Greetings Fellow Avatars!

Here’s what we have for you in this week’s edition of Update of the Avatar:

• Very Large Creatures: Dragons (Work-in-Progress)
• Early Dev+ Release 21 Testing
• Let’s talk about… USE BASED SYSTEMS! Part 2
• End-of-Summer Telethon

Very Large Creatures: Dragons (Work-in-Progress)

Geoff Mellon (character artist), Kevin Wells (character artist), and Bren Wilson (animator) are working on our next Very Large Creature: Dragons! Check out these work-in-progress images:

Early Dev+ Release 21 Testing!

[A Dev+ Forum Post by BurningToad (aka Ken Pfile)]

Hello all! We have a new build up on QA for early R21 Dev+ testing [requires Developer or higher pledge level]! As usual, it is still incomplete, and likely very buggy, but it is a big help to us if y’all can test it out and help identify major issues!

The test set up is like previous tests, happening on a separate server, known as the “QA Server.” You will be able to play through Steam or through a new SotA Launcher install.

The QA version of SotA has been updated to version 255, which is available through the Launcher or through Steam.

[Read more…]

Let’s talk about… USE BASED SYSTEMS! Part 2

[A Dev+ Forum Post by Chris Spears]

Ok, as promised, I present to you the second half of the use based wall of text! My First post was all about how it appeared to the player. This one is going to be for those who want to dig a bit deeper and understand what is happening under the covers. If you don’t care, or if you don’t like math, you should probably stop reading here.

So when I’ve referred to the system before I’ve called it a hybrid use based system. In a pure use based system, just using a skill would advance it and players could become masters at skills through repetitive, often macro-able methods. While we wanted a use based system we also wanted to limit that type of artificial behavior as much as possible.

Our system actually still has players earning experience through in game actions. Those experience points go into a pool of “to be spent” experience. Then using skills spends points out of that pool on the skill to level it up. How many points spent on each skill use depends on the current level of the skill, the size of the experience pool, whether the skill use was successful or not, and a few other secret items. The amount would be a certain % of the pool for the base value so having a large pool of experience built up will accelerate the process.

The amount applied per use will be capped so it requires a minimum number of uses to advance. The minimum number of uses starts around 5 for most skills and advances up to 100+ at the highest levels.

Each skill tracks its own experience and levels up similar to how players level up in the current system. Each skill requires far less (varies widely but around 1/100th) experience than the current leveling system. This means that players will see tons of incremental progress and if they choose to only work on a couple of skills, they will increase at a MUCH faster pace than leveling.

Skills will have a difficulty value associated with them that we likely won’t show. This is how many times more costly a skill is to level. Some things that have a very limited opportunity for use, like taming, might level more easily. Other things that are immensely powerful will level more slowly, like raising stats. Leveling str/dex/int will be in the order of 5-10X average skills.

Active skills get experience applied on use. Passive skills gain experience very slowly over time. Players will also be able to pay trainers for a lesson for a specific skill which will grant a buff that applies more exps to a skill per use.

Now for the part that players will hate BUT that is key for long term survival of the game and allows us to have really fast non-grindy progression, skill decay! So in addition to being more realistic, the purpose of decay is to allow us to not have hard skill caps and to make it so we can let people level up skills faster but still keep some control mechanism. I’ll get into the math of that in a bit but first also let me talk about why situation X isn’t a problem.

What is situation X? Well, hopefully that is your situation no matter how you play! The decay is only accumulated for around 2 days max loss. The accumulated decay is only applied on death or on skill gain. The decay is based on real time whether players are in the game or not. So players who want to go PVP and expect to die 20 times in afternoon are not going to suffer any more than someone who went adventuring and died two or three times. Players who are just logging in for some role playing and saying hi to friends won’t suffer any loss. Players who are in the military and get deployed for 2 months will only be coming back to around 2 days of decay.

Ok, next tidbit I’ll throw out is our first rough target for how much loss players will suffer. I won’t share exact numbers for how we’re doing the loss but I will give you an actual example of a real world situation. A player is awesome and levels up 20 of their skills to 80. Then they get a job and at the same time have a kid. They login every day for a year straight and die every day without earning any experience, you know, because they have a kid. This is pretty much the worst case, 365 days in a row of 1 day’s worth accumulated exp loss. So at the end of 1 year what do you think their skills will be at? 1? BUZZ! 20? BUZZ! 40? BUZZ! At the end of one year they will only have dropped to 72. If instead they only logged in once a week and died and earned no experience, they would be at 77 at the end of a year.

Ok, now I know after seeing that example, I imagine most of you are concerned that it isn’t enough decay to slow anyone down. Well, actually it is because of how it combines with the difficulty curve for raising skills at very high skill levels. With the decay used in the example, a player would hit a soft cap, due to reaching a steady state of losing experience at about the same rate they are earning experience once they hit around 400 times their daily earn rate.

So even casual players will be able to get a fair number of skills into the 80 range and keep a few dozen at 60+. The real challenge is going to be for those players that want to keep 1 or more skills in the 100+ range. Remember, that the difference between a 100 skill and 80 skill is around 10% but that last 10% costs 5 times as much as it took to get from 1 to 80! If players want to push beyond 100 they can but that curve gets steeper and steeper!

To give players a rough idea of the effort involved in leveling up a skill from from 1 to 80, which is what we consider to be master level, the effort required is about the same as it takes to get to level 28 right now. With the effort it currently takes to get to level 50, players could master 5 skills and have 30 additional skills to 40.

Things are MUCH more forgiving for those who are less concerned with becoming grandmasters. If a player just wants to get skills to 40 (which unlocks 3 out of 5 possible glyphs), then they should be be able to get 15 skills to 40 in the time it currently takes to go from level 5 to 20 under the current system. And just a reminder, 40 is approximately 70% of the effectiveness of a grandmaster.

So why spend the effort to be a grandmaster? Because to some players, that last few % is all the motivation they need to work for it. Additionally, becoming a grandmaster in a skill will let you unlock the grandmaster title that you can proudly display. What better way to attract new customers than to proudly display your “Grandmaster Weaponsmith” title. Also, if you’re trying to send a message to would be challengers, just fly your “Grandmaster Swordsman”. Those titles likely won’t make R21 but those, and probably some Steam achievements, will make a later release.

For R21 players, it will feel a bit like a player wipe release because all of your skills will be reset. So for a brief moment, all players will be on a pretty even playing field! Actually what we’re doing is moving all your current experience to that pool to be spent on skills. Also, recall that how much gets applied to skills on each use is based on a tiny percent of the size of that pool. So if PlayerX currently has a half million exps at the end of R20, they will start R21 with a half million exps in their pool to be applied to skills on use.

So the other thing that this means is that those players with lots of saved up experience will actually be able to advance quite a bit just from practicing. Over time though, they will burn through their pool and need to go adventure, PVP, or craft more challenging items to refill the pool. The other thing to expect is to see the hard core people behaving oddly as they try to be the first person to become a grandmaster a particular skill.

Ok, that is probably enough blathering to satisfy my wall of text for today. I look forward to the questions and answering concerns as I’m sure there will be many.

See you guys in game!

Chris “Dippy Dragon” Spears

End-of-Summer Telethon

August 31 marks the end of our Summer Bonus promotion and to commemorate the event, we are holding a 12-Hour End-of-Summer Telethon, from 10am CST to 10pm CST, August 31, 2015! We are giving away hourly prizes during the telethon, as well as three Big Prizes, including a Patron, Ancestor, and Lord Pledge!

There will be hourly events, several of which will be hosted by twitch broadcasters, including Meet the Devs, Devs vs Players In-game Gustball Match, Feature Deep Dives, Devs vs Players In-game PVP Match, and more!

The full schedule of events will be included in next week’s Update of the Avatar, so stay tuned!