Contents tagged with balancing

  • Balancing - Phase 1.5 and 2

    Created on 7/5/2016 7:42:48 AM by Alduin

    Hello Runners,

    a German version of this announcement can be found on the official forums. Eine deutsche Version dieser Ankündigung kann im offiziellen Forum gefunden werden.

    the first wave of balancing changes has hit Titan and the first set of fixes and adjustments are going to arrive on Vedeena beginning of this week (and they will be patched to Titan a week later if public testing goes well). But we didn't put the work on the next steps for our balancing project aside, no! Instead, before investing too much work into what we intend to be Phase Two of the balancing project, we want to discuss our plans with you. However, first of all, Phase One.Five.

    Phase 1.5

    This phase will consist of two changes.

    Phase 1.5 - Ammo Changes

    The first set of changes will adjust the damage composition of all ammo types. Our intention is to increase the diversity of damage types you might encounter on the battlefield. In the end hopefully none of the damage types will be classified as "secondary" damage anymore.

    Phase 1.5 - Implant Changes

    The second set of changes will adjust implants. Bragi is currently working hard to give all implants a purpose again and to remove all the comma values. We think this is a long overdue change.

    Work on it is still ongoing, especially since we had to tackle the issues of Phase One first, but if all goes well Phase One.Five will be finished quicker than Phase One.

    Phase 2

    In the meantime the planning for Phase Two also has begun. Since we tackled the offensive part of PvP with Phase One, it is time to review the first part of the defensive part of PvP in Phase Two, namely the armor system. To give you a little bit more insight into what is going on in our crazy minds, let me quickly summarize "The old armor system", "The current system" and the "Armor item situation" first.

    The old armor system

    Some of you might still remember the very old armor system Neocron used to have. The armor was non locational and the armor bonuses gained from an armor part were applied to your whole body. This made setups possible where you could either specialize on high resistance against few damage types or split your resistance amongst all damage types.

    The current system

    The current system splits the armor bonuses into three regions, each being covered by two armor parts, plus an additional power armour slot which applies its bonuses to the whole body. This adds a lot in terms of realism and complexity to the game. You can also use different armor setups for different parts of your body in case you expect your enemies to use different weapons for your feet and your head.

    Armor item situation

    Currently the situation concerning armor items is sub-optimal in our opinion. The number of options is clearly limited and the number of options for certain damage types is even more limited. To add to this odd situation, there are some nice options like the Viper King armor, which however are not available as a complete set.

    Our thoughts

    Both systems, the old one and the current one have their strengths and weaknesses. The current situation in terms of usable armor items is far from being optimal. So what do we need to do? First of all we should ask whether the current system is still optimal or whether we can come up with something better.

    A new armor system?

    This is exactly the point where we now need your input! We are currently thinking about two possible changes (which do not exclude each other) to the current system, somewhat motivated by the shortcomings of the old systems.

    First of all we are considering to remove the concept of locational armor again. We would instead apply all bonuses to the whole body again. Why? The concept of locational armor adds more to the complexity of the system than to the variety of viable options.

    Another idea we are considering is to add armor mods. The armor mods should not be essential, as in that they increase an item's total armour value, but instead only change the composition of resistances the armor grants.

    Again, those two changes are not exclusive, so we could also think about applying them both in Phase Two. Nevertheless, please let us know what you think about this matter! Do you think an armor modding system would improve Neocron? Do you think the locational armor concept should be kept? Do you have other ideas for a new armor system? Tell us what you think on the official forums!

    Sincereley,

    Your Neocron Support Team

  • Balancing - the (near) future

    Created on 8/4/2014 8:06:34 PM by Alduin

    Dear Runners,

    Balancing phase one has finally come to an end. The final patch has been applied to Vedeena, final feedback has been gathered and adjustments have been made. The final patch will be built the first weekend in August. Great news I would say and I hope you will say so too!

    So when will this patch be applied to Titan you may ask? Soon(TM). We will hold this patch back a little bit to carry out some maintenance work on Titan. We want to ensure that this patch launch goes as smoothly as possible and ensure that Titan is prepared for a huge wave of returning players. The problem however is that we cannot give you a schedule on this yet, because our main server administrator Zoltan, is currently barely available due to a hardware failure with his laptop. Rest assured we will do everything we can to get everything up and running as soon(TM) as possible.

    What about the future of the balancing project? One thing is sure, the balancing project will continue. First and foremost we will want to gather large scale feedback on phase one to see what went wrong and what went well. In case there are urgent issues with phase one we will of course patch them as soon as possible - remember we were never afraid of patching at weekends. ;)

    However in parallel we will also continue to the work on phase two which will at least consist of changes to implants, like for example, giving every single implant a purpose again. The development of phase two will not take as long as the development of phase one. For phase one, a lot of tools had to be developed and a lot of research had to be conducted. The tools are now developed and also large parts of research are completed which will considerably speed up development of phase two. More details on phase two will follow soon(TM).

    A german version of this post can be found in the german announcements sections of the official forums.

    Slauncha

    Alduin