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Updated Citan Forum posts to 10/9/2022
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==== Dragons Housing Update Summer 2022 ====:Housing hasn't started being implemented yet; it's only had some design work done. Housing is low priority because it requires a TON of engineering and art investment which need to be focused on other things right now. : We don't publish a road map because we don't use a "waterfall" design paradigm. We don't have a large staff, or an art department that's continuously cranking out assets. We're just a couple of people working on a HUGE game, so we have to be agile about what we focus on. We look at what seems most important each month, and we try to work on that. : Recently, I spent time trying to figure out why new players quit playing, and so my recent focus is... to try to keep new players from quitting. It turns out lots of players think Eltibule is especially ugly. That's is a problem because it's a new-player area. New players reach Eltibule, see those 90s-era ground textures, and they just can't deal... it's too ugly. So that needs to be the focus for the moment. : Before that, we had no plans to make big revisions to Eltibule this year. I'd made some minor improvements a few months back, fixing broken trees and such, and I was hoping that would be enough that I could focus on new areas. But I don't think it is. It still needs a lot more help! So that's delayed everything else while we get this fixed. : So anyway, that's why we don't publish a road map: because we don't use one. If we had a team of even a mere 10-20 people, we would NEED a roadmap. But we don't, and we don't! : Housing will happen when it can. But not in 2022. Same with the dwarf race, definitely not happening this year. Sorry. : We just have too much else to focus on first.:: 8/17/2022:: https://forum.projectgorgon.com/showthread.php?3051-Player-Housing-promises-from-2015&p=21207#post21207==== Bug Reporting ====: I'm sorry you're having trouble, I want 'm not sure what's wrong, whether you were given a bad code or what. But please use the email [email protected], because we can't help you with this on the public forum. We have to ask questions that use private information, and we have to move toward give you a "super l33t powers new secret code, so we obviously can't post that here. Please use the email, that 's the only way we can help you. : And please give us a few days to respond to those emails, because we are intentionally limited not a big company. And it's the weekend.:: 3/6/22:: https://forum.projectgorgon.com/showthread.php?2986-Project-Gorgon-Package-Thoroughbred-Breeder&p=20907#post20907==== Povus Lamps ====: Thanks for the feedback everyone! I'm still interested in more feedback, wanted to answer some queries.: I think there's kind of a tiny groupmisunderstanding here -- I realized city fighting (as I envisioned it) wasn't going to work in Povus before we launched Povus. It went through many iterations before it launched (and then many more iterations after). When I timed myself doing the lamp lighting quest, I was using what I considered a "final density" game designof monsters, but they weren't the same exact monsters that I ended up using, and I underestimated how impactful that would be. (Also, the layout wasn't randomized yet, so I may have inadvertently been memorizing what happens where -- not sure how much that affected timing though.): My original intention was that lamp-lighting should be a soloable task for a single level 85 player with decent-but-not-great gear. And I still think that's a nice benchmark to hit eventually, but I also realized it's not really that critical right now: I still expect high-level monsters and players to fluctuate in power a lot, so trying to perfectly tune a huge encounter like that is guaranteed to require revision later anyway.: I think it's currently in the right ballpark. Too hard, but I can could easily see why it being too easy after a few more revisions. : I'm not trying to drill down as deep as you're suggesting... when I sit down to revise gear, the most important questions I want answers for are stuff like:* which treasure mods are currently popular?* which mods are seriously under-used?* which skill combinations are popular?* which abilities are used in each skill? : I've routinely used this sort of data in the past, but I've realized it's excitingbecoming inaccurate at high level due to the low number of samples. I'm not expecting to be able to actually "balance via data", but from my viewpoint as a you can do when you have millions of players. ("Looks like the Sword of Godhood is OP by 5.4%!") But I can definitely get enough data to answer basic questions about how players are playing the game designer . : The first goal is to have enough data to detect the majority of currently-active skill combinations. Right now for some skill combinations, there's only one or two players using it feelsat high level. But they are absolutely dominating the game with those combinations, which tells me that...there's not enough players, basically.Otherwise more people would have picked up on it. well : Ideally I could get enough data bulk to tell which mods are used with which skill combinations. I hate when I make the mistake of replacing treasure mods that seem like junk (and are under-utilized, based on my data), kind but are actually critical for a certain skill combination. The data is too thin for me to pick up on that sort of thing, so instead of psychologically manipulativenurturing a weird combination, I accidentally snuff it out. That sucks. : That (Question about a server if needed)got edited out of the blog post because when I mentioned that in Discord, people assumed it was a sure thing, that we would 100% definitely add another server when we leave beta. But that's not something I can predict. If the beta population becomes huge right before we leave beta, then we could launch a new server right after beta. But if populations are low leaving beta, I'm not going to open a new server -- that would split people up too much. : I'm also not going to force people to play on an overcrowded server if I can help it, even during beta. We have another year or so of beta remaining. If we suddenly get everybody playing really overcrowded next month, I'm not waiting until the game launches to open a new server! : So I don't want to put ideas in peoples' heads that there's a certain timing that I can predict. We'll open more servers if and when the hopes in-game population merits it. : Thanks for the input everyone!:: 2/26/2022:: https://forum.projectgorgon.com/showthread.php?2983-Discussion-Dev-Blog-February-2022&p=20886#post20886==== Content Stoppers ====: Thanks for the feedback! I hope that the introduction of getting this amazing mounts improves travel time. : One thingI want to focus on (for newish players) is "content stoppers" -- times where a new player just doesn't know what to do or where to go. Obviously the game doesn't have a specific path through the content, but I also don't want things to be so nebulous and broad that you have no idea what to do next. : I think a lot of new players hit one of these spots where they don't know where to go, and then only they just give up and quit. So if you've run into those situations, please share the details! : (Of course, asking in-game will usually get you a good idea of where to go next, but most players won't ask, so the game needs to do a better job of broadcasting some of that info.):: 2/9/2022:: https://forum.projectgorgon.com/showthread.php?2946-First-impressions-from-a-new-player&p=20823#post20823==== Moderator Concerns ====: There is certainly a lot more history to your account and behavior, which I've researched. But to your inquiry, we won't be posting lengthy rules about what can be said on Discord, because the specifics change often based on many factors -- often changing day to day. The rule is just to follow moderators' requests. You don't have permission to "challenge the moderators" when they give you an instruction to stop talking about something. : If you feel a moderator is being unreasonable or abusive you should send in an email ticket to [email protected] so that we can evaluate the situation. However, I have preemptively evaluated this situation, and I encourage you to drop it .:: 10/9/2022:: https://forum.projectgorgon.com/showthread.php?2972-Clarify-Discord-Rules-amp-Regulations&p=20822#post20822==== Orc Soups ====: I like this. Looks like good Orc racial content to me!:: 1/31/2022:: https://forum.projectgorgon.com/showthread.php?2966-Hot-Orcish-Soup&p=20805#post20805==== Resource Availability ====: Hm, I'm not sure what sort of answer you're looking for with this? If you're looking for a tiny fraction set-in-stone guiding "design principle", there isn't one. We take each situation on a case-by-case basis, and change our mind when it seems like we're doing it wrong. We tend to leave things open to cross-character assistance by default and correct that decision when needed. : For one thing, if you want a game to have broad, open systems (for instance, where you can throw arbitrary items on the ground for other people to pick up), you simply can't prevent some level of cross-character aid. And the thing is, players like doing it because it makes them feel clever. A huge part of peopleProject: Gorgon's design is about letting players feel clever. : It only becomes a problem when players are in competition, and suddenly "multi-mule-farming" becomes a competitive requirement, and a burden on other players who don't want to bother. In cases where that case happens, we can either make the resource account-limited, or we can just out-level that resource's requirement with something new. Or both. : I guess another way of answering that question is: what particular resources are you concerned about? It might be something that "solves itself" as you level -- I mean like milking cows. You can make milking mules if you want, but soon enough milk won't be the resource that's gating your progress. : But other things may be a problem and need fixing. I actually expect to make account-limiting changes to mushroom farming in the future. We can do that with other resources if it seems wise.:: 1/31/2022:: https://forum.projectgorgon.com/showthread.php?2965-Path-of-least-resistance&p=20804#post20804==== Mac Issue Update ====: Hi, we've fixed this issue for the next update, so please hang in there for another week or so.:: 1/20/2022:: https://forum.projectgorgon.com/showthread.php?2960-MacHack-suddenly-acting-weird&p=20768#post20768==== Backer Package Bugs ====: I'm sorry you ran into that. This limitation should definitely be more prominent on the Shop screen, and we'll get that updated. : The way the system is implemented, you can't apply two backer packages if they both have features that can only be received once. Most of the rewards in those packages simply can't be given out twice. For instance, we can't give two sets of breeding horses to the same account, or give two custom titles to the same account, etc. So if we let you apply two packages that overlap, you wouldn't get the full value of the second package. : Since we knew the packages could only be applied once, we made the VIP time in the bundles extra generous as well an incentive. (We don't want to let people get 9 months of VIP for $50 repeatedly, because that price point makes the Steam subscription seem really crappy, and there are rules on Steam about dramatically underselling the Steam version of a subscription.) But we do realize some people want to buy VIP time from the shop, so we're looking at ways to do that. We might just implement paid loot boxesadd a new package like "VIP booster pack" which has nothing but VIP time in it, and no special features that overlap with other packages. : In your case, since you've already purchased the second backer package, if you're okay with not receiving the other features of it (aside from the VIP time), we can do that -- please send an email to support@projectgorgon.com and include your unused package code and the name of one of your characters. We can manually apply the VIP time to your account.:: 1/7/2022:: https://forum.projectgorgon.com/showthread.php?2953-Double-backer-pledges&p=20744#post20744==== No Wipe at Launch ====: Yeah, long and short of it is we aren't planning to do any special wipe at least launch. Your characters will roll over from beta to launch mode with no dramatic changes. : We may still have to wipe skills or even whole systems during beta for balance reasons, so I definitely can't say "no wipes of any kind ever", but nothing is planned for launch.:: 1/3/2022:: https://forum.projectgorgon.com/showthread.php?2950-Wipe-details&p=20734#post20734==== UI Systems ====: I'm not sure that a new UI system that saves a single click would be worth the added complexity... unless I'm missing something? You're suggesting instead of clicking the dropdown and choosing "Cheesemaking", there'd be a tab labeled "Cheesemaking". So it would save you one click. That seems a little too specialized right now -- the crafting window is already pretty intimidating! : Just to make sure, do you know that you can mark recipes as Favorites? So you can just mark your commonly-used recipes and put them all in one place.:: 11/30/2021:: https://forum.projectgorgon.com/showthread.php?2936-Crafting-menu-bookmarks&p=20677#post20677==== Animation Changes ====: The original post came long before we changed movement speed, so that is definitely not why the original poster wanted the old animations. : My understanding is you haven't even *tried* our recent efforts to find a middle ground. We've continued to tweak these systems in each update, and we aren't done. : The bottom line is that we get feedback about poor animation quality often from new players, and we just absolutely must fix that. It also is just untenable programming-wise: monsters and pets cannot keep up with you if you're moving at literally 30 m/s while fighting. I realize it was a nerf. I'm sorry I couldn't address this sooner and it took YEARS before we could get money to fixing it. But that'll happen several more times before launch: lots of stuff needs to nerfed and a lot needs to be buffed. : That doesn't mean we've just arbitrarily decided our first solution was the best! We've been working on different approaches to meet all these different requirements. And I'd appreciate your help in figuring out that compromise game, one that looks good AND feels good. But the feedback you've given me here just says "I REFUSE TO EVEN CONSIDER COMPROMISE. MAKE MY GAME MY WAY OR I QUIT." It's not helpful to me.:: 11/30/2021:: https://forum.projectgorgon.com/showthread.php?2811-old-animation&p=20676#post20676==== Mac Issues - Fog ====: Addendum for Mac users whose screens are covered in opaque "fog": of the three hacky potentional-fixes we added, it appears the third one is the winner. So you should open the Settings window in-game, find the Special Settings tab, and add the word MacHack3. : As a side-effect of this hack, the outdoor sky will look weird: cloud cover, stars, and even the sun and moon will not be rendered accurately. But more importantly, you'll be able to see the screen! : We'll keep looking into this and try to improve our hack in the future.:: 11/23/2021:: https://forum.projectgorgon.com/showthread.php?2933-Update-Notes-November-18-2021&p=20671#post20671==== Framerate Drops ====: It's no doubt an issue with the game or a setting, we've seen that sort of problem before. It can be caused by a lot of things, but the biggest culprit seems to be the day/night cycle which triggers some Unity bugs related to shadows -- even if you have shadows turned off. You can tell when that's the cause because the problem will go away after an hour or so of game-time. : We've had no luck alleviating the underlying Unity bug, so we've instead switched to an entirely new sky-dome system for the next update -- one that hopefully won't be as susceptible. Unrelated to that, it looks like Unity may have finally fixed the bug in a recent patch fix. (But about a month too late for us -- we already switched sky systems.) So I'll be interested to see if you still have this problem after the next update!:: 9/31/2021:: https://forum.projectgorgon.com/showthread.php?1198-Framerate-drop-in-Serbule-when-looking-in-certain-directions-(with-video)&p=20507#post20507==== Vulnerability ====: Vulnerability lasts 5 seconds. That length was chosen so that even if your reflexes are pretty sluggish, you can probably get in one attack before it ends. If you have good reflexes, you can reliably get two attacks in. (And you can sometimes get three attacks in, but not reliably.):: 8/15/2021:: https://forum.projectgorgon.com/showthread.php?2867-vulnerability-time&p=20486#post20486==== Select Target ====: This is a very interesting write-up! I appreciate you sharing the secret of Select Target of Current Target, it can be used in a lot of interesting ways, and not just for healing! That was one of those features we added with little fanfare. We've tried to make the selection work automagically when possible -- for instance, if you have another player selected when you use an attack, it automatically routes your attack to the target's target. But sometimes explicitly selecting the target is the way! to go, especially for communication. It should probably have a default keybind...:: 8/3/2021:: https://forum.projectgorgon.com/showthread.php?2883-So-you-want-to-play-a-healer-Nepe-s-guide-to-healing&p=20424#post20424==== Name Changes ====: No plans to change what names are allowed. If we ever do allow multi-word names it probably wouldn't be a VIP-specific feature, and it would probably not be part of your "real" name anyway. For instance if you marry a human NPC, perhaps you could take their last name. You would be shown to others with both names, like "Bob Newhart", but people would still just /tell Bob hi.:: 5/22/2021:: https://forum.projectgorgon.com/showthread.php?2854-All-About-the-VIP-Membership-Program-Questions-amp-Discussion&p=20264#post20264==== VIP Tokens ====: You can also win VIP tokens in the more expensive match-3 game in the casino. The odds are... not good... but it's possible It's basically so rare as to be an Easter egg though.
