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 | August 30, 2011 A Draconic Design NotesHey there EpicDuelists! Sorry about making you wait for the last update- we ended up having more to fix than we’d anticipated. I cannot apologize enough for the delay, and I cannot apologize enough for the lack of communication from me personally. I’ve started my Master’s Degree and teaching undergraduate bio lab, but don’t worry! I’ll still be writing the Design Notes for all your EpicDuel needs.
Dragon-Con As Nightwraith explained in the last DNs post, ArtixEntertainment is visiting the 2011 Dragon-Con in Atlanta, GA over the weekend. You will be able to meet most of the AE staff, including EpicDuel’s own Nightwraith and Charfade! I wish I could be there with you guys (see the previous paragraph). Say hi to everyone at the lab for me though! On Thursday Night from 8-10 join the AE staff at room 4724 at the top of the Mariott for a pizza party with Artix, Cysero, and the rest of the team! It’s all ages, and super-casual (although I would not suggest showing up in pajamas and bunny slippers. I mean, I guess there’s no one stopping you...) On Friday at 2:30 PM at the Savannah room at the Sheraton, join the staff with the official AE panel (if you’re cosplaying, that’s the place to do it. If you’re of the female persuasion, I can suggest a certain EpicDuel Biodome scientist whose costume is particularly inexpensive...) There will be videos, moglin punting, quiz games, Ponies, and more!
Dragon Duds To celebrate DragonCon, the Dragon Weapons are returning to Delta V, along with two new mutating weapons (by which I mean they change class with you, not that they cause point changes in your DNA): the Draconic Destroyer and the Draconic Devastator. These powerful weapons will be limited quantity/time seasonal rares. These items will last as long as Dragon-Con, but after the con period is over (midnight on Tuesday, September 6), the shop quantity will reset to 0.
We will also be returning the back-to-school items, and just like last year these, as well as the Dragon items, will be available from Slayer in The Barrens (Barrens Outpost). There will also be new Varium and credit-only Dragon styles available from Steve 2.0 in Fortune City or Steve 1.0 in Central Station.
Calendar Giveaway Alina announced in her Design Notes today that there are FOUR 2011 Year of the Moglin Calendars up for grabs! All you have to do to enter is to complete an offer from AExtras. You can find them under “Get Points” when you sign on to your Master Account at Portal.Battleon.com. Don’t think you have a Master Account? Luckily for you, if you're an EpicDuel player, it’s your EpicDuel login! The more offers you complete, the more ArtixPoints you can receive, and the more chances you have to win!
This calendar includes a code that unlocks the Chronomancer class in AQW and DragonFable, as well as the Chronomancer armor in AQW.
To show our international community some love, one calendar will be awarded to a player from each region of the world:
Offers are not available in all regions, and all AExtras are third-party offers. We have no control over the content of the offers, or what offers are available worldwide. As always, participate at your own risk. Insect Fact of the Week To celebrate DragonCon, today’s Insect Fact of Science will be about Dragonflies! Dragonflies are characterized by large multifaceted eyes, two pairs of transparent wings held perpendicular to the body at rest, and their bodies are elongated. They are hemimetabolous insects (if you remember my earlier fact about insect metamorphosis, this means that they gradually molt from a nymphal form to an adult form), and the nymphs live in water. Dragonfly nymphs have a unique mouth structure, where the labium (a part of the mouth that resembles a chin on many insects) is modified to extend from the insect to snatch prey. They then use these raptorial mouthparts to hold prey- such as aquatic insects, other juvenile insects, or even fish- while they eat it. Adult dragonflies are generalist predators (hence the association with dragons) and eat mosquitos, flies, bees, ants, and very rarely butterflies. Dragonflies are very similar to Damselflies, but can be distinguished by several characteristics. For example, damselflies hold their wings parallel to their bodies, over their backs, while it is physically impossible for dragonflies to do so. |
 | August 26, 2011 New Old Fortune CityTitan vs. Adobe After a struggle spanning many days, from the darkest cavern, to the highest peak, until at last, Titan threw down his enemy and smote its ruin on the mountainside! That is to say, Titan and our wonderful crew of testers made it known to the software behemoth that their latest "update" was ruining performance in EpicDuel (and a few other Flash-based MMOs) so they essentially released an update just for us! I'd call that a WIN. Get the latest version of FlashPlayer here! Thanks Adobe! We've also been making some important changes to the backend of the game -- changes we can't go live with until they are completely. Because of this, we won't be releasing until later tonight. I'm predicting a... *summons the guidance of the mischievious time faeries* 9-10 PM EST release time.
