Hey Everyone! It was a very exciting June for The Etherscape with the first round of alpha testers getting into the game. It has been super energizing to see players in game and get all kinds of great feedback. The team is excited to be dropping our July content update now. It is a little lighter on features this time because we spent more than half the month fixing all the bugs the alpha testers found. However, there is still plenty to look forward to! Read on for the details.
The Mail has Arrived
We are excited that the mail system is now fully functional in game. The mail system serves a few important purposes in game...
We can send rewards to our early players such as resources and gems.
If there is a failure in the minting process, we can return your items and resources to you.
We can notify players about information like new releases and upcoming governance proposals.
Anyone who played in the June release will notice that they have a nice surprise waiting in their mailbox for them when they log in. We will continue to use the mail system to drop goodies to our active alpha players.
Reading Mail with Rewards
Time for Some Luxury
The next major feature in this release is that the Luxury Merchant is now open and accepting your gems. The luxury merchant sells account upgrade tokens which can provide quality of life improvements or other benefits such as for governance. In this release, there are two item available...
The Imperial Sovereign which grants 1 vote per proposal.
The Stash Chest which increases your stash size by 5 slots.
Luxury Merchant Items
We will be adding many more items to the Luxury Merchant over each release, so stay tuned. Some of the items will be limited time tokens that will only be offered while supplies last.
Balance and Reward
During the first week of the June alpha several players were reporting that level 10 was simply too hard. However, after a bit more time honing skills and gathering loot, players were tearing up level 10 with the following results...
Dominating level 10 (courtesy of henk)
So, it was clear that some balancing was needed. As a result, we have done some minor adjustments do item rolls based on balance testing. We have also changed enemies to have armor and resistance which makes them harder to kill. Overall, the changes should make level 10 a little easier (but level 11+ will be harder).
It is intended that The Etherscape should have extremely good loot drops which make your character very strong. So, the goal wasn't to do heavy nerfs, but to instead allow for increased difficulty content with higher rewards. As a result, when you reach level 10 you will now see quests generating for levels 11-13 which have higher difficulty and higher rewards.
For example, level 13 quests will have +500% magic find which means you will have 5x the chance of finding epic and legendary item drops.
Work Out Those Bugs
As always, with this build we have crushed a large host of bugs. Many of these bugs were found by our alpha players. Thanks so much for everyone's bug reports! I am hopeful that the July release will be a leap forward for stability. A few examples of major bugs that have been fixe are the following...
Merchant fix when 2 players are using
Inventory fix when using different sort order
Visibility issues for players joining levels
Stop allowing the class ability slot to be clobbered by dragging an item over it.
All summon abilities create level 1 characters
The borders of town were incorrect allowing walking out onto the water
And many more!
Where to Now?
The July release makes a lot of progress, but we still have a huge list of features to add to The Etherscape. If you want to check out what we are currently thinking about adding in the future, you can check out our roadmap here...
We intend to have our first governance proposal to vote on what the release focus for September will be. Check it out in game to see the options and pick up some Imperial Sovereigns to grant you votes.
Keep following this blog and our Discord channel for the latest news and updates. We will keep the community notified as the transition from Efinity to Enjin continues to play out. You can also view the full release notes here.
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