soul until 10 hours into playing it; then it's much easier to see it as a world and story-building tool."
Indeed Caspian, it also means that those "rare souls" will fetch a handsome price on EBay, lol
As well as cost a handsome price to try to purposely acquire. Say we go with $10 a pack, best case scenario that is anywhere from $1000 to $10000 to find in addition to the cost of a spark for every soul, which is needed to activate the soul in order to find out it is rare.
Hmm and alternate accounts since you are only able to have a limited number of active souls on one account.
Oh and let us not forget you would need to sell your entire account in order to sell that one soul.
@mystichaze that first few sentences by Caspian, mentioning how WoW is pay to win with a sub, doesn't inspire confidence in his argument.
But really isn't relevant to the description of the Soul Packs, or how they are intended to work. Right?
It shows he either A) has a very strange, irrational view of what constitutes pay to win, or B ) signals that the entire intent of his explanation was more PR than genuine opinion with regards to how he views SoulPacks and P2W items in general.
EDIT- The WTF rings hollow. He tried to compare sub to Pay to Win in a sub-mandatory game. Sorry, but logic dictates that's quite false. It buys him zero credibility for the remainder of the answer.
He also tried to imply that, because you're not guaranteed to get a better than average soul, it cannot be pay to win. That's also ludicrous.
Lootboxes were the way BF2 implemented pay to win mechanics. It fools no one just because you don't let them buy the upgrades outright and with direct purchase.
"But - if "rare and powerful" souls show up maybe 1 in 100 packs, or 1 in 1,000 and it's not known it's a "rare and powerful" soul until 10 hours into playing it; then it's much easier to see it as a world and story-building tool."
Indeed Caspian, it also means that those "rare souls" will fetch a handsome price on EBay, lol
As well as cost a handsome price to try to purposely acquire. Say we go with $10 a pack, best case scenario that is anywhere from $1000 to $10000 to find in addition to the cost of a spark for every soul, which is needed to activate the soul in order to find out it is rare.
Hmm and alternate accounts since you are only able to have a limited number of active souls on one account.
Oh and let us not forget you would need to sell your entire account in order to sell that one soul.
Hmm looks like my last post didn’t go through so here’s the tldr:
The way math works... if something costs $10 for a 1 in 100 chance of a rare soul it would take an average of around $500 to get one. It could be $10... or it could be $3000. That’s the very nature of a lootbox.
Also, his numbers were a hypothetical argument or is there someplace that says they will be 1 in 100 chance? Same with the need for a spark. That’s the first time it was suggested as far as I know and was also hypothetical. Is that confirmed?
Good to see see us having continued influence on the game design. If he goes with that it would definitely reduce the chance for abuse.
All time classic MY NEW FAVORITE POST! (Keep laying those bricks)
"I should point out that no other company has shipped out a beta on a disc before this." - Official Mortal Online Lead Community Moderator
Proudly wearing the Harbinger badge since Dec 23, 2017.
Coined the phrase "Role-Playing a Development Team" January 2018
"Oddly Slap is the main reason I stay in these forums." - Mystichaze April 9th 2018
Comments
In the meantime, we have several community ambassadors and community members that are always available and eager to answer newcomers questions.
Love how people piss on SBS about their progress and then fuss that need to do all kinds of for the most part frivolous BS things like forum updates and what have you, that take time and money.. and turn around and piss on them that they can't get it all done with their current funding.
It literally would take less than 5 minutes to update the FAQ.
You guys are funny sometimes. They can build this incredible game in record time with a tiny team, but simply updating 3 lines of text in 2 years is beyond them. I mean, these are the guys that were able to toss the half billion dollar backed SpatialOS and replace it with off the shelf stuff in a few weeks right?
You might think the inclusion of lootbox mechanics in their business model is "frivolous" but some might find it important. And such a simple thing as updating a few lines to explain it should not be such a huge burden as you infer.
All time classic MY NEW FAVORITE POST! (Keep laying those bricks)
"I should point out that no other company has shipped out a beta on a disc before this." - Official Mortal Online Lead Community Moderator
Proudly wearing the Harbinger badge since Dec 23, 2017.
