Dev Note #20

Dev Notes #20 – Mission System

Hunting Mission System
Since the Entropia Universe mission system was introduced in VU 10.8.0, there have been continuous updates to the system to increase usability, improve features and expand into new areas of gameplay.

With the original introduction of the mission system, there were only five missions available; this number has grown over the years to more than 4000 missions currently available in Entropia Universe. In this Dev Notes article we’d like to inform you of our plans for the most significant overhaul of the mission system to date, which is planned for release in the third quarter (Q3) of 2019.

Planet Calypso will be the first planet to introduce the new mission system. The other Planet Partners will transition to the new system soon afterwards, once any issues are resolved and any necessary tweaks and adjustments are implemented.
Main Features

  • Hunting within a team or participating in a Shared Loot event will now reward all contributing participants relevant progression in their missions based on relative contribution (whether the contribution is made by damage dealing, healing, or scanning).
  • Missions requiring kills of a specific creature will automatically begin whenever a qualifying creature is killed, removing the need to first interact with an NPC or mission terminal.
  • Once a mission stage is completed, an interface will appear with reward(s). The next mission stage will automatically begin, even if you decide to choose rewards for the preceding stage at a later time.

Bestiary
The Bestiary is where you will find all relevant information regarding your avatar’s current progression in Hunting Challenge missions.
Implementation
As this is a completely new system that will replace the current mission system, progress in existing missions unfortunately cannot be carried over into the new system. Therefore, we are taking this opportunity to give all participants an alert to the upcoming changes several months in advance so that they have time to complete any active missions.

There will also be a grace period where both the new and old systems will work in tandem, during which time kills on qualifying creatures will result in progress on both the old and new versions of the Hunting Challenge missions. This grace period will extend approximately one month from the implementation of the new mission system.

Example
You have the current “Iron Atrox IV” mission active. After the implementation of the new mission system, for each kill of a qualifying Atrox creature, you will receive progress on the new Atrox Hunting Challenge mission as well as on the legacy “Iron Atrox IV” mission. If you fulfill the requirements for the Iron Atrox IV mission during the grace period, you will receive the usual reward, but you will not be able to begin the legacy Iron Atrox V mission. Instead, you will automatically receive the next stage of the (new system) Atrox Hunting Challenge mission.
When the one month grace period has elapsed, all missions from the old system will be disabled for all participants. Progress will no longer be possible for the deprecated missions, and uncompleted missions will not provide any rewards.

There will be a similar grace period of one month from the implementation of the new mission system for Planet Partners. More info and specific dates will be provided as the Planet Partner implementation draws nearer.

Dev Note #19

Dev Notes #19 – Item Dropping Changes

The recent VU 15.18.0 release notes included the following:

It is now only possible to drop items in your own estates

This change sparked a lot of discussion in community channels, along with much speculation (some of it wild yet entertaining) as to the reasons for the change.

The main purpose of removing the ability of dropping items on the ground in “public” places was to improve performance. Having a large number of low-value items scattered across busy servers was negatively impacting performance for everyone on the server. On some busy servers the effect of “item art” and random litter was very detrimental to performance.

Another concern was security, since we receive quite a few support cases each month where participants (especially new ones) inadvertently drop items on the ground (despite the warning dialog).

We are of course open to creating exceptions for special cases where placing items in the universe is desirable and unlikely to be abused, and we welcome your feedback.

Dev Note #18

Developer Notes #18 – Volatility Improvements

Based on the data gathered from the volatility test conducted last month and discussed in Developer Notes #16 and #17, our balancing team has decided on a set of new permanent settings that will be implemented over the next several days.

These changes will affect manufacturing and mining activity as follows:

Manufacturing
Overall volatility will be reduced, while the overall success rate will be increased by approximately 5 percentage points. Based on feedback, the range of Near Success outcomes will include larger outcomes than during last month’s test, to ensure that it is possible to recover a wider range of blueprint ingredients when a Near Success happens.

Mining
Overall volatility will be reduced, mainly by implementing a smoother distribution of the various claim sizes. In addition, the value of the smallest possible claims has been increased slightly.

 

***NOTE*** Please keep in mind that these are macro-level changes to the manufacturing and mining systems and thus the results or experiences for individual avatars and/or for small sample sizes may not be immediately noticeable. Also note that the overall (macro-level) expected return for these systems will be unaffected.

Dev Note #17

Developer Notes #17 – Volatility Test Completed

The recent success rate & volatility test announced in Developer Notes #16 has now been completed. The balancing team has gathered a large amount of usage and economic data during the test, which will be analyzed over the coming days.

The initial analysis of the data is very promising with regard to increased success rates and overall volume of activity. We plan to fully implement a version of the settings used during the test period, with additional tweaks, in the near future.

Thanks for your patience and activity during the test period.