Letters to the Players
Introduction
Let’s talk about balance, specifically the balance between crafting, treasure, and quest items. These are the three ways that you can get items in AC2, and they have been fighting with each other for a long time. As we work on the balance for the crafting system, we’ve had to confront these imbalances, and, if we want the new crafting system to succeed, we have to make sure that these systems stop fighting with each other. We’ve made some decisions about how to make this happen – some of which you’ll like, some of which you might not (in the short term). Along the way, I’ll interject with comments that the Vanguard team made, along with my responses to those comments. This is going to be very long, but it’s also a whole lot of information, and a big change to AC2.
Let me set out our goals:
- Make crafting, random looting, and quest rewards all fun and useful, and ensure that none dramatically beats the others
- Devise a system that we can maintain into the future, rather than just making a quick stopgap
- Avoid redoing the entire game’s balance as a result
Our first solution, which we talked about before (“we’ll just buff everything in the game until even Soulbounds aren’t very good anymore”), didn’t meet that third goal of avoiding rebalancing the whole game. But the underlying premise is still true – we needed to raise the stats of crafted items pretty high if we wanted crafted items to be useful… or else we would just have to nerf existing items until crafted items were competitive! It came down to a choice: do we nerf anything that doesn’t fit into the Vision, or do we spend hundreds of developer hours rebalancing everything in a furious attempt to get things back in sync? That translates to a different question: do we infuriate players by nerfing all their existing stuff, or do we have three back-to-back low-content months while we redo numbers? What a great choice to have to make!
In the end, we decided on something in the middle of these extremes. We’ve raised item stats as high as we could go without causing an avalanche of rebalancing. (Some rebalancing will still be necessary, but it won’t be so deafeningly important that it causes us to drop everything and spend months rebalancing stuff immediately). And after we raised things as high as we could sanely raise them, we looked at what items were still too powerful, and decided to nerf a small number of quest items.
We also made sure that our plan helps to fix some of AC2’s “trouble spots” in the treasure system.
Treasure System Changes
We’ve often heard “Treasure sucks! Fix it, stupid!” or another crowd favorite, “Make AC2 treasure more like AC1 treasure, AC1 treasure is more fun!” Actually, the number of these complaints has gone down dramatically in the past four months, as we’ve added lots more rare items to our treasure system, but there is still an underlying feeling that AC2 treasure is a little dull. Why is that? What makes AC1 treasure more fun than AC2 treasure?
Well, I know one thing – it isn’t because of the length of time it takes to get better stuff. In AC1, I would often go for months before I found a new item that I wanted to actually use. In fact, I would often spend days killing monsters that couldn’t possibly drop things that I wanted to use. But even when I knew there was no chance to find a weapon I wanted to use, I was still interested in looking over the loot from the monsters. The biggest reason? I was trying to make money off of the loot. In AC1 (and most other RPGs), you have to take stuff back to a vendor in order to sell it, and you can only carry so much loot. So loot has its own sort of mini-game built in, where you are always looking for very valuable items that aren’t too heavy. When you get a full load of valuable items, you head back to town and sell it all. Obviously AC2 doesn’t have any aspect of this dynamic – no vendors, no item weight, no endurance. Does that mean we’re permanently going to have a less fun loot system than AC1? No, not necessarily. The real key is to make sure that players are always interested in looking over the loot from monsters, even if they don’t think they’re going to find a new uber sword. And that’s why the number of complaints have gone down over the past four months – the rare items, mirra, orts, gems, trophies, and potions all help to keep people interested in looking over loot, and as we add more of this stuff, the loot system will become more and more enjoyable.
But there’s another aspect of AC1’s treasure system that we shouldn’t overlook. A typical monster in AC1 might drop four or five items… but that loot might consist of a loaf of bread, a spell component, a hat, a cheese wheel, and a magic sword. Most of this stuff is filler – stuff that’s a little useful, but not overly useful. And there are only one or two items in here that you might want to use forever (the hat and the sword). Compare that to a typical pile of loot from an AC2 group monster: two weapons, two pieces of armor, and a potion. Nearly everything in our loot consists of armor or weapons, meaning you have to look at each one to see if it might be useful to you. (Or, more often, just look at one or two items and then get bored and transmute all of it to gold.) The ratio of weapons and armor to other types of items is much higher in AC2.
