Progress update

Hi there community!
With elementalism now completed and fully patched we thought we might talk a bit about what’s next and try to give you some kind of roadmap to follow. Please note that things might change but overall there are three big things we want to adress in the near future and today we will give you rough outline of what we want to do and why we want to do it.
We are once again trying to get the community involved as soon as possible to get feedback so please discuss these topics on the forums.

Revamped tutorials

We are still having a surprising amount of new people testing out the game every day. However we are having trouble with keeping them interested and invested in the game.

In an attempt to solve this and shield these new players from the more difficult parts of the game we will introduce a starter island. The starter island will follow the same rules as the rest of Nave and has most of the things you can do in the main game but at a smaller scale.

In this area players can learn trades from different NPCs by doing minor tasks. These tasks do not only teach the player about the different parts of the game but it also rewards them with extra goodies once they are completed. This will speed up the initial leveling experience for new players.

Players can stay on the starter island for as long as they want. When they decide to leave they can take everything they have earned on the starter island with them using a special bank but they can never come back to it. This island will not be as profitable as the rest of Nave as the goal is to get the players into the game and learn the basics, not to make them rich.

The starter island will be heavily monitored for trolling and other types of bad behavior. People who do not follow the rules will be banished from the island. These rules will be much stricter than in the rest of Nave.

This island will also include better ways to communicate and get in contact with the different guilds of Nave so that hopefully new players may be interested in joining a guild once they leave or even join one while still on the island. Being part of a group or a guild helps new players a lot as they can ask more seasoned players for advice or even gear.

Currently a new player that gets killed in Tindrem might lose everything they own in one strike. But after earning both skills and items on the starter island hopefully this player will be able to re-equip themselves and get back into the game again. New players will also be introduced to the dangers of Nave and what it means to play a full loot open world game where players can chose to steal from or attack other players at any point.

What we want to do

This issue has been discussed for a very long time on the forums and we agree that things need to change. These changes can be split up into smaller patches in a better way than the starter island so hopefully we can patch this in a similar way to how we patched Elementalism. We would greatly appreciate feedback on all of these points. So please leave your feedback on the forums as this is a difficult and large area of the game.

We have had a pretty clear core vision in mind for territory control from the very start. It is however a massive system that have evolved a lot since its first inception. What works and what doesn’t work is often difficult to predict in a sandbox game and often the community don’t all agree with the changes we make to territory control as some parties use it to dominate the world and others simply want to use it to build a friendly community or a trade hub.
With that said here are some topics we want to address in the coming months:

Alliance System

Currently it can be difficult for guilds to group up and have any chance against the bigger guilds in the game. By introducing an Alliance System smaller guilds will hopefully have a better way of grouping up and fighting the massive guilds and keep them in check.
Anyone who you are allied to will be treated like if they are in your guild from a flagging standpoint. Allied players will be flagged as if they are in your guild but with a extra icon on top of the flag. The same goes for guilds that become flagged as being at war with you due to you being in a guild that is allied to a guild that is at war with them.

Stricter Control Tower rules

The idea behind control towers was that guilds could constantly fight over and harass these important points on the map. Control towers are rather weak and should be going down and up again rather often but this is not happening. One issue we have struggled with is placement. The current system for placing Control Towers is very open. They can be placed on almost any place in the world. This is good from a sandbox standpoint but also opens up for towers being placed in seemingly unreachable spots on the map. We want to make these rules stricter to hopefully increase conflict around territory.
Not a lot stricter, but a bit.

Territory Capture System

This is yet another idea that has been talked about on the forums. Instead of guilds having to completely destroy everything a guild owns to build their city, they will now be able to gain control over it.
Currently Territory Structures that aren’t in anyone’s territory will lose life every hour. This change would make it possible for guilds to take that territory and then convert the structures to their side.
Our current idea is that the structure will only switch guild if it’s under a certain percentage of life. This way the original owner has a chance to defend itself and take it back, but since the structure will lose life due to riots, after some time has passed it will simply be captured.

Siege Weapon Placement

Placing siege weapons can be a real pain. We want to move the placement system into the new type of placement that is used by both territory structures and modular buildings. This will also open up the system for new small structures that can be used during sieges but aren’t weapons.

Sieges

Sieges currently take a very long time, require a lot of setup and are in general not as interesting as a siege should be. We have some ideas that involve adding more active preparation before the sieges start around the keep or house in question. At this point these ideas are just that – ideas. We will release more information on this topic as they come closer to being proper design.

We will also guild-flag any siege weapons that are placed, which makes it so that defenders can use siege machines from inside their palisades without having their own guards attacking them.

This is a big one.

We want to introduce some of our first factions in Nave. Players will be able to join any of these 3 factions if the faction’s requirements are met. Once a player joins a faction everyone in that faction will be allied to the player, and will be at war with everyone in any other faction.
As with allies, people who are in the same faction will be flagged as allied/at-war with an extra icon on the flag. While in a faction you will have the ability to gain and lose faction points that can then be spent on faction-specific items, abilities and favors.

Factions Wars

To complement these factions we want to introduce a daily event that will take place at a set time every day (alternating every other day between EU peak time and US peak time).
Everyone on the server will be informed that this will happen at a certain point and anyone who is in a faction may join in to help their brothers and sisters out.

The goal of the daily faction war is to invade another faction’s base and steal their faction sigil.
These sigils are sealed in a statue by a magnetic shield. To be able to break this shield you will first have to charge your character by draining power from your own faction’s sigil. This can only be done at set times every day as the sigils need to recharge.

If you manage to get an enemy faction sigil back to your sigil and hold it there until the time runs out your faction will be rewarded with faction points. Other actions during the faction wars will also reward players with extra faction points.

Each faction will have its progress tracked and visible on the site.

Hopefully this will encourage more meaningful conflicts for the people who want that out of the game and keep PvP players fighting other PvP players rather than mindlessly slaughtering people to get their kicks.

That’s all!

The way we implemented Elementalism has been well received by the community. Instead of patching everything at once we try to push out patches more often each with its own new set of features and we want to try to do that again. Obviously the new player experience needs to be patched all at once but the other additions can mostly be split up into smaller parts and patched once they are finished.

As usual please note that these are bullet points of what we want to do and nothing is set in stone. This is not everything we want to change but the main things and as per usual we will patch bugs and do minor balance tweaks as well.

We would really like your feedback on these upcoming changes so make sure you leave them in this thread:http://www.mortalonline.com/forums/threads/what%E2%80%99s-next-development-update-discussion.157573/