Il Nando
17th December 2004, 17:26
Now that we’ve caught our breath (after the successful launch of Catacombs), and now that Mark's given you a glimpse at our plans, it is time to bring everyone in the community some specifics of the additions and changes to the game. Here's a few that we are currently working on:
- More Catacombs Character Customization Options
Building upon the foundation laid with Catacombs, we will provide additional options for customizing your characters. A new batch of faces, hairstyles, tattoos (where appropriate), and more will be introduced in the coming months. Remember, Catacombs players can change their character’s appearance by talking to an NPC found in their Realm’s friendly Catacombs city.
- Server Clustering
We have been playing close attention to the community feedback from our different servers. Several servers have populations high enough to support exciting RVR. However, our lower-pop servers often don’t have enough fighting players logged in simultaneously, and gameplay on those servers is suffering.
To alleviate this problem, we've come up with a new solution: we will “cluster” the servers, which uses the new instancing technology we introduced in Catacombs. The intent of this system is to give players lots more friends and enemies in RvR, but not change the home server’s community unless the players seek to do so. The way it works is as follows:
Servers that are clustered will have shared battlegrounds and frontier zones. Thus, all players on the clustered servers will RvR together.
For PvE, players will have a choice of which server’s PvE zones they wish to enter (among the servers in that particular cluster). The current plan is to put an NPC in the capital city controls which server’s PvE zones you enter – if you want to venture to another server in the cluster, you may do so by talking to that NPC, which will let you zone into other server’s PvE and housing zones. For example, if in a cluster of three servers, players on all three servers can adventure on each of the three server’s PvE zones.
Players will be able to send private messages (/sends and /tells) to each other across the clustered servers, just as if they were physically logged on to that server.
Players from “foreign” servers that are adventuring on another server in their cluster will be identified as “[playername] of [servername]” or something similar.
Some servers will be clustered and some will not, depending on population.
These are just the basics; we’ll announce the full system when it is implemented around the beginning of the new year. At that time, of course, we’ll announce the actual servers that will be clustered together, and when we do so we will take into account which Realms “fit” together best amongst the servers.
- Instanced RvR
A common question during Catacombs’ development was whether or not Instanced RvR would be coming. We decided to focus Catacombs on PvE – but now that the expansion has launched, we’re putting together a design and starting to implement Instanced RvR. I don’t have too much to tell you about it, other than it will be a “matching service” that will find groups of like level and power in other Realms on your server (or cluster!) and put you into a dungeon-type area to RvR. We are working on different types of rulesets right now; more information will be forthcoming when Instanced RvR goes into testing.
We will post complete information about each of these new additions when we put them up on Pendragon for testing – expect to see the first patch notes in the first half of January.
Ipse dixit :nod:
- More Catacombs Character Customization Options
Building upon the foundation laid with Catacombs, we will provide additional options for customizing your characters. A new batch of faces, hairstyles, tattoos (where appropriate), and more will be introduced in the coming months. Remember, Catacombs players can change their character’s appearance by talking to an NPC found in their Realm’s friendly Catacombs city.
- Server Clustering
We have been playing close attention to the community feedback from our different servers. Several servers have populations high enough to support exciting RVR. However, our lower-pop servers often don’t have enough fighting players logged in simultaneously, and gameplay on those servers is suffering.
To alleviate this problem, we've come up with a new solution: we will “cluster” the servers, which uses the new instancing technology we introduced in Catacombs. The intent of this system is to give players lots more friends and enemies in RvR, but not change the home server’s community unless the players seek to do so. The way it works is as follows:
Servers that are clustered will have shared battlegrounds and frontier zones. Thus, all players on the clustered servers will RvR together.
For PvE, players will have a choice of which server’s PvE zones they wish to enter (among the servers in that particular cluster). The current plan is to put an NPC in the capital city controls which server’s PvE zones you enter – if you want to venture to another server in the cluster, you may do so by talking to that NPC, which will let you zone into other server’s PvE and housing zones. For example, if in a cluster of three servers, players on all three servers can adventure on each of the three server’s PvE zones.
Players will be able to send private messages (/sends and /tells) to each other across the clustered servers, just as if they were physically logged on to that server.
Players from “foreign” servers that are adventuring on another server in their cluster will be identified as “[playername] of [servername]” or something similar.
Some servers will be clustered and some will not, depending on population.
These are just the basics; we’ll announce the full system when it is implemented around the beginning of the new year. At that time, of course, we’ll announce the actual servers that will be clustered together, and when we do so we will take into account which Realms “fit” together best amongst the servers.
- Instanced RvR
A common question during Catacombs’ development was whether or not Instanced RvR would be coming. We decided to focus Catacombs on PvE – but now that the expansion has launched, we’re putting together a design and starting to implement Instanced RvR. I don’t have too much to tell you about it, other than it will be a “matching service” that will find groups of like level and power in other Realms on your server (or cluster!) and put you into a dungeon-type area to RvR. We are working on different types of rulesets right now; more information will be forthcoming when Instanced RvR goes into testing.
We will post complete information about each of these new additions when we put them up on Pendragon for testing – expect to see the first patch notes in the first half of January.
Ipse dixit :nod:
