Bogul and Shozen talk state of the union of Albion Informer and give a quick update on postings from SBI, before delivering part two of their interview with Red Army.
This episode is sponsored by StormLord’s Poetry Corner
Official News Recap: Week #4 of June 2017
This week we had plenty of official news posts on the official Albion Online homepage. Lets take a look.
Rookies of the Month (June 2017)
In what seems to be a new segment on the official website, UrzakeFrostgard writes a nice article, introducing three fairly unknown guilds: GoodFellas, Rangers of Celidon and Iron Bank. The GM’s of those guilds however, are no strangers in the community of Albion Online. While not many may have heard of RangerDovefalcan yet, Kutweer and Sharka are both veterans who have been playing Albion Online since early Alpha and are well known and respected in the community.
I recommend reading the nicely written spotlight, if you want to know more about those guilds. And good luck with your guild endeavours!
- Link
Guardians: An In-Depth Look
Enya does a nice writeup of the different open world bosses, which are called Guardians.
So far five different guardians exist, that are designed for 10 player groups:
- Old White (Hide)
- Ancient Ent (Wood)
- Rock Giant (Rock)
- Enormous Dryad (Fiber)
- Ore Colossus (Ore)
“These big world bosses can be found in Tier 6 resource hotspots, and randomly respawn between 12 and 48 hours after being defeated. There is no way to know when a Guardian has spawned, so scout the area if you want to take one down.”
Check out the initial newspost for more details on HP, skills and more pretty screenshots!
- Link
Player Spotlight: Nausk
In what seems to be a new segment on the official Albion Online homepage, we get an interview with Nausk, who is most famous for his solo ganking Blackzone Tales YouTube videoseries.
Check out the link to the spotlight, if you want to know more about Nausk or the link to the videos.
The official servers recieve a ‘massive hardware’ upgrade & Hector Patch #2 live.
As announced by Enya and after an extended downtime the servers are back up with new and improved hardware. Let’s see if it will hold up on release! :)
// edit: appareantly the whole upgrade of the hardware was delayed and not just the downtime
In addition to that, Hector Patch #2 went live on the main server. We already posted a Patchnote Comment post about it yesterday.
Here is the link again in case you missed it.
That’s it for today!
We are still working on our next podcast episode which will feature the second part of the interview with KingMojo and Norzor of Red Army!
If you want to hang out and chat with us or if you have any cool things we should mention here or on our podcast, make sure to join our discord!
Patchnote Comments: Hector Patch #2
Hector Patch #2 just went live on the main server!
Let’s take a look at the patchnotes below.
Hector Patch #2 / Version 1.0.326 – REV 88688 / 22 June 2017
Improvements
- Caerleon’s Bank and Marketplace are now in their own sub-areas in Caerleon.
Comment: This gives Caerleon its own special feel and atmosphere for the storage area. I am not sure whether or not I am happy with the look of the rather large entrance to the chest and bank areas. With an estimated large concurrent userbase in Caerleon come launch, seperate clusters seemed to be necessary. Let’s see how this turns out usability wise.
- New starter areas have been added to help with potential overcapacity.
Comment: Sure, why not. They might just remove them again after launch, if they don’t need them anymore. I’ll have to find out though if the travel distance to a green city is the same one similar to the other starting areas. After a first glance on the map it seems like it is 1 more zone if you spawn in the new zones.
- Black Market setup has been adjusted to increase the frequency with which armors and weapons will drop.
- The immediate result of this change will be that armor prices increase ~9x faster, and weapon prices increase ~45x faster, than previously.
- This in turn should mean that many more weapons and armors are sold to the Black Market (as it will now be offering good prices for them far more frequently), which will lead to higher drop rates for these items.
- The effects of this change will not kick in immediately, because old orders will still need to process through the system before the changes take effect.
Comment: A lot of people complained about the BM and item drop frequency. Mind you in a state of the game with lower overall mob deaths due to end-of-beta fatigue and a bug that persisted where not all items dropped equally. I wonder if they overdid it, 45x faster? It will be interesting to see if the first person on the server after launch to hit T8 bags can sell them for 10m+ to the BM guy.
- Improved quantity selection in crafting: it will now remember the last amount you selected so long as you keep crafting the same item.
- Destiny Board achievements are now untracked by default.
- Destiny Board starts to track achievements when they get some progress (ie Fame is greater than 0).
- During this patch, all achievements with progress will be set to tracked, and all achievements without progress will be set to untracked.
- Added a limit to how many achievements you can track at once.
- Added tooltips for Destiny Board tracker notifications.
- Added “time remaining” in tooltips for buffs/debuffs.