This higher rate of getting weapons and armor has several side effects. It means that there are a lot more junk items – if nearly all your loot is weapons and armor, most of those items are, by necessity, junk. And, as we already suggested, this amount of weapons and armor isn’t really fun. It causes people to get bored of looking at loot!
So we’ve made a big change to how loot works in AC2. We’re going to drop the number of weapons and armor you find on each corpse. In the short term, this means the total amount of loot will go down, but over time, we’ll be adding more and more “miscellaneous” items, so that the raw number of items you get will go up, but the extra items won’t be weapons and armor. So for now, group monster loot will look a little sparse, but that will get taken care of over time.
At the same time, we’re improving the minimum quality of random treasure. Instead of having, say, a 20-point damage spread on level 30 weapons, there’ll be a ten-point spread. That means that you won’t find the really crappy weapons and armor anymore. So you’ll find less stuff overall, but it will be better stuff on average. This makes sense, because the goal isn’t for you to have a harder time finding good stuff – the goal is for you to have to look at fewer crappy items.
And, in order to make the treasure system compete with the crafting and quest systems, we’re also increasing the overall power levels of loot. In the old system, a medium-quality level 50 sword might do 275 damage, but a new medium-quality level 50 sword will do 297 damage. Part of the reason we’re able to do this is because there is no more Item Improvement in the game, so we can give items the equivalent of a T3 improve for free. But we’ve also gone beyond a T3 improvement in many cases.
So that’s treasure in a nutshell: fewer items, but much better quality items. Over time, the amount of loot on monster corpses will go back up, but the number of weapons and armor you find will stay pretty low… it just isn’t fun to find too many of that sort of item at a time.
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Vanguard Question: Since there are fewer items in loot, won’t this mean we get less gold per monster? How will we be able to afford to craft, or buy crafted items? Yes, in the short term it does mean that the amount of gold obtained from killing monsters will go down. Crafted item costs will be based on the new amount of gold per kill, so that shouldn’t be a problem. In the long term, we expect the amount of gold in monster loot to go back up, as we add more fluffy (but valuable) stuff to the loot. This will mean that gold costs of items might need to go up later on – and we even have a crude mechanism for supporting that. Crafted items use coal or other purchased materials as part of their ingredients; these substances are purchased from an NPC. Each month, the NPC can increase the cost of coal as needed, to account for inflation. We won’t go too far with it – it’s just one variable, after all, and can’t be stretched too much – but it can be a simple device to account for inflation (or heck, we can just use it to simulate a fluctuating fuel market, based on things that are happening in the storyline). |
Incomparable Items
Another change related to treasure items will also go into the June update. Remember the yellow-text items? These are what we call Incomparable Treasure. Supposedly, they have the best natural stats of any treasure item, so we gave them a yellow label so you could recognize the best items more easily. However, not all Incomparable items are actually the best items possible. We’ve completely redone how Incomparable Treasure is generated. Now, Incomparable items are very rare. When you find one, it will have far more damage than a comparable treasure item – and often even better than a comparable crafted item! An Incomparable level 50 sword would have 325 damage or so. But there’s a down side: new Incomparable items always have durability. That is, they will wear out over time, unlike other treasure items. Think of them as rare items that are very powerful, but wear out like crafted items.
Spellbinding Treasure Items
Another thing to keep in mind is that the new Spellbinding craft skill can be used on random treasure items. Any random treasure item – including Incomparable items, but not purple-text rare items – can have one more spell applied to it by a Spellbinder. However, there’s a drawback: as soon as you imbue a treasure item with another spell, it is no longer permanent. It has durability, and will wear out and disappear after a certain number of uses.
Crafted Items
Where does crafting fit in? Well, the idea behind crafting is that it takes crafters a decent amount of work to make a crafted item, but the items are worth buying and using, as they tend to beat random treasure.
Crafted items, then, are up near the very top of the treasure system scale – crafted items have something like 99% of the maximum armor or damage of the best possible random treasure item. Adding on to this, they have inherent powers depending on what variety of weapon is created. Crafted items can have anything from armor bonuses to speed boosts to accuracy buffs on them. To top it off, crafted items can have additional spells stuck into them by Spellbinding (weapons get two spellbinding slots; armor and shields get one spellbinding slot). But these items are not permanent – they don’t wear out quickly, but they do eventually wear out.
So when we compare treasure items to crafted items, it breaks down like this:
- Crafted items are always a good way to get a reliably powerful item, though the item will eventually wear out. So crafted items can’t really be handed down to vassals like treasure items can.
- Treasure items are usually inferior to Crafted items, but, if you look long enough, you can find better treasure items than you could get from crafting.
- Treasure items are permanent, and can be passed down to others when you’re done with them.
- Treasure items also include Rare Items, which have unique powers and abilities that can’t be reproduced any other way, and Incomparable Items, which are at least as powerful as crafted items, but also wear out like crafted items do.
- If you want to Bind extra spells onto Crafted items, you have to find that spell on a Treasure item, and then transfer the spell to a Crafted item. So even if you prefer Crafted items, you’ll want to look at Treasure items, searching for elusive rare spells for your Crafted weapons and armor.
To make sure that this system stays in balance, crafted items are being directly mapped to treasure items. That is, we might code it by saying that a L50 crafted sword has 98.7% of the possible damage of a L50 treasure sword. This way, if we increase the power of treasure items in the future, crafted items will automatically get more powerful as well – the ratios will stay correct, and they’ll stay in balance with each other.
Inherent Powers of Crafted Items
As I mentioned, crafted items come with inherent powers built right into them. There are several different sets of powers, and the available powers also vary based on what type of item it is (gloves can have some powers, but breastplates can have other powers). The list of powers that crafted armor can have include: bonus health regeneration, increases to max. vigor and health, hit absorption (it has a small percentage chance to completely negate a hit, so that the attack does 0 damage), runspeed boosts, and offensive mastery increases. Or you can opt to just create Heavy Armor – it doesn’t have inherent powers, but it has a lot more armor instead! You can also put one extra spell into any crafted item with Spellbinding.
Crafted weapons are similarly powered. They can have things like an increase to critical hits, reduced vigor, improved variance, offensive mastery, extra armor, or just raw extra damage. You can also put two extra spells into any crafted item with Spellbinding. Or, if you choose to create Arcane Crafted Weapons, you can trade built-in powers for a third Spellbinding slot.
The goal of all this is to make sure that Crafted items are well worth the effort it takes to make them.
Quest Items
The third aspect of balance is quest items. Quest items are where our big balance problems came from, really, because Quest items are very powerful in today’s game, especially between levels 40 and 52 or so. The original idea was that quest items would fill particular niches, so you might be given a quest weapon that’s great for killing Olthoi, but your crafted weapon would still be better for killing other monsters. There are two problems with this. First, a great number of quest items don’t fill a niche – they just directly compete with treasure and craft items, and they usually win. Second, the whole “fill a niche” thing isn’t as easy as it sounds. When we’ve tried, we seem to end up with items that are too powerful or too weak. Our technology for filling niches is too heavy-handed… we need new ways to fill niche roles. So that’s an ongoing task for us – filling niches successfully. But in the short term, we have to come to terms with some existing quest items that are extremely powerful compared to what the treasure or crafting system can generate.
Right now, quest items usually “win” – they are typically the best items in the game for huge ranges of levels, until they eventually become obsolete. The problem with this is that they obsolete crafted items for all the levels that they “win.” On the other hand, if they don’t “win,” then what’s the point of any of these items? These things aren’t niche items – they’re just general weapons and armor. If they aren’t great, then nobody’s going to use them for anything.
Since we can’t go back and force every quest item into a niche, we’ve decided that the best way to fit these items into our system is to let them be the best possible item for a few levels, but not for too long a range. That way, they’re worth questing for, but they become obsolete in a level or two. Our improvements to the treasure and crafted item numbers cause nearly everything to sort of fall into place, with only a handful of serious outliers.
Comparisons Between Crafted Items and Quest Items
Let’s look at some examples of how the numbers play out:
NEW Crafted Heavy Breastplate (this is the variety of crafted item that has the most armor):
83 armor at level 45,
93 armor at level 47,
102 armor at level 50,
122 armor at level 50 lore 15ish
Plus one additional magic enchantment of your choice.
Artefon Breastplate (King’s):
90 armor at level 45+
99 armor at level 45+ (with T3 Improve)
Plus inherent fire protection.
So in this case, the Artefon armor is only better than crafted armor for a few levels. However, if you have the item T3 Improved, then it’s overpowered for a few levels higher than we’d like, which is why we’ve talked about removing the existing Item Improvements from all quest items (but not random treasure items). We’re still discussing whether we need to do that or not, but we’re leaning towards doing something like it. Anyway, let’s look at another comparison:
NEW Crafted Heavy Helmet (the variety with best armor instead of other features):
17 armor at level 40,
23 armor at level 45,
29 armor at level 50.
