Life is Feudal:Arden - patch 0.27.1.16

Feudals,

the team continues the work on polishing game mechanics, fixing bugs and improving overall QoL. We have heard your feedback and dove deeper into combat balancing - as a result, some weapons have received significant changes in speed and damage output (yes, the Awl Pike is getting nerfed!). Some fundamental game mechanics, such as the INT stat, were reworked to better suit the state of the game. The recently introduced "Stack" button was further improved to take into account the "regionality" or resources. Please read below for further details:

Character progression

Changed: “Intellect” stat no longer gives additional skill points. When a player increases INT, they receive the following benefits:

• reduced crafting action time: 0.25% for 1 point of INT

• +1 Luck for every 5 points of INT 

Skills

Changed: the team has adjusted the duration of “Treat a patient (Bed Rest)” ability to be:

• 5 minutes when used in the open world

• 10 minutes when used inside an Instanced Battle (IB)

Guilds

Changed: (only for “seasonal” Arden) when a character leaves a guild, they must suffer a “penalty“ (alignment loss). Currently the mechanic only works correctly when the character actively performs the leave action while logged in. We observed players avoid or manipulate alignment loss by being offline when removed or by initiating leave/kick events under conditions that bypass the penalty.

Therefore, we have made the necessary adjustments so that the penalty always apply, and we increased the alignment loss from 10 to 25.

New: in our attempts to further balance guilds based on their membership number, we introduce a new multiplicator that will increase the overall base upkeep for a guild’s monument by 5.7% for each unique account above 50.

Combat

Fixed: the team has fixed a bug that affected the capture/counter-capture mechanic. Now the capture downgrades an outpost (both “military” and “non-military”) by 1 level, and counter-capture downgrades an outpost (both “military” and “non-military”) by 2 levels.

We've redesigned the combat state system to make combat feel more dynamic.

We also continue our work on combat balancing:

• Nordic sword

  • hit animation reduced from 1.15s to 1s 

  • recovery animation reduced from 1.30s to 1.15s

• Falchion

  • hit animation reduced from 1.15s to 1s

• Grossmesser 

  • hit animation reduced from 1.1s to 1s

• Claymore

  • swing animation reduced from 1.2s to 1.1.s

  • hit animation reduced from 1.3s to 1.15s

  • recovery animation reduced from 1.3s to 1.15s

  • damage increased by 9%

• Zweihaender

  • swing animation reduced from 1.3s to 1.2.s

  • hit animation reduced from 1.3s to 1.1s

  • recovery animation reduced from 1.3s to 1.15s

  • damage increased by 10%

• Flamberge

  • hit animation reduced from 1.2s to 1.1s

  • recovery animation reduced from 1.2s to 1.15s

  • damage increased by 8%

• Chieftain Sword

  • piercing damage decreased by 10%

  • slashing damage decreased by 11%

• Pollaxe

  • swing animation reduced from 1.1s to 1s

  • hit animation reduced from 1.2s to 1s

  • recovery animation reduced from 1.1s to 1s

• Bardiche

  • hit animation reduced from 1.2s to 1s

  • damage increased by 7%

• Broad Axe 

  • hit animation reduced from 1.2s to 1s

  • damage increased by 5%

• Spear

  • hit animation increased from 0.75s to 0.8s

• Boar Spear

  • hit animation increased from 0.75s to 0.85s

• Awl Pike

  • swing animation increased from 0.95s to 1s 

  • hit animation increased from 0.7s to 0.9s

  • damage decreased by 20%

• Estoc

  • swing animation increased from 0.5s to 0.7s

  • hit animation increased from 0.9s to 1s

  • recovery animation increased from 0.8s to 1s

  • damage decreased by 3%

• Lance 

  • damage decreased by 10%

• Jousting Lance

  • damage decreased by 20%

• Decorated Jousting Lance

  • damage decreased by 10%

• Hunter Axe 

  • fracture chance is decreased from 0.4 to 0.25

Changed: weapons of the Pike category currently allow players to jump and perform an attack while in mid-air. This behavior is being abused, as it enables players to close distances unnaturally fast and gain unintended mobility advantages in combat.

