| Text
| - 2(xsd:integer)
- Hardware
- --05-11
- --06-22
- 86400.0
- --07-18
- 2005.0
- Quick Learner
- Ciandra's Fortune
- ART
- Innate Renewal
- A: Yes.
- Archmage's Endurance
- And if rare items were only found in loot, then UCMers would have a natural advantage in finding them. Heck, it would encourage pharming just to get the items to sell on eBay. There isn't much more we can do about UCMs than we are already doing, e.g. find and ban them. However, we can do something about making sure the hunt for rares doesn't become a pharmer's paradise. We've put our heads together and come up with a two-pronged approach, which we now propose to you for discussion:
- A: We do not expect to take the world down for a significant amount of time. We may bring the world down to prop a new version of the game, if so this will be announced in the news page on the Launcher as well as in the forums.
- NPK Deaths from level 11 to level 20: No change – 1 non-wielded item dropped, as before.
- I'm pretty happy with the way Viamontian history and lore turned out. It's especially nice that this is a result we achieved through a liberal amount of idea-sharing and collaboration.
- Let's look at a simple example: One potential Augmentation that we announced at Turbine Nation was the ability to carry an extra backpack. Let's say that the cost of this Augmentation is 4 billion XP. So you do the quest, obtain the gem, and use it. 4 billion XP is drained from your available XP and invested into this Augmentation, and now you have an extra backpack slot on your UI. This slot is yours for the rest of eternity, and you can place any backpack you like in that slot.
- Will there be any change to the rate of advancement for uber-level characters, or is this high level just for folks who macroed and used XP chains in the past?
We recognize that there's a real need for more content for uber-level characters and up, and we are definitely committed to creating it.
- Below you can see some examples of the unique appearance of Rare weapons. Click on an image to enlarge it!
300px
300px
300px
- Under no circumstances will a character receive less experience for a PXP reward after Throne of Destiny than they would receive today.
- In addition to all that, Steve has been maintaining the production schedules; if you've ever worked on a game development project, you know what an excruciatingly detailed – and thankless – task that is. It isn't just making lists; it involves talking to everyone on the project, looking at results and making sure everyone knows the state of everyone else's tasks. He's an ace at it; this is one of the few projects I've seen in game development where we actually know the true state of every single task and how close to completion each one is. Rather mind-boggling, considering the thousands of separate tasks that need to be tracked.
- And just to add to your joy, imagine some of the previous developers who wrote some of this the code, people long gone from the company, didn't provide frills such as documentation or commenting the code, so that those who followed after would know what those various bits of the code were supposed to do.
- The real question here is: What haven't these guys been doing lately? They've been working on everything from finishing up the new code to raise the level cap, cleaning up the Augmentation Gems code, doing some polishing on Rare Items code, to some scary, low-level work on the engine to support DirectX 9 in the graphic upgrade.
- For example: Let's say that your character is level currently 126, and in fact you've been level 126 for almost a year now. You have 4.2 billion total XP, 1 billion available XP, and 8 billion XP invested into your skills and attributes. The first time you log in after upgrading to the expansion, your total XP will be set to 9 billion, you will advance to level 146, and you will receive 2 skill credits.
- The vitae system has not changed substantially since Asheron's Call launched in 1999. Since that time, the experience awarded by killing creatures has increased considerably. This means that a 5% vitae loss currently is much easier to work off now than it was in the past. In addition, the maximum cost to work off a point of vitae was capped at 12,500 experience points.
- Ah, much to discuss this time around. Much news, as well as much that is new; this is going to be a long one covering a wide range of subjects. We had intended to post this a couple weeks ago, but several dates had to be firmed up and confirmed with our partners; we wanted to be confident talking about them. So, to paraphrase Bette Davis: "Buckle up, boys; it's going to be a bumpy ride."
