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Darklords

A New Elevation

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Hi all,

 

We’ve been aware of the discussions on the forums regarding the desire for a completely new and fresh experience in PvP on Epic. The issue we face with this is the long term requirement in order to set something like this up. As such we've compiled a list of changes we can make in a short timeframe that we feel address the majority of issues raised.

 

Everything below is planned for just after the end of june update about a month from now, but is dependent on a vote to be held soon to see if the majority is in favor of a reset to the Elevation map and some pretty heavy mechanic changes for epic in general. Everything below is not final and we are more then open suggestions of things to add/remove/change.

 

Larger changes to Epic as a whole are planned for later in the year, and will include any successful changes over the next few months as well as extra planned content and changes for that time.

Changes below are all Epic Only Changes and some are also Elevation Only Changes

 

General Changes(All of Epic)

  • New 2k Sized Map by Ausimus
    • This week we will open a public poll on the forums to vote on the possibility of a new map for Elevation.
    • The current 4k map size is a bit large so we would like to go back to a 2k size map.
    • This map will be a temporary map and will be unlikely to be around past the end of this year we have future plans that could easily force Elevation to change again in the future.
    • Resetting of the map would also come with no new map given for the first month or two, allowing for exploration and unexpected confrontation.
  • Deeds disbanding on a set number of chain drains(Elevation Only)
    • A common complaint is deeds can be near impossible to disband even after its clear the owner has not been defending it in days.
    • Our current plan is to require 5 drains in a row to disband a deed but we are open to suggestions on what number of drains in a row should trigger an auto disband of that deed.
  • Meditation effects will cap out at 9, effect above 9 will no longer work on epic.
    • Scaling SOTG is disabled meaning no sotg at all.
    • Hate path creature damage effect will be changed to something non damage boosting.
    • Insanity Clean wound will be reworked to heal more wound types.
    • Balancing all the effects over level 9 are just not viable in the time we have, we propose disabling meditation skills/passives over level 9. These will be revisited in the future when there is more time to spend on Meditation as a whole.
  • Stone Skin, True Strike, and Continuum will have their cooldowns drastically increased to 1 hour.
    • Currently these spells are way to powerful and can be cast almost endlessly with enough karma. We are looking for some feedback on what you think good cooldown lengths might be for each of these spells on their own.
  • Physical Damage Resistance/Penalty will be replaced by Fall Damage.
    • Stacking DR can get a bit crazy, the idea behind this is to change the physical damage valrei trait and replacing it with fall damage similar to the water damage one.
  • Rare vehicles will no longer increase the speed of an under crewed boat it will now increase its cargo.
    • This perk has been long known to be one of the best rare item bonuses in the game for pvp, we would like to remove the passenger bonus and instead allow rare+ boats to have increased cargo areas instead.
    • 30% increased cargo space per rarity level
  • Reduce Hell Horse Speeds
    • Hell horses might be a little too fast, we are looking for ideas on how you would like to see them slowed down some ideas include reducing rare shoe bonus and removing the always on speed traits.
  • Combat skill Soft Caps
    • To help balance out the top tier accounts vs people just joining we would like offer a sort of soft cap on some combat related skills including body stats.  This would not make leveling them any slower but would reduce your effectiveness per level in that skill above a set level for each.
    • Your total carry weight(for example) and other less combat oriented areas will still receive full benefit from levels.
  • Open up quick travel between any server border with a 1 hour cooldown for everyone on the boat before they may cross using that again.
    • Many know that sailing between servers on the epic cluster can turn into 2+ hour long trips, I would like to find some reasonable limit to help prevent abuse but I think we can find a good middle ground any suggestions appreciated.
  • Speed up horse breeding
    • Currently losing too many horses in a short period can mean sitting back for weeks to restock. The current plan is to speed up gestation to roughly 2 days until birth but leave growth periods the same.
  • Remove Karma Recall(Along with recall being gone will mean no teleporting out of stupid situations you might get into).
    • It’s no fun to be tracking someone down from a sticky situation they got into and for them to just vanish from being cornered back to a safe deed with everything they own. 


