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[Padreic]

(as seen here!)

Alganon Newsletter January 2011

The War of Conversion
The strategic battle for land and resources has begun. Members of the Asharr and Kujix who believe their way is the right way will do whatever they can to convert their enemies to join them. The neutral cities of the world, not protected by the gods, are at the mercy of the ongoing battles between the two organizations. The gods agreed that they would fight each other only in the world of Alganon, and only within their domains or through the summoning of their followers.
The latest chapter in the War of Conversion begins today!

Towers PvP

Throughout the world various towers have been placed. Each of these towers represents a control point for its zone, and each zone has 3 towers. If a single faction controls all three towers in a single zone, they "control the zone" and everybody in the zone receives a buff to their attack power, spellpower, experience gain and renown gain. Once a tower is captured, it cannot be retaken for 1 hour. Towers are defended by a few NPCs who will alert all friendly players in the zone that they are being attacked. To keep the buff, rally in defense of your towers!

Battlefield Promotion
Whenever a player of experience level 10-49 enters a PvP area and is flagged for PvP they will receive a Battlefield Promotion to level 50. This temporary promotion increases the player's attributes to that of a level 50 and increases all known spells to their level 50 equivalent. Also if the player is using Renown PvP gear it will scale to level 50 with the player. Players of all levels are encouraged to participate in the Tower PvP system!

The Renown System
Renown is the leveling system for players who engage in PvP. Similar to the way experience points work, you'll gain Renown Points (RP) for engaging in PvP activities. As you level up your Renown you'll gain access to increasingly powerful PvP items. The Renown Level cap for the Towers patch is 10, so all first tier PvP armor and items are now available for unlocking!

PvP Armor
The first set of PvP armor is available and can be purchased from the PvP vendors in the new military quarter of each main city. These armor sets all are itemized with Fortitude, a damage mitigation stat unique to PvP. Stacking Fortitude will give you a defensive advantage against other players. Additionally, Renown armor sets do not take Battle Durability loss and never need to be repaired to engage in PvP. Also, this armor scales with players that receive Battlefield Promotion. For characters under level 50 this is a huge advantage.

PvP Studies
The study system receives its first major expansion in the Towers patch, with about 50 new studies being added for PvP. Players will be able to customize their characters according to the type of PvP they most like to play. These studies build on one another and the final studies in each chain are powerful and difficult to attain. The new PvP studies added in this patch together with those coming in the next one form a fully integrated PvP research system unique to any fantasy MMO!


About Alganon
Alganon is a fantasy-based MMORPG that allows thousands of people to play together in a virtual world that features a rich history dominated by commanding deities, powerful weapons and armor, deadly magic, epic quests, ancient places to discover, the utilization of detailed tradeskills, and more. Designed from scratch and based in a uniquely created world, the goal in designing Alganon is to provide "Simple Gameplay with Unlimited Growth in a massive world of immersion and interaction."

Part of achieving this goal was to create a game that is easy for anyone to play, but also to build the game so that even the most skilled and hardcore gamer has the potential to grow beyond their expectations. A world where the casual and hardcore gamer alike can adventure, grow, and share their accomplishments with each other.

Our development team at Quest Online have designed everything from the ground up, tailored to feedback from the community about what you want to see in an MMO. While it can be difficult to select new games worthy of our time with so many prominent MMOs on the market, we have sculpted Alganon to be the game you do not have to dedicate all of your time to. We have implemented a system where your character evolves even when you aren't playing.


Game Features

• Adventure together with thousands of other players simultaneously.
• Journey through an epic world filled with dungeons of different styles and depths.
• Explore two massive continents and their huge capital cities, which serve as major hubs for the races inhabiting them.
• Choose from two races and several classes - with more to come.
• Encounter hundreds of interactive characters and monsters.
• Learn the continuing story of Alganon by completing a wide variety of challenging quests.
• Practice various trade skills to help locate reagents, make and enhance custom items, acquire wealth through trade with other players, and more.
• A robust guild system with extensive management ability for community managers to establish rewards and ranks to suit their own tastes.
• Enjoy hundreds of hours of gameplay with new quests, items, and adventures in static and instance areas.
• Buy items, beef up your character etc using the Tribute micro-transaction system.
• Test your skills against other players with non-lethal dueling, or fight to the death against your faction's enemies.
• Battle enemies to control territory for the benefit of your faction

With much more to come, there has never been a better time to enter the world of Alganon.
Join Today, Play Forever!

[chukk]

Hi, was actually about to post a little first impression of mine on the new patch, but since there's this thread here to discuss it, i might as well post
it here as well.

