T21 production cycle 100% done & all T21 builds using standardised format - currently balancing T21 build costs.

After the slave mines, I get to go back to making sparklies (yay!)



p.s.

Free tip - commodities other than ada are now relevant & desirable!

Me love you long time.

3-some?

I think it's awesome that Things like Frozen Blob won't be 10m per anymore.

Only if you wear a brown paper bag
I hope its more along the line of rubi and bacta.

I'd say that there's two strands to the T21 builds.

Firstly, we've moved away from the "stepped" module building process where every BP needs exactly the same commod, just with a different aug added, in that a variety of commodities are used, across the board. However, these are all weighted. i.e. While one build uses say X thousand tier 1 commods, another might use only 30 tier 3 commods. This is a deliberate attempt to make sure that all of the player base has some economic input (aka - do you really want to waste base slots on tier 1 commods, or will you just pay that newbie team to do it for you?).

This isn't to say that we've thrown out the entire factory process - not at all. Your factories are still integral to the process.

Secondly, to balance this out, there is a focus on a single tier 3 commod, to reward / allow uber teams to continue to fight over resources. i.e. To build T21 items, you will need to have X resource and you will want to make sure you have a decent supply / uni.


Added to this is the very definite plans that come with C2. Organic tech is something that we feel C2 needs, and as such.... well... you know your commodities, I suggest you start hoarding those now.


p.s.


Thank you to all teams / players testing tonight, I hope you had fun! Ares was taken down, Hephaestus and Zeus still remain! Feedback is welcome - we're getting serious bug testing done, and also seeing what / how the AI should be tweaked

We've just finished a couple of attempts on Heph. It was fun and all, but one part of our second attempt I didn't care much for was farming the roids. Could you make them drop 3-4 instead of 1 per roid?

Yes please, it took ages for all the zerkers to get enough.

Please update test.

What's wrong?

Oh, Do we have any update on the DM changes and that list of Content that was supposed to be going in soon?

iirc it was you that mentioned tweaking the DM drones, and adding a new line etc.

He means from the live server, so everyone would have their current items/levels/skills etc...

Because some people may have had certain weapons/gear on bases when test was last updated, or maybe they didn't have the skills.

Also people may have run out of cash for drones/gg considering the buttfucking most olympus groups get

Kanga

All my accounts have expired .

Fale.
Yes, I failed at spelling Fale.
Im starting a trend.
Hop on the band-wagon, hoes.

Report from behind the scenes:

Again, most of you will be wondering on the delay in getting Olympus live (don't worry, Voom shouts at me most days that we need to get it patched in live asap!). Things we've been doing:

1) Re-re-written the T21 production process. Aka "Rubigate".

Now, when you see it, you might think "Gosh, that's pretty simple, I could have done that in a day!". Hopefully good design means that this will be true.

The behind the scenes work has been fairly massive - SAL has been pulling raw data from the copy of live on test, and we've broken down exact numbers of stockpiled resources (global), how many bases / extractors are equipped by resource type, the pattern distribution of resources and how players are interacting with the commodity side of the economy (e.g. we can tell you that 21.57% of available bacta seeds were used this uni, that 46.34% of rubicite seeds were actually unavailable to build on, being in perilous or that 85 ada extractors were equipped globally, allowing us to accurately work out the global production of ada*).

This allows us to balance builds a lot better, see a dynamic chart of resource stockpiling / usage / trends and so on - I call this "Rubigate" since we found out that someone (*cough* me *cough*) had slanted things too far towards rubicite. Humble pie from me, re-write ensues, Julian makes rude comments towards my emotional state

1a) We've been economic modeling resources for these builds, and the costs throughout the T21 process - T1 has been made cheaper, whilst T3 got more expensive (roughly 60bil for their ships, which is roughly double that of UZ ships - although what you, the players, will do with market prices will change that. Could be that real time prices rise from the base costs, but that's naked capitalism for you - we're aware of the price of a lion commod on the open market, for instance.)

1b) We've modeled the entire commodity process to be more thematically tied to effects, meaning that there's some logical order to build processes. i.e. Adamantium remains where it is, whilst other commods are linked to in game effects. A simple one is Energon = Energy (kinda obvious). This makes our lives easier, in that if we have an item direction / effect, we can attribute build costs in a standardised way. Coupled with the data tables, we can accurately weight the amount of a commodity required, rather than the issue of the moment which has been "if in doubt, slap an tit / lac / ada module on it" or "roughly add 10 T3 commod here?".

1c) The net effect of this *should* be to normalise commodity desirability (not price, that's up to the player driven economy) back to how it was designed. It will take time though.

2) Pretender Loot tables. We've noted the complaints of people regarding "crappy loot drops", so all of the Olympians (I'm currently going through the last draft of this, typing up Jeff's framework) will have weighted tables, with three tiers of rarity. e.g. You kill Ares (congrats!): you get various weighted chances on rolls on the three tables. Obviously, the loot in each table is unique to that table, and contains various items / BPs.

2a) To complement this, Jeff has been adding a whole lot of new items to the drop tables, and I'm adding in some (hopefully) interesting consumables / items. No, this does not mean crates of tweaks. All of this takes time, as we have to make the item, balance it, then create the BPs, cost those up, add new items to the drop tables and so on.

3) Actual work on the physical side of Olympus - Hephaestus is getting an extra gal, and we're looking at some seriously cool boss scripting stuff. If it works as intended, we can actually make player's actions when *not* fighting bosses effect their progress.

4) You might ask why we're doing all of this now, when no-one will be able to build T21 gear for a while. Two reasons: firstly, its easier to balance in an entire chunk, and secondly players hate it when the dev team change costs / stats after the fact (wattage augmenter, sorry about that) - so grunt work done now will allow players to swamp Olympus and not worry that their Zeus items will suddenly get changed when they've just swapped their stash of ada for <censored>...

4a) This goes for the T21 augs as well - they're getting balanced around play experience and not just the balance sheet formulas, which will make you all a lot happier. We hope.



Back to work. Oh, p.s.:

Coding stuff - HAL is ill at the moment (wish him well!) but Jey / SAL / Jeff have been bug hunting. The C2 coders also have regular "scrums", which I'm not invited to, but sounds very manly and exciting.


*There are some serious ada hoarders around! 30k odd of stashed ada, even given usage rates!




This caused us a bit of confusion last night - drone changes have been made, just not put live, but as we work on a current copy of the XML, it appears to us like they have done (was in regards to a BP costing that wasn't showing up on searches for commod requirements). Details other than that I will leave up to the content dev responsible or Jeff, but as far as I can see, these changes / additions are ready to go live when we next patch.