Anime Albion Online

[Kane]

Fellow Adventurers,

Thank you for supporting Albion Online, and for your help with improving the game through beta testing and providing valuable feedback.

The Final Beta is now four weeks old. This is a good time to assess the state of the game as it is right now and plan for the final steps before the official release.

Please keep in mind that - unlike many other games - Albion Online’s Beta is a true beta, meaning that we truly see it as a proper test designed to help us make the best game possible. It is not a “hidden release” with a beta tag added to it as a marketing trick. This does mean that there are inadvertently issues with the game that we will need to address prior to release. Albion Online is a staggeringly complex game and thus we absolutely do rely on proper testing to get it where it needs to be.

All in all, we have mixed feelings about the Final Beta thus far. A lot of changes and new features lead to a significant improvement of the game. However, some of the changes gave rise to new issues, some of which feel like a setback compared to Beta 1.

It is our goal to combine the strengths and avoid the weaknesses of Beta 1 and Final Beta to get the game ready for release - and we won’t release the game before it is ready.

Below, we will highlight the key areas of improvement for you. The list is by no means exhaustive, so if a particular issue is not listed, it does not mean that we are not aware of it. It is our intention to address all of these issues during final beta, prior to release of the game.

Note that the below list does not include new features planned. Our core focus is addressing the issues listed below first prior to introducing fundamentally new game mechanics to the game. Still, we do have new features in our pipeline, and we will announce them in due course.

Travel and World Size
The new world launched with Final Beta overall is an improvement over the old one. However, it is also very very large. We are introducing a travel mode for mounts, persistent mounts and well-balanced fast travel in green zones to address this.

Economy
The current economy is very gathering centric, while not placing enough focus on PvP objectives and PvE. We will rebalance this to make sure that all the activities mentioned above play a key role in the game’s economy.

Gathering
In some circumstances, gathering can be a very tedious experience currently. We will re-balance the number of spawn nodes and respawn rates to achieve a significant improvement here, without deviating from the principle that high-end resources should be rare.
Also, we will introduce special gathering armor sets for each of the gathering branches, with unique looks and unique abilities suitable for gathering and traveling. On top of that, we will add abilities to the gathering tools as well, such that you can - if you like - use them as an alternative to a regular weapon. So if you are a miner and want to PvP with your pickaxe, you can. The skills on these items would be optimized for surviving and escaping, which is very important for gatherers in general.

Royal GvG in yellow and red zones
We will bring back GvG to yellow and red zones

PvP Objectives
PvP objectives such as hell gates and treasure chests currently do currently not matter enough in the overall economy. Through our economy rebalancing, we will address this, and expect that chests and hell gates will almost always be fought over.

Outlands World Design & Time Zones
The current Outlands world design - combined with time zones - is not ideal, as it often means that guilds cannot effectively fight each other if they are in different time zones, as they are too far away from each other. On top of that, the current Outland design puts powerful guilds next to normal guilds, and for lack of better opponents nearby, leads to one-sided and thus boring confrontations. Finally, we are missing the amazing hot spots such as Bone Harbour that made the outland experience so much fun in Beta 1.
We will re-design the Outlands in such a way that there is a region where powerful guilds from all time zones can settle close to each other and take part in constant conflict. At the same time, we will have an outland region for feasible to less hardcore guilds - again from all timezones - where they can settle and fight, without constantly being afraid of the power house guild next door. T7 and T8 will be available for both play styles, however, there will be more of it in the hardcore areas.
PvP hotspots such as Bone Harbour from Beta 1 will be re-introduced to the game.

City and Gate Camping
Our current measures to keep city and gate camping in check are not effective enough. We will make a few changes to address this, the most important one being that we will replace city guards with more powerful ranged watch-towers. Another change is that we will make it harder for city campers to flee into the city if they face opposition.


