Further, even better balance improvements!
Hello warriors!
The last week was just prelude – today’s update introduces even more and even better balance improvements to provide the best gameplay and PVP experience possible. Ready your weapons, push the enemies back and claim the lands!
For the Motherland!
Balance:
After the extensive analysis, we’ve come up with several improvements to the game’s balance aimed to improve the experience for underdog nations players. These changes are vital to the game’s core – open-world PVP. While a year ago there were 2 underdog nations in every server, at this very exact moment only one server has just one nation tagged as underdog. Anyway, we keep working on improving the game’s balance all the time, as its the core of fair and fun PVP for everyone.
– From now on, only the underdog nation’s players will earn Glory Points when fighting in its homeground – this change was introduced to encourage searching for challenging battles and opponents in order to climb up the leaderboard and give some breath to the nations that were pushed back to their main city
– From now on killing an underdog nation player is rewarded with 100 Nation Points – that number will be the maximum nation points pool in that case and distributed between players with an assist system; still, the underdog nation players will lose 500 points for dying and will gain 500 for killing enemy players as before
– Disabled moving via Logistician to the minor flags of a location which is currently attacked during a siege event to solve an issue with the players bypassing the queueing system and disturbing the siege events balance – it is still possible to get to such areas on foot
– Updated joining the siege events and Valley of Death Tournament for overpopulated nations in order to increase the chances for underdog factions in these controlled-environment PVP scenarios – from now on, players with the lowest level have the highest priority to join them (taking the highest level of all characters of a given player); please remember that this change applies only to the nations which are clearly stronger than any other one on a given server
– From now on, the time to drop the activity during the State of War depends on the number of guild castles controlled by a nation – the more GCs a given nation controls, the slower the activity meter decreases; It will create more possibilities and give more time for underdog nation guilds to try to get into possession of a Guild Castle
– Introduced the respawn time modifiers causing that the respawn is shorter by the native players and longer for the others when fighting over:
- The native non-looting areas of any nation, to prevent breaking the nation's power and pushing it back to the capital
- A few closest homeground locations of an underdog nation, to allow such a nation to push the enemies back and mobilize
New players experience:
– Introduced a new questline for the Midland players, following the announced plan of adding new quests in order to improve the new players experience – the new questline is an extension of the storyline started with the recently updated starting Midland questline and it introduces a lot of brand new locations, as well as some new in-game tutorials which will be introduced for the other 2 nations too
– Updated the order of unlocking the Sangmarian starting quests – The Disappearance of Claretta is now available before enabling the quests at Basilea Farm and Baalhammon Farm, since the latter two are more difficult to complete and they used to push the players more into the central parts of the world before they were ready for it
Quality of Life:
– From now on, the gate doors are not respawning as long as the location is tagged as besieged – this change was heavily requested by the Community
– Improved the interface of announcements displayed in the main menu
– Boosted rewards for completing the Sorcerer’s Tower events that were placed in the distant areas, hence they weren’t visited as frequently as the others: near the Volcano, behind Hordun Temple and on the traitors island
– Added aa confirmation window appearing when a player tries to sell an item to an NPC vendor much cheaper than its average price in the market
– Introduced the bleeding effect applied by NPC enemies which are using daggers, or stabbing with one-handed swords
– Numerous minor optimization improvements in the code
– Numerous minor tweaks to the placement of NPC enemies
Siege engines:
– Pouring burning oil onto enemies will now count as the assist damage
– Fixed a bug causing that the siege engines were levitating after spawning
– Fixed a bug causing that the force applied to siege engines by multiple users was multiplied linearly, allowing to move them too fast and glitching them through gates or avoid damaging the chassis
– Fixed a bug that allowed shooting with catapult through the gate roof
Fixes:
– Fixed a bug causing that after a Guild Castle was captured by another guild, all structures tagged destroyable before State of War was still tagged after capturing the GC
– Fixed the Bullseye ability
– Fixed an issue causing not refreshing UI when leaving and joining back tournament queue
– Fixed an issue with main and glory arena teleports
– Some more fixes related to teleporting characters onto models of decorations, farming or player placed workshops
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Hotfix 2020-02-10
Balance:
Basing upon the Community feedback and the data collected after applying the latest update, we’ve made several tweaks to the recent balance changes. From now on, the rewards for fighting the players of an underdog nation are proportional to the balance differences – of course, the difference between nations needs to be high enough to even trigger these safeguards:
– From now on, strength of the “Balancing system” effect, which increases the number of earned gold and experience for the underdog nation’s players, is proportional to the balance system score difference between an underdog nation and the nation with the highest score at a given time
– Updated the Glory Points gain for besieging locations in the underdog nation’s homeground – the attackers get Glory again but it’s decreased proportionally to the balance system score difference between an underdog nation and the nation with the highest score at a given time
– Updated the Nation Points gain for killing the players of an underdog nation – although it’s still decreased, the number of Nation Points earned is now proportional to the balance system score difference between an underdog nation and the nation with the highest score at a given time, varying from 100 NP when the enemy nation is completely outplayed to 500 NP when the balance score difference doesn’t exceed the limit required to trigger the underdog status
Please remember that all these safeguards activate only if the balance score difference is high enough to actually tag a nation as an underdog – lowering the rewards won’t even happen until a long-term disbalance comes into place!