Localization As a byproduct of the efforts to optimize EpicDuel and streamline performance, Titan has been replacing all the interface components in the game. This paves the way for another very important feature going forward: localization. Soon* EpicDuel will be available in multiple languages, starting with Portuguese. It's a good thing we don't have as many quests as the other AE games, or that task would be monumental! *Soon as in sometime in the future that may or may not be near at all we don't really know
Ye Olde Fortune City Tonight, you will be introduced to the newest area of Delta V, or is it a sub-area? In any case, Old Fortune City, the current headquarters for the Exiles is accessible through the staircase in the back of Hank's in Fortune City. All the new equipment will be there, so you'll want to hurry if you want to be the first to check it out!
New Gear! Of course, we didn't forget all the lovely implements of destruction we showed you last week! They're still coming, and thankfully, there's plenty for Varium and non-Varium players! You might also check out the Limited Quantity Shops. Just sayin'.
A New Champion Rises We've been teasing at a new character to be introduced to EpicDuel since the early Delta previews. We're finally ready to drop him in game, but not quite ready to reveal his true identity. Some of you may already have figured it out, but the explanation will shock you!
DragonCon 2011! It's that time of year again, folks!
Time to dust off your plastic lightsabers and Doctor Who fezzes and join us for the 2011 DragonCon in Atlanta, GA! This will be AE's 7th consecutive year attending and if you plan on going, we would love to meet you! What is DragonCon?It's basically a four day long, 45,000-person costume party with games, comics, anime, robot battling, art galleries, vendors, concerts, celebrity guests, and panels on everything from how to swordfight, write novels, make costumes, meet the cast of your favorite TV series…AND you can go to our panel and meet US! DragonCon is for audiences age 16+ (unless accompanied by a parent.) DragonCon is not run nor operated by Artix Entertainment. PIZZA PARTY!Thursday Night at 8pm to 10pm
ARTIX ENTERTAINMENT PANEL (Main event!)
Friday at 2:30pm at the Sheraton, Savannah room
Fan TableAlso this year, there will be an Artix Entertainment fan table located in the Hyatt. Stop by each day for a special ribbon to hang on your DragonCon Badge (Jemini made them... there is a different dragon for each day!) There are limited quantity of badges for each day... so first come first serve! We will always have two members of the team and any volunteer players who want to hang out and play battle cards with us. There will also be an art drop-box on the table if you want to submit any of your artwork in person. ----- Pack your energy drinks and assorted totems of nerd culture and join us for the biggest AE party of the year! Remember: what happens at DragonCon, stays at DragonCon...until it's posted on the Internet! Tags: Nightwraith DragonCon Titan adobe flashplayer localization fortune city |
| August 19, 2011 Status ReportAnother week gone by, another week of battling the recent animation lag that was introduced by the latest Flash Player update. After talking with Adobe and many other programmers, Titan was finally able to make headway in fixing the damage. The problem is the fix is very time consuming and will involve a massive overhaul of some critical components, which is why we didn't feel confident in updating this Friday. With some luck and a few long nights and early mornings, we'll be back on track for another update next week. Problems like these are about as fun to solve as they are for you to endure, so we appreciate your patience as we deal with them as quickly as possible.
Old Fortune City Many years before the war, Fortune City was a small mining colony that quickly grew as work of the Varium boom spread across the galaxy...perhaps too quickly. Unregulated mining created a massive sinkhole that caused the entire colony to collapse beneath the surface of Delta V, burying thousands of miners and their families with it. Far below the bustling metropolis of its predecessor, the colony now exists as Old Fortune City, a terrifying reminder of the callous excess of Baelius' reign.
