AVWW Post-Release 1.009-1.010 "The Opal Guardian's Store" Released!

[nanostrike]

I have one suggestion:

Since Consciousness Shards always drop, can we have them get sucked to your character like the Health Orbs?  It's a pain to pick them up when they go falling a lot of times and I frequently have them get stuck inside walls.

If there are multiple characters in the area, maybe have them share the Consciousness Orbs.  Either an even split or "Everyone gets them" like with the Enchants.

[Misery]

Great job about the new meteor missions, I surely like it.

But, about consciousness shards, it may be only on my side, there are still white (old) ones and green (mob drop) ones, and the guardian counts only white one, effectively making green ones meaningless. There are even no counter for mob drops.

Could you fix it? or... could you tell me how to make it work?

Thanks.

EDIT: One more thing, in a boss room in at least some missions, it just plays soothing or flat ambient-like music, not awesome boss music...
EDIT2: well, played more and figured out that normally they both drop white and green shards... not sure why some monsters only dropped green shards (probably on missions). anyhow, boss music doesn't show up, that's for sure.

EDIT3: sorry for many editting, forgot to say shards are awesome, and in caverns boss music plays, found giant green amoeba to be a farm of consciousness shards because it splits and recovers over time (which I think is bad, but if you intended, so be it)

I noticed that too, the green shards.   Are they a bug?    Most enemies I've seen drop both, and picking up the white shards brings up the usual "so and so got X number of shards!".    Grabbing the GREEN ones does literally nothing and they dont show in the inventory.



Anyway, this patch, definitely liking this patch.   The store thing is a great idea, I'd wondered if we were gonna see any sort of currency/shop in the game. 

I really like the fact that you can get enchants in there; the seeker enchants are useful, but of course they dont ALWAYS produce the slot-type that you want;  being able to just BUY enchants of a specific slot type is pretty great.   Not to mention the various other things in the store.

Havent tried the meteor missions yet..... I just started on continent 2 so there's alot of trying not to die while looking for buildings for the settlement.... but they sure SOUND a heck of alot better.   

[Dan_Cilantro]

The mob drops coupled with the store just made AVWW a lot more interesting and addictive. Good job!

[Coppermantis]

Interesting. I was in the mindset of "Monsters don't need drops, exploring is already rewarding enough" but now that there's the store and all that nice stuff I have a new desire to fight evil so that I always have enough to buy anything I might need at the shop. AVWW got a lot more interesting, this should please a lot of people.

[EtherealOne]

The new shards thing is great, however, the supply depot missions I now seem to be finding pretty much impossible since I cannot defend all four of the stashes by myself.

[Erkin]

This is crazy, i never seen a such great support for a game, you don't sleep and eat ?
Oh and... i never seen one bug in 20 hours of game.

Thank you for your dedication.

[tigersfan]

So... green shards eh? Yeah, those aren't supposed to be there. We'll have to look into that.

Nanostrike -- everyone SHOULD be getting shards that drop, if they were in the chunk when the enemy died. If this isn't happening, please let us know.

Erkin -- Welcome to the forums. To answer your question, yep, we eat and sleep We're a really small company, and I guess that let's us move on stuff quickly.

[Wanderer]

Fresh errors for .009.

Attached the log.  I just checked in on the server, saw red, and am attaching.  Sorry, it's late and I'm too tired to pay a ton of attention to what caused them.

[Terraziel]

How do the enchants bought from the store actually work?

Are they truly random or do they use your current enchant quality?
most importantly do they increase your enchant quality?

because, superficially, buying them from the store is now by far the best way to get enchants, ~30 enemies to get an enchant of the slot you want compared with finding enchant containers to get a random one (even with seekers)

[Quaix]

Love the changes. Almost feels like a whole different game. It feels like a lot more will change in 1.010, so I'll only speak in general terms.

Some general thoughts:

 - It seems we've had upgrade stone inflation. Cost of maxing out a character decreased by a factor of three or more and at the same time upgrade stones are much more common. Trash mobs drop the equivalent of 3-4 upgrade stones worth of consciousness shards and boss mobs drop 25.
 - I'm kind of hesitant to suggest this, but it makes sense logically: Since it's possible to trade for upgrade stones, they become superflous.. redundant.. obsolete. Why not introduce a 4th Iari which sells upgrades  directly for consciousness shards? They imbue you with consciousness shards to make you stronger.. kind of makes sense.
 - Stash rooms have been marginalized since you can buy almost everything you can find in them. I think the items which are also found in stash rooms need to be a lot more expensive, or removed from stash rooms altogether. There should be enough incentive to visit stash rooms to make it worthwhile to the player, without making him feel like he's looking for a needle in a haystack.
 - I think enchants which are too specific, like "purple right arm enchant" should not be in the store. Make the player gamble for them. I think having "random enchant" is good enough. It should be expensive enough to encourage players to get enchants the regular way -- the option to buy them should be there as a "consciousness shard dump".

Edit: I like how Anachronism missions are now. They feel just right in terms of difficulty compared to other missions.

[Misery]

Love the changes. Almost feels like a whole different game. It feels like a lot more will change in 1.010, so I'll only speak in general terms.

Some general thoughts:

 - It seems we've had upgrade stone inflation. Cost of maxing out a character decreased by a factor of three or more and at the same time upgrade stones are much more common. Trash mobs drop the equivalent of 3-4 upgrade stones worth of consciousness shards and boss mobs drop 25.
 - I'm kind of hesitant to suggest this, but it makes sense logically: Since it's possible to trade for upgrade stones, they become superflous.. redundant.. obsolete. Why not introduce a 4th Iari which sells upgrades  directly for consciousness shards? They imbue you with consciousness shards to make you stronger.. kind of makes sense.
 - Stash rooms have been marginalized since you can buy almost everything you can find in them. I think the items which are also found in stash rooms need to be a lot more expensive, or removed from stash rooms altogether. There should be enough incentive to visit stash rooms to make it worthwhile to the player, without making him feel like he's looking for a needle in a haystack.
 - I think enchants which are too specific, like "purple right arm enchant" should not be in the store. Make the player gamble for them. I think having "random enchant" is good enough. It should be expensive enough to encourage players to get enchants the regular way -- the option to buy them should be there as a "consciousness shard dump".
 - Consciousness shard numbers are needlessly inflated. We can reduce all costs and drops by a factor of 10.

I agree about the upgrade stones.  Ever since the changes with those, well..... The game hasnt exactly gotten any less difficult, and I still get killed by things, buuuuuuuuut, I still have about 700 upgrade stones.  That's WITH 2 of my current characters fully upgraded.   It is, right now, EXTREMELY easy to fully do 10 upgrades per character.

You could cut the frequency of the stones appearing in half and I'd STILL have a crazy excess of them.


Also, yes, some costs of stuff need changing.

I would say..... dont change the options for enchants in the store..... the ability to buy by slot is a very useful thing..... but DEFINITELY increase the cost.  Alot.  So that it doesnt make the charge system pointless (particularly since that's such a good mechanic).

[keith.lamothe]

Fresh errors for .009.

Attached the log.  I just checked in on the server, saw red, and am attaching.  Sorry, it's late and I'm too tired to pay a ton of attention to what caused them.

For 1.010:

* Fixed a bug where purchasing an enchant could give an enchant that doesn't have optional conditions (like the enchants that only emit light).  Those would be bad deals and cause errors in the enchant-generation process anyway.

Danke

[zebramatt]

Love the changes. Almost feels like a whole different game. It feels like a lot more will change in 1.010, so I'll only speak in general terms.

Some general thoughts:

 - It seems we've had upgrade stone inflation. Cost of maxing out a character decreased by a factor of three or more and at the same time upgrade stones are much more common. Trash mobs drop the equivalent of 3-4 upgrade stones worth of consciousness shards and boss mobs drop 25.
 

I agree about the upgrade stones.  Ever since the changes with those, well..... The game hasnt exactly gotten any less difficult, and I still get killed by things, buuuuuuuuut, I still have about 700 upgrade stones.  That's WITH 2 of my current characters fully upgraded.   It is, right now, EXTREMELY easy to fully do 10 upgrades per character.

You could cut the frequency of the stones appearing in half and I'd STILL have a crazy excess of them.

A relevant Mantis: http://www.arcengames.com/mantisbt/view.php?id=7544.

[x4000]

UPDATE: 1.010 is now out.  This is basically just a cleanup maintenance patch with some hotfixes for stuff from the last few versions, plus some extra polish we threw in there "just because."  Hopefully this is the last release prior to Monday, when we get back down to serious business.  Enjoy!

[Izumi5]

I've never thought the patch to be released this fast... You're certainly doing great job!

And yes, I just played boss tower mission, almost overwhelmed by a giant green amoeba, not by false green shards, with tense music!

Well, another minor, trivial, what can I say... misspelling? (sincerely, tell me the word) It's just about periods in pop-up texts. Even in a settlement, pop-up text for white and blue guardian, and difficulty setting has periods, while those for green guardian and spellgem crafting workbench doesn't have periods. Maybe you should clean-up those texts.

Anyway, good and swift job.