Red Zone PvP & Risk vs Reward
We need to make sure that the red zones have a fair risk vs reward ratio for different player types. For criminals, this means that they, on average, should expect to score slightly more than 1 kill for each death that they suffer. More if they are skilled, less if they are not. For virtuous players, it means that they should be able to utilize red zones in such a way that the risk of getting ganked is real, but the reward for venturing into the red zones is higher, meaning that, on average, it is worth it. The closer we get to this ideal balance, the more populated the red zones will be. Currently, ganking in red zones is too easy, and currently, the balancing values for the crime system are probably a bit too soft. Expect some revisions here during the course of final beta, until we get it right.

Content
Our content pipeline is filled up with great additions, many of which will be rolled out during Final Beta. This includes two more biomes, the highlands and the forest, a huge amount of additional artifact items and also a set of new dungeons. Our goal is to produce new content on a constant basis, now and, of course, post-release.

World Uniqueness
We made a huge jump in world design from Beta 1 to Final Beta. However, we are far from where we want to be. All in all, our world does not feel real and unique enough, and this is something we will work on by improving the world map, introducing more diverse zones and improving the overall topology of the world map, meaning that you might have certain short-cuts, or more zones that do not have connections in all 4 directions. This will lead to a much more unique, strategic and immersive game experience.

Music and Sound
Finally, during this Beta, music and better sounds will be added to the game.

Destiny Board: Ongoing Optimization
As in any previous alpha and beta test, there is ongoing optimization happening to the destiny board. Currently, we believe that some unlocks are too grindy, whereas others are too easy. On top of that, we will revisit the ratio between learning points, fame and grind time to achieve optimum balance between them.

Other
The above list only highlights key strategic areas. As always, there are bug fixes, quality of life changes and little tweaks and improvements too numerous to list.


As always, we will keep you posted with constant updates and more details as things materialize.

Thank you very much for your support in helping us create and constantly improve the game.

Kind regards,
Stefan

https://forum.albiononline.com/inde...al-Beta-Way-Forward/?postID=420513#post420513

hmpf

 

[Revenant]

12 micro-issues remaining

 

[Kane]

Closing the power gap between small and large groups in PvP
Gestern, 17:47+6

Hi all,

in forum discussions, the topic of zerging comes up frequently. In those discussions, it's often mentioned that we should introduce some form of friendly fire, or have a lower cap for the number of players who can be in a guild or alliance.

In this post, we want to clarify our measures to close the power gap between smaller and larger groups, and also why we do not think friendly fire or a lower cap on the number of guild members would work.

1. What is a zerg?
How large a group of players has to be to be called zerg is widely subjective. Some players say it's groups larger than 5, others say it's 20 or more. Some people jokingly say that every group bigger than yours is a zerg. In reality, the largest groups we tend to see currently are around 20 players. On special occassions, we have seen battles with up to 70 or 80 players per side. Most groups in Albion, however, are usually in the 5-10 player range.

2. Anti-Zerg Mechanics
These are our mechanics to close the power gap between small and large groups. They work: with the right preparation and skill, it is possible to win group fights even if outnumbered 3 to 1.

• Focus Fire Protection: if you get damaged by multiple players at once, you will get a % damage reduction that increases the more people are damaging you
  
• Healing Sickness: if you are being healed by multiple healers at the same time, you will get a % healing reduction
  
• Escalating AOE damage: if you hit multiple players, beyond a certain base number, at the same time with an AOE-Spell, the power of that spell will increase.
  
• Crime System: in yellow and red zones, groups of people committing a crime all get the full crime penalty - it's not split up evenly.

3. Fight or Flight
Currently (31. August 2016), the fight or flight balance in Albion Online is not ideal. In general, if you notice an enemy group, it can be too hard to avoid the fight by running away. This of course does not mean that avoiding combat should be easy, however, it should be easier than it is right now. Once we have a better overall balance here, heavily outnumbered groups will be able to pick their fights more carefully, and we will see less instances of accidentially running into a situation where you cannot win, without any chance of avoiding the fight.