: Behind the scenes, VIP tokens were added as a sort of prototype: we wanted to ensure that we could give out VIP time through game items, and VIP tokens are the "implementation detail." We think they make great rare rewards, but we aren't currently imagining that you'd be able to buy them for in-game currency.:: 5/22/2021:: https://forum.projectgorgon.com/showthread.php?2854-All-About-the-VIP-Membership-Program-Questions-amp-Discussion&p=20262#post20262==== Chat Logs ====: I also wouldn't call it a "massive" disadvantage, we're talking about a single skill amongst a hundred, but to answer the question we haven't really decided anything new there yet, but we're discussing it. : We'd always planned for chat logs to be part of VIP. But you'll note that "chat logs" isn't included in the VIP features blog post... because we're still weighing the pros and cons of changing something that players have already gotten used to having for free.:: 5/22/2021::https://forum.projectgorgon.com/showthread.php?2854-All-About-the-VIP-Membership-Program-Questions-amp-Discussion&p=20258#post20258==== GEforce Now ====:After they went to an opt-in service we of course opted in, which did nothing. Since then we've repeatedly tried to get it to work, filling out the automated forms. So why aren't we in the program? Your guess is as good as mine. The automated forms were accepted but we aren't on the service. We get no feedback, and no input in the process. So ... that's where things stand right now.:: 4/28/2021:: https://forum.projectgorgon.com/showthread.php?2756-PG-on-Geforce-Now&p=20183#post20183 ==== Chat Logging for VIP? ====: The option to enable chat logging has *always* been clearly marked as being eventually VIP-only in the special settings documentation. Same with book-save-to-file. So we haven't changed anything about our plans, we're just finally getting ready to launch VIP and giving these features proper UI toggles.:: 3/25/2021:: https://forum.projectgorgon.com/showthread.php?2807-Update-Discussion-March-25-2021&p=20033#post20033==== Can I have more than six abilities? ====:We've discussed this one many times and this is definitely not going to happen, sorry! You're limited to six abilities from a skill for balance reasons. I want the choice of which abilities you use to be agonizingly hard, not trivial. And of course if you could use all the abilities at once I would have to rebalance them quite differently, because they're balanced around you not having them all. :: 2/28/2021:: https://forum.projectgorgon.com/showthread.php?2787-Suggestion-More-flexible-combat-ability-bars&p=19893#post19893==== Augmentation Changes ====:Yeah, we can definitely improve augmentation. It shouldn't work differently for NPCs versus players, so we need to choose whether NPCs attune items, or whether players don't attune items... but there are pros and cons for each direction. The knee-jerk is to just remove the attunement, but I *am* worried about hand-me-down uber weapons. It's not a problem yet, but that's only because we don't have max-level gear yet. We will have max-level gear eventually, and I'm sure hand-me-downs will be a problem, because it has always been a problem in every other MMO with unattuned gear (unless the game has item decay, which we don't). :So I'm not sure what approach to take -- I don't really like either of those options, so I've been punting the problem until there's new inspiration. I'm sorry it's been confusing and surprising! We'll get a more coherent solution in place soon. Maybe by giving augmented items an "attune-on-next-equip" flag or something like that. :As for shamanic infusion, that's one where I reserve the right to sometimes make weird skills. Leveling this skill is basically an alternative to using augments, but they're only for shamanic infusers. Infusions make the equipment arcane and unwieldy (that's what happens when you glue a dozen enchanted lizard tails into your helmet!), and only people with the right training can use it. That's just how the skill works...I see no need to turn it into yet another "everybody can use this" crafting skill.:: 2/28/2021:: https://forum.projectgorgon.com/showthread.php?2786-Suggestion-Make-equipment-enhancement-more-streamlined-and-accessible&p=19891#post19891==== Controller Support ====:We had some game-controller support early on for movement and cameras, but maintaining it involved a lot of "moving targets" in terms of supporting individual controllers well, and at some point it broke and we didn't get around to fixing it back up. Now that we're more deeply integrated with Steam, I'm tentatively hoping to expose a lot of the game's functionality to the Steam Input System, which will let people set up custom Steam Input profiles and share them with each other. That's not on my immediate radar, however... we're bogged down in other stuff at the moment. But I do think basic controller support is important and will eventually happen. :(Probably never going to get to "full" controller support for all the many UI windows in the game, though, meaning that you'll probably always need to use a mouse-cursor to select items in your inventory, etc. But Steam input will at least let you move the mouse-cursor with a controller, albeit awkwardly.):: 1/31/2021:: https://forum.projectgorgon.com/showthread.php?1276-Anyone-play-with-a-controller&p=19790#post19790==== Sounds & Volume ====:Looks like srand is doing some volume tweaks based on this thread, so if there's a really loud sound you hate, please let us know here now! (The more specific you can be, the better.) :Background info: the master volume DOES affect every sound. But there are still lots of mixing problems because the raw wavefiles of each sound can have any volume, and some are naturally louder than others. We've coded a way to fix that by manually lowering the volume on specific sound effects... but it requires us to manually tweak each sound individually. :It's also possible that some sounds are being played as "2D" sounds instead of as "3D" sounds, which means the sound has the same maximal volume no matter how far away the source is. That's another thing we can fix, but we have to manually set the appropriate setting for the sound. :Volume is also a fairly subjective and complicated thing -- headphones versus speakers, ambient noise vs. music, etc. So I doubt we'll ever have a perfect volume, but hopefully your reports will help us fix the really jarringly loud ones. :(Also, I did make the boss warning screens intentionally loud and terrifying... but I think Sandra's veto'ed that, so it'll be softer next update.):: 1/3/2021:: https://forum.projectgorgon.com/showthread.php?2708-Warning-Danger-ahead!&p=19675#post19675==== Animation System, Pets, Wipe Target ====:The animation system probably won't have any direct impact on your pets. But getting to the underlying concern, yes, we will be replacing the visual appearances of most pets in the future, but no, that won't cause them to be wiped. Your pets will just suddenly look different. :As for resetting during wipe, I don't know for sure; we haven't made any decisions there, but I hadn't anticipated wiping them. :(Edit to add: the "wipe" being referred to is an item-wipe to help make the game's economy work better with an influx of new players. This is planned to happen when the game leaves Early Access. The soonest we could realistically leave Early Access would be December 2021, and that's if we hit all our milestones this year. Last year was not a great year for us, both for understandable business reasons (our contractors didn't make all their art deliverables) and personal "holy shit this year sucks" reasons, so leaving Early Access in 2021 will require this year to not suck as badly. Long story short... I wouldn't count the days until the economy wipe, because it's a long ways away.):: 1/3/2021:: https://forum.projectgorgon.com/showthread.php?2751-Animal-Handling&p=19674#post19674==== Hide NPC Options ====:We may do that with Do Favors... we've gone back and forth there. It's tricky to code, because NPCs are driven by code scripts, and some of them handle favors differently. So it's not simply a UI tweak. But it's probably a good idea. :With Training we probably won't do that, because it's important for players to be able to see what the NPC eventually offers.:: 12/28/2020:: https://forum.projectgorgon.com/showthread.php?2748-NPC-UI-Request&p=19655#post19655==== Butchering Organ, Fat chances ====: Hmm. I've just looked over the code and data, and it looks okay. There's been no changes in source control, so it's still the same chance it's always been. There could of course be bugs, but I don't see any in the butchering code flow. It's pretty simple, so let me go through how it works. I'll use Barghests here, although Snow Oxen are the same (except slightly easier butchering check, 73 instead of 80). Fae bears and fae panthers are also similar. :Animal fat *is* an organ, so an organ knife does help. Your chances for an organ are 3% for every 9 points of the relevant anatomy skill, plus any item bonus. So if you have a level 45+ anatomy skill and Amutasa's +7% organ knife, you would have a 22% chance for an organ. Barghests have five different organs (stomach, brain, heart, spleen, tier-4 animal fat) so if you get an organ from one, you have a 1-in-5, or 20%, chance of getting a fat. That amounts to... (0.22*0.2=0.044) a 4.4% chance to get fat from a Barghest. :I've also double-checked the fae bear and panther, and this is true for them also, except that they drop tier-3 fat. (The bear is a level 80 butcher and the panther level 73.) The butchering difficulty level doesn't always match the product result right now. It will make more sense eventually, when we have lots more high-level monsters to spread the loot out on, but right now it's a bit messy. Also, note that fae panthers are fae anatomy, not cat anatomy. But fae bears are bear anatomy, not fae anatomy. :It's important to note that if you fail the first butchering skill check ("botch the butchering"), it won't even roll to see if you get an organ, so having Butchering as high as possible is important. :Anyway, 4% seems about right for a rare crafting resource that's supposed to have some trade value. Randomness is streaky, but I don't see any reason why it wouldn't be 4% given a large enough sample size. :In any case, the way it's coded right now doesn't give me an easy place to tweak the numbers, it just falls out of the organ harvesting system. When the anatomy level caps go up, the organ-harvesting rate would shoot up... but I think this would make organ harvesting too easy, and I'll need to rethink about how all these systems scale. (That's why I haven't raised the anatomy level caps yet.) :Edit 2: it may be possible to raise some anatomy skills to level 54 with synergy bonuses, and this would give you +3% more chance for organs. The server simply divides your skill by 9, rounds down, and multiplies the result by 3, so your skill level is all that matters. I mention this because anatomy skills don't have labels that go above 50, so there's no "Butchery yields rare meat or organs: +3%" at level 54... but those labels are just to make the system more understandable to players. The server doesn't care.:: 12/28/2020:: https://forum.projectgorgon.com/showthread.php?2747-Butchering-result-of-animal-fats&p=19653#post19653==== Screen Flashing ====: Hmm, yeah I see it now. And I'm sorry to say I don't have any good ideas here. It looks like the GUI is freaking out, but those are just standard Unity UI elements. I can say it's definitely not directly caused by a game setting. (The "screen flash" referred to by DisableScreenFlash makes the entire screen flash a solid color, and only during combat when you take damage. Internally, it briefly shows a whole-screen UI element.) My best guess is the video card is running out of memory. Does this happen if you reduce the graphics quality to extremely low levels?:: 12/8/2020:: https://forum.projectgorgon.com/showthread.php?2737-Graphical-glitches&p=19598#post19598==== Deer Tricks ====:Thanks for the feedback! I'm still reviewing it. Wanted to mention, though, there's a couple of "tricks" to the Deer skill which aren't obvious from looking at it. One of them is pretty important, and I'll work to make it more obvious in-game: your pet deer's attacks are internally all considered Deer Kicks. This was specifically done so that the mod that applies from "future Deer Kicks by any deer" works with the pet's attacks -- and in fact the pet's version works much better than the player's for this purpose, since its version of Deer Kick has a much faster reset time than the player version. :Another "trick" of the deer is that it has two knockback-on-stun mods, which stack. This was intentional, I think -- it was done long ago, and I don't remember. It's not usually very helpful to stack knockbacks. But deer is the only skill that can... so it feels like a nerf to take it out. But I probably will. :Still working on this skill; compared to Ice Magic, it's very difficult to tweak into a good place.:: 12/6/2020:: https://forum.projectgorgon.com/showthread.php?2729-Deer-and-all-things-Doe-related&p=19581#post19581==== Ice Magic, Deer ====:Thanks for the feedback! I've finished most of the upcoming changes to Ice Magic, and a surprising number of your suggestions are in-line with the changes I've made -- which tells me I'm probably on the right track. I'm especially fond of the new Cryogenic Freeze: it will be toggleable, and it also has a new scaled-up ice cube graphic to make it really obvious when used. And it's just kind of inherently fun to use now. :Now that you've done an easy skill, try something tougher: a similar write-up on the Deer skill! :(Edit: that's mostly a joke at Deer's expense -- I've already made a bunch of changes to the skill for the next update. But I would definitely love to know what, if anything, Deer players love about their skill, to make sure I'm not accidentally destroying it!):: 11/24/2020:: https://forum.projectgorgon.com/showthread.php?2728-Ice-magic-related-thoughts-and-suggestions&p=19542#post19542==== Player Stalls ====:We just don't have enough room for every player to have a permanent stall. Right now we're at a relatively low population ebb (player population has raised and lowered over the course of development many times... mostly unpredictably), but even at this relatively quiet point in time, we have over 1000 active players each week... and something like 200 vendor stalls. So that just doesn't scale. The fees are intended to force you to give up your stall for a while each month, or else pay a huge fee. I want people to be able to rent a stall for at least a week each month, even when populations go back up. :I'm open to other suggestions here, but I don't think the fee structure is the problem; it's a solution to a different problem, so to speak.:: 11/17/2020:: https://forum.projectgorgon.com/showthread.php?2725-Player-vendor-stalls&p=19511#post19511==== "Regrow the City" Systems ====:We talked about doing this for Halloween, actually. But it was cut due to art time. :My experience with permanent "regrow the city" systems in AC2 was pretty informative. It took a lot of art time to make all the different visual tiers of workstations -- two artists spent several full months on just those. And then they were mostly irrelevant after a couple months: players cranked the cities up to the highest tiers, and kept the workstations up pretty well, so most of that art was never seen again. That's fine for a game with a multi-million dollar art budget like AC2, but it seems wasteful to me here. :So I think the way we'll end up doing "grow the thing" mechanics is as a weekend-long live event, not as a longer-term installations. That way the "low-quality" versions will eventually get used again, and the art expectations for brief live events is a little lower anyway but there's a gotcha there: during beta, it's hard to predict how many people will be online in a given month, let alone a given weekend. If we set the bar too high, the live event will be frustrating. If we set it too low, it'll be trivial. So we'll have to do some experiments there, but I'm guessing we won't see a ton of this type of content until after the game leaves beta.:: 11/16/2020:: https://forum.projectgorgon.com/showthread.php?2709-Rebuild-quests&p=19499#post19499==== Broken Mods, Rabbit Ability Themes ====:Thanks for the feedback! I noticed your comment about broken mods in the other thread, and I'm sad that I missed a broken mod. I didn't see it in the database. As a general rule I try to fix treasure mods pretty quickly (because they're mostly just data errors), so if something remains broken for several months, please feel free to re-report it. We get a lot of bug reports in-game and most are invalid (which is pretty normal -- for instance, many new players report the broken golem in the newbie-island dungeon as being bugged, because its running against the wall... but that's intentional). So unfortunately we can miss bug reports sometimes, especially if its interspersed with balance feedback -- feedback goes into a separate channel, so it's easiest for us if bug-reports and