Letter to the Players
posted on 01-Oct-2004
Welcome to the October Letter to the Players!

Last month in Dereth, Isparians struck a major blow against the Burun menace by killing Morgluuk, one of the two apparent leaders of these alien invaders. But the discovery of a fourth temple as well as continued attacks by the larger Guruk Burun may have complicated matters.

The Queen's forces have begun arming those who prove their worth with Noble weapons, and the spies under the Lugian Captain K'rank continue to report on the movements of the Burun and the Renegades.

As this ongoing struggle escalates, we turn to the future.

Maintenance Window
Beginning in October, we are scheduling a regular weekly server maintenance window on Tuesday mornings. This maintenance window will begin at 6AM PDT / 9AM EDT / 1PM UTC and will last for two hours.

During this time each week our Operations personnel will have the option of performing maintenance on the game servers, which may include downtime. While as always we will try to avoid downtime as much as possible, it may be necessary at times to bring the worlds down during this maintenance window without prior notice.

Scheduled maintenance outside of this window will always be announced ahead of time on the State of the Network.

Rollback Recompense
As of the October event, currently tentatively scheduled for Wednesday October 13, it will no longer be possible to obtain a free level from Jalina al-Hajj in Al-Arqas. We strongly recommend that players not wait until the last second to obtain this free level. If something were to impede a player's ability to obtain the free level just prior to the October event, we would not be able to compensate that player's characters.

Coming Soon
(These are items that we plan to implement in the October event. Many of these items were mentioned in prior articles. These changes are in addition to the new quests, dungeons, and items that we'll be introducing in the October event.)

Salvaging Skill
In the October event, we will be introducing a new skill to the game: Salvaging. This skill will be added automatically to all existing characters and all new characters will start with it.

The Salvaging skill cannot be specialized and is not based on any attributes. The Salvaging skill's curve for rate of return when salvaging is considerably different from the curve used for the existing Tinkering skills.

When any player attempts to use an Ust to salvage an item or items, the game will check to see what skill will give him the greatest return - one of his Tinkering skills, or the Salvaging skill. It will then use that skill to salvage the item or items. The text displayed when salvaging will now also let the player know which skill has been used.

For example, let's say I have a Gold Mace that I want to salvage. I open up my Ust, toss it in there, and click "Salvage". If the game realizes that I will get a better return using my Salvaging skill, I'll see something like:

You obtain 3 Gold (ws 6.00) using your knowledge of Salvaging.

But if the game realizes that my Weapon Tinkering skill would give me better return, I would see:

You obtain 4 Gold (ws 6.00) using your knowledge of Weapon Tinkering.

The Salvaging skill, at very high levels, can actually have a rate of return of greater than 100%!

We know that many characters may have trained and spent experience on a Tinkering skill solely to be able to salvage more efficiently in the field. Players of these characters may wish to untrain the Tinkering skill and put the experience into Salvaging instead for a higher rate of return. To this end, all characters will receive Gems of Forgetfulness for each trained Tinkering skill upon first login after the October event. These Gems will not count against the quest timer for skill sellback.

Our goal with this new skill is to allow all characters to have the option of increasing their salvaging efficiency by spending experience. In the past, only Gharu'n characters had this option without spending skill credits. There are still balance issues with the heritage groups that we plan to address, but we felt that giving all characters access to effective salvaging was quite important. In addition, we had the resources available to deal with this issue now, whereas solving the other balance issues is considerably more complicated.

Ust Improvements
In addition to the Salvaging skill, in October we will be introducing a number of improvements to the act of salvaging itself. The three changes we are making for October are:

You can now salvage items of multiple material types simultaneously. See below for more details.

We have resolved a rounding issue that could cause you to receive more salvage from salvaging items individually than from salvaging them all at once. Salvaging multiple items at once will now provide the same amount of salvage as one-at-a-time did in the past.

You can no longer place full bags of salvage into an Ust. In the past, this would prevent the Ust from working.

The most significant change is the ability to salvage items made of multiple materials simultaneously. In the past, if I had a Gold Long Sword, a Teak Nabut, and a Pine Budiaq, I would have to salvage each item individually. Starting in October, I can drag all three items into my Ust and click "Salvage".

You obtain 1 Pine (ws 6.00), 2 Gold (ws 7.00) and 1 Teak (ws 6.00) using your knowledge of Item Tinkering.

If you will be doing this frequently and do not wish to see the entire text each time, you can use the command /filter -salvaging to block the display.

When we first announced this feature, many players requested that we make this a toggle-able option. They enjoyed being able to drag a full pack to the Ust and have it automatically filter all items of a particular material type. So, we've gone ahead and added a new option to the Character Options panel: Salvage Multiple Materials at Once.

By default, this option is unchecked - the default behavior is unchanged. To salvage multiple materials at once, you must check this option in the Character Options panel.

Additional Salvaging Improvements remain In-Concept.

Crafting Quests
As part of our continued goal of making more content for tradeskill characters, we'll be introducing a new tier of Crafting Quests for chefs, fletchers, and alchemists in October. These will work the same way as the previous tiers have... although the NPCs administering the tests may be asking for some items you've never seen before.

Gromnie Teeth
On the same topic of content for tradeskill characters, we come to the topic of the Gromnie Teeth quests. Since the introduction of the percentage-based Ash Tooth crafting reward, some players have used this and the skill sellback quest as a way to "launder" experience into a non-craft skill. The introduction of additional percentage-based rewards only exacerbated this behavior. These percentage-based rewards were intended to benefit tradeskill characters, not to benefit players who only train a trade skill so that they can eventually move the experience into a combat skill.

For October, we initially investigated a cap such that characters at or above a specific skill level would receive a diminished reward. This proved to be a poor solution, and here's why:

Consider two characters that have Cooking trained at character creation, with a skill of 300.

Character A is optimized for Cooking: He's got a starting Coordination and Focus of 100, has raised them both to 223, and has put about an additional 56 million into his skill.

Character B is the exact opposite: He's got a starting Coordination and Focus of 10, has put a minimum amount of experience into them, and at 300 is one point away from capping his trained Cooking.

For an Ash Tooth craft reward, Character A earns about 6 million experience into his Cooking skill. Character B earns about 420 million!

Now, obviously Character A is built for Cooking. (Although you have to wonder why he didn't specialize the skill, but I digress.) He'll be able to advance his skill to higher levels much easier than Character B. So why is it that this Cooking quest has a better reward for Character B than Character A?

This also shows why our initial idea couldn't work. Where do we cap the experience reward for each skill level, when the target characters can have such diverse stats?

Instead, we have chosen to put a flat cap on the reward of any individual Gromnie Tooth: 10 million experience. No Gromnie Tooth reward can exceed this cap.

So, how does this affect our characters above?

Character A sees no change. He earns his 6 million. Character B, on the other hand, hits the cap and earns only 10 million.

Consider Character C, who has Alchemy specialized and has optimized his character for Alchemy. He's started with 100 Coordination and 100 Focus and has always raised his attributes along with raising his Alchemy.

When does Character C start hitting the cap? Most likely he won't hit the cap until between 350 and 375 Alchemy, depending on where he's put his experience. Even at 375 experience it's possible that he'll only hit the cap on the Copper Tooth reward, the 30% reward.

The goal of this change is to eliminate the abusive behavior, with minimal impact on the tradeskill characters that these quests are intended for. We're confident that this change will still allow tradeskill character to advance to very high levels of skill through these interactions while preventing the quests from being misused by other characters.

See you in Dereth!

- Ibn