Starr: Please refer to the Q1 schedule post for that answer.

Starr: We have considered it but we have decided to hold on producing more of these for now due to public perception issues.

Starr: We could spend time on this but for the most part these don’t really impact any game play so the development time would not be a good return on investment.

Starr: Yes

Starr: We could consider for offline mode eventually.

Starr: We can consider but then the cost vs. reward benefit of devotionals would not be balanced so it is unlikely.

Starr: Yes

Starr: yes

Atos: I would love to do more with the visuals for night vision but just haven’t had time to mess with it. I would like to put a eye adjustment feature on it and set it so it adapts slowly and add in a motion blur for elements that bloom. Like the idea but no time right now to do it!

Atos: Choosing ransomed items now only includes the first item of a type in its list of choices. So having 200 unstacked worms only counts once. We didn’t get in the stack splitting but it does favor medium size stacks of stuff over giant ones. It can still pick a giant one but just less likely. I don’t think we are going to reveal the exact math but feel free to go experiment with a friend and see what you think!

Atos: I plan on continuing to add more 2-3 second window situational or response skills BUT as with past skills, I try to make this optional. While I like to reward people who do like that aspect I don’t want to make it so powerful that it is required to be competitive. I have hooks for checking time since you criticaled hit or were critically hit, since you block/parry/dodge or were block/parry/dodged, and plan to more options of that sort over time. For the most part between now and launch my focus will be on Masteries (now calling them proficiencies), a small number of new skills, combos, and balance.

Atos: I hope to get in a “Verbose” mode for combat feedback before launch that should address some of these concerns but reminder, most games do not show you all the combat numbers and math

Atos: This simply means I’m lowering the damage caused by focus use slightly. I think it was at 1 and then turned up to 2 and now coming back down to a middle spot between those two.

Atos: Nope! I will say that I need to fix something with it and it won’t be clear what it does until then…

Starr: Yes, we can make that an option

Starr: Not at this time but we do plan to implement a feature that increases spawn rates as player numbers increase in a scene.

Atos: We would likely have more creatures, not more powerful ones. Creating more powerful ones is more challenging technically and players don’t like it when the exact same creatures vary in difficulty from encounter to encounter.

Starr: Yes

Atos: The economy is doing amazing well in my opinion. Inflation is just about exactly where I want it, the gold to COTO values are pretty much exactly where I predicted they would be, but there is too much stagnation on vendors. I think that is one thing I regret is not putting some long term cost for items on vendors or having some kind of auto purge for old things. Mix that with a modest pre-launch player population and it results in a LOT of items sitting on too many vendors. I have ideas on addressing that BUT first I’m waiting for launch to see how things change with lots more players. I think local economies develop but less in the way we expected. Trade towns evolved but it is just too hard and too punishing to all to try and restrict trade to specific areas for the economy. There is still some locality stuff but not as much as we talked about the first year or two.

Starr: Unlikely. The phoenix visuals come mostly from its visual effects. Without visual effects it looks mostly like an eagle.

BCotton: Gems enchants are tied to the color of the gem not to the specific gem type. It’s a possibility that ward and jewels would unlock specific enchants but there are other areas of enchanting that we will expand first.

BCotton: Watering is still on a timer. There are not unique visuals of each growth stage. Watering a plant reduces the time it takes to mature.

Starr: We will look into providing more text clues but we want them to be part of the exploration of the game.

BCotton: Crystal nodes are not organized by tier like other nodes. They organized by size. It looks like all the sizes offer the same xp reward. This is a bug and will be fixed.

Starr: We are considering it but we want to see the data on the impact of the current refining skills on base ingredients for a couple of releases before possibly expanding.

BCotton: Subcomponent creation is often not on refinement tables so we’d have to add skills to all the skill trees.

Starr: There would be a large performance implication by doing this so unlikely. We already modify the visual based on the material used (color changes) and whether the item has been enchanted/masterworked (glow effect).

Starr: Great idea! Remember though that any item that can be customized or that can have unique stats cannot be stacked.

Starr: Yes

Starr: We have done some experiments with this but there are some serious visual issues. The main issue is that walls and fences have very “soft” collision to make them easier to place partially inside of each other to make perimeter fencing easier. Unfortunately this means items placed “on” them will appear partially “inside” the walls/fences. We don’t have an easy way to fix this without creating two separate collision layers which would be performance expensive. With that said we do want to make this happen eventually.

Starr: Interesting idea

Starr: We do not support POTs in Offline (see post)

Starr: Great idea!