Map Reset Specific Changes (Elevation Only)

  • Reduce the max slope you can dig to something under 300 while keeping the skill you need to dig it the same.
    • This will make creating massive dirt walls a bit harder and allow more people to help build deeds instead of requiring 99+ digging accounts to finish walls.
  • Reduce the max rock you can surface mine and place mine doors on while keeping the skill required the same.
    • Rock pits are an issue as they add onto dirt walls, though with mine door restrictions below might not be needed feed back on this appreciated.
  • Can only have 4 mine doors placed on any given 11x11 area and must have 3 spaces between each individual mine door.
    • We all know of the current mine door meta, we would like to end that with this new map and put some hard caps on the amount of mine doors in a given area.

 

We’re looking for your feedback on this all but won’t be responding immediately, instead we’ll be collecting some questions and things to discuss on the devstream later today. 

 

 

 

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If you are going to keep the other servers connected.

 

i suggest  maybe travel via server boarder be disabled for around 1-3 months? to stop everyone from having everything ready in knarrs etc to bring over and insta build deeds in 1 day.

 

only have portal travel allowed through home server deeds enabled?

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Reduce the max slope you can dig to something under 300 while keeping the skill you need to dig it the same.

 

Don't reduce the map digging slope. There really isn't anything to gain from this other than more frustration for people. Make it so that you can dig 300 slopes sooner - perhaps at 80-90 digging. I am stunned that there are PvP accounts without 90 digging on Epic but I think its reasonable to assume everyone has at least 80, which is pretty easy to get. 

 

Reduce the max rock you can surface mine and place mine doors on while keeping the skill required the same.

 

Reducing the maximum rock further is another recipe for extreme frustration because a lot of rock is naturally steeper than that. A lot of terrain would be off limits to surface mine then. Your proposal to eliminate the mine door meta is a far better idea because the issue with rock pits is fundamentally how it plays into the mine door meta, not because 100 slope rock is a pain on its own.

Edited by Ols

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im not entirely sure i see anything i don't like

on top of slope maximums i'd also like to see the inability to tar dirt walls, currently you can on epic

 

everything else looks awesome dudes, i get this isn't what everyone wanted from the changes aka wurmageddon, but for something to "fill the gap" before big changes, this is rather nice

Edited by platinumteef
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1 minute ago, platinumteef said:

on top of slope maximums i'd also like to see the inability to tar dirt walls, currently you can on epic

 

tr8r

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Not bad at all - only I don't think letting old accounts on to the server resolves anything in regard to newer players but it is what it is. The other thing I wished for was reversal of tomes but 1 hour cooldown helps a bit. Not being able to tar walls is a good idea.

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I was hoping for a skill reset just so everyone can start from scratch and be on even footing, and also so there isn't too much coding needed from the devs.. but i guess this will work as well since from what i hear we will get updates next year which sounds great. A lot more changes than I anticipated.. thank you for giving pvp some love.

Edited by faty
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I sincerely hope the voting won't be derailed by people who don't care for Epic or even PvP. Even though I've spent the last couple months of playtime to work on a new Elevation deed, I am personally looking forward to a new Elevation map. The question is, what comes afterwards? Will there be a new map? Only time will tell, but this sure looks promising.

I also like the suggestion by@hemrzz- that could be interesting.

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I like this!

Allthough i see the skillreset Point, i don't Think it is a must if the "combat" skills get caped at a deasent level for new toons to make damage.

 

I like this alot!

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yes, but the deeds will not be as imbha, not minehops everywhere, and so on. so they will be easier to raid aswell.

 

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4 minutes ago, Gladiator said:

Everyone will have fully built deeds in 2-3 days. 

There is not a lot we can do on this point that I can think of off the top of my head, but we are 100% open for ideas to help address this issue.

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11 minutes ago, faty said:

I was hoping for a skill reset just so everyone can start from scratch and be on even footing, and also so there isn't too much coding needed from the devs.. but i guess this will work as well since from what i hear we will get updates next year which sounds great. A lot more changes than I anticipated.. thank you for giving pvp some love.

skill resets would require a huge amount of coding to ensure it worked right, as well as affecting everyone currently playing on epic as well. While a soft cap on the more dominating skills isn't the perfect solution, it's one we're putting forward because it's the easiest in terms of dev time as well as addressing the majority of the issue, that high characteristic and fs accounts are vastly stronger than new players 

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Just now, Tedzogh said:

yes, but the deeds will not be as imbha, not minehops everywhere, and so on. so they will be easier to raid aswell.