Fixes:
– Fixed a bug causing that attackers could lose Glory Points after losing a siege over the underdog nation’s homeground location with a negative personal Glory score (already applied on weekend)
– Fixed a bug causing that vertical doors didn’t open, especially in world events (already applied on weekend)
– Fixed a bug causing that players shooting a catapult or trebuchet at the allies, or using oil at them, received the traitor status (already applied on weekend)
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Hotfix 2020-02-11:
After closely checking the statistics of weapon usages at various places for the long time, we have decided to do some tweaks related to the bows. First, the PVE usage was close to being obsolete due to the nature of NPCs having much more HP than the players and in the end, a bit different nature of PVE gameplay. For that reason, the PVE damage for bows has been increased by 50% for better playing experience.
Same time, we do know that the difference between a "good shot" and "random shot" is simply huge. There are many factors in Gloria Victis which affect the final damage – not only related to weapon damage, player stats or skills but also to the power bar, weapon durability, picking a proper weapon to counter your enemy or aiming at the correct place.
It is all the part of the skilled gameplay, but it also creates a very huge, and often frustrating gap where a shooting player can be frustrated because he didn't hit another headshot or backstab – and a player receiving damage might feel that he was getting one of the “big” shots.
For that reason, we have removed the possibility of backstab with a bow for both PVE and PVP (which with the full dex character could mod the damage by x1.27) but at the same time we increased the base damage by 10% to adjust that removal. Thanks to this small change, while the archers will feel they’re more effective in different combat scenarios, the enemy players won’t be punished any longer for receiving shots they didn’t even have a chance to block, which should improve the balance in castle sieges too.
Please don't consider this change as the final one – we want to collect your feedback and iterate it quickly in the following few days. Thanks in advance!
At the same time, we are aware of NPC archers issues - while it requires lots of work, and we are focusing on horses mostly now, a quick solution to make the issues with the lower, same time keeping them in-game was to add less accuracy to their shots, especially for the lower level NPCs.
Moreover, we have updated the algorithm of the time required to drop the attackers’ activity during the State of War. The changes will be more smooth now, as the activity dropping speed is changed slightly for every Guild Castle controlled by a nation instead of doing it for larger thresholds.
Other than that, this hotfix introduces many further improvements to the recently updated Midlandic questline and a fix to the bug causing that attaching more players to the siege engines didn't increase their movement speed.
As always, we are open for the feedback on the changes!
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Hotfix 2020-02-13:
The last week’s update added new balancing systems with effects scaling proportionally to the power of disbalance. We now decided to remove one of the old balance safeguards – a debuff causing that guilds of a nation which balance meter score outbalanced two other nations didn’t get the money spent by the enemies for tokening a Guild Castle after a successful defense, and that such a nation didn’t get any bonus for controlling Guild Castles.
The buff no more takes sense due to the latest changes which scales with the domination difference, and combined with the latest changes took too much reward for playing better. For that reason it was removed.
Also, the recent changes done to archery removed the backstab mechanics, which could increase the archer’s damage by 30%, at the same time compensating it with a slight (10%) increased overall damage. However, we noticed that the headshot damage can reach too high values, so it’s been reduced to compensate the the 10% damage increase done before.
An interesting fact: the only server which has any nation tagged as underdog at the moment is Monteverde, while the other servers have none.