Updates to rules and mechanics

Talad

Merry Christmas and Xiosiamas to everyone! We would like to update you on the recent changes we did to the rules. First of all, we have built a new model which puts together the rules simulators we already had in place. Basically the tool allows to simulate the progression of a character and calculate the total time spent in performing certain tasks, the amount of experience, practice and money gained. This allowed us to identify some problems in the current progression, where certain skills were very unbalanced and slower than others.



Here is a summary of the changes:

• 
  Monsters for tutorial: The monsters present in the tutorial have been made much easier to kill, so new players will have a smoother start.
• 
  Quests: We have dramatically raised the amount of money and experience quests provide. They were unbalanced compared to fight/magic/crafting.
• 
  Weapon decay and repair: Weapons and armors were decaying too fast, about 1 point of quality every 10 hits, which was quite unrealistic. The new ratio is 1 point every 100 hits. Also all basic weapons (Small Battle Axe, Short Sword, Club, ... ) have been lowered to a cost of less than 1000 tria, and we changed the repair formula to allow everyone to repair items cheaper than 1000. This should make life of new players easier. Also you can now see the instructions on how to use the repair kits in their descriptions.
• 
  Spell Practice: Practice given when casting spells has been changed to vary based on the spell's realm and caster's skill rank. Basically when you are higher rank, you will gain more practice points by using higher realm spells. Before it was flat.
• 
  Crafting: Practice gained from Crafting was previously only related to the number of transformations completed (example smelting one ore). The new formula takes into account the time spent in the process and gives practice point accordingly. We also fixed a bug which was calculating improperly the time of crafting when a secondary skill was not required. This should make crafting have a similar progression to fight/magic.
• 
  Loot: The value of all monster loot (excluding random weapons/armors) have been rebalanced to take into account the actual strength of the monster and the probability of finding the item.
• 
  Damage in combat: The damage dealt in combat (weapons or melee) by high rank characters was exponentially reaching too high numbers. This was allowing monsters to one-shot-kill players and viceversa removing much of the fun of combat. The overall damage formula has been changed to remove this exponential factor.
• 
  Experience points: When killing a monster (magic/fight) the engine was comparing the power of the attacker and the victim and then assigning experience points based on the result. The problem was that only stats (str,agi,end,int,cha,wil) were considered. The new formula includes stats, weapon skills, magic skills, and armor skills. The result is a much more balanced number of experience points.
• 
  Training stats: Stats (str,agi,end,int,cha,wil) were considerably faster to train than skills, up to the point you could max out in few days. This was obviously not the intent, so we slowed down the progression of stats considerably. This together with the other changes we did, will rebalance their usefulness in the game compared to skills.
• 
  Overall progression: The overall progression of a character includes three main factors: experience, practice and money needed for trainings. Now that we have connected the most important formulas of the game into a single tool, we can more easily balance progression. Also we can calculate the amount of hours needed to reach a certain rank (example from 0 to 100 in sword) or to rank up by one. We have reviewed this and made the progression a bit slower than before. For example to go from rank 0 to 10 it doesn't require 10 minutes anymore, but 3-4 hours.

Considering the big amount of changes done, we will avoid doing other changes for some time, and we will wait for your feedback. Please test the system with new characters and with existing ones. We know it's not perfect by any means, but we hope the changes above are a significant progress to make the game more enjoyable and balanced.

Thanks to everyone who participated to the testing!