New Weapons! Here's a taste of the new high level guns and bazookas (varium and credit only!) coming next week to EpicDuel! Look for them in the newly-opened Old Fortune City!
New ED Site! We've been looking at the websites of competition and we feel it's time to step up our game. Charfade has been a busy bee painting this beautiful EpicDuel scene for our new website.
Balance! There were several items we hoped to include in this week's balance update, but due to time or oversight were not included. These changes will be included in an update next to *hopefully* address imbalances remaining among the new and original classes. Our testers have been battling relentlessly all week and coming up with a comprehensive list of ideas to make balance stronger than ever! Despite arguments to the contrary, we don't favor any one class, even if certain classes are easier than others. EpicDuel is at its best with a diverse assortment of opponents!
P.S. It doesn't do anyone any good to berate Cinderella if we miss our mark on updates. In many cases there are circumstances beyond our control that cause an update to be delayed, and it's hardly her fault. She's just going based on the information we can provide. Thanks for your understanding. Tags: Nightwraith |
| August 16, 2011 Balance Breakdown, and your normally-scheduled updateHi there EpicDuelists. By now you’ve heard about the way that the latest version of Adobe Flash forced us to delay the update by a few days. We should release later today (Tuesday) or early tomorrow (Wednesday) assuming a bit of code Titan is currently working on works the way it should. Again, we sincerely apologize for the delay. Working in the Flash environment means that we have to constantly adapt to a changing language, and sometimes updates to Flash cause problems for us, and we’re not always able to predict what a new update is going to bring.
Break it Down Here’s the deal on the new skill scaling. Fixed-damage skills (eg Fireball, Plasma Bolt, etc) will be calculated with a level 1 base damage, the stat factor, and either an Improve value after level 20 or a Reduce value before level 20, so essentially lower levels (where fixed-damage skills tend to be overpowered) will see a reduction in effectiveness. At higher levels, these skills will essentially receive a buff. This should really improve things for caster mages. The follow skills now have their base damage scaled by level: Field Medic, Plasma Bolt, Fireball, Overload, Plasma Rain, Super Charge, Artillery Strike, Multi-Shot, Surgical Strike, Super Charge, Bunker Buster, Plasma Cannon, Stun Grenade, Plasma Grenade, EMP Grenade, Technician, Field Commander, Reflex Boost, Malfunction, Intimidate, Smoke Screen, Defense Matrix, Blood Shield, Hybrid Armor, Assimilation, and Toxic Grenade. Percent based skills (Double Strike, Berzerker, Massacre and Bludgeon) will work differently than they had previously. How it works right now is that they’re calculated by base damage + weapon damage - [defense/resistance]) x % bonus = your damage. After this update, it will look more like Deadly Aim, in that your damage = (base damage + (weapon damage x % bonus))- [defense/resistance]. This should be a buff for builds that do not rely entirely on strength, but players will insane amounts of strength should see a slight reduction in damage. The goal was to encourage deeper investment in skills that scale too well with only one point of investment. The percents for all of the skills affected by this change have been adjusted. The way robots work has also been changed. Using either the robot’s special attack or the robot’s attack will cause both options to go into cooldown. The cooldown is staying at 3, however, to keep bots from being the "instant kill" weapon they have been in the past. The Gamma bot will also receive a small damage buff (+1 for a new range of 12-16 damage) to help compensate for the extended cooldown. Assault Bot's special now reduces Curse.
Maximum block chance reduced to 40% (down from 45%). Shadow Arts can increase block chance up to 50%.
Critical Strikes now ignore 50% of defenses (down from 75%). Maximum critical strike chance is now 20% and you now have +1% chance to critical strike for every 7 support over your opponent. Minimum crit chance reduced to 1% and base crit chance is now 4%. Other Skill Changes:
Static Charge will now work by taking 80% of your combined base damage from strength and primary weapon damage. That will be the number that is considered for the energy restore.
