2/27 Q&A Livestream Notes, Secrets of Aayanad will be released March 10th.

Secrets of Aayand is planned to be released on Tuesday, March 10th. They are aiming for the afternoon and they want to get it out before the rush of players getting home from work. Can it be delayed? Yes, it is possible but we are on schedule for that and the progress is looking good.


PTS

• Great turnout to test secrets of ayanad
• Going well, in Khrolan’s opinion
• Over 70 groups in library at the same time
• Khrolan and Amary being very active on PTS forums
• Daily events on PTS Mon-Thur
• Were 4PM this week
• Will be 11 AM next week for EU players
• Trion is internal testing an update to the current build on PTS
• Has bug fixes for current PTS build
• Including Mirage Island portals not working from the library lobbies
• To receive 10 T5 Celestial Obsidian weapons
• “Obsidian or bust Fluffy!”
• They give weapons for off meta builds
• PTS is coming down Sunday, March 8^th

Patch 1.7 Name

• Community can give the name on the forums
• Devs will read them
• Make it boat/water themed
• Devs think their patch naming sucks
• "Pimp My Boat"
• "Current Eventz"
• Patch 1.7 Will be released 2 months after SoA

General

Can you change which servers are on which AH cluster based on population or put them all on one AH cluster?

You cannot put them all on one AH cluster, the technology limits this. No plans to shift the servers around, this has not even been considered. Each cluster has its own economy, can talk about this but not really interested at this time. They can see why you would ask for this based on server populations.

Any ideas of bringing new servers online for new players?

The new servers that they brought online at launch are currently friendly to new players with open land and newer, aspiring guilds.

Server transfers?

No news on server transfers or mergers right now.

Teasers for new content, like the new galleons, can we get a video?

There is a trailer for secrets of ayanad coming. We leak most of our content on PTS. Once Secrets of Ayanad launches we’ll see lots more lead in to 1.7.

More character slots than 4 per server?

No proposed changes to that

Any chance of a dungeon queueing system similar to 5v5 arenas?

That’s the 2015 dream. Trion’s goal is to get likeminded players playing together, but Khrloan is not sure how to get there.

Any chance of exploration rewards being reintroduced, and why where they taken down?

They were taken down because the currency, Nui Tears, were removed. This was done to remove the total amount of currencies in the game.

Divine gifts didn’t stop on the 23^rd.

It was supposed to shut off automatically on the 23^rd and it didn’t. They think it will be shut off in the 55 build, but we’ll just have to wait and see. Most likely they will be on until the Secrets of Ayanad release. Divine Gifts are hard coded into this version release (as are siege schedules). Trion can’t just turn them off, it’s in the code they don’t have access to. If this was something that was hurting players they would be actively pursuing a fix, but since it’s just free stuff they’re just letting it sit.

Why is content delayed from KR and put into sectional releases?

Localization. They are taking over a year’s worth of content and condensing it. By going at a slow speed they make sure to avoid massive bugs and issues. Localization takes a lot of time.

It goes KR to English. English to localized English. English to French and German. It all has to be reviewed and then put into a final build. The localization team is well into 1.7 right now.

We are catching up far faster than content is coming out in KR, which is good for Trion’s goals.

Any progress from XL games on increasing family size?

Trion has had that request in for a while but hasn’t been pressing it. They will give it another push. They want this to happen.

With recent DDOS are there plans to guard against them in the future?

With each attack we learn more about the servers and how to guard against them. Trion is evolving as the attacks keep coming in. They are working their best to combat these and get the servers back up as soon as possible afterwards. There is a new change coming in as a joint work between Trion’s Ops team and XL in the works to help fight against this.

Friends vs just family having access to land?

No good solution on this right now. You could set your land to public but while your friends use the land but that isn’t a good solution. This idea makes sense but has not been considered.

Improved guild quality of life changes? Make their own chat channels like officer chat?

Trion is not ready to talk about their plans for the future with guild tools. They want a more robust system (which is in development right now) and they aren’t ready to talk about it right now.

Any fix for pirates and the dream ring quest?

Pirates can pretty much do the dream ring quest, they can engage at least to a certain point.

There are ways that pirates can kill Morpheus presently, they are not intended, but it can happen and Trion is not policing it. It is admittedly unfair for pirates with Morpheus as a target, they will take this to XL.

Is the dress blue or gold?

No.

Crafting / Gear

Any idea to change larceny so it’s not just lower labor on opening?

There is no plans for this to change. There is some lobsidedness in the profressions. Some see a turn for the better, like machining gets a boost, with the introduction of 1.7 because a lot of the boat customizations use machining. Maybe in the future there could be an improvement but nothing on the horizon for larceny.

With SoA will experia plants be in the game?

They are supposed to be, they are not in the PTS right now, Amary needs to check if they are in the updated version they have in internal testing. Khrolan saw notes about it, he thinks they will be there but they can’t say it officially until they confirm it.

Any chance for new instruments in the game?

There are Ayanad and Obsidian instruments? Someone on PTS got an epic quality Ayanad Lute and it looks like an electronic guitar, it sounds cool.

Aurioria Capes, any chance they will no longer be bind on pickup?

No, not right now. Haunted chests remain illusive and capes remain bound and typically not the one you want.

Can Handicrafts be aligned with other crafts with not having sealed until illustrious?

It’s a concern,  it would make sense. But they aren’t sure on this for now.

What’s the point of point of pushing the lower proficiency gates on armor and weapon crafting?

There is a change in KR and Russian versions right now. The thinking behind this (that comes from XL) is to increase access to a broader range of characters to make an attempt at crafting. Since the RNG is so harsh the more players in any given day crafting armor the higher the potential chance that more gear will get out there. Top tier Ayanads are still at 75k. This is not a fix to crafting which is the RNG and archeum supply. This is not a fix to either of those issues, this is just an access change and this came down from XL, Trion had nothing to do with it and it is not unique to our region.

Why does Kraken only drop one item?

Because he only has 1 item. He wants you to come back and see him again.

Could we  be able set a recall point to our houses to avoid using hereafter stones?

Krolan would like to hear more ideas on this. Should it be something that comes innate with every house? Should it be a memory tomb you can place in your house? (This could be made with printing) This sounds like a good idea but they would like more feedback from the community to see if there’s any downsides that aren’t clearly apparent?

Vehicles / Property / Mounts

Submarines?

Still no update. Not until after 1.7.

How is vehicle collision review?

It’s still in progress, right now secrets of ayanad is stealing their focus right now. It’s a more complicated scenario than most think because vehicle is a broad term. Most people only think of farm carts or maybe mortars while sieging, but there is an overlaying wrapper on the way vehicles work in the game and it poses more problems than expected. They admit they need to work on this more but Secrets of Ayanad has had their focus and they will work on pushing this to the forefront.

Sloth Gliders, will they be removed from loyalty shop anytime soon, like SoA?

It isn't going anywhere anytime soon, but it may go away sometime.  With loyalty items they like to make sure that if someone had zero loyalty points when it was put there they could still have time to obtain it through loyalty. They have no plans of removing it and if they get plans to remove it they will let us know when they find out.

With SoA Trion is introducing a limit of 2 unbuilt property plots in the world. What happens to those who currently have more than 2?

Once SoA goes live you will be prevented from putting down more plots until those are built. Unbuilt Plazas do not count towards your limit of 2 unbuilt properties because they are a huge undertaking.

Sonar on blue dolphin?

They’ve been going back and forth (with XL) on this and it looks like sonar will likely be added back to cyanfin. There is not timeline on this, presently. It’s the short range Sonar. Won’t be in for the 55 update.

Mirage Donkey?

Bug where it moves faster in other directions is fixed. You can see that on PTS.

High end gliders (kraken glider, red dragon glider), any chance of a renormalization and looking into T3 speeds, that they could have their abilities changed again?

Khrolan – In the distant future there will be a glider reimagining. The fundamental / core abilities of gliders will be reviewed and the system will expand on they currently work. No changes until we approach that.

Is ship customizations in part 1 or part 2 of 1.7?

Part 1. That’s the goal of the split. Part 1 is coming out first to give players a chance to look at the new ship mechanics, rebuild and customize their ships, and get used to the new ships. Then part 2 is the meaty part of the update where you start interacting with large scale world objectives and maybe a naval arena. Details are far off, but that’s the reason for splitting 1.7. The duration between the parts may shrink, but it’s still 2-4 months out so they haven’t ironed it out yet. They did it to give us time to adjust to new ships before giving us the content to avoid frustration of new sea content and not knowing the ships well enough to complete it.

Any chance to be able to trade in a car or be able to sell cars?

This could make sense, it’s a good suggestion, but there’s nothing in the works right now.

ETA on Pegasus mount?

Khrolan - “Oh man, soon.”

Amary - “Soon TM.”

Khrolan - “Not stupid soon, cool soon.”

Can you define cool soon and stupid soon?

Stupid soon is over a month, it’s soon but we don’t know. Cool soon is we know but we just don’t want to announce it yet. It’s less than a month.

Fishing boats, latency, and FPS lag?

XL has recognized this as a bug, but they don’t know the current status of it.

PTS players, providing good gameplay data, really want to know Trion’s thoughts on Archeum in the game.

Trion’s official stance on archeum is that it’s low. It doesn’t meet the demand that players have. Khrolan has 15 pages of notes from players on how to fix this. It isn’t as easy as saying “Just increase the drop rate in coin purses” but it’s not that simple. How much exactly? They don’t know and they can’t just make a change to such a large system. They know there needs to be more and they want to get it to the players. They are looking for new, intelligent ways to give more avenues for archeum to come into the game. There is an upcoming promotion on the horizon, with less frequency that divine gifts, which will bring archeum into the world. Khrolan is on our side, there needs to be more archeum. But it isn’t easy for him to do this. People in the office are sick of him talking to them about this. He is very passionate about this issue and desperate to get more archeum into the game and to us.

Here's a video of him discussing this topic.

PVP 

Is putting the siege gatehouse separate from the rest of you castle an exploit or a mechanic?

Currently there are lots of problems with the siege system from LOS to physically blocking specific locations, to respawn points, for gatehouses, for overall design, for advantage to the defender. These all plague our sieges system. The solution is to get up to Korea’s updated siege system. They’ve experienced all these problems and they have fixes for them. Part of getting there is releasing SoA. Part of the reason Trion is pushing content releases is they want to get up to date with the KR version because the less time we spend behind the less time we have to deal with mistakes they’ve already fixed. Pushing for the KR version of siege is something Trion is working on, but it isn’t as simple as giving them that updated siege system because of all the versions in between our version and theirs. They want to get caught up because it gives them more flexibility to affect the future.

1v1 Arenas

The way players drop in has been addressed in future updates.

To improve the speed of arena queues has XL thought about cross server arenas?

Yes, this is something they want to work towards but it’s not currently in the plan. There’s an order of operations to the plans. First we need to get caught up to the KR version. Then matchmaking needs to be reviewed. Then they can start exploring this.

If you want to check out the live stream yourself you can watch the VOD here. The duration is 56 minutes, this week.

They will still be streaming next week even with PAX East.