Posts made by OlivePit

The latest spotlight mentioned that weather will be implemented shortly after the start of beta.
This raises the question of what weather will be in the game. Cosmetic? Stacks? Damage? Debuff?

Putting parts of a discussion that happened on discord here for a record:
Topic: Weather effects and mechanics.
Spoletta noted previous mentions of various armors being more common on different worlds (leathers on Tartaros and fibers on Arboreus) and connected that with other descriptions of Tartaros being hot to come to the conclusion that different armor types will be required to survive different environmental conditions and associated weather.

I pointed out that adding some new mechanic and limitation on equipment choice would be excessively complex when all mobs, players, and equipment already have elemental resistance stats and a elemental stacking mechanic in place. I pointed out that having environmental effects simply causing stacks of cold/warm/shock/corrosion/etc to accumulate at a rate of 1/sec during storms to all in an areas would be simpler especially if also paired with the elemental resistances having an effect on the decay time of stacks.
Notable example is the sea trolls which have 2080 shock resistance (85%). They are not immune to shock damage but would be totally vulnerable to the stun that triggers on applying shock stacks... unless elemental resistance affected the decay rate of said stacks. Normally stacks decay at a rate of 1 per 1.5 seconds, if elemental resistance had an effect then sea trolls would have shock stacks decay 1 per .25 seconds instead which would mean that they -could- be stunned, but would require a lot more than just one source to overwhelm their resistances.
This example was then mirrored to the proposed Mamoth mob where I hypothesized that were it to have 2080 cold resistance you would expect it to be very resistant to cold attacks and not be frozen in an ice block at 10 stacks.
This system could easily incorporate the existing elemental resistances in place for various armor materials and imbued gem elemental resistances such that a simple 200 resist (35%) would be sufficient to protect against weather stacks.
While this would also be reducing the effectiveness of mages who apply stacks the simple answer there is to increase the number of stacks that the abilities apply or just remember that most of them reduce the associated resistances and thus in this system increase the time for a stack to decay.

I hope that the reason that weather effects will not be avalible right away in the coming beta is because they are working out this system because they want weather to be more than just a cosmetic effect.

Other thoughts?

stupid things

dead lands

@spoletta
I still want to tame the giant spiders or bears on Myr...
Considering taming is a stretch goal and currently we can only tame horses I think it is best to not get our hopes up... sadly...

The current continent -Myr- is 60km^2 with 35 city sites, the new one -Aerhen- is 40km^2.
It is very understandable that the smaller size would be easier for servers to handle, and that is probably a good decision.
My concern is how this reduced size will affect the player economy, pvp harassment, and resource availability.
The smaller continents will inherently be easier to travel and collect resources from all parts thus reducing the value of location and specialization.
Having no real fast travel is a major benefit for creating local specialized markets which encourage trade between towns and players. Reducing the area will result in a major dampening effect on trade and interdependence which fuels player engagement.
In a previous alpha towns had exclusive access to the resources of their area, which made location and trade important parts of the game. With that gone now are we also giving up on interdependent towns and player trade?

This might be less of an issue if the continent is like a volcanic island, with the center being inhospitable and hostile to travelers thus requiring settlement and travel on the rim. But would still be hampered by the fast travel ports...

Could we get a far zoomed out pic of the continent? or a description of its general geography?

Nice teaser.
Still not a beta date, but still appreciated.
question- are there city sites only in the steppe and tundra? or also in the lava and mountainous regions?
if it is anything like the current continent I would guess that the lava, ice, and mountain regions are all mob only zones like how the mountain and shadow vale are currently.

so much for 'quarter 1 beta'

@Jazzysunshine
Hi, Harbinger of Famine here.
I think it is safe to say I have done the most testing and investigation of the games farming and harvesting potential and am happy to answer most any question you have on the topic.

So... Good news and bad news.

Bad news:
Without major changes to the plot sizes and city permissions there is no way to have your 'own farm'.
Gathering wild plants, trees, mob drops, and ore varieties are heavily effected by local biome differences.
Farming takes -days- to go from planted to harvestable and needs checking up on every 10-30 hours depending on need of crop.
You cant farm most of the crops and plants that are found in the game. Right now we only have 5 crops.
Anyone at the citizen level can mess with the crops which you do have access, and power over to, farm meaning that if all of them are not on the same page someone might just dig up what you are growing and plant whatever it is -they- want.
Farm animals are not introduced yet... but there are plans for the future.

