Posts made by Prometheus

Hi all!

The second major release of the Spring Alpha has arrived, featuring:

• The much awaited respec of character attributes and city researches;
• The Siege Workshop - prepare your catapults for the upcoming city sieges!
• New functionalities for the world map: view territory and view nations;
• Massive client performance improvements on asset loading: it should be now 2x or even 3x faster!
• Some changes to bounty hunting and a few bug fixes.

Read the full announcement

Get your catapults ready, Governors... City warfare is coming!

@Kralith said in City Management Feedback Thread:

Storage of the Packing station you can open, you even can click the sacks and the carrying animation starts, but you actually don't take the sack out. This station don't makes sense to get open to everyone. It would just confuse people, that they can craft sacks there, but can't get the sacks out.

Storage at Woodcutting Station is accessible. You can use the wood in it for crafting, you can take out the wood from the station storage, BUT you can't place it back to the station as non citizen (didn't tried this with residental status). The hand symbol for placing something in a storage not even appears. This way is the Station not really usable for everyone, when they can't place wood logs by themself.

Alright then the Packaging Station and the Woodcutting Station are the only 2 bugged ones (for the former the bug is client-side only it seems), since they're both meant to be citizens-only. We'll fix it in the next patch, thank you!

@Dreamcraftwd said in City Management Feedback Thread:

We all want to open the crafting stations to more people but by doing this we lose control of the warehouses. Anyone can enter the city and take any ore, wood, stone, material they would like, so we shut down the city (citizens + residents only).

Could you elaborate more on this? I've just tested in game with stockpiles, smelteries, etc, and it seems they're working as intended - that is, they are usable by citizens only. The options "Everyone" and "Citizens + Residents" only apply to crafting stations with "instant crafting" (e.g. Tailoring Bench, Forge...) as explained by the (?) tooltip next to the setting.

@Kralith did you experience anything different?

@Farlander said in Time of Upkeep of Residentials are not equal at all:

What happens if a player is away from the game for a period of time say for a week vacation? I know in other games I have played that player could put themselves into "hibernation" where things were frozen like upkeep costs until they logged in again.

You can deposit gold in your claim to pay for up to 4 weeks of maintenance

@Kralith @PeachMcD the first maintenance due should always be 7 days after the plot is claimed.

Sadly we had a nasty bug the first days where when you claimed a plot of land it would instead tick weekly from the moment the claim was created (the launch of the Spring Alpha - March 31). This meant that if someone claimed the plot on April 5, the maintenance was due on April 7 instead of April 12, for instance. It's because of this bug that you thought that maintenance ticks should be in sync - they're not.

This has been fixed a couple patches ago but not mentioned in the patch log I'm afraid. Sorry for the troubles it has caused!

@Nekrage the effect of Luck on enchanting is negligible (if any - I need to check), while for crafting I'm sure it's non-existant. This is also a useful info for @OlivePit.

The things that matter when crafting to determine the quality chances are the bonuses from city researches (+15, +15, +20) and the shop (+50).

The things that matter when enchanting to determine success/failure rates are the type of item (weapon vs leather / hide / cloth / chain / plate armor) and its quality.

I agree all these info are well hidden... We need to find a way to explain it properly in the game.

As for Luck in combat, we're having an internal discussion about that. If you don't go below 10 CHA (so below 0 Luck) you're good though, you shouldn't worry too much.

As for introducing a "skill-like" system for character progress in crafting proficiency, we're going to open a discussion about that with the community soon

Hi @OlivePit, the chance to fail "tragically" (the one that breaks the item) is 7% - even without Luck, it's very low. You should succeed often (66%), fail consuming reagents without breaking the item a few items (100-66-7 = 27%), and destroy the item... well, very very rarely.

If it happened to you so often, it means something is not working correctly, either in the RNG or in the actual probabilities. We'll check it out, sorry for the item loss!

Bug Fixes

• Fixed a bug that would sometimes cause a city not to earn gold from purchases of land parcels in the region, even though an entry stating "1,000 gold gained from purchase" was added to the city's journal.
• Fixed a bug that in rare circumstances could cause an item to duplicate when taken out of the storage of a marketplace.
• Citizens are now able to place packaging stations everywhere within the region of their city.
• Fixed a bug that sometimes made a city that received an invite to join a nation unable to accept it.
• Fixed a bug with the game's physics that sometimes caused very fast projectiles (arrows) to go through targets in the server (they disappeared in the client, but didn't do any damage).

@GiaoCodex said in Patch Log - v.a.2.5.1b + Moderation News:

Will this be expanded so Parcel owners can also drag out wagons that are inside their parcel that they don't own?

Carts and wagons are the same rule-wise If you can't move it, it's possible it's bugged because it was left there before the patch. You can always PM @Specter on Discord and he'll delete it for you

@Harleyyelrah said in New Limits on Locating Packaging Stations Is Unrealistic & No Fun:

Oh geez! You mean it's not intended?! lol harvesting the wheat fields took so much extra time because of that!