Coined the phrase "Role-Playing a Development Team" January 2018
"Oddly Slap is the main reason I stay in these forums." - Mystichaze April 9th 2018
By the way I was able to find that updated information on what the lifespan expectations are
Source: https://chroniclesofelyria.com/blog/20017/DJ-20-A-Tale-of-Twelve-Tribes
Direct quote:
"Note: One important thing which is not effected by Tribe is lifespan lengths. In the early designs of the game we'd had a random lifespan between 10 and 14 months to account for differences in genetics. But we've since done away with that, and given everyone a standard 52 week lifespan, regardless of bloodline or tribe."https://chroniclesofelyria.com/forum/topic/23401/a-year-of-foundation#post260738
Of course, SpatialOS isn't a game engine, so while it provided a platform on which we could build our game, we were still responsible for writing all the systems of CoE. As we were developing those systems we discovered we could make headway faster, enable unique gameplay features, and leverage a large ecosystem of existing code by moving from C# to JavaScript/TypeScript as the primary language of our backend. Fortunately for us, as of SpatialOS 10.3 Improbable had an experimental JavaScript SDK, which meant we could continue to use SpatialOS along with our new chosen language and architecture. So in early spring we made the move from C# to JavaScript and, as a result, saw rapid improvements in the rate at which we could develop new features. This was also around the time we saw accelerated progress in the development of the VoxElyria client (formerly referred to as ElyriaMUD).
But, then we started encountering some issues. First, while SpatialOS provided load-balancing and fault tolerance for all our spatial workers, there were still many workers that were not spatial in nature. Workers such as our authentication and login server, our AI system, and our Procedural Story Engine. For these, we still needed our own load balancer, fault-tolerance, and cross-process communication. So, we began researching different technologies that, while not a single solution, would provide the scalability, reliability, storage, and communication benefits normally provided by SpatialOS.
Second, we started to have some concerns about the financial viability of SpatialOS for our needs. Whenever you use SpatialOS you're also signing up to have your game hosted by Improbable. That has the benefit of lowering operations costs, but has the drawback of passing all the hosting fees they pay to their cloud partner onto us. It also means we don't have the ability to choose a hosting partner - whether cloud, bare metal, or dedicated servers that meet our performance needs. And CoE has some very specific needs! In specific, our use of Offline Player Characters (OPCs), the extremely large size of our world, the vast number of entities in the world, and the way we divide our game server up into dozens of different worker types meant that SpatialOS was particularly expensive for our use-cases. Our philosophy has always been about keeping our hosting fees low so we could pass those savings onto you. With SpatialOS, our hosting fees would have been more expensive, which would have forced us to increase our prices - something we didn’t want to do.
Of course, we brought our concerns to Improbable, and over the last eight months they’ve done a fantastic job working with us to try and bring the price down. Unfortunately, it remains an expensive solution for us. To make sure we were prepared, we began looking for alternative technology that could fill any gaps left behind if we were unable to use SpatialOS for any reason.
As we had already started leveraging Docker Swarm, a Container technology for load balancing and fault tolerance of our non-spatial services, we knew we could transition to a full Docker stack if necessary for our spatial services as well. When we realized we were going to need to communicate between our spatial services and non-spatial services, we integrated RabbitMQ into our back-end, a super fast routing and message protocol used to serve 10's of millions of requests by banks and other high-traffic websites across the internet each day. And because we needed persistent storage for all our non-spatial data, we integrated PostgreSQL into our backend. Fortunately, PostgreSQL supports SQL, NoSQL, and even spatial queries, enabling it to act as a backend and persistent storage for both our spatial and non-spatial data.
All of the above technologies were integrated into our backend to solve non-spatial related problems, but we made those choices because we knew we could lean on them if worst-came-to-worse. And then we encountered our third and final roadblock. In the most recent release of SpatialOS Improbable deprecated their JavaScript SDK and marked it as unsupported. This left us with our biggest challenge yet - we no longer had a good way to interact with the SpatialOS backend.
