Gloria Victis News

Hello warriors!

Although most of the team members are working hard on finishing the implementation of freebuilding for Guild Castles, along with the Guild Castles balance update, mounts and horseback combat, we have another weekly update for you! This week we focused on the balance between factions.

We’re focusing on it because it’s a crucial aspect of the game. Any long-term issues with the open PVP balance hurt all players – both the ones of outplayed nations, who might find it difficult to grow in numbers and strength, and the others from currently dominating nations, as the lack of challenge can lead to boredom, even if the players from leading nations can switch to the outplayed factions for free.

For this reason, most of the recent updates included improvements to the open PVP balance. This week’s update adds more of them, intended to give more space for smaller guilds to grow and eventually lead their nations in war, which will only add to the fun of epic open-world battles and massive castle sieges.

#NoMoreStagnation!



Changelog v.0.8.9.9

Open PVP Balance:

– From now on, if one nation heavily outbalances both of the other factions, guilds from this nation won’t receive the money spent by enemy guilds to prepare a siege on their guild provinces in case of a successful defense
– The buff “Bonus for controlled locations” (which increases the looting chance, crafting chance and earned experience) is not applied now for a nation which heavily outbalances both of the other factions at the same time, domination over one of the nations won't trigger this effect.
– The effect strength of the buff “Bonus for controlled locations” is now doubled if the nation controls at least 1 Guild Castle – the max value is still gained for controlling just a few locations closest to the nation’s capital city
– From now on, guilds owning the Guild Castles don’t earn money from automatically starter Open State of Wars which end in successful defense – still, if any player-run guild will join the attack and pay the cost of joining a siege on such Guild Castle, the defenders will get back part of this cost if they’ll defend the province
– Added a weekly gain of Guild Points, for players with the rank of officer and above, for all of the guild’s victorious Saturday’s Open State of War – the number of points assigned is 2x higher than the daily gain for controlled Guild Castles and, as well as the latter, added directly to the player’s contribution to the guild



Quality of Life:

– Added a new group event taking place in the Otton the Raubritter’s hideout between Rodrock Fort and Tenebrok which offers precious rewards for the level 60+ players
– Improved snapping the Barricade’s preview object to other existing Barricades
– Minor server-side optimization to the NPCs pathfinding
– Introduced 2 remaining skins for 1-handed hammers which can be applied to the Karleonian Pick: Sons of War Hammer and Imperial Champion’s Hammer



Fixes:

– Fixed a bug causing that the burning oil could be visually used twice in a row and fixed the oil’s respawn time – if there would be any further issues, please report them and attach a video showing the problem
– Fixed a bug causing that the guild’s recruitment offer was automatically removed from the recruitment board if the guild reached its maximum number of members
– Fixed a bug causing that a player at Arena level 10 used to lose the Arena Points for lost ranked duels
– Fixed completing the locations capturing Daily Challenge
– Fixed a bug preventing the player from spawning new objects in the place of a previously destroyed Siege Engines Workshop
– Fixed placement of the reported floating resources and interactive objects

Hello warriors!

Time for a little earthquake – here comes the Open State of War! From now on, every Saturday will be a global arena of guild fighting over territories on all servers. Say goodbye to stagnation and welcome more action – read below for details!

On top of that, as in every weekly update, we have a bunch of quality of life changes and bug fixes for you, including combat improvements.

Check them out and see you in battle!

Changelog v.0.8.9.8

Guild Castles & Open State of War:

Being a part of a strong guild owning a castle which isn’t attacked for weeks isn’t fun – the stagnation is a fun-killer, right? We know it too – for this reason, and in order to increase the dynamics of fights over Guild Castles, so the underdog nations will have more space to grow as challenging enemies, we decided to introduce the open State of War which will happen once a week:

– From now on, every Saturday the State of War will take place on every Guild Castle, on every server, according to the current State of War time set on each castle! #NoMoreStagnation
– The open State of War will be triggered by storyline-based renegade guilds: Brandon guild attacking castles controlled by Midlanders, Ragi guild attacking Ismirs and Sirius guild sieging Sangmarian locations

Please remember that each of these State of War events can be ended easily within just a few minutes if the enemies won’t make enough progress or get pushed back by the defenders. Also, the State of War triggering works the same as before on other days of the week.