Starr: Maybe eventually but we would have to put in a lot of code to prevent placement of them in untenable locations.

Starr: Yes we know that the permissions system needs another polish pass.

Starr: Yes please report as bug

BCotton: Updating treasure chest loot as always been on my radar but not a priority right now. We have to careful with treasure chest loot since many of these are easily farmable.

Starr: We can examine the drop rates but we do want some items to remain rare.

BCotton: I would suggest keeping it rare. Just because it has more uses is no reason to make it less rare.

Starr: Interesting observation. The size was based on ease of use, not distance but your logic is probably better.

Starr: The difficulty of every scene is displayed in multiple places. Please bug any scenes that do not have the correct difficulty marker on the overland map (pile of skulls and info screen), inside the scene near the entrance (pile of skulls), or inside the scene below the compass.

BCotton: These bonuses were always meant to add to skill level. It was a bug that it was adding to proficiency. This actually made these bonuses more powerful that they were designed to be.

Atos: Two factor authentication is coming but not in time for launch.

Starr: We can always try!

Starr: Yes, UI gets polished each release.

Starr: Please report in bug forums

Atos: First off, a reminder that you don’t need to know this information and most games wouldn’t share the exact math because it is too complicated for most players. But you asked for it so here it goes, just don’t complain that it is too complicated plzthx or I’ll just start giving simple answers! Decay accumulates over time (real time, not game time) but is capped at a max of 1 day. When you die in a PVE zone to something other than a player, half of the current decay is applied. If a friend resurrects you, then a quarter of the decay is applied. Half of one day’s decay is 0.125% or 1/800th. If you are over level 40, each adventurer skill over 40 will have decay applied. If the skill is 80 or lower, it receives half the decay, 81 to 100 receives normal decay, and 101 and above receives double decay. So if you had your thrust skill at level 80, that is around 180k xps, and died without a res from a friend you would lose 180k x 1/800th x ½ because the skill is 80 or under which means you would lose about 112 of the experience you had applied to that skill. If you have have the skill set to maintain/train and had xps in your pool, it would take them from your pool, if not, it would take them from the skill and it could potentially drop to 79. If you got a res, it would lose 56 points.So 56 xp point per skill at 80, why are some complaining you ask? Well, let’s say you had your Blade Speed skill at 110 and died. XPs to get it to 110 are roughly 13 million. The same math as above except it is 2x loss because it is over 100 and you end up with 32.5k xps. Still doesn’t sound too bad, right? Well, now level 100 skills to 110 and BAM, you’re up to 3.25mln xps lost on a death. Just a friendly reminder that skills don’t have a cap BUT that doesn’t mean you should train them all crazy high. You can choose when to stop but if you want to level them really high, you are choosing to take that risk!

Starr: Interesting suggestion.

Starr: We answered this in a previous telethon but we are waiting on context sensitive music tech to implement this.

Starr: We can consider but we try to keep collision shapes as simple as we can for performance reasons.

Atos: So first, I’m confused by your statement that allowing players to make choices with benefits and costs is somehow destroying your ability to setup your character however you want? As for that feature, just a friendly reminder that I throw out ideas on my blog to get player feedback BUT I listen to player feedback. I’ll be making a long post on what the system ended up being. The final system does require players make a choice but the choice is not permanent or even required.

Starr: No ETA, post launch.

Starr: Yes

Starr: Yes

Starr: We will consider

Starr: If you are not partied with them and they are in a Party instance or an instance that is full you will not go into the same instance. Or if you are not playing in Open Mode then you won’t go into same instance either.

Starr: We don’t have the manpower to do that test. That is tens of 1000s of combinations that you are talking about. The best thing to do is for players to report any issues they see with these items in the bug forums.

Starr: We can consider

Atos: By design! Healing blast is largely aimed at the dedicated healer and is big and more efficient but by design, slow. The new proficiency system (was masteries) will actually speed up healing blast but currently that is the only way to make it go faster!

Starr: Yes there are lots of gem enchantments tied to the chestpiece.

BCotton: Armor procs are unique to chest armor and require them to be gemmed. Chest armor has enchantments just like all other slots.

Starr: We have already done multiple polish passes on this space so unlikely as we have other scenes that also need work.

