Devblog: Improving Demonic Pacts 05/08/2021 - 15:15

You may recall that Update 1.72.4 applied the following two changes:

• After losing a PvP fight with an active pact, the losing team's characters' pacts are automatically disabled.
  This change protects losers of successive attacks by letting them decide when they want to activate a pact again.
• Characters with an active pact can no longer be attacked by characters who are more than 50 levels below them.
  This change limits the impact of low-level characters who attack other characters with no hope of winning but who want to waste their targets' time.

Shushu Prison

To protect characters from anti-gaming, attackers who lose their pact PvP fight will be sent to a prison in the Shustuft Crust!

There will be different ways for them to get out:

• Collect ore there and place it in a container (this action will take you about 3 to 5 minutes)
• Defeat a Shushu guardian (whose level will match the attacker's)

 

After getting out of the prison, the character is sent back to their Phoenix.

The goal is to allow "regular" characters to very easily and quickly get out of prison (it should be a minimal constraint), while penalizing "mule" type characters sometimes used to repeatedly attack targets. We're introducing a delay mechanic to deal with this behavior.

An overview of the Shushu Prison (under construction)

Increasing the duration of extraction phases

We want to make extraction a little more dangerous and give hunters enough time to get there when an extraction is going to start.

We are therefore updating these delays:

• Casting a convocation: 10 → 20 seconds; exposes anyone starting a convocation for longer
• Convocation: 2 → 4 minutes; gives hunters more time to prevent an extraction
• Truce: 10 → 30 minutes; limits the number of altars that are active at the same time
• Manual extraction 10 → 20 seconds; exposes anyone attempting to extract for longer

Reducing the period of immunity after activating a pact

To keep this immunity from being used to get near extraction points too effectively, the duration of immunity granted after activating a pact is now 10 seconds (down from 30).

Allowing recall potions

Recall potions may now be used with an active pact.

We believe they currently serve the same purpose as logging in again, and there's no reason to continue banning them.

Visibility of pact inventory management

The icon displayed above characters with an active pact will have a different appearance if their pact inventory is empty or contains something.

This change will reduce the amount of frustrating PvP fights for the attacker (who can't earn any rewards) and for the person who is attacked (who wouldn't have been attacked if the attacker had known there was nothing to earn).

Protection against "infinite" combat

Some players exploit a form of anti-gaming that consists of making a pact battle last for as long as possible to force the opponent to forfeit or waste tons of time.

To prevent this behavior, characters will earn bonuses to MP and damage inflicted each turn in pact battles.

This change should gradually stop players with bad intentions from evading clashes and defeats.
These bonuses may be updated depending on player feedback; we'll pay close attention to ensure that they don't disrupt the flow of pact battles.

Improved management of allies

To enhance allies' capacity to join pact battles, when a character tries to join a team that is limited to the group, the team leader will get a notification informing them of this, and if the leader allows it, the character requesting to join will immediately enter the battle.

Help interface for learning about the feature

Pact statues located in cities will allow you to access a book explaining how the pact system works and the various steps to start an extraction.

Hiding in the scenery

To enable characters to hide in the scenery, we've applied the following two changes:

• The pact icon displayed above characters is now displayed at the same depth as the character. Thus, when a character is hiding behind a scenery element, their pact icon will also be hidden.
• The names of characters with an active pact will no longer be displayed when players use the feature to display the names of all characters present (activated by the V key by default).

 

We're hoping these two changes will allow players to hide in order to lay an ambush as well as to escape attacks more easily.