Greetings Mortals,
On March 27th Henrik hosted his bi-weekly QnA stream, where he discussed some upcoming changes to the sieging system, as well as some details about the second character slot and updates to our development roadmap.
You can watch the full stream archived over on our YouTube channel:
Second Character Slot
Occaisionally in the past when discussing additional characters, we have floated the idea that they may share certain aspects of your first character, such as Nation Standing or Murder Counts.
In the end, to offer the most value we have decided to forgo any such limitations and treat the additional character as a separate entity almost entirely. The one restriction we plan to have is for player housing, being to limit each account to one player house.
This means your second character will have an entirely separate Action and Profession point pool, and will not share Nation Standing or Murder Counts with your first character.
Additionally as we have received a few questions about it, this second character slot is completely free and will simply be unlocked when the patch goes live.
Sieging Update
For some time now we have been monitoring the behaviors of many guilds in regard to how they approach and interact with the current sieging system.
Although there is still a lot of room for tweaking the current values to attain better balance and more enjoyable gameplay, there are a few areas and scenarios which we can never fully escape from with the existing system.
One such problematic area is the nature of surprise sieges. With the current system, despite the Supply Structures offering localized defence, a siege can begin at any time of the day, which heavily incentivizes guilds to target each other during their lowest population hours.
Although this is done for clear advantageous reasons, it often results in less than optimal gameplay for both sides, with the ‘attackers’ being bored and mostly uncontested, and the ‘defenders’ waking up to their assets being gone without being able to participate.
Another area which we wanted to solve, is that the current system always favors the ‘attackers’. The ‘attackers’ choose what day the siege will begin on, as well as what time they will start.
To address both of these areas as well as many others, we are introducing a new system which uses ‘Siege Challenges’.
Siege Challenges
- When one guild wants to siege another, they will send a ‘Siege Challenge’ to that guild.
- Upon receiving this challenge, the defending guild has 48 hours to respond by picking a time slot within the next 48 hours for the siege to take place.
- Both guilds then see a count down until the siege can begin.
- During this time window, all of the defending guild’s assets will be vulnerable to siege. Outside of this time window, all guild assets will be invulnerable.
- If the defending guild successfully defends their assets until the siege window is over, the siege is considered a failure and the attackers must try again in the future.
- If the defending guild does not respond to the challenge, a default time will be chosen of 24 hours from when the challenge was sent.
- The time chosen by the defending guild must be at least 24 hours from the time the challenge was sent.
- Sending a challenge has a gold cost of 500g and a Prominence cost of 10,000, paid from the Treasury of the guild sending the challenge.
- There is no limit to how many times you can be challenged by other guilds simultaneously.
- You can not challenge a guild which you have already sent an ongoing challenge to.
- If Guild A has sent a challenge to Guild B, Guild A can not send another challenge to Guild B until the first siege has concluded.
- Guild B can however send a new challenge to Guild A while the first challenge from Guild A to Guild B is ongoing.
- Structures and houses which are not claimed by a guild will not benefit from this system currently.
- Structures which are still under construction will remain vulnerable, even outside a siege challenge window.
- Newly completed structures have a cooldown of 24 hours before they can gain invulnerability outside a siege challenge.
One of the goals of this new system is to ensure both parties have ample time to prepare for the siege, and allow for as much participation as possible.
Supply Structure Changes
As part of this update to sieging, we are making some balance adjustments to the existing Supply Structures and localized defence mechanics.
As we are sure many of you would agree, the gameplay of capturing towers for Guild Defence was not optimal and at times could be very tedious. As such, we have changed the way Supply Towers work, to make them serve a purpose more in line with their name.
In the next update, Supply Towers will no longer add global Guild Defence, or lower the amount of Prominence drained per tick.
Supply Towers will now produce Guild Supply every 30 minutes.
The amount of Guild Supply produced is set to start out at a “safer” rate, currently 3 Supply every 30 minutes per tower held. However, this rate can be adjusted over time if necessary, or if needed after the PTR testing phase.
With the new ‘Siege Challenge’ system and its vulnerability window mechanic, we are also making some adjustments to the rate at which Guild Defence gained from Supply Storehouses and Supply Lines increases and decreases.
Guild Defence gained from Supply Structures will now decrease much faster, and increase much slower, allowing for essentially a two stage siege under normal circumstances, where the ‘attackers’ must first siege your Supply Structures, and then siege your assets such as TC structures or player houses, Strongholds and Keeps. This is similar to the current system, however there will now be much less down time between these two stages.
Roadmap Update
Last week we made some adjustments to our development roadmap page.
It is no secret that the new player experience could be improved. Most of you are also keenly aware of the performance issues we have had regarding large battles since the migration to Unreal Engine 5.
These are two things which, although they weren’t voted for on our community roadmap poll, we know are extremely important for the health of the game.
As such, we have reordered some roadmap items to allow for a Sprint 3 which is heavily focused on new player experience polish as well as utilization and optimization of the latest UE5 updates to hopefully improve performance.
We have a very long list of improvements to Haven and the starting experiences of new players, to help make sure their first steps in Nave are both memorable and enjoyable, while better showing off what Mortal Online 2 has to offer.
This polish does not only benefit new players however, as we have many quality of life changes planned which are sure to interest even the most grizzled veterans.
In addition to allowing us to work on these areas of the game which will benefit everyone greatly, we have also moved ‘Combat Abilities’ to Sprint 4 because we want to ensure they are able to have enough time in the oven. The combat of Mortal Online 2 is a core pillar of the game, and we want to give any additions to these systems the love and attention they deserve.
Upcoming PTR Date
The Public Test Realm for this upcoming patch is currently planned for Wednesday the 10th of April, next week.
As we near closer to this date, we will announce more details about what you can expect to play around with on the test server, and what events we have planned to aid with testing the new systems.
Whether you’re a longtime fan of Mortal Online 2 or a newcomer in the world of Nave, dive into the vault with Henrik every second Wednesday at 8:00 PM CET to get your questions answered by the CEO and game designer.
See you in Nave,
The Star Vault Team