EpicDuel PVP Game Design Notes

December 21, 2012

The Dark Yeti offers an energy-based alternative to the classic Baby Yeti's attacks. When Omega goes live, you will be able to upgrade it to the Omega Dark Yeti!

Along with a Baby Yeti and Dark Yeti in EpicDuel, you will also receive a Baby Yeti Battle Pet in AQW!

Shirts are a real limited quantity item. There are only so many, so once they're gone, we're very unlikely to reprint more.

Get a shirt, save three yetis! Can't beat that! Mr. Scrabbles approves!

Happy Holidays! I look forward to continuing Omega development in the frosty Northlands.

Tags: Titan Are You Yeti Shirt HeroMart Yeti Pet Bot AQW

August 01, 2012

War is Ending... Who Will Prevail?

The Infernal Infiltration War is rapidly coming to its epic conclusion, and it’s still anyone’s game. Legion! Do the Administrator proud and bash down that door before the Lawman gets his grubby hands on imperial property! Exiles! Don’t you know about the rumors about what’s in there? Treasure, weapons... you name it. Are you just going to let the Legion have that? Remember what the Legion did to those poor Yetis? See your Generals for a final rallying cry!

Remember, the winner of this vault will determine the fate of the Vault’s contents, and Delta V.

Great Grenades!

Everybody’s been asking about the grenades, and whether they will have Varium sellback after the War. We’ve decided that they’ll have credit-only sellback, so stockpiling the dropped grenades or grenades from the missions (remember, there are missions for FREE grenades) in the hope of getting Varium is not useful. Grenades are happiest when thrown!

Clarifications/Corrections

Some players were concerned about moderator participations, as I’m sure you’ve seen us playing in the War. Moderators are able to participate, but we must adhere to guidelines with regard to using grenades and war participation. As some players who’ve been partnered with me know, having a mod on your side is not a guarantee of success, and we don’t get grenades or drops at any greater frequency than you. Mods are also prohibited from being on the tops of the war boards.

Also, the credit-only mechachillid weapons were mistakenly tagged as seasonal rare, when they are in fact permanently rare. They will be getting one additional enhancement slot with the correction.

Olympic Addendum

We forgot to mention it in last week's Design Notes (it was in the patch notes), but we are currently offering a limited-time achievement to commemorate the 2012 Olympics in London.  It will be available until August 17th, which should be enough time to collect the 2012 Tokens necessary to claim it!

Mechachillids? In MY AQW? It’s more likely than you think.

One of the Mechachillid drones, Roggark, somehow found his way into Battleon looking for recruits to defend the Vaults! He’ll be selling some of the discarded exoskeletons to Lore’s denizens... but they can only be used on Lore. Funny thing about that. See the AQW design notes for more info!

Tags: Cinderella Infernal Infiltration War AQW Mechachillids Grenades Moderators

October 26, 2011

Hello there, EpicDuelists! It’s your friendly neighborhood Cinderella with the continuation of the Great Harvest Festival! Our first *real* event in EpicDuel is going so well, and I’m really excited to be experiencing this with you!

A Harvest of Gear

So, getting this out of the way first, as it seems the only question anyone has asked me about the Harvest is when the Harvest Armors are being released. Well, Nightwraith is working hard to get out several armors for you. Keep watching this space for previews!

Continued Retrain Improvements

While the retrain improvements were certainly a giant step up from the previous iteration of the feature, there remain some issues. For one thing, we’re addressing the issue with your weapons being unequipped from your character on retrain. Following the adjustment, the system will be able to intelligently know for which items you meet the requirements.

Not too intelligently, though. We don’t need to accidentally program Skynet here...

...or do we? 0_0

More Snorkness!

If you’ve been working on the Ooky Spooky mission, you may have noticed that Snork has gotten a makeover lately. His frightening visage is reminiscent of the Indigenous War God, and in homage to his patron, Snork will soon be able to engage players in battle.

There may be other secret rewards in this or future Harvest updates, so be sure to keep your eyes peeled for any other treats!

Rumor has it that defeating Snork in battle gives you a chance to win a special prize perfect for the occasion.  I wonder what it could be! :3

Future Directions

We’ve already started work on the next big EpicDuel event! We’ll have some big improvements to the quest engine which should make this extra-exciting for players!