When this happened, the engineering guild and I spent several meetings exploring our options with respect to shimming an interop layer between SpatialOS and our JavaScript-based backend. But in the end, we realized that it would be too time-consuming and error-prone to try to continue to use SpatialOS when we already had an efficient routing and communication protocol, an architecture that allowed for scalability and fault tolerance, and a persistent storage solution that enabled us to track and update the state of the world. So, as of the end of 2017, Chronicles of Elyria is no longer using SpatialOS, and is entirely built on the Soulborn Engine. We really enjoyed working with the folks over at Improbable and we are still looking forward to how their platform impacts the online gaming industry as a whole. Their technology is still an extremely powerful solution for virtually all distributed simulations out there. But for our particular technology choices and game mechanics, it just wasn’t the ideal solution.
As you can see, our non-spatial services required a large part of 2017 to be spent getting our core stack set up and creating the necessary components to have our own, proprietary platform. And because we were concerned about how things would end up with SpatialOS, we continued to make progress on these areas within the Soulborn Engine throughout 2017. In fact, we went to PAX West this year and showed off our jousting demo. This was the first time we'd taken a multiplayer demo to PAX since our combat demo back in 2016, but unknown to many, the Joust Demo was running on a locally deployed version of the Soulborn Engine. This means that everyone who played the jousting demo at PAX West has already played on our new server stack.
And finally, in December 2017, we released Version 0.1.0 of Chronicles of Elyria to our “Friends and Family”. This was the first time offsite users were able to play Chronicles of Elyria. Again, the milestone was completed using an entirely Soulborn-based game engine. So, what does this all mean in a nutshell? It means that in 2017 we began by using SpatialOS, and ended with something that, while not a single solution, does everything SpatialOS did - ultimately providing us all the same functionality as SpatialOS, while allowing us to keep our operating costs low and providing us more control over our server performance. With the transition complete, we’re now ready to move forward with more core gameplay mechanics in 2018.
Altruism doesn't cut the edge off emotions. Heads will roll as tempers flare. The determined defeated will bear the brunt of funding this game's operational phase.
Logic, my dear, merely enables one to be wrong with great authority.
I'm currently reading some interesting comments on Lootboxes and Soulpacks from him. It looks like he agrees they are lootboxes and compares them to card packs in games like Magic the Gathering. He thinks those are different from other lootboxes, I guess like Fortnite.
Will read more when I am not on a phone.
PROGRESS! Once that basic concept is agree to at least you can have a valid discussion about the extent or impact.
All time classic MY NEW FAVORITE POST! (Keep laying those bricks)
"I should point out that no other company has shipped out a beta on a disc before this." - Official Mortal Online Lead Community Moderator
Proudly wearing the Harbinger badge since Dec 23, 2017.
Coined the phrase "Role-Playing a Development Team" January 2018
"Oddly Slap is the main reason I stay in these forums." - Mystichaze April 9th 2018
Funny how you left out the most pertinent part of his conversation:
Regarding Soul Packs - They are "loot boxes" in the same way CCGs are "Loot boxes."
Ill post more when I'm not on my phone. Like I said, progress!
All time classic MY NEW FAVORITE POST! (Keep laying those bricks)
"I should point out that no other company has shipped out a beta on a disc before this." - Official Mortal Online Lead Community Moderator
Proudly wearing the Harbinger badge since Dec 23, 2017.
Coined the phrase "Role-Playing a Development Team" January 2018
"Oddly Slap is the main reason I stay in these forums." - Mystichaze April 9th 2018
Caspien admits SoulPacks are like CCG lootbox card packs.
At least we got past that part! Now we just need him to take the 5 minutes needed to update his FAQ so customers can make an informed decision. Pro or Con lootbox, at least people should know what they are getting in to.
All time classic MY NEW FAVORITE POST! (Keep laying those bricks)
"I should point out that no other company has shipped out a beta on a disc before this." - Official Mortal Online Lead Community Moderator
Proudly wearing the Harbinger badge since Dec 23, 2017.
