Letter from the Game Director - November

AmazingAvery · November 2009

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Silirrion

Game Director

Letter from the Game Director - November

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This month has been a bit hectic with work on the next major update alongside the work on the expansion and managing to wedge in a trip to Korea for the GStar event in Busan. This has meant that it was a little bit of a rush for me between all the travelling to prepare this text. So I have to extend my apologies to the other language forums as there might be a little delay before this text is available in all the localized versions since I was late with the text! Trying to write a coherent text from airport lounges is always a little challenging! I didn’t want to miss the month though!

Postcards from Busan

The show in Busan went very well. Our partners at Neowiz did an amazing job of presenting the game. The show-floor booth was very well put together and they put on a wonderful show for the Korean players. It was great to see people enjoying the localized version and getting to grips with Age of Conan for themselves.

Online gaming is more established and the number of choices of available titles for the Korean gamers is wider. It is a very competitive market and it will be really interesting to see if we can make some inroads into that market with our own game. It's definitely a daunting challenge, but an enjoyable one all the same. We make games for the people that play them, and one thing that visits like the one this week confirms for me is that there is definitely the appetite for good online games there!

What’s coming up…

The team is busily preparing the 1.06 update for the test servers this week. Prepare to see a lot more information on the update as soon as the update is available for testing. We will have full preliminary release articles for the features for you all to digest.

We are really looking forward to getting the feedback on the Guild Renown and the tier three raiding. It has been a few weeks of hard work resolving the technical issues that popped up after 1.05.6 and we are looking forward to catching up with the 1.06 progress.

Looking at the balance.

The next major update to the character development system will be in the form of the Alternate Advancement system that comes with the expansion. That said, we are looking at a few areas where we can make some minor adjustments prior to the alternate advancement system. In the course of the 1.06 series we will be making a series of changes based on the balance concerns surrounding the balance between melee users and casters, in particular on two areas – crowd control and stamina usage.

In terms of the crowd control we are going to be making some significant changes to the crowd control abilities. Specifically we are looking at reducing the range on the majority of the casting class’s crowd control abilities. The intention is to not have those abilities be something that allows people to keep someone at range, rather they will become escape abilities more than ‘pinning’ abilities as they will require your target to already be inside melee range.

Combined with this we will be preventing the casting classes from utilizing stamina potions. This should significantly reduce the duration of the casters ability to ‘kite’ melee players, while still reserving it for escape situations or well timed usage.

Obviously we will be testing these changes during the course of the 1.06 cycle testing on the test servers.

The remainder of the feedback is being taken into consideration when the systems team is working through the new feat trees, combos, spells and abilities for the Alternate Advancement system.

See you in Hyboria!

As we head into December I am really looking forward to being able to get the 1.06 update really put through its paces. Keep your eyes out for the preliminary update articles very shortly and I hope you all enjoy the month in Hyboria!

__________________

Craig 'Silirrion' Morrison

Game Director

GPrestige · November 2009

Good, screw those casters!

Mokwee · November 2009

I didnt know this game was still running.

GPrestige · November 2009

Originally posted by Mokwee

I didnt know this game was still running.

Not only that, its awesome.

Thorqemada · November 2009

The letter means that pve again is hurt from pvp - that dps is again the king over tactic and strategy and that gameply is even more one dimensional

AoC is a great game and can be an even greater game but that dps-only-way is not my way - i will give the expansion a chance and if it is only dps that counts its over and out for me...

Halandir · November 2009

Originally posted by Blutmaul

The letter means that pve again is hurt from pvp - that dps is again the king over tactic and strategy and that gameply is even more one dimensional

How do you reach that conclusion? Not saying you are wrong - It just seems to me that the PvE implications will be minor while it should actually require more tactic from casters in PvP.

Changing the range of caster CC sounds like a novel idea that might have a chance to work, instead of inventing and giving melee classes new CC cancelling skills.

Stamina changes is also different from what I expected (working percentages would have been a lot easier) but something needs to be done and this sounds viable to me.

Overall I actually felt quite positive about the letter and the changes the GD outlines. Oh well - someone labelled me a "hater". I guess I am now officially a "confused hater"

Tarka · November 2009

Originally posted by Halandir

Originally posted by Blutmaul

The letter means that pve again is hurt from pvp - that dps is again the king over tactic and strategy and that gameply is even more one dimensional

How do you reach that conclusion? Not saying you are wrong - It just seems to me that the PvE implications will be minor while it should actually require more tactic from casters in PvP.

Changing the range of caster CC sounds like a novel idea that might have a chance to work, instead of inventing and giving melee classes new CC cancelling skills.

Stamina changes is also different from what I expected (working percentages would have been a lot easier) but something needs to be done and this sounds viable to me.

Overall I actually felt quite positive about the letter and the changes the GD outlines. Oh well - someone labelled me a "hater". I guess I am now officially a "confused hater"

I must agree that I cannot see PVE being impacted very much by this change. I played casters in AOC, and whilst I didn't use stam pots or pvp, I can still certainly appreciate the caster vs melee pvp issues that have been plaguing this game since pvp was introduced. There have been countless suggestions about how to fix it (e.g. do away with stamina and mana bars and just have a health bar which reduces by a set figure rather than a percentage when running and thus is balances a melees larger stamina bar against a casters CC abilities). I just find it amazing that they are taking their time over such things (and many others). The pvp community has been screaming about this for over a year now. But, this is FC we're talking about. They don't rush anything for anyone.

I also find it quite astonishing that its taking them this long even to get such important issues such as T3 raids and the PVP issues onto test, never mind into the "live" game. When was 1.05 released? March? How long is it predicted that these elements sit on test? I can almost hear Craig Morrison say "Until they're ready" lol. Obviously FC's patience is greater than its customers.

I'm also disappointed that FC see fit to focus the community news on the expansion right now. Does this mean that there won't be any more "big" patches before the release of the expansion? I can see the community viewing that as a kick in the nuts considering that there's so much to put right with the game. If they leave it in this state, then I personally don't expect the expansion to keep people interested for longer than a few weeks. Such a shame. Another opportunity wasted.

Thorqemada · November 2009

The Way they go is to balance around DPS and to decrease the strength of any non-dps-ability more and more and the only reason for that is pvp-balancing.

This single solution will not make the game much badder but it is the sum of all efforts to balance pvp that affects pve in a way that is less and less fun.

The game becomes more and more one-dimensional and that gives me a bad feeling !

LordBonezy2 · December 2009

Originally posted by Blutmaul

The Way they go is to balance around DPS and to decrease the strength of any non-dps-ability more and more and the only reason for that is pvp-balancing.
This single solution will not make the game much badder but it is the sum of all efforts to balance pvp that affects pve in a way that is less and less fun.
The game becomes more and more one-dimensional and that gives me a bad feeling !

Its really to bad they haven't figured out Abraham Lincoln's proverb. You can please some of the folks all of the time and some of the all of the folks some of the time, but you can't please all of the folks all of the time. In another light, its pretty easy to see this game needs PVP and PVE rulesets for character balance. The fact that they don't even bother just means they can't because they don't have the resources. It is what happens when you paint yourself into a tiny corner by chasing away your playerbase.

Rdlaban · December 2009

Nice to see that the GD is on the ball with the caster vs melee balance, and I am really eeger to test out the alternative advancementsystem they are putting in for expansion. Hopefully it will be troughly tested.

And if 06-cycle is the last before the expansion the expansion will come out aorund summer -10?

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Letter from the Game Director - November

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