Plus one additional magic enchantment of your choice.
Tyrant Helm:
25 armor at level 45+
Plus Tyrants Ward protection.
The Tyrant helm fits fine. Now let’s look at some problem items:
NEW Crafted Reinforced Boots:
15 armor at level 40,
19 armor at level 45,
24 armor at level 50,
29 armor at level 50, lore 15ish
Plus, 15% runspeed increase, and one spell of your choice.
Boots of the Lost Heroes:
20 armor at level 40+
22 armor at level 40+ (Improved)
Plus, 15% runspeed increase, +100 health, and +100 vigor.
So the Boots of the Lost Heroes are the best boots to wear for a long, long time. It’s not so much the armor level that gives us trouble here – the armor level “wins” for a long time, true, but it’s really only a couple points of armor. The real trouble is with the buffs – nothing can compete with those buffs. And it’s not like the boots require days of arduous questing. It’s pretty easy to get these boots, and they obsolete craft recipes for a very long time. We’ve decided we need to nerf these boots.
NERFED Boots of the Lost Heroes:
20 armor at level 40+ (not improvable)
Plus, 15% runspeed increase, +25 health, and +25 vigor.
Now, the boots are still the best thing to wear for several levels, but they aren’t excessively overpowered.
Let’s look at some weapon comparisons:
NEW Crafted Heavy Sword: (The variety with the best damage)
240 damage at level 40
282 damage at level 45
320 damage at level 50
Plus two spells of your choice.
NEW Crafted Guardian Sword: (The variety that gives you extra armor as its bonus)
230 damage at level 40
268 damage at level 45
307 damage at level 50
Plus extra natural armor. You’d get 14 extra AR at level 50, and a few points less at the earlier levels. And also you can add two spells of your choice.
Hero Sword
320 damage at level 50+
Looks like the Hero Sword loses out here – the range of its usefulness is pretty small. That’s okay, we can buff quest items later, if we really feel the need to. But let’s look at the Soulbound weapon. This is where we run into trouble.
NEW Crafted Champion Sword:
230 damage at level 40
268 damage at level 45
307 damage at level 50
Plus, +16.6 offensive mastery points, and two spells of your choice
Soulbound Weapon of Linvak:
264 damage at level 40+
288 damage at level 40+ (Improved)
Plus, +37.5 offensive mastery points
Here we have a serious problem. We raised weapon power as high as we could comfortably raise it, but still the Linvak Soulbound weapon is VERY powerful – it’s the best weapon for levels 40-48, easily. And for many classes and templates, that +37.5 mastery makes this the weapon of choice for many levels beyond that. Even after all the buffing we could do, crafted items still can’t compete with this reasonably. So we have to nerf it.
NERFED Soulbound Weapon of Linvak:
250 damage at level 40+
Plus, +25 offensive mastery points
When we nerf it, it’s still the best weapon possible for a level 40 or 41, and it still has a better accuracy buff than can be provided by the craft system, so it fills a niche, to some extent. This is a painful decision, particularly because we already said we weren’t going to nerf Soulbounds. But that was before we ran the numbers and just felt we had to do it. (I’ll talk about this in more detail in a second.) The nerfed version also seems to fit pretty well with the difficulty of the quest.
There are a couple other items that we just couldn’t let stand. One of them is the Kingdom leggings. Let’s compare:
NEW Crafted Heavy Leggings: (best armor)
32 armor at level 40
40 armor at level 45
50 armor at level 50
83 armor at level 50, lore 90ish
Plus, one spell of your choice
Kingdom Leggings:
60 armor at level 45
75 armor at level 45 (crystal imbued)
81 armor at level 50, lore 92 (Augmented version)
The kingdom pants are the best pants in the game for something like 15 levels! And, when augmented, they once again “win” for another few levels. And these are LONG levels – the 50s are extremely long, as you know. So we just have to nerf these pants.
NERFED Kingdom Leggings:
47 armor at level 45
59 armor at level 45 (crystal imbued)
81 armor at level 50, lore 92 (Augmented version)
So now they still “win” by a lot for several levels, and they should, as they’re the reward for a very difficult quest. The Augmented version actually loses out here – it is made obsolete by the new crafted armor. We’ll think of something to do for those in the future, though.