feedback-reports are sent separately. I'm not sure what happened in this particular case, but anyway, thank you for the bug report! :I wanted to ask you for ideas about new ability themes you'd like to see. In this case, I mean the "fiction" of the ability. I'm frankly out of ideas for Rabbit-themed abilities, which is why some of them are kind of blah. So if you have some, please share! Rabbit is partly a solo-survival skill, and partly a DPS skill. (And Rabbit's Foot is its sole group buff.) So I guess we'd be looking for either survival or attack abilities.:: 11/16/2020:: https://forum.projectgorgon.com/showthread.php?2723-Rabbit-related-thoughts-and-issues&p=19498#post19498==== Percentage Mitigation, Flat Mitigation, Scaling ====:Great feedback so far! I'll try to answer some questions here. Instead of specifically replying, though, I'm going to paraphrase your questions into my answers. That way people don't need to read the entire thread to follow what I'm saying. :Percentage Mitigation, Flat Mitigation, ScalingPercentage mitigation is insanely powerful, which makes it great as a baseline for tanking. But it scales too well -- there's no room to grow. If your ability gives you 26% mitigation at level 75, where do we go for an encore? In the case of Bulwark Mode, we're looking at 27% mitigation at level 100... is it exciting to level up 25 times in order to gain +1% damage mitigation? I don't think so, but that's the best I can do there. But then we have to look at treasure. None of Bulwark Mode's treasure can boost that percentage at all: it would be too powerful, allowing lower-level players to tank much higher-level creatures than they should. Instead, the treasure has to boost mitigation by a flat amount. This way, you need to keep finding better treasure as you level up. :Flat mitigation on players makes a lot of sense because monster damage scales almost linearly. (This is very different from player damage, which has multiplicative elements, so mitigation on monsters is much less powerful.) For instance, a level 75 "Carnivine" has +97 damage boost. If it was a level 70 monster, the damage would be +89 instead. If it was level 100 it'd be +143. This monster is a wuss, but you get the point -- these are smallish numbers that increase at a relatively modest pace. :That's true for both solo monsters and Elite monsters -- Elites obviously hit harder, but their damage scales slowly with level. So with some number-massaging, I should be able to make flat mitigation the main form of mitigation. :Giving out tons of flat mitigation does create new problems. I'm especially worried about granting literal invincibility against lower-level monsters. You can see that already with Staff: if you go back and fight newbie monsters, they simply can never hurt you. I don't like this design and will need to fix it with new mechanics. :One mechanic I'm considering to fight over-mitigation is something from Asheron's Call 2 I called "armor chipping". Here's how it worked: if an attack would be mitigated to below 25% of its original value, then a random amount of the damage (between 1% and 25%, rolled randomly for each attack) would "bleed through". So no matter how good your armor was, you would still take an average of 12% of the damage from the attack (plus or minus 12%). So you could still be "chipped" to death by lots of smaller creatures. :This did help prevent overmitigation in AC2 (which is especially problematic in a PvP game), although it wasn't terribly popular with player tanks, who really like seeing "no damage" floating above their heads. But anyway, even if we don't use this particular system, we'll definitely need a few new mechanics to help with balance problems. :Long story short: I've always been pretty hesitant to give out meaningful amounts of mitigation because of the abusability of it for farming lowbie monsters. But I think flat mitigation -- in large amounts! -- is going to be necessary to make high-level group combat work. So... we'll just have to make it work! That probably means changing monster damage, and adding new systems to prevent abusability, and who knows what else. :Not all Bosses/Elites are Useful Data Points for TankingIt's dangerous to do too much theorycrafting against the most powerful monsters in the game. Zukelmux is probably the best example -- he was made specifically to stump players. He's harder than anything I thought players could handle with level 70 equipment alone, and I expected players to need all sorts of special items and tricks to survive it. :Having this fight in the game was a very useful data point for me, but it's not one I'm trying to maintain forever. In fact, Zuke is destined to get a pretty hard nerf eventually. (I kind of tipped my hand about that when he was included in a daily Aurest quest.) He'll still be really hard to kill, but he probably won't deal as much damage as he does now. :It's also important to realize that monsters can serve different roles, and you aren't supposed to be able to tank them all! The "Multipurpose Utility Elementals" in the newest dungeon are a good example. They have an opening move that sprays acid which will shred armor in seconds. But that's their opening move, and then they can't use it again for 30 seconds. And it does no health damage... so... one simple solution is: don't tank that! Let an off-tank pull it and get hit by the acid, then let a tank take over. :In that case, I tried to make the acid powerful enough to force players to think creatively. Maybe it needs to be more potent, I dunno. But the point is that there are lots of Elite and Bosses with gimmicks, and they need to have different solutions besides "take the damage in the face and laugh because I have insane mitigation". I mean, sometimes that's what's needed, sometimes not. :(And I realize many of the current monster gimmicks just don't work, because the numbers aren't quite right, or something about it just didn't end up mattering to players. In those cases, I'll try to fix the numbers to make their gimmick work. That will help make combat more interesting.) :Other Stuff:"If a piece of gear is eligible for discounted Transmutation, all the mods on the item should be eligible, not just the particular skills that have changed." I like this idea and I think it makes sense. Probably can't implement that overnight, but will at some point in the future.:"What about abuse by kiting mobs or AoE burst-killing them?" I think a good first step in fixing these problems is to make the monsters live longer so they have more opportunities to react. So that's the step I'm focused on. After that, if something is still too cheesy... well, we'll have to fix it one way or another, depending on the exact details.:"Kitchen Sink" reminder: I mentioned this in the last update thread, too. I'm throwing the kitchen sink at the problem, meaning I'm going to try out a few different game systems and see what's fun. That's what Bulwark Mode is. It was actually slated as a special tool just for dwarves. The Dwarven Stalwarts are referenced in the game a few times -- Bulwark Mode was originally going to be "Stalwart Mode." But dwarves are a long way off, and this system seems too useful to be limited to one race. Maybe. We'll see how it all pans out.Numbers will change! I was working on the numbers for this update right up until the evening before we launched it, never quite happy with them. I'm pretty sure I overdid it with Staff flat mitigation, and maybe in other places, too. None of those numbers are locked in. I'm just trying to quickly shift overall tanking balance in the right direction, which will mean some skills are overpowered for a bit. Please remind players that this isn't permanent; I don't want players to get the wrong idea and and make a Staff build specifically because it's overpowered right now, and then be disappointed when it's nerfed a month later. So if you see people talking about it, please help remind players of the eventual plans. :I had more to say about specific details, but we're really getting into the weeds, so I'll stop for now. Please keep the feedback coming!:: 11/10/2020:: https://forum.projectgorgon.com/showthread.php?2715-Update-Discussion-November-6-2020&p=19462#post19462==== Longer Lasting Combat ====:Thanks for everyone's ideas! I am taking some notes and I hope people feel free to continue to talk about this topic. It's a very valuable discussion here. :I think my next step will be to do another round of "make combat last longer" changes. This includes both group and solo combat. I've been extremely cautious about doing this in the past, because it will most heavily impact players with weak gear sets. (If you have tremendous burst DPS, you'd still probably be able to burst-kill solo creatures even if they had twice as much health/armor as they do now.) In the short term, that's awkward, because it reinforces the "rich get richer" problem with DPS. But I think I need to make those broader combat-duration changes first, before I start hacking on mods and skill systems. :My plan will be to make players generally more tanky, and to offer new mechanisms to increase survivability. I have a handful of ideas, from mods to new game mechanics... and I'll probably throw everything at the wall and see what sticks. We'll iterate quickly and do weekly updates to try to massage everything. :After that, we can come back to the "too many DPS mods" problem with a different vantage point.:: 10/22/2020:: https://forum.projectgorgon.com/showthread.php?2694-Update-Discussion-October-15-2020&p=19361#post19361==== High Level Balance ====:I've talked about this before, but to catch people up, here's some background on where we are with high level balance. :I'm moving small pieces of the balance equation around to try to make the game work better, like tweaking Power curves to help reinforce ability roles. Ultimately, though, the elephant in the room is that players can have way, WAY too many offensive treasure mods at once. Until I fix that problem, these other fixes will seem weird, because they aren't fixing the core problem. :The core problem from a player's POV can be summed up as "I don't need to defend myself if I can finish combat in 4.1 seconds". This playstyle means you are more than willing to drop defense in order to hit the magic DPS level where everything is trivial. And if something is higher, you just die. :This is very poor game design that gets worse and worse at high level, and I have to fix it, but I don't know the precise way to fix it. That's why I'm fixing small parts of the equation, seeing how it affects things, and trying to figure out the best approach. Ultimately the change will be a severe nerf, and I would like to get it right the first time. :My knee-jerk idea was to just reduce the total number of treasure mods you can have on at once. But now I'm thinking maybe a new mechanic that forces players to take a certain % of defensive mods. (Say 40%.) I don't have a mechanic for that in mind, but one easy approach would be to make all the mods on certain slots (say chest, legs, necklace) be defense/survival. That's awkward for pure DPS skills, though, because their defense/survival mods would be crappy. But maybe that's fine. Actually that's probably for the best. :Anyway, I realize nobody likes being nerfed, but I really don't have the ability to present fun and exciting battles to high-level players right now. I can present fun and exciting battles to the top 5% of players, sure. But everybody else will get wrecked, because the top few percent of players can deal, what, maybe 500% more damage than the average player with crap mods? That's really fun for advancement as a player because you can slowly see yourself getting MUCH more powerful. But it's just too big of a power differential for us to create content for, and you will quickly find the game un-fun because nothing is challenging. (Or else it would be un-fun up until the end, because everything would be balanced to be too hard until you finished your 70-mod treasure set.) :It's my fault for letting the balance problem get out of hand, but I do have to fix it, and I will. Expect to see more small nerfs as I work things out, as well as at least one major nerf as I restructure the game to allow it to be balanceable and fun. :There will be more info about that nerf before it comes, so you won't be blindsided by it. I'm not sure when it will happen because I don't know what it is. So far I haven't found an approach that makes me go "aha, that's it!" The closest solution I have is forcing certain slots to be defense/support mods, but that will be very weird for some combat skills. I'm still hopeful that there's a cleverer solution. :(And, of course, rebalancing players means rebalancing monsters. Monster rebalancing is much, much easier than player rebalancing, though -- since monsters don't use mods! Monster balance can be changed around as much as needed to fit where player DPS ultimately ends up.):: 10/18/2020:: https://forum.projectgorgon.com/showthread.php?2694-Update-Discussion-October-15-2020&p=19320#post19320==== "Your Inventory is Full" message ====: thank you for the feedback. The "your inventory is full" message is probably caused by an item with a max-allowance. In other words, it's "your inventory is full [of the special item this chest drops]". So you don't need whatever plot token is in that chest since you already had one. The messaging for plot-items can obviously be improved, and I'll try to do that next time I'm working on the inventory system.:: 10/12/2020:: https://forum.projectgorgon.com/showthread.php?2653-Update-Discussion-September-10-2020&p=19284#post19284==== API? Character Sheet? ====:We do have plans for an API, but the "character dump" type functionality is probably not going to happen until post-launch. There's a lot of other "API-esque" stuff that has higher priority, like integrating with 3rd-party apps (such as Discord). But I expect it will eventually happen. :I like the idea of a "character sheet" in-game option, though. That seems interesting and (probably) relatively easy.:: 10/12/2020:: https://forum.projectgorgon.com/showthread.php?2686-Is-there-an-open-API-Project-Gorgon-API&p=19283#post19283==== Walking Through Textures ====:I've been thinking about this one, and I don't really have much insight to offer... it seems like it's basically broken Unity's rendering. The most likely culprit really would be a driver (or other software on your machine, like BIOS-based performance enhancers or some kind of "graphics accelerator" software that's not tuned right for this game). But since you've mostly ruled that stuff out, my next guess is a bad collection of game settings. Perhaps if your camera clipping point was flung forward and the low-res terrain was enabled on otherwise-high-res settings... well, the results wouldn't really match what you're seeing... but would give you something kind of similar. So I would try deleting your game settings to see if it helps. It's a file in your user account's public file area, you may need to enable the Explorer option to see hidden directories to see your "AppData" folder. It's here: :C:\Users\(accountname)\AppData\LocalLow\Elder Game\Project Gorgon\GorgonSettings.txt :Just delete or rename that file and the game will create a new one next time you run. Next time you start the game, turn off the "Auto-Adjust Quality Level" option in the graphics settings, and just set the game on Good graphics with no overrides... let's see if that fixes the problem!:: 9/29/2020:: https://forum.projectgorgon.com/showthread.php?2673-Walking-through-ground-textures-(hills-trees-mountains)&p=19164#post19164==== Crafting Caravan Item Upgrade Test ====:Changed the wording to prevent people worrying about being banned over it. Obviously it's a less-than-ideal situation where the tech doesn't match up with our needs yet. But that happens sometimes during development. So we're asking people who barter for higher-tier versions of old items to not sell or trade them. Please gift them to an NPC or destroy them for materials if you don't want them.:: 9/24/2020:: https://forum.projectgorgon.com/showthread.php?2671-Discussion-Crafting-Caravan-September-25-2020&p=19138#post19138==== Fat Drops ====:@user - that's an interesting take. I admit I haven't really considered leaving it as-is, because it makes it impossible for me to do specialty encounters -- "you MUST do this" type thing. I don't want to do that all the time, but with a boss like (the ghostly one) in this update, I don't really want him to be affected by, say, blood loss. But eh, maybe it's fine. Magic is magical. :@user - fat drops are based on the monster's level and their anatomy type. Herbivorous animals (such as Ungulates) have the best of all of the resources: skins, meat, organs. Carnivores have the worst. And omnivores are somewhere in between. But that said, it does look like the specialty monsters in the Fae Realm (which amounts to nearly all the monsters in the Fae Realm) are missing parts of their butchering profile. Will take a look at that now.:: 9/16/2020:: https://forum.projectgorgon.com/showthread.php?2653-Update-Discussion-September-10-2020&p=19086#post19086==== Game update feedback ====:Thanks for the feedback, please keep it coming! A couple bits of info to add: :- RE: new framerate problems in low-density areas: I'm not really sure where that would be coming from. We didn't have graphics changes in the last update, at least, not intentionally. We'll be looking for a culprit. :- RE: debuffing monsters' vulnerability: the way it works now is just a limitation of the implementation and will eventually be a true multiplicative. In other words, if you make a monster take 20% more Fire damage, and they normally take 0% fire damage, 0%+20%=0%. Doesn't work that way yet (in all cases), but it will. :- RE: new bosses: they ARE actually easier than the final boss of Gazluk Keep. I was worried I set the bar too high there in terms of how much damage I expect a group of 6 people to be able to generate. And really, it's just hard to figure out where the difficulty point should be, so this time around I decided to err on the easier end. But if most people think they're pushovers, I'll probably bump them up a notch in the next update. :Also, the captain encounter is supposed to be a forced-multi-pull encounter: if you aggro any of those three elites, you should always get all of them. New tech, and obviously not working out well enough yet, but I'll do some more work to fix that also.:: 9/14/2020:: https://forum.projectgorgon.com/showthread.php?2653-Update-Discussion-September-10-2020&p=19072#post19072==== Event feedback, performance ====:Look, guys, I really appreciate feedback, and it's part of the reason we do those events, so thanks! Just please keep things in perspective: this isn't the first boss invasion, and it won't be the last. Each time we try to improve the experience. Then we iterate. Over and over and over. :I know that performance problems seem so easy to fix from the outside. But I'm working on hundreds of thousands of lines of code, built atop an ever-changing graphics engine, and trying to support 3 operating systems and an infinite number of hardware configurations. So it's hard work, is what I'm saying. But performance IS getting better, and the proof is in the pudding: my 5-year-old test card now gets 60fps in Serbule Hills, when a year ago, it struggled to get into the 30s. :Performance is getting better for most people. If it's not getting better for you, I'm sorry. It's not for lack of trying. :So what happens next? Before the next boss battle event we'll have more changes to the particle system to try to improve perf there. Then we'll try again, and again. And again. :And I totally get it if that plan doesn't work for you! But this is the only real path forward for me. So if you've had enough, I hope you'll come back some time soon when you have newer PC hardware, and I'm sorry it didn't work out.:: 9/14/2020:: https://forum.projectgorgon.com/showthread.php?2658-I-know-it-is-JUST-me&p=19071#post19071==== "You are already logged in" ====:It's your route to the server: it's not staying stable. When you get the "you are already logged in" message, it means the server didn't disconnect you, and it was waiting for your client to communicate with it, when your client disappeared abruptly. The TCP stream was severed at some point between the client and the server. I don't have more information about what is disconnecting you, but it's not directly due to the game itself, and there's nothing in the patch that would cause this. It's networking problems. The 'net has been pretty shitty for me in other games this week, so give it a day to get better. I don't really have much else I can do in the short term. :(BTW, it's supposed to let you log back in immediately, but there's a problem with the Steam integration that prevents it. So after you get the "you were already logged in" message, you have to restart the game again. But you'll be able to log in immediately after that. I'm sorry about that.) :Edited to add: if you have a VPN service, try playing the game through it. This will give you a different route to our host address, and will often circumvent the problem in your normal route.:: 9/13/2020:: https://forum.projectgorgon.com/showthread.php?2656-What-is-going-on-with-the-game-for-me&p=19058#post19058==== Low-Res mode ====:That's very weird. I don't know what's happening. Try starting the game in "force low-res" mode by holding down the CTRL key on your keyboard on the character-select screen. (The "Enter World" button will change to "Enter World FORCE LOW-RES".) That will hopefully rule out any graphics-related issues.:: 9/6/2020:: https://forum.projectgorgon.com/showthread.php?2648-Strange-issue-can-t-interact-with-world-but-can-see-chat&p=19026#post19026==== Death Penalty ====:Hmm, I do remember hearing about a game where after a certain number of deaths, you were dead forever. I don't recall which game that was... but definitely not this one, sorry! Long ago we did discuss various death penalty options on the now-defunct elder game blog, and ultimately settled on the "hardcore" item-break mode. :These days, we do have some players who like to create their own restrictions for their alts, and I've started adding game tools to help them (use the chat command /behavior to see the optional restrictions we track). So I'm sometimes tempted to add a "true" permadeath mode for those crazy players... but it'd probably be after 1 death, or maybe 10... 1000 seems high to me!:: 9/1/2020:: https://forum.projectgorgon.com/showthread.php?2644-Was-there-a-limit-on-number-of-deaths&p=19002#post19002==== More emotes? ====:Yeah, we do plan to flesh out the set of emotes in the future! (There are some technical bottlenecks -- I'm trying not to add new humanoid animations until after we make some other technical changes.) :In the short term, I'll see if I can change the textual messaging of /wave when you have another player selected.:: 8/31/2020:: https://forum.projectgorgon.com/showthread.php?2642-More-positive-emotes&p=18997#post18997==== PC Partner Preference ====:Yeah, I don't see why it wouldn't be open to other races, will rework the dialog a bit. :Internally, that question is really just a way for the game to ask you (the player) what gender you'd want your "background romantic NPC" to have, when they eventually show up. If you choose the elf option saying you don't know what sex they'd be, the game just flips a coin for you! So I wasn't really thinking of this as a "what sexual preference does your character have" question, although from a player's point of view it obviously is, so the jokey elf option seems a bit too flippant:: 8/18/2020:: https://forum.projectgorgon.com/showthread.php?2626-PC-Partner-Preference&p=18917#post18917==== P2W VIP? ====:It really depends on your definition of P2W. The VIP plan will include some extra storage space, probably a little bit of bonus inventory space, maybe extra stable slots, etc. Stuff like that does make the game easier and it could be considered P2W by some people. :But in the sense of the term that I think you mean, no: the VIP plan won't make you literally more powerful than other players. No special high-end gear or VIP-only mods or anything like that. It's important to me that the VIP plan always feels entirely optional.:: 7/22/2020:: https://forum.projectgorgon.com/showthread.php?2606-What-are-the-future-plans-for-monetization&p=18802#post18802==== Settings file reset ====:RE: Spirit Fox movement - not intentional. Will be like other small animals (e.g. Rabbit form) after a fix. :RE: Copying over your settings file -- yes, it's possible. You can rename the old file as the new file, and it will load those settings, they're the same basic format. The danger is that for some players, you'll log in with now-invalid graphics settings, and you'll have a black screen, unplayable resolution (640x480) or other weird problems. But for "most" players I think it would work out fine... so you can try and see! If it turns out to be unplayable, just delete the settings file and let it make a new one. :Note that some settings, like your chat settings, can't possibly be saved, because the format changed. But manually copying your settings file WILL definitely save your keyboard bindings, because that part hasn't changed between the settings files. That's the part I wish I'd managed to retain, but for logistics reasons, we just couldn't.:: 7/17/2020:: https://forum.projectgorgon.com/showthread.php?2599-Update-Discussion-July-16-2020&p=18761#post18761==== Beast Forms at Release ====:It's still a ways away, but the general plan is to wipe all Effects on the player, which will undo any animal forms, as well as all other curses, buffs, and debuffs. But you raise an interesting dilemma that will be shared by a few other animal forms. We might be able to squeeze something in for those cases, it'll depend on how the details shake out when we get closer to that point.:: 7/11/2020:: https://forum.projectgorgon.com/showthread.php?2590-Beast-forms-and-Game-Release&p=18732#post18732==== Fletching ====:I don't want to make changes to fletching that would make it pointless. If I did, I would also need to make archery less versatile and impactful, because the skill's balance takes the difficulty of fletching (and to a lesser extent, having to carry all that ammo) into account. The down side of ammunition is why the skill can be simultaneously super versatile and super damaging. :I wouldn't make fletching pointless anyway, because who wins with that? "I'm a fletcher. I make arrows that add +1 damage and nobody cares." If fletching isn't relevant then I don't want it in the game. We'd just do "imagination arrows" like every other MMO, and I'd rebalance accordingly. But before we throw the entire design out, why not help me make it work as intended? Why not order some arrows from people? There's a work order board. Why don't archers use it to order tons of arrows? :And the weird answer seems to be, in part, because of the sort of person attracted to archery. Because moreso than other skills, archers tend to REFUSE to buy arrows. Sure, there aren't a ton of vendors, but there are more than zero, and if there was a market there would be more sellers. But archers can make them cheaper themselves, and don't want to pay. So... there's no market. How do I fix this? I don't know, but I can tell that "make fletching pointless so there's no need for a market" is not a very good fix. :But the answer is also definitely NOT "make them so trivial to make that every man, woman, and child is selling arrows." Because, again, you wouldn't buy arrows. You'd just make them yourself because they're trivial. The skill would be pointless. :It's a hard problem, so if you have ideas on how to fix it, without just killing the problem entirely by nullifying its importance, then I'm all ears!:: 7/3/2020:: https://forum.projectgorgon.com/showthread.php?2582-Are-there-plans-to-make-Fletching-less-painful&p=18682#post18682==== Giant Monster bug ====:Found the problem with monster scaling! It has to do with how numbers are formatted on your machine -- for instance, if you're in a country that formats the number "1.5" as "1,5" then... it's broken for you. Heh. :I've got it fixed here, and there will be a new beta build up this evening or early tomorrow. In the short term you can switch your OS to US English before running the game; this will make things work for you. Although you may have to delete your GorgonConfig.txt file again. :More about the bug: the 2019 version of Unity supports more localization features than the 2017 one did. And they're turned on by default, which our code definitely didn't expect. So the server is sending over numbers like "1.5" which your game client doesn't understand anymore, since it expects "1,5" now. Similarly, your old GorgonConfig.txt file had numbers in the US English format, and so a volume of "0.5" looked invalid -- defaulting to 1, or 100% volume. Window positions were munged similarly. :And now we have a new problem: in beta builds, the GorgonConfig.txt file is written out in your language-specific format as well. So once you've run the beta, your volume is stored as e.g. "0,5", and after the next beta, that will be wrong again! And you'd have to delete your settings file yet again. :It's all just confusing and I can foresee it causing some headaches, so I'm going to simplify things by just renaming the settings file. That way you'll be given a fresh set of defaults. The current live build uses GorgonConfig.txt; all future builds (starting with the next beta build and continuing with regular builds after that) will use GorgonSettings.txt instead. :I think giving everybody a fresh slate may be wise anyway, since a lot of the graphics options don't work exactly the same as before. :Thank you to everyone that helped us track this one down!:: 6/30/2020:: https://forum.projectgorgon.com/showthread.php?2572-BETA-BUGS-(For-the-2019-4-build-currently-in-the-Steam-beta-system)&p=18650#post18650==== Any pattern to which abilities can go on the sidebar? ====: Flesh to Fuel is the only side-bar-able survival utility power, as far as I can remember; it's one of the perks of the Fire Magic skill.:: 6/11/2020:: https://forum.projectgorgon.com/showthread.php?2560-Question-About-Survival-Utility-and-Sidebar-Placement&p=18529#post18529==== Sun Vale cave buffs vanished ====:Those both create non-timed buffs so if you've hidden "permanent" effects, you won't see the icons. As far as I can tell they are working though. (The buffs aren't permanent, especially the Sun Vale ones, but since they don't have a traditional timer they get lumped into permanent in the UI.):: 6/5/2020:: https://forum.projectgorgon.com/showthread.php?2548-Update-Discussion-May-28-2020&p=18465#post18465==== Connection Trouble ====: That is definitely indicative of a connection problem, and it's unlikely that any in-game settings will affect it. You need to be able to sustain a socket connection to the server, which can sometimes be difficult on wifi -- you could try using a wired connection to your router, and see if that helps. :It may not be a problem in your home at all, though; your route -- that is, the different internet machines that you connect to between your home and the server -- may just be unreliable. In that case the best workaround I've found is to use a VPN service. This will give you a different route to our server. :(And yes, the "retry now" message without actually being able to easily retry is a bug, sorry. The code design changed when we added Steam authentication, and it's not trivial to make that work again. But it's on the list.):: 5/8/2020:: https://forum.projectgorgon.com/showthread.php?2536-Troubleshooting-D-Cs&p=18336#post18336==== Item Management, Do Everything, Grind ====:Thanks for the feedback! One thought and one question. (Edit: and another thought after that, plus parentheticals.)