Weekly Update 325: Last week of the current Glory Season & Combat changes!
Greetings, Warriors!
Today, we are announcing the end of the current Glory Season, introducing some changes in combat, and a lot of fixes, thanks to your feedback and reports.
When developers are continuing our work on the two biggest milestones that we need to achieve to release the 1.0 version of the game and leave Early Access – Reshaping the game world, and changes to Guild locations and SoWs, our moderation team is preparing some changes and improvements in our rules and penalty system, and how you can access them.
We also put our hands on a professional mocap suit, so we will be able to create new animations for Gloria Victis in-house. This is a nice addition that will make our game much more detailed, and introduce more life to the game world and NPC behavior.
Check the details below, and see you in battle!
The screenshot’s authors have been awarded. tomfrana, Erikson, tdues, and alhak – enjoy your Ambers!
[h2]Glory Season[/h2]
Remember, that this week is the last of the current Glory Season! The New Season will start on Thursday, the 14th of July. Also, we’d like to remind you that the last day of the season – Wednesday, the 13th of July – will be a dedicated day of the season's end. You will not earn any Nation Points during that day, and it will be the last bell to donate the one you accumulated to your guild. The top players on the ranking table will earn great rewards and nice titles, so it’s time to compete against the others and fight your way to the top of the ladder!
A little explanation for the new players: Glory is a season-based ranking that rewards you for activity in the faction v faction v faction PVP. The seasons last 2 months and are rewarded with unique titles, as well as gold. Also, every Thursday night you’ll get Contribution Points – an in-game currency used to purchase special items from the Glory Quartermasters. The amount of earned CP depends on your position on the leaderboard, so climb up it!
[h2]Combat changes[/h2]
Unnatural feints spam
After long and constructive conversations with our community on our Discord and Social Media, and after processing a lot of the ingame feedback messages, we decided to take a closer look at some aspects of our combat system. Feinting spam, what was the topic of the discussion, proven to be troublesome in some cases.
Our aim is to have a combat system as clear and intuitive as it is possible, so any unnatural feelings should be addressed. It simply looks weird when a player was able to change the attack direction indicator repeatedly and very fast, especially in the eyes of less experienced players. On the other hand, such maneuvers were not really effective in combat, simply burning stamina, and being easily countered by combat veterans.
Our combat designers came up with a few solutions that will reduce the usability of the feint spam tactic and make it easy to counter:
We are slowing down attack attempt time after some quick feints spam, so a player who will spam feints in a short window of time will release his next attack slower, which will give his opponent a window to land a strike. It seems obvious that making such a fast series of moves should make our hands tired or throw us out of balance a little, and make the next strike slower.
Quick math: When we start holding an attack and we will stop this attack, making a feint (by block or feint button) in the first 300ms of the attack attempt, the system counts a special counter. Max counter cap is 5, and when our counter is higher or equal to 2 (so not on the first feint), the system adds 50ms for every counter point to the next attack attempt time. The full spectrum of possible delay is then from 0 to 200ms. The counter is being reset after we hit the enemy, block his strike, or get hit by him, or after one second (1s) from the last count. This way, players will still be able to make fast feints but be encouraged to mix them with slower ones and other actions. A fluid mix of strikes, slower and faster feints can still keep the use case for feinitng.
Feinting intends to deceive the opponent and create an opening in his defense, yet in real combat, it is also some kind of opening for an enemy that experienced duelists can take advantage of if they read the moves properly. With the changes explained above, we wanted to simulate that, and we hope it will greatly reduce the unnatural feint spam, by making it overall better balanced with more risk. Players who were not using that strategy will not feel any difference.
Longer attack cooldown after hitting the block
We would like to introduce a change that aims to give more possibilities in 1vX scenarios of fights, create more openings and give more meaning to blocks in group combat.
We are adding 100ms to the attack cooldown which is strictly connected to the ability to do the next attack after the previous attack was blocked. It is not a huge change from the value it already had before that change, but it seems healthy for the balance to increase it a bit.
This change should make tanks a little more important, give new players more time to react or back out in outnumbered combat, and create more openings in combat, which is always a good thing to have, to make it more interesting, and skill-based.
Two-handed sword swings
Based on many discussions with players and their opinions, for which we thank you very much, we decided to introduce a slight tweak in two-handed swords. We want this decision to give swords a clear use case in their strengths. The versatility of two-handed swords is their advantage, but their damage (not counting expensive unique items) seems a little too low to be popularized among players. We decided to reduce the “BackToArmed” time by 50ms, after hitting with the sword from the side (the time after the overhead was not changed, so the style of the game using the Crusher Sword will not change at all). Backtoarmed time specifies the time at which a character can move to the next action after performing an unblocked attack. This means that by using a two-handed sword, at the expense of damage, we gain more combat dynamics if we focus on side attacks.
Have a good day! ✌️😗
[h2]Quality of Life[/h2]
– Server optimizations, change of the flow of bug reports, and player reports.
– Balance of the Night Ritual event: Changed the event time from 30 to 10 minutes, changed the alchemy chest reward to a misc recipe box, and increased the silver reward from 8 to 25 silver.
– Updated the visuals of the Upcoming Events window, to match it with the new User Interface style.
[h2]Fixes[/h2]
– Fixed an issue where when killing the enemy, the game could lag spike due to the update of the Character Development equipment nodes progress.
– Fixed client-server colliders synchronization on the architect tables in the upgradable keeps.
– Fixed the issue where it was possible to glitch a siege engine on bridges leading to Tenebrok.
– Fixed blurry fonts in multiple places in User Interface, for example, progress points, and mount window.
– Additional fixes to AI edge cases snapping while moving to waypoints.
– Fixed the issue where Abilities Window could throw client error on spawning player during first loading screen and during moving to or out from Valley of Death Tournament.
