Balance and Bugfixes
First, we’ve got a few things this week that should improve balance and quality of life on Sleeping Giants. In general, we believe that the new map is about where we want it to be, but we’ll continue to monitor how you play and continue to address all issues if they arise. Specifically, we know there are quite a few rarity bugs that still persist and we’re working on cleaning all of them up as soon as possible.
Slightly bad news first - we decided to delay Balang Walker packing feature until Monday, just to ensure that it goes as well as possible. Packing is inherently a very dangerous feature, with huge potential for abuse, and even critical truly game-breaking bugs. Historically, pretty much every duping bug and most of the critical issues that forced us to revert came from packing, so we're extra cautious when bringing it back.
Changelog for today's patch:
- Increased durability for all ceramic tier equipment and later tools.
- Removed deviation from Ballista shooting.
- Excluded items from daily maintenance if their total is less than 10 a day.
- Decreased Ballista reload time from 7s to 4s.
- Implemented new Sulfur harvesting mechanic. Sulfur rocks in lakes can now be demolished with Scattershot, then turning into harvestable pebbles on the ground.
- Fixed Soil Excavator not being placeable on Event Tiles. It can now be placed to mine Clay or other resources.
This change to maintenance should improve the situation a little bit, but we don’t consider it the final answer with respect to Maintenance in the least. With the Packing Update on Monday, we’ll also be adding back the ability to pack and unpack items in the Maintenance Chest to move them around your base. We'll also continue to improve Maintenance as a feature using your feedback.
Overall, packing will work quite a bit differently than before. We’ve teased it a little bit, but in order to help you plan we thought we’d go into a bit more detail before patching it in. The Balang will not have a core as it did before, rather it will be able to pack any base on the ground, including hangar pieces and any other structures, and will be able to pack even quite large-sized bases. The piece limit will include only walls and other base pieces, rather than all of the stations and other structures in your base.
Packing will take a similar amount of time as previous iterations, but unpacking will incur a significant time cost on top in a form of a set minimal unpacking time. We want this mechanic to be used to move and resettle, not to have mobile FOBs, creating sky bases or performing other exploits, and the time to unpack is added to limit such abuse cases. In addition, we don’t intend for this feature to be used to keep a giant protected base packed into a walker hidden inside another base. For that reason, when something is packed, after a grace period that should be long enough to move and resettle, it will cause your entire base to begin taking decay damage. To increase the ease of moving all of your belongings at once, we’ll be including walker packers integrated into a Balang Walker as well, but they will also be subject to the decay penalty. Accidental canceling of packing has also been removed - it will simply pause during damage - which will limit the potential abuse of zeroing someone’s base because they can’t unpack it.
These are a lot of significant core changes so we’ll be monitoring how it works in real gameplay, and adjust and iterate whenever necessary.
Walker PvP
For a while now, but definitely since the start of S5, we’ve seen the prevalence of the “Crack and Drop” meta.
See a community member’s video here to see what we mean:
[previewyoutube=BlhZ0_4L8SU;full][/previewyoutube]
Fire arrows originally were an attempt to address this, but we were never completely satisfied with this solution, which is why you’ve seen a lot of changes in the way walkers are employed, trying to promote and emphasize the gunboat gameplay.
With the upcoming PvP Update, we’ll have some more changes should significantly improve the way walker fights play out. As we said in a previous devblog, we want to encourage crew member gameplay. Having the driver more actively involved was something we wanted to achieve, but we also want there to be something to be gained by having some clan members on your walker in a fight, rather than having all walkers operated by a solo driver, while maintaining that option as well, just less effective. Our goal here is to encourage team play, while keeping the promise of the solo experience.
First, we’ll be removing the current combat timer and replacing it with a new system, which encourages continuing to defend your disabled (but not zeroed) walker and return it to service if your defense is successful in the end. Rather than the whole walker being held up by a combat time and kept there by continuous damage, individual parts that are broken will create a cooldown for that specific part, which can be replaced after the timer has passed. In addition, combat repairing will be possible, though less effective than repairing out of combat, while also not stacked based on the number of people repairing.
To address the “crack and drop” meta directly, damaging the walker in combat will no longer be the method for opening the walker storage. Rather than requiring fire arrows, you will have an equippable item that does hull damage while used on an enemy's walker deck, which can also be interrupted by getting damaged.
During the battle itself, we will be implementing some new mechanics that should make the fight a bit more dynamic and interesting. At certain hull HP thresholds, certain walker “subsystems” will become non-functional, requiring some coordination and teamplay by the captain and the crew members to restore the functionality. Some of the options for these components will be things like active Torque use, control of remote weapons and/or automatons, automatic reloading, water container leaking and used for respawning, and so on. Captains will be able to restore these systems themselves without letting off the steering levers, but a team will gain certain benefits from having a crew member assisting in the task of repairs.
There are a lot more details and pieces and parts, like adding more control groups to weapons that will change the way both PvP and PvE walker fighting works, and we’ll likely expand on this later, since we’re continuing to actively design new and improved mechanics for this update, but this devblog is probably already going to set the mark for most words yet, so that’s all we'll say for now. Let us know what you think and keep suggestions coming!
PvP Overhaul vs PvE Focus
I think it’s very important to address upfront the constant debate among the community about the focus of the game. We know that some people will see the upcoming patch focusing on PvP as a pivot “back to PvP” or “giving up” on the PvE vision that was promised as the main focus of S5, but we assure you that it's not at all the case.
We’re still very much excited about and committed to the PvE components of the game. Our next map, which will be a completely overhauled Ancient City map, will be almost entirely PvE-focused experience. We aren’t ready to tease too much about it, but we hope that it will be a unique experience that hasn’t existed in Last Oasis so far in any form, and bring with it some new mechanics and features. In addition, we’re interested to know which other types of PvE gameplay loops you would be interested in seeing, so we plan to conduct a poll soon regarding these matters.
However, fundamentally, Last Oasis is a Sandbox PvPvE game. The conflict part is an incredibly important one and while we know some players don't want to engage in PvP at all, most of the community is interested in taking part in PvP at least some of the time. So creating a healthy PvP environment is also an important part of the future of Last Oasis. In the past, the sands were a bit too lawless, and we hope our planned changes will help create a healthier environment for competition.
Okay, let’s get into what we’re planning for this update.
Conquest/War Declaration/ORP
With the PvP update, territory control will be receiving a major overhaul. Rather than proxies claiming entire maps and providing resources, they will claim only a portion of a map and provide a “Sphere of Influence” (SOI). This SOI grants all bases of the owning clan inside of it an ‘offline raid protection’ (similar to Trade Stations before) for the majority of the day, while everything outside of this SOI on that PvP map will be still unprotected.
The proxy itself will always be invulnerable, unless another clan decides to declare a war on it, which will provide some vulnerability time during which the proxy can be damaged and destroyed, which will, naturally, remove the offline raid protection for all contained structures in its zone.
Wars will be declared by blind bidding against a specific proxy at any Trade Station, operated by the Flotilla. The defenders will then have an opportunity to counter-bid to attempt to stop the attack.
There are a lot more details to it, of course, especially technical ones, which will likely evolve as we work through the development of this feature, but we’ll leave it more basic for now just to take feedback and hear your responses to this idea.
KoTH POIs
On PvP maps, we will be adding POIs that are King of the Hill PvP events. Every hour, these POIs will become contestable, and the winning clan will receive some sort of a bonus from a list of possible ones while on that map for the remainder of the hour.
Examples include things like increased harvesting rate, schematic drop rate, crafting speed, decreased water consumption rate, and so on.
In addition, some of the options will actually be debuffs for the other residents of the same map, so that enemy clans and other players are encouraged to go and attempt to counter-raid the POIs, rather than simply turtling on their own tile and collecting all of the bonuses.
Lastly, holding all of the POIs on a map will provide a set bonus, which right now we’re considering to be the previous Proxy Walker mechanic of having an automatic generation of a percentage of resources harvested on that map by all the players.
Let us know what types of bonuses you’d like to see as a player and what set bonuses would encourage you to engage in such a mechanic, and we’ll put them on the list for consideration.
Learning to Craft Schematics
(or, as I like to call it, The Secrets of the Rupu)
We will be introducing another new mechanic, which will allow you to permanently learn the ability to craft schematics across the game, which will be different from the current Rupu Shrine feature.
On PvP maps, POIs will spawn that will be some kinds of walker wreckages or archaeological dig sites, containing bits of knowledge. These sites will allow you to input a piece of equipment, which harvests the knowledge over the course of several days, limited to 1 machine per clan at any given time, before they’re fully used and respawn somewhere else. These POIs will be designed for players to build bases around them and protect the POIs from other clans and players, which, of course, will be targets for counter-raids.
The bits of knowledge will be non-physical, similar to stat points, and will be generated over a long cycle, with most being produced at the end. So, how this is intended to play out, is that you can take the knowledge out of the machine frequently, to be very safe, but reset the recycle and therefore have slower progression, or you can take risk and let the cycle complete, leaving yourself vulnerable to enemy attacks, but gaining much more knowledge. By making them non-physical we hope to avoid any strong pressure to constantly depot them into PvE maps for safe-keeping and focus on learning and fighting aspect of the feature.
Once you have these knowledge shards (and a copy of the schematic), you will go to Event Maps, which will have POIs, similar to previous iterations, like the Ancient Crafting Site, the small fabricator, and such, which allow you to unlock the ability to permanently craft that schematic. Unlike previous iterations, when you unlock something, all members of the clan will learn how to craft that schematic to avoid having a single clan member who learns all the progression. In addition, due to their non-physical nature, you won’t lose them all if you take a risk, and we hope that will be a healthier state than in previous seasons.
Crafting schematics will only require a single input - a new resource called Drafting Paper, which will drop from all PvE encounters, and will be available from other sources as well.
Overall, we believe that this will go a long way towards resolving many of the issues with the schematics system, while still preserving the purpose of the feature. Again, there are a lot more details, but this will be a devblog by itself when we have all of them pinned down, so we’ll end it here for now. However, we are interested in your specific feedback, like whether you think all tech should be learnable or high-end things should be crafted using schematics only, or whether you think one clan should be able to learn everything or what is learned should be limited either by balance or hard-locking parts of the tech tree depending on the decisions, so you can branch and create a specific set of knowledge.
Conclusion
That was a pretty long post, so I’ll keep it short now. I want to reiterate that we are sharing all these details in advance so that we can receive your feedback and iterate on our designs before completing their implementation. Nothing we've described is set in stone, and we’re interested in hearing both from PvP and PvE players about these mechanics. There is a good chance we’ll find that one of the discussed features isn’t something that moves the needle for some of you, or that we find a way to introduce the same or a similar mechanic as discussed to suit the PvE-side of the game without disrupting its ability to be a fun mechanic for PvP players.
It’s likely that this devblog will create a million questions, so expect a follow-up next week with a Q&A that covers any and all major areas that you have questions about or just discuss on any of our platforms, and that adds more details that I didn’t have room for in this post.