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Vanguard comments: it takes many hours to make the Kingdom leggings! It doesn’t seem fair to nerf them. Answer: it was a pretty tough decision, because it does take a long time to get the kingdom pants. But it’s not long enough that the reward should basically beat everything else in the game up past level 60. In the end, we felt it was just too far out there. The other pieces of Kingdom armor, though also very powerful, don’t need nerfing due to the amount of work it takes to make them. But they also become obsolete much faster than the pants. |
Finally, there is the Sun Shield. We kept cranking up shield levels as far as we could comfortably go, and now shield armor has about as much protection as a breastplate. However, the Sun Shield is still the best shield in the game for too many levels:
NEW Crafted Heavy Shield: (max SR)
84 armor at level 45, 150 dmg
105 armor at level 50, 174 dmg
Plus, one spell of your choice.
Sun Shield:
111 armor at level 45+, 111 dmg but 0 variance
Plus, inherent glow.
So the Sun Shield’s armor level still wins for something like 6 or 7 levels, which is just too large a range. We’ve taken a little armor off of it, and redone its damage/variance to be more normalized.
NERFED Sun Shield:
101 armor at level 45+, 131 dmg and normal variance
After this nerf, the Sun Shield is still arguably the best shield for 3 levels. It’s unequivocally the best shield for level 45s.
The changing of the variance might cause some questions. The problem with 0% variance is that it was done for flavor, just to give the shield something else interesting about it. But the designer of the shield didn’t realize a quirk of the game (and other devs didn’t catch the mistake in time) – the variance of a weapon or shield is also used as the variance for skill bonus damage. So a 0 variance shield means that you get full damage from your shield attacks, instead of getting between 80% and 100% of it, like you would with a regular 20% variance shield. This doesn’t mean much at low levels, but in time, with Major Damage Bonus, this turns into thousands of extra damage. Of course, by the time it’s a huge difference, the armor level of the shield would be much lower than normal, but we still don’t like the idea of people swapping out the Sun Shield to execute attacks and then switching back to a different shield with higher armor. Since we’re nerfing the item anyway, it made sense to fix this, too.
(Incidentally, this quirk of how variance affects skill bonus damage is why the style of crafted weapons with improved variance might not seem as good as the variety with improved damage – the improved variance is more useful than it seems, if you take high-damage skills into account. This is a very obscure but important aspect of the game, and we’ll work on ways to better display this information in game.)
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Vanguard comments: By raising shield levels, you’re comparatively weakening classes who can’t wear shields, like Claw Bearers and Raiders. Answer: Well, this is true, but most people were using Sun Shields (or better) anyway… we haven’t made this problem any worse here. We’ve been talking about the balance between shield wielders and non-shielders, and we’re a bit divided as to whether it’s a problem or not. If we eventually decide to rectify this, we’ve talked of adding special “off-hand jewelry” – something that you can wear on your off hand instead of a shield or second weapon. Think “Michael Jackson-Style Glove of Invulnerability” or perhaps a “Hand-Held Totem of Accuracy.” But I’m not sure if or when we’ll add that new type of jewelry. |
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Vanguard comments: it seems like the new crafted weapons are much better than the old treasure items we’re used to, but the crafted armor isn’t much better. Answer: there are two reasons for this appearance. The first is that we had already heavily augmented level 50 loot a lot earlier, back last year when we were trying to appease level 45-50 players by giving them really powerful items. We already used up our range of acceptable improvements in the 45-50 range, so crafted armor isn’t a dramatic increase from what you’re used to, there. (We had some more leeway with weapons in that level range.) However, the crafted armor below and above that range is pretty well improved. Level 60 crafted items are very good – for instance, L60 crafted pants handily beat Augmented Kingdom Armor. The other reason that the numbers might seem low at level 50 is because players are used to thinking of their level 53 or 54 item as a level 50 item, because it has a tiny amount of Arcane Lore. When we originally created Arcane Lore, we decided that we would only expect players to put 15% of their XP into this skill at any given level, so that you could use items of your level. That would give you 17 lore at level 51, and 92 lore at level 60. Well, while we were play-testing the hero system, we decided that the 15% number worked well for high levels, but it was a bit too aggressive at the low levels. So we changed the lore requirements of items between level 51 and 59. (At level 60 and beyond, it’s back to our original 15% number, so level 60 items would have something in the area of 92 lore.) So you guessed it: those first few levels were set up to have practically no lore. In fact, it’s possible to find a level 53 item with 0 lore! Of course, players would think of a 0-lore item as being a level 50 item. Then when they compare it to a level 50 crafted item, it will seem weak. Comparing it to a level 53 crafted item makes it seem more competitive. We’ve also decided to change the lore requirements between levels 51-53 (the levels that could result in lore 0 treasure items). As I mentioned earlier, crafted items are tied to the best possible values of treasure items. So if a treasure item could have 0 lore at level 53, so would a crafted item! This looks really silly – nobody would ever make a level 50-52 crafted item; they’d always jump immediately to level 53. We decided to increase the lore expectations of those first three levels so that they can’t be 0. We will now expect about 7 lore at level 51, 15 lore at level 52, and 30 lore at level 53. After those three levels, the expectations will remain the same as always. In general, crafted armor has been greatly increased, though there are a few places in the scale where it won’t seem as big a deal. |