Good news:
Farming is absolutely essential to the city economy which enables technological progress, so there will be demand for farmers.
The fertility and nutrition mechanics are just complex enough that some time must be put into maintaining soil nutrition levels through crop rotation. This gives risk/reward and benefits to planning.
Not everyone is interested in farming and not everyone needs to be a citizen to get what they need from a town. Thus it is very possible to restrict the number of wild cards and establish yourself as one of a few leaders of the cities farm plots.
Because of localized resource scarcity the value of harvested goods is likely to be stable and due to slow transport systems the further you go from an area of high availability the goods should increase in value accordingly.
Gathering ore/plants/trees will have -some- danger as mobs will be in the general area, so you are unlikely to be totally board, but is still safe enough that it is a low risk task that is necessary. This means that others will pay for you to do the farming/gathering for them while they are off doing the 'more fun' aspects of the game like boss grind and pvp.
Since the harvestable resources are diffusely populated on the island there is very low chance to be targeted for pvp as they cant be sure where you will be. This is in contrast to mob hotspots which are much more likely to be watched and or camped.

Let me know if you have any other questions.

more empty promises left unfulfilled.

no news is bad news

@Logain

The increased transparency is referring to just the fact they are telling us information about the actual game development and not just fluff and hype. I am being serious. Giving positive reinforcement for any 'good' behavior is essential for encouraging them to do more of it.
It would be better if they gave us more info, like the questions you asked. I hope that being somewhat positive will encourage them to do so.
I too long for the old days of Prometheus's direct videos.

Seriously? I thought the data migration was done back in febuary as per this news post: https://fracturedmmo.com/gamigo-data-transfer/
This also clearly means that we would be in beta now if not for Gamigo delays with their launcher.
I am glad to hear -some- news, but was hoping for good news.
Thanks for the increased transparency.
I guess we get to wait for April for the beta, unless they rush the heck out of the migration, have no issues, and then cut the governor preview of the city sites way down from the traditional 7 day head start.
I hope I am wrong and this gets done smoothly allowing for beta to start by the 31st at the latest allowing them to save face.

more fluff and distractors. no real news... and the quarter is ending in 2 weeks. WTF Gamigo

still no news on the beta. sigh

and still no news. guess beta is not happening anytime soon.

AAAANNNDDD still no news... sigh.

will they? or wont they?

drum roll please.

The areas circled in light blue are houses that are a stones throw from mobs.
The very effective and active group criminal hype dominated the far eastern ogre camp as easily as they did likely to the very close proximity to the town and houses. This allowed them to farm the mobs almost continuously giving them an excellent source of bear meat (for paying town upkeep), gold coins, and blood iron ingots. With this advantage they were the only group who were able to test all of the summon able world bosses, make multiple raids on towns testing the siege mechanics, and enchant their equipment to the highest allowed by the towns tech levels available in the test.

There are other places where similar benefits exist and in the case of the Arena of Olyssa you can practically fight mobs while standing in your house. (and be killed by them) or Snipe other players who are hunting mobs there from the safety of your home creating a gankers wet dream.

The fact that in this post they labeled large areas with "TBD" greatly implies that they intend on having mobs spawn even in those areas which are even closer to housing. This is backed by the fact that the western coast "TBD" area is already populated by sea trolls.

How this will effect the game balance is partially speculative, partially based on past trends (criminal hype guild).

If the human housing options are concentrated that reduces the area of exposure/access to mobs and allows for larger areas of higher mob activity. If the human housing options are heavily dispersed all over the map that creates much more potential overlap/exposure/access to mobs which might necessitate reducing the overall mob presence to only the hot spots which would create higher density of player activity in specific areas which would further encourage pvp and ganking.
Having areas of high concentration mobs also reduces the area that can be given to resources like stone and ore. A specific example is Bandit Camp #1 which used to be a zone of high stone saturation with some copper but was entirely replaced by the high density bandit camp. This greatly reduced the stone available to the two towns right next to the camp which slowed their construction significantly.

Doing one thing will cause effects in other things. Some of these effects we know from past tests, some we do not. The general idea of having isolated houses is cool, but will cause other consequences, like the reduction and concentration of mobs which will increase factors favorable to pvp and ganking.

Overall I think it can be agreed that people do not want too many mobs around their houses or their mining areas. As such

are much more player friendly than other options. Not only does it allow players to mine and smelt faster and safer, but it increases the cost of PVP and ganking in the area making them less likely to happen.

While situations like this:

Are just ingredients for guaranteed PVP and Ganking, not to mention kill stealing and sniping. (of the summoned world boss)

Would be cool to get @Prometheus 's take on this feed too !