Editing AC2:Announcements - 2003/01 - Cacophony (section)

== Letter to the Players ==
{{AC2 Article
 |  Link = microsoftgamesinsider.com/AC2/Guides/lttp-01-03.htm?nc=1
 | Title = "Cacophony"<br>January 2003 Letter to the Players
 |  Text = 
Here's a summary of some of the major changes and additions we're making in our January Episode, "Cacophony."  There are a number of changes made for January not discussed below; you'll see these changes noted in the January Developer's Notes.  A number of new quests centered around the Tumerok continent of Omishan are not discussed here either, since we don't want to spoil them.   Happy Holidays, and we look forward to presenting the January Episode to you in a few weeks.
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'''1) Global Chat Channels'''
<br>The essence of any massively multiplayer game is the ability to communicate with the other people who share your gameworld.   Whether you're coordinating resources to finish a quest, or finding someone to hunt with, or just generally chatting, global and regional chat channels are indispensable tools. To that end, we've introduced three new types of chat channels for players: general, regional, and trade channels.
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The general chat channel is accessible to everyone on the server. This channel will default to your chat window 4, but you can configure the channel to appear on any chat window you wish (as you can with all of the channels by going to your chat options.)  To speak on this channel, type /cg message.  Messages from this channel will appear as [General] Player_Name: message. 
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The second type of chat channel is the regional channel.  All of Dereth has been divided up into 21 different regional channels, the names and scope of which correspond to the 21 different playground names (i.e., the names you find on the continent difficulty maps accessed through the Map panel).  For example, while you are in the Drudge Citadel area, you will be able to send and receive messages on the [Citadel] channel.  The format for this channel follows that of the general channel.  To speak on this channel, type /cr message.  This channel will default to your chat window 1.
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The third type, the trade channel, is assigned to a small region around each town for players trading and seeking items.  These channels will always be called [Trade] even though (for example) the [Trade] channel around Cavendo is completely different than the [Trade] channel around Mayoi.  To speak on this channel, type /ct message.  This channel will default to chat window 1.
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Note that a message will appear in the chat window when players enter or leave a regional or trade channel.
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We hope that these channels will help bring people closer together and find each other more easily.  Keep in mind that if a channel serves no purpose for you (e.g., the [General] channel may be too active and spammy for you to get any useful information), you can elect not to have any messages from that channel displayed at all.
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For the future, our next step will be to implement user-controlled channels.  This would allow players to create their own chat rooms for their own use, whether it be for friends, or for coordinating multiple allegiances on a quest.   The details of the implementation are still under discussion; one possible path may be that every player can create one channel which they own and control who is invited to that channel.  We hope to do this in the next few months.
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'''2) Other Chat Changes'''
<br>All chat channels, including "allegiance" and "fellowship," now have the same format: [Channel_Name] Player_Name: Message.  So, allegiance messages now look like [Allegiance] Pectar: Hi! 
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We've also added an opacity slider to each of your 4 chat windows.  By pressing the button on the upper left corner of the window, you can modify the opacity of your window from complete transparency to complete opacity.  In a future month we will extend this functionality to the radar as well.
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Also, for each type of chat message category, you can now elect to have those message windows "pop up," or become visible, when you receive a new message.  For example, you can put your allegiance messages in window 2, minimize that window, and then that window will pop up only when you receive an allegiance message. (You must minimize it again after every popup if you wish to keep it off the screen).  Select the popup option in your Chat panel category options to turn this on.
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'''3) Treasure Tweaks'''
<br>In January we focused on addressing the "gaps" in the treasure system that had occurred. At certain experience level ranges, players sometimes had difficulty finding useful armor and weapons in the loot system when fighting creatures of the player's level. To this end, we have smoothed the curve considerably for the treasure system. We've adjusted the specific values of items, such as damage and armor level, to ensure that players are finding more useful loot for their level more often.
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In addition, weapons used by many specialized classes, such as Claw Bearers and Hive Keepers, are now be generated with damage values akin to their non-specialized cousins. Players will also find that the level restrictions on many items are roughly equivalent to the level of the creatures that dropped them. This means that items coming from a level 20 creature would have restrictions a few levels above or below level 20. The traits given on many items have been revised as well.
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For the future, we will be concentrating on making the "cool" loot even cooler. Weapons and armor will begin to affect a lot more statistics than just combat delay and vigor cost. Also, powerful weapons and armor will do a much better job of immediately communicating to the player (through the Examine panel) that they are items of significant power.
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'''4) Crafting Tweaks'''
<br>We've examined and improved a number of areas affecting crafting.
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First, we revised the items created by the Armor and Weapon crafting skills to make their damage and armor level more compatible with the treasure system. Generally, all crafted items should be slightly better than the average range of loot items for that level, although rare treasure items can be more powerful. Crafted items will also have higher gold values, depending on the skill tier of the item. Along with this, the cost of crafting weapons and armor in tiers 7 to 10 has been reduced by 30%. Toolmaking has also been revised so that it is easier to progress to more difficult skill tiers.
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In Osteth, the more difficult variants of the creature types that drop trophy items now have an equal chance of dropping that trophy item.  For example, all Reedsharks above the Reedshark Runt can now potentially drop the Reedshark Spike. Also, Mimbu Carapaces now drop on additional creatures.
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To make mining more lucrative and appealing, players will now tend to receive higher trait motes from mines than in the past. Also, mines flagged as producing uncommon motes will generate these more often. Distilling materials has been enhanced as well, with distilled uncommon motes, such as the mote of Elariwood distilled from a mote of Wood, receiving traits equal to 35% of the original mote's traits. We've also doubled the number of times you can mine a specific resource to 10 times a day.
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Item Improvement also received attention. Skills now offer more benefits and are more accessible to all players. The first tier skills should now be accessible to players level 10 to 25, tier 2 improvements should be accessible to players 25 to 35, and tier 3 should be accessible to players level 35 to 50. To improve accessibility, we've reduced the trait values required for the various recipes. We've also instituted new caps on the maximum possible benefit each skill tier can provide, which should motivate players to continue to improve their skills as they increase in level.
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Another crafting area addressed in this episode is dyeing. The dyeing vocation has been completely removed and all dyeing recipes have been moved to Item Improvement. In addition, all characters now have access to all of the dyeing recipes by default. These recipes can be found in the Item Improvement section. Finally, the dyeing recipes have been simplified and now require only two things: a dye plant found randomly throughout the game world, and gold. The gold costs for dyeing have been dramatically reduced. Since the difficulty of some of the dyeing recipes has changed, players will find that they may not have the same skill level in dyeing that they had previously.
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Workshops and recipes now display more information for crafters. When examined, workshops now display the amount of the bonus they provide along with the amount of fuel needed to reach the next skill bonus level. Recipes now display the difficulty of the recipe, letting crafters know if their crafting skill level offers a high enough chance of success to risk attempting to craft an item.  Additionally, the reset timer on nearly all of the recipes has been removed; those timers still remaining are displayed when examining the recipe.
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'''5) Skill Examination Panel Changes'''
<br>When you examine a skill to see its description, you will now see a lot more information, including:
* The minimum and maximum base damage. The minimum damage would be the damage done by the skill with a rating of 1, while the maximum would be the damage of the skill with a rating of 50.
* The actual damage of the skill at its current level.
* Vigor cost.
* Range, both the minimum and maximum, in meters.
* Reset, or cool down, timer between uses.
* Vulnerable time, or how long after using the skill before you can use any of your skills (such as when using a recall skill).
* Additional effects, such as if the skill does damage over time, its area of effect, or other special effects.


'''6) Tweaks to December Content'''
* All of the "killquest" creatures now initiate Fellowship-propagative quests.
* On Osteth and Omishan, you will now see another type of rare quest creature: the dungeon quest creature. Killing this creature will give you a quest to go to the bottom of a local dungeon and kill the "boss" creature found there within a certain time period.
* The treasure found in the Order Caches, Shadow Hoards, and Singularity Troves have all been significantly improved.


'''7) Miscellaneous Tweaks'''
* The Fellowship panel now refreshes its information much faster than before.  This should help group and healer play significantly.
* When you complete a quest, your experience point reward for the quest will be displayed in your Chat panel.
* When you are hunting outside of a Fellowship and kill a creature, the amount of experience points gained is displayed in your Chat panel.   For January, you will not see such displays while you are in a Fellowship.  This will be added in a future month.  Also, if you are hunting with a pet, you will typically see two such messages every time you kill a creature.  The total these messages indicate is your total experience point reward for the creature.  These messages will be combined into one in February or March. 


'''8) Some Fixed December Bugs'''
<br>(full list to be available in the January Developer's Notes)
* The bug where your Chat panel stops autoscrolling has been fixed.
* There is now a "Smaller" option for your font size, approximating the size of the display font at release.
* The bug where Aunmauri's Vengeance increased one's run speed by 500% has been fixed. There is no longer any speed buff associated with the third obelisk, only the damage bonus that had been originally intended.
* Characters that had names of a single letter have been restored and are playable again.


'''9) XP Reduction for Tyrants and Gigaraths'''
<br>As part of the January episode, we have made some AI pathing changes to help solve a bug that would cause monsters to get stuck on the landscape and subsequently not attack its foe. This would allow a user to get XP from the monster at little to no risk. This problem was very noticeable with Tyrants and Gigaraths. While we are hopeful that the fixes we put in will fix the bug, we are also aware that we could not allow this bug to present such an obvious exploitable situation in the game. As such, until we are 100% certain that the Monster AI has been fixed, and monsters are not able to become easily stuck on the landscape, we have reduced the amount of experience points tyrants and gigaraths give by 90%. This is only a temporary measure, and as soon as we are certain that the bug has been fixed, we will return the monsters to their normal XP. In the mean time, other good monster types to hunt would be Flayers, Shreths, Gurogs and Gear Knights. There are also a lot of other exciting battles to be had. We apologize for this inconvenience and we hope to be able to return these monsters to their full XP soon.
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