For example, if your primary damage was 13-16 +28, let's take 14 + 28 = 42 * .80 = 33.6 (rounded up to 34). At level 1, Static Charge now restores 28% damage to energy, so you would get 28% of 34, which rounds up to 10 energy. In addition to this, if your actual damage dealt is higher than your combined strength and weapon damage (like when your crit on an opponent with low defense), the actual damage will be used to determine how much energy is restored. The actual damage you do with Static Charge is still effected by defense or resistance and is 100% of primary damage (same as Strike).
Weapon Mutation Another obscure feature of this release is a change to the way items that switch classes (Founder Armor and Beta Gear) now work. They have been recoded to work dynamically, meaning faster performance for the database, and the ability for us to add class changing items in the future! This change involved standardizing the base states of these weapons, so you may notice a slight difference in the stat configuration. Your enhancements, however, will remain the same regardless of class.
Friday Friday, gotta get down on Friday... We also have things planned for Friday! Because everybody’s looking forward to the weekend. Nightwraith’s confirmed that we’ll be releasing some bazookas and guns (although I haven’t statted them yet, so I can’t tell you the prices. Sorry). However, I can tell you that they will be high level, with both varium and non-varium options.
Old Fortune City Many players have collected the Old Fortune City Key, and wondered what it means or what to do with it. It’s unsurprising, many of the planet’s inhabitants wouldn’t know about Old Fortune City. Many years ago, before the scourge of Baelius, prospectors from all over the galaxy made their way to Delta V to mine her precious varium lodes. They called their little shanty town “Fortune City” because of the promise of untold riches. They built the city up from the few ramshackle tents, however its glory was short-lived. The varium lode they’d been mining was larger than previously anticipated, and the vein continued under the city. The settlement sunk beneath the surface of the planet, and was largely forgotten. Decades later- perhaps out of a desire to romanticize the harsh lifestyle of the prospector, perhaps out of an odd sentimentality- Baelius commissioned Fortune City to be rebuilt over the ruins of the old mining town. Now known as Old Fortune City, Oz and the other exiles were able to excavate enough of the town’s structures to use them as a base for their operations.
Insect Fact of the Week Slight correction to last week: termite colonies include male workers. Ants are fascinating animals, and some species maintain agriculture. There are only four known animal groups that have discovered agriculture- humans, bark beetles, termites, and ants. It is about this last group, ants, that I will speak today. Leaf cutter ants are true farmers. The workers of the colony collect leaves and use these leaves to cultivate their fungus gardens, which provide food for the entire colony. One such species of ant is entirely female- there are no men in this species at all! Other ants keep other insects as livestock. In these species, the ant colony maintains a herd of aphids, which they can milk for honeydew- a sweet, delicious (to ants at least!) substance that aphids produce. The colony is able to maintain control over their herd through chemical signals- the aphids follow chemical tracks left by ants, which keep them from wandering away from the herd. In return, the ants protect the aphids from predators, such as the ladybird beetle. Tags: Cinderella |
| August 12, 2011 The Unending Battle for Better Flash PerformanceFlash Fight 2000 Just when we thought we were making some good progress in improving EpicDuel's performance, Adobe swoops in and releases a sneaky, ninja update to Flash Player of their own that is just crushing animation performance in EpicDuel. Titan is talking with Adobe to find a solution to the problem, but it may take some time, especially if the problem is on their end. We first noticed this while playing EpicDuel on Chrome, which installs the latest version of Flash Player (10.3.183.5) automatically (convenient, right?). Firefox and Internet Explorer worked fine until we updated Flash Player on them. Until this issue is resolved, you may want to try a different browser without the latest version of Flash Player, or try uninstalling Flash Player and then installing an earlier version of the program. We apologize for the inconvenience, but this issue seems to be beyond our ability to control. Such is the double-edged sword of Flash game development.
Balance Update With this release we are rebalancing all skills that have fixed effects by adding a improvement faction based on level. This includes buffs, debuffs, shields, damage dealing skills that have fixed damage, and a few other skills that see limited use at higher levels. The net result of this is that all skills affected will be slightly weaker at lower levels and stronger at higher levels. For those who want a complete list of affected skills, here it is:
Damage Skills: Plasma Bolt, Fireball, Overload, Plasma Rain, Super Charge, Artillery Strike, Multishot, Surgical Strike, Bunker Buster, Plasma Cannon, Stun Grenade, EMP
Buffs: Technician, Field Commander, Reflex Boost, Debuffs: Malfunction, Intimidate, Smoke
Shields: Defense Matrix, Energy Shield
Other: Hybrid Armor, Blood Shield, Assimilation, Super Charge, Toxic Grenade
Because of this huge, sweeping change, and because we've spent so much time combatting Flash's performance issues, we have decided not to raise the level cap this week.