Other changes to Guild Castles:

– Due to reducing the number of available State of War time windows – 3 weeks ago already – from 3 down to 2, timers on all Guild Castles on which old SoW times still remain have been changed to the first available time for given server; of course, guild leaders can change it to the other time if preferred (this change was announced a while back in the Guilds Update patch notes:
https://steamcommunity.com/games/327070/announcements/detail/1610521707067365905
– Added a system message displayed if the State of War has been triggered on a location controlled by the player’s guild, hinting about a possibility to counter-token enemy locations and spread the enemy forces during their attack

Combat Improvements:

– Slightly reduced the detection angle of backstabbing attacks
– Fixed a bug causing that the player could get stuck in the weapon sheathing/unsheathing loop if the enemy would apply staggers on him if he is still stunned and stuns if he is still staggered
– Fixed a bug causing that the player performing a shieldbash wouldn’t get staggered if the enemy blocked it with a weapon

Quality of Life:

– Introduced a set of special words for the “narrative languages” translations in the “Say” chat messages received from enemy players – from now on, there are specific groups of words which aren’t translated randomly, so enemies can understand the overall meaning of a message (although they won’t be posted publicly to prevent abusing them); this change, consulted with various experienced game developers, was made to let the players express their emotions instead of keeping them inside, which used to lead to increasing the overall toxicity among all nations
– Introduced notifications about events in the locations controlled by the player’s guild, informing about the status of workers and supplies generated by them
– Added a confirmation box displayed before moving to a Guild Castle by clicking on its flag on the map
– Updated the models of Mercenary’s Trousers, Praetorian's Trousers, Recruit’s Trousers, Veles’ Trousers, Legionary’s Trousers and Scout’s Trousers
– Minor improvements to the last stage of “The Disappearance of Claretta” questline and “Enclave of the Rejected” event
– Improved the “Balancing System” buff’s description
– Improved rounding the percentage values in some buffs’ descriptions
– Minor improvements to the Player Reports, Bug Reports and Feedback windows interface

Fixes:

– Fixed a bug preventing player from respawning if he was killed quickly after receiving first aid
– Fixed a bug causing that the non-looting zone in the siege event could be slightly smaller than the siege’s zone itself, causing that players close to the borders of the latter could be looted but still had 5-seconds respawn – now these areas are of the same size
– Fixed a bug causing that the Arena Champion in “The Adventurous Four” questline didn’t always respawn after being killed
– Fixed a bug causing that the Rejected Shaman in the final stage of “The Disappearance of Claretta” questline didn’t always respawn after being killed
– Fixed a bug causing that the recipe for Battle Short Spear used to drop too often from the Loot of Brandon's Cohort chest

Hello warriors!

Another huge weekly update is live! First of all, it introduces the first iteration of a long-awaited feature: NPC archers! You can test this mechanic on various NPC enemies in the world, especially around the starting areas of each faction. In near future it will also be applied to the NPC guards in the player-controlled castles too, helping improve the territory control balance.

The NPC archery itself is a part of the preparations for another planned feature: horses and mounted combat, as they will serve for a countermeasure for mounted archers. The mounts themselves have to be postponed, though, as a majority of the Community demanded us to focus on improving the players' synchronization – so we shifted more manpower to this aspect. In effect, we just applied a huge synchronization update! Now, with improved synchronization, we hope we’ll be able to focus more on the mounts and horseback combat.

There are also further steps taken to finalize the Freebuilding and Guild Castles update, Quality of Life improvements for Alliances and Guilds and numerous balance tweaks, gameplay improvements and bug fixes – check them out!

See you in battle!