Today, we are announcing the end of the current Glory Season, introducing some changes in combat, and a lot of fixes, thanks to your feedback and reports.
When developers are continuing our work on the two biggest milestones that we need to achieve to release the 1.0 version of the game and leave Early Access – Reshaping the game world, and changes to Guild locations and SoWs, our moderation team is preparing some changes and improvements in our rules and penalty system, and how you can access them.
We also put our hands on a professional mocap suit, so we will be able to create new animations for Gloria Victis in-house. This is a nice addition that will make our game much more detailed, and introduce more life to the game world and NPC behavior.
Check the details below, and see you in battle!
The screenshot’s authors have been awarded. tomfrana, Erikson, tdues, and alhak – enjoy your Ambers!Changelog v.0.9.9.5.5 Beta
[h2]Glory Season[/h2]
Remember, that this week is the last of the current Glory Season! The New Season will start on Thursday, the 14th of July. Also, we’d like to remind you that the last day of the season – Wednesday, the 13th of July – will be a dedicated day of the season's end. You will not earn any Nation Points during that day, and it will be the last bell to donate the one you accumulated to your guild. The top players on the ranking table will earn great rewards and nice titles, so it’s time to compete against the others and fight your way to the top of the ladder!
A little explanation for the new players: Glory is a season-based ranking that rewards you for activity in the faction v faction v faction PVP. The seasons last 2 months and are rewarded with unique titles, as well as gold. Also, every Thursday night you’ll get Contribution Points – an in-game currency used to purchase special items from the Glory Quartermasters. The amount of earned CP depends on your position on the leaderboard, so climb up it!
[h2]Combat changes[/h2]
Unnatural feints spam
After long and constructive conversations with our community on our Discord and Social Media, and after processing a lot of the ingame feedback messages, we decided to take a closer look at some aspects of our combat system. Feinting spam, what was the topic of the discussion, proven to be troublesome in some cases.
Our aim is to have a combat system as clear and intuitive as it is possible, so any unnatural feelings should be addressed. It simply looks weird when a player was able to change the attack direction indicator repeatedly and very fast, especially in the eyes of less experienced players. On the other hand, such maneuvers were not really effective in combat, simply burning stamina, and being easily countered by combat veterans.
Our combat designers came up with a few solutions that will reduce the usability of the feint spam tactic and make it easy to counter:
We are slowing down attack attempt time after some quick feints spam, so a player who will spam feints in a short window of time will release his next attack slower, which will give his opponent a window to land a strike. It seems obvious that making such a fast series of moves should make our hands tired or throw us out of balance a little, and make the next strike slower.
Quick math: When we start holding an attack and we will stop this attack, making a feint (by block or feint button) in the first 300ms of the attack attempt, the system counts a special counter. Max counter cap is 5, and when our counter is higher or equal to 2 (so not on the first feint), the system adds 50ms for every counter point to the next attack attempt time. The full spectrum of possible delay is then from 0 to 200ms. The counter is being reset after we hit the enemy, block his strike, or get hit by him, or after one second (1s) from the last count. This way, players will still be able to make fast feints but be encouraged to mix them with slower ones and other actions. A fluid mix of strikes, slower and faster feints can still keep the use case for feinitng.
Feinting intends to deceive the opponent and create an opening in his defense, yet in real combat, it is also some kind of opening for an enemy that experienced duelists can take advantage of if they read the moves properly. With the changes explained above, we wanted to simulate that, and we hope it will greatly reduce the unnatural feint spam, by making it overall better balanced with more risk. Players who were not using that strategy will not feel any difference.
Longer attack cooldown after hitting the block
We would like to introduce a change that aims to give more possibilities in 1vX scenarios of fights, create more openings and give more meaning to blocks in group combat.
We are adding 100ms to the attack cooldown which is strictly connected to the ability to do the next attack after the previous attack was blocked. It is not a huge change from the value it already had before that change, but it seems healthy for the balance to increase it a bit.
This change should make tanks a little more important, give new players more time to react or back out in outnumbered combat, and create more openings in combat, which is always a good thing to have, to make it more interesting, and skill-based.
Two-handed sword swings
Based on many discussions with players and their opinions, for which we thank you very much, we decided to introduce a slight tweak in two-handed swords. We want this decision to give swords a clear use case in their strengths. The versatility of two-handed swords is their advantage, but their damage (not counting expensive unique items) seems a little too low to be popularized among players. We decided to reduce the “BackToArmed” time by 50ms, after hitting with the sword from the side (the time after the overhead was not changed, so the style of the game using the Crusher Sword will not change at all). Backtoarmed time specifies the time at which a character can move to the next action after performing an unblocked attack. This means that by using a two-handed sword, at the expense of damage, we gain more combat dynamics if we focus on side attacks.
Have a good day! ✌️😗[h2]Quality of Life[/h2]
– Server optimizations, change of the flow of bug reports, and player reports.
– Balance of the Night Ritual event: Changed the event time from 30 to 10 minutes, changed the alchemy chest reward to a misc recipe box, and increased the silver reward from 8 to 25 silver.
– Updated the visuals of the Upcoming Events window, to match it with the new User Interface style.
[h2]Fixes[/h2]
– Fixed an issue where when killing the enemy, the game could lag spike due to the update of the Character Development equipment nodes progress.
– Fixed client-server colliders synchronization on the architect tables in the upgradable keeps.
– Fixed the issue where it was possible to glitch a siege engine on bridges leading to Tenebrok.
– Fixed blurry fonts in multiple places in User Interface, for example, progress points, and mount window.
– Additional fixes to AI edge cases snapping while moving to waypoints.
– Fixed the issue where Abilities Window could throw client error on spawning player during first loading screen and during moving to or out from Valley of Death Tournament.