So i'd usually categorize myself together with those people who love to PvP,
so you might be able to guess how much i was looking forward to this last update. I was really hyped to see what you guys come up with to spice up the currently existing gameplay and allow us to enjoy it even further.

///
Before you continue reading, please remember ... this isn't an attempt by me to bad-mouth anything, I simply want to point out how this last update felt from a players perspective since the publishers usually tend to overlook some of those points.
///

Well ... the update has been released now but for some odd reason, my inital
hype kinda flowed off and it's kinda become awkward to think about pvp ... Now, before the patch you heard me asking about the
potential cost of PvP in this game and if you'd actually enable your players
to obtain whatever is available for PvP with ingame available currencys or effort (since i'm trying not to go crazy with money on a game ... especially not f2p ones since there's usually p2p counterparts out there which don't cost
more than 10-15ish bucks a month).

Now, pre-patch, we've already had the Battle Durability implemented altho it didn't exactly get into use since barly any Cross-Faction PvP occured.

With this newest update tho, people are engaging in PvP more often which is actually a good thing, but the benefits of PvP'ing don't exactly outweigh the drawbacks that come together with PvP.

You start out as Renown Rank 1, and till you can wear a full PvP set, you need
close to Rank 10 or so but how to get there ? There's only PvE equipment with existing Battle-Durability available until you've reached certain renown levels.

So just a short assumption from my side ... let's go with each pvp kill, gives 10 renown, you usually take out 4-5 foes before you die once.
Now, to get a renown rank up, you need hundreds of kills (let's assume it's rank * 100), which means you should die like 20 - 30 till rank 2, 40 times till rank 3 and so on. So, up till Rank 10 you die like 1000 times while each death costs you 8 tribute in the beginning, this comes close to 4000 Tribute, assuming you'd keep buying new PvP gear as it becomes available and you could equipp a full PvP gear, which costs about 2k Tribute to purchase/per month.

So, to get started with PvP in this game that used to be PvE only, you need to invest another 8.000 Tribute (in addition to the 2k - 4k for the Level increase/ability packs/Special pack).

Up to this point tho, we haven't started with studies ... or talismans.

The talismans which should be easier to calculate, cost another 2500 Tribute upping the total cost to 10.500 tribute.
Concerning the studies, it's a bit harder to determine the costs. There's approximately 50 new studies, each character needs maybe 30 of those with
each of them costing between 400 and 800 tribute ... eww, this pushes
the cost of a single character into the 30.000 ish Tribute (one time payment + 2.000 tribute / month).

Now, this one time investment of 20$ turns into a close to or even more than 100$ with an additional fee of 10$/month to maintain your pvp gear.

(Don't forget, this is only for one character on the account, you can have 8 of them tho.)

Sorry ... you heard me expressing my concerns about expensive F2P games before you released the patch and now i can even back my concerns up with actual numbers.

If you guys really want PvP to have a future in this game, you need to change something about the current system. You can't expect people to start this game and spend 120$ on it and continue to pay as much of a fee as any other P2P game out there.

There either needs to be a way, to trade Tribute with other players so you could buy it from them with ingame gold. To do so tho, it first needs somewhat
of a larger playerbase which isn't a given at the moment. So opting for this option won't get this game anywhere in the near future i guess.

For players to be interessted, in selling Tribute for ingame Gold there needs to be a reason to spend gold on which doesnt really exist either. Aside of some mounts or way to expensive studies (with barely any effect), there's nothing to take money out of this game. It's like a huge pot of Gold, where evryone's earnings get thrown into and nothing happens to empty that pot. It just grows bigger and bigger.

Here's some suggestion which would maybe make me consider PvP'ing a bit more in this game ...
1st of all, i'd completly throw out the battle durability thing, c'mon that's nothing else but a way to bully us players (at least that's how i feel about it). Just have PvP deaths, cause twice as much regular durability damage to players gear than PvE deaths, and you'd automatically take out a bit more ingame gold out of the game.

2nd turn some of the currently cash-shop only items into optional stuff, like the upgrade for one's personal bank, where you can choose to pay with ingame gold or Tribute. Things that could be handled like this ... the 2nd/3rd Ability role with another 2 or 3 available for tribute only, the inital PvP studies while endgame ones, could stay tribute only, at least the starters should be available for both, gold and tribute, low tiered PvP gear like having blue gear available for both, tribute and gold and purple gear for tribute only (but not insanly higher stats on it), talismans, reallocation of ability points at level 50 ... currently you can change it once per level for ingame gold only, once you hit level 50 tho, you won't have any additional level ups anymore giving you no other option than to spend tribute to reallocate them. I'd suggest to simply increase the fee for each additional reallocation. The first one costs 75s per level then they should become like 25s per level more expensive with each additional re-allocation.

Well, i'm really looking forward to see how this game progressess and i hope you guys consider some of the suggestions made to improve the game. Especially, i hope for the 1st suggestion to make it into the game ... the Battle Durability is sth like a thorn in my eye right now ... It simply makes me think twice before engaging someone in PvP which shouldn't really be the case since game should be fun to play and not have u worrie all the time about how much money it's gonna cost you if you engage with player XY

[Nightvision]

Several things come to mind right off the bat. First, we have a whole bunch of new quests that are coming very soon that are all PvP related and give Renown as one of the rewards. You won't be limited to killing players to level your Renown in the very near future.

Second, your numbers are not accurate.

* Battle Durability is pro-rated until RL 10 which is where you should have a full set of PvP gear. At RL 10 you should be able to repair about 20 times per month for about $5.00 if you're wearing level 50 PvE epics. That's something like 150-200 deaths.

* It doesn't cost $10/month to maintain PvP gear, it costs half that.

* There are 4 tiers of PvP studies and the Tier 1 studies cost less than a dollar each. Investing in 2-3 studies per month is about what we figure the average is going to be. So that's another few dollars a month if you want to do studies, and you should.

* We are working on some Tribute subscription packages that I think will address a lot of your concerns. You tossed out the $10-15 per month value and I think that's a reasonable expectation for players and QOL. We could package up some PvP services and easily fit in that model. For example a "Basic PvP Package" with maintenance and enough Tribute for 2 studies, a few stacks of Battle Remedy, a new Armor item etc. for $10.

[chukk]

Sorry, I my numbers are off, i tried to base them on whatever i've seen so far ingame, like for example each death costing 8 Tribute to repair the BD since i'm wearing 8 items which have a battle durability. Once u got a full set of 14-15 items that can lose durability 100 or 200 deaths should be like 1500 - 3000 Tribute.

If you maybe think that requesting the BD to be removed completely is unreasonable since it probably took alot of effort to get that working,
maybe it could be set up so that one item loses one point of bd per death
and not all of them. This would at least be a compromise i could live with ...

btw exactly do you mean with: "* Battle Durability is pro-rated" i don't quite understand that part.

And concerning the quests ... PvP and quests don't mix up, unless it's something like kill x players from the opposing faction.
Anything else shouldn't really reward any renown, else it'd turn out like in Warhammer where instead of people fighting each other PvPvE raids form, which
farm the keeps and battle objectives for renown.
(same goes for rated duels btw ... easy/safe renown farming there...)

[Padreic]

btw exactly do you mean with: "* Battle Durability is pro-rated" i don't quite understand that part.

He meant that the repair costs for Battle Durability scales with your Renown Level and is a fraction of the full cost at the lower Renown Levels.

[Nightvision]

Battle Durability has several components to it, here's a better explanation...

First, at this time there are 8 slots with items that are affected by Battlefield Degradation: Head, Shoulders, Chest, Wrist, Gloves, Belt, Legs, Boots.  Nothing else takes BD loss at this time.

Those 8 armor pieces take 1 damage point per death by another player.  A point costs 1 Tribute to repair.

The cost is pro-rated over the first 9 Renown Levels.  At RL 1 it costs 0%, you repair BD for free.  At RL 2 it costs 11.11%, at RL 3 22.22%, RL 4 33.33% all the way up to RL 9 which costs 88.88%.  For example, if you are RL 2 and you die while wearing 8 pieces of PvE gear, it costs 0.8888 Tribute per death to repair... TOTAL.  At RL 9 it would cost 7.11 Tribute.  At RL 10 it's full value, 8 Tribute.

The reason for this is simple, Starting at RL 2 you have the opportunity to buy a new piece of PvP gear every Renown Level.  By RL 10 you have access to the entire 8 piece PvP set.  This is to allow people to make their own gear decision.  If you only want to PvP a little bit, it will only cost you a little bit of money to do so and you can use their normal PvE gear.  If you want to PvP all day, every day, you'll want the PvP gear and the costs will be predictable and reasonable.

I honestly can't think of a more fair way to monetize PvP from a player perspective.

[zerof]

First, at this time there are 8 slots with items that are affected by Battlefield Degradation: Head, Shoulders, Chest, Wrist, Gloves, Belt, Legs, Boots. Nothing else takes BD loss at this time.

Based on my own observations, in additions to the armor pieces, weapons also take battlefield degradation.