Why did no one report report it or complain about it for 10 days, it's probably a 10 minutes fix

@LonelyCookie said in Is this Alpha just PVP development:

We have a saying here, "Slibem nezarmoutíš" which (brutal translation) is roughly "Cant do any wrong with a promise".

Ahah I'm afraid I totally disagree with that saying It's a long discussion and better suited for the official Roadmap to the summer alpha

(and yes, I've seen the post, I'll reply as soon as I have a bit more time)

@PeachMcD @OlivePit @Kralith @GamerSeuss damn that's a terrible bug. Packaging stations have (should have, apparently) their own ruleset that allows them to be placed everywhere inside the region of the city... so you don't even have to place them on the fields (which would take farming space away) - you can just place them nearby.

The fix will go straight in the next patch. Had we only know about this earlier we would have fixed it right away, it must have been a gigantic pain... sorry

Addition: you can see it's a bug by the fact you don't get the message "this station must be placed inside of the city territory..." when you click the build button. Instead it allows you to start the placement, but the blueprint just remains red...

@Vialli said in Is this Alpha just PVP development:

@Prometheus this alpha had the chance for people to play for the whole month, unfortunately this alpha is over for a lot of people already. A lot of players are suffocated because they can’t access content due to large PVP groups killing anyone they cross.

Yes, as I've said before, we are aware and we are planning solutions, but that's not something we can deliver before the end of the test sadly.

Please be aware that all testing phases for backers last for 1 month (at least). This one (Spring Alpha) is the 7th one we have and there will be more

Hi @Vialli PvP (the criminal system, jails and BH, the upcoming city sieges) was surely the focus of this Alpha, together with the restructuring of the layout of the world and cities (the Tech Tree, residential areas, etc). Almost all of the dev time was spent there, very little was added on the PvE and player progression side compared to the Fall Alpha.

We would have liked to do more on PvE, but we're a very small team (8 people, of which 3 programmers including myself), so... we can say that all the PvE has been tested already. What hasn't been tested is the interaction between PvE and PvP players, which is happening now for the first time - rather unpleasantly, as you've pointed out.

The structure of the world is surely a big culprit there. Player progression has to go through some specific hotspots, you can't complete your character if you don't... well, actually you could do a lot if there was an active economy with people selling Lore Tablets at marketplaces, but there isn't. So you feel stuck.

We have plans to address the situation which we'll disclose in our upcoming roadmap, but it's going to be a major rework, sadly not something that can be patched in during a playtest.

@RedIO said in Patch Log - v.a.2.5.1b + Moderation News:

Please revert the changes and add a buffer to the end of animations to cast the next ability or move after instead of cancelling the current action, it's really difficult already when the game drops inputs out of nowhere (like standing still trying to healing wave and nothing else). These changes are just making me consider becoming an archer or pure staff damage mage.

Yes, you're 100% right. The issue here is that we don't have a dedicated animator in the team to rework all our ranged animations so that the projectile casting points is close to the start of the animation, which is vital in a game where arrows and staffs projectiles are directional instead of a targeted like a MOBA.

That being said, latency plays a role there too. The studios is from Italy and we can do animation canceling just fine even if servers are US East, although US players can do that better. I've checked out where your account is from and unless you've moved, you're 10,000 miles (15,000km) away from the game server... we have a long way to go with improving latency compensation, but I'm not sure you'll ever be able to do the skilled animation canceling you're thinking about until we open Oceanic servers

@Eurav said in Allow moving of other players carts and wagons on your plot:

I just got reminded of the latest patch notes:

The owner of a land parcel can now pull any cart inside of its land claim to get it out (pull, not open).

Seems like it does not work, at least not for Wagons

It seems there's an issue with carts created before the patch indeed We'll see what we can do next week. In the meantime don't forget you can ping @Specter who will remove the cart for you!

@Xzait said in ⁹Rescent Nerf to mages.:

I honestly think acid damage is alot more dangerous right now than ice or magic damage was. People were only complaining about magic missiles and ice spikes in particular, because almost every mage seemed to have it... My question is... if it was such a problem... why the hell did noone decide to protect themselves against them?

@Eurav said in ⁹Rescent Nerf to mages.:

I don't really think naked mage gankers were a problem... They were basically weak mages without any enchants. For someone PvP experienced with gear, it would have been easy to kill them.

Every experienced player could have protected themselves, and they largely did. That's never been the point. We nerfed that build because it was devastating against unprepared players, and widely abused for PKing without risk.

We changed the scaling of mage spells because in general we wanted the power scaling curve of mages to be on par with that of warriors - same need to have good gear to be competitive.

Mage Armor had and has nothing to do with the need to use armor or not, since the armor of mages is cloth, which gives almost 0 physical resistance and is used for its other bonuses. The missing need to use good cloth armor stemmed for the missing need to have good modifiers.

