Update from behind the construction fence !

Housing

A quick update about our housing zones and how they will work. Over time, DAOC expanded the housing region for each realm to 9 zones, with 200 houses per zone for a total of 1800 houses. In the past, Uthgards housing zones were limited to 1,200 houses per realm. The reality is that we never had the time and man power to finish implementing even 1,200 houses per realm, the markets, or horse routes.

We're pleased to announce for the relaunch that we will keep 9 housing zones per realm and enable all houses. We have already completed all horse routes (there are literally hundreds of routes) and the housing lots are being enabled. New tools we use for SI enable us to have a more rapid implementation of that. In addition, players can look forward to using the markets at the center of each zone for their market explorer usage, or if the need arises, to recover something from their house vault if it has been repossessed, as well as visit the taxidermist NPCs or a tradeskill master. Due to the added capacity, we will revert to the proper live like payment methods available, taking rent from both the lockbox and your consignment merchant.


Crafting

Crafting will be bound to classes on relaunch. We wanted to implement that old feature for a long time but it was not really possible to change with Uthgard already running and lots of legendary crafters. You can see which classes can learn which tradeskills here

Another change to crafting you will probably welcome might be that you can't fail on grey items anymore. Previously you had quite some chances to fail on grey items. Especially as legendary crafter this didn't feel right. That is changed now.


Arrows / Poison weight

A long long requested fix. We corrected all arrows and poisons to have half the weight of what we had. Fixing such issues while Uthgard is down is way less complex as if we had to bother about vaults and inventories.


Player concerns regarding population

One of your major concerns seems to have been whether our servers are able to handle the amount of players which potentially could be trying to access Uthgard when we open up again.

Our answer to that:
We're confident that our server can handle high player numbers without any major issue. However it would be naive to completely ignore the case of implementing a server cap even though we hope this won't become an issue.

We have implemented a per-realm player cap that can be activated if there is a need for it. To lower your frustration when the cap is reached we have implemented a queue system to the game launching process which means your client won't even launch before we're sure you can join the server. You will be able to see at which position in the queue you are currently waiting.

One of the performance issues we could run into is that in the first days our patch server will get quite some load. A possible solution to this will be to let you automatically patch your client in advance before launch day. There is quite some amount of client data to be patched to get your DAoC client back to old times and Uthgards setup.

Hopefully that answers your concern about a player cap and our servers capabilities of handling a bigger amount of players.


Defense penetration

We also wanted to give you a bit of information about some of the areas we have been devoting time during the last 3 weeks (and more).

One obvious area is defense penetration and we are happy to say that this research is starting to show its benefits.
We have developed a new formula for all types of defense (evade, shield, parry) and our formula is to our satisfaction very close to the research results we compare it to. To show you how close to a working formula we are here is how much difference there is from our formula to these research results:

Block:
Max 3.40%
Min 0.01%
avg 1.02%

Parry:
Max 3.85%
Min 0.02%
avg 1.00%

Evade:
Max 2.23%
Min 0.17%
avg 0.90%

So what do these numbers mean?
Basically this is the defense difference from formula to tests which for blocking means that the max difference from formula to our research are 3.40% (ie if our formula predicts 50% chance of blocking the actual research showed 46.60%). On average this difference is 1.02%, and the closest we got to our research were 0.01%.

It needs to be said however that where our formula differs the most is in extreme situations (attacker with low attack stat and skill level vs defender with high shield and high defender stat). It also needs to be said that this formula is still being developed and the more we take a look at it, the closer we gets to what research show.

And while talking about research we want to send a big thank you to all those players who helped us research defense penetration and other aspects of DAoC which is crucial for our future development.


Bolts

Our research also made it possible to finally fix bolt damage and bolt miss/hit rates! We know this will make some of you happy!


Sidenote about news frequency

We know you are eagerly awaiting any news and we admit we have been slow to get news updates out to you. We would like to take a moment to explain why that can happen and why we don't push out news every other day/week and why we don't always respond to questions in forum:

a. Putting out news in a fast pace. The way we prepare our news statement is an iterative process and often our news are going through a lot of changes before it reaches your eyes. For those who are used to providing newsletters and similar texts know how much work can and often are put into these. It isn't simply writing some text in 20 minutes and posting it. Every news starts as draft and staff members add to it over time. We try to make them as well spoken, and as clear as possible. We also try to avoid posting news about plans underway and try to stick to things which are done implementing or which is at a state where we can be fairly certain we will be able to finish the project before we go live.

b. Posting on the forum in general. During the development of our relaunch we decided to keep our forum activity at a minimum for various reasons. One of those are that we simply want to devote time to coding, implementing mobs, items, doing research, etc. Another reason is because we want to make sure everyone is being told the same things and at the same time. The only way to ensure that everyone read our statements and that everyone knows where we are going with the server is posting our responses to players feedback is posting these responses in a news topic. We apologize if this leads you to believe we don't care about your posts or feedback. This is of course not a situation we like, however we hope you understand why we try to keep statements to news posts like this one.



We look forward to hearing your feedback.

Warm regards,
Your Uthgard Staff

Great work staff, now keep them updates comeing, even if it concernes only one issue. Its nice to get some updates every now and then! And i really hope you guys can launch it soon, daoc is like heroin!

Thx for the update, hope to see your server reopened soon again!

Great news, now don't forget about allowing DoT's to stack from different damage types

ty for this update... sounds good!

i love the crafter and bolt news
thumbs up!

Good stuff! Keep it up!

Sounds amazing! Thanks so much for the info. Can't wait!

So any clue on Relaunch date?

Thank you for the update.

Great update hope to see more coming soon

interesting

Though the part about no more fails on grey items made me LoL.

Yeah! Keep it up! Great news!

And reopen day is...????????????????

Trishin wrote:Defense penetration

How do you test extreme cases considering block and parry rates have been capped on live?

Will defense rates against mobs also get a makeover?