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Vanguard comments: What about Item Improves and Mirras on the items that are being nerfed? Answer: any nerfed item will automatically lose its Item Improvement. However, it will retain any Mirra and Orts that have been added to it. We are considering removing the Mirra from these items and placing the Mirra back in the user’s pack... we’ve been debating the pros and cons of it. However, even if we decide to do so, there are time constraints – there isn’t time to do it in June. |
Legacy Items
I should also mention legacy treasure items here. The original Sun Shield was made as good as it is for a reason – it was trying to compete with legacy treasure shields. There are a lot of very powerful legacy shields that are as good or better than the Sun Shield. These shields were collected back in the days when you could kill a Gigurath with Lucky Charm enabled and get level 65 loot with level 50 requirements. We’re monitoring these items. There are about 420 legacy shields on Thistledown that are better than the Sun Shield for level 50 players. That is, 420 in active use. But the month before, there were over 500 legacy shields in active use. Although these items usually get handed down through allegiances, they still tend to slowly get lost for one reason or another. We talked about nerfing the legacy items such as shields, but it really doesn’t seem worth the outcry.
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Vanguard Comments: there are also legacy leggings that are about as good as the pre-nerf Kingdom leggings… Answer: true, but these turned out to be extremely rare. There are about 30 leggings in active use that are as good or better than Kingdom Leggings at level 50. These are amazingly great collector’s items, but they don’t seem to present too large a problem in terms of balance. |
Change of Direction on Soulbounds
The Vanguard team took us to task about changing direction on the Soulbound weapons. Their concern is that the earlier letter will be perceived as something of a bait-n-switch. And unfortunately, I think it does come across that way a bit. People have pointed to the strange wording of the letter, which seems to be saying “we’ll avoid nerfing the Soulbounds, but it will throw the whole game out of whack, and it’ll be your fault!”
Actually, it wasn’t meant to come across that way at all. As the Vanguard team knows, it was originally going to be a question we posed to players: should we try to buff the whole game, or should we just nerf items that get in the way, particularly Soulbounds? But the Vanguard team didn’t think it was a very good idea to present this sort of divisive question to the player base; it could only create a ton of friction and angry back-and-forth flames, and in the end, we devs would just have to make up our own minds anyway. This was sound advice, so we made up our minds before we presented the letter: we’d buff stuff, rather than nerfing stuff. We quickly reworked the letter so that it wasn’t in the form of a question. That way, we could still present it to the players, so they know what we’re trying to accomplish. After all, more communication is better, right?
Unfortunately, the letter still has some of the phrasing from the earlier version of the letter, which gave it a sort of “if we do this, it’ll be bad this way, and if we do that, it’ll be bad this way” wording. The original version was trying to fairly present both sides of the case. But the final version, which presents both sides of the case and then tells you which way we’re going to go, comes across as wishy-washy and, strangely, accusatory. My apologies – we should have completely redone the letter, or better yet, not posted it at all. Because we posted that letter before we had run our final numbers.
In the end, we did end up buffing treasure and crafted items dramatically. We still went down the path outlined in the first letter. But it’s a matter of degrees. We stopped buffing things when we felt it was going to completely throw balance out the window, causing us to spend the next several months frantically rebalancing monsters and skills. Instead, it will create a slow spiral of modest changes. Make no mistake – this will still create small imbalances for a long time. For instance, the increased power of items reduces the importance of offensive skills, which will require them to be buffed so that they’re still as useful. And monsters, obviously, are going to be a bit weaker than intended. But the rebalancing won’t be the difference between day and night. It’ll be small increases to skills, monster stats, etc. Because the game won’t be unplayable if we don’t make these changes immediately, we can take our time and make the changes in a few months, after we study exactly how to rebalance stuff.
