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These are the release notes for Early Enrollment v10.1! Key features include:
Territorial Warfare Starts Tomorrow! Holding & Outpost Warfare and Settlement Capture starts Thursday 30 July Tomorrow we are going to activate Early Enrollment 10.1. This will turn on Holding & Outpost Warfare. This will also mark the start date for attempts to capture unused Settlements. Please read more about these features in this blog. Starting tomorrow Companies can feud opponents and begin overrunning Outposts. That means that Friday the first Holdings may be contested. You will need to monitor your territory during your Settlement's PvP window to watch for attacks - there is no in-game notification. You can read complete release notes for the 10.1 update here. Additional Notes We are going to run a script during downtime to correct some bugs with the amount of Influence that has been allocated to structures. You can read about that process in this forum post. Please note that in 10.1 we are changing the Bulk Resource Upkeep costs for Holdings and Settlements. Be sure you're reviewed the new info (which is in the blog posting) before Monday morning. As always if you have any questions please email us at customer.support@goblinworks.com and we'll do our best to assist you!
Basic Guides to game mechanics Search Tools: N/A :) (but it's easy to search the forums. Google "whatever you want to search for" site:goblinworks.com/forum) Moderated use of visual flair: Except for staff, none at this time Links to useful external resources Download links that aren't obtrusive: I have no idea what this means.
Players this morning, 13 June, we updated Early Enrollment to v9. You can read the complete release notes here!
This morning we deployed a server-side fix, v8.2.3, which addresses the erroneous calculation of Influence after a Feud or the teardown of a Holding or Outpost. A client-side patch is not required. We are planning to do an influence recalculation that will restore Influence to Companies that were affected by the incorrect previous Influence restoration after Feuds and structure Teardown. We did a dry run of that adjustment this morning (Friday 05 June) but did not implement the adjustment. We may have the opportunity to do the adjustment tomorrow (Saturday) or we may wait until Monday. We will get it done as quickly as we can. Fixes:
This update did not change any of the calculations for Influence, it just fixed the bug that caused Influence to not be restored correctly. We are continuing to evaluate the underlying calculations themselves with your feedback.
We attended PaizoCon last weekend and during the show we presented a number of Pathfinder Online panels to the attendees. We recorded 4 of them for distribution: The Goblinworks 2015 Annual Update The Economics of Pathfinder Online The Pathfinder Online Art Review PvE and Escalations in Pathfinder Online There's a tremendous amount of content in those panels and I'd be happy to try to answer any questions anyone may have although I may have to punt and ask that you shift some specific questions to the forums at goblinworks.com where my team can try to answer in more detail. And if you'd like to try Pathfinder Online free for 15 days, email customer.support@goblinworks.com and I'll be happy to issue you a trial invite. RyanD
Saturday starting at 11:00am (Pacific), we will be running a special edition of Adventure Time from PaizoCon. Watch on twitch.tv/goblinworks
We've posted a new blog about the new Deurgar content in Early Enrollment 7. Early Enrollment 7 is scheduled to be deployed Friday 17 April. You can discuss this blog on the Goblinworks forums!
Players, I am going to be broadcasting live via twitch.tv/goblinworks this afternoon at 2pm (Pacific). The objective is to demonstrate the new Outpost & Holding Feature (although we may see some other stuff too!)
There's no functional difference between an "RTS engine" and an "over the shoulder" engine. They effectively use the same technology and the same art pipeline. You save some money because you can make less detailed models, but you gain a lot of costs because you have to spend a lot of time trying to make small graphics look cool, and distinct enough to be understood by the player. The only place where this really applies (both savings and cost) is in character models. The models for structures, vegetation, etc. remain about the same level of cost & complexity regardless. No money is saved on the environment because you have to make a huge world in either scenario. A substantial cost is added in UI and visual effects (VFX). In an RTS environment you don't get the simple feedback loop of seeing your character act and being able to respond. Instead the game needs a lot of visual indications and audio indications that the user's input has been received and is being processed. Plus in the RTS world you need to be able to group and issue group commands, set waypoints, etc. all of which requires a lot of extremely complex programming, to say nothing of the level of graphic design required. And then in the end you are taking the risk that the so-far nonexistent RTS "MMO" market is big enough to support a game that has to iterate from an MVP to some final state nobody has ever seen before, vs. the proven "over-the-shoulder" MMO market that is 2 million people in size (or larger) and where the evolutionary roadmap from MVP to something more sophisticated is intuitively understood by most of the players - they already know what the final destination looks like and they don't have to try and imagine it. Summary: You don't save any money, you don't use less complex tools, you don't need less talented people, and you take a huge risk that nobody understands what you're trying to do and that the market you're addressing doesn't exist.
We are going to do an interation on the forums to mke them character, not player, centric. We have a lengthy list of enhancements we intend to make to provide a forum experience that is an extension of the game experience. To do that we need a platform we are comfortable we can modify in the ways we want to. We are using a single sign-on system for authentication across all our tools. We need a forum that we can integrate with that system. We need something small and simple enough that we can be reasonably certain there are no serious security leaks in, since we are using a single authentication system and we need to be able to inspect that system to ensure ourselves we think it is safe. We want an off-the-shelf system that we don't have to write ourselves so we start with a common baseline used by other teams that we can learn from and troubleshoot with. Our current forum meets these needs and is more than adequate for its current use case.