- Before the conspiracy theorists drown out the rest of us, this is in no way connected with the launch delay discussed above. In fact, I, among others, lobbied hard to get that delay and the fact that we got it – even though Turbine is going to take a financial hit on marketing and distribution money that has already been spent and a confidence hit with some of your fellow players – should prove that this company is committed to giving you quality. In the old adage of "You can have it good or you can have it Tuesday," the company chose the former. How many times have we seen companies choose Tuesday, instead? It doesn't guarantee a flawless launch, but it does reduce the risks to one and that's the best any of us can hope for.
- With only those few clues, writing out a more complete Viamontian history took a lot of research, and the last thing I wanted to do was to write something that contradicted something already published. There is no centralized lore "database" at Turbine. We mostly rely on scattered specs and an oral tradition to keep track of lore. To dig up all previous mentions of Viamontians in the history of Ispar, I literally had to run an Agent Ransack search on the in-game writing directory. I spent a couple of hours just reading through all the lore I could, making notes, soaking it in and getting a feel for their activities. Most of this is lore I had read before, but it's one thing to pick up a few isolated events, and quite another to have a feel for the whole of their narrative. Writing the Viamontian history was kind of like navigating a long hike through the mountains with no trail to follow – just a series of landmarks.
- So, what did I find when I went looking for TOTAL_EXPERIENCE_INT? I found two nice clean accessors on the server, plus a bunch of places where the accessors should have been called but weren't, and a lot of nasty hard-coded references on the client. Well, the client is like that. We're working on it, but that's a work in progress, so I set that aside for a bit to deal with later. On the server, I marked the places that should be accessors with a nice 'TODO LEVELCAP' comment and went searching for everywhere that the code called the accessors. At this point I knew that the code was pretty well confined to a class called WAgent , but I still searched the entire bloody code base anyway – it's better not to be surprised.
- * Name: Enhancement of the Mace Turner
* Element: Bludgeoning
* Keeper: Nawamara Dia
* Name: Enhancement of the Blade Turner>
* Element: Slashing
* Keeper: Ilin Wis
* Name: Enhancement of the Arrow Turner
* Element: Piercing
* Keeper: Kyuoju Rujen
* Name: Storm's Enhancement
* Element: Electric
* Keeper: Enli Yuo
* Name: Fiery Enhancement
* Element: Fire
* Keeper: Rikshen Ri
* Name: Icy Enhancement
* Element: Cold
* Keeper: Lu Bao
* Name: Caustic Enhancement
* Element: Acid
* Keeper: Shujio Milao
- A: Experience rewards based on the amount that you need to get from your current level to the next level are referred to as "PXP" rewards. After Throne of Destiny, all characters – those who have the expansion pack and those who don't – will have PXP rewards correctly calculated. There are two caveats – the first is that characters that have hit the maximum level cap of 275 cannot earn more experience at all, so they will not gain experience from these awards. The second is that many PXP rewards will have their maximum reward capped so that very high-level characters can't get a reward that isn't appropriate for the comparative difficulty of the quest.
- Each of these Augmentations will grant a character 10% innate resistance to one damage type. Only two of these Augmentations may ever be used, but you may use any combination of two. For example I could use two Fiery Enhancements to give my character 20% innate resistance to Fire damage, or I could use one Fiery Enhancement and one Icy Enhancement for 10% resistance to Fire damage and 10% resistance to Cold damage. The Keepers of these gems can be found in Hebian-To.
- I continued searching backwards from there, but I didn't find anything terrible interesting so I'll spare you the details. At any rate, all my searching gave me enough information to decide where in the code path we need to start supporting 64-bit integers and pointed out all the locations on the server I would need to modify to match. It also allowed me to make some minor improvements to bits of the code path that were less than optimal – turns out we were doing some silly stuff to figure out if you had leveled every time you gained XP – and reminded me of extra test cases to write up in the specification. You can see why I say that searching is one of my foremost coding tools. There's nothing magical about working with our code base; it's just a matter of finding a starting point and unraveling things in a logical fashion from there.