The cost is pro-rated over the first 9 Renown Levels. At RL 1 it costs 0%, you repair BD for free. At RL 2 it costs 11.11%, at RL 3 22.22%, RL 4 33.33% all the way up to RL 9 which costs 88.88%. For example, if you are RL 2 and you die while wearing 8 pieces of PvE gear, it costs 0.8888 Tribute per death to repair... TOTAL. At RL 9 it would cost 7.11 Tribute. At RL 10 it's full value, 8 Tribute.

Is there a minimum of 1 tribute per point of repairs? My character currently has a 91% battle durability. When I click repair, the window ask for 10 tribute points. I am a RL 1 at the moment. Based on your description, should it be 0% or 0 tribute?

[chukk]

Is there a minimum of 1 tribute per point of repairs? My character currently has a 91% battle durability. When I click repair, the window ask for 10 tribute points. I am a RL 1 at the moment. Based on your description, should it be 0% or 0 tribute?

What zerof said there.
If it'd be like in Nightvisions explanation it should be free to repair BD for all of us, since most of use are still stuck at level one for quite some time. Yet this scaling doesnt really seem to work, since reparing my 8 equipment pieces that took BD damage when i died once cost me 8 Tribute to repair on my renown rank 1 Reaver as well as on my renown rank 2 Cabalist.

I honestly can't think of a more fair way to monetize PvP from a player perspective.

The pvp studies, buff potions, pvp equipment, talisman, and all the other optional buffs you can get from buying stuff from the tribute market are fair enough from my point of view (if this also counts as player perspective).

Also, you forgot about the Weapons, which makes it 10 - 11 Items that take BD damage while dying.

Edited by chukk, 03 February 2011 - 12:35 PM.

[Padreic]

Thanks for the replies and details on these issues, guys. Weapons should not take BD and it looks like the BD scaling isn't working as it's designed. We're looking in to both of these issues to get them squared away. The BD scaling change alone should make PvP combat far, far more enjoyable at pretty much any RL.

[chukk]

Yep, under those circumstances it really looks way better

Hopefully it'll be fixed soon and maybe you guys can take a look
at the renown distribution for kills, not sure if 6 renown for killing a level 50 guy when your level 50 is enough, considering you need 2.2k to get to renown lv2 and i think it's 3.6k or so to get to 3 just up it a notch, to maybe 20 or 25 per kill.

Also something i haven't tried yet, but how is the renown distributed within party members? Do all get the renown or will the renown be divided by the amount of people in the party?

[Padreic]

Yep, under those circumstances it really looks way better

Hopefully it'll be fixed soon and maybe you guys can take a look at the renown distribution for kills, not sure if 6 renown for killing a level 50 guy when your level 50 is enough

There are many factors in the formula for Renown gain including the RL difference between the players, experience level difference, Battlefield Promotion, etc. This also factors in diminishing returns for the repeated killing of the same player. All things being equal, killing a higher exp level player will net you more Renown than killing someone of your own level or lower. For a level 50 it will be more of a battle gaining Renown until A) Renown Levels are higher and can raise the multipliers a bit and we introduce quests/keeps to drive more PvP play. In the end, the more you PvP, the better it will get. We're also exploring other avenues of earning more Renown within standard PvP or Tower play.

Also something i haven't tried yet, but how is the renown distributed within party members? Do all get the renown or will the renown be divided by the amount of people in the party?

Each member gets the full Renown. It's calculated the same way it would be in a solo kill for group members in range, so group members can get the same full Renown gain from other members killing the PvP target.

[Nightvision]

A follow up to my follow up...

Battle Durability will now correctly be calculated on PvP death. Rank 1 will not suffer any BD loss and the battle durability damage taken will now scale with Renown Level. Lower Renown Levels will take less durability damage per death, only taking a fraction of a point. Please note that due to this scaling players that wish to spend less on repair bills should repair their Battle Durability gear when the BD is low, not every time they die. This will have a significant decrease in repair costs.

For example: At RL2 you will take .1111 points of durability loss per item per death.  The first death will show on the item UI as taking 1 point, and if you repair after the first death it will cost 1 Tribute.  However you can die 8 more times and the durability on the UI won't change.  On your 10th death you'd lose another point and could die 9 more times before the next point was lost.

At RL5 you take .4444 points per death, so you only get 2-3 deaths between loss of a durability point.

Hope that makes sense to everybody.

Now, the other bit of news is that this is all live as the hotfix was done a few minutes ago.  Additionally we've returned all Tribute that was collected for BD repairs, so if you repaired your gear already that Tribute is back in your account.  In addition we've repaired everybody's BD on all their gear so everybody starts as of this moment with full Battle Durability.

Please try the system and give it a fair chance.

[Issy]

yay! See you all on the battlefield.