Changelog v.0.8.9.7

Balance:

– Added including the sum of looting points spent by all players of each nation into the balance safeguard mechanics
– Increased the State of War duration to 1 hour 15 minutes, as due to the introduction of siege engines, which can be destroyed by the defenders and bring the siege to a halt until the attackers replace destroyed siege engines with new ones, the time required to break through all the gates is much longer than before
– Updated the buff for playing an underdog faction – due to the recent changes for buff for the underdog nations, which gives more gold and experience for playing such faction, it’s reasonable that this buff shouldn’t apply to only new players [like the exp buff before] but to all players of such a nation; for that reason, from now the buff is given to all players across the dominated nation when they play on their main server instead of new characters only; once the nation grows and exceeds the threshold to lose the underdog status, everyone will keep the same buff for the next 12 hours of playtime (unless a player changes his main server over this time – then the buff will be removed, as it already was)
– Tweaks to the balancing safeguard calculations determining dominating and dominated nations



Quality of Life:

– Huge improvements to the players’ position synchronization – special thanks to Mightykitten and Bermax for sending us videos with exact reproductions of significant problems and possible exploits; of course we couldn’t test all cases, such as large-scale battles with hundreds of players, in the internal testing environment, but from our tests the overall synchronization looks much better now
– Introduced the first iteration of the NPC archers – the first archers can be met along the starting quests of each nation and we’ll be adding more of them following the development of this feature, so this mechanic will be eventually be applied to some of the NPC guards in the player-controlled castles too, helping improve the territory control balance
– Added a possibility to move to all of the Guild Castles controlled by the player’s Alliance using the /home command, so joining an Alliances will be more useful now
– Added a 48 hours-long cooldown on using the Alliance home command for guilds which just joined an Alliance and 48-hours long cooldown on using the /home command or respawning in a guild castle for players who just joined a guild, in order to reduce the benefits of introducing spies into enemy guilds
– Added a possibility to move to the castles controlled by the player’s guild or alliance by clicking its icon on the map
– Updated the position of “Disappearance of Claretta” questline following the plan for Guild Castles and Freebuilding update, as its former position collided with the planned location of one of the upcoming new Guild Castles; we also took the opportunity to improve these quests and refresh their locations
– Disabled placing new player-spawned objects in the arenas on the Sangmarian and Midlandic starting areas (Ismirean arena didn’t have such a problem; the fix won’t affect the already existing objects in these areas)
– Minor improvements to the respawn window’s interface
– Minor improvements to the main tab of the Guild window



Fixes:

– Fixed a bug preventing players from switching from FPP to TPP camera mode if it was set to FPP while driving a battering ram
– Fixed a bug causing that the materials chests in the Skergard Castle’s storehouses could be used twice in a row
– Fixed a potential reason for a bug preventing players from capturing flags
– Fixed a bug with synchronizing the event’s start time (countdown to lifting the colliders at the spawnpoint) in the Sea Wraiths and Volcano events
– Fixed a bug causing displaying the wrong number of players in the invitations to Sea Wraiths and Volcano events
– Fixed all reported cases of the static (not the upgradeable ones) models of wells which couldn’t be interacted with
– Fixed a bug causing that NPC guards couldn’t reach the main building in Tenebrok

Hello warriors!

Check out the newest update packed with gameplay improvements, balance tweaks and bug fixes requested by the Community! The number of changes is pretty impressive despite the fact that a large part of the team is now working hard on introducing the freebuilding system for Guild Castles. Speaking of the latter – as only leaders and vice-leaders will be able to build castles, be sure your guild has the vice-leader role assigned! Closer to the final implementation we will announce the date and make sure that you will have 3-days period free from the State of War so you’ll be able to fortify your castles. Stay tuned!

Also, join us for a PVP event! It will start at 9:00 PM GMT (Saturday, September 7th). Join us in the arena on [SouthAmerica] Monteverde server and fight for fame in 5v5 battles. The winners will be immortalized on the in-game monuments and every participant will be rewarded – to arms!



Changelog v. 0.8.9.6

Balance:

– Increased the cooldown on spawning further siege engines, while decreasing damage done by battering rams to the gates – thanks to these changes capturing the flags quickly with small groups, before the defenders can react, won’t be as effective as before, but the attackers will be able to replace siege engines destroyed by defenders easier
– Updated the balancing debuff for players of the nation with largest numbers logging to other server than their main one (which can’t be done under normal circumstances, unless the native players let the ones from another server log in using an exploit) – the basic debuff is -30% to such player’s HP, stamina and dealt damage, but if a nation would clearly dominate one of the other nations, it will change to -50%
– Updated the buff for new characters and Greenleaf players joining an underdog nation – now it gives 30% bonus to both gained experience and gold earned from quests, dynamic events, looting NPC enemies, Daily Rewards and Challenges
– Updated the Valley of Death Tournament party-making system – from now on, players will be added to the ongoing tournament if there is at least 2 nations have players in the queue
– Updated the Recruit’s Glaive, changing it into the Recruit’s Long Axe, because the glaive’s model gave an unfair advantage of range over similar weapons, and added its recipe to the assortment of a basic Sangmarian weaponsmith vendor



