Sudden Season

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December 1999 - Announcements Page

Turbine/Microsoft Announcements

Teaser

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Atop a hill overlooking Zaikhal, Asaina al-Arqis placed a crystal apparatus on the ground, aligning it to the setting sun. The light caught within its facets, held, and the delicate mechanism began to gently spin. She frowned and tapped the base of the device. Over the past three days, the portents had been clear. Portal runners from Hebian-To and Cragstone confirmed it: the temperature was slowly, steadily falling, and showed no signs of stopping...

Atop the dune, under the feeble sunset light, Asaina al-Arqis hugged her thick cloak around her, blew into her hands, and bent and replaced the gem at the apex of her sensing apparatus. Sunlight glinted from the facets, sank within, then struck a violent spark at the center. With a crack the light winked out, the supporting wires loosed their hold, and the suddenly gray stone fell beside the last two she'd tested. She could not calibrate the equipment any finer, but she knew enough. A week, perhaps, probably less, and even the desert would freeze. It was time to give a final report to the Council.

Murmurs and coughs faded from the Council chamber as the four-foot column of enchanted ice drained candlelight from the room. "Here is yet another image," said Asaina al-Arqis to the assembly. "This is what the shard foresees for Qalaba'r." The stolen light resolved into a view of the familiar desert town, but it could hardly be recognized: snow was in the air and lay thick on the ground. "It is time to prepare. Mark me -- tomorrow, the view outside your own windows will be very much the same."

Rollout

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The forecasts have proven true! Yesterday, like all the days before, the snow gleamed only on Dereth's far-off peaks, stark, clean, and unattainable, a symbol of impossible quests. But this morning, Derethians from Holtburg to the sub-tropical reaches of the southernmost Sho and Gharu'ndim lands awoke to find snow falling outside their windows. During the intermittent breaks, the sun beat feebly in the frosty sky. The first adventurers to explore this strange wonderland were startled by crude snowmen that materialized in a swirl of ice -- only to cast beneficial enchantments on them. Taking these kindly creatures as a good omen, citizens declared a holiday vigil for the sun to regain its strength, and have put aside their usual activities to invent food recipes and create festive robes, candles, and paper lanterns.

However, many sages are studying the situation under grave doubt, fearing some baleful magic is at work. In every town, criers announce that the team of Sir Joffre Tremblant, who sought a fabled mountain city, is overdue to return. Scouts ranging far afield have brought back reports of new snowmen of nasty disposition and even a few of gigantic size. Meanwhile, the world grows colder still . . .

Release Notes

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Here are all the tiny little details of the game update that was made on the morning of December 16, 1999. This list is culled from "check-in" notes submitted by the game developers themselves.

For a shorter description of the most significant changes in this update, please refer to the latest "Spin from Turbine" article on the AC News page on the Zone Web site.

There have been many changes made for the December event "Sudden Season." Details are not in these build notes, because that would spoil the fun of finding all that has been added! One bit of advice: it's likely that much more has been added than you think at first glance. There's a lot more than just some snow on the ground!

Notes for Build 2233-2245:

The portal from Mayoi to South Direlands has been removed.
Damage reports on creatures that are resistant to basic damage types (slash, bludgeon, etc) are now accurate. They used to report full damage, even if they were not doing full damage.
AIs don't try to get as close to you before making a melee attack. Also, if they fail to reach their target, and their target has attacked them, they sometimes execute an attack anyway (just for fun).
Fixed an amazing one-line bug that caused all self-targeted AI-cast spells to fail!
AIs no longer consider their target resisting their spell a failure! I think this'll make spell-casting AIs much tougher, as they won't stop casting spells just because you resisted a handful of times (obviously they will stop whenever they run out of mana).
Adjusted the algorithm that AIs use to judge whether or not a missile attack was effective (i.e., close enough to its intended target). It's a little random now and, on average, less pessimistic. AIs should continue to fire a couple more times before giving up.
AIs now use the same "effective missile" evaluation algorithm for projectile spells as they did for missile weapons. Previously, if a fireball landed a little off-target, the AI would consider it a failure -- not anymore!
AIs have finer-grained magic error counting. They segregate projectile spells from other magic. So if they fail to cast a projectile spell at you because you're hiding behind a door, they'll try any direct damage or enchantments they have instead of just stopping spell-casting altogether.
When randomly choosing a target, AIs now are more likely to choose targets that are closer to them! This should help quite a bit for making AIs who haven't been attacked or damaged yet (i.e., locked onto their target) behave more intelligently.
AIs have a chance of sticking with their current target (per attack) even if they've been attacked or damaged by someone else. Should create fewer waffling creatures.
Fixes made to a number of conditions that would cause inventory to go weird -- invisible objects and such.
Forgot to update the value of the Sword of Lost Light. Now worth much more.
Fixed spots where players were getting stuck in Holtburg Dungeon.
Newbie Yari does piercing damage.
Players getting stuck in E. Lytlethorpe building -- fixed.
Players getting stuck in Mountain Keep dungeon -- fixed.
Players getting stuck in the Fort Witshire dungeon -- fixed
Fixed Mei Dungeon directions.
Water Temple quest & dungeon updated -- limiting access to the water bottle there.
Deleted an item generator in the Lugian Tower near Qalaba'r -- objects were being placed on a couch and looking bad.
Scroll of Acid Bane 6 fixed -- was teaching Acid Bane 5.
Vendors & Trade notes -- all vendors who sell large-denomination trade notes should also accept them now.
Cliff near Armoredillo Lair allowed easy kills -- exploit fixed and tested.
Grocers now accept base and intermediate food/tools used in cooking.
Old Drudge Grotto too close to North Yanshi -- changed.
Checked in the update to Leadership spells -- violet, not yellow, spell effect occurs when casting.
What vendors sell has been changed, and can change at any time (details withheld).
Once an empty corpse is closed, it rots immediately. This is to alleviate lag caused by lots of useless corpses hanging around.
Deleted a shield generator which was generating stuff on top of a roof.
Raised magic defense of Magma Golem.
Narrow ravine near Armoredillo lair fixed -- exploit.
Holtburg quest updated so newbies can find the locations easier.
Set resistable flags in on the Imperil Other spells (whoops).
Magma Golems have level-5 harm spells and other nastiness.
Mosswart Muckers removed from the Folthid Cellar -- exploit.
Skeletons are now level 7 -- not tougher, just higher level.
Some portals are not summonable via magic spells
PortalColonial wrong color. Portal is now blue.
PortalRanch wrong color. Portal is now blue.
Leadership spells now have orange particles.
Fixed a small typo in the book "Lashanda's Hand."
Fixed a ridge Lugians were getting stuck on.
Lou Ka's Yaoji now does 2-5 damage.
Collector in Nanto accepts tan rat tails.
Added the *snowangel* emote/substate.
The bowyer is now appearing at Neydisa Castle.
Fixed power of Rejuvenation Self 6. Was 10, now 250.
Most throwing weapons were failing in combat because they weren't properly calculating how fast they could be thrown through the air.
Fixed a tiny typo in the Story of Ken-Gou.
Collectors give 50 pyreals for a rat tail, not 75. Two of the collectors were giving the wrong amount.
Healing Mastery spells have orange effects.
Drudges near house being camped -- exploit fixed.
In Character Options panel, changed text "Vivid targeting indicator" to "Vivid Targeting Indicator"
Magic item difficulty ratings weren't correctly compensating skill limits. Now behaving to spec. New items should not be as difficult to use.
Shreth is a thinner beast, which should fix any exploit locations somewhat.
Virindi Fort Dungeon -- camping location fixed.
Fixes a problem with the appraisal panel where it would display garbage when assessing a creature.
Fixes a problem that would sometimes result in the Create Spell panel's spell component list not displaying all of your components, or not being scrollable when it should be.
Button added which allows you to turn off rain and some other weather effects. Useful if these effects slow your frame rate.
Paintings moved in Desert Mine.
Bandit Castle dungeon note on alchemy fixed.
Projectiles will no longer collide with ethereal non-creatures. This will prevent them from hitting hotspots and portals.
Generators no longer shut down before their time.