If we had just kept increasing equipment levels up past the point where we stopped, our concern is that things would be way too easy. We’d need to drop everything and immediately rebalance all monsters from scratch, and re-jigger skills accordingly, which would mean we’d have very low content for two to three months, and things like the new aura buffs and the Hero Skills 2.0 would be further delayed. But we just can’t afford to have several consecutive months of rebalancing right now. It doesn’t make sense to do that right when we start our advertising campaign.
(As it is, the July update is going to be fairly light, because the June update is taking up more and more of the July time budget. So we’re already going to have to have a moderately light month in July… but we need to keep it from becoming an epidemic of light months.)
Conclusion
So, let’s recap what all this means:
- Treasure becomes considerably more potent, and the really useless treasure will no longer be generated;
- fewer, but better, weapons and armor will be generated in monster loot;
- crafted items will be based on high-end treasure items, plus they will have inherent powers. Their down side is that they are hard to create and eventually wear out;
- quest items have stats that tend to be a little better than crafted items, but only for a couple of levels – then they stop being as good as quest items;
- future quest items will try to better fill particular niches, rather than flat-out competing with crafted items;
- a few quest items are being nerfed to better conform to our new system: Sun Shield, Linvak Soulbound weapons, Kingdom Leggings, and Boots of the Lost Heroes. We may revert Item Improvements from other quest items; we haven’t decided yet.
That’s the plan. This has been a very long letter, and it probably isn’t completely satisfying. How does it all fit together? Well, we’re working on a giant “how all of crafting works” document, but I can give you a few important bits that will help things to make sense.
What you can expect things to be like
First, please understand that this is a huge amount of changes. Because of this, testing is taking quite a while. (And it doesn’t help that we keep making adjustments at the last minute in response to Vanguard feedback.) We had first decided to delay our update by one week, and then just recently we decided to delay it by two weeks. That’s where we are now: the June update will arrive in Wednesday, June 30th, which is the last day of June!
Also, understand that with this extended power, where crafted items are basically the best items in the game (with exceptions), crafting stops being a solo occupation. Creating items is a big job now, and requires a lot of parts. The individual parts aren’t too frustrating – we’ve designed the crafting curves so that they’re a lot shallower than regular player levels, so you can always feel like you’re advancing in each individual skill. But there are a lot of crafting skills, and they can be broken up into three major categories: supply-side skills such as mining and butchering, item creation skills like weaponsmithing and toolsmithing, and Spellbinding. You’ll need capable crafters from each category.
In other words, because of the power of the crafted weapons, they take a lot of effort to create. It’s not likely that you’ll be able to be a “one man show,” making dozens of level 55 swords each day. If you try to do it all yourself, spreading your CXP across all the different skills, you won’t have very good results. It might take you a day of effort to create just one item! The key to success is specialization – different people can do different things, and offer their services to others. In time, of course, you’ll be able to become capable at everything all on one character. But that will require a ton of time and dedication.
This also brings up another problem: how to jumpstart the system. At the very beginning, it will be very hard for people to craft high level items, even if we take into account the rollover conversion from the old crafting system. The chaos of this brand new system will throw people for a loop for a few weeks. It will take time before people understand that they need to raise Refining at higher levels, or that they need high-quality Toolmaking tools in order to maximize their yields and be productive. At first, it’s going to be a little confusing, and people are going to end up needing many hours of work just to make a single item. Even if they get lots of CXP from the conversion process, they aren’t going to be able to “do it all” right out the gate.
This chaos is unfortunate, but it will also work itself out in just a couple of months. The alternative was to simplify the system so that there were fewer skills, but that would hurt its viability in the long run, and would get rid of “jobs”, which were one of the things the crafting community asked for.
We’re working on some extra ways to reduce unhappiness in the first month. Even so, it’s still going to be more messy than we’d like it to be, but we’re very confident that it will sort itself out pretty quickly, as people find their niches and learn how everything works.
This is a huge change to AC2, but it’s also a fun change. We’re extremely excited about this completely new system, and we’re hoping that, once you get the hang of it, you’ll be hooked, too.
