[Ubi Official] Pathing Changes

[Ubi Official] Pathing Changes
Hey all,

As many of you are aware, the recent patch on 7/12 has changed the behavior your generals will take on their way to battle: this change was intended by the patch.

• The path the general takes now corresponds to the preview
• The general now takes a straight path to his destination
• A bug that made the general jump back to the start of his route
is fixed

These changes were needed in order to fix some of the existing bugs in the game. Not all blocking has been removed. The only thing that has changed is pathing. You can still use an advanced blocking technique, just be aware that the pathing in many cases HAS changed.

The old pathing system solution wasn’t an optimal solution. The old system was too taxing on the performance of the game and caused some side effects like:
a. Running settlers
b. Difference between preview and path taken
c. Jumping general in adventures
d. Invisible generals (impression that he disappeared)
e. Unnatural routes

This needed to be addressed in order to push forward with development. We do, however, apologize that the change affected users the way it did. We do not want to take the strategy out of the game, but issues that create bugs or could create potential future bugs need to be addressed. I hope you will bear with us through this change.

As noted in a different thread, the new path finding will probably not significantly affect adventures where all camps appear after each other and that cannot be skipped, even if some pretty advanced blocking methods have been made for them, e.g:

• The Island of the Pirates
• Witch of the Swamp
• Traitors
• The Dark Priests
• Wild Mary

However, the new path finding will affect existing guides for adventures where you today can skip camps, e.g:

• Horseback
• Stealing from the Rich
• Outlaws
• Victor the Vicious
• Sons of the Veldt
• The Nords

We are now hosting a Guide Creation Contest so we can work through the changes together. This contest can be found here.

I am sorry if this wasn't the answer you were looking for. Feel free to discuss the changes in the thread below.

-Katealyst

Kate, re:Island of the Pirates

i totally don't understand this one. There is a hidden camp (trap). Used to could send a general to a bandit camp, knowing he would be
"intercepted" by the trap. Now it says, "Your general has been intercepted!" So he heads for the trap. Then it says "Your general has
been intercepted!" And he heads back to the bandit camp.

How many times can a general be intercepted? He heads for A, gets intercepted and sent to B, but he before he gets there, intercepted again and
heads back to A.
Doesn't really matter I guess, since you can just send him to the trap in the first
place. But I don't get the interaction that's going on. Hope you'll clear this up.

Edit: Oops, my bad, I named the wrong adventure, you guys probably couldn't figure out what I was talking about. I meant Pirates.

This was the last Developer Diary...


Planned for 2012

• Moving buildings (approx. Aug)
• New trade system (approx. Aug)
• Guild quest system: First the daily quests (approx. Aug), the further parts of the guild quest feature follow afterwards
• Fix for the online display of friends
• Economy overview (approx. Aug)
• New Tutorial (approx. Aug)
• Combat prediction (approx. July/Aug)
• New Info-Window including change log, in game news, events, etc. (approx. Sept)
• Economic adventures (approx. Aug/Sept)
• Features for Level 50+ (approx. Fall)
• PVP (see below)


Are these just lies to keep us around? I don't see anywhere on there where it says anything about changing the pathing (basically saying "screw you" to the people who spent hours making the previous guides) Anyways, back to the developer diary. That is the list of things that THE PAYING PLAYERS WANT. Why are we adding ridiculously priced buildings and taking a step backwards in our adventures. We have a member of our guild who has been trying for months to find a reasonable way to do SoV. I'm sure he's not the only one that just got crapped on by this change.

My point is, the developers know what we want. It's listed in that developer diary. Yet, we have had 2 absurd updates that did not include anything on that list.

Your responses to some of the complaints I have seen make it seem like these are new issues being brought up and you need to bring it to the attention of the developers. They know what we want. You know what we want. Stop playing dumb already please and maybe explain why these changes are being made ahead of the ones that were mentioned in the developer's diary. I've already given up n half of that list because I will have already quit the game or the game will have gone under before they happen.