==== Item Management, Do Everything, Grind ====:Thanks for the feedback! One thought and one question. (Edit: and another thought after that, plus parentheticals.) :To some extent, item management is just something the game will have to deal with, because that's the bones of this game. There are thousands of types of items, and probably a thousand more to come, and I can't really give people enough storage to store everything they find. (And if you think managing your current storage is bad, think of what it'd be like with 1000 more storage slots! Bad.) :The intent is to get players to sell the items they don't need right now, and buy them from others when they need them, facilitating trades and transactions. But combined with not having an auction house (they speed up moment-to-moment gameplay but hyper-inflate game economies, so I'm using slightly-slower alternate sales systems), players feel friction in letting go of stuff they don't need right now, because they really will probably need that item some day in the future. It's just not worth the hassle to store it for the next 100 hours before you need it, but how do players know how soon they'll need this thing? They can't. I've been working hard to make that more obvious (with more improvements to the "Item Info" window being my next stab at it), but I don't think I'll ever perfectly succeed here. :The way items work is critical to how I want the game to evolve, with new skills and areas and content being added every month or two, literally for as long as I can keep making the game. This type of free-form expansion requires a LOT of items, so that old items don't become too over-used. Actually, there are a lot of benefits to the game's item design, and only one serious down side: the "everything is useful to somebody so nothing can be thrown away" problem. I've kind of made my peace with the fact that it will always be a sticking point, because the benefits are too important. I'm not removing a thousand types of items, and I'm not giving players a thousand more storage slots, so the problem... will always be a problem. No game design is perfect. If that's the game's big flaw, eh, I'll live. :(Just to clarify: there ARE more storage slots coming, plus more item-management tools. Mounts have a "send to saddle bag" system that I'm hoping will reduce in-dungeon item management. But in terms of the bigger picture, there will always be more kinds of stuff than there are places to put the stuff. So there will always be friction here, because players will always have to make decisions about what they want to keep and what they want to sell.) :NPC favor, on the other hand, shouldn't feel grindy. "Grindy" just means boring. Leveling anything in any MMO is repetitive, and if you really notice the repetition it's called "grindy." NPCs favor is just a generic leveling mechanism, so the actual way that you raise favor can change. Maybe I should reduce the focus on item gifts by adding a few hundred more favor quests. (They'd naturally have to be very samey, but then, so is gifting right now.) My question is: do you think having a bunch more directed leveling goals for favor (kill-ten-monster quests, fetch-the-gizmo-from-the-dungeon-chest quests, etc.) would be worth the effort? :(Some individual skills, recipes, etc. are too punitive or costly and need more tweaking, like bear claws not dropping enough. But those are individual balance problems and I'm talking about the general design here, which OP seems to be referring to.):---:You mentioned "everything I do seems to spiral out of control" and that's pretty much the "I want to do everything" problem: the game lets you do everything, every skill, every NPC, every city faction, every dungeon, everything. But if you try to do everything at once, it means you NEED literally everything, and that just exacerbates other game problems. The design intent is that you'd pick up missing stuff from fellow players, but since you don't HAVE to do that, players tend not to. It often seems like crafting the thing you need won't be that hard, so you just take a detour and do that. And suddenly you're mired three crafting-skills deep, nowhere near the actual skill you cared about. :This isn't exactly the player's fault -- it's a sandbox problem, where the goals are nebulous and self-chosen, so the goalposts tend to move as you decide that no, what you really want is this OTHER thing first. No, wait, it's this other thing... etc. But there are tiers of "sandboxyness", and I think many (most?) players want the game to be a LITTLE bit more directed than it is right now. :So the more I think about it, the more I'm tempted to add new restrictions to help here. Not as limits, but as structure, rails to help players. For instance, maybe I should let you only pick one or two major crafting skills at a time. When you get a skill to 100 (or whatever), you can add another skill and start leveling that, but you have to focus on only a couple at a time until they're "done". Just one example idea. :I want the game to be very free-form and open, but I don't want to burn players out with a lack of direction and a lack of movement on their goals. It may seem paradoxical, but in MMO design, adding more restrictions is often the way to help players feel less frustrated and have more fun. If you have ideas about how to approach that, please share your thoughts!:: 5/8/2020:: https://forum.projectgorgon.com/showthread.php?2529-This-game-ultimately-feels-demotivating-to-me&p=18282#post18282==== Damage Vulnerability Calculation ====:The attacker's damage is calculated using the steps I listed above, then that amount is applied to the target(s). The target subtracts their mitigation, then multiplies the remainder by the appropriate damage-type vulnerability. :There are definitely exceptions and lots of special cases -- a few are intentional one-offs, but others are bugs, or works-in-progress. An example of the latter -- we recently added new vulnerabilities based on attack form: Melee Vulnerability, Burst Vulnerability, etc. You would think those would be applied at the same time as the damage-type vulnerabilities, but right now they're applied earlier, before mitigation is applied. That's a bug -- but one I decided wasn't important right now, since we barely use those vulns yet. It'll become a higher-priority issue when we use them for more stuff. :If there's something in particular that doesn't seem to work right, it's not a bad idea to report it -- even if it's a known issue, seeing someone report it means that somebody cares about it, which raises its priority at least a little bit!:: 5/5/2020:: https://forum.projectgorgon.com/showthread.php?1674-Developers-or-experts-please-help-Cow-Unarmed-and-mitigation-questions&p=18243#post18243==== Animal Husbandry Species ====:Depending on the schedule, it's possible that bees (and possibly rats) will get their genetics later on. But if timing works out right, it'll work with bees too.:: 4/10/2020:: https://forum.projectgorgon.com/showthread.php?2491-Next-Major-Content-Update&p=18125#post18125==== Fairy Magic Items ====:Thanks for the write-up, and to the first point you're maing: you're right -- and I realized it was going to be an issue, but didn't have time to rewrite the transmutation table yet. But I've got it encoding the needed info already. :Whenever you loot or craft an item that has a Fairy Magic power in it, that information is being encoded into the item. In a month or two (when I'm next working heavily with treasure), I'll change the transmutation table to use this information. It'll look to see if an item has the "fairy magic" flag, and if so, all fairy magic and mentalism abilities will be available in all re-rolls. This will also mean you can roll fairy magic off an item, and later roll it back on, if you wanted. That will make it more practical to have two Fairy Magic abilities on an item. :I'll also be adding a few more Fairy Magic treasure mods at some point in the future. (None picked out yet, or I'd have added them already, but there's space for a few more which haven't been filled in yet.):: 4/10/2020:: https://forum.projectgorgon.com/showthread.php?2483-Sub-skill-re-rolling-fairy-magic-transmutation-feedback&p=18124#post18124==== Animal Husbandry ====:The next dev blog is still a week away, so I'll share a little info, sure. :We're never exactly sure when all of the assets we need for something will become available, and the pandemic has made some things take longer than expected. So this next update is different than I'd expected the April update to be. But it's something I've been excited to work on for a while: Animal Husbandry! :Animal Husbandry will let players breed Animal-Handling animals (and eventually rideable horses). We're modeling the genetics after a simplified version of real-world genes, with dominant and recessive genes, mutation rates, that sort of thing. :This means that Animal Husbandry is a long-term skill. Even with the special gene-viewing powers we'll give you, it can still take many hundreds of generations to get the "perfect pet", and each generation takes a few days. But when you have offspring you're proud of, you'll be able to sell pet-only offspring (without breeding rights) to other players, so you can make a name for yourself as e.g. the vendor with glowing-eyed cats, or the breeder who makes the super-tiny grimalkin, or the blue-bear breeder with the extra painful bite. :It's definitely not something every player will be excited about. But for a certain small percentage of players, I think this will be an AMAZING system, perhaps the best genetics simulation in the MMO space, which entertains for years to come. For everyone not excited by that... well, everyone will eventually reap the rewards of fancy pets and mounts when they're on the market. :We're busy building the artificial genomes of rats, cats, and bears, and it'll be another couple weeks before it goes live. We've replaced some animal models to give us more possibilities for appearance mutations. :Aside from Animal Husbandry, there's also various UI improvements, including a couple from the recent forum thread, some more fae stuff, and probably some more content in Sun Vale/Fae Realm if the timing works out. :One thing that probably won't get much attention in a dev-blog, but which I'm happy about: I finally managed to repro the "cursor is stuck in the middle of the screen" bug. It is indeed a Unity bug as suspected, but once I was able to reproduce it semi-regularly, I was able to find a workaround. So the next update should see the end of that one. (This also fixes some of the "cursor got stuck as a certain shape" bugs, but not all of them, I suspect. But we'll get there.):: 4/10/2020:: https://forum.projectgorgon.com/showthread.php?2491-Next-Major-Content-Update&p=18120#post18120==== Forum Feedback ====:I don't think trying to gatekeep opinions based on play time makes a lot of sense, because it's hard to know where the cutoff should be for feedback. In general, if someone has a first-hand opinion about a skill, I want to hear it, even if its ill-informed, because that can still tell me something. And the amount of playtime is really not a good indicator of how in-depth someone's experience is, either. But that doesn't mean their feedback is bad. :A few years ago I remember getting feedback from an avid Druid player, who gave very detailed info on all the pros and cons of every ability, but when it came to the Healing Sanctuary ability, their only feedback was "it doesn't have listed heal amounts, so I've never bothered with it." But in fact Healing Sanctuary was even more powerful then than it is now (for then-max-level content). For a healing druid to ignore it was... crazy! In the end, my biggest takeaway from that multi-page list of feedback was: I really needed to get some numbers displayed for Healing Sanctuary. (Which I did, as soon as I could.) If even a die-hard Druid player wasn't going to bother experimenting, I couldn't expect more casual players to do so. It reinforced that I need to get as much info on the in-game ability popup as I can. :So that was very useful feedback. And feedback that only a long-term player could have given me. And feedback that they didn't exactly intend to give me. And feedback that, if we got it now, would get attacked by other players because they obviously don't know the skill as well as they think they do. :That's the danger in gate-keeping. I don't have a good way of protecting this sort of very valuable feedback, feedback that's objectively WRONG but still subjectively PRECIOUS because it represents what lots of players may be thinking, and needs to be addressed in-game somehow. :So I don't want to do anything that would intimidate other players into not posting feedback. If you have first-hand experience with a skill and want to share it, I want to hear it. Hopefully we can create a culture where we can respect that feedback for what it is, rather than worry about the exact "correctness" of said feedback.:: 4/4/2020:: https://forum.projectgorgon.com/showthread.php?2487-Good-Afternoon&p=18099#post18099==== Augment Loot ====:There haven't been any changes to how loot is generated that I'm aware of. I'll review it, but I don't see anything obvious that may have creeped in. Randomness is streaky though, so it's difficult to get a picture from a handful of data points. One thing to keep in mind is that the skills are determined independently of the item's rarity, so you should keep track of the total number of inaccurate items, not just the ones that are really high rarity. If you got 50 blues and greens with correct skills and 4 yellows with wrong ones... that's just bad luck. Anyway, I'll look further for any weirdness that may have creeped in, but there haven't been intentional changes in that system. (Also important to know: loot-dropped augments do NOT use the same system and are MUCH more likely to be for random skills.):: 4/1/2020:: https://forum.projectgorgon.com/showthread.php?2471-Update-Discussion-March-20-2020&p=18071#post18071==== Loading Crash, Force Low Res ====:The usual reason for game crashes is that the video card runs out of memory. Setting the graphics to "poor" is a good start to diagnosing, but since that didn't help, the next step is to make sure no special settings are causing the problem. Next time you're logging in to Kur, hold down the CTRL key on your keyboard. The login button will change from "Enter World" to "Enter World FORCE LOW-RES". This turns off all overrides and uses "-2: Retro-Terrible" graphics settings. :If you still crash, then we can rule out the usual causes and the next step would be to email me the output log from your crash so I can see if I can spot a problem. But usually the next step is more annoying: it will work fine in that extreme low-res mode, but when you raise it up again it'll crash. In that case I would turn off all graphics overrides (and if that doesn't help, perhaps even delete the local config file) to see if that fixes it. Changing something like View Distance can make a big difference to graphics memory used. :There were no changes (that I can think of) to Kur in the last patch. Did you your video driver update very recently? That could also be a culprit.:: 3/30/2020:: https://forum.projectgorgon.com/showthread.php?2480-Kur-Mountain-Issues&p=18055#post18055==== Fae Magic Bug ====:Yep, it's a bug that non-fae can get access to the Fae racial skill. Even though they can only access the first few levels of the skill, it's still too much, and we'll be wiping it completely for non-fae -- all levels and associated recipes and rewards will be revoked in the next update.:: 3/22/2020:: https://forum.projectgorgon.com/showthread.php?2471-Update-Discussion-March-20-2020&p=18006#post18006==== Dungeon Flight ====:Some dungeons also need their ceiling collision geometry improved. But yes, once I'm confident that the perching code is robust (which will take a while), I plan to open up dungeons to flight on a case-by-case basis as it becomes possible.:: 3/20/2020:: https://forum.projectgorgon.com/showthread.php?2322-Update-Discussion-November-22-2019&p=17988#post17988==== Unarmed ====:@Yaffy - Great write-up, thanks! I'll keep that in mind as we go forward. For the record, the removal of those mods from Unarmed was twofold: at the time I felt Unarmed was a little overpowered (when taken as a whole), and more importantly, removing them made room for some Evasion mods. I figure if there is any (non-animal) skill that can focus on Evasion, it has to be Unarmed, so I wanted to at least get the basics of that slotted in for the skill. Of course, evasion has its own problems with interactivity (or lack thereof) which need improving... Since the old mods weren't strongly themed, they can get slotted in anywhere -- I figured I'll reuse them for the last tanky skill I'll be eventually adding. Or it may make more sense to use a similar mechanic when revising the existing tanky skills.:: 3/19/2020:: https://forum.projectgorgon.com/showthread.php?2467-The-design-behind-quot-Tanking-quot&p=17959#post17959==== Fae Update ====:A quick status report, since I mentioned the next game update would be soon -- it'll be soon A few more days. It started as a quick bug-fix update but then I had to go and add new game mechanics (like the aforementioned stun-decay tweaks), which always take a ton of testing. And meanwhile Sandra's added a bit more fae newbie improvements. :So probably Thursday, Friday if we're unlucky.:: 3/17/2020:: https://forum.projectgorgon.com/showthread.php?2455-Update-Discussion-March-9-2020&p=17912#post17912==== Event Looting ====:We have to walk a fine line here. We've heard resentment from players in the past about ninja-looting during free-form events. It can really spoil the event for people and it can even create a negative impression of the entire game community. I don't want a few bad eggs making these events less fun. :On the other hand, we can't perfectly tell who is helping "enough" and who isn't. Live events are chaotic and messy enough as it is, and sometimes we'll get it wrong. But I still suspect we should TRY to stop ninja-looting, rather than turn a blind eye to it. :So even though we get it wrong sometimes, we'll keep trying to improve our methods and tools for live events, to make them more fair and fun for everyone. It'll take time and experimentation, which is why we test. Thank you for helping us test these events, and for letting us know how the events are working for you.:: 3/15/2020:: https://forum.projectgorgon.com/showthread.php?2462-Testing-of-the-world-boss-event-held-by-Jack&p=17893#post17893==== Convenience ====:The problem here is you're selectively ignoring convenience. A fairy ice mage has a TREMENDOUS convenience of not having to research any of their spells. That is a ton of work... and even unlocking the ice magic skill is hard. You've chosen to ignore all that and say "but AFTER all that convenience, what do they have? They suck!" :But if you're going to completely ignore convenience, then fairies are obviously superior to other races. They lose 16 inventory slots but have a fairy-only storage spell that gives them access to 30. 