- So... if I can't spend it on capped skills, what do I do with the experience I earn at the highest levels?
- That search lead me to two methods called AddCharacterPoints and AddProficiencyPoints . When I searched for everywhere these methods are used, I found about what I expected. AddProficiencyPoints is called by NPCs and when using a skill gives you skill experience. AddCharacterPoints is called by NPCs , by the allegiance system , by the fellowship system , and by creatures when you kill them. It's also, however, called by AddProficiencyPoints – because 10% of the XP you earn by using skills is also added to your available experience. I knew that, at some point, but I'd forgotten it, so it's a good thing I did a search or I might have missed this case.
- Q: What will my new level be? Third-party apps tell me that I'm level 210 already. Will I be level 210 after I install Throne of Destiny?
- A: No. We are removing the experience scaling system completely. Under the old system, if you were killing a creature that more than a few levels below you in level, you received only a fraction of the experience for that kill. This was meant to prevent high level players from camping low level areas for experience. However, because of the exponential experience curves in Asheron's Call, even the full experience value of a creature more than a few levels below you is a tiny drop in the bucket compared to what you are likely to need for your next level or another skill point. So high level players aren't going to be camping low level areas for experience anyway, because that practice just isn't very efficient. Given that, it makes more sense to simply remove the scaling system.
- Beginning this week and continuing every week until the launch, we'll be posting one or more new articles, FAQs, forum threads, art pieces and/or dev diaries from the Throne of Destiny development team. The goal here is two-fold; let you know some of the details of what is happening, so you can comment and ask questions about them, and, frankly, to tease y'all a little bit between now and the launch, because we haven't yet revealed all of the new features that will launch with TD . We'll cover everything from the new minimum machine specs you'll need to run the game to how the level cap, augmentation gems and rare items will work in the game to just what the graphics upgrade will look like when the 6,000 textures have been replaced. Every subject we cover will have a forum thread assigned to it, so you can comment and ask questions.
- Wouldn't it be neat, someone said, to have very rare items drop in loot? Like, you know, really cool stuff, potions that boosted your health 200 for a short period or a pearl that increased strength by 250 for a few minutes. Now, wouldn't that be way cool?
- If the world happens to go down unexpectedly late at night, or during the weekend it is possible that it may not be brought back online until regular US east coast business hours.
- And who knows? Maybe one day I'll actually make it out of the Training Academy on Darktide without getting ganked.
- When I was done with a first draft, I sent it out to Allan and Brandon for their feedback. After a few rounds of feedback and revision, we had come up with a robust history, which I hope will help with future lore-writing for Viamontians.
- To acquire an Augmentation, you first need to obtain a Blank Augmentation Gem. Once you've found one of these, bring it to one of the NPCs listed below. Each NPC carries a different Augmentation Gem, which he or she will exchange for a Blank Gem or one of the other Augmentation Gems.
- We're also porting back, where it makes sense for AC, some core engine and server code changes in the Middle-Earth Online development tree. This doesn't mean we're porting back the MEO graphics engine; the incompatibility between using Maya and bones in MEO and the segmented limbs in AC is just too great. Rather, we're pulling back some nice bits of code that should optimize some functions . The Core Software team in Westwood has been doing some nice work and we decided to add a couple days to the current milestone to grab some of it.
- "Exactly!"
- Other art tasks we've been working on recently include vetting and approving the art for the new rare items, integrating the new Viamontian buildings into the AC:TD build tree so we can play around with them and really digging into modeling the new quest objects. This week, we're also heavily into animating the new monsters; the Eater is the first up.
- The "old formula", ignoring all other factors, is currently your level divided by ten, with a chance of dropping an additional one or two items. This formula will generally apply to characters on accounts that have not purchased Throne of Destiny.
- Q: Will the level limits on XP-sharing fellowships be changed?