ADDENDUM (red means important!) Due to the unexpected performance problems form Flash Player and the extensive nature of the balance changes, we have decided to postpone the release until next week (mid week) to include more thoroughly tested balance changes and actual content. We'll be usuing this weekend for additional balance testing in addition to solving the Flash Player issue. Again, we apologize for the inconvenience, but this time it wasn't actually our fault! Tags: Nightwraith flash player adobe balance lag |
| August 10, 2011 Coding Mania, and what’s next to come...Those of you who frequent the forum were treated to a post from our Fearless Leader, Titan. For those of you who haven’t seen it, here’s his post in its entirety:
For those who are wondering what the changes made on Friday and over the weekend actually were, I am here to enlighten you. What it means for you is a variety of exciting possibilities. I’ve installed several structural changes as promised in EpicDuel Delta that will make new features possible. Prior to this update, many of the major features were what I would classify in the “overwhelming difficult to build” category because of limitations caused by the design of the game code. After spending loads of hours rethinking and retooling the engine, you can expect big expansions to the game at a rate faster than you’ve seen since we launched.
Some of these features include new armor types (not just for player, but also for NPCs), larger more meaningful factions, tournament brackets, larger buddy lists and group chats, item banks, improved retraining system, and additions to the storyline that will push the faction war to new limits.
Thousands of lines of code were updated to work more dynamically over the weekend... this means faster development times for new features in the future. When it comes to adding things like new drops, prizes, armors, weapons, etc, it’s now a much faster process for us. Instead of having to define an item id in 15+ different places, we can now more rapidly create content that simply works! This is an empowering change for Nightwraith and Charfade as they’ll be able to more easily add content without the need for additional coding assistance.
These are all ways in which we can now improve the game for you, and though balance changes had to wait until this week, the options now available to us for new features, and items is vast. Overall, this week’s progress, though it may not look big content wise, has been a very big step! We would like to thank you all for understanding, and hope you enjoy the exciting features and items these changes will allow us to release!
Plus, an added benefit that hopefully most of you are finding is an improvement in server response times... faster gameplay means more battles, more fun, and more EPIC!
As always, the entire EpicDuel staff is dedicated to making a fun gameplay experience for everyone, whether it’s Titan actually coding the game, or Charfade and Nightwraith drawing the in-game content, or my team balancing, testing, and disciplining the game, or me with the varied things I do for the game (writing the DNs, some of the writings on the website and in-game are my doing, I run the Facebook, etc.) We are working hard to improve the game, Dear Players, and I hope that hearing it directly from Titan reassures you of that fact.
Balance Changes I announced last week that we were prepared to roll live with several proposed balance changes, including adjustments to set-damage skills (such as Plasma Grenade or Overload), which could either buff or nerf the skills depending on your current build. Factoring in character’s level with set-damage skills will establish a more fair range of damage for the skill, and allow us extend the usefulness of skills that are often overlooked at the higher levels. This level based improvement formula. can also be extended to buffs and debuffs. We will even be able to control the rate at which certain skills improve to prevent them from becoming UPed or OPed at higher levels. As always, we’re concerned with improving balance and making the game more fun, for all of our players, and some of these balance changes should help to bridge the gap between paid and unpaid players. It’s always been a tricky situation for us to maintain balance, and the battle is never over. However, with changes like these, we feel we’re taking steps in the right direction. In addition, we’re talking about raising the level cap to 34, so both paid and free members will have something to which they can look forward!