Letter to the Players

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Highlights of the Update on December 16, 1999 A Question of Balance I'll can the chatty banter for this update and get to the heart of the matter.

We've received many complaints regarding the changes to mages. People who had invested many hours (and countless XP) into certain professions have had their characters' power levels drop suddenly. Foes who had been easy kills had suddenly become a challenge. Players who ruled the landscape now find themselves less effective as solo players.

It seems worth taking some time to explain how these changes came about.

Goals Desired, Goals Not Achieved When the magic system for the game was being designed, it had some clear intentions:

   * to provide a fair alternative for combat that required somewhat more thought and planning;
   * to provide schools of magic that worked well in concert with other skill sets or other characters;
   * to create areas of overlap between schools of magic, where each school had its strengths and weaknesses.

Those were some of our many goals for the magic system. Unfortunately, as our Beta cycle wrapped up, we realized that we had not accomplished these goals nearly as well as we'd hoped.

   * Spell resistances were underutilized by monsters, making any projectile spell as useful as any other, and removing a tactical element from spellcasting.
   * Given the extreme ranges of Drain and Harm spells, Life Mages were nearly powerful enough to make War Mages obsolete. Life Magic was always intended to be best at giving life, not taking it. (While this makes life mages best suited for group play, this is balanced by making the Life Magic skill -- and other "enchanter" skills -- cheaper than War Magic during character creation.)
   * Enchanters were finding that higher-level spells added little benefit, making their schools of magic less appealing.
   * Complex Portal Spells were very easy to learn, devaluing something that should have a been a mark of distinction among powerful Enchanters.

The sum total of these concerns was that mages were less interesting to play than we'd wanted, and in some cases, much more powerful than other classes.

The Tough Decision We've spent the past month or so figuring out how to address the situation -- and a good chunk of that time trying to decide if we should address it at all. We've been tempted to leave things be, but decided that we'd be risking a worst-case situation where every non-mage was frustrated by their disadvantages and every mage became bored with how easy the game was to them.

So we needed to take action. What to do? One thought was to leave mages the way they were, and give everyone else a commensurate power boost. The problem with that solution is that non-mages, in general, are balanced properly against the difficulties of monsters and encounters in the game, and against the levels of treasure and experience points in the game. If we boosted their abilities, then all of that other data would become unbalanced, and we'd end up having to revise everything in the game. And that's just not practical.

That left us with one option: lower the power of some mages. This is something we approached very, very carefully (as shown by the many long-winded paragraphs above), because we know how much it stinks to have your abilities knee-capped in the middle of the game.

Should these balance issues have been addressed sooner? In a perfect world, they would have been, but the discrepancies between professions only became crystal clear to us towards the end of Beta. We realized then that we had missed some vital game-balance information -- but by that time, we were in the middle of the game's “Release to Manufacturing” process, a long, multi-week process that could only be derailed for the most catastrophic of bugs.

(We know one way to catch these issues sooner in the future is to get more involved with the community. That's why this site was created, why we're showing up more on the fan sites and in chats, and why we're working to get even more involved.)

Careful Changes The decision was made to alter game balance for mages in the following ways:

   * In the last update, Magic Resistances were added to monsters, making War Mages stop to choose the proper spells when attacking their foes. (With proper tactics, players do as much damage as they did before this change.)
   * In the last update, Drain and Harm spells had such great range that they let Life Mages strike at foes with impunity, leaving War Mages in the dust. Reducing their range returns these spells from the main benefit of Life Magic to a side benefit, and returns Life Magic to its original intent: a means of providing healing, regeneration, and protection.
   * In order to provide greater benefits to enchanters, we lengthened the durations of higher-level Enchantments.
   * Advanced portal spells were increased in difficulty, making it harder for low-level Enchanters to cast them.