30 is greater than 16, case closed. Fairies are better if you ignore convenience factors. (They can't use metal armor? That just an inconvenience while finding gear -- we'll ignore it too.) :The point is you can't just selectively ignore convenience. If you want to argue that the inconvenience of accessing those extra slots is worse than the inconvenience of researching 100 levels of ice magic, that's an argument you can make, but that isn't the argument you're making. You have to take all the costs and benefits into account, not just "what have you done for me in the last five minutes of gameplay in this dungeon.":---:In general, I think we'll have to wait some time to see how people feel about the race's tradeoffs. I count it as a win if long-term players aren't incentivized to reroll as a fairy because of obvious mathematical combat superiority. The advanced races are going to be all about tradeoffs, conveniences versus inconveniences, doors opened vs. doors closed. And I'm basically aiming for contention. Because if everyone agrees that the tradeoffs of one race are better than another, I've done a poor job balancing. If there's a fair amount of argument about whether the tradeoffs are worth it, with some players liking the tradeoffs and some disliking it... that's a sign of good balance. So I'm going to mark you in the "not good enough tradeoffs" column, but we'll see how some more players feel before making changes.:: 3/15/2020:: https://forum.projectgorgon.com/showthread.php?2455-Update-Discussion-March-9-2020&p=17882#post17882==== Stunning ====:- It's not intentional that fairy magic be usable from the sidebar, that will be fixed soon! :- Elites and bosses use all kinds of different rage attacks besides aoes, but the fact that you only remember the aoes probably indicates just how ineffective those other attacks are... :- Stunning IS supposed to have diminishing returns. But it diminishes slowly from a 4-sec down to a 1-sec stun, which takes a while. It was designed around a 15-second battle duration, which has never actually happened. Should be less of a problem when combat is longer, but yeah, maybe this is a system that I should crank up, at least temporarily, to move people away from stun-locking.:: 3/14/2020:: https://forum.projectgorgon.com/showthread.php?2455-Update-Discussion-March-9-2020&p=17873#post17873==== Elite, Thorns, Fae ====:A few answers to questions/comments: :GK elites: Previously, GK bosses received cranked-up chances for Exceptional, Epic, and Legendary gear, above and beyond what bosses already were supposed to receive. They also got bonus health (between 9000 and 15,000 extra), and a bit more damage. In contrast, GK elites received a smallish health bonus and a damage bonus, but they weren't supposed to have extra chances for high-rarity loot. The elites in question (like the yellow Lieutenants) used one of the bonus-tables intended for bosses instead of elites. So they had +9000 max health instead of the intended +6000, they dealt something like 30 more damage per attack, and also had +20% chance for exceptional, +10% chance for epic, and +2% chance for legendary gear. They ALSO had their bonus chances from just being elites (which gave them e.g. +25% chance for exceptional already), so the stacking effect really made them a goldmine. I knew they gave out too much high-rarity loot, but I didn't put together why until just a bit before the update when I was cleaning up the entity files. :Thorns changes: I forget which thread it was in, but someone mentioned that thorns shouldn't do health-bypassing damage, and I realized that no, they weren't supposed to! Meaning that the damage-calculation spreadsheet assumes they deal regular damage. But then I implemented them as direct-health damage. So that was basically a bug fix, a no-brainer fix for me. That helped me understand where things were breaking down in my spreadsheet math. Even so, I still think thorns damage is overpowered when farming weaker monsters, and I'll have to address that at some point. :Fae newbie area: we'll make the trolls a fixed rate spawn so that they don't overwhelm the newbie area. Will also work on the newbie quests a bit more to try to make that intuitive. We'll do another client update with more bug fixes early next week! :Fae hives: these are definitely overtuned at the moment, meaning they are way too hard. They also have really cranked-up loot profiles, so it sort of works out, but not really. Will work on rebalancing those soon, but since these are large outdoor elite encounters, and I don't have a lot of experience making those, I expect it'll take some time to figure out how to make them flow.:: 3/14/2020:: https://forum.projectgorgon.com/showthread.php?2455-Update-Discussion-March-9-2020&p=17863#post17863==== OP Necro? ====:In case there's any doubt: yeah, Necro has some overpowered combinations. It's not the only skill with them, either. I do plan to fix those problems, but in this upcoming update I've had to focus on other things. So it'll stay OP for a bit, but not forever.:: 3/4/2020:: https://forum.projectgorgon.com/showthread.php?2447-NecroHammer-40k&p=17740#post17740==== Purple and Gold Items, Complaining. ====:Ugh. I'm tired of this petty cat-fighting, every thread seems to devolve into it, and I'm just going to start deleting posts that are off-topic. Sorry if I also delete something important you wanted to say -- feel free to repost it without snark and bitching. I know snark and bitching is natural, and I'm not really a fan of censoring, but I just can't handle it. I have to read all this stuff, and if your posts put me in a bad mood, it disrupts my day. That means I end up just glossing over certain posters because they constantly put me in a bad mood. I can't afford that. I have work to do. (Ever wonder why dev teams don't seem to read forums very often? Because it's physically exhausting. Weird but true. In other jobs, I've sometimes had producers tell me not to read the forums at all because it can sink productivity so bad.) :Thank you for your understanding.:---:I didn't make it clear enough before, but purple and gold items are inherently overpowered items. I balance around a good set of red gear (that is, red gear with well-chosen mods). That's why I said that the drop rate of purples and golds is too high in groups -- those items can break the power curve, and when you're in all gold, you're VERY overpowered. :It feels good to be overpowered, though, and I want to let you beat the game's difficulty curve. This is a game where you SHOULD be able to stomp the crap out of enemies if you try hard enough. But I am not obliged to make that easy. And I won't be making it easy. In fact I'd sooner drop gold-tier items from the game than make gold the balancing standard. Seriously. Those items already make my life VERY difficult while balancing. (e.g. "This content is too hard for a balanced group... but if even one group member has all golds, then it's too easy...") :Now, getting a good set of red gear IS a bit too hard at high level when you're just soloing. I acknowledge that and I'm working on it. But I'm not going to be handing out purples and yellows like candy.:---:Also, please consider how you frame your complaints. If you're complaining that it's hard for a max-level player to get amazing gear, you are NOT a newbie player. If you have even one skill over level 60, you are most definitely not a newbie. I know there are other players with REALLY overpowered gear sets, and everyone wants to be like them, but their existence doesn't make you a newbie. It makes them crazy overpowered, yeah, but some of them have put THOUSANDS of hours into the game. Just... incomprehensible amounts of time. Even so, if you've played for 50 hours, you are not a newbie. :Another framing problem: I mentioned this in another thread and I don't want to harp on it, but maybe I should: getting "only" a few hundred hours of gameplay out of an in-development MMO is GREAT by any reasonable standard. Stop trying to say that's not impressive. Stop pretending that you'll be able to play the same game literally forever. You can keep coming back and I'll keep adding stuff, but you'll eventually get bored and have to wait for new stuff. That's life. Not even WoW can keep people engaged literally eternally, so why would I be able to? Please be more reasonable with your framing.:: 3/3/2020:: https://forum.projectgorgon.com/showthread.php?2443-Tuning-Non-Elite-Mob-Availability-and-Drop-Rates&p=17699#post17699==== Overpowered Transmutation ====:Yes, I would in fact say that making overpowered items is in a good place. Players need to keep in mind that legendary items are inherently overpowered. I don't balance against having legendaries -- having them means you will be doing more damage, healing more, etc. than the game plans for. You are becoming overpowered. And yeah, that takes a while. So what? :Look, if you're bored at max level and think everything seems boring, STOP PLAYING. Take a break. If you hate grinding, then don't grind. Come back in a while. Or decide that having spent HUNDREDS of hours in this game is enough, and you're full up on Gorgon, and you can move on. All of these things are okay with me. :Intentionally making it even easier to get overpowered gear -- and thus making it even harder for me to create some sense of challenge for you -- is not in the cards, no.:: 3/3/2020:: https://forum.projectgorgon.com/showthread.php?2445-Transmutation-of-mods-needs-some-serious-help&p=17698#post17698==== Monsters and Augments ====:One of the changes in the next update is relevant here: random augments will drop in loot. (They'll be more common at low level than at high level, and at the eventual max level they won't drop in loot at all -- that's to avoid making high-level Augmentation crafting useless.) My goal with loot augments is to help players get through the tricky parts of the game's difficulty curve. It's not the only needed step, but its another step in that direction. So we'll take that step and then see what the next step should be. :It's not intentional that solo loot is "pointless" compared to group loot -- at any level. Group loot should be better, but exactly how much better? That balance-point has changed many times during development. Right now the scale is tipped too far in favor of group loot. I intentionally cranked the rarities of group loot (during pre-Steam testing) to encourage alpha players to group, because I desperately needed feedback and data on grouping -- and it was VERY hard to find a group with so few players on, so it needed to be REALLY worth it. Now that it's a bit easier to find a group, elite monsters' rarity-chances (and/or possibly the sheer amount of equipment dropped) feels too high to me, and I may tone it down a step. (Just a step -- I don't want to overshoot the mark by nerfing too hard.) :Solo monsters also need a bit more oomph, too, but not all monsters need the same thing. Loot is very personalized, and VERY complex. Every monster has its own loot profile, and many solo monsters just need some general tuning up: the goalposts have moved since their loot profiles were made, and newer monsters are better. I've been working on those behind the scenes in recent updates. The harder ones are the ones that need new content. For instance, a level 70 polar bear drops a single Tuft of Fur 25% of the time... that seems especially poor. I mean, when that bear drops flower seeds, the seeds are pretty high-tier. But you get the same Tuft of Fur from every bear in the game, whether they're level 40 or 70. Tufts of Fur are important for crafting across many levels, though, and its important that you be able to gather crafting needed materials in high-level areas -- I don't want to intentionally send high level players back to kill newbie bears. So fixing this bear will involve creativity, which takes time. Maybe high-level bears drop Massive Tufts of Fur, and I retrofit some recipes to use that instead of plain old tufts. (And maybe you can tear a Massive Tufts of Fur into three smaller Tufts of Fur, a la Perfect Wood. In fact, the reason we have Perfect Wood is to solve this exact sort of problem.) Or maybe in this case I decide its not worth the trouble. Maybe I can just have level 70 bears drop TWO Tufts of Fur. Does that make them worth killing for anyone, ever? I dunno. Whatever I end up doing to the bear, that'll fix one single monster. Then we need to repeat for ... every monster in the game, eventually. :Anyway, figuring out how to improve solo loot will take time, and I'll do it in steps. The next steps are in the next update!:: 3/3/2020:: https://forum.projectgorgon.com/showthread.php?2443-Tuning-Non-Elite-Mob-Availability-and-Drop-Rates&p=17679#post17679==== Lock UI ====:Thanks, that's what I was afraid of. I don't want to add the "Lock UI" feature until I've rooted out all the bugs like the chat window moving. Because the Lock UI option wouldn't fix those bugs... it would just mean you had to unlock the UI to be able to manually fix it. :Do you shut down the game by using the Steam overlay's quit option, by chance? (It's one of the causes of chat-window problems.):: 3/1/2020:: https://forum.projectgorgon.com/showthread.php?2430-Interface-Suggestions!-A-list-before-implementing-housing&p=17658#post17658==== Teleport Binds ====:I don't plan to add any more new ties/binds in the immediate future; I still need to think about how the pacing will work when everyone has a mount! For now I think teleportation is in a good place, in terms of how many different places you can get to at once. We may add some more ways to get to those same points, though.:: 2/25/2020:: https://forum.projectgorgon.com/showthread.php?2428-Some-new-teleportation-spells-please&p=17574#post17574==== UI Updates ====:There were no new features in UI revamp?! Prior to the big UI update you couldn't reposition most of the UI elements at all, so a "lock UI" feature would have been... a bit premature, let's say. That update also added everything from item-highlights when gifting, to right-click item menus, the ability to get more info on items, chat tabs(!), the ability to scale the UI at all(!), and that's just a few off the top of my head. I'm sorry you think its uglier, but there were definitely new features -- features I worked really hard on, and am proud of. :And since that update I've continued to work on the UI, including the crafting panel, the group panel, dialogs, the sales screen ... my point being that I do in fact improve the UI, and I do want suggestions. So please don't tell people what I will or won't add. Let people offer suggestions.:: 2/25/2020:: https://forum.projectgorgon.com/showthread.php?2430-Interface-Suggestions!-A-list-before-implementing-housing&p=17573#post17573==== Elves, Adult ====:Elves are frank and honest about their sexuality, and in-game humans behave much as you do: with disgust. So it sounds like you should play a human and not an elf. In any case I'm certainly not toning anything down about their (honestly extremely tame) dialog. So you can deal or not, it's up to you. End of discussion. :I closed the previous thread because this topic is not up for debate. Please stop restarting the "tone" debate, because it only causes flame wars. The tone of the game is not changing, and I'm not going to discuss it further with you.:: 2/23/2020:: Source==== Critical Healing ====:I'm working on relevant changes to monster stats and higher-level combat for the next update, stay tuned for more on that.:: 2/18/2020:: https://forum.projectgorgon.com/showthread.php?2412-Critical-Healing&p=17414#post17414==== Holistic Wellness Continue Bonus ====:I like this idea a lot. I don't have a way to implement it right now but I'll keep it in mind as new features become available.:: 2/17/2020:: https://forum.projectgorgon.com/showthread.php?2410-holistic-wellness-not-so-holistic&p=17383#post17383==== Match-3 Cheats ====:I think you're wrong that we haven't acted on your cheating reports in the past. But if you know of someone who has definitely cheated at the match-3 game and who is still playing a week later, please let me know who. (For privacy best to send in a new ticket in-game with their character name.) :It's possible to cheat in the match-3 game by using 3rd-party software. We easily detect this (since it doesn't send the correct mid-game metadata to the server), and we routinely perma-ban for it. It usually takes a few days for the ban to happen, since I manually double-check the logs before actually doing the banning. We don't bother to clean up the scoreboards -- their scores roll off the list after a week anyway. There isn't an exploit per se: it's cheat apps. I could do more to block this type of cheating, but it's so easy to detect that it hasn't been a priority. Plus, it acts as a honeypot for cheaters, letting us detect and ban them. :That said, the person in this screenshot claimed to use a different exploit method -- one that doesn't involve third-party software (although it registered in our logs as cheating anyway). Given the bug report, some other details, and lack of prior cheating attempts, we're investigating before taking action. :I would normally not discuss matters regarding banning on the forum, but given that their name is plastered on the high-score lists in game, I guess it's unavoidable.:: 2/16/2020:: https://forum.projectgorgon.com/showthread.php?2409-Quite-the-exploit&p=17375#post17375==== Cheating ====:Please report cheaters via the in-game report tool, because obviously a forum post saying "there are cheaters" isn't something we can act on. But yes, we ban for multiboxing, and we've had to ban more people for it