- Upgraded all remaining text in the game to use the new font.
- Trophies now give their bonuses to up to three laborers rather than up to two.
- Added a warning about renaming etc when creating characters.
- Royal Sigils can now be transmuted to higher tiers (although doing so will be very expensive).
Comment: The ratio is 5 (current tier) : 1 (higher tier). With current expeditions being capped at T6, you need 5×5= 25 T6 sigils to make 1 T8 sigil. With 32 sigils needed for a T8 royal helmet and 64 for a royal chest, thats 800 or 1600 T6 sigils per T8 royal item. Which is quite a hefty price for T8 royal gear. I like it.
- Royal Sigils are now classed as materials in the market.
- Missions no longer show timeouts if they have very long durations.
- Improved Undead and Morgana group dungeons.
- Open world Ghouls now have a new ability.
- Dryads and Forest Spirits are no longer aggressive.
- Toads, Boars and Monitor Lizards have had their aggression radii halved.
Comment: Some areas really needed the aggro reduction. Should make a lot of gatherers happy.
- Reduced durability of (non-Founder) furniture, making them easier to destroy.
- You can no longer place furniture near banks (you know who you are).
Comment: Heh.
- Increased zoom speed and movement speed in the World Map.
Changes
- Gathering journals now only count resources of their tier and up to two tiers higher.
Comment: No more quick-filling those T2 and T3 journals with T7 and T8 nodes because of the higher fame per tick. A move towards making trade routes between green and black more important.
- The “Flail” line of weapons is now called “Morning Star“.
Comment: Hey boss! This stupid animation is to hard to make work! — Uh, wait you realized that now after 3 years? Alright, fu** it. Lets just rename it.
Oh and while you are on it, consider renaming expeditions into ‘fishing’ as well.
- Reworked visualization of zergs to not show individual player positions.
Comment: Someone send me a screenshot of the difference pls. :P
- It is no longer possible to find T3 resources in the Outlands. Their old positions have been filled with T4 to keep node counts constant.
Comment: Oh wow! Another (i’m tempted to call it major) change to resource distribution! Together with the journals another nudge at making the trade routes through Caerleon more important. Question: Will gankers be happy if they pop a transport loot pinyata and only get T3 resources?
Fixes
- Moved the siege camp in Birken Fell to remove overlapping PvP areas.
- Fixed Arcane Orb cooldown to be the correct value of 15s.
- Fixed damage area on Forest of Spears.
- Improved various visual issues with projectiles.
- Fixed some issues with calculations for focus cost of enchanted items.
- Fixed an issue with visuals for Separating Slam ability.
- Fixed some issues with the rewards in the final chest of safe zone hellgates.
- Repositioned building NPCs/clickables to ensure they’re easy to access.
- Demon Gatekeepers (eg Vile Warden) have had pursuit range reduced from 60m to 35m so they can no longer be pulled out of the Unrestricted PvP area.
Comment: Giggdy. Who abused this ? Heh.
- Removed unnecessary warning when entering expeditions.
- The Keeper Chieftain remembered the abilities he had forgotten and now uses his complete ability arsenal again.
- Destroyable chests now have health and armor to make them a little harder to loot.
- Fixed an issue where farm buildings did not have enough durability.
- Fixed more issues with Guild UI shaking.
- Fixed an issue where respawning in Caerleon was not portal-binding players correctly.
- Fixed a visual issue with gathering multiple nodes in rapid sequence.
- Fixed an issue with toggling nametag visibility in cities.
- Various visual and effect fixes.
- Various audio fixes.
Source:
— END —
have a nice day :)
Albion Informer Podcast – S0E04: Red Army Interview Part 1
PvP Leaderboards: Week #3 of June 2017
Launch is one month away!
Are people still pvp’ing in final beta?
Lets find out.
Largest Battles – Week #3 of June 2017
Comment: [OOPS], [Sexy] and other clash late wednesday night for a respectable 6.17m total fame. Looking at the killboard it looks like as if [Sexy] and especially Betrayed Souls walk away as a victor from one of the more costly battles this beta. In our second largest battle this week [ML] with Vigilance and Millenium win a big fight.
