Dev Blog: March 2012

If you have followed along the forums, you know that we have been testing the PvP Bonuses to Honor Equipment with Leonis, and we have hit a few snags, but looking to have 95% of our testing wrapped up before the end of this week. With that being said, that means we need to get to updating this on the live servers and talking more about the PvM bonuses.

PvM Bonuses will be seen on Pegasus before we live launch them, and right now may come separate from the PvP Bonuses on Honor Equipment.
Testing of the PvP will pick back up tomorrow, with some focused testing on the Mechanics, and Leonis wants to try and test against Player Summons just to see how damage might be received and dealt during PvP.

Genesis is setting up to start the Game Arena testing as early as the first of next week. What he will be focused on is the testing of all the Queue System, Solo/Party Joining, and Generally trying to push has heavy as he can to ensure that things are stable. During the testing you will be able to see some of the changes to what is currently the Union Wars and give us some feedback. We have it on our schedule to test about 2 weeks, and if things go well an update mid-month, with the new Union War (Crystal Defenders).

Through out March we will be testing Skill changes, updates and additions. We wanted to take a much wider approach to how skills are used in battle. Often times we see a lot of single skill use, if at all for some classes, and this isn’t fun. So our plans are to widen the availability of active skills while building out the skill trees to focus more on the strength of the job classes. We will be testing Skill’s soon after the PvP/PvM Bonuses are set for the Live Service, so keep your eyes open for this on Pegasus, and a possible late March update.

There has been a return to the maps of Junon in our schedule to update the early player progression. We are working on adding in a number of quest lines that help continue to game play speed that we started and left off just before Zant. This last weeks patch had some small changes that will be part of the Breezy Hills section of the update. We hope to complete updates to the maps and the additional quests that will link players from Luxem to Junon Polis by the end of March.

In the Early Parts of March we will be updating the monster level ranges for Goblin Caves, Desert of the Dead, Forgotten Temple, Oblivion Temple, Sikuku Prison, and Magic City of Eucar. These changes are intended to narrow down the wide spread of monster levels while encouraging players to experience other maps and dungeons. Over the last year the player base has migrated to quickly getting into Oblivion Temple and then making the leap to Sikuku Prison for nearly half the game. We want to focus on giving good reasons to adventure in to Luna (See recent Patch Notes on Quest Updates) and focus dungeons on Party/Group Play and give top side planet play a focus for the solo player with mixed group options. These changes are currently on Pegasus.

One of the last big changes planned for March is the addition of Premium Points which will allow players to break down item mall equipment for partial value and exchange for consumable items, other equipment and possibly limited offered items. We will be converting all equipment from decompiling into Satarunes to break down into Premium Points. This will give your old item mall equipment a new value for those that would want to trade them in for medals, job skill resets or other equipment. The Points will work much like the Honor and Valor NPC’s and we will add new NPC’s to major towns that will exchange Premium Points for items.