recently, so I can understand that misinformation is spreading. Please help fix that problem by spreading correct information! :Our terms say that you can't multibox for any reason. In the past, for people who unwisely chose to buy multiple accounts, I've given a VERY RESTRICTED permission to log multiple characters online in order to trade items. But only to trade items, quickly and efficiently. :Some players have started twisting that generosity into exploits. I'm not even talking about using multiple accounts in combat, which is obviously cheating. I mean AFK-cheating. Such as: :"I'm just muling... while my mule plays music in the garden". No, that's cheating. :"I'm just leaving my mule AFK here next to this poetry podium while other people recite poetry." No, that's cheating. :"I'm just muling while my mule gives out battle chemistry buffs." No, that's cheating. :As those examples suggest, just being AFK on multiple accounts is often cheating. That's because it's easy to help others earn XP while AFK, and doing that with multiple characters at once is unequivocally cheating. :It's also cheating to leave multiple characters online in order to wait out timers or debuffs (e.g. cow milking mules). :In fact, given the number of cases we've had to deal with recently, I will go further and say: if both of your characters aren't actively trading items with each other, one of them should be logging off. That's just a rule of thumb to help you avoid being banned. :I feel that I was being very generous even letting players item-mule between accounts. But I'm not willing to go any further than that. :And if you see people cheating, please report them in-game so we can investigate.:: 2/11/2020:: https://forum.projectgorgon.com/showthread.php?2381-Having-a-second-account&p=17307#post17307==== Activate Pack ====:The old pre-Steam packages from over a year ago, like the one you bought, have to be manually processed and imported, which I do just before a game update -- which in this case is a weeks from now. (This manual processing step is why we switched systems!) I'm sorry it takes a while, but none of the benefits of the packages are in-game yet, so you aren't missing out on anything. :(Edit: unless your package has a title, which IS implemented, but still doesn't happen until the next game update, regardless of which system you bought from. Titles have to be baked into the game client so they happen alongside Steam patches.):: 2/4/2020:: https://forum.projectgorgon.com/showthread.php?755-How-will-my-quot-PACK-quot-be-attached-to-my-account&p=17250#post17250==== Fairy Questions ====:There isn't a hard lock on running the WN quest so it is possible to carry someone through it, probably, if they are extremely careful. However, the new-player fairy experience is not easy, and it assumes you are reasonably competent at the game. For instance, you need to make your own ice knives from frozen ice that you conjure, which means using several recipes and abilities in conjunction. This isn't super hard stuff, but a complete newbie will be totally overwhelmed and totally lost, and the newbie experience for fairies doesn't cover any of that stuff at all. (It's busy teaching you the new stuff specific to fairies.) :A new fairy will start at level 30 in a couple of skills. There are four combat skills being developed for them, and I think you'll be able to pick two of the four. (Not quite sure yet. Could be you can pick from two skill combinations, or something like that.) After the newbie experience you can always start new skills as usual, although being a fairy means that some skills are a bit harder to learn than they are for humans, elves, and rakshasa -- while others are a bit easier. I don't want to get into what that means exactly, because I'm still fiddling with the details. :Some of the fairy's abilities and restrictions are permanent in every form, but most physical attributes are tied to their physical form. So a fairy turned into a deer will play pretty much like a regular deer. :We aren't designing the experience with the expectation that fairies are receiving support from other characters on the account. That said, no, we won't be adding more character slots for them, sorry. (But the eventual VIP service will include another slot or three.) :The fairy is pretty far out there in terms of design. What I mean is, it has a lot of weird mechanics that may or may not work! But the game's in beta, and this will be a soft-launch of the race, so players just need to understand that the mechanics will probably change over time. I don't think setting up the test server will be too helpful, because I think most of the tricky changes will take weeks to gather useful feedback on. Well, maybe I'll rethink that. But right now I intend to use the main server for testing.:: 1/29/2020:: https://forum.projectgorgon.com/showthread.php?2384-Some-General-Fairy-Questions&p=17183#post17183==== Blocking Stance Upgrades ====:The first few tiers differ by having lower Power costs until they are free by tier 3. Tiers after Blocking Stance 3 are supposed to have a small Armor-heal (healing about 25 armor per tier), and they do in fact do that, but the display data got screwed up somehow, so I don't think the armor healing is displayed. I'll take a look at it for the next update.:: 1/20/2020:: https://forum.projectgorgon.com/showthread.php?2376-Blocking-Stance-upgrades&p=17114#post17114==== Large Conch Shells ====:Shells come in three sizes, small, medium, and large. Small ones are mostly what appears on the beach, and they have extremely low chances of being a Large Conch. But the large shells you find deep in the coral reefs have better chances of being large conchs. :Not every skill needs conchs, so if you're a bard trying to make a horn, you can buy them from other players. Since this is an item that can be obtained by level 30 players, a level 80 player can just pony up some cash for a work order to get the conchs they need.:: 1/17/2020:: https://forum.projectgorgon.com/showthread.php?2362-Update-Discussion-January-9-2020&p=17081#post17081==== Damage Type Immunity ====:Damage-type immunities are an important tool in my game-design toolbox. I started to write out an explanation, but it's turning out to be way too long. (I'm trying to post more on the forum, but my posts always take hours and I can't afford to stop working for hours... which is why I normally just lurk.) I'll try to organize my thoughts about immunities and turn it into a dev-blog at some point. :For now, I'm not going to talk about immunities in particular, but I wanted to say a few things about damage types in general. :The most important thing to know is that monsters' damage-type vulnerabilities, weaknesses, and immunities aren't particularly balanced yet. More content will smooth out some of the imbalances, and other imbalances will be fixed by changing monster types, but most of that type of thing will happen in late beta. In the short term, I'm mostly taking a hands-off approach because I think micromanaging this aspect of game balance would be bad. Here's why. :Damage-type stats are broken up by "monster type" to make it easy to learn and remember their resistances. You can learn early on that skeletons are weak to Crushing damage, and that is true with both a level 1 skeleton and a level 125 skeleton. However, I haven't made level 125 content yet, so I don't know how many skeletons are going to be in it. If a lot of level 120 content takes place on Skeleton Island, then that sounds like a big buff to Crushing damage! But I won't know minutia like that until we get there. :This kind of problem happens on a micro scale all the time: I look at an existing area of the game and say "hmm, there needs to be more herbivores here," and just like that, I'm subtly altering the "balance" of damage types based on how many of each type of monster spawns there. :I change other types of things all the time (like ability damage, or specific gear mods, or whatever). But I feel like damage-type resistances are more broadly relevant than that. It feels like "player knowledge" that should be respected. If you've learned that skeletons are weak to Crushing, and you leave the game for six months, when you return and discover that's changed, it feels a little insulting, like the game didn't respect your previous learning. Actually, you wouldn't think twice about one or two little changes, but if the damage types are different every time you come back to the game, that just feels demoralizing somehow. There's a difference between "all the mods for Sword have been revised... again" and "all the monster damage types you learned over 200 hours of play have changed... again." :So I don't want to constantly change monsters' damage type vulnerabilities. And right now isn't the time to focus on them. I'm struggling to explain why... how about this: imagine the game's balance as a tree. Its roots are the core game rules, the trunk is made up of all the combat skills, and the branches are all the game's dungeons and areas. The specific monsters in each area are leaves on those branches. Right now, not all the branches exist yet, and parts of the trunk are missing, and some of the roots are kinda scraggly... they may need to be replaced. Focusing too much on the leaves now seems shortsighted. :My current plan is to make only a few surgical changes during beta, just fixing whatever is really broken. In late beta when I know more about the shape of the game's balance, I can do one big revamp of monster damage types. (Of course, I'm not planning to stop creating content, so things will likely get out of whack again pretty quickly... but it'll at least be at kinda balanced for a little while. Balance is hard.):---:Anyway, what concrete info can I give you? I can dredge up a lot of minor design goals -- the most obvious one is that Darkness and Fire damage are supposed to have more resistant/immune monsters than other damage types. But even those ideas aren't locked down and could change. :There is one important over-arching design goal that won't change: I want the game to HEAVILY encourage players to have two damage types in their build, not just one. They can have a "main" damage type, but they should also have a secondary damage type that can be used in a pinch. Or barring that, some friends. I'll be keeping that goal in mind as I balance the game. (I have lots of reasons for that design goal, which I'll try to go into in a blog post, but suffice it to say that it isn't likely to change.) :I also wanted to warn you that if you're choosing a damage type because very few monsters are resistant to it... I didn't do that intentionally. It may or may not be something that sticks around. By the way, I also haven't intentionally made lots of monsters resistant to Nature damage. That just happened organically, and I expect it'll work itself out in the level 100 area, which is full of demons. :I'm open to making strategic changes to vulnerabilities right now, if a few surgical changes would make a big difference to game balance in the present moment. (I don't know what those surgical changes would be, off hand, but I'll be lurking if you have opinions.) Otherwise I'm content to wait until more of the game's content is added before making lots of broad changes. :(And I've spent over three hours on this "short" post and I need to get back to work! I have edit-itis and I could spend many more hours trying to make this really concise and clear... but hopefully this is at least coherent! Forcing myself to stop editing.... now.):: 1/17/2020:: https://forum.projectgorgon.com/showthread.php?2370-Damage-Type-Immunity&p=17080#post17080==== No Character List ====:Try temporarily disabling your virus-protection, my guess is something is forcefully disconnecting (or otherwise blocking) the game almost as soon as it gets the connection going. Which we've seen from some overzealous antivirus programs.: Actually, I see a server-side error that may be related to your character -- if so, you won't be able to log in until I can fix that in a day or so. I'm sorry about that! But point being, if the virus-protection isn't the cause, then I think I know the cause, and its on our end.:: 1/11/2020:: https://forum.projectgorgon.com/showthread.php?2363-Cannot-login-since-downloading-recent-patch&p=17004#post17004==== Turn off camera follow. ====:I don't really understand this one... if camera-follow was turned off, the camera would just show the player getting further and further away until they were off-screen. The camera has to follow you to be useful. I'm sure you mean to turn off something else, but I'm not sure what!:: 12/21/2019:: https://forum.projectgorgon.com/showthread.php?2338-Camera-Follow-OFF&p=16919#post16919==== Retroactive favor? ====:This can happen if you did a Hangout with the NPC -- they will do their level up the next time you talk to them.:: 12/21/2019:: https://forum.projectgorgon.com/showthread.php?2140-x-Favor-from-gifts&p=16918#post16918==== Stun Trap ====:Stun Trap had one nerf to its damage. ONE. The rest were mechanics fixes, in my book. The mods that give it random extra traps are powerful as hell, but not reliable -- that's their down side. But I'm willing to talk about other options, sure. Deflating those bonus-trap mods to make room for more reliable damage is an option. But before we can talk about that, though, I have to be clear: I'm not going to avoid fixing things because other things also need fixing. :If a skill can be used to efficiently kill Elites, I'm going to fix it. Yes, that means Fire magic is probably due for a nerf also. What else needs nerfing? Help me out here, I'll fix all the big offenders at once and we can have a more level playing field. It feels like its about time to get it over with, doesn't it? :So what else is more overpowered than Stun Trap was? What yardsticks are people comparing everything to? I need to know what those are so I can fix them too. (Edit: and yes, I really want to know what those are, or at least what people think those are, so I can look at them more closely!) I can't afford to think "Well I can't nerf THAT because that OTHER THING is SO overpowered, I just have to leave this problem FOREVER". I'm one guy trying to make an MMO balanced, along with six or seven other jobs I have to do, and it's hard as hell. I make mistakes and I have to fix them, retry things, sometimes retrying over and over and over. That's just the way it is. :People want me to play this shitty trick on myself where any mistake I make, I have to leave it forever. "Why not just buff everybody else?" Because then I have like 50x more work to do for myself. And when everybody can kill elites, I have to add Mega-Elites and Ultra-Elites just to compete with the growing power curve. Great, even more work for me. And for what? I do tons extra work just so beta-testers don't have to suffer a small power change? How is that sane? :The game is in beta. It needs nerfs as much as buffs. Probably MORE than buffs. So you'll need to get used to nerfs because its going to keep happening. In cases where I can catch myself and fix an obviously-overpowered problem quickly, like in this case, I think it makes sense to do the nerfs fast. But that doesn't mean longer, slower-burning problems in other skills won't get fixed eventually. :If you want to discuss the pros and cons of different ways to change the skill, I am all ears. I'm willing to talk about how to make each skill work well. But I'm NOT playing the "other non-mentioned things are more powerful so you are forbidden from fixing problems" game. :Agreed?:---:If so, then let's talk about options for Stun Trap. It's now in the damage range of several other skills. Maybe a little less, maybe a little more. One benefit is the ability to pre-cast. Fire Breath costs a ton of Power, and you pay that cost in combat. Stun Trap's power cost is paid out of combat, so you can just wait a few seconds before starting the fight and its like the spell was completely free. That's a big advantage. The two-second casting time more than counterbalances that, but its not something we can just ignore. That said, I'm willing to entertain other ways to organize the skill. :My thoughts on the extra-drop-chance mods: they're VERY powerful, but they're unreliable, so that makes them much less powerful. It's super tricky to find the sweet spot for mods like this. But I think they're fun, so I want to keep them if possible. :I'd frankly like to go for a bit more utility on Stun Trap instead of yet more damage. It's a STUN trap, after all. Maybe those mods could become something like "and the target gets stunned again five seconds later" type thing. Mrm, yeah not a lot of room there between exciting and overpowered... but the point is I'm not sure Stun Trap needs to be more DPS. It's in the proper range: it hurts things real bad. And also stuns them. I want to make sure the damage-boosting mods are worth having, but I don't think it needs to be, like, the best burst damage in the game or anything.:: 12/21/2019:: https://forum.projectgorgon.com/showthread.php?2347-Death-of-the-beast-forms&p=16916#post16916==== Indoor Flying ====:About flying indoors: in some dungeons it's possible to