We understand that in some cases -- particularly for Life Mages -- this has a significant effect on how you approach playing the game. We're sorry that we had to make these changes, but they were necessary to ensure that the game remain fun and balanced for everyone over the long haul.

Future Improvements That said, we acknowledge that the balance between mages and other professions may still not be as good as we want it to be. Given the many elements that determine how effective a mage is, the way magic behaves differently at different levels, and the many different approaches players take to each school of magic, the perfect balance point is devilishly difficult to determine.

In the future, we will be looking at the results of these changes, and also at other issues that affect balance, such as availability of treasure, balance between different melee weapons, and ability to exploit AI in certain situations. However, there are two guidelines that will shape how we approach all of these concerns:

   * With our first update, we made a priority of addressing the most severe imbalances first -- particularly where the changes would end up lowering a player's power. Aside from resolving exploits, our priority going forward is to make changes that only add benefits to players, not take them away.
   * We are not going to rush these changes. It's much more damaging to have to make multiple changes to a system due to lack of understanding of the problem. We will look carefully at the issues at hand, test our solutions thoroughly, and try to do them once and only once. We will not allow a situation where your power levels fluctuate wildly over the course of the game.

On the Horizon: Our Next Update I'll wrap this up with a brief overview of some of the changes being worked on for our next update. While we've focused our efforts on creating a compelling event, we've also made some improvements to the game. Highlights of this update are:

   * Monster AI will be getting a slight upgrade, to improve monsters' ability to plan tactics, use enchantments, and respond to attacks.
   * Miscellaneous tweaks have been made to improve monster balance. (Some monsters have even been learning from the mages that attack them . . .)
   * Vendors will be able to purchase cooking items, and will sell more alchemy and fletching items.
   * A rare case that could cause your client to crash or freeze has been fixed.
   * Our ongoing storyline is beginning. (Don't forget to bring your mittens!)

Finally, I want to ensure our commitment to improving Asheron's Call. It was a long, hard road bringing this game to fruition, and we're going to keep working to refine it. The best is yet to come.

--Chris Foster, a.k.a. "Slapp"

Spin From Turbine #2:

On December 16, Asheron's Call had its second major update. In addition to heralding our first event and the beginning of our ongoing storyline, this update includes a number of changes that affect game balance. None of these will affect any one profession to the degree of our previous alterations to magic.

Listed here are those items that we think are of most interest to players. If you want to read about every single tiny change we've made, look in the News section of the Zone AC Web pages on the Zone for an article titled "Build Notes, December 16."

Event Changes: Half the fun of the "Sudden Season" event is discovering for yourself what has been added or changed, so no details are listed here. There's much more than just some snow on the ground! Ask around, read the news, and explore.

Monster AI Changes: We've made a number of changes to how monster AI works, in the interests of making them behave a bit more intelligently. While there are limits to what we can do to improve AI in the short term, we will be watching the results of these changes carefully, to see how they fare.

   * Monsters will react more sensibly to occasional "issued attacks," and will not break off their attacks as quickly.
   * Monsters who fail to hit you with projectile attacks will continue attacking with non-projectile "harm" spells, if they have them.
   * Monsters will tend to "stick" to their targets more consistently, and "waffle" less frequently between targets.
   * Monsters now are less fixated on getting extra-close to their target before making a melee attack.
   * Monsters were failing to cast spells on themselves, due to a bug. Argh! Monsters are less dumb now. (Our own mental faculties, on the other hand, remain unchanged.)