As a part of our work to further balance the weapons, we blocked the ability to perform any attack during jump animation when using the following weapons:

• Short Pike*

• Medium Pike*

• Long Pike*

*- including “sharpened/perfect versions.

Fixed: we have restored the ability to cancel a lance attack.

Changed:

• Reduce stamina consumption when blocking 3 → 0

• Enemy stun duration of successful parry:

  • stun time on parrying combo attack: 1.6 → 1.1

  • stun time on parrying regular attack: 1.1 → 0.8

Changed: when stamina runs out in combat stance (trying to move without stamina), we brought back a “catching breath” animation to indicate recovery. During this time, movement or parry are disabled. This is the first step of implementing the out-stam mechanic, we will be monitoring how it influences PVP, and we will also possibly add out-stam on performing hits without enough stamina later.

Changed: according to the players’ feedback, resistance of “castle”-type fortifications was too low and did not provide defence proportionate to the amount of resources spent. We made the decision to increase the resistance for the “castle”-type fortifications for better balance and as an incentive for continuous improvement of the walls throughout the season.

Changed: we noticed that during HJH players replace structures destroyed by siege damage way too fast, thus rendering the work of attackers ineffective. Therefore, we decided to increase the duration of abilities “Build a Simple Construction”, “Build Construction”, and “Build Complex Construction” to 30s during JH/HJH/PJH.

Changed: currently we observe a situation when a player could use regular or premium decorations to block a particular tile and limit siege mechanics for attackers. This is not a strategy we want to support. Therefore we set owner timeout on premium and regular decoration to 60s, so other players can remove them after that time. 

Changed: During the JH/HJH/PJH, the following actions will take 1s:

• Collapse

• Break Reinforce

• Dismantle

• Deconstruct

Fixed: we have detected a disturbing practice where players could manually edit client configs, i.a. network connection settings, and thus decrease performance for the players around them. We have made the necessary adjustments to revert the settings to default and block the means of altering them. 

IB

Changed: the cooldown for initiating IB over a province was increased from 24 to 48 hours. This change is aimed at diversifying the lands guilds fight over and bringing better balance to the IB mechanic.

Fixed: due to permission restrictions allied guilds could not use the ability “Enlist to battle” on a friendly guild monument and sign up for an IB. We fix this situation by allowing the players from “friendly” guilds to perform the following actions (and also some extra):

• “Manage Combat Styles”

• “Enlist to battle”

Knools

Changed: “Knool Archer" has a reduced magnitude of “Bleeding” effect.

Technical

Fixed: the team has fixed the error that prevented transfer of characters from “Newbie World” to “Arden”/”Seasonal Arden”.

Fixed: we fixed the situation when character's stats could display incorrectly in the character selection menu.

Fixed: we have eliminated the majority of situations which provoked swift camera rotation after completion of action and subsequent start of movement.

Fixed: the recently introduced “Stack” button had an unpleasant effect of stacking regional and non-regional resources of the same quality, with the former losing their regionality in the process. Now the “Stack” button will create two stacks of the same quality resource, keeping regional resources separate.

Fixed: the team eliminated the bug that caused the game to crash when a player attempted to delete a character.

We have updated the P2P system, now it should work more stable.

UX/UI

Changed: we have enlarged the inventory window for Military outpost (T2 and T3).

New: players can now enable/disable crosshair in third person view in “Settings->Video”.

Shop

Changed: we have introduced an option to split item stacks in Account Inventory. This way, if a player has several units of an item they want to use on both of their characters, they can now split the stack and choose to “Consume” for each character individually. 

Fixed: “Boosters pack” now functions as intended.

Christmas ceasefire

Starting today, Christmas ceasefire is in full effect:

• ceasefire will be active from December 23rd till January 13th

• JHs and IBs will remain without changes

• guild monuments will no longer require support points

• animal food consumption and breeding rate will be x5 slower

This way, players will still be able to jump in and enjoy the rivalry whenever they want throughout the holidays, but they won't have the pressure of providing upkeep.

This year has been very eventful for the feudal community. We hope that the upcoming one will bring more battles, more friendships and more conquests! "Season 1" is almost here, and we can't wait to see you enjoy the new content!