4. Encouraging Smaller Groups
We have various mechanics in the game that encourage people to split up into smaller groups. These are:

• Hell Gates and Gateway Dungeons being limited to 5 players
  
• Different treasure chests spawning at the same time, thus, encouraging larger groups to split up
  
• GvG fights being 5v5 by design
  
• Our fame bonus for playing in a group: it caps out at 5 players, so you get maximum efficiency in a group of 5
  
• Upcoming: Mobs in Dungeons will get a focus fire protection if they are being hit by more than 5 players. (10 players in raid dungeons)

5. Friendly Fire???
Some people have suggested that we could further weaken larger groups by introducing friendly fire. We do not believe that this is the case.

• Friendly fire does not hurt larger groups more than it hurts smaller groups. It's very easy to verify this by viewing various PvP videos - you will notice that the two groups fighting are usually well apart from each other
  
• Friendly fire makes melee classes unviable in larger fights. But precisely smart melee play is needed to punish zergs to the maximum effect, and on top of that, Melee DPS roles are curerntly under-powered in group fights, which is something we plan to address soon.

6. Reducing the member cap on guilds/alliances???
It is often suggested that we should reduce the member cap on guilds and alliances to reduce zerging. Here is why this would not work:

• The group sizes that people tend to call zergs (usually, groups of 15-20 players) are too small to be captured by any reasonable guild member cap. As a territory holding guilds needs multiple different professions, and given the fact that not everybody is online all the time, the lowest thinkable guild cap would probably be around 100 players. This would not catch any of the group sizes we are seeing in Albion.
  
• The main impact of not being in the same guild or alliance would be friendly fire. However, friendly fire is not effective at weakening larger groups.
  
• Even if there was an effective cap, it would be very easily played around. You can always set up alt guilds under the control of the main guild, circumventing any artificial restrictions set up. It's very likely that people who are asking for a cap on guild size would then be equally upset about guilds working around that cap.

Best regards,
Your Albion Online Team

https://forum.albiononline.com/inde...large-groups-in-PvP/?postID=422275#post422275

 

[Kane]

Fellow adventures,

today, we have released are fourth final beta patch. Whereas the first three patches were almost exclusively about bug fixes and some balance adjustments, this patch already brings some new features with it. Another key change is that we have significantly buffed PvP rewards across the board. Happy hunting!

This patch is just one step on getting the final beta ready for release. Expect lots more to come.

Your Albion Online Team


Director's Notes

The focus of this patch is the improvement of the traversal of Albion's big new world. It also brings better rewards for open world PVP and a new feature which lets you teleport back to entrance of a dungeon.

Changes

Mounts
With their new Gallop Mode mounts have become way more mobile, which has a strong impact on the game. First and most important traversal is now much faster and feels better. Ganking a mount is also now a lot more difficult, especially for solo gankers. However, we believe that ganking mounts was clearly too easy before - if a majority of mounted players face certain death whenever they encounter a ganker, they will eventually avoid using mounts altogether or avoid going out into pvp zones, ultimately decreasing the prey for the ganker too. To keep mounted players encouraged to travel through PvP areas, it is important that their chances to escape from ganks need to be reasonable.
Keep in mind this is the testing server. These values are not set in stone and might change before the patch hits live. We will review the feature, and if mounts turn out to be too strong for disengagement, we will adjust its balance.
We also revisited the roles of the rare mounts and adjusted some of their values to better differentiate them.

• New Gallop Mode: After a few seconds of moving while mounted, your receive an additional move speed buff. This buff is cancelled if you are damaged or slowed, and put on cooldown for 8 seconds.
  
• Mounts are no longer buffed by movespeed passives on equipment.
  
• Move Speed Buffs, such as Flee and Sprints, are now removed when mounting up.
  
• Oxen and all other mount types will be dismounted after taking the same amount of damage. Before this change, a player on an ox would not be dismounted until they were already dead.
  
