Lots and lots of behind the scenes work but I mostly wanted to do a dev update with the overall server goals and what's coming down the pipe.
The game isn't supposed to be a clone of conquer. We're working hard to add new features that streamline how the game is played and make it more fair and accessible in the long term. A great example is our mass compose system which gives increased perceived value to +1 items. Sure they could always be used to make items but now you can almost instantly take all the +s you hunted and melt them into + stones. This makes traditional farming much more useful in modern conquer without having to rely on heavy CP drops. Here's some of the major systems being worked on right now.
#1: Artifact Breakdown/Extend
Our server does NOT allow souls to be made permanent. This is to avoid long time players or those who donate from simply being able to ignore major world events and bosses. If you're already full perm souls then why bother killing a boss? With that setup then bosses have to focus on CP drops and then you have a economy with runaway inflation.
Instead we've created a system where souls of any level can be broken down into artifact points. Those points can then be used to extend the duration of souls that are already applied to items. Each time you extend the duration though, the cost to extend it again goes up! This means that even crappy phase 1 souls you find will still hold some value and ensures that p5-6 souls always are in demand.
#2: Player Mail
This is a 3 phase system really but the short version is we want to be able to send items to players so they can be claimed later (donation rewards, event rewards, quest rewards, holiday rewards, etcetc), we want players to be able to send messages and items to their friends (and if the items are not claimed after X days they need to return to sender) and we want to add our own auction house system which means we'll need a way to deliver items.
Obviously new patch conquer has a mail system but 5517 does not. We're instead writing our own and it is already added server side. We're just tweaking the interface and then will be making it accessible to players.
#3: Holiday Events
Yes, most servers do holiday events but thanks to the ability to create custom interfaces, we wanna push things a bit further. Given heroes is a relatively new server, the month of December is going to be heavily focused on starting to advertise and welcome new players. We're really not fans of top100 sites but many people do use them so we will be offering increased vote rewards, recruitment rewards and more. More to the point though we'll be adding....
-Advent Calendar
Interface is still being worked on but the basics are, every day you can log in and claim a prize from the calendar. As the month goes on the prizes get slightly larger. In order to claim your daily rewards you either must vote for the server successfully (validated postback from your ip) or you must find one of Santa's missing presents from monsters. Once you've found one, no more will drop for you till the next day and you can claim your advent reward.
-Do you want to make a snowman
Using similar systems to those discussed in my previous post (pushing objects with fb/ss), players will push snowballs around the map and must stack them in their base. When you successfully stack 3 of them ontop of eachother, it creates a snowman and you win! you get to then place that snowman in your house as a decoration or in any of the major cities! warning: placing in a city will cause the snowman to melt after 14 days. You may not place snowmen near/on npcs or portals.
-Frost Raid
We want to test out some new raidboss concepts and so we're putting together a much easier, non gear based raid for the holidays. Enemies inside will be winter themed and will have a number of devastating attacks. Our main focus with this raid is to test out the following concepts for use in future bosses.
-Monster group logic (minions which can assist the main boss in various ways)
-Attacks which slow jumping/walking speed.
-Ground targeted attacks which may be dodged
-Non gear based events where % dmg is used so all players are equal
Nothing ground breaking but should provide a rather fun winter series of events.
