Background Work

This week's live game update is a rather small one due to most of the focus continuing to be on the upcoming season and its reworks/overhauls. For the upcoming content it is still currently a WIP and in testing on the playtest server and may change depending on feedback we get or data we collect!

Changes

• Some backend/technical cleanup of unused fields and functions
• Some cleanup of unused or unnecessary frontend components
• "Super Duper Accuracy" for Loot Goblin chance calculation, primarily affects some catch-up time shenanigans
• Enchanted Armory enemies Poison def aff reduced from 2 to 0.5
• Black Knight variants poison def aff reduced from 1 to 0.8
• Guard/Militiaman reduces poison def aff from 1 to 0.8
• Royal Reverence effect changed; chance for acrobatics 5 is 10-15%, missing hp bonus now gives bonus crit stats under 50%

Background Work - Still WIP!

We've been working on the new augmenting/enchanting system these last couple weeks, here's a quick rundown of the main changes (still WIP, may be changed based on feedback):

Removal of soulbound / item leveling mechanics -

Splitting augmenting into two conflicting paths has caused a lot of trouble and headaches for us and the players, and we've decided to strip out some of the chaff from both while keeping what we consider the good bits. All items will become tradeable like pre-refactor, but augmenting will be a lot less RNG-centric. Instead of a chance to destroy the item on a failed augment, each augmentation attempt adds to an augment counter that is specific to the item and once that counter passes a specific threshold the item will augment to the next level. In this system there is NO chance to fail, there is only a very small chance to critical aug, meaning that the augmentation counter increases by 2 instead of 1. The goal of these changes are to completely remove the potential "bad feeling" when augmenting and the potential loss of progression and help reduce variability due to RNG while acting as a sink for items and materials. Augmentation costs will also be overhauled. In most cases the augment attempt cost will be ~1-5% of the original crafting cost of the item; however, higher augmentation levels will require a copy of the base item to upgrade the item once the counter has reached the threshold.

Integration of Affixes -

Since affixes will be coming to the main gamemodes, we've had to reconsider a lot of how the economic aspect of affixes needs to look like and integrate the system into existing skills. For example, the simple "press button to salvage item" system is incredibly basic and just not good enough, so we've replaced it with a new "Item Research" system to complement the above augmenting changes. This will add a new "Research Queue" where the player will conduct experiments on items. Currently, when a player succeeds in the experiment the item is NOT consumed and produces affix dust as well as the current augmentation fail item (prismatic dust, infernal dust, etc.). When the experiment fails the item is consumed and a relevant item scrap is produced. This will become the primary source of experience in Enchanting as well as a significant item sink.

Why new systems?

Idlescape is an idle game so the new systems had to focus more on the time than the material aspect; the primary resource consumed in these changes will be time rather than purely material, even if the new material sinks are another goal of the systems.

As it is now these changes will only be present on Season 2 when it releases; the old "Salvage" button system will be on main gamemodes as well as the Research system being disabled on them so that we can properly evaluate and balance the systems according to internal data and player feedback.

So what's planned for Season 2?

• Quests
• Achievements
• Tutorials
• Talents
• Affix Integration
• Augmenting Overhaul
• Shrine Overhaul
• So many technical overhauls to handle the above that I have honestly lost count

Which of these will go to main gamemodes immediately?

• Quests
• Achievements
• Tutorials
• Talents
• Old Affix System
• Shrine Overhaul
• The technical stuff that gives me nightmares

Other tidbits of info

Quests have been slowly integrated into various systems and progression steps and will be able to unlock purchasable talents, unlock passive perks, unlock crafting recipes, unlock entire mechanics (do your tutorials!), and some more fun stuff! The Shrine Overhaul allows much stronger shrines at exponentially increasing costs. I hope y'all like gold sinks (and maybe material turn ins)! It should be worth it though since it is theoretically possible to unlock over 32 shrine milestones (global and personal), up from the 9 global milestones, every week!