Enchanting Update

Hi Folks,

TLDR? See the last few lines at the end of the article.

Firstly, thank you as always for your patronage and doing what you do to support us and our development efforts. We are a little unique in terms of our game and platform, in that we are in development (early access) while you all put in the time and effort to play. Because of that, we always do what we can to limit the impact to players with the changes we make to get us moving closer to our vision for the game.

This news article is to announce that we are disabling enchanting as we know it. We appreciate that this will strongly affect those that have invested large amounts of time and effort into it. We have thought long and hard about this particular change, and wanted to share some of the reasons on why it needs to be done.

- The two developers that wrote the system are no longer with us. The complexities of this system mean that it is quite difficult to simply pick up and support/balance ongoing. We've tried multiple times to make this happen, but the fact is it's just too much work. That's why for example you saw Five Star General disabled, but never brought back or otherwise addressed.

- Some of the enchants are wildly imbalancing, and result in trivializing encounters that we don't want trivialized. This means we need to redesign these encounters to suit the enchants, which simply isn't sustainable. (We should be designing enchants to match encounters, not the other way around.)

- Moving toward Britannia we are no longer using LoA monsters and PvE balancing will be scaled toward UO. Enchanting in its current form makes this very difficult to accomplish for us.

- Enchanting in its current state isn't lore friendly and doesn't meet the current team's ongoing vision for the game itself, especially with the impending move to the Britannia map later this year, and the rebasing of everything involved in that process.

- Enchanting in its current form has a fairly significant performance impact on the game. This was one of the primary reasons for disabling Five Star General, which was an extreme case of performance impact.

- Our other, more extreme, alternative to this was an item/gold wipe, which we really wanted to avoid. While the economy is definitely not in a great state due to multiple challenges over the last year or so (yes we are well aware!), we want to avoid any sort of wipe wherever possible.

- We are working very hard on creating new systems which will empower our crafters and player economy, enchanting conflicts with our long term vision for this in its current form.

However, your characters will continue to track what enchants they previously had from 'Enchanting v1.0', and as we move forward and potentially introduce an 'Enchanting v2.0', we will look to make sure that characters that previously put in the time, money and effort are rewarded appropriately. Plans aren't set in stone for this part yet, but we'll share more detail as soon as we can.

Hang on to your enchanting mats too - we will once again look at a way in which we can make these worth something to you.

TLDR?

- Enchanting v1.0 is disabled for the short term. - Enchanting materials will no longer drop off mobs. - Enchanting may return with a v2.0 in the long term. It will be a ground-up redesign/rewrite - Keep your mats, we will look to reward you for that investment and will advise on how we will do that later down the track. - Your character will continue to track what enchants you had from v1.0, and we will also look to reward you for that investment as well. - We have exciting overhauls to the player economy and crafting coming very soon!

Attention Tamers! ZooKeeper will remain active temporarily while we move through this transition.

Thank you once again for your continued participation in our project, and we sincerely hope you'll enjoy everything we have in store in 2020.