Patch 5.0:
This patch kicks off our economy related changes and comes with two major milestones: Marketplaces, and a surprise framework evolution. Included in this patch are also general tweaks following up on player feedback.
Marketplaces: Marketplaces are the main attraction of this patch, and the most complex feature we've ever implemented, touching every single layer of the code. The current delivery is the minimal viable version of the Marketplace, with all the foundation blocks necessary for such a system to exist. This includes entirely new interface components, such as a datagrid that dynamically updates with server side data, filters and other framework changes we had to do for cosmetic reasons like pagination. The persistence of items is also a new module specifically designed for the feature. We will expand on them multiple times over the coming months, whenever the previous feature group is validated and stable.
Functionalities:
- Marketplaces are all local and can be found in NPC cities and chaos cities.
- Players can place individual items and stacks of resources for sale.
- Each character has 25 sale slots available per market places.
- The seller sets a price per item. Partial stacks can be purchased for stackable resource.
- Placing objects in sale has a cost proportional to the duration and overall asked price.
- Sales can be placed for 1 day for 2% fee, 3 days for 5% fee or 7 days for 10% fee.
- Time is not counted towards expiration when server is down. You get the time you paid for.
- Items bellow 95% of base durability cannot be sold.
- Items can be searched and filtered:
- There is a simple full text search.
- You can display only specific categories of items.
- You can add specific filters.
Graphical asset pipeline: The surprise is that we now have a fully operational asset pipeline, which we've used to create and place the new marketplaces and their gnome owners. This is something we weren't planning on having prior to release, but one of the devs had a breakthrough and we decided to invest some time in it. We've used the entire chain for the marketplaces: adding new models for the buildings, accessories, new shaders for metal and rotations, new gnome models and their animations.
At this stage, we can do everything that the game would need asset wise:
- New meshes.
- New animations.
- New textures.
- New shaders.
- Alter the world.
This is a great news, as it will allow to expand our artistic capabilities post release without any limitations, and we have already started creating more 3D models for features coming down the line. In the short term, we will start by doing more world building changes using the worldbuilder, but this heralds great things for the future.
Removal of harvesting/crafting tools: You will no longer need to purchase or use tools to harvest and craft. Simply go up to a node or monster grave, and press the secondary use key, mapped by default to G. The tool will remain in hand for convenience if you want to chain multiple nodes/graves. It is the same for crafting. For skills that didn't have a crafting station prior: Taming can be used at workbenches, and herbalism can be used in laboratories.
Durability losses tweaks:
- All durability losses have been divided by 2.
- Durability losses from melee attacks are divided by 3 compared to damage from other sources, making them cost 6 times less than pre-patch.
- Damage over time effects will now impact durability less. They will do as much per damage point as a regular attacks do.
Monster melee damage tweaks: Monsters, depending on their tier, will now do an average of 30% less damage to players when attacking in melee. This makes the early game easier for new players and indirectly buffs metal armor in PvE.
High end skill scaling and damage display tweaks: Before, damage for most attacks were truncated to the lowest integer, meaning some of the scaling, including the final 5% bonus of skills, could be lost. We've added more granularity, allowing to get two numbers behind the point both in display and in effect.
Tooltips will now show more information:
- Duration of food.
- Healed amount and heal per second for potions.
- Crafting skill in which an item or resource is used as an ingredient.
Opened mount graves can now be destroyed: Opened mount graves now have a health bar of their own and can be destroyed too. Items left in them will all be destroyed. This prevents using them as an invulnerable force field around conquest objectives.
Hotfix 5.0a:
- Fix items durability preventing sales.
- Allow all old crafted item (before this patch) to be sold
- Fixed a bug where you couldn't sell an item if you had exactly the amount of gold required by the marketplace.
- Fixed a bug in the enchanting window where you could place ingredients everywhere in the window
- Fixed a few map bugs:
- Selection will appears on login
- Allow the text search for "marketplace"
- And more tweaks to make the map more logical.
- Fix marketplace display issue when no items are placed, the paging show now "1/1" instead of "---/---"
- One of the gnomes had escaped a marketplace. he has now been properly shackled by his manager.