use flight to perch monsters without any danger. We've generally just brushed those issues aside because we have bigger issues to deal with, but as I prototype the upcoming playable fairy race, it becomes more pressing. Fairies, who have access to all combat skills, make it really obvious how broken indoor flight can be. I think the sanest solution is to just turn off flight in dungeons, so that's what we did. :As for why we didn't ground bats indoors in the first place, it was due to a technical limitation of how the giant bat flight was implemented. We couldn't disable giant bat flight indoors without stripping it off of them permanently (until they stopped being a bat and became a bat again). So we just left things kinda-exploitable until we had a better solution. :RE: giant bat flight speed, isn't there a flight-speed boost jewelry just for them already? If not they're probably due for one. We may also end up giving giant bats an improved innate indoor floaty-jump bonus, to allow for a bit of acrobatics in-dungeons. (Stuff we're experimenting with for fairies... if any of it makes the cut, we'll backport it to bats.) I also have some fun ideas of how Giant Bat will tie into Vampire synergy... though that's farther off.::Two random things: :- I agree bats should be able to fly in the casino and will make that happen :- I fixed a scripting bug with Sugar the deer, who now has the usual talk/gifting options (but no Favors just yet). It didn't make any patch notes because I edited her script live, so I wanted to document it somewhere.:: 11/22/2019:: https://forum.projectgorgon.com/showthread.php?2322-Update-Discussion-November-22-2019&p=16795#post16795==== Astounding Winter Leather Recipe ====:It will get added soon. It just keeps getting bumped down the to-do list, but I suspect we'll manage it soon -- not in the next update (which is in QA now) but probably the one after.:: 11/7/2019:: https://forum.projectgorgon.com/showthread.php?2299-astounding-winter-leahter-recipe&p=16722#post16722==== Future Update Features ====:Yes, as I discussed in blog posts, the mount system and the animation system have run into technical problems, so in the short term we've reordered the schedule to focus on rolling out new/updated land areas instead. :The animation update is necessary for mounts to work, so it can't really be abandoned -- but the method we tried hasn't panned out, and we're trying a new tack. This is programming work that we've contracted out, so I don't have anything close to an exact timeline, but I can say it's not happening before the end of the year. We're going to have to switch from Unity 2017.4 to 2018.4 in order to make it work, and that's a very BIG technical hurdle that we're slowly working through behind the scenes in each update (e.g. replacing particles that aren't supported anymore in the next version, that sort of thing). And beyond that there are a bunch more steps involved before we get mounts into the game. :In my ideal ordering of features, mounts would be added before we added tons of new outdoor areas, because obviously it's not ideal for beta-testers to have to run everywhere on foot. On the other hand, we're trying to create new content in a way that most benefits beta-testers. The next area we're working on is a complete replacement for Sun Vale, making it much larger, because the game needs more level 30 outdoor adventure areas. (This new Sun Vale will also serve as the Fey race newbie-hunting area, as fairies will start with some combat skills in the 30s.) After that, we'll be pushing on to the lands past Rahu and on to Statehelm in the first part of next year. (There's other lands beyond Statehelm, mainly the "end game" lands in the Crone Hegemony, but they're not in our pipeline yet, so I don't have any idea when those will show up.) :There are other big technical tasks that are happening behind the scenes, too. Due to the animation delays, it's looking much more possible that the first version of instanced housing will happen before mounts do. I dunno for sure. But mounts will happen when they can, that's all I can say right now.:: 10/10/2019:: https://forum.projectgorgon.com/showthread.php?2283-ETA-on-new-Animation-system&p=16602#post16602==== Kremmu the Warden ====:Kremmu doesn't currently spawn, but will eventually return!:: 10/1/2019:: https://forum.projectgorgon.com/showthread.php?2267-Kremmu-the-Warden&p=16572#post16572==== Respawns, App Focus ====:Aggro didn't change in Kur at all (or anywhere else, except possibly some tweaks in the Fae Realm), so I don't really know what that's going on there. Respawns likewise haven't been changed, so I'll need more information to try to figure out what's wrong. :If you're being surprised by spawns, do you have the recipe that gives you spawn premonitions? It sounds like that may help. (And will also help us tell if the problem is from extreme respawns or extreme monster aggro.) :RE: app focus: here I have some bad news -- I promise that the game isn't the one changing your app focus. (The Unity engine doesn't really even give me the programmatic ability to change focus, probably because of Unity's multi-platform nature. I could write special focus-changing code that's specific to your OS, but I definitely didn't.) :It does sound like something's interfering with the game's focus, but it's not caused by the game. It could be caused by software that came with a new peripheral, for instance... it's not really something I can debug from here, but try the usual things: shut down everything you can, temporarily disable virus protection, etc., and see if you can isolate the cause.:: 9/26/2019:: https://forum.projectgorgon.com/showthread.php?2265-Update-Discussion-September-20-2019&p=16536#post16536==== Mod Triggering ====:Things that have a % chance to activate are pretty much always rolled separately. (Things that add a % of damage are a different story!) Having both mods that give a 5% chance to stun means you have two 5% chances. They can both trigger at the same time, which in this case does nothing (since double-stun isn't a thing). But the Heal Undead mod you mentioned works the same way, and you'd get two stacking mitigation buffs if they both rolled successfully.:: 9/1/2019:: https://forum.projectgorgon.com/showthread.php?2256-A-question-about-mod-triggering&p=16421#post16421==== Dropoff XP Bug ====:It is indeed unintended that bonus levels affect XP drop-off. Another bug: hoplology, phrenology, and similar recipes are not supposed to have XP drop-off at all; they just got marked incorrectly in data, and will be fixed in the next hotfix or update we do.:: 8/26/2019:: https://forum.projectgorgon.com/showthread.php?2251-Update-Discussion-August-25-2019&p=16372#post16372==== Mogyar Cheese ====:It's true, this cheese is much rarer than it used to be. I'll work the recipe into a drop sometime soon-ish, so that it can be grown like other cheeses. The recipe doesn't exist atm.:: 8/6/2019:: https://forum.projectgorgon.com/showthread.php?2240-Mogyar-cheese&p=16280#post16280==== Zoning Lag ====:The lag you're experiencing is specific to your computer, it's not network-related. In a nutshell, it happens when the game loads blocks of data (from your hard drive) that are too large for your computer to handle elegantly. :Because of how scenes are built in the Unity engine, the first piece of data we need to load (the scene's terrain) is really massive, and although we tell Unity to do this in a responsive way, if your computer is slower, it can end up being unresponsive. The biggest cause of this is a slow hard drive -- using a faster drive or an SSD will make this unresponsive time much smaller or go away entirely. (The other cause is a slow video card, but in my recent experience the hard drive speed is by far the biggest bottleneck.) :The setting that Shieldbreaker mentioned may be useful to you in reducing that time window, although it probably won't remove it entirely. The important thing to know, though, is that your computer is NOT locked up, and is NOT doing nothing -- it's just doing something that's taking so much of its processing power that it can't even get around to updating the screen. So reducing that locked-up time may paradoxically not be what you want, because it may make the total load time slightly longer.:: 8/6/2019:: https://forum.projectgorgon.com/showthread.php?2241-Zoning-Lag&p=16279#post16279==== Invisible Players ====:I think the "people are invisible except their items" problem is a bug with the SphereCull special setting, which we haven't tracked down a fix for yet. (It looks like it may need to wait until we upgrade to Unity 2018.4 later this year, but I may find a fix sooner.):: 7/8/2019:: https://forum.projectgorgon.com/showthread.php?2205-Graphic-settings&p=16133#post16133==== War Cache Runes ====:We've patched a bug that caused some bosses to be unable to spawn portals (or do other things) when they die. :There's another bug I've seen reported a couple times which I can't reproduce in a development environment: some people are seeing no clue-runes in War Caches, the little plates are just empty. If this happens to you, please try relogging and seeing if that fixes it. And whether or not that fixes it, please let us know in a bug report! Please report the results of your experiment whether it fixes it or not. That'll help me understand what sort of problem it is. Thanks!:: 6/27/2019:: https://forum.projectgorgon.com/showthread.php?2189-Update-Discussion-June-26-2019&p=16030#post16030==== Unarmed Equipment ====:The new unarmed equipment (that buffs evasion) explicitly states that you must be using Unarmed, of course. And if it isn't working as listed, PLEASE report that, as it is obviously a bug. And if it wasn't listed that way (which it is), THAT would be a bug, too. Obviously. At least I think it should be pretty obvious... okay, I guess it isn't obvious to other people, so let me put it another way: :If you find something insanely out-of-whack from the norm, which doesn't mention being unusual, it's probably a bug and it would be really helpful if you reported it. For instance, if literally ALL skill-specific gear requires the skill to be active, and a powerful new piece of skill-specific gear showed up without that requirement, the first thought shouldn't be "I guess this piece of gear is going into ALL my skill set builds forever! Nice!" but rather "That's a bug, I should help Eric make the game work by reporting it." :I'm not talking about when something is EXPLICITLY different, such as the special fireball abilities that say they can be used even when Fire Magic isn't active. I'm talking about things that don't say that they're breaking the general rules, but are. If it's not explicitly an exception to the general rule, then ... it's probably a bug.:: 6/27/2019:: https://forum.projectgorgon.com/showthread.php?2189-Update-Discussion-June-26-2019&p=16021#post16021==== Telka's Teeth ====:personal insult? Give me a break. These are separate development topics. You want me to quickly remove parts of a design because you said something on the forum a few days before the update went live? :First, you shouldn't be able to retain the powers of Telka's Teeth in an animal form; that would be a bug. So let's skip all this werewolf stuff. :Second, like I said before, these are supposed to be rare. They aren't supposed to be something you can use constantly. In the same way you can't use Eternal Greens to just zerg through hard dungeons forever (due to a lack of said items), you shouldn't be able to use high-level Telka's Teeth constantly either. So if they do become popular the rarity will make it obvious how impractical it would be to use them every fight. And if that doesn't happen then I'll be decreasing their rarity, so they become a powerful prized possession. Something that will be mimicked in other ways for other races. :Third, I'm working on adding the necessary counters to evasion to make it more balanced -- hence the monsters with Accuracy in this update as a starting point. A few points of evasion isn't really going to be worth rerolling a character for, at the high levels, I think. And if I'm wrong when all is said and done, I'll fix it. :Fourth, stop with the persecution complex. I'm trying my best to be responsive, but things take time. You need to either give me space to do so or just give up on the game, because this whole "you offended me by ignoring me" thing is not okay. I value your feedback, both in the past and the future, but it should be clear by now that I'm not going to delay an entire beta update because you think it will be more imbalanced for a bit longer. I have schedules to keep; that doesn't mean I'm ignoring you. Stop it.:: 6/26/2019:: https://forum.projectgorgon.com/showthread.php?2189-Update-Discussion-June-26-2019&p=16021#post16021==== Secrets in Update ====:There are more "secrets" in this update than usual, mainly due to experimental ideas that didn't pan out, but which left behind something interesting. Some of those are actual literal secrets (such as hidden rooms) but others are just little interactions or items that didn't merit "patch note" status. But one change that maybe should have been added to the notes: there's a book on Joeh's counter in Serbule which teaches new players how Augments are supposed to work. It gives a bit of Lore XP when read.:: 6/26/2019:: https://forum.projectgorgon.com/showthread.php?2189-Update-Discussion-June-26-2019&p=16014#post16014==== Gazluk Caves ====:I actually thought most of those Gazluk caves were full of level 70 monsters already. It's unfortunately too late to adjust much for tomorrow's update, but I'll plan on making some changes there for the update after.:: 6/25/2019:: https://forum.projectgorgon.com/showthread.php?2185-Some-Meaningful-Level-70-Solo-Content-Please&p=16003#post16003==== Value of Mitigation ====:Yeah, in retrospect I should have left this alone as I suspect it's going to derail Yaffy's excellent thread. Well to bring it back around to mitigation: one of the trickiest things is that different content will be very different. Orcs are predominantly melee martial fighters, so that's sort of GK's thing, but at higher level we'll have dungeons full of demons, snake people, and all kinds of other stuff that are less inclined to use swords and hammers. (That said, I expect physical mitigation will always be a bit more useful than the others, just because so many monsters have claws and pincers and so on.) :Since I'm still using GK as the prototype for group combat, I've already made some changes to it for next update -- and I may make a few more based on this thread, just to make it a bit more varied. GK is a really big place, after all...:: 2/21/2019:: https://forum.projectgorgon.com/showthread.php?2180-Estimating-the-Value-of-Mitigation&p=15943#post15943==== Limited Secret Skills? ====:I don't think I want to move toward a "super l33t powers that are intentionally limited to a tiny group" game design. I can see why it's exciting, but from my viewpoint as a game designer it feels... well, kind of psychologically manipulative. We get everybody playing in the hopes of getting this amazing thing, and then only give it to a tiny fraction of people. In that case we might as well just implement paid loot boxes... at least I'd get money out of it that way! :Kidding aside, there are some ways that can work (e.g. when there are scores or even hundreds of weird overpowered things, and each is super rare). But I don't think that's an approach we'd want to take for this particular game.:: 6/21/2019
:: https://forum.projectgorgon.com/showthread.php?2178-A-realistic-way-to-add-dragons&p=15940#post15940
==== Dragons ====
:I don't think I want to move toward a "super l33t powers that are intentionally limited to a tiny group" game design. I can see why it's exciting, but from my viewpoint as a game designer it feels... well, kind of psychologically manipulative. We get everybody playing in the hopes of getting this amazing thing, and then only give it to a tiny fraction of people. In that case we might as well just implement paid loot boxes... at least I'd get money out of it that way!
:Kidding aside, there are some ways that can work (e.g. when there are scores or even hundreds of weird overpowered things, and each is super rare). But I don't think that's an approach we'd want to take for this particular game.
:: 6/21/2019
:: https://forum.projectgorgon.com/showthread.php?2178-A-realistic-way-to-add-dragons&p=15940#post15940
==== Combat Length ====
:In terms of combat length I'm basically trying to get battles to last long enough that there can be nuance and difference to each monster. I've long since realized 40 seconds (or even 20 seconds) isn't going to be possible without a lot of annoying restrictions. EverQuest has a lot of very forceful game systems in place, including trash monsters that require grouping, punitive XP formula if a group has members with too divergent of a level range, HUGE level-up power increases combined with huge monster XP drop-offs to push people to new content every level, etc.
===== The First Forum =====
No information can be gathered from the first forum for the game.
<noinclude>[[Category:Game Blogs]]</noinclude>