• Dire Wolves no longer provide any additional defensive stats or crowd control resistance.
  
• Dire Bears no longer provide any additional crowd control resistance.
  
• Dire Boars' crowd control resistance has been increased.
  
• Undead Horses no longer increase your carry capacity.
  
• Donkeys' carry capacity is slightly increased.

Increased Chest Rewards

• Rewards in chests have been increased, to make it more attractive to fight over them and create hotspots for PvP. The longer it takes for a chest to respawn, the bigger the rewards in it.
  
• The smallest chests, found on the Royal Continents and around cities in the Outlands, spawn every hour.
  
• Intermediate chests, found only in the Outlands, spawn once a day, during their region's prime time.
  
• In castles, chests spawn once a week - 2 hours before prime time every Sunday.

Dungeon Escape Mechanic

• While inside a dungeon, players always have an additional Exit Dungeon ability. This takes 60 seconds to cast, so it can't be used to instantly run from other players, while still being able to be used to avoid back tracking or getting left alone in a high tier dungeon.

Hellgates

• Added refined resource drops to Demon bosses.
  
• Adjusted hellgate spawn amounts and times: Gatekeepers across the world will now refresh on a 30 minute cycle.
  
• Adjusted the balance of how many Gatekeepers appear in different areas.

Various

• After a GvG, all team members of the winning team receive the invulnerability spawn buff.
  
• The invulnerability buff given when changing region now also expires on distance, i.e. if the player has moved too far away from the region's entrance.
  
• The Flee ability now provide 200% extra carry capacity, instead of unlimited extra carry capacity.
  
• Reputation changes are now displayed as overhead messages
  
• The command /suicide is no longer usable during combat.
  
• Sending a new chat message will automatically scroll the chat window to the bottom.

Fixes

• Reduction in crafting focus use now works when when refining or crafting enchanted items.
  
• Fixed a bug that prevented buildings from being set to 'everybody can attack'.
  
• It is no longer possible to keep harvesting resources when you have a full inventory.
  
• Fixed a bug where clicking on a popup window after switching clusters wouldn't close the window the first time.
  
• Fixed an issue where Demon Gatekeepers were not appearing in T6 regions.
  
• Fixed an issue where alt-H would remove the HUD while dead.
  
• Fixed an issue where Slipscarp Jetty was not showing correctly on the world map.
  
• Fixed a missing territory connection in Deepforest Grove.

https://forum.albiononline.com/index.php/Thread/40942-Final-Beta-Patch-4-2-September-2016/

 

[Kane]

 

[Kane]

ELAINE
We are happy to announce the first content update since the start of Final Beta: Elaine!

The Elaine content update introduces Albion to the highlands, a green land full of plateaus, hills and water. On your travels through the highlands you will meet the mighty Keeper faction, as well as an occasional hill marmot.

But there is more! Elaine brings a total of 36 new Artifacts for you to craft powerful weapons, off-hand items and equipment with, as well as various other changes and improvements.

Read more about Elaine in the changelogs. (To be added later)

New Biome: Highlands
The highlands are a big green oasis, full of hills, river streams and waterfalls. Pioneers have tried to settle the land, but were banished from the land by the Keepers, leaving remnants of civilization overgrown by nature.

The resources found in the highlands are Rock, Ore and Wood. They are home to the Heretics and the Keeper faction.

Read more about the highlands here.

Return of the Keeper Faction
The Keepers of Albion are giant humans that have been part of Albion for as long as history has been recorded. They are one with nature, and have learned everything they know from the animals and magic surrounding them.

The Keepers can be found in the highlands and the upcoming forest biome, where they will protect nature from intruders with all their might.

Learn more about the Keepers here.

Artifact Items: Keeper
As the Keepers make their comeback to Albion Online, they bring powerful Artifacts along with them. Venture into the Keeper dungeons and craft their Artifact items to unlock the Keeper’s true potential.

There will be a total of 7 Keeper Artifact items: 5 weapons, an off-hand item and a cloth armor set.

