|
Aelthai -> =Dev, Balance= Monster Rewards and Pricing Updates (6/7/2012 19:32:31)
|
As many (and I do mean MANY) of you have noticed, the new monster rewards and item prices are now live. This has been coming for .... longer than I'd really like to think about; we've known it was needed, but getting all of the stars to align for it to go in was not easy.
In fact, you're going to continue to see changes for a bit, as things that were not caught in the massive update and/or were changed after the massive update was planned are corrected - and things that weren't caught in the massive update at all are updated. In particular:
Recent monster and items may till have old prices (they are being fixed as I type this!)
Stat Training prices have not been updated. They will be!
The prices for changing the element of Guardian armor in the Guardian Tower are not updated (they will change similarly to how item prices changed).
I haven't had a chance to read the feedback yet (I will when I have the chance!), but here is a quick summary of WHY the rewards were changed:
* At medium levels, it was impossible to afford to train your stats in the sequence that was assumed by the game without doing something to boost your gold above the expected rate of gain. This was not preferred.
* At high levels, stat training was no longer an issue - but you ended up not being able to replace your equipment as often as assumed, and if you wanted to change builds, you were just out of luck.
* Monster rewards and item prices were not synced with each other in any way - often not even in the same category! We tried to make higher level mean more expensive, but that wasn't always true, and the ratio of say, a weapon's cost to an armor's cost varied widely - so it's wasn't predictable. Monster rewards were equally inconsistent.
So we had a bunch of reasons to change prices and monster rewards.
In general, we decided to me much, much more forgiving with gold.
At low levels, you'll find that monsters give out far less reward than they used to (we wanted to stretch out the very lowest levels a little more to give you more time to learn the game before things start getting difficult - at the lowest levels, for example, what your resistances are does not generally make a difference in your survival, so you have time to learn what that means). Even so, you start off with a good bit of gold from the beginning, so you have something to play with and use while learning.
As you level, that starting gold becomes less important, but we allowed a fairly frequent replacement schedule for all of your items - one that if you want to, you can easily stretch beyond without killing yourself, so you can squeeze out some extra gold to get that Really Nice Item or get an item EXACTLY when you reach its level if you want to save for it - or so that you can (with care) completely untrain and retrain your character, and recover in a few levels.
There is a very, very steep XP and Gold curve. It is related to the XP required to level, and we retained it because it had a few nice effects - one of which is that past mistakes tend to hurt you less, it's much easier to recover than it would be in a system with a flatter curve.
So in short, enjoy the update! And watch for the things that aren't complete to be updated as time goes on.
|
|
|
|
