SandBoxer.Org

Today we’ll give you a look into some of our scheduled updates for the next couple of months. This is something we’ve never done before, but it is the way we want things for Darkfall Unholy Wars, involving the community, our players, in our future plans.

These are just some of the things we have planned that we’re reasonably sure will be added to the game according to the schedule. There is also a “Community Issues” component in our content updates and patches that will be addressing player concerns, issues and working on player suggestions on a regular basis. You can see an example of the kind of content this includes in the first update on the 3d week of May.

I will stress again that this list is not exhaustive. We will be adding a lot more to every update and we’ll more updates and patches than the ones listed here. We’re giving you an idea so that we can maintain a discussion on things to come based on insight and scheduled updates.

May Week 3:

The third week of May we’re adding our first major Dungeon and addressing a several community issues we had prioritized. This update among other things will include:

New Troll monsters
New Zombie monsters
New Troll Lord monster
New Cave Troll Monsters
New Dungeon: Iriendir

Community Issues:

Party Kill Round Robin: We’re implementing a party distribution system that operates in a round robin fashion.
Holding Protection Shards: We’re implementing a protection shard mechanic that operates through the clan GUI and uses Dominion Points.
Territory Control map painting: We’ve been investigating the possibility of painting territories on the map. This is more a visual enhancement rather than an actual gameplay effect
Clan holding improved crafting: The purpose is implementing crafting operations in clan holdings that also more efficient, costing less gold, and having a higher success rate. This is one of the measures to be taken to increase clan holding worth.
New Unique Resources: We will have several (at least 10) completely new unique resources that will be used as special rewards.
Smaller Strong Boxes: Their current size allows players to block passages with them and this was obviously not their intended use.
Reduced Building Costs: Clan holding building costs are to be reduced, as well as clan holding building hit points, and increased dominion gained when destroying clan holding buildings.

May, week 4:

This is the week where the 3d Elementalist School is completed and added to the game. Also some more of the scheduled additions include:

New Malaut Monsters
Monster boss for Broadherne, called “Below Whisperer”
Monster boss for Broadherne called “Below Nightmare”

June, week 1:

This week we will address prioritized community issues, suggestions, and concerns.
This is also the week which kicks off the Naval Era for Darkfall Unholy Wars and we will be adding a new Warship to the game.

June, week 2:

We will be adding another Warship to the game
New monsters: a mix of Trolls and Spiders

June, week 3:

This week we’re adding the Markets to the game after a lot of work that was needed to complete them.
We will also add the 3d Warrior School.
We’re adding a new major dungeon, Marthnyr
Another major dungeon, Hardruk.
We will be addressing a list of prioritised community issues
We will add another Warship to the game.
New monsters: 2 Cave Hags
New Boss monster: Cave Hag Boss

June, week 4:

This week we’ll be adding the 3d Skirmisher School
We’re also adding a fourth Warship.

July, week 2:

This week we’re adding the 3d Primalist School and all roles will now have 3 schools each.
We’re also adding another dungeon: Svartvann
New Monsters: Icejarl
We’ll also be addressing a variety of prioritized community issues.

July, week 3
This is the the apex of the naval war era and we’re adding Sea Fortresses
We’re also adding the new Backpack
Big Boss, the Ragaizan.

July, week 4:

We’re adding Resource Monoliths to the game with all the implications these have for PvP
We’re adding Utility Ships
A new dungeon: Dulguna
New monsters, Melechars Family
The Bloodknight
We’re also going to address a variety of prioritized community issues.

That’s just a brief presentation of some of the things to come, and a taste of how we’re going to proceed with adding content to the game as well as the frequency of the content updates. As I mentioned above, this is far from being a complete list. We will be working well outside the things we’ve included here and we will go into detail in the days and weeks to come, explaining everything and interacting with the community.

As always, your feedback is important to us.

Thank you for reading.

The elections for the 8th Council of Stellar Management (CSM8) are now all wrapped up and CSM8 is already in action reviewing providing feedback on many of the features coming in Odyssey.

With the changes in this years election system to using the Wright Single Transferable Vote (Wright-STV), we at CCP thought it might be interesting to take a look at some of the important statistics regarding voter behavior and how ballots were counted. In the new voting system, voters were able to fill out up to 14 slots of their ballot, or "vector", in order of preference. The ballot if then processed by the Wright-STV code to ensure that it is optimally used to elect candidates in the voters order of preference without wasting the vote on those who can't use it or who do not need it, until there are no more candidates on their ballot (this is reffered to as exhaustion of a ballot). The percentage of the ballot exhausted to elect candidates is equivalent to the ballots "strength" in the election in comparison to other ballots.

First up, we looked at the length of the ballot and examined how much value got exhausted per length

Graphs of the last two columns:

We also found it interesting to look at which slots on the ballots were used to elect candidates: This shows on average, how powerful each preference slot from 1-14 on each ballot was at electing a candidate to the council.

Here are some interesting high-popularity ballot orders and how they got applied. These are what many would refer to as "bloc votes". We bolded the bits that we found interesting.

3964 votes followed this vector:

['mynnna', 'Kesper North', 'Kaleb Rysode', 'Sort Dragon', 'Sala Cameron', 'Banlish', 'Artctura', 'Malcanis', 'Unforgiven Storm', 'Awol Aurix', 'DaeHan Minhyok', 'Mangala Solaris', 'Psychotic Monk', 'James Arget']

43.65% of your ballot expended to elect mynnna

39.48% of your ballot expended to elect Kesper North

Kaleb Rysode was eliminated in round 3 with 610 votes

Sort Dragon was elected before your vote got here

15.87% of your ballot expended to elect Sala Cameron

Banlish was eliminated in round 16 with 2173 votes

Artctura was eliminated in round 5 with 736 votes

Malcanis was elected before your vote got here

Unforgiven Storm was eliminated in round 11 with 1383 votes

Awol Aurix was eliminated in round 4 with 687 votes

DaeHan Minhyok was eliminated in round 1 with 246 votes

Mangala Solaris was elected before your vote got here

Psychotic Monk was eliminated in round 14 with 1844 votes

0.99% of your ballot expended to elect James Arget

1639 votes followed this vector:

['Sort Dragon', 'Sala Cameron', 'Banlish', 'mynnna', 'Kesper North', 'Kaleb Rysode', 'Awol Aurix', 'Artctura', 'Malcanis', 'Unforgiven Storm', 'DaeHan Minhyok', 'Mangala Solaris', 'Travis Musgrat', 'progodlegend']

74.47% of your ballot expended to elect Sort Dragon

Sala Cameron was elected before your vote got here

Banlish was eliminated in round 16 with 2173 votes

mynnna was elected before your vote got here

Kesper North was elected before your vote got here

Kaleb Rysode was eliminated in round 3 with 610 votes

Awol Aurix was eliminated in round 4 with 687 votes

Artctura was eliminated in round 5 with 736 votes

22.90% of your ballot expended to elect Malcanis  ß This explains the bump in the Strength/slot graph at #9

Unforgiven Storm was eliminated in round 11 with 1383 votes

DaeHan Minhyok was eliminated in round 1 with 246 votes

Mangala Solaris was elected before your vote got here

Travis Musgrat was eliminated in round 10 with 1103 votes

progodlegend was elected before your vote got here

2.63% of your vote was exhausted

595 votes followed this vector:

['Ripard Teg', 'Malcanis', 'Trebor Daehdoow', 'Ali Aras', 'Mangala Solaris', 'Nathan Jameson', 'Korvin', 'Corebloodbrothers', 'riverini', 'Roc Wieler', 'Psychotic Monk', 'James Arget', 'Unforgiven Storm', 'progodlegend']

63.40% of your ballot expended to elect Ripard Teg

32.82% of your ballot expended to elect Malcanis

Trebor Daehdoow was elected before your vote got here

Ali Aras was elected before your vote got here

Mangala Solaris was elected before your vote got here

Nathan Jameson was eliminated in round 17 with 2430 votes

3.77% of your ballot expended to elect Korvin

Corebloodbrothers was eliminated in round 12 with 1575 votes

riverini was eliminated in round 9 with 992 votes

Roc Wieler was eliminated in round 8 with 895 votes

Psychotic Monk was eliminated in round 14 with 1844 votes

James Arget was elected before your vote got here

Unforgiven Storm was eliminated in round 11 with 1383 votes

progodlegend was elected before your vote got here

The 1-vote vector peeps broke down like so:

577 "Greene Lee"

469 "Mangala Solaris"

454 "Corebloodbrothers"

410 "Korvin"

280 "progodlegend"

258 "Ripard Teg"

247 "Trebor Daehdoow"

239 "Psychotic Monk"

234 "Nathan Jameson"

225 "Chitsa Jason"

207 "Malcanis"

180 "Steve Ronuken"

176 "Mike Azariah"

175 "Sala Cameron"

169 "PsychoBitch"

156 "Ali Aras"

107 "riverini"

102 "Travis Musgrat"

82 "Ayeson"

82 "James Arget"

82 "Unforgiven Storm"

75 "Banlish"

67 "Roc Wieler"

62 "Sort Dragon"

55 "Kesper North"

48 "mynnna"

47 "Cipreh"

28 "Artctura"

25 "Awol Aurix"

21 "DaeHan Minhyok"

10 "Kaleb Rysode"

When we ran the STV-2 election to find the two most widely supported CSM members to be the new 2 permanent summit attendees in the 2+5 system we found that Mynnna and Ripard Teg were victorious, but that the difference between the 2^nd and 3^rd place candidates for the 2-seat guarantee was 299.11 votes between Ripard and Mangala (with Ripard winning).

Finally, let’s take a look at how many votes actually affected the outcome of this election in comparison to the CSM7 elections.

For CSM8 this number is easily found. The equation looks a little something like “candidates straight up elected + remainder votes for each person elected by default”, or in number form “10 * 3106 + 3091 (Korvin) + 2885 (Mike) + 2651 (James) + 2612 (Chitsa) = 42299 Votes”. This means that of the 49702 votes cast in the election 85.1% of them had a direct effect on the makeup of the council.

Finding this number for CSM7 is a little more difficult. 14,813 votes were cast for candidates that did not make the top 14. These are "under-votes" and had no effect on the final council. The more difficult area is determining “over-votes” (votes cast for a victorious candidate that did not affect their standing and could have been used to elect a different candidate). If you consider being in the top 14 to be “unaffected standing” then there were 26,348 over-votes cast in the CSM7 elections. If you feel that being one of the top 7 delegates is "unaffected standing" (as many do) then there were 12,495 votes cast for those in the top 7 that did not affect the election outcome. This means that of the 59,109 ballots cast in the election, 31,801 ballots affected the outcome of the top 7 and 17,948 ballots affected the outcome of the top 14; That comes out to be 53% and 30.3% enfranchised votes respectively.

This drastic improvement from 53% enfranchisement to over 85% is exactly what we were looking for when we made the move to Wright-STV. Now that a voters opinion is more likely to actually count towards the results of the election, our next big push will be towards visibility and voter turnout for the CSM9 elections.

If you would like to do your own analysis of the votes you can find the full list of ballots cast in .blt format here and the ballots we used in the STV-2 election here. Also, you can find the previously published Wright-WTV code used to process the ballot here.

Mortal Online
May update and patch.

Today we are releasing a very important patch that significantly improves the game performance, to better support large scale population and wars with excellent performance. Updates have been made in the capital city of Tindrem which has, in the past, lacked proper optimization which made clients struggle. It should now be an optimal starting location for all new players both in terms of performance and using a short and easy tutorial for all new players to easier get into the game mechanics. Lots of polish and bug fixing has been worked on in this patch.

We have also added the mount package which includes two totally new mount types; the old Molva Beast is back, and the new Lykiator that has been transported from the continent Urmothâr, Lykia. The Molva beast is a very strong and powerful mount that can grow to a very large beast using the right knowledge of how to control them. There are lots of different mount gears to buy and put on the Molva beasts such as the famous Tindremic-marked thick armor. The Molva is often used to knock down its opponents with an incredible force when you push the Molva into a “berserk” state. The Molva is usually the slowest in general run speeds of all the current mounts but it has the highest run burst speed.

The Lykiator is much more agile than both the horses and the Molva, they can climb in steeper angles in mountains, and they can jump very high. Their turn radius is swift and agile, but their main run speed is slightly lower than the traditional horse run speed. It holds natural body armor and there is no armor that can be put on the Lykiator other than saddles and eye blinders.

Both the Lykiator and the Molva beast starts out on a rather low creature control cost depending on its subspecies. There are 5 subspecies for both the Molva Beast and the Lykiator all with their unique appearance, stats and features. Depending on their subspecies, they can cost more creature control points. Experienced breeders can however mix these subspecies to find an optimized suitable mount as a result that cost less creature control. To achieve their pure strength if to be used as a weapon even greater creature control is required by learning their zoology skills. Not all specific subspecies stats can be mixed in a breed however, so to obtain the most powerful subspecies and highest level a tamer must obtain the correct skills to control them.

A new combat system and style has been introduced into the game: a truely unique way of fighting in an MMORPG on mounts using lance weapons. Crafters will be able to craft a new weapon type starting out with a traditional lance handle and a few different head types. A mounted lance fighter holds the lance out and will aim at the target and allow the mount to give the force and damage. The lance does real time traces against any surface in the world and will react as soon as it impacts, even if it’s the ground or a living creature. Due to huge force being used when the lance impacts, it does loose durability rather quickly. Crafters have to find a suitable combination of material and head types to find different use of a lance weapon. It may be focused into a full knock down of a mount, or simply to cut deep into the flesh with the aim of causing severe damage. Defenders may always try to block and avoid being knocked down by a mount and absorb the damage if perfectly blocked/parried. We rely on pure player skills when fighting as a mounted lance fighter just as any mounted combat.

Notice boards have been added to most cities. Here players can post their own notes and requests and orders for other players to read. A player only needs to buy a book, write something on a page and tear it out and put it on the board. Mortal Online has also received a slight face lift visually in lightning and color tone. It does lean a step closer to the old look and feal of earlier beta builds.

While we will continue to polish and remove bugs from the game, we are getting closer to having the character and armor content replaced next, which will both improve the graphics and performance.

As always, even though we do not make frequent public updates regarding cheats in Mortal Online this is always a very high priority for us to make sure cheaters will never be able to play the game and that there are no cheats that get away undetected. We recently expanded on our anti-cheat detection software to that which major companies, such as Blizzard, also use. This has already gone to good use as we have banned a few accounts using such software already. Cheating will never be accepted and it will always result in a permanently ban.