Letters to the Players
Hello again! I haven’t had as much time as usual to post on the boards; I’ve been very busy with the billing system. It’s a very frantic time here as we iron out last minute bugs and issues. Much coffee and late-night work is being had by all. But I felt I needed to step away from that for a bit and give you some updates on how things are looking for AC2.
They are, in fact, looking quite positive from our point of view. But here’s the conundrum that we’ve seen before: often when we’re making great strides, the community will not see all of the details, and we will see player morale drop when there’s no good reason for it. The best explanation I’ve heard is that there’s two times when Turbine is more quiet than usual: when we’re working on good news, and when we’re managing bad news… and our players always assume the news is bad.
However, the news is good. Some of it is a little too unpredictable to talk about quite yet (for instance, Hero 2.0 is still changing all the time), but you’ll see a whole bunch of new stuff very shortly. Let’s get right to it.
New Billing System
If you haven’t heard, the new billing system will soon be in place for new customers; existing customers will be migrated a little while after that. See here for more information.
We’ve been working for over a year to develop a world-class billing and support infrastructure; the result is a resilient billing solution which I’m confident will be well received. The basic structure of our system is now complete, and we’re about ready to roll out the billing system and the new launcher. But that is just the first stage of features; other systems will come online over the next year: better customer-support tools, improved authentication servers, new price plans, and new game features such as web-integration, character migration, and extremely powerful chat channel features.
But all of these features start from billing, which is the most important part of the infrastructure. The QA department is subjecting it to yet another exhaustive battery of tests over the next few weeks before they certify it ready to go. In fact, because our QA department is spending so much of its time testing the billing system, we’ve pushed our September update back to the 29th, so that they have a bit more time to allot to testing our update. However, this shouldn’t affect our schedule for future months (the content team has already moved on to the next month.)
Jolt
We’ve partnered with Jolt to run Asheron’s Call 2 in Europe. See the FAQ. We’re really happy about this, because we just don’t have the presence in Europe to make AC2 all it can be, and Jolt is an expert at it. Jolt is extremely excited about the game and what they’re going to be able to do for it – and their plans are very aggressive. The details are still being hammered out, so we can’t give you a lot of particular information yet, but I think our European players are going to be very pleased.
Treasure and Crafting Changes
Hero-level treasure has been tweaked in September by renormalizing the damage and lore values for post-50 weapons. There were some bugs that kept the weapons from being as good as we intended them to be.
The crafting system has also been updated. Players will now get more CXP for crafting items of most levels. The CXP yield is actually reduced a little bit for the early levels, but it soon starts to outpace the old amounts, and by the time you’re making level 50 items, the reward is more than double. Level 60 items return nearly 300% of the CXP they used to.
I can guess what you’re thinking: “Great, item creation needed a big boost, but why did you bother nerfing the CXP from low-level item recipes?” Well, we’d like to eventually allow you to earn CXP for making low-level (“green”) items. That way, if your customer needs a low-level sword, you’ll earn at least a little CXP for making it for him. One of the steps we need to take for this is to make sure the trait-to-CXP ratio is fair for all levels. Right now, if we allowed you to earn CXP for green recipes, the best way to earn CXP would be to do the newbie recipe over and over forever, because that gives you more trait-per-CXP than any other recipe does! So we made some small adjustments to close this loophole.
We’re planning to allow you to earn CXP for green recipes starting in October or November, unless we notice other snags in the meantime.
We’ve also made mining a lot more intuitive by adding visual cues to your mini-map whenever you mine. See the September guide for details. Check out the mini-map on this developer screenshot; it shows hotter/colder information based on the color of the dots:
Click here!
Monster Changes
We’ve made some changes to Monsters in September as well. I had expected the changes to be more sweeping, but we needed to clean up some of the underlying systems first. The first step is being able to tell what types of attacks monsters are actually using. The visual appearance of monster projectiles is extremely arbitrary; in most cases it was chosen by the whim of the artist during development! If we’re going to have more distinction between magic, missile, and melee, we obviously have to be able to tell them apart.
When a Gurog throws an axe at you, it’s obviously a missile attack. But what if it’s a cone of blue energy? That could mean any number of things in our game. It’s not intuitive. So we looked over most of the monsters in the game, and, if their attack wasn’t already intuitive (like a Gurog axe), we made it more obvious. You should be able to tell magic projectiles from missile ones now. Here are some examples of magic attacks:
Magic Attacks
Notice that there are several different colors of each. These are different types of attack: normal, acid, ice, energy, fire, lighting, and water. (The colors look a little weird in a static picture, but make more sense in the game.)
