Posted by Retroman 2 years ago (Source)

Hello players of Albion,

I am excited to announce our changes for Season 13.

Our next big content update will focus primarily on major improvements to activities in the Open World. However since the development of a new big update takes a lot of time, we want to introduce some improvements already with the start of Season 13.

Mobs found in the Open World
The fame of all existing Roaming Mobs has been doubled. Furthermore, if Roaming Mobs are not defeated, they have a chance to reroll to a more valuable mob over time. This way we can guarantee that the low value mobs are exchanged over time, even if players do not actively defeat them. This change should make rare mobs appear more often in the open world.

We are also introducing entirely new roaming mobs which are more rare and provide more valuable Loot:

Treasure Drones
Treasure Drones are rare Roaming Mobs which transport valuable Avalonian Chests through the open world. They can be defeated by a solo adventurer. The chest contains Avalonian Artifacts, Avalonian Energy, silver and a mix of all kinds of fragments. The drone comes in four different rarity levels, like the dungeon chests. Furthermore, the tier of the drone also depends on the tier of the zone, with higher tier drones carrying more valuable loot.

Crystal Spider
This is a new Rare Boss that randomly spawns in Roaming Mob positions across the Outlands. Once it spawns, it will be displayed on the minimap for every player in the cluster. The boss is suited to be fought in small groups of 3-5 players. Defeating it gives high value Artifacts, including Avalonian Artifacts, as well as Season Points. On average they spawn every hour per zone in the Outlands, and each Crystal Spider gives between 10 (“Outer Circle'') and 30 (“Inner Circle”) Season Points.
The goal for us is to provide a spontaneous hotspot in the open world that attracts small groups in the vicinity, leading to potential small-scale fights that contribute to a guild’s season success, outside of the big CTAs.

These new mobs in the open world are expected to roughly double the supply of Avalonian Artifacts in the game. This should provide a stronger incentive to play in the open world. Increasing the supply of Avalonian artifacts should also help to make Avalonian items more affordable in the long run.




Gathering and Transmutation
We will also drastically increase the enchantment rate for all resources in the Outlands. The amount of .2 resources spawning in the open world has been doubled, while the amount of .3 resources spawning has been quadrupled.

To further boost the value of gathering resources in the open world, we will also adjust the transmutation prices. Transmutation prices will generally be increased, with lower tiers seeing more of an increase than higher tiers.

For Enchantment upgrades, going from .0 to .1 will see its cost roughly tripled, going from .1 to .2 doubled, and going from .2 to .3 will remain relatively unchanged.

For Tier upgrades on everything but stone, the transmutation cost will be 200 times the Item Value of the resource, which results in increases at lower tiers (5 and 6) of up to approximately +166%, +100% at tier 7, and no change going to tier 8.

For Tier upgrades of stone, the price will go up +166% for T4 -> T5, +100% for T5 -> T6, +33% for T6 -> T7, and again no change going from tier 7 to tier 8.

Castle Outposts
The loot of the Castle Outpost chests are also doubled, to attract more players when the chests are about to spawn and increase the incentives for small- to mid-scale fights over Castle Outposts. All these changes are meant to create more continuous action throughout the day, instead of only a focus on big CTAs.

World Bosses and Static Dungeons
While we are happy that players have started to play this content more, we might have pushed players too much into monotonous activities, especially with the fast respawn timer of world bosses. Therefore we are changing their respawn rate from every 60 minutes to once every 120 minutes (on every uneven hour, i.e. 1 UTC, 3 UTC, etc.). This rate is still low enough to not encourage another big pre-announced guild activity, but with a bit more breathing room to not encourage permanently camping this one cluster.

The Season Point generation from mobs will now also follow the same flattened curve between “Outer Circle” and “Inner Circle” as the territories and castles. This means the difference between Outer Circle and Inner Circle mobs is less pronounced.

Siphoning Mages
We doubled the fame of Siphoning Mages, to make mage raiding a bit more rewarding for the individual player and not only the player’s guild.

Safety from Instances in the Open World
Having a Hideout in an area provides a lot of benefits, which are good for encouraging guilds to have a base in the Outlands. However it provides too much safety when doing activities in the vicinity of the Hideout. To prevent any ways of a guaranteed retreat option into the Hideout we will reduce the range of shield bubbles when leaving an open world instance. Now when leaving any kind of dungeon, Hellgates, Corrupted Dungeons and Roads Portals, the shield bubble will only have a 20m radius. The very long range shield bubble will now only be available for the main entrances to a cluster.

Disarray
To reduce the effectiveness of trying to stack as many players into the cluster queue as possible we adjusted the Disarray curve to be much steeper, which especially makes a difference in groups of 100+.
Currently on live the effective damage penalty between groups of 100v150 is very low. This will be changed so that the relative damage difference will be way more important.

Some Example values of the Relative Damage Penalty:




Full List of all Disarray Levels:


Castle Layout
We are also making some adjustments to the layout of castles:

• The narrow bridges leading to the castle gates in the forest biome will be widened, to give the attacker more space to breach through the doors.
  
• A staircase has been added to get onto the outer wall in the Lord’s room for castles in all biomes. This gives the defenders a better chance to spread out, once the attacker is at the last gate.
  

20v20 Crystal League
Currently the attendance for Level 2 and Level 3 matches is very low. That is why we will consolidate these two levels. Level 1 and 2 matches will happen daily, and Level 3 matches will be twice a week. The daily Level 2 match will keep the same rewards as the current Level 3 matches. Level 3 Tokens can’t be purchased anymore and the Level 3 match rewards will be somewhat between current Level 3 and Level 4 rewards.

Full 20v20 Schedule




All these changes are intended to go live in the next Off Season, before the start of Season 13. And they are currently still in production, so some details may differ when they go live.

We hope you are excited about the upcoming changes for Season 13. And, like always, we are very interested in your feedback.

Cheers,
Retro