@AvenaOats - sorry, still can't process that much stuff. Is your core point "over-the-shoulder 3D worlds are dead"? Because if that's your core point, I just don't know what to tell you. You're wrong. Are you wondering how big we think the market for a for a fantasy sandbox MMO is? ArcheAge, which is a beautiful game that sells itself as a sandbox (but has only a very small bit of sandbox gameplay) generated two million signups in the west. It's Free to Play so that's a reasonable sizing function for "how big is the North American and European Market for a sandbox fantasy MMO" (the addressable part of that market for a Pay to Play game will be smaller, of course.) Are you wondering why we don't have more players yet? We have not turned on the marketing. We are spending effectively nothing on marketing yet. Awareness that this game exists within that 2 million person audience is close to 0%.
To be clear, we have not said that it is "too hard" and thrown up our hands. We've said that doing it will require substantial resources we don't currently have. We cannot continue to follow our roadmap, which includes many features and systems that the game requires regardless of the presence of dungeons or no dungeons, and attempt to build a dungeon feature. When we have those resources available, we'll do dungeons. Of course we want dungeons in the game. And they're not "too hard". They're just expensive.
@AvenaOats - some constructive feedback. I think you have interesting things to say. I am not reading them. Your posts are too long and lack pithiness. If you could condense your points to a few sentances you would have a wider audience, at least wider by one. I am as guilty if this problem as anyone so I recognize a fellow member of the excessive verbosity tribe. A boss I once had told me that if he had to scroll to read my email, he deleted it. Changed my style to accomodate. Reccomend you consider the same.
I wanted to address the OP's original issue with crashing a lot. If you are not on a Mac, you should not be crashing a lot. Those problems have mostly been addressed. If you wish you can run DXDIAG.EXE and paste the output text (not an attachment) and email it to customer.support@goblinworks.com and I'd be happy to take a look and make any suggestions that seem useful.
Hey everyone! At 2pm (Pacific) today I'm going to broadcast from the Test Server and show off some of the features of Early Enrollment v6. To view the broadcast, visit twitch.tv/goblinworks!
layers, We're configuring some features for the folks with Head Start enrollment from the Kickstarter and we sent some emails inadvertently. Very sorry for any confusion. If you are an Open Enrollee and you get one of these emails you can safely ignore it. Mark thinks about 300 emails were sent, and mostly to internal accounts, but a few did go to customers.
Not only "yes, someone will pay" but "yes, so many people will pay that it would be a common occurance". When we are ready to talk more about Holdings & Outposts you will see some ways to magic-bullet a character. Formation combat and seige warfare will provide others. Any time we introduce a game system where one character can have a big impact on economics, logistics, or combat, magic-bullets become a real issue. Regular purchases of power are less effective at inducing retention than intermittent random power increases of decreasing frequency. That is why booster packs of trading cards have rare, uncommon and common cards. You need to reset the platform eventually when the frequency of reward drops too low (which we will do by regularly introducing new Feat trees everyone can start "at the beginning"). But that isn't why base capabilities like Power and Hit Points are on a curve not a line. If they were on a line then the "correct" choice would usually be to purchase more of them before any other Feat, leading to the syndrome EVE encountered when it had Learning Skills (skills that let you learn skills faster). People were pressured to learn the Learning Skills first, which took 6 months, before starting other training. "Smart" players understood that doing so was the "correct" sequence even though it cost six months of game time and boredom. That was, for obvious reasons, bad.
In EVE, you earn skill points in real time by picking a skill to train and working until it's finished training. So the only way to get skill points is to be actively training a skill. You can "pause" that training and starting training something else but that doesn't rebate the skill points accumulated for that skill that you paused. In Pathfinder Online you gain XP in realtime into a bank. You can then spend that XP any time you want to acquire a Feat. Without the achievement gates, people would allow characters to accumulate XP for a very long time, and those characters would be extraordinarily valuable on the secondary market, because without the gates, you could buy one, and immediately acquire exactly the right Feats required for any needful purpose without any delay whatsoever. Those characters would become "magic bullet" solutions to many in-game problems. With the gates you have to spend some time actually playing the game in order to advance your Feat training, in addition to just having the XP.
You start by training a hull-specific skill, like "Frigate". There are 5 ranks of the Frigate skill. Each rank provides an increase, with a reducing magnitude, to some basic aspects of the Frigate class of ships. You need at least 1 rank to fly a frigate. Frigate skill is also a prerequiste for the next larger class of hulls. Each "module" you want to put on a hull (think "weapons and armor") requires a basic skill. So to equip a missile launcher, you have to train "Light Missiles". There are 5 ranks of that skill, each rank privides some improvement to the functionality of your missiles with diminishing mangnitude, and "Light Missile" is a prerequisite for the next size of Missile systems. Missile systems have various attributes that can be improved with other skills. Things that make them lock on to targets faster, reload faster, use less ship-energy, etc. There are also skills that let you use various types of missiles, and that let you use advanced launchers and advanced missiles. There are skills that let you improve almost every system on your ship in the same way. You could spend more than a year training every possible skill that improved your "frigate" piloting experience. Ar the end of that time, you would be ~30% better in all frigate things than a character that spent about a month training just a few frigate things. Frigates vs. the next ship size up are about as powerful as a goblin is vs. an ogre. So a player that spent the minimum time to train the skills necessary to get into the next hull size, then spent a couple of months training for that hull would in most cases, always beat a frigate in a 1:1 fight, even the frigate piloted by someone who spent all rhe time necessary to train all possible Frigate skills to max rank.
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