- We also have a price cap: We expect the Suggested Retail Price to be at or around $29.99. If the SRP is going to end up much different than that, we'll let you know immediately.
- * Revisiting the display levels of creatures that are targeted at level 126+ characters to take into account the fact that these characters are now 150 or 200 instead of 126;
* Providing Augmentation Gems that ameliorate the effect of the scaling;
* Revising the underlying system of experience scaling.
- That isn't as easy as it sounds, due mainly to some legacy code we're dealing with now. We'll no doubt have to write a new tool to handle it efficiently; Lodestone, a consultant group that we're working with on the graphics upgrade, has some clever ideas we're going to try on for size.
- This Augmentation reduces the number of items dropped by a character upon death. Each use of this Augmentation reduces the number of items dropped on death by five. The Augmentation may be used up to three times over the course of a character's life and can potentially even reduce your death items to zero. This Augmentation does not change the number of items dropped in a PK death.
- One of my favorite parts about working as a game designer is creating backstory and lore. It draws upon the same energies and skill sets as one of my favorite pastimes, which is playing in or running tabletop role-playing games.
- All of us on the AC franchise – the Live Team, the expansion pack team, QA, NetOps and the Envoys – want to thank you again for supporting the game, especially since we reacquired it last year. It means a lot to us that you still play and enjoy AC; you're the reason we're investing millions of dollars and tens of thousands of development hours in the game.
- A: Go to Sanamar – you can either start there with a new character or take one of the portals located in Holtburg, Shoushi and Yaraq. In Sanamar you will find Turbine Vendors and a Turbine Emissary. Buy a level token from a Vendor and hand it in to the Emissary.
- We don't anticipate that this will be a huge issue immediately at the launch of the expansion, so we're not planning on changing the system as part of Throne of Destiny. We are, however, considering redesigning parts of the fellowship system through the monthly updates in order to make it generally more social and inclusive, and we will doubtless address this issue at that time.
- * Cost: 1 billion experience
- * Cost: 2 billion experience
- * Cost: 500 million experience
- A: The exact chart is rather too large to be posted here. The best way to describe it is that the well-known extrapolations of this table that currently exist in the player community are close enough for basic planning.
- * Cost: 1 billion experience
* Keeper: Husoon of Zaikhal
- - Jessica
- So, if you don't receive an invitation for this first round, don't worry, you may get a chance to preview it later on. There will be a pretty hefty download involved, around 400 MB; you've been warned. You'll also need an active account on the Turbine Billing system to be part of the test or preview. If you haven't yet migrated your account and want to be involved with the test or preview, now is the time, :D.
- -7776000.0
- Can you imagine the conflicts you'd run into trying to do that? That old legacy code is going to be an issue every step of the way. It can be done; it just has its own set of unique issues with which you have to deal and you never know when something you didn't anticipate is going to rear up and bite you in the butt.
- Example: My character can carry 10,000 Burden Units of equipment before he becomes overburdened. After using this Augmentation Gem, he can carry 12,000 BU before he becomes overburdened.
- * Cost: 1 billion experience
* Keeper: Alison Dulane of the Bandit Castle
- Q: Will there be any change to the rate of advancement for uber-level characters?
- The cost to work off a single point of vitae loss increases based on character level. By level 15 or so, it should take about 5 kills to work off 5% vitae loss. Around level 70, it's 10. It reaches 15 around level 160 and 20 at level 275. This is true for all characters, whether or not they are on a Throne of Destiny account.
- Each of these Augmentations will increase one of your innate attributes by five points. No innate attribute can go above 100. You may use up to ten of these Augmentations over the life of your character.
- So, to sum up: There are currently two level caps in AC. The true level cap occurs at level 126, when total XP can no longer be increased. The effective level cap occurs somewhere between the extrapolated levels of 233 and 261 when invested XP can no longer be increased.
- Which worlds, you ask? This question scares me, because everyone is going to want the fresh machines for their main world and we can't please everyone. One world is an obvious choice: Darktide. The nature of the combat on that world is such that it makes sense to have it running on our best hardware, so Darktide will be getting one of the makeovers. As for the second world: we'll look over the logs and make a choice based on a number of metrics, including the number of active accounts and overall use. If two or three worlds are close on those metrics... I don't know, maybe we'll hold a raffle or take bribes, :D.
- See, in our current system, all the XP values of a character – including the counters for total XP, available XP, and the XP invested into each skill and attribute – are stored in 32-bit integers. This means that there is an implicit cap on these values. You cannot store a number larger than about 4.2 billion in a 32-bit integer. So total experience is capped at approximately 4.2 billion – or, using our handy XP-to-level table, level 126. So a player character can never exceed level 126.
- And because someone is certainly going to ask: Yeah, we did plan a lot of extra slack time into the engineering schedule long before we began coding, more than I've ever planned into a project before; I'm talking about a full man-year of padding just for legacy issues. We ended up being bit harder than we thought we would by those issues.
- While this isn't directly related to the expansion pack, I want to discuss hardware in general. As most of you know, when we bought the game back from Microsoft, we inherited the old equipment used to run the game – servers, routers, hard drive arrays, et al – as part of the deal. Some of those servers are seven years old and are starting to act funky; remember the SQL servers that died last year? Some of these funky-acting game servers are bound to start failing soon; hey, you'd keel over, too, if someone kept you working for seven years straight without a break.
- Next I reviewed the last of the building texture batches that came back from the out-sourcers. That's 1000 down, 5500 more to go. Whew! Unfortunately I had to send back 23 because they needed a few improvements. So only 977 down, 5523 to go.
- As you might imagine from the Development section of this letter, we're spending quite a lot of time on graphics upgrade and UI issues. Sometimes, the bugs we see can actually be pretty funny. Check out the screenshot of a data bug from an older build. We wanted to check that the building texture redraws from our art outsourcer were lining up and degrading properly, so we put them in an old ACDM tree for a quick look. The buildings ended up looking like they were designed by crazed tuskers:
300px
Thankfully, this was one of those bugs that can be – and was – easily fixed, though it had us scared for a few minutes.
- Example: My character has an innate Coordination of 75. After using an Oswald's Enhancement gem and paying 500 million experience, my character will have an innate Coordination of 80. I could then use nine more Innate Attribute Augmentations by acquiring the gems and paying the experience point cost, although I could only use 4 more Gems on my Coordination.
- Our NetOps crew has much of the equipment in hand and we're hoping to get this done before the expansion launches . When we do make the replacements, the two worlds that are getting the fresh equipment will be down for most of a day while we transfer the databases; we'll give you plenty of advance notice on that.
- One last note on this topic – Throne of Destiny will also remove the penalty for breaking from your patron. This penalty will be removed from all characters regardless of whether or not they have purchased the expansion pack.
- So, after reading your comments and contemplating on them, that's our current thinking on rare items. Now we want to know your opinions. Fire away; I have on my rare Level 5 Everlasting Pantaloons of Fire Resistance.
- In the Throne of Destiny expansion, we are fixing this entire mess and raising both of these level caps. Read on to discover how!
- Our goal is to facilitate the management of allegiances without leaving so many loopholes for fast experience gain that the social purpose of allegiances is occluded. We will be paying close attention to feedback from the community before we make any decision on this question.
- But if we just allow total XP to increase without fixing the current mess – in which total XP and invested XP are terribly out of synch over level 126 – then we've merely added more confusion to the system. So in addition to increasing the storage for total XP, we are also going to recalculate total XP based on the sum of available and invested XP. We'll do this once for each character, the very first time they log in after upgrading to the expansion pack. During that recalculation, characters will also be awarded any new skill credits for the levels they pass.
|
![[RDF Data]](/fct/images/sw-rdf-blue.png)