Devblog: Changes to Temporal Anomalies 2022-05-09 15:00

A Calm Look Back at the Story So Far

Our original intention in introducing this system three years ago was to replace the old system of Stars (which players could see by mousing over a group of monsters) with a dynamic system. This system was intended to limit overharvesting in certain territories – and by extension, to limit overgeneration of XP and loot – while also increasing the attractiveness of certain territories that normally drew fewer players. Unfortunately, we haven't been satisfied with the impact that the anomalies have had on the game. After conducting long investigations in the forum, watching lots of gameplay videos, and analyzing data collected with our internal tools, we've identified a number of major problems with the current system:

• The penalties had only a very minor impact on overharvested territories. Other loot-boosting systems provided an easy way to counteract these penalties (lookin' at you, Idols!). Worse yet, the penalties ultimately only affected the players who were at the same level as the territories in question – in other words, the players who weren't as likely to overharvest their content in the first place.
• The less commonly harvested territories constantly offered very high bonuses. This led to overgeneration of resources, which inevitably resulted in imbalances to the economy on certain servers.
• Certain anomalies remained open for days at a time (and this was all the more striking with low-level anomalies). This was also indicative of players' lack of interest in fights against anomaly guardians.
• Anomalies appeared very often in the same territories.
• Certain steps in the process of creating a legendary pet made it very difficult to access this level of optimization (we'll come back to this in more detail in a minute).

 

So what's changing specifically?

Changes to territory bonuses/penalties

Loot and XP penalties have been removed.
The bonuses provided by anomalies in different territories will increase or decrease in a passive and cyclical way every hour. The changes to these bonuses will be driven by player activity in each territory. The less a territory is harvested, the faster its bonus will increase; conversely, the more it is harvested, the slower the bonus will increase. Note that if the level of harvesting gets too high, the bonus can decrease all the way down to 0%.
To make the system easier to understand, we've decided to remove map-specific bonuses. There will now be just one bonus for the entire territory. Likewise, the dungeon bonuses will be linked to the bonuses for the territory where each dungeon is located.
 

Changes to Anomalies

We're changing our approach so that anomalies will now appear in underharvested territories with a big bonus (+90%). We've set things up so that anomalies won't always appear in the same territories or at the same level ranges.

• An anomaly will now remain open for 2 hours, after which it will close.
• Fights against Anomaly Guardians can be repeated as many times as you like.
• Guardians are now level 200, regardless of the level of the territory in which the anomaly appears.
• The Uchronic Elixir is now divided into three consumables with effects of different strengths (Uchronic Elixir, Improved Uchronic Elixir and Major Uchronic Elixir), and three all-new recipes have been created for the occasion! These consumables will allow players to increase their chances of obtaining certain resources in fights against an anomaly guardian, in exchange for an increase in difficulty. In addition, they can be used in a territory affected by a Temporal Anomaly in order to obtain new loot and XP bonuses.
• The amount of loot and XP bonuses, the power bonuses granted to enemies, and the duration of the consumables' effects will depend on the type of Uchronic Elixir the player consumes.

 

Anomaly's effects on the territory and its dungeon

• XP and loot bonuses increase to 150% as long as the anomaly is open. They remain the same for the entire duration of the anomaly.
• When the anomaly closes, its bonus continues to apply for another 30 minutes within the territory.
• Once these 30 minutes have passed, the bonus is reset to 0% and returns to its cyclic progression.
• We've changed how characteristics bonuses are assigned to monsters in an area when a Temporal Anomaly is open: There are now three variants activated when a player consumes a Uchronic Elixir.
• Monsters in the area become aggressive for the entire duration of a Temporal Anomaly, regardless of the player's level.
• For those who prefer to keep things chill, we've introduced a new consumable that allows you to go unnoticed by these ferocious creatures: the "Repellent Potion".

To sum it all up in one sentence, we wanted Anomalies to be interesting opportunities for you to seize when they appear, rather than a constraining system that's ineffective and restrictive for players.
 

What About Our Pets?

The legendary pet system has also gotten an overhaul! This system turned out to have certain defects that we felt it was essential to correct.
We noticed a huge imbalance between the different legendary powers: certain powers were completely neglected, while others had their hour of glory thanks to synergies provided by other spells and items. This is why nearly all of the legendary powers have been overhauled to make them more attractive as a whole. While this improvement is still only accessible to a small part of the community, we hope that you'll develop an interest in using these various powers, whether it's to complement your favorite exotic equipment, to make gameplay a bit more enjoyable in monster fights, or to counter a certain type of commonly recurring gameplay in your Kolossium battles.
Also, the presence of various imbalances in the recipes for the Babyhemoth Reflection and the different quintessences encouraged us to go ahead and modify not just the legendary powers, but also a good number of the recipes and the way that items are used to improve your pets:

• First of all, crafting a quintessence used to be very expensive, and the random aspect of the system forced players to make multiple attempts to obtain the desired power. The result was a massive increase in the kama cost of any legendary pet with a particular power.
• In addition, when a player wanted to trade one at a Marketplace, they were forced to put the pet with the legendary power up for sale. We felt that this was an inconvenient way to have to do things, and we decided to change it to give players more freedom.
• Previously, you had to use the quintessence on your pet to learn what power would be applied to it; this could become a source of frustration when it led to obtaining an interesting power on the wrong type of pet.
• The criteria for obtaining the "Time Loop" and "Timeless Loop" resources needed to craft all quintessences were not explained clearly enough, which made it very difficult for players to acquire these items.
• Unlike the recipes for legendary equipment, these recipes required two distinct legendary resources (available from chests in the Well of Infinite Dreams at a very low drop rate) in order to obtain a legendary pet with a power.

 

Changes to the legendary pet system

• The criteria for obtaining the "Time Loop" and "Timeless Loop" resources have been removed.
• Change to "Babyhemoth Legend": this resource has been renamed to "Babyhemoth Relic" and is no longer available in chests in the WID, but is instead dropped at a very low rate by Temporal Anomaly Guardians. Players can increase its drop rate for 5 fights by consuming a Major Uchronic Elixir. The other two tiers of Uchronic Elixir have no effect on the drop rate for this resource.
• It is now possible to obtain a pet's legendary power in the form of a tradable item:
  • Introduction of new items which each contain one of the legendary powers: "infused croquettes" (infused bwork croquette, infused arachnee croquette, etc.)
  • The quintessence is now a consumable/chest which, once used, gives the player the infused croquette with the specific effect (chosen at random based on the type of quintessence). The infused croquette can then be given to the legendary pet, or it can be traded instead.
• It's essential to minimize the impact of this mechanic on the PvP experience for players from levels 60 to 199. This is why we're adding a prerequisite for pets with the "legendary" status, which will now require that the character be level 200 before they can be equipped.
• Changes to multiple recipes.

 

Reboot the loot!

As you surely know, DOFUS is currently suffering from overgeneration of the resources won by players at the end of their fights against the various monsters in the game. If we didn't take the opportunity to deal with this issue as part of our revision of the anomalies and the bonuses that go with them, these bonuses would simply be added to the existing ones, which would only further reinforce the overgeneration problem and all of its negative impacts on the in-game economy. So our goal at this point is to revitalize the economy by trying to clean up the loot system as much as possible. We'll now share some changes being made to the loot system, and we look forward to your feedback. Your comments, opinions and criticisms are very important to us – after all, this system is one of the cornerstones of the game, so it's essential that we take your feedback into account!

First of all, here are the various issues we've identified with the current system:

• A so-called "rare" drop rate may not be rare at all, since the various stackable bonuses are all multiplied together. As a result, certain "rare" resources can become very easy to obtain once loot bonuses have been optimized to a certain level. For example, resources with a basic drop rate of 1% may wind up with an actual drop rate of 40% or higher.
• While this effect is less critical for so-called "common" resources, which start with higher basic drop rates to make them more accessible, they can still end up being overgenerated as well.
• As mentioned earlier, this leads to an imbalance in the generation/destruction cycle, which has a negative impact on the economy of many servers.
• Certain counterbalancing factors linked to these bonuses can be easily avoided.

In light of this situation, there were a number of different principles that we felt we should keep, add or improve:

• Encourage players to optimize their characters and their performance to increase their chances of obtaining various resources.
• Diversify the optimization options.
• Reduce the cases of excessive bonus stacking that have a harmful impact on the economy, but without completely changing the way people are used to playing.
• Also encourage people to diversify the range of territories they target. More diverse and balanced resource generation means a healthier in-game economy.

First and foremost, we need to distinguish the two types of bonuses that affect drop rates in the game. On the one hand, there are the so-called "controllable" bonuses, like Idols and Prospecting; on the other, we have the "uncontrollable" bonuses like Almanax, Challenges, Temporal Anomalies or Shield. Controllable bonuses allow players to optimize their characters for resource acquisition. Each player can make their own decisions on whether or not to use these tools. Uncontrollable bonuses, meanwhile, are partially random, and therefore do not depend entirely on an explicit player decision.

Controllable bonuses represent 50 to 90% of the total bonus value applied to drop rates. We believe that these bonuses are too heavily weighted, so we want to slightly reduce their influence on the formula to something closer to 50%. An unfortunate side effect of weighting controllable bonuses too heavily in the calculation of drop rates is that uncontrollable bonuses lose much of their importance. If players can simply ignore uncontrollable bonuses with no real impact, we lose an important tool for encouraging them to regularly switch up the territories they target.

Another important point is that the bonus provided by Idols is the only