Part 1 - background
Over the last couple of months on Alter Aeon, a lot of work has been going on under the covers. We've been making pretty serious changes to the building tools, player and mob experience, and to areas in general. I'd like to talk about a few of those and give some insight into what's happening.
This all started a bit after the 20th anniversary event in January. From player complaints and some new data collection code, us builders started to realize that there were problems with experience at mid and high levels. The mid level experience problems were pretty easy to work out, and were largely fixed by changing the way that exp caps were calculated.
However, the high level problems were much harder to understand. In the end, it's because we didn't think about areas properly when building them.
One of the most important things we realized when looking through areas was that we didn't actually have any concept of high level solo zones. The only difference between a group area and a solo area was the level of the mobs in it, and because of that our group zones were a little too weak, and our solo areas were way too hard.
Something else we realized is that the difficulty of mobs was all over the place in most high level areas. Some areas had decoration mobs, exp mobs, bosses, and super hard fame all near each other without warning.
On top of this, we've also recently discovered that the number of areas in the high level ranges is far from ideal.
All of these things combined have made high level exploring pretty dangerous and inconsistent. They've also made the game far more difficult for high level solo players than it should have been.
Part 2 - what we're doing
One of the biggest and most far reaching changes we've been working on is to completely split group and solo zones. We've now got solo areas, and areas that can be marked for various group sizes. Our building tools look at the type of area, and the way mobs are built changes based on it. Solo areas get built with much easier mobs that are are reasonable to solo, while group areas get built with much harder mobs based on the group size.
Under the old building system, a high level player might have been able to solo their way through a lower level group zone. That will be a lot harder once we get areas updated for the new system, but under the new system higher level players should actually have solo areas that make sense.
Another problem with doing all the updates at once is that we need to think a lot harder about where high level areas are placed and how many high level areas there should be in each level range. Right now we're leaning toward making a 'low level corridor' that stretches from Ralnoth to Orton and possibly Vandar, then increasing area level as areas get farther away.
Part 3 - now what?
The downside is that there's a lot of areas to update. Even after we get the area levels worked out, we've got to go through a lot of zones and rebuild a lot of mobs to bring them up to spec. It may be several months before all the kinks are worked out.
The upside is that we now know a lot more about what the problems are and how to fix them. We've got builders looking at areas now and doing test changes and updating areas to see how the new tools are working.
When we're done with this, we expect it to be a major improvement to high level game play, making it on par with the low level player experience on the islands.
I'll post more updates over time as the work progresses. Once we get this all under control, it should help open high level exploring to a lot more players and will really be a positive step forward for an already awesome game!