And if it’s a missile attack, it will LOOK like a missile attack. Here are some example projectiles.
Missile Attacks
These also correspond to particular types of attacks. The two leftmost are basic damage-dealing attacks; the others are:
Top Row: Bile, Numbing, Shock, Harming, Disease, Poison Bottom Row: Acid, Ice, Energy, Fire, Lightning, Water
Again, they look very boring here, but they they have particles attached to them that make them look more interesting and distinct in the game.
In addition to this, we also made a huge number of the “lesser-loved” solo monsters yield more XP. This should make solo hunting more rewarding for classes that have a hard time soloing nemesis monsters.
We will continue to work on monsters in the coming months; we’ve created a Monster Team to tackle all of the issues in a methodical manner, and really take our monsters to the next level.
Skill Changes
The new projectile improvements we talked about are in. This affects the Ranger, Raider, and Alchemist. These classes’ attacks will “Miss” less often – if the projectile lands within a few feet of the target, the game will count that as a hit. In practice, this improves accuracy by 20-30%; it’s pretty noticeable. Note that this only reduces Misses; Evades will still happen as often as before.
Hivekeepers can’t take advantage of this new feature, because their attacks don’t fire in an arc. So if they miss, the projectiles end up landing a very long way away. This feature can only be used for arc-based attacks. However, in the future we’ll find a way to improve the Hivekeeper’s accuracy a bit.
We have purposefully omitted the hammer, spear, and wrench skills for now, but we might add them at some point in the future. We have also omitted the Claw Bearer, but we have no intention of giving this power to them… Claw Bearers have plenty of power as it is.
Just to be clear, this change does not affect monster skills. We might have it affect certain special monster attacks in the future, but nothing for now.
On a different note, we had intended to adjust the Dark Side Alchemist tree’s reset timers this month, as our August changes turned out to be a slight nerf, rather than a slight buff. But this slipped the September schedule and will be done in October. My apologies.
Game Issues
It’s been a while since we talked about bugs, so let me bring you up to speed on where we are. There are four major technical issues that we plan to address (or are addressing right now); I call these the “big four.” (There are lots of smaller issues, of course, and we fix several small issues each month.)
The big four are: server lag, rubberbanding, monster/pet pathing, and sound problems. Our engineering efforts have been diverted by the billing implementation, but we’re starting to have more resources available to address these problems.
Let me talk about each issue briefly.
Server Lag
We’ve seen more server lag and “lag spikes” in the past few months than before. There are two possibilities: players are doing something new and different, or our code is doing something new and different. In this case, it appears to be a combination of both.
Despite popular belief, the issue isn’t tied to just Cacophos or other content, nor is it tied to having a certain number of people online. Those are catalysts, but not the real underlying cause. Something is using up our server resources in a new way. Players can sometimes do Cacophos without trouble, even at peak load times. So there’s a missing piece to the puzzle.
This is considered the #1 “bug”, and we have been investigating it for a while. Although we haven’t found the underlying culprit, we’ve decided to start adding in smaller optimizations we’ve found from our performance analysis. Some of these optimizations are going in for September – for instance, if you have a lower-end computer, and the game seems to freeze up every time you select an item or use a skill, you’ll likely see improvements on Wednesday.
We have more optimizations going in for October and beyond, but these will probably not be the dramatic lag fix we’re looking for. We really need a smoking gun that tells us what’s at the root of the trouble. I think we’re almost there – we have a lot of information now, and should be able to put it together shortly. So I’m pretty optimistic about this issue – much more than I was a month ago, when we were floundering for lack of evidence.
Of the “big four” issues, I expect lag to be cleaned up first.
Rubberbanding
Rubberbanding is when you’re walking along, and suddenly you bounce back to where you were a second ago. This happens because the client and the server disagree on where you’re supposed to be standing. When there’s a disagreement, the server always wins, so you bounce back to where the server thinks you should be.
Rubberbanding is partly caused by server lag. Whenever there’s server lag, the server isn’t calculating your position as quickly as the client is, so they get out of synch. Boing! However, there’s more to it than that – certain objects and places in the world cause rubberbanding regardless of server lag. These are the areas we’re most intrigued by.
This bug has, of course, always existed in AC2. We first assumed that this was caused by problems with the art data, but we’ve eventually ruled that out. Players claim to experience a lot of strange behavior that we can’t explain yet. So I’m not terribly optimistic that this will get fixed in the next few months. But we do have some clever “quick fixes” that we’re going to try; if those work well on the test world, we’ll get those in for October and hopefully mitigate this problem to a lesser issue.
Sound Issues
Our sound system works great for many players. I have a mid-level Creative Labs card and have no issues – it’s rock solid. Yet others insist that they can’t play unless they turn off sound. What’s the deal?
Well, Asheron’s Call 2 was developed using a Microsoft DirectX technology called DirectMusic. Most games use the older system, called DirectSound. But we wanted to take advantage of the new features, so we decided to use the newer tech. Unfortunately, sound card and driver developers have not jumped on the bandwagon as much as we’d hoped. Even now, a year and a half after the game shipped, several of the most popular cards do not support Direct Music very well.
So we’re considering our options here. We can certainly gut Direct Music and replace it, but we have to look at what features we’d lose by doing so, how long it would take, etc. It may make more sense to add new user-controls, so that players could better choose how much sound support they wanted. We’re not sure how useful that would really be, though.
This issue has been on the back-burner for a long time, so we’ve only recently been able to start looking at our options. When we make a decision, I’ll fill you in.
Monster/Pet Pathing
We have a pretty cool AI system under the hood, yet all our monsters tend to stand around and do dumb things. In many respects, they’ve been lobotomized. This is largely because they can’t reach their targets efficiently. Pets suffer from the same problem. We’ve made some code breakthroughs here that have improved the issue in many dungeons, and we have some more code improvements on deck for October/November. But there is another aspect to this problem: some dungeon tile sets are just not good for monster pathing. The physics are too complex for monsters to get through. Heck, a lot of times PLAYERS can’t get through the dungeon without getting stuck on the walls, and we expect monsters to be able to do it? Obviously, these dungeon pieces have to be simplified. (In the world of computer art, it’s often a lot easier to make things complex than it is to make things simple. So they’re overly complex because the artists didn’t have time to make them simpler.)
We’ve been planning to replace these dungeon pieces with better ones for a while now. Then we went and tried to do it, and hit two snags. First, it takes a long time for our artists to fix the dungeon pieces – it can take up to a day per dungeon piece, which means it will be many months before all the dungeons are redone. Second, the pieces don’t fit together in quite the same way as the old pieces. That means the level designers will have to go back through every affected dungeon and touch up the entire place. That will take a long time, too.
So there’s good news and bad news here. Bad news is that this will be an ongoing process for the next six to eight months. Good news is that we will be able to use the fixed-up dungeon pieces for new content pretty soon, so at least upcoming dungeons won’t be as problematic.
Consignment Vendors
As Keth mentioned over here, October is a big month for us. This is when we will introduce Consignment Vendors. We have a pretty cool way for you to unlock them and get access to them. Not all the Consignment Vendors will be unlockable in October; others will become available in November.
Here’s a peek at some of the new stores:
Human Vendors
Lugian Vendors
Tumerok Vendors
This is a lot of new technology for us, and we’ve certainly got big plans for how to use the Consignment Vendor systems in the future to provide lots of other features!
Conclusion
As you can see, lots of stuff is happening very fast, and the team is swimming in a sea of activity. A lot of our plans aren’t quite solidified enough to talk about yet, and lots of them are related to content, so I don't want to spill the beans. But however you look at it, a lot of cool stuff is going on. And there’s more to come.
Postscript
There've been lots of posts about the classes that aren't getting the new missile boost. Remember that the skill work we've done for September is an extension of the work we did in August. The August work pretty much avoided changing base tree skills, so the spear and hammer trees were beyond the scope of the work this time. The human base missile skills are integral to the Ranger playstyle, so they were included in our playtesting and planning. The Lugian base missile tree, on the other hand, doesn't get used by Raiders, so we omitted it. We have a very tight schedule, and we just can't adjust every skill at once! But I fully expect we'll get to them the next time we adjust skills.
It's a little weird to see people insisting that Claw Bearers should also get this tech. In the August letter, we explained that Claw Bearers were quite a bit more powerful than other missile classes, but that we weren't nerfing classes just to obtain inter-class balance -- instead, we'd buff the weaker classes by giving them accuracy improvements. And that's what we're doing here. So this is the completion of the plans I laid out in the August letter. It doesn't make any sense to give this power to Claw Bearers -- the main reason we developed this feature was to boost up the weaker classes!
Now, you could make the argument that we ought to nerf Claw Bearers in order to make room for this accuracy-improvement tech. But that's not something we're going to jump into without lots of thought. If, over the coming months, this becomes the clear consensus of Claw Bearer players, then we can discuss that for the next skill update, scheduled for the middle of next year.
