New update notes

Some big changes in here, and discussion over future tweaks.

As usual the team has been reading and discussing the feedback from our beta community. This has been a big week with the addition of Esamir (those of you who are NC have had a chance to really check it out!) and the introduction of such a large game changing element has definitely introduced some issues we wanted to discuss.

First up, some Esamir problems.

We’ve seen a lot of repeat feedback about Indar and the number of regions contributing to splintered front lines and not encouraging enough big fights. With Esamir we hoped to see what effect a continent with fewer regions would have on those types of fights. We definitely are seeing much larger engagements on Esamir when it’s active, the number of players participating in the average fight is significantly higher than on Indar. This comes with a side-effect however, in that it is that much easier to secure the continent against an empire coming in and attacking, with fewer defensive requirements, finding a hole can be a lot harder. This is obviously exacerbated currently in game by population imbalance (which is another issue further down, don’t worry) which is the larger issue. We’ve known all along that the larger distances would encourage more tank fights, and we’re definitely seeing that. whether or not that’s a positive or a negative depends on how much you like tanks, but most of the issues with infantry ineffectiveness vs. tanks are solved over time as more potent AV weapons are unlocked, so the fact that they’re a bit over-abundant on Esamir currently isn’t very surprising considering we just had a character wipe. Bug-wise, there are some issues with teleporter and jump pads being missing, some floating objects, etc., most of those will be resolved in the next update, and yes, we will be reducing the fog density. Overall we’re pretty happy with how Esamir is playing once populations are even and fights are actually occurring. If you’ve had a chance to play on Esamir when it’s more colorful than just pure blue, what do you think of the gameplay there?

Passive Auraxium and it’s effect on the metagame.

Earning Auraxium passively based on territory control is causing a lot of issues with the meta-game. It’s contributing to players ‘squatting’ on a continent when there’s no active fight there, and it’s rewarding people for doing nothing useful or fun. In the next update we’ll be moving Auraxium gain over to an active reward for earning xp. You will no longer earn Auraxium passively for holding facilities on the map. There are a lot of support actions (spotting, squad revives, transport, logistics) which don’t have all their experience rewards, but our goal is to reward with xp for all useful actions in the game, and therefore you’ll also now be earning Auraxium that way as well. This should help a lot with the issues of people squatting on continents, and also make it so that empires with no presence on a continent are not actively discouraged from going to fight there because they’re giving up the passive Auraxium gain on the continent they did hold territory on.

Converting weapon unlock to Certifications

One idea that’s been talked about quite a bit is removing the concept of Auraxium entirely and making weapon unlocks use certification points. This would simplify character advancement to using one shared resource: Cert Points. This is something we’re still in the discussion phase of, but we wanted to put it out there for you all to get a chance to comment on. From our perspective this makes a lot of sense for several reasons; it simplifies the UI, makes the game easier to understand for new players, and gives you meaningful trade offs (“should I spend my cert points on new jumpjets, a new sniper rifle scope or a new assault rifle?”). Obviously pricing for certs would need to be adjusted along with this change, the goal would be to make weapon unlocks take about the same amount of time using certs as they take right now for an average player earning an average amount of Auraxium. Weapon attachments and class abilities would be rebalanced along with this as well. Again, this isn’t a set course of action, but a possibility that we’re discussing and we wanted to hear what the beta community thinks of the change. Give us some feedback on this please.

Cert point balance is broken (primarily for weapon attachments)

We’ve got some bad cert prices up right now specifically for weapon attachments. Many of the attachments are priced in odd and unintuitive ways. We’re going through these now and setting better prices. What you’ll see with this change is something along the lines of this for a theoretical weapon’s optic attachments:

Reflex Sight – Cost: 6 cert points – Requirement: None
3.4x Scope – Cost: 12 cert points – Requirement: 6 cert points spent on optics
4x Scope – Cost: 12 cert points – Requirement: 6 cert points spent on optics
4x laser Scope – Cost: 12 cert points – Requirement: 6 cert points spent on optics
7x Scope – Cost: 12 cert points – Requirement: 6 cert points spent on optics
IRNV Scope – Cost: 24 cert points – Requirement: 30 cert points spent on optics

This will give us a ‘progression’ of sorts in the cert trees. You’ll notice that with the sidegrades one of the differentiating factors is access to attachments. Our goal with this is to help define the role of the weapon by the attachments it has access to; long range assault rifle? Gets access to more long range scopes, high velocity ammo, firemodes like single shot and burst fire. CQC assault rifle? Gets access to more close range scopes, suppressor, laser dot, and soft point ammo. This won’t be quite as restrictive as this, since we still want weapons to have plenty of customization for YOUR style, and many weapons will be ‘generalist’ with a wide range of attachment options, but using attachments to help our specialist weapons be specialized is one of our goals for sidegrades.
I know this doesn’t come close to addressing every issue that’s been brought up, but we’re working our butts off to tackle them as quickly as we can. As always, thanks for your continued feedback, bug reports and discussion – we couldn’t do it without you guys.
Until next time!

http://forums.station.sony.com/ps2/index.php?threads/beta-status-and-upcoming-changes-auraxium-edition-10-10-12.30178/

Worth noting there’s a 2.5 gb patch to install today, so if you plan on a game later, get installing.