PTR Date Next Week
The PTR for the upcoming update will begin next week on Wednesday the 25th of February!
If you missed our last development update, you can view it here on our website to learn more about what we have been working on:
Into the Vault #153 | New Lands Revealed, Next Patch Details
As usual we will be making a post just before the PTR goes up on the day with instructions on how you can get involved with the testing, along with the patch notes of what you can expect to find on the PTR server.
New Patch Information
As we are now further along in development of the update, there are a few additional things we have been working on which we couldn’t mention in the last update, but that we will now describe below.
Voice Chat Improvements
The new VoIP upgrade is coming along very nicely, and we have been able to explore and tackle a few new additions that we are very excited for. One of the new things we are currently working on that wasn’t possible before with the old system, is affecting player voices in different ways based on things like whether or not your head is under water, or if you are wearing a full faced helmet or one that covers your mouth.
Additionally we are looking into detecting whether or not the environment is occluding a direct path to someone you are hearing, such as being on the other side of a wall or around a corner and having that affect the sound. These types of additions can quickly become rather complex however, and there may yet be any number of reasons or limitations that result in us having to make sacrifices here for the sake of for example performance or stability.
These changes should serve to make VoIP interactions much more immersive, and we can’t wait to see them in action!
Plate Armor Stat Normalization
We are also taking the opportunity in this patch to address a long standing issue related to armor variety and validity of choices.
As many of you in the community will be intimately familiar with, certain heavy armor styles, namely Mercenary Plate, have long been slightly out of balance which results in the other plate armor styles being chosen far less often in favor of it. It is natural that hardly anyone, aside from enthusiastic fashion purists, would choose to use a style of armor that they know is less optimal competitively.
As such, we plan to adjust the stats of the lesser used plate styles to be much closer to each other, making your choice of armor style mostly a cosmetic preference rather than for its stats.
Now, there will still of course be differences in stats between the plate armor styles, we are not simply giving everything the same values. Instead, we have preserved the key differences between the styles while simply shrinking the amount that they vary between one another. For example, the Draconigena Armatus style will still maintain the highest piercing defence, however it will no longer have such abysmal slashing defence by comparison. In general, we have increased the viability of the lesser used styles, rather than simply “nerfed” the best one.
Our goal with this change is to allow all of you to choose the style of armor that you enjoy most aesthetically, without having to make compromises in terms of competitive viability in doing so should your preferences not align with the “meta” option.
We will have our ears wide open for feedback about this during the PTR testing phase, and we will also include some questions about it in the PTR feedback questionnaire so you can let us know what you think before it goes live.
Standing Loss for Killing Pets
With the changes to murder count detection which we announced in our previous development update, it opened up the potential for certain issues to become more prevalent, such as for example killing someone’s pet in order to check what is inside its bags (or simply to inconvenience the owner) before riding away without engaging with the pet’s owner in order to avoid a murder count and standing loss.
To mitigate this while also addressing a long time complaint, we have enabled standing loss, based on the region you are currently in, to occur when killing an innocent person’s pet, provided you are not in the wilderness, and the owner has not assaulted you first, or is not a criminal or murderer themselves. This standing loss will occur instantly, and only applies for the single player who actually kills the pet.
We plan to introduce this new mechanic with a standing loss of -2 when killing an innocent pet, with the goal being to lessen the prevalence of both the above mentioned unsatisfying engagements where pets are killed without engaging with the owner, as well as to mitigate pet killing in lawful towns, as doing so can now lead to becoming exiled due to negative standing.
We are very interested in your opinions about this new mechanic, and so we will naturally be including some questions about it in this patch’s PTR feedback questionnaire after that begins and you have had a chance to test it out.
Prominence Upkeep Balance
In this next patch we plan to increase the amount of Prominence drained by certain high value structures substantially. This is coming as a result of the current values being so low that the Prominence drain on most Territory Control structures is an after though, and not generally considered impactful. This is the case for a number of reasons, however a notable one is that the original values have not been rebalanced since the introduction of tasks, in particular the introduction of the Daily tasks, which gives us an extremely reliable metric of how much Prominence an average guild of a certain number of people can earn at a minimum each day. This value now far surpasses the daily drain of Prominence from most structures, hence the planned increases.
The exact adjustments will be announced along with the full patch notes of the PTR, however you can expect them to be quite impactful.
Tindrem Arena Hub Improvements
Whilst the end goal is to eventually expand the Tindrem arena with new features such as organized and automated matches and events of various types, we wanted to take the opportunity in this patch to update the Tindrem Arena with a few changes that will hopefully make it more of a useful hub for both officially hosted and player hosted events in the meantime.
Some of these changes include the addition of banks and red priests inside the “fighters quarters” areas on either side of the arena, as well as immobile but extremely powerful sentry guards to keep everything lawful. Murderers and negative standing players will be allowed to enter the arena, but if you turn grey while inside the arena these sentries will defend the area with deadly efficiency.
The first simple event we plan to host after this patch goes live, will be a simple gathering event inviting everyone to the Tindrem Arena to mingle and have fun duelling and talking to each other.
Although we will be making use of it for official Star Vault hosted events as well, the majority of the time the area will be open to you all in the community for hosting your own player run and facilitated events in a reliable and largely safe-from-interference environment.
We will announce the planned gathering event after the patch is live, and we look forward to seeing you there!
Miscellaneous Fixes
As usual, there will also be a long list of smaller fixes and improvements, as well as balance adjustments to some spells in the full patch notes. Look out for them on Wednesday next week!
Note
Please keep in mind that as development progresses, any details described above may change or be adjusted where necessary.
Naturally a large focus of the team is also working hard on the new upcoming North American server continent Sarducaa, with more teasers to come on that in the future as well.
See you next week on the PTR,
The Star Vault Team