Learn more about the Keeper Artifacts here.

Artifact Items: Hell
The Keepers are not the only faction with new artifact items. The Demons of the depths of hell have new impressive drops, which you can use to craft the Hell Artifact items.

A total of 21 new Hell Artifact items will be added: 15 weapons, 3 off-hand items and 3 armor sets.

Learn more about the Hell Artifacts here.

New Crossbow and Axe Spells
The Crossbow and Axe weapons receive new spells, allowing players to further individualize their playstyles!

Crossbow users have the option to choose Explosive Bolt on their first slot and Noise Eraser on the second.

Internal Bleedings is added for Axes, as a second slot spell.

Swamp Animals
The swamps are now populated with more appropriate creature types.

Foxes and boars have moved on to greener pastures, probably driven out by a variety of snakes and lizards that now call the swamps their home.

Read all about the swamp mobs here.

Various Fixes & Improvements
Numerous smaller changes, bug fixes and improvements will be implemented with this update. Some examples:

• Tier 1 mobs have been added to the steppes and mountains.

• Various spells have been rebalanced.

• Multiple invisible walls in raid clusters were removed.

• Several Destiny Board requirements got fixed.

All fixes and improvements can be found in the change logs. (Coming soon)

 

[Kane]

Apparently, SBI is trying its hands at actual Game Design instead of just copy/pasting from Call of Duty/World of Warcraft. Game designers designing games. GOT fucking Y 2017, 18 & 19.

Fellow Adventurers,

One of the main aspects that we will be working on to get the game ready for release is the new Outlands.

These are the areas of Albion Online where PvP is totally unrestricted. They are optimized for guild play and allow guilds to capture their own plots of land and building up their own towns and fight over control, influence, power and wealth in the region. They also contain player cities, which act as a good base for players and, via guild islands, allow guilds to take part in the outland gameplay who are not yet ready to capture their own home territory.

When redesigning the outlands, we are making use of lessons learned from the Beta 1 and the Final Beta, with the goal of combining each version strengths while avoiding the weaknesses.

We believe that we have found a design that fulfills these goals. Here it is:







Note that the maps above are an abstract topological respresentation of how the zones are conneted to each other. The actual look and feel of the world will be far more immersive and not feature the chess-board layout that you see above - in the same way that an actual underground rail network map looks nothing like the actual rail network. The cities displayed are also not little islands surrounded by water, but fully attached to the land mass. For a glimpse of the actual look and feel of the world we are aiming for, see the last picture below.

Design Goals
Increase population density
By increasing the ratio of home territories versus normal territories, we want to achieve a higher population density. At the same time, we will still make sure that home territories will always have one buffer zone in between them.

Create a better mix of hot spots and quieter areas
The outside areas of the Outlands will be lower risk and lower reward, and will be tailored more towards solo and small scale play. The central areas are expected to see constant group action.

Match guilds of similar skill
The top right region offers the highest rewards in terms of resources, PvP objectives and PvE content, and we expect it to be the most competitive and most densely populated. The bottom left region is at the lowest end. Since it offers lower rewards, we expect that area to be more peaceful, less competitive and also less densely populated. By deciding where they want to settle, guilds can pick their own level of difficulty. For the lower end zones, we will try out our soft gear cap mechanics that we successfully used in Beta 1.

Make travel distances more reasonable
In the current Outlands, the travel distance from a home territory to the next harbor could be up to 12 zones, and up to 8 zones to the next city. The travel distances are being reduced, without making them too small. Furthermore, the higher end Outlands will have a longer effective travel distance to the green zones than the lower end Outlands in order to encourage trading. Note that in the picture above, the green harbors lead to places at the start of the yellow/red zones, the yellow harbours lead to the middle of the red zone and the red harbours to the outer reaches of the red zone.