Atos: We don't have an automatic query for this so it takes a while to pull this so only going to do 10 and get back to working on Mastery:

Shingle-Roof Four-Story (Row Home) - 7

Shingle-Roof Two-Story (Village Home) - 7

Wood & Plaster Burned (Village Home) - 10

Shingle-Roof Three-Story (Village Home) - 11

Meteoric Iron Two-handed Hammer Head - 12

Shogun Bungalow (Village Home) - 15

Shogun Crafting Pavillion (Village Home) - 16

White Iron Two-handed Sword Blade - 17

Constantan Two-handed Sword Blade - 24

Ancient Staff of Anarchy - 26

Atos: My belief is the concerns with the taming system are largely caused by people comparing it to the UO system and the power it gave. The difference is in UO, you had to give up a LOT of other skills to be a master tamer. In games like WoW or EQ, the classes are designed around whether they have a pet or not so they can make the pet more powerful. In SOTA, we let you learn any and all skills so if we made pets powerful, they would be essentially mandatory for play and players wouldn’t have to give up anything for them. We tried to balance this through focus costs and consumables but still didn’t get to a point where old tamers were happy. I will be introducing a new proficiency system (I was calling it masteries) and it will finally bring choice and also more power to tamers. It will go live in R51.

Starr: We will consider

Starr: It would require a new walk mode so unlikely. Also if you look at the actual carnival parades the dancers walk and then stop periodically to do the actual dancing.

Starr: We post these in the release notes each release. We don’t post these ahead of time because they change so dynamically each release. For the latest up to date information check out Chris’s blog posts in the forums.

Atos: I try to post daily what I’m working on and explain my reasoning when possible. I also respond to feedback as time permits. What my blog for the best information on new skills and features coming!

Starr: Please see Chris’s blog posts in the forums for the latest information

Atos: Too much information to list here! I will make a big post before QA goes live explaining all the features and changes. Remember, these are completely optional!

Starr: Yes, like turning lights on/off, closing shutters, etc.

Atos: Tab? Is this a trick question? :/

Atos: I’m pretty sure this is just your imagination. The system has a fixed speed. If you are 100% certain, make a youtube video showing it please and report it as a bug.

Starr: Yes

Atos: How well games on any engine make use of SLI is largely dependent on the game. SLI tends to break the second you add any post effects that use data from the previous frame. For instance, a motion blur or a tone mapper with an adjusting brightness feature. Currently, you won’t see much if any improvement but post launch we will continue to optimize for more advanced features. Right now we still bounce back and forth between CPU and GPU bound depending on the machine specs and the scene.

Starr: Yes

Atos: Strongly considering adding a Focus PROFICIENCY (changed from mastery) skill for pet mastery that will aid all pets, including tamed. For tamers who choose both taming and pet proficiency, they will see significant tamed pet power!

Atos: Pets in the hands of those who don’t have skills will be weak. Pets are largely defined by their master. With the upcoming changes, the exact same pet could have 300 hps with one owner and 1500 with another.

Atos: If you mean will players want archers in their parties, then I believe the answer is yes. They are good damage, low heal requirement party members who can AE or focus damage and even do a little CC.

Atos: There will be an amount of mandatory down time with knockdown BUT yes, you will be able to jump out of it. While knocked down, the target will have greatly reduced defense and will be easily crit-able. I’m pretty sure everyone knows how broken knockdown was and how there was zero defense or counter for it.

Starr: Eventually but this requires a major feature addition called “Place Items Anywhere” that has lots of potential exploits that will need to be accounted for so this will be happening post launch.

Starr: Please report individual issues in our bug forums so we can address each one.

Starr: Eventually yes but right now we simply do not have the resources.

Starr: Yes

Atos: Yes, full details coming on PROFICIENCIES! (changed the name) Read my blog for examples of what melee will see.

Starr: Yes

Starr: Good question. Hidden Valley Ranchers?

Atos: I think until we get by launch, we’re holding off on any API changes. Once we see what the load is on that big data box, we’ll consider adding more metrics for players to mine.

Starr: Unlikely as they are part of what drives the value of those bundles.

Starr: We are considering it.

BCotton: I believe this is more supply and demand. All the refined elements have the same array of potential resource nodes. Mining nodes are clustered in caves while leather comes from creatures. Both of these are more common than tree and cotton nodes.

Starr: Yes eventually

Starr: Yes we will have a craftable Inn

Starr: Perhaps eventually.

Starr: Yes eventually however currently those items have no 3D object built for them so there would be a bunch of art production time to be spent to make this feasible.

Atos: This would help performance a lot with decos BUT remember, that many decos define the lot. Currently walls and fences and greenhouses and trees and other defining elements are decos. Also, we’ve seen lots of players get creative and build their lot boundary walls out of furniture. We could do this but it would require a fair amount of work to find all the edge cases for stuff we need to load no matter what. It is on our list of performance items to tackle soon though but it is far from trivial!