BattleCard Mod Packs this FRIDAY!

As if a major release wasn't enough to get you excited about the weekend, the new BattleCard Mod Packs will be released in Toys R Us stores throughout the United States this Friday!  Purchase both packs to unlock the PaladinSlayer class in AQW!  For more details, check out Alina's writeup in the AQW Design Notes!

Like a Prayer

Commonly called “Praying Mantises” because of their folded raptorial forelegs, Mantids are members of the order Mantodea, which contains over 2,000 species in 15 families. Mantises are closely related to cockroaches and rockcrawlers, as well as termites.

Mantises are easily recognized by their distinctive elongated prothorax, raptorial (grasping) forelimbs, and distinctive triangular head with large oval eyes. The structure of the Mantis’s eye creates a pseudopupil, giving the insect a cute appearance. The distinctive foreleg structure is used to capture prey, which can include lizards, frogs, birds, snakes, fish, rodents, and other insects, as well as defend themselves from larger predators. They are commonly eaten by larger predators due to lack of chemical defenses.

Mantises display a behavior similar to the “rocking” behavior of stick insects. This is either an adaptation to mimic the swaying of a leaf (there are many mantises which have adapted as leaf mimics) or a way to gauge the distance between landmarks.

There are some commonly-held beliefs about mantises- one is that the female must consume the male in order to mate. This is controversial, since the behavior has only been observed in captivity with starved females. In the wild, or with recently-fed females, this behavior is not observed. In the United States, mantises are not endangered, and are in fact quite common and sold as an alternative to pesticides. Only one species of mantis is considered at risk, Apteromantis aptera, which is listed as “Low Risk” in its native habitat of Spain. 

Tags: Cinderella harvest Festival spooky AQW retrain Armors BattleCards

July 21, 2011

*Pro-Tip*

EpicDuel's new URL will be http://epicduel.artix.com/play-now/  
Redirects should be working shortly, but you may want to update your Bookmarks as well!

High-Wire Balancing Act

Well, it appears that we all know that EpicDuel crashed this weekend. For those of you who are fans of EpicDuel on Facebook or follow us on Twitter, you already know that the crash was not just EpicDuel, but AdventureQuest, AdventureQuest Worlds, MechQuest and DragonFable (essentially everybody but HeroSmash was affected by the crash). Titan ended up having to re-publish the entire game from a coffeeshop! I want to personally thank all of our players for bearing with us and waiting patiently while AE was essentially down.

The crash was related to load balancer, and fortunately we’ll be able to avoid this problem in the future since we’re moving the games to Artix subdomains! We’ve also been working on patching up some exploits and bugs, which is why we have been restarting the live game throughout the week. If you still see exploits being used, please give us as much detail as possible- knowing exactly what’s going on helps us find the problem so Titan can fix it! 

We will likely be restarting once again today (Thursday) to install more fixes, but the content and balance updateswill be released tomorrow.

Balance Updates

After taking the feedback from the most recent update, we are continuing to tweak balance among the new and old classes.  We have not settled on specifics yet, but it seems Cyber Hunters and Blood Mages are still comparatively underpowered and we will make changes to address that.  There are tons of suggestions for balance right now, some more drastic than others, but at this point we would rather approach balance with a scalpel than a sledgehammer.

*Update* Complications in the dev server have forced us to push the balance update to the next week since the changes weren't thoroughly tested.

NEW STUFF!

It's time again for another round of armors.  Shed your current battle-worn exterior and try something new!  Nightwraith’s been working on a few new armors for the non-varium crowd, including the new City Guard Armor, the Imperial Tech Mage and the Exile Soldier Armor! Visit Naomi in Central Station to check them out!

Special AQWorlds Musical Event Featuring ArcAttack!

We’re aiming for to release earlier on Friday because we’ll probably be playing AQW on Friday, July 22 at 6 PM EST! Rounding out the DoomWood Saga in AQW will be the musical stylings of ArcAttack, who have harnessed the power of lightning and are using it to create music... FOR SCIENCE! All of us nerds (science nerds and music nerds alike) over here at AE are super-excited about it, and we’re sure you’ll love it too!

Tags: Cinderella ArcAttack AQW Armors balance Fixes