Encourage interaction across time zones
In the current Outlands, the top end guilds could not really fight each other if they were in different time zones, as the distance between them was too large. Instead they had to fight their neighbors, which usually did not stand a chance. The new layout makes sure that guilds of similar skill can settle next to each other and compete, no matter their peak time zone.

Be able to adapt different population numbers
The map layout self-adapts to population numbers to a large extend. If population is too low for the space offered, we expect the low end Outlands to be less crowded, without really affecting the population at the high end, due to all the best rewards being there. Less populated low end Outlands however are not even a bad thing, as it makes it easier for guilds who are currently based in a city or in the yellow/red zones to make the transition to the Outlands

Allow for expandability
As shown in the picture below, the Outlands layout can be expanded dynamically to account for a growing population post release.



Create an immersive and believable world
We want Albion Online's world to feel real and immersive. Apart from the actual zone design, this has a lot to do with how zones are presented on the world map. We will rework the current world map, with the goal to create a more realistic look and feel. As an illustration of what we mean by this, please see the picture below, but note that the actual look and feel is still under development.

We are very confident that the new outlands design fulfills all the above design goals and is a drastic improvement on the current layout, but also on the layout used in Beta 1.

We are looking forward to your questions and feedback.

King regards,

Your Albion Online Team

https://forum.albiononline.com/index.php/Thread/42928-New-Outlands-Design

 

[Kane]

More PvP less carebear shit.

 

[JamesGoblin]

Galahad update is coming, here's the trailer:

 

[Revenant]

Bought Epic Founder as well after realizing this was B2P and not P2P. Any Codexian guild around? Do any of you guys play this? Release is supposedly on July 17th or something like that, so time to get our bearings if we intend to play this.

 

[Scruffy]

is this still garbage? has it improved?

 

[buru5]

Is this related to Fable?

 

[Revenant]

is this still garbage? has it improved?

Hard to tell for me yet, but combat seems to be significantly skill-based, i.e. it's possible to outsmart a better geared player and loot him. Timing is very important and a lot of abilities have skillshots comparable to competitive MOBAs. Problem is, PvP zones are roamed by parties and you'll get ganked unless you're also running with guildies.

Also, the game actually runs on Android phones even though the official Android requirement is a 7" screen, so you can do your gathering/crafting while taking a dump.

 

[Revenant]

This is why Albion will be the best MMO when it's released on July 17:

 

[Metro]

Scam game.

 

[jungl]

I been waiting forever for this game to be f2p but apparently its going b2p at launch. The impression I'm getting is it fucking sucks and the developers are trying to squeeze as much cash out of hardcore and casual gamers alike with its crafting, pvp sandbox aspects before they can't hide its mediocrity anymore.

 

[Hoaxmetal]

Any impressions?

 

[Revenant]

Been playing since yesterday, as Epic Founder's allowed me to start one day earlier than cashul buyers. Starter areas are quite crowded, competition for gathering nodes is rather high. Haven't set foot outside blue zones yet, so dunno about the status of PvP. Mats sell really fast, netting a decent profit, because everyone's crafting everything.

 

[Kane]

• No quests
• PvP Centered
• Sandbox
• SBI promises to purge WoW players and other carebears <quote>ON FUCKING SIGHT</quote>
• B2P prevents brazilian favela lords and east european bums from ruining the game with inanity while people with money can flaunt that IG and consequently collect all the chicks
• Dicksize does not only matter but is readily apparent.

Is good.

Revenant gimme your ID

 

[Hoaxmetal]

Sounds, I might pick it up later, if no big issues come up.

 

[Night Goat]

Oh wow, it's cross-platform with Android. Enjoy your cell phone game, idiots.

 

[Kane]

Oh wow, it's cross-platform with Android. Enjoy your cell phone game, idiots.

 

[Terpsichore]

Looks like ass.

 

[Kane]

Looks like ass.

So do you. But out of respect and decency we don't go into random threads and post about it.

 

[Terpsichore]

No, it quite literally looks like ass. Who thought this artistic direction is acceptable?