Quality of Life:

– Updated the respawn window, adding displaying the location of the player’s death, marking the distance between death place and selected respawn and hiding the optional buttons when respawning during the Valley of Death Tournament
– Introduced fading the screen after death, when the respawn counter goes to 0
– Added message about receiving First Aid in the respawn window
– From now on, it takes 1 minute to leave the Sea Wraiths and Volcano events – receiving damage resets the countdown; this change was done to prevent players from leaving such events instantly so they would avoid being looted
– Introduced the first iteration of sound effects changing dynamically as the player moves to different regions of the game’s world, including wind sound effects of different strength which are synchronized with the trees animations and particles (this change doesn’t affect the sound effects of rivers or waterfalls)
– Added weaponsmith NPCs in the training arena so you’ll be able to purchase training weapons and repair your equipment in there
– Removed a non-looting zone which remained in a position of the former siege camp near Twinfall
– Several minor UI/UX improvements
– Added 4 new skins from the top-tier 1-handed bludgeoning weapons: Karleonian Pick and Karleonian Mace



Fixes:

– Fixed a bug causing that the looting window could close itself a few seconds before the looting timer went to 0
– Fixed an exploit allowing players to get inside the player-built objects models, such as upgradeable walls, by standing in the area of such object before it was built – from now on such player will be moved to the closest available spawnpoint
– Fixed an edge-case bug allowing players to hit other players through some buildings models
– Further improvements to the jumping system in order to prevent exploiting this mechanic
– Fixed a bug causing that the Ismirean spawnpoint chamber’s guardsman in Blackrock Castle was placed in the middle courtyard
– Fixed placement of many reported floating resources
– Fixed the Glory Quartermaster’s minimap tooltip

Hello, warriors!

A new update is live! In response to the Community requests, we’ve added a new, season-based guilds ranking, which will let you and your friends compete for the title of the most active guild of a season! There are also important quality of life changes to the Guilds, Alliances and Guild Castles management – read below for deatils!

Also, we’ve made a lot of user experience improvements, such as possibility to choose one of the nearby respawn points, and balance changes – with Waterford Castle and Greenport positions updated, which will allow for much more PVP action in that area!

Moreover, let us welcome you to the new Glory season! The top players of the just ended season have earned their rewards and titles, so time to compete 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 which 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 in the leaderboard, so climb up it!

See you in battle!



Changelog v.0.8.9.5

Rankings:

This update introduces the first season of a new, season-based guilds ranking. The former, persistent guild ranking remains in-game – its leaderboard can now be accessed by interacting with special monuments in the capital cities and guilds can still advance in it, while “Guild ranking” tab in the Rankings window now displays the scoreboard of a season-based ranking.

In contrary to the original persistent ranking, the new one is not cross-server. Thanks to this, local guilds from less-populated servers won’t be locked out of the competition. Also, the new ranking only counts Guild Points gained by a guild during a given season, helping to indicate the most active guilds of the current season.

The last day of each season will be dedicated to finally donate the Guild Points to your guilds, and a day after the Nation Points collected by a player will count from 0 as the new season will begin. Since it's the first season with a new ranking, we didn't want to wipe your current Nation Point without a warning. For this reason, this season starts without wiping NP stacked on your characters. It's still to be decided when will the new season end - we consider an option to end it earlier than standard 2 months-long seasons, as it's the first season with new guild ranking.

The last day of a season will be a dedicated day of the season's end. It will not be possible to earn or lose the Nation Points at this day and the scoreboards of other season-based rankings (Glory and Arena) will be frozen then to let you see the rank tables before the season ends. However, it will be the last chance to donate your NP to your guild as the Guild Points. When the new season starts, the Nation Points collected by a player will count from 0 as the new season will begin.

