Weekly Update 226 – Improved Group Arena

Another Weekly Update for you! This time, you receive several Quality of Life improvements, namely the ones for the Group Arena Skirmishes. And as always, there’re many other changes so every player will surely find something cool in this update.

Also, we’d like to give you an insight on the Fishing system which we’re working on – we hope to release it this month! Within Fishing, you can a mini-game, active and passive fishing, player-built fish traps to get some fish remotely, a variety of fish baits of different quality and even the ground bait. Also, the system will provide depletable resources – the fish population will depend on how much a specific spot is exploited on various servers!

Stay tuned, and see you in battle!

Changelog v.0.9.3.11

Group Arena Skirmishes:

– Improved the groups size balancing – now the numbers should be adjusted when some player leaves during the queue – Unblocked moving to the arena when registered for a skirmish – Improved creating the teams during the queue – now there is a higher chance for groups bigger than 4 players – Improved notifications for players at the Skirmish and in the queue – Added earning character experience for Skirmishes

Balance:

We updated the way of applying the Medical Assist buff, which affects the respawn time for the balance purposes. Our data analysis show it's a pretty effective balance safeguard which lets the outplayed nations stand against the enemy.

However, it used to happen from time to time that once the underdog faction finally grouped up with enough forces to stop the enemy players, it could push them back into their homegrounds (area around the capital city, ranging as far as the forts, i.e. Greenport, Ulfgard or Scarsdale). In such a case, the nation being able to push the enemy back into its own homeground definitely shouldn't have a respawn time buff.

For this reason, the Medical Assist buff does no longer have effect in the enemy nation's homeground.

Quality of Life:

– Added transparency to the players' markers – from now, the markers will be working the same way as using the text markers mode, which means fading out with the distance and angle from the camera; both modes have been improved to not disappear marker when another player was behind our character at the corner of the screen – Merged the Valley of Death registration widget with the Objectives list – From now on, Mounts are ready to ride right after taming – Adjusted the number of spears required in the Crafting Order events – Warrior’s Spear from 20 to 7 and Short Warrior’s Spear from 15 to 8 – in response to the player-made suggestions and reports – Several improvements to the Ismir starting questline – Adjusted the head position for the NPC enemies – now it should be easier to hit them with a headshot – The NPCs will no longer perfectly cancel their block when the player tries to kick them, since kicking a blocking NPC was really hard – Clamped length of looting time to 30 seconds – the time was mostly connected with the balancing system. Lengthened respawn time was also increasing time when player could be looted. From now it is clamped, so even few minutes of the respawn time won’t let enemies loot you after so long time. – Blocked displaying hints when the tutorial is turned on, since it lead to showing too much information on the screen

Fixes:

– Fixed an edge case bug