Monster Balance:

   * Banderlings and Black Drudges now cast more slowly.
   * Golems in general had Magic Defense that was too low for their level -- making them easy sources of XP. This has been changed.
   * Skeletons have higher levels, to reflect their challenge. (We'll probably do the same soon for Mountain Rats, but they kill us every time we mention the idea . . .)
   * Lugians can now throw boulders faster and farther than before. Duck!
   * There were small glitches in the data for some types of Gromnies, Drudges, Armoredillos, Golems, Olthoi, Mu-miyah and Virindi, which gave each of them inordinately low or high protection against a specific damage type. These have been fixed.
   * Magma Golems have been learning from the mages that attack them . . .

Vendor Changes:

   * Vendors can now buy back all expensive trade notes that they sell; this was a glitch.
   * Aqua Incanta and Neutral Balm are now available with many more vendors.
   * A number of bowyers should have sold fletching items, but didn't. They do now.
   * You can now sell cooking items to grocers. Stop abandoning all those sides of beef, kids!
   * Vendors (particularly Kuro of Kara) were buying some inappropriate items. This has been fixed.

Magic Balance:

   * Imperil Other can now be defended using the Magic Defense skill. This was a glitch.
   * Players were using portal magic to provide "short-cuts" through quests. Now, critical portals within quests are set so that they cannot be "tied" using portal spells. This does not affect any other portals.
   * The Scroll for Acid Bane 6 no longer teaches Acid Bane 5.

Miscellaneous Changes:

   * In some rare cases, the client could freeze or crash when you were wielding items or otherwise manipulating your inventory. This should be fixed now.
   * Corpses now decay much more quickly when they are empty. This minimizes clutter on the landscape, which in extreme cases can cause slowdowns.
   * A glitch in the treasure system was found which caused nearly all treasure to have overly high requirements; in all future treasure, you should find that most treasure items have lower requirements for use than in the past. This change is slight for average treasure, but more significant for powerful treasure.
   * An additional character option lets you turn off most weather effects, to speed up your frame rate.
   * A handful of tweaks were made to rumors, quests, portals, object placement, and graphics.
   * Some chests or other places in the game would stop respawning their items under certain conditions. At least one of those conditions is now caught, and the spawn will now fail less often, if at all.
   * There was a bug in throwing weapons code that made them less likely to hit their targets. This is now fixed, so you may want to give thrown weapons another chance.
   * When you attacked monsters that were resistant to a basic type of damage (bludgeoning, slashing, etc), the chat log reported full damage, even though you were doing reduced damage. This is fixed. You are not doing any less damage due to this update; it is just reporting the damage accurately.

--Chris Foster, a.k.a. "Slapp"

Note: If you want to refer to past "Spin" articles, look for the "News Archive" link at the bottom of the News page.

Recap

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Discoveries

Town Crier Rumors

Town Crier tells you, "An unexpected chill has brought snow and ice to much of Dereth. No one knows what has brought this sudden chill upon us. The word is to be wary of the snowmen. There're rumors of bigger ones too!"

Town Crier tells you, "New robes available at some tailors! Wear yours for special occasions or as a fashion statement!"

Town Crier tells you, "Sir Joffre Tremblant's adventuring party has gone missing. The group was last seen heading north from Arwic."

Town Crier tells you, "Some people claim that the sun has grown slightly dimmer, but no one has confirmed this for sure. Some say it has contributed to the sudden chill. I also accept money, if you want more news."

Town Crier tells you, "There is a season in the Naqut, back in Ispar, during which the winds gust constantly, and sandstorms cover the land, blotting out much of the light. It is called the Night Feast, during which we pray for fortune in the coming year, cook food with fine spices like cinnamon and oregano, and Feast the night away!"

Town Crier tells you, "This is the time when we Aluvians are celebrating the Solstice, a time of lights and drinking and very good cheer. Join me in wishing Aluvians everywhere a fine and wonderful Solstice! Nothing is better at a time like this than a good drink and a fine apple pie."

Town Crier tells you, "We celebrate now the Festival of Lights. Bring your torches and circle around, while we honor the Elder Spirits whose truths bring us light. Enjoy the food and drink, maybe someone will at last replicate the fiery kimchi that will make our celebrations complete."