Insect Fact of the Week If you’ve gone down through the mines, you’ve likely met Insectoid mine worker Kraggor. Kraggor’s people are modeled after real-life eusocial insects. In these creatures, which include members of the orders Hymenoptera (bees, ants, and wasps), and Isoptera (termites). Eusociality is characterized by a colony being “ruled” by a Queen, who is the mother of the colony, and has a very strict division of labor. The workers, such as Kraggor, in this type of system are always the Queen’s daughters or sisters, who perform upkeep tasks, building, food gathering, and caring for the young. Males in these colonies are soldiers when they live in the colony, although in the case of termites, many colonies have both a King and a Queen. Some species of gall-forming aphids or thrips (order Hemiptera, or True Bugs) display a type of eusociality where non-reproductive members of the gall become soldiers, who protect the young. Tags: Cinderella balance Titan code lag performance |
| August 05, 2011 Coding is hard...or so I've heardSorry fellers, it looks like we didn't get to most of the features and balance improvements we planned for this week. We've been undertaking what has become and increasingly more massive project this summer to essentially rebuild the foundations of the EpicDuel game code. What started as a modest rewrite has turned into a full scale war against bad, old code and confoundingly inefficient database designs that should allow us to do things that we previously deemed to difficult or outright impossible to implement. The parts of the game being rewritten are the same things that have prevented us from introducing more bots, more quests, more class changing items and more of everything you like about the EpicDuel. We're still planning on implementing the balance change next week, but it looks like we'll need to squash a few more bugs fore we start building new. Thanks again for your patience and understanding as we usher in a bold new era of features and content for our humble little game. Tags: Nightwraith |
| August 03, 2011 Rebalancing the EquationHi there EpicDuelists! It’s that time of the week again, time to let you know what’s on our agendas for this week!
Balance Changes Last week I promised that we’d implement some balance changes soon, and we’re finally ready to release the planned balance changes!
Here’s what we’ve confirmed:
This is not meant to be the “be-all, end-all” Ultimate Solution to Balance, but as I’ve said before, we’d rather go in with a scalpel than a sledgehammer. The improved scaling with cast spells required Titan to program a new scaling system, which is a big reason for the delay. This list is subject to last minute changes as testing progresses!
Code Improvements We’ve managed to fix a few bugs, including one where removing a buddy does not unlink you as allies, one of the sources of lag (hung battles), and a few bugs on our moderator tools. I’ve also been getting a lot of questions as to why we haven’t implemented more bots into the game, or added more dynamic options (such as battle pets) to the game. The system that bots currently use needed fixing, and Titan is currently building a better system for robots, as well as several other new useful features. We like building new features, and it’s really fulfilling to be able to set the ground work.
New Banners! Charfade’s back from her holiday, and she’s been working on giving the webpage a facelift. I’m not sure when this’ll go up, so I don’t know it has gone up or not when you’re reading this. If it has, good job Charfade! If it hasn’t, also good job, but not as enthusiastically.
LQS Restock As stated in last week's DNs, we plan on restocking the Telsa and Lady Tesla Armors once again with the new release on Friday. This restock will be small, but we'll try to give everyone who missed out on it last week a chance to grab it! This is the last guaranteed restock. After this weekend, restocks, if they happen, will be very small and entirely random. We want to provide a fair chance to as many players as possible to grab the LQS items, but we also want to retain rarity and value of the item for those who were lucky enough to grab it immediately.
More? We'll see what we can squeeze in before the end of the week! Could be anything!
Now we’re E/I! Not really, but when I asked on Twitter how the players would respond if I started putting an “Insect Fact of the Week” on the Design Notes, the response was overwhelmingly positive. So, this feature will be a regular occurrence! Here are a couple facts about insect maturity! When insects mature, they molt- that is, shed their exoskeletons- until they are mature. The developmental stage between each molt is called an “instar”. Since insects do not molt after reaching maturity, the term “instar” only refers to larval or nymphal forms of the insect. The process of maturing in insects is called “metamorphosis”. Homometabolous insects undergo complete metamorphosis, where the larva forms a pupa, and undergoes a dramatic change. You know about this if you’ve ever seen a caterpillar turn into a butterfly. Hemimetabolous insects go from a nymph to an adult through gradual changes, and the nymph often resembles the adult. An example of this kind of insect would be a dragonfly. |