That being said, mages undoubtedly have issues building an effective gear set like what warriors can build because they lack of good materials for cloth armor. The best cloths in the game right now are tier 3 and they're kind of bad even for a tier 3, plus there's only a couple. They pale in comparison to metals. Same goes for wood vs metal. Moreover, there's an overall lack of mage spells that prevent you from building a real "fire mage", "ice mage", etc.

That's not something we can address in this test, but please bear with us, we'll talk about our plans in the upcoming roadmap

@Xzait said in ⁹Rescent Nerf to mages.:

I bring this up, partially because of Black Widow Spiders. Before they felt like a bit of a threat, just like big black spiders... Now, even without ANY magic resist... In fact I have negative Magic resist due to 6 base Int stats, they still aren't a damn threat They are COMPLETE pushovers. Completely useless mobs. Giant Spiders seem to have been buffed and now have stupid amounts of poison damage. WTF? How can this be called Balancing?

Giant spiders haven't been touched in ages, but you're right that the nerf to the base power of mage spells has made some spellcasting mobs less threatening. We didn't have time to go through each one and raise their Spell Damage modifier accordingly, since it wasn't a big priority - we'll do that in the next patch

Hi all,

this time I'd like to give you a big announcement before we get to the patch log.

As you likely know already, the advent of the proper ruleset of Syndesia and PvP has brought a level of toxicity in our communication channels (global chat, Discord, forums) that's completely unprecedented in the history of the game.

Banter between PvP guilds that gets completely out of line, discussions between points of view (usually on PvP) that degenerates in name-calling and vulgar language, and even violations of point 5 of our TOS.

To put an end to this, Fractured now has its first two moderators: @Rife and @spoletta! Give them a warm or a scared welcome, according to your role in the situation explained above!

Moderators are regular community members with the following powers:

• Muting players in the game;
• Kicking / banning players on Discord;
• Editing posts / removing posts, and banning users on the forums.

I know what you're thinking - what about @Specter? Even though he's had the title of moderator, he's always been way more - a proper game admin, with full admin powers... and that is now his title

And now, to the patch log!

Changes

• The overall strength of Goblins has been reduced - most notably their magical resistances, damage, spell casting chance and run speed. This should make it much easier for new players to fight them, and particularly for mages.
• Some monsters (such as all the canids) are also slower now.
• The attack speed of the mage staff has been increased from slow to medium (and the damage reduced accordingly). It's now a much more pleasant weapon to use for kiting.
• The owner of a land parcel can now pull any cart inside of its land claim to get it out (pull, not open).
• Carts can no longer be stolen inside of cities and land parcels.

Bug Fixes

• Stolen carts can now be opened correctly.
• Items with variable properties (e.g. armor, weapons, lore tablets) can now be put on sale correctly on the marketplace.
• Fixed a bug that would make projectiles disappear in the client when hitting a player that was not a target of PvP (e.g. a good player hitting another good player). Please note that this was just a client error, as the projectiles were correctly going through in the server.

@Xzait said in My thoughts on karma and 'justice':

By choosing the places I go to farm carefully, I have all but avoided all PvP and ganking, because, if you think about it and plan ahead, it's pretty easy to determine where PvP is going to be an issue. The map even calls them 'hotspots'. Seems self explanatory if you ask me...

This is correct, ganking is avoidable if your aim is farming gold.... but if you want to get skills for a new character, or to complete an existing one past the Young status, it's unavoidable. That's likely the biggest issue right now, but we're hard working on ways to deal with it

@spoletta said in My thoughts on karma and 'justice':

Now, there are a few issues with that. The biggest one is that the current implementation is extremely easy to exploit. You can clean the karma of anyone at zero cost, so things obviously need to change. What I suggest is that the karma gets reset, but if the player turns again evil at a shrine in the next week, his karma is reset at the previous levels. To clear his tab, he needs to be a good guy for at least a week.

This is something we've been considering - just setting the alignment to Good without setting Karma to 0, to allow the criminal to continue as a Good player but taking away the exploitable part. It might make it in a future patch

@LonelyCookie said in Spring Alpha Major Release #1:

Basically nerfing the good side, while giving many benefits/lowering downsides to the criminal side

We really don't think this patch has "nerfed" the good side in any significant way. Almost all existing bounty hunters had 10,000 Karma already* and getting there doesn't take that long. The requirement is there to prevent players from switching from PK to BH easily. The criminal side hasn't been really given much either, since most of the dedicated PKs sit at -10,000 Karma or close and it's much faster to get there now.

That being said, notwithstanding how much the criminals cried like the jail and BH systems were the end of the world, they have done little to keep criminal activity under control, so further measures will be required.

*there was a bug with Karma not growing when killing mobs with 100% knowledge. It's been fixed and the Karma of all players with positive Karma has been tripled to account for the losses. This wasn't mentioned in the patch log.