Coined the phrase "Role-Playing a Development Team" January 2018
"Oddly Slap is the main reason I stay in these forums." - Mystichaze April 9th 2018
Indeed Caspian, it also means that those "rare souls" will fetch a handsome price on EBay, lol
Caspian: If you put a nickle into a slot machine and 99 out of 100 times get a nickle back, it's not gambling. Also, gambling requires that you be able to get nothing back - or something of less value than you put in. When you always get something back of equal or higher value than what you put in, it's not gambling. Not by any definition of the word.
Caspian: Honestly, we don't think Soul Packs will be utilized much. They're simply there for people who want a bit more starting choices.
Caspian: @Esoba What I mean is - we expect most players to find a soul they like, and then repeatedly play that life after life. So while people may initially buy a soul pack or two - we don't expect that to be something they do ever again. Or at least, not before every incarnation.
Capsian: @Dro I guess the takeaway should be this.... No matter how much you've thought about CoE game mechanics, I've thought about them longer - YEARS longer. That doesn't mean I'm always going to be right. But it does mean none of our decisions are flippant, and all have been given serious thought to the immediate and long-term goals of the game.
Caspian: Soul packs are post-launch as well. But they are the only thing we plan to sell aside from Sparks post-launch. If you want a specific type of soul, there's likely a themed pack for it. You can't desire a specific soul, because giving people the ability to pay more to get the specific soul they want WOULD BE P2W. It would limit the most interesting souls to only those who can afford it IRL. We're fine with that pre-launch, as it helps fund the studio and set the world up for a good starting place. But that's not what we want the business model to be post-launch, and anything that is purchased pre-launch can (and will) be lost post-launch eventually
Caspian:@Dro If you're talking about wanting a specific type of Soul, then as others have said, the packs are themed. 3 Souls with a range of attributes and skills that focus on a single archetype.
Caspian: @iSagan Tentatively, you can only have 5 Sparked character on a server, per account. We may lower that to 3.
Progress!
All time classic MY NEW FAVORITE POST! (Keep laying those bricks)
"I should point out that no other company has shipped out a beta on a disc before this." - Official Mortal Online Lead Community Moderator
Proudly wearing the Harbinger badge since Dec 23, 2017.
Coined the phrase "Role-Playing a Development Team" January 2018
"Oddly Slap is the main reason I stay in these forums." - Mystichaze April 9th 2018
Hmm and alternate accounts since you are only able to have a limited number of active souls on one account.
Oh and let us not forget you would need to sell your entire account in order to sell that one soul.
EDIT- The WTF rings hollow. He tried to compare sub to Pay to Win in a sub-mandatory game. Sorry, but logic dictates that's quite false. It buys him zero credibility for the remainder of the answer.
Jeromy Walsh BS at it's best !
It's only not gambling if there's no chance of EVER getting more than that nickle back.
The moment there's a "chance" involved, it automatically becomes gambling. Longer odds just carry higher payouts when they DO occur.
Lootboxes were the way BF2 implemented pay to win mechanics. It fools no one just because you don't let them buy the upgrades outright and with direct purchase.
The way math works... if something costs $10 for a 1 in 100 chance of a rare soul it would take an average of around $500 to get one. It could be $10... or it could be $3000. That’s the very nature of a lootbox.
Also, his numbers were a hypothetical argument or is there someplace that says they will be 1 in 100 chance? Same with the need for a spark. That’s the first time it was suggested as far as I know and was also hypothetical. Is that confirmed?
Good to see see us having continued influence on the game design. If he goes with that it would definitely reduce the chance for abuse.
All time classic MY NEW FAVORITE POST! (Keep laying those bricks)
"I should point out that no other company has shipped out a beta on a disc before this." - Official Mortal Online Lead Community Moderator
Proudly wearing the Harbinger badge since Dec 23, 2017.
Coined the phrase "Role-Playing a Development Team" January 2018
"Oddly Slap is the main reason I stay in these forums." - Mystichaze April 9th 2018