I may as well be asking these questions to my cat, though. I have a much better shot at getting a real response.

The new pathing does not work.. I wish that things could go back to the old "better" system.. I'm not very impressed with this new system.. For us not as advanced players it is making the game very frusterating.. I also agree with the above posting.. Why no changes that have actually been requested?? Isn't that why feedback from us players is requested??

It's amazing how one seemingly simple 'bug fix' can uproot and entire community, but that's what has happened here. Hours and days and many trials and errors have yielded the wonderful and comprehensive guides that everyone has been using for so long, and one little patch has thrown most of that work out the window. More than upsetting the people who use the guides, this pathing fix is a slap in the face to all the people who put in the effort to make the guides. It says: "Oh, good work, but we don't really care about you, and the time you spent." I'm all for fixing problems with the game, but a huge change like this, with no heads up or consultation with your players, when there didn't seem to be a problem in the first place, is rather hard to take. I think that we'd all appreciate some more feedback and discussion from the developers, now and in the future.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by BB_Katealyst

We are NOT taking out advanced blocking. We are not trying to ruin your game experiences. The only changes that were made was the change in pathing.

---

This is a direct quote from the Adventure Guide competition.

IF this is the case, then my complaints are taken care of =) Some clarification on this in public places would probably ease the worries of quite a bit of the player base and stem the flow of anger directed at the BB's.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by BlackFyre

they're trying to bring all the adventures in line with each other where it comes to loot/xp per loss. while this will work great on new player's opinions of the adventures, it ruins the old player's opinions of adventures.

Eliminating blocking is a good idea when it comes to prep for PVP (so just do it for WILD ZONES or whatever the hell you are thinking for PVP zones)(we'd love to hear what BB is planning for PVP, not hearing ANYTHING is worse than hearing a lil bit of something). For the current PVE and adventure system though, it's about as bad of an idea as they can come up with. If blocking were completely removed, i would no longer enjoy the adventures and it would lead to me quitting the game. If they want to add to the game, they need to actually do that by adding more adventures, more options for adventures, and more variety/complexity to adventures. NOT by making all the current adventures into total crap by making them into a linear smash n bash w/ no strategic options.

---

my theory on why for the removal of NORMAL blocking.

My friends are stuck on a quest to upgrade a building. It will take them weeks of contigous login before the can advance.
They are so screwed and anyone else that started late. thank you thank you.

The new pathing takes all the strategy and still out of the adventures. How can it be considered a strategy game when you have to attack the camps in order with no other choice. Strategy is having options to do one thing or do another. But when that is taken out of the equation, you might as well just set up adventure calculator and say this is what you'll get if you have enough troops. Without ways of doing an adventure more than 1 way then there is no point in even doing the adventure. Sure it "brings new life" to adventures, but that last as long as it takes to make new guides then its just attack and repeat.

Undo the pathing changes or make it more flexible to choose our own paths (like it should be with real battles) and the game will be far more enjoyable.

Kate, if you want my input on pathing and locking changes it is basically this.

If your company looks at the combat system and thinks pathing and blocking are the issue, you are simply wrong. The issue is how comparatively useless every troop in the game is compared to recruits. If you want to fix adventures, give me a reason to use something other than the first combat troop i get in the game.

Advanced blocking still works. I was annoyed when the path changes first happened, but ultimately it didn't take me very long to figure out new garrison placements for my favorite adventure. It plays pretty much the same as it did before. A friend sent me his garrison placements for a different adventure, he says that one plays the same as well. And I've found updated guides for pretty much every adventure I regularly do or plan to try.

So in my experience, this change has not broken the adventures beyond repair or removed any sense of strategy.

Updated the original thread with why we had to change pathing. I hope that it clears at least some things up.

We are currently working on a new developer diary with updated dates so keep your eyes peeled for that.

I also wanted to emphasize that this change did not adversely affect development. Our development team is not small. They do not all work on a single feature. Some are tasked with bug fixes, while others are tasked with feature creation, and others are tasked with item creation etc. Just because one feature comes out before the others doesn't mean it is more important. It just may have been finished and tested on the test server sooner. As you can imagine, bigger features require longer development time and a longer time on the test server.

I encourage everyone to check out the test server regularly, as that is the perfect time to give feedback on new features.

If I missed it, I am sorry. But no where in the list of the changes and the reasons do you mention that the leader camps now have agro. While this looks like a minor change it can cause serious problems when trying to figure out pathing.

Kate, your reasons for changing the pathing seems to be good reasons. And i now know that the old pathing is impossible to revive, because the "new pathing" has also been impletemented on British, German, and all other European servers. However, the new pathing was put on the German servers ages before it was put on the US servers, right? So i'd imagine that you guys would have had plenty of prior knowledge about this imminent change.

Most players are adapting to the new change. My only suggestion, and i believe many players will agree with me, is to warn us beforehand about drastic changes such as these

Oh yes, and thank you for being so courteous in spite of the vast amount of hate you've seen on these forums. People, including myself, are just frustrated by some of the recently added features.

I am glad that the fix is in.
Those issues in adventures were unacceptable.
The guides are being amended.
However, I had a sftr invite disappear.
It came, I accepted, and it went to cyberspace limbo.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by BB_Katealyst

[Ubi Official] Pathing Changes
Hey all,

As many of you are aware, the recent patch on 7/12 has changed the behavior your generals will take on their way to battle: this change was intended by the patch.

• The path the general takes now corresponds to the preview
• The general now takes a straight path to his destination
• A bug that made the general jump back to the start of his route
is fixed

These changes were needed in order to fix some of the existing bugs in the game. Not all blocking has been removed. The only thing that has changed is pathing. You can still use an advanced blocking technique, just be aware that the pathing in many cases HAS changed.

The old pathing system solution wasn’t an optimal solution. The old system was too taxing on the performance of the game and caused some side effects like:
a. Running settlers
b. Difference between preview and path taken
c. Jumping general in adventures
d. Invisible generals (impression that he disappeared)
e. Unnatural routes

This needed to be addressed in order to push forward with development. We do, however, apologize that the change affected users the way it did. We do not want to take the strategy out of the game, but issues that create bugs or could create potential future bugs need to be addressed. I hope you will bear with us through this change.

As noted in a different thread, the new path finding will probably not significantly affect adventures where all camps appear after each other and that cannot be skipped, even if some pretty advanced blocking methods have been made for them, e.g:

• The Island of the Pirates
• Witch of the Swamp
• Traitors
• The Dark Priests
• Wild Mary

However, the new path finding will affect existing guides for adventures where you today can skip camps, e.g:

• Horseback
• Stealing from the Rich
• Outlaws
• Victor the Vicious
• Sons of the Veldt
• The Nords

We are now hosting a Guide Creation Contest so we can work through the changes together. This contest can be found here.

I am sorry if this wasn't the answer you were looking for. Feel free to discuss the changes in the thread below.

-Katealyst

---

Would a general with a whole bunch of troops really take the most direct route??? I understand this is a strategic vs tactical game, but the concept of choosing to attack weak positions and by-pass strong ones is nothing new and not cheating or unrealistic. It does make one wonder if the ultimate objective is to prolong the battles and force more resource consumption, with the hopeful goal of increasing gem sales. Personally I'll just take longer. I've not yet done any adventures (on vacation and recoverying from last one), but it will be sad if it is now just a "slug" fest. Also as one of the other respondent's put the cost of creating some of units versus their effectiveness is unbalanced (see soldiers vs elite soldiers). I don't have a formula to adjust it, but the cost in terms of time, raw materials for weapons and ale/beer/wine etc should be reviewed.