ROSE Online :: State of the Game

Since summer we have been watching the behavior of how and where player level up, and how they level up. This has gotten a lot of senate attention and even some bigger discussions with the community about the state of where we are at right now.

We set out earlier this year to improve on the new player experience and have taken the last few months to review and see what if anything should be the next step to improve on the new player experience. There are a number of smaller things that impact the new player experience that you will start to see show up on the live servers over the next two months, and there are some bigger changes that you will hopefully join us in testing on Pegasus during February.

Here are some of many things we have in our pipeline, which will make it to Pegasus before going Live

Movement Speed; adjusting the early and base movement speed to help with traveling in the earlier stages before players get into carts or receive their movement speed passives.

Questing to Glory; Outside of Zant’s few quests and the Hero Quest the availability of quests for players is very thin.

• We have put in past updates story line quests, which often taken a lot of time and seem so small when received to the community, so we wanted to focus on adding more small story exchange and repeatable quests starting with Zant and Orlo and working our way both up and down the level ranges.

Leveling distribution; we tend to flock towards the best EXP gains as players and by doing so we miss out on a lot of other content with how wide of a level spread many of the core leveling maps are currently.

• The goal is to narrow the time spent in the dungeon maps, while increasing the value of monsters in areas that are not as dense with spawns.
• Instead of spending 80 levels in Oblivion temple, our goal is to have the player in and through the dungeon in 25 levels (+/- 5) and looking for the next area to experience.

Game Play vs AutoBots; One of the problems this last year has been player using macro’s/bots to sit and spin. Basically using higher level skills which tend to be AOE in effect, to kill monsters in dungeons. This leaves for a very flat game play experience.

• We are working on expanding the player’s skill tree with more active skills and a better definition of their class.
• AOE’s skills are very strong, and often the strongest single Skill Power active skill characters have, what we are working on is splitting up the Skill Power and the AOE Effect.
• Giving players another skill which would be the stronger of the two and it would be a single target skill, while the AOE skill would be a secondary or additional skill which can be used to aid in battle and not dominate the game play.
• The focus around these changes will help us better identify classes and their job roles while balancing power and adding to game play.

Advanced Game Play Changes

PvM and PvP sub bonuses to equipment
Attribute System (n type of system where monster attribute can give a resistance or a weakness against a players attack)

Both of these systems are about ready for testing on Pegasus, we are working on updating the tool tips to better indicate what bonuses and effects equipment has and better explain what the items role maybe. You will see here a picture of the new tool tip design will be.

Game Arena

So much has been talked about, and this is surely the biggest project we have undertaken with ROSE to date.
We will be testing through February and working on converting over the Union War Map, and slowly adding and converting other maps within ROSE.

The Senate has given you a small glimpse of what the Game Arena is going to look like and even some of its functions.
The Game Arena is a queue style system which we plan to use for PvP encounters and doing more PvM type raid instances with.

Here are a few details about the UI additions with the Game Arena

Game Arena Interface

• Displays a list of games that the player can sign up for.
• Keeps the player informed of their sign up status.
• Enables game sign ups from anywhere in the game.
• Features an on-demand game queuing system.
• Players enter a lobby area to prepare for battle before the game begins when enough players have signed up for a game.
• Arena Group functions to enable large groups of friends or clan members to sign up for the same game and play together in the same team.

Group Manager / Group HUD

• Allows up to 15 players to form a group to queue for games.
• Separate group from party system, allowing uninterrupted party play while waiting for queues.
• Tracks HP, MP and buffs for all members from any location.
• Provides toggle button to show or hide Group HUD.
• Group management options provided through Group Manager interface, freeing up space in HUD.