Editing Announcements - 2002/03 - Persuasion (section)

== Letter to the Players 1 ==

{{Microsoft Zone
 |  Link = <nowiki>http://zone.msn.com/asheronscall/news/ASHEletter0302.asp</nowiki>
 |  Date = March 13, 2002
 | Title = Letter to the Players
 |  Text = Persuasion
Oodles of changes for the March Event, so let's get started!
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<font color=#FFFFFF>'''Housing'''</font><br>
First, for the month of February, while we had (unfortunately) a number of server crashes, we had no confirmed reports of item loss on hooks or in chests, with one important exception, which we'll discuss in a bit. We now believe storage and hooks offer secure storage for your items.
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However, if you put items into your storage chest or hooks, and some time shortly thereafter (anywhere from immediately after to roughly 10 minutes) the world or specific server where your house resides crashes, there is a possibility that you would lose the items you just placed. Unfortunately, this is a risk that will always be present when storing items in your house.
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The good news is that we will continue to place a strong emphasis on ensuring server stability, and aggressively investigating the causes behind any server crash and fixing those promptly.
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One of the items on our checklist for future housing improvements has been implemented this month. With the @house available command, we hope that people will be able to monitor open houses more efficiently than by having to camp individual houses. While the command won't solve the problem of there being more demand for houses than supply, we think Residential Quarters will.
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Residential Quarters are an implementation of housing that we plan on releasing either in the April or May Event. It will be a series of linked rooms in a shared space accessible by a portal. Each room can be purchased by a single player, and the rooms offer storage, a recall spot, and a few hooks for players to put items. One of the key advantages of these Residential Quarters is that they allow us to make thousands of these spaces available in a given month, which we hope will help alleviate all players' desires for a space to call their own. Players will be able to own either a Residential Quarter or a house, but not both. Look for more information on the Residential Quarters next month.
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We will also continue to develop regular housing. This month we are releasing another 200 total units: 150 Cottages, 40 Villas, and 10 Mansions. After this month we will not be making any more mansions, and instead will be releasing 150 Cottages and 50 Villas per month.
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Our future plans for housing include:
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:* Adding more usable hooks in the Mansions.
:* Allowing players to be able to use pyreals and Writs to purchase additional storage space in their houses.
:* Allowing players to be able to use items while the items are on a hook, and create content that takes advantage of this ability, e.g. questing for a portal to (cool place X) to put in your house.
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One final note: Certain portals to Villa dungeons were broken by a change made right before the March Event. Unfortunately, these portals will not work throughout the March Event. They will be fixed for April, however. These locations are:

:* 23.0 N, 46.4 W
:* 23.1 N, 46.6 W
:* 23.3 N, 46.4 W
:* 23.5 N, 46.6 W
:* 23.5 N, 46.1 W
:* 23.1 N, 46.1 W


<font color=#FFFFFF>'''Skills'''</font><br>
As you may have already noticed this month, for the first time in over two-plus years of Asheron's Call's existence, we decided to retroactively reduce the skill cost for an existing set of skills. A few months back, we took a look at all the skills and asked whether they, in some form or fashion, were worth their skill cost.
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In some of these cases over the years, we have attempted to balance perceived inequities in the advantages of skills versus their skill costs with content. For example, the Singularity Key dynamic was such an attempt, to make Lockpicking worth its 6 skill credits.
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Ultimately, balancing some of these costs with content was proving to be very difficult or ran a large risk of creating other imbalances. Two skills we felt we would not be adding much additional functionality to (or even if we did, it would not change the basic cost of the skill), were Missile Defense and Alchemy.
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While Missile Defense definitely has its uses in combat and in allowing one to activate certain magical items, it was certainly not an 8-credit skill. We feel that 6 points to train and 10 points total to specialize more accurately reflects Missile Defense's benefits in Asheron's Call.
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We also felt that Alchemy, while having the most benefits of the craft skills, and therefore worth more than Fletching and Cooking, was never going to get the constant updating through content that might make it worth its 8 skill credits to train and 16 to specialize. So we felt that 6 and 12 brought that skill closer to its actual worth.
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So what else is on our skill-balancing plate? First, we should mention that we are not planning to reduce the cost of any more skills, nor are we planning to increase the cost of any skills. That said, there are some skill dynamics that we are planning to either add new features to, or to change entirely.
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Appraise Armor, Appraise Weapon, Appraise Magic Item, Appraise Item and Assess Monster are all skills that we are looking to change over the next few months. That is the extent of skill-balancing that we will be investigating over the few months. (This is a separate process from our continued efforts to both balance melee skills with each other and with alternate forms of doing damage such as archery and magic. Our efforts to improve melee skills will continue during this timeframe as well.)
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Over the next few months, we will release more information about these changes and what they mean for the world of AC.
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<font color=#FFFFFF>'''Melee Changes'''</font><br>
This month contains the first step we are taking to making the warrior and archer classes of Asheron's Call feel like they are able to compete at the higher levels of AC content with their mage brethren.
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One advantage that mages have over the other templates is their ability to "unlock" higher and higher damage potentials as they increase in skill. As they increase their War Magic skill, they are eventually able to cast differing levels of War spells, with each level at a higher damage range than before.
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Warriors and archers have not had that ability, until now. With Wield Requirements, we are now able to offer melee and missile players an ability to do higher damage as their skill level progresses. Ultimately, we would like to eventually offer an even higher level of damage potential for players, but we will first be monitoring and evaluating how effective this stage is.
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A few notes about this specific stage: We have intentionally not improved either staves or daggers at this time. This is because of our desire, once all the weapons' changes are made, to have a weapon's true power be based roughly on their skill costs to specialize. In this manner a person who paid 16 credits to specialize sword will be able to out-damage a person who spent 4 credits to specialize dagger (for the purposes of this balancing we have to assume the optimal heritage group for a racial weapon, e.g. an Aluvian dagger character).
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Given the power of the hilt dynamic, we will not be making any changes to dagger until we make our ultimate melee changes. And since staff is only a 4-credit cost to specialize, we are leery of making too many changes to staff until we have a better sense of what the ultimate effectiveness of these changes are.
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Also, we did not add these changes to any hiltable swords. Generally, we did not add these changes to any of the lower damage versions of weapons.
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Our next step in our plans for melee improvements will take 2-4 months to implement (sometime between May and July). We will share more details about the system as we get closer to implementation.
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<font color=#FFFFFF>'''Treasure Changes'''</font><br>
Hand in hand with the weapon changes comes our second set of changes to our treasure generation system. Since we were tinkering with certain systems anyway (such as weapon and jewelry generation), now seemed to be the best time to look at the parameters of what was being generated, and tweak those parameters so that they more accurately reflected the current state of the higher level game in AC.
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Hence, our changes to the percentages of how often certain weapons spawn at the higher levels of treasure in the game, and the changes in percentages to how often certain spells appear on jewelry.
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First, the weapons. While I know many of you will miss the acid javelins being spawned so often from SIK chests and Singularity Troves, our goal was to make sure that the weapons people are most likely to use at the high levels for a given skill are indeed the weapons actually being spawned. This meant fewer shou-onos and light crossbows, and more longbows and morningstars.
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We also seized this opportunity to balance out which types of weapons were being spawned. One of the more egregious imbalances of the system was the rate at which unarmed weapons were spawned at the high levels--roughly 2% of the time. This has been boosted to 8%. The snippet in the [[Announcements - 2002/03 - Persuasion#Release Notes|<font color=#FFFFCC>developers' notes</font>]] covers the high level issues, but the basic idea is that the availability of the weapons are loosely tied to their skill costs.
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As for jewelry, we noticed that the rate at which useful multiple-spell jewelry was being found and used was a little low. To address this, we both upped the chance that multi-spell jewelry would be found, and made it more likely for "useful" spells to be found on the jewelry. While it may have made sense initially for Armor to appear 30% of the time as the spell on a piece of jewelry, it no longer makes quite as much sense some 2 years into the game. We expect to make a change in the next couple of months that will make this dynamic available to even more players, at all levels.
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Finally, a couple of design fixes to problems, one old and one new: The old one is the lack of missile masteries (TW, Xbow, Bow) on gauntlets/sollerets. Ultimately we decided that there was no real reason in today's AC to allow the melee skills to have all the fun with these armor pieces. The new one is when we implemented cantrips on armor, we didn't make shields a separate category from armor, which resulted in some useless items (shields with Bow Mastery cantrip, etc.). This has been all fixed now.
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<font color=#FFFFFF>'''Fun'''</font><br>
Sometimes, having played or been involved with Asheron's Call since its inception, it's easy for us over here at Turbine and Microsoft to accept that the game is the way it is, and focus on adapting instead of thinking about what can and should be changed.
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The way we use mana stones/charges is one example. It's tedious and slow to have to be constantly checking your items to see if they're running low on mana (although the mana bars help), but hey, it's the way the game is, right? Except that we saw it really didn't have to be that way.
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And that was the genesis for our two tweaks this month to the mana stone: the ability to use it on your paper doll to fill up all of your items at once, in order of their greatest need, and to receive a warning some time before the item actually runs out of mana, so you won't lose that critical Armor 6 or Bludgeon Prot 6 just as the next set of Tusker Guards respawn.
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Another change we made under the vanguard of "Fun": making nearly all creatures appear on radar. While we appreciate the design considerations that went into the initial idea, we decided that at this stage of Asheron's Call, it was a better play experience to let everyone use their radar effectively. We felt it appropriate to emphasize playability over "reality" in this case. We also recognize that while such a change does not eliminate the usage of certain 3rd party programs, that at the very least it allows those who do not use such programs some of the same gameplay advantages.
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Finally, after lots of consideration of some of the dynamics of the "Boss Monsters" we introduced some months back, we decided to address part of the problem directly, rather than waiting for all these melee/missile changes we had been talking about for a long time. While these changes are currently being worked on, we realized that those future changes and the changes that we did make this month wouldn't help a melee player kill a Diamond Lord now. We feel that with the reduction in regeneration rate and armor level, the Diamond Lord is now a much more melee-possible monster to kill. Look for some changes to the other Boss Monsters next month.
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<font color=#FFFFFF>'''Hot Topics'''</font><br>

:* Hollow Weapons--Due to a bug at the last minute, Hollow Weapons changes have been pushed to April. Expect upgrades to Hollow Axe, Sword, Mace, and Spear for the April Event.
:* As with our changes to mushrooms this month, expect more changes to areas in the future to make it more difficult for players to gain experience by killing creatures while away from their keyboards.
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<font color=#FFFFFF>'''Next Month and Beyond'''</font><br>
As you saw in the March [[Announcements - 2002/03 - Persuasion#Release Notes|<font color=#FFFFCC>developers' notes</font>]], we fixed a longstanding bug in which players who had never entered a tieable portal could portal recall to their logout spot. Along those same lines prepare for further changes next month to many of our portal/transportation dynamics.
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<font color=#FFFFFF>'''Some of the highlights:'''</font><br>

:* Everyone, regardless of whether they have Item Magic, will receive the ability to recall to their Lifestone without dying.
:* Those players with Item Magic will get a host of new features:

:* The ability to "Lifestone tie" so that they will have access to two Lifestones.
:* A second portal tie, recall, and summon spell so that one can tie to two portals.
:* The ability to recall through a "last-used" portal if one hasn't learned tie will be removed. In its place will be a new item magic spell, "recall through last used portal" which will be available to everyone with Item Magic.
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Also in the near future (either April or May), we unveil some changes to one of the most maligned attributes in Asheron's Call: Endurance. While we didn't want everyone to run out and start pumping out 100 100 100 10 10 10s or 10 100 10 10 100 100s characters after April, we do want people to think that having more Endurance can be a viable play style, especially if you are a melee character. Look for more information next month.
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Over the longer term, we're still going to focus on melee improvements. And we will take a look at the mid-level play experience (defined as level 25-50). Is it challenging? Is it fun? Expect to see some changes there over these next few months.
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Finally, just because being a mage may be the most effective way to play Asheron's Call right now, it doesn't mean it's the most fun. Once we implement some of these changes to the melee dynamic, we will then begin unveiling some radical (and fun!) changes to the way magic works in AC.
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As always, thank you for playing Asheron's Call.

--The AC Team
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