Important things first, we are forced to move our update release from September to October. The situation is caused by so many things that I cannot describe it in a few words. I will transparently write you everything about what we do and what we did to give you a vertical view behind our timing.
Initially, the update was supposed to contain a few main features:
– Chat ( private chats, global chats ).
– Open Market for trading your goods.
– Player profile viewing.
At the very beginning of the tasks, everything looked so promising. However, when we designed everything, we found out a few things described below.
Open Market
The design of the Open Market is pretty simple:
- Anonymous trade offers
- Offer validation period ( a slight delay before an offer will show up )
- Requested item and offered price.
- Few trade spots.
- Offer limited by time.
- All submissions accepted/finished will be sent to the mailbox.
- Items have to be unique to maintain the value of trading in the long life of the game.
Ad 1; Ad2;
We have analyzed many games with open trading or marketplace ( WoW, D3, D2, and a lot of krMMO’s) we found out that a lot of games gave the possibility to make fake trades at the given time sell game items outside of the game. Firstly, we will have ToS updated for such a case. Secondly, we have found a few ways to fix it by designing the system differently but maintaining the same experience as the player.
Selling the items outside of the game is breaking the balance of the value of the in-game items. Open Market is the auto-balanced system. If some in-game item is bigger in stock, it has a lower value. When people stop creating such an in-game item, it will lower in stock, and the value will increase again.
Making faked offers to sell items outside the game will destroy the balance because the stock will increase without spending on the other side of in-game items.
Ad 7;
And here we have the first issue that we didn’t expect. In the current gameplay, whoever and however got the legendary item would always have the same value. That’s the biggest early game design mistake we make. The item has to have its unique value to reward a player’s activity ( grinding, crafting, trading, looting ).
For example, person A played for a week to get the legendary item and stopped being active. Person B playing actively for two months but already has this legendary item, is there a reason to be engaged to get a second of the same legendary item if it will give no additional value? The value of the backpack between Person A and B will be the same no matter how long they have been playing.
Redesign of the gear items
W had to redesign gear items. What we did is we transferred all the gear items that you’ve done till now and made them unique per the whole server. Those items will maintain the same statistics that they have got earlier.
- Newly created gear will have a random range of each statistic ( Health, Attack, Defense, and Attack Speed).
- Gear items are no longer stacked in the backpack, so we moved them to our own inventory.
- Legendary items will be easier to be craft ( Re-balance of the crafting system ) to give a possibility by grind to get better and better items.
- We will introduce a new quality of the item ( RELICS ) with new Runewords.
- Items will be able to be looted ( if the scheme is completed ).
- Each created item will be signed by the looter or a creator.
Redesign of inventory UI and UX
This is another thing that shown up without being in the schedule. The redesign of the gear items forcing us to make the UX and UI much better, as we will now have dozens of unique items. We have to give them the possibility to swap and compare them easily within the inventory. So on, we changed the whole screen to better fit RPG quality and meet all your expectations, which have been already posted in the #ideas channel on Discord.
Chat system
We want to introduce a really advanced chat system, which is taking us much more time as we advance through its development.
We already introduced:
- Multiple channels split between languages
- Global channel
- Private messages
With the private messages we found a lot of design problems, like:
- blocking a users
- adding a friend to the list
- notifying users about a message
What is more, we are making it guild’s ready and extra features like item’s sharing, user profile’s sharing, etc. Everything had to be discussed multiple and multiple times.
The lord of dissection
By making this update we also want to introduce further gameplay, that will give you more fun and more reason to do daily tower runs. At the moment uber bosses are defeated only to get you runes. Starting from the update uber bosses will drop their parts required to open the portal to the lord of dissection. Lord of dissection will have the drop chance to drop all the relicts. The statistics of the boss are prepared for the late gamers that are able to win around 60 levels of the frozen tower.
We also designed the whole story behind the Lord of Dissection and relics related to its story. You can find it here: The Lord of Dissection – Miners Settlement
The town
It’s one of the biggest update things. After completing the story with a guardian quest, you will grant access to the city. It’s also a multiplayer hub, in which you will be able to see active player characters walking within the city. This feature will make the game finally feel more alive as you will see the players talking on the chat or being active. It will also contain a future guild spot and the Open Market spot.
The guilds will be introduced with the next big update, but the place for them is already designed, and you will be able to see it within the city.
Player Profile viewing
This is feature is already ready. After the update, everyone will be able to view the profile of each player straight from ranking or chat. Check his equipped items, level, statistics, or even each of the runewords build.
Our team
Because of the constant development of the game and the growing community, we decided to make our team a bit bigger. We spent a few days searching for the right people to join us. After all, we have 2 artists and another one will join in October. We have also 3 programmers.