f13.net

Folks,

Once again into the white lion's mouth we boldly go with another patch. As such, here are some highlights from the next patch. The full patch notes will be posted later today with all the goodness from this patch. We're currently *hoping* to get the patch up and running tomorrow but after last week's patch, we'll hold it up if necessary.

1) We have added a 'Join All' button to the scenario window which now allows players to join all scenario queues in their current tier at once.

2) In order to promote realm and population balance, some realms on some servers will now award their players with a +20% bonus to renown points and experience. This is not a permanent bonus, but rather a temporary incentive to promote balance. Realms currently offering this bonus are marked on the server list with a colored icon; blue for Order and Red for Destruction - Check the Herald for the latest list!

3) In an ongoing effort to deter players from going AFK while in scenario starting areas, we have made the following changes:

a. Players who join a scenario and remain in their realm's spawn area for two minutes will be automatically removed from that scenario.

b. Upon entering the spawn area of a scenario, players will receive a debuff that prevents them from earning renown, renown points and experience. This debuff will be removed when the player leaves the spawn area.

4) In response to player feedback, we’ve added RvR and NPC chat tabs for new players. These tabs filter scenario chat and NPC chat respectively. In order to minimize frustration to users who have already customized their chat window, we will not be overwriting any current settings, so this change will affect only new players. Players who wish to add these tabs may do so through the normal chat configuration options. While in scenarios, players will no longer be able to select "Need" in their loot windows unless their character can use the item being offered according to his/her race and career. In other words, if you are a level 5 WL, you can "Need" on a level 7 WL item.

5) Fixed a bug that prevented players from creating an alliance with more than two guilds. Now that this issue is resolved, alliances can grow to great numbers to crush their enemies!

6) Fixed an issue that was causing the chat window to reset to its default position at logout.

7) In order to deter players from spam-mailing, WAR continues to enforce a 5-second delay between sending mail messages. However, we have reduced this delay to 1 second for mails being sent to alts or guildmates

8) The war against the gold spammers continues. We’ve added new code that will hinder the spammers as they seek to carry out their nefarious deeds! No details, for obvious reasons. This is only the next step, not the final one, in our continued battle against them.

9) All game logging to files will be disabled by default. This should help those with lower-end machines in heavy congestion areas like scenarios, open RvR, etc. It might even help some higher end machines depending on other programs that are running on the user's machine during these events.

Okay, those are the highlights. We have some important hot fixes as well that we are working on as well that affect open RvR. We'll talk about them as soon as they are ready to go. They will bring a smile to the face of the many people who have been asking what steps we are going to take to help make open RvR more inviting to people. And no, we didn't nerf scenario exp, rp, ASAP, ok? 

Mark

Folks,

Also, late word on another change in 1.0.2. From now on, all logging to files done by the client is now disabled by fault. It was accidentally left on from beta and will now be disabled. We'll post instructions on how to turn it back as well. Future versions will also have a GUI that will allow players to tune the file logging.

Thanks for the guys at the Vault for pointing this out to us. We do think that it could be the cause of some lagging in open RvR, scenarios, etc. on some machines. While this should have little effect on the high end rigs (unless you have a ton of other stuff going on in the background), it should definitely help on the lower-end machines.

Mark

b. Upon entering the spawn area of a scenario, players will receive a debuff that prevents them from earning renown, renown points and experience. This debuff will be removed when the player leaves the spawn area.

Two issues I see that may present themselves as problematic:

Even easier than that. We could call upon the old reliable gamer tool, a PILE OF QUARTERS, to weigh down a "run forward" button.

There's a 7-day 20% bonus for reknown and xp on Bechafen (Open RvR)  :awesome_for_real:.  So yeah things are looking up.

That's the only server with the bonus right now.

I swear I saw an incentive for people to play the outnumbered side in the patch notes. As I mentioned, I don't think this will be enough, but they're clearly addressing the problem, and its good to see them do so this quickly.

For all we know, they have more complex fixes (such as Dogs of War) in testing, due in the very same patch that addresses the miserable NPC pathing. :)

Elder is not back yet. Personal tinfoil: they used the servers for production servers and are getting new ones for test. Mostly because it happened with daoc ;)

Sadly it doesn't look like the XP gain for servers is dynamic. Bechamel and Ungry (or something like that) have 7 day +20% Order gains assigned to them.

Mythic's plan appears to be to manually set reward levels per servers to deal with imbalances. :awesome_for_real: