Booster pack and upcoming additions, small note from Means

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Chrisax
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Booster pack and upcoming additions, small note from Means

Post by Chrisax »

Friday with Means - November 7th, 2008
I am currently in Lund, Sweden for the funeral of my wife's grandfather so this weeks update will be a quick note that I can update during the week with screens.

The Booster:

I had hoped to put together some screens of the new Dust Brigade before I left but things got a bit crazy. We'll try to get them up this week before the next Friday with Means.

Before I left for Sweden, our build engineers (who are STILL on vacation in Japan..) were going to produce the first build of 18.0 for the Test Live dimension. 18.0 will be the Booster we have been posting screens from...so it is very exiciting to get a first version on to test so we can start balancing the content with players in the very near future.

Things to look for:

Player based fear has been re-introduced. This means all your old abilities that use it (very much like the "oops" we had earlier) will once again work with the new mechanic. Just so we are clear "THIS IS ONLY FOR TESTING PURPOSES". In no way will these old abilities have a fear component affecting players in the final versions of the booster. For now this is a very simple way of testing the Fear mechanic without having to distribute new nanos and items to everyone who wants to test it....anyone arriving on TestLive can easily get these nanos on their own. Please feel free to visit TestLive and terrorize each other.

The "Feared" state:
When feared you will flee in terror...running away from your target like a maniac. You will be unable to cast nanos or attack. You will be able to use items/perks. Items will be coming in new versions of 18.0 that will break Fear/Stun/Root and immediately return full character control. In upcoming versions Fear will not be "spamable" by a single user on a single target. The longest intended Fear is set to be 8 seconds..and no longer.

Knockback mechanics will hopefully be in at the end of next week for testing.

Typing this on an IPhone took forever...I'll try to add to this thread this week.

Cheers from Sweden!

Colin "Means" Cragg
Fear and Knockback are going to become a part of regular AO pvp. You are not going to be staring helplessly at your character for long periods of time. Crats will be a class that has a fear toolset, and as such it is likely that the stun durations will be adjusted at the same time.
8 seconds is an absolute maximum under any and ALL circumstances. Losing control of your char for longer than that is absurd...and hopefully won't exist anymore in the near future.
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