We believe that these changes, frequently requested by our Community, will allow for more rivalry between the guilds and create more competition possibilities!

Other changes to the existing rankings:

– Introduced diminishing the gain of Glory Points for players defending the same location again shortly after it has been captured by the enemy lose a location or if the defence lasted for at least 10 minutes and Glory Points for it were already distributed, in order to prevent a potential exploit
– Updated the arena duels matchmaking algorithm, solving an issue of the top players having to wait too long to find an opponent – from now on, after 5 minutes they will get the first found free opponent with highest arena level available at a moment



Guilds & Alliances:

– From now on, there are 2 available times for State of War on each server instead of 3, set on 7PM and 10PM of the server’s local time: CEST (UTC +2) for Europe, CT (UTC -6) for North America, BRT (UTC -3) for South America and SGT (UTC +8) for South East Asia. The available times have been selected to be most comfortable for players from different time zones who play on a given server. It’s a welcome change, since strong groups of players split into alliances of 3 guilds from one nation could control even 6 Guild Castles on their server, which was obviously bad for the game's balance. Please keep in mind that your current time for State of War, which you’ve set before the update, will remain until Monday – if you will not select it manually until this time, it will automatically set to the 1st available time.
– From now on, each guild belonging to an Alliance can set the State of War time separately for the Guild Castles under its control in order to increase the meaning of Alliances
– From now on, the debuff for players of a nation dominating on its server logging from other servers applies all the time instead of the State of War time only – in normal cases players would want to affect the other server’s balance usually couldn’t log in to it anyway, but it has been exploited by native players logging out to let the foreign players in, so this change will counter it



Balance improvements:

– Updated placement of the Waterford Castle and Greenport with their minor flags in order so the distances from them to Lordly Haven are now as from Dimar Castle and Seaclaw and to make more opportunities for open world PVP in this area; moreover, this change was required to progress with the planned Guild Castles placement and freebuilding update
– Further adjustment to the player looting balance – slightly increased the cost of looting points for all times, while at the same time we added indicating the tier of items, so it will be easier for looters to select worthy reward while not punishing the looted players more than needed
- Due to the fact that players will loose less items now because of being looted by other players, durability of the top-tier items has been reduced a bit to maintain the proper level of demand on the market



Quality of Life:

– Another part of the client-side optimization of the upgradeable walls
– Updated the respawn window, replacing the current “closest spawnpoint” option with the possibility to select one of the nearby respawn points
– Introduced the priority for looting a killed NPC for the first 5 seconds for the player who has dealt the most damage to the target in order to reduce the occurrence of the loot-stealing problem
– Added displaying the name of used emote in the chat for nearby users who can see actually the player performing an emote
– Updated the levels of events taking place in the areas of starting quests
– Minor improvements to the starting quests
– Removed the impact of armor’s weight on the resource gathering duration – it now depends only on the equipped tool
– Updated the exemplary equipment sets of each nation in the first step of character creation
– Improved the Nation Change’s interface
– Improved the slider in Heraldic symbols list, Skins and Supporter Shop windows
– Added a notification about firewall blocking the connection on the loading screen after selecting a character
– Logging into another character makes the character respawn in the capital city, this long-awaited feature was made to prevent meta game of creating as many alts as possible to teleport around the cities which overall greatly decreased open-world combat
- Logged in at the burning location will make character login on the closest non-attacking location both while logging at nation and guild castles. As normally player can respawn close to the burning flag if he was inside it radius within last 15 minutes, relog works the same - we save the castles which player was close to for 15 minutes in case player crashes or needs to relog to allow him to log back in the city he was defending.


Fixes:

– Fixed permissions on gates in Guild Castles – from now on, if any set of permission (guild, alliance or nation) allows the player to do a given action, he will be able to perform it
– Fixed a bug causing enabling the cursor mode while performing any action using a progress bar
– Fixes to reported bugs in Sangmarian quests
– Fixed getting stuck when trying to walk up one of the stairs model
– Fixed the door’s durability in Mereley Lumbermill
– Fixed a bug causing that the free heraldic symbol of a bow was displayed as Fleur-de-lis after applying it
– Fixed updating the nation’s color on some equipment models – it used to bug if the player changed nation after changing gender