| Largest Battles – Week #3 of June 2017 | ||||
| Started (UTC) | Players | Total Kills | Total Fame | |
| 14.06.2017 00:32:22 | 86 | 79 | 6.17m | Details |
| 14.06.2017 18:54:47 | 100 | 84 | 5.21m | Details |
| 14.06.2017 01:12:57 | 112 | 143 | 4.15m | Details |
| 18.06.2017 12:33:54 | 46 | 29 | 4.15m | Details |
| 18.06.2017 21:05:19 | 112 | 54 | 4.13m | Details |
Top PvP Kills – Week #3 of June 2017
Comment: Oh what? Thats right. Filemon and Sickfarmer are in the same guild – Gentlemen. What happened there? After some some research and the friendly folks on the official albion discord channel, I was told the duel bug still persists in the game: When you still have a dot after a duel in a teritorry it can lead do you actually dieing. Oops. I hope nothing trashed. Heh. 2nd highest and thus more legit kill is Hoba from Red Army dieing in 8.2 in a GvG against Betrayed Souls.
| Top PvP Kills – Week #3 of June 2017 | ||||
| Time (UTC) | Killer | Victim | Fame | |
| 13.06.2017 22:31:12 | Filemon [TY] | Sickfarmer [TY] | 2.06m | Details |
| 18.06.2017 05:03:32 | Zecareca [Sexy] | Hoba [OOPS] | 1.70m | Details |
| 16.06.2017 12:01:34 | Copoka [FAME] | Sohrab [OOPS] | 1.70m | Details |
| 16.06.2017 20:11:38 | Elthronn [OOPS] | Tyrul [TY] | 1.66m | Details |
| 18.06.2017 20:58:30 | samanthafox [ML] | Deana [Sexy] | 1.62m | Details |
Top Kill Fame (Player) – Week #3 of June 2017
Comment: Eh. Cmon guys. Just Red Army and 2 ex [Sexy], ex [Pk], ex (?) THE ABYSS. I think the ‘ex’ The Abyss and the two guys not being shown in a guild is the most important thing about this.
// Edit: After some research it turns out Lkuk is still in Grief and just left temporarily, but it shows like this for some reason.
| Top Kill Fame (Player) – Week #3 of June 2017 | ||
| # | Player | Fame |
| 1 | FLAIR [OOPS] – Red Army | 6.66m |
| 2 | Norzor [OOPS] – Red Army | 6.39m |
| 3 | Lkuk | 5.26m |
| 4 | Aggressor | 5.04m |
| 5 | Sohrab [OOPS] – Red Army | 4.81m |
| 6 | Derrick [OOPS] – Red Army | 4.74m |
| 7 | Marusia [OOPS] – Tea Party | 4.68m |
| 8 | KingMoJo [OOPS] – Red Army | 4.37m |
| 9 | Hoba [OOPS] – Red Army | 4.27m |
| 10 | GRRRRRRRRRR [OOPS] – Red Army | 4.16m |
Top Kill Fame (Guild) – Week #3 of June 2017
Comment: Fame totals to get you into the top#10 are going down again as we head towards the end of final beta. No major changes, but everyone except for RA is below 30m.
| Top Kill Fame (Guild) | ||
| # | Guild | Fame |
| 1 | Red Army | 82.54m |
| 2 | THE ABYSS | 27.95m |
| 3 | Tea Party | 27.86m |
| 4 | Betrayed Souls | 25.31m |
| 5 | The Filthy Casuals | 25.24m |
| 6 | Echo of Silence | 21.60m |
| 7 | Jollibee | 20.64m |
| 8 | Tankui Russia | 20.30m |
| 9 | NoLife | 19.64m |
| 10 | KDS | 17.49m |
GvG – Most Attacks / Defenses Won – Week #3 of June 2017
Comment: Is THE ABYSS is back? Also, 3 attacks to get you into the top#10? Ugh. I’m looking forward to release ;)
| GvG – Most Attacks / Defenses Won – Week #3 of June 2017 | |||||
| # | Guild | Att. won | # | Guild | Def. won |
| 1 | Red Army | 17 | 1 | Red Army | 19 |
| 2 | THE ABYSS | 11 | 2 | THE ABYSS | 10 |
| 3 | Infinite | 9 | 3 | Echo of Silence | 9 |
| 4 | Say My Name | 7 | 4 | Say My Name | 8 |
| 5 | Echo of Silence | 5 | 5 | Infinite | 7 |
| 6 | Memento Mori | 5 | 6 | Tea Party | 7 |
| 7 | NoLife | 4 | 7 | Chicken Kiss | 5 |
| 8 | KDS | 4 | 8 | Lads | 5 |
| 9 | Betrayed Souls | 3 | 9 | Mercenarios | 4 |
| 10 | Mercenarios | 3 | 10 | ES MEJOR | 4 |
— END —
have a nice day :)
Albion Informer Podcast – S0E03: A Look Back
In today’s podcast Bogul and Shozen take a look back at the early days of Albion Online discus how it has changed over the years.
Bogul still pines for QOL changes and Shozen tries to apologize for last weeks comments about the map.
News Round-Up & Hector Patch #1 live!
Hector Patch #1 just went live on the main server. We take a closer look at the patchnotes below.
We also have a bit of official news on top for you this week.
If you have any comments, corrections, suggestions or things that I missed, hop on our discord and let me know!
Current Client Version: Hector Hotfix #1 / Version 1.0.324 - REV 88214 / 16 June 2017
Official News & Devtracker Tidbits
Before we dive into the patchnotes, lets take a quick look at what went on in the forums and the homepage this week.
Official News
New Mounts coming with Hector
We get a nice bit of news that shows off the new mounts introduced with Hector, their stats and really nice screenshots and pretty videos.
| Mount Hitpoints | 805 |
| Move Speed Bonus | +85% |
| Gallop Move Speed Bonus | +135% |
Comment: I highly recommend reading the post yourself on the official website.
Albion Armory: Buldozer’s “Catch Me If You Can”-Miner
This armory posts explains the mindset of a solo-gatherer and gives some examples of how to properly avoid open world attacks with your setup.
Comment: A ok read if you you need to polish up your solo-gathering game.
The build is Miners Gathering Gear + Bloodletter + Mistcaller Offhand
Devtacker Tidbits
The Best Version of Albion Online
In response to a forum thread where people argue about ‘if the current game version is the best of what it could have developed into’ Korn shared this interesting bit of information:
- I’d like to share some numbers on our end. On a like-with-like comparison, meaning that we compare activity after 100 days post wipe, the “Galahad Beta” (Beta 3) performs at > 300% of Final Beta (Beta 2), and > 160% of Closed Beta (Beta 1). This holds true for all player groups, casual and hardcore alike. And this is with a wipe being just 1 month away.
Comment: I can not dispute numbers and metrics and I agree that those kind of numbers show a positive overall development of the player-base. But the follow-up statement ‘wipe just 1 month away’ seems to me to be part of the reason of higher numbers, comparing that to an alpha game that is 2+years down the road in development. Some of the arguments in that thread are on the ranty side of things, but this will be an ongoing thing we will see where ‘old’ players complain about the past with selective memory.
Potential Hellgate Population Issue and Infernal HG Soft-Cap
In a response to a thread made by HyperAgressive, where the complaint about a potential issue with current HG population is raised and in a different thread, Korn responds to both with bringing up the following points:
- There is currently a major configuration bug with the black market which essentially has prevented any meaningful amounts of T5.0+ loot from dropping for now. The max storage values for T5.0+ gear are set up too high, meaning that the black marekt has not “charge up” to equilibrium level yet, which in turn means that this gear is not being sold to the NPC, meaning that it also won’t drop from mobs. The exception to this is bags, as for these, the balancing is correct or maybe too high. We’ll fix that balancing bug as soon as possible. Loot amounts will increase significantly as a result.
- There is currently a balancing error in the black market system, which pretty much has prevented T6+ gear from dropping, apart from bags and capes. This will be fixed soon.
- On top of that, we are considering to test a very very soft cap (emphasis mine) for infernal hell gates. Why? The reason is that if the meta tier for hell gates become too high, the risk reward ratio gets skewed. In a structured 5v5 set up, where 100+ item power advantage can matter a lot, much more than in an open world setting where there is always a risk of dying due to randomness/being outnumbered.”Very very soft cap” means that the actual item power decrease for being over the soft cap item power would be very small.
Comment: Now we know the reason for the weird behavior of the black market since hector with bags having much higher prices initially than any other items. The charge-up issue of the black market is compounded by the potential dropping playerbase at the end of test-phases. What stands out is the idea of potentially capping gear levels in HGs though. Also, lets face the fact that everyone is going to ignore the word ‘soft-‘ in their arguments to a degree. I am not sure if I like the reason given by Korn above for the cap is reasonable, but I don’t think we know the exact numbers yet. One complaint raised though, which is the potential issue of ‘splitting the playerbase’ has not been tackled as of yet. If you have an opinion I encourage you to voice it in the forums – as it is a potential hot topic for the future.
Focus Cost for Watering Crops
In another statement mate by Korn, we get some insight into the current intended balance of watering crops:
- It’s balanced in such a way that watering 50% of your plants is enough to sustain your fields indefinitely. Also, you gain masteries quite fast, which will bring down your focus cost by a lot.
Comment: Some of the discussion and numbers brought up in the thread are interesting for future farmers to be. Yet as far as I can tell some of the arguments given contain issues, of which I might respond to later.
Community Manager Talion cautions players about buying AO keys through 3rd party sides
- Keys available for purchase on sites other than our own Shop (albiononline.com/en/shop) are in most cases purchased using stolen credit card data. Criminals use that data to buy keys through our shop and then immediately resell them for a lower price through other marketplaces. Once these fraudulent purchases are discovered by the card owner, or a card gets marked as stolen, a chargeback is initiated on the purchase made with us and the key gets automatically deactivated as a result. (…)
- Please do yourself the favor to only purchase through the official Albion Online Shop, as it is the only secure place to purchase Albion Online Keys.
Comment: Don’t cry when you want to save a few bucks by using a potentially illegal channel, just to get scammed.
Hector Patch #1 / Version 1.0.324 – REV 87940 / 15 June 2017
Comment: This patch mostly contains a lot of fixes for things that didn’t properly make it into Hector, but also some changes that are worth pointing out.
Fixes
- Crafting buildings now all have the same maximum nutrition capacity, but no longer start full (Novice buildings all start with 100 nutrition as before); nutrition is still not added on upgrade.
Comment: This is weird and I wonder where this change came from or why it was applied. Probably some differences due to food having different nutrition values initially? The big thing is that buildings do not have any food in them once built. All in all just a slight balance change to increase food use or tackling a deeper issue? Let me know if you have an opinion!
- When crafting equipment items, the default amount is now 1 rather than the max possible amount your carried materials could create.
- Moved half of the outland castles around to fit timezones better.
Comment: Too bad they didn’t say which ones. If you do castle content, better check your timeslot before you do any event planning this weekend!
- Removed incorrectly placed relic chest in Bellever Tor.
- Removed incorrectly placed territory from Windripple Fen.
- Fixed an issue where T8 resource nodes were being incorrectly reset to 1 unit after downtimes.
- Changed offscreen nametags in cities so they only show for GvGs and duels (which should improve performance).
- Fixed an issue with the Fury ability where it would only stack five times rather than 10 as intended.
- Removed delay from Meteor‘s knockback effect, and it will now only be applied on impact.
- Moved Destiny Board completion notifications further up the screen.
- Fixed an issue where the nutrition bar would not immediately update when feeding territories.
- Fixed certain dungeons having the wrong icon on the map (solo dungeons using the group dungeon marker).
- Fixed an issue where opening the Destiny Board could also issue a move command.
- Fixed crafting focus values for many enchanted resources.
- Fixed weight and nutrition values for various farm-related items.
- Removed the ability for GvG mercenaries to kick people.
- Improved the Undead General fight, including adding a new ability.
Comment: A bunch of fixes, not too much to comment on here. Part of the last push to make the release version of Albion Online as good as possible.
- Rock Giant should now be set up correctly.
Comment: What does ‘set up’ mean? Weird comment. Anyone know? Will investigate and edit.
- Reduced the danger level and power of Ancient Mammoth hide mobs from Elite to Veteran.
Comment: Some players have been complaining that gatherers who skin animals can not solo T7 and T8 mobs. A fix towards this complaint?
- Improved the Demon Prince:
- Hellrifts now spawn at a distance of 5m.
- Most of his abilities now deal more damage.
- Laser Sweep’s beams now rotate around him.
- Pursuit range is reduced from 80m to 30m.
- Aggression range of portals and demons increased to 50m.
- His knock-back will now also alert all enemies within 50m around all affected players (so be sure to clean up beforehand).
- Cool-down until a new wave of demons is spawned from the portals has been increased to 10 seconds.
- Also fixed a number of minor issues
- Keeper Druids have been stronger than intended so the power of their spell Static Discharge has been reduced:
- Static Discharge: now has a reduced radius (4m down to 2.5m)
- Static Discharge: a bug where its damage and debuff was applied again to everyone 3m around the target has been removed
- Static Discharge: damage has been reduced by 5%
- Adjusted various elements of the Fungicide expedition to make it less unintentionally dangerous in a couple of specific locations.
- Kicked out a couple of T5 archers who’d snuck into Fishy Business, and hired T4 archers to replace them.
Comment: Fixes to PvE content, that finally went up high enough on the priority list? To me this is good because it means we will see more QOL changes soon, if they have time to deal with this kind of content.
- Increased T2 gatherer journal reward from 37.5 units to 38 (should now always level up a T2 laborer, before it would sometimes round down).
- Fixed an issue with “show only craftable items” filter not working correctly.
- Fixed an issue with some expedition mobs not correctly dropping silver.
- Removed “mission completed” state from mission tracker UI.
- Made some improvements to fast travel and portal UIs.
- Various improvements to Guild UI (member portraits now clickable, limited text field length settings, added a slider for Guild tax settings).
- Fixed an issue with the Caerleon loading screen.
- Fixed incorrect error when trying to mount while gathering.
- Only the Guildmaster and the Right Hand can now edit Guild description info.
Comment: Finally! No more trolling. A log would have done a similar thing, .. just saying.
- Fixed some issues with territory and Guild member views getting stuck in the Guild UI.
- Fixed some edge issues in Caerleon.
- Fixed some minor UI issues with splitting stacks.
- Improved readability of text for tutorial missions.
- Destiny Board tracker now automatically resizes when completing the tutorial.
- Fixed focus values for crafting furniture.
- Made spell effect areas look nicer.
Comment: Yay! .. Yay? OH SH** FIREBALL
- Fixed an issue where achievement reminder icons in the Destiny Board tracker (the little “!”s) were not being removed when clicked on.
- Fixed waterfalls being silent.
Comment: Shozen: ‘Silence falls’ ..
- Adjusted volumes for fireplaces.
Comment: Rushing water silent. Small burning logs roar.
- Fixed an issue where some mob abilities were not correctly obeying their activation conditions (eg should only activate when player is in range but was instead activating always).
- Fixed missing explosions for Meteor and Exploding Shot.
- Fixed an issue with the opening of the item details UI.
- Improved visuals of flails and hammers.
- Improved mission selection layout.
- Crafting equipment items will now attempt to fill existing equipped stacks before overflowing into the inventory.
- Fixed an issue with incorrect map zooming when searching on a zoomed-out world map.
- Updated minimap icons for fast travel portals.
- Fixed an issue with Destiny Board info in 80% UI scale causing shaking.
- Added crafting focus and learning points to character stats in the expanded inventory UI.
- Fixed an issue with Guild button in the territory attack details UI.
- Added a popup to explain how local banks and markets work (can be suppressed).
- Fixed an issue with player buttons in the GvG details UI.
- Fixed a weird visual issue when attempting to use broken tools.
- Fixed some minor issues with the Black Market UI.
- Fixed an issue where inspecting another player did not show any mount they had equipped.
- Made it so you can click the target item when enchanting.
- Fixed visual issue when capturing monoliths in GvG.
- Fixed an issue with the display of inactive abilities when inspecting another player.
- Swapped position of “build” and “cancel” buttons in the construction UI.
- Fixed an issue with display of reputation penalties and nametags.
- Fixed incorrect minimap colors.
- Fixed numerous minor level-design issues, including invisible collisions and offset areas.
Comment: The offset areas seemed to just pop up with Hector. New or old issues?
- Fixed various animation issues with farm animals and laborers.
- Improvements to various visual effects.
- Fixed an issue with partially full journals not filling correctly in conjunction with stacks.
— END —
that’s it for today folks
have a nice day :)
Albion Informer Podcast – S0E02: Pre-Hector PvP Wrap Up
Shozen and Bogul wrap up the PvP events leading up to Hector.
Veton gets 15 minutes of fame, Red Army conquers all, and giants battles in this weeks run down.
PvP Leaderboards: Week #2 of June 2017
Hector released at the beginning of last week, which led to a new landscape and new oportunities for PvP engagements. Lets take a look at the leaderboards and find out, if we can see any of that impact already.
Largest Battles – Week #2 of June 2017
Comment: Very low ‘Total Fame’ numbers compared to the previous months, with at least two out of the top#2 taking place before Hector went live. In our largest battle last week [OOPS] clash against [Sexy] for a measly 4.6m. I had hoped for more.
| Largest Battles – Week #2 of June 2017 | ||||
| Started (UTC) | Players | Total Kills | Total Fame | |
| 05.06.2017 01:35:55 | 81 | 45 | 4.60m | Details |
| 07.06.2017 21:48:57 | 10 | 7 | 4.31m | Details |
| 08.06.2017 02:24:14 | 10 | 6 | 3.72m | Details |
| 07.06.2017 20:14:11 | 10 | 8 | 3.57m | Details |
| 05.06.2017 01:16:12 | 10 | 7 | 3.34m | Details |
Top PvP Kills – Week #2 of June 2017
Comment: Norzor is back! He now holds #1 and #2 for largest ever recorded ‘Top PvP Deaths’. #3 is held by Snowlz at 2.76m. Appareantly Boo managed to spank Norzor naked during a GvG. A bug on the killboard?
| Top PVP Kills – Week #2 of June 2017 | ||||
| Time (UTC) | Killer | Victim | Fame | |
| 09.06.2017 20:05:43 | Boo – ZORN | Norzor – Red Army | 2.77m | Details |
| 08.06.2017 20:10:26 | Hoba – Red Army | Finale – ZORN | 2.41m | Details |
| 07.06.2017 20:18:17 | Mohicans – THE ABYSS | akunamatata – NoLife | 1.98m | Details |
| 06.06.2017 03:06:50 | Hallo – Red Army | ShinnoK – Envy | 1.71m | Details |
| 08.06.2017 20:09:54 | KingMoJo – Red Army | Boo – ZORN | 1.69m | Details |
Top Kill Fame (Player) – Week #2 of June 2017
Comment: 9.16m and almost everyone else close to or above 7m fame?! That’s a new record high! More and more people are bringing out their T7+ gear stockpiles to play. Aggressor‘s kills are a mix of open world and GvG kills against a lot of 7.1+ geared opponents. Others in the top #10 have high amounts of open world / hellgate kills, with the occasional GvG kill sprinkled in.
| Top Kill Fame (Player) | ||
| # | Player | Fame |
| 1 | Aggressor [Sexy] – THE ABYSS | 9.16m |
| 2 | reizerrr [Sexy] – THE ABYSS | 7.99m |
| 3 | Lkuk – Grief | 7.80m |
| 4 | Far – VenuM | 7.47m |
| 5 | Modestos [FAME] – NoLife | 7.36m |
| 6 | BIRAR [FAME] – NoLife | 7.32m |
| 7 | Copoka [FAME] – NoLife | 7.13m |
| 8 | akunamatata [FAME] – NoLife | 7.06m |
| 9 | KA1 [FAME] – NoLife | 6.91m |
| 10 | Dukes – Umbral | 6.89m |
Top Kill Fame (Guild) – Week #2 of June 2017
Comment: Red Army still holding firm onto the #1 spot. I doubt we will see any changes to that during this beta. Lots of familiar faces in the top#10, if you followed the previous installations of this blog. We see however, still somewhat low total fame numbers, which can be attributed to ongoing end-of-beta fatigue. In case you wonder who Betrayed Souls is, they partly comprised of ex Articulo Mortis members.
| Top Kill Fame (Guild) | ||
| # | Guild | Fame |
| 1 | Red Army | 98.80m |
| 2 | THE ABYSS | 45.18m |
| 3 | NoLife | 41.44m |
| 4 | Tea Party | 36.36m |
| 5 | Chicken Kiss | 33.53m |
| 6 | Echo of Silence | 27.51m |
| 7 | Betrayed Souls | 27.00m |
| 8 | ZORN | 26.63m |
| 9 | Tetra-Phi | 26.20m |
| 10 | Umbral | 21.16m |
GvG – Most Attacks / Defenses Won – Week #2 of June 2017
Comment: Red Army winning a lot more compared to last week. Did someone get conqured in the east? ES MEJOR showing up on the leaderboards out of no-where. A quick look on the mini-map didnt reveal anything appearant. I’ll take another look and report back later.
| GvG – Most Attacks / Defenses Won – Week #2 of June 2017 | |||||
| # | Guild | Att. won | # | Guild | Def. won |
| 1 | Red Army | 24 | 1 | ES MEJOR | 10 |
| 2 | Echo of Silence | 9 | 2 | Say My Name | 9 |
| 3 | ES MEJOR | 8 | 3 | Red Army | 9 |
| 4 | Betrayed Souls | 6 | 4 | Echo of Silence | 8 |
| 5 | NoLife | 6 | 5 | THE ABYSS | 7 |
| 6 | Say My Name | 5 | 6 | ZORN | 6 |
| 7 | Infinite | 4 | 7 | Betrayed Souls | 5 |
| 8 | Mercenarios | 4 | 8 | NoLife | 5 |
| 9 | ZORN | 4 | 9 | Chicken Kiss | 4 |
| 10 | Metatrone | 3 | 10 | Tankui Russia | 4 |
— END —
that’s it for this week again, let’s see how this Hector thing develops further!
have a nice day :)
Devtracker: Post Hector Feedback & Analysis
Hector launched this wednesday!
We discussed the patchnotes here and will talk about our initial impressions on next weeks show.
Today I want to discuss some of the developer comments that were made in the recent days, mostly in response to initial Hector feedback.
Before I get started, a shoutout to AlbionOffline.com and their devtracker. While it does not capture all devposts it is a great help to get an overview about recent dev activity!
Since Hector was published to the live-server and is now what is officially called the ‘launch-version of Albion Online’ by community manager Axototl, the dev-team is busy gathering feedback and responding to various threads on the offical Albion Online forums.
Below I will highlight some responses and comment where I feel like I have something to add.
On a unrelated note before we dive into the devtracker, the Albion Online client seems to have recieved an update to its file structure which makes looking at XML game-data way easier compared to the past.
I expect the community to publish a lot more detailed info on mobs, spells, drops, loot chances and many other things that were previously somewhat secret due to that change.
I will also try to do a bit file-diff analysis in the future. The folder for the XML files is currently located at:
\AlbionOnline\game\Albion-Online_Data\StreamingAssets\GameData
I suggest you open the XML files with a tool like Notepad++ that will make the files much easier to read.
Comment: I know this has ethical issues and some people don’t like this kind of deep dive into the games code as it impacts the immersive experience and the mystery of the game. If you are this kind of person, treat this as a spoiler and ignore it.
Here is a little sample:
Focus Cost of Enchanted Items
Monochrome responded to a question by Sensei987 providing us with the formula to calculate the focus cost:
1.75^(LOG((itemvalue/#ofresources)/2)/LOG(2))*#ofresources*10
Comment: While not immediately useful to many, some will find the exact forumla helpful for their spreadsheets.
Item Power Soft Cap Scaling
Zog asked about the new item power soft cap scaling, in which monochrome gave a quick response.
However, in a follow-up post IamDigital linked a nice youtube video, where the table below is used.
Comment: For the alpha players: Blue zone = Green zone. Looking at the numbers below, we see how fast the scaling kicks in.
Performance Issues and Zone Phasing
Another hot topic that was brought up are current performance issues that likely are the result of some recent changes in the Hector patch.
Due to the centralized role of Caerleon some community members are worried about server performance and proper preperation for launch on SBIs side.
Bercilak made a thread about it and Korn released a statement on a slightly different but related topic: scaling plans. In case the amount of players in Caerleon should go beyond 1000 active players at a time.
In a different thread Eltharyon noted that they have been focussing on server-side performance for now, which makes it more likely that they will fix some of the performance issues on the client-side before release.
If you care about the details of their scaling and performance plans, I recommend you read the threads I linked above.
Comment: Releasing a new version with changes to the graphics system often results in performance issues for some part of the player base. We should see some fixes for that rather soon I expect. On the topic of scaling I am not sure what to think yet. 1000+ people in one city seems crazy, extremely overcrowded and unplayable, especially if people are allowed to duel. This actually happening seems unlikely to me though. But who knows. I am curious to see how the current map-design of Caerleon will support the concurrect active users of the city in the future.
Hanibal Dev Comments
Game Designer Han1baL also responded to some questions and had a few interesting tidbits of information for us.
- The crafting slider will be changed to 1 (instead of max for crafting items), in about two weeks with the next little patch.
- The tracking will be changed to not automatically track every node. We’re thinking about tracking a node automatically once you made progress in it (got fame in the node).
- The friends invite will be in with the graphical rework of the friends UI which is sadly not coming with release but the first content update after release.
- Guild descriptions will only be changable by the GM and RHs
- A timer that shows you when you can travel to different outland regions and / or portals will be added at some point
- Adding resources to buildings will be automated hopefully before release still, so you dont have to click it over and over again to add chunks of 30 resources to the building.
- The destiniy board will be re-done (the 4th time?) at some point after release to make its usability better.
Bercilak responds to criticism of ‘devs don’t listen’
In a new thread Bercilak opens a discussion on one of the age-old criticisms from the community if and how much the developers are listening to the community feedback.
He details how they approach community feedback, explains how he sees various groups of the community that all want their piece of the cake and how they approach those members of the community.
Comment: This thread is turning into a popcorn worthy one fast and I recomment you get yourself a drink or a snack and read it. It is pretty new but it might be one that defines future community interaction ideas of SBI. Make sure to leave a comment if you have constructive feedback to give. I mostly agree on his points made and it shows the difficulty of dealing with a large and diverse player community.
Content Updates
Eltharyon made a statement on large content patches vs quick regular updates here.
If we felt that weekly balance updates made sense we might consider them. We believe it takes longer for the impact of balance changes to truly come to light. Additionally, there’s a significant overhead in frequent releases- doing so would slow us down overall. We try to strike a balance and whenever we are convinced that a short term change is necessary, we will do it.
Mob XP & Farming Efficiency
Eltharyon responded to criticism of mob fame balancing with detailed table.
Check it out if you are into fame farming efficency stuff.
Quote:
Expected result: based on numbers killing elite mobs is the effective method to grind fame or drops.
— END —
Thats it for this week, corrections, comments or things I missed – please let me know on the forums or hop on our discord and send me a PM!
have a nice day :)
Albion Informer 