 

 

Exactly. Logical restrictions like removing minehops and mine door meta makes it easier and more fun to raid deeds. The whole point of this game is to have a deed - so complaining that people will have "fully built" deeds quickly is silly. Preventing people from arriving by boat would be a very good idea as it'd force them to gather most resources on Elevation and not arrive with knarrs full of dirt.

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ONe question, will PMK's still be a thing on Elevation?

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Just now, Tedzogh said:

ONe question, will PMK's still be a thing on Elevation?

 

Controversial opinion possibly, but hopefully not. PMKs have become a "Chaos thing" and I don't think they mesh well with having home servers because it ends up with dead default kingdoms and thriving PMKs that don't interact and live on separate servers.

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Thats a bit of my Point, id rather not be part of a home server, in a PMK i am 100% at the acual server i wanna be on. if it was up to be the home servers would be removed completly ?

 

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1 minute ago, Tedzogh said:

Thats a bit of my Point, id rather not be part of a home server, in a PMK i am 100% at the acual server i wanna be on. if it was up to be the home servers would be removed completly ?

 

 

People keep talking about removing home servers like it would encourage more people to play on Elevation, but it wouldn't. Some people would just quit the cluster. There just needs to be more incentives for Serenity and Desertion players to actually participate on Elevation like Affliction players do.

 

We don't have any PMKs on Epic atm but with a population spike I think it would be best to block more from being formed and leave that as a Chaos mechanic. Encourage people to play with people they don't already know and not just retreat to the same cliques they've played in for the past decade.

Edited by Ols
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The major problem on Elevation isn't the fact that the deeds are old and impossible to break into. The problem is the map is too big. No matter what sort of map we get, this fixes that exact problem. Some sort of restriction on the gathering of materials might make things interesting.

On the matter of home servers and their removal, I don't think it's a good idea. The home server/war server model gives newer players a bit of protection on the home servers, both with the debuffs and of course geographically. It's the way the game is meant to be played, with the "soft" PvP on the home servers and the full PvP on "Wild".

 

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33 minutes ago, hemrzz said:

If you are going to keep the other servers connected.

 

i suggest  maybe travel via server boarder be disabled for around 1-3 months? to stop everyone from having everything ready in knarrs etc to bring over and insta build deeds in 1 day.

 

only have portal travel allowed through home server deeds enabled?

Will consider this and add it for discussion for sure seem reasonable maybe not 3 months but for the first bit I could see this being reasonable.

 

6 minutes ago, Tedzogh said:

ONe question, will PMK's still be a thing on Elevation?

No solid decision but a 2k map might be a bit small for pmks, we are open for opinions on this for sure like with delaying border crossings it could be something that is allowed later once things are settled in but not right away

 

2 minutes ago, Ols said:

 

People keep talking about removing home servers like it would encourage more people to play on Elevation, but it wouldn't. Some people would just quit the cluster. There just needs to be more incentives for Serenity and Desertion players to actually participate on Elevation like Affliction players do.

.The home servers will be staying attached and online with this update.

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Yeah, i know ppl like the home servers, just expresed my view on it, for me it should be one pvp server in the game and nothing else, the pve don't speak to me what so ever, but thats a completly other discussion we don't need to take here.

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7 minutes ago, Tedzogh said:

Yeah, i know ppl like the home servers, just expresed my view on it, for me it should be one pvp server in the game and nothing else, the pve don't speak to me what so ever, but thats a completly other discussion we don't need to take here.

 

In my view that's what Chaos should be and it was a mistake physically connecting it to the Freedom cluster. Chaos should be "pure PvP" and Epic should be "hybrid PvP". I think we're better served by making Chaos and Epic more different to provide people with different experiences, rather than keeping them too similar.

 

Also NO ISLANDS! Please make a 2k map that's only one continental landmass, with a steep drop off at the coasts to discourage people from making island deeds. A poor choice of geography in the new map could seriously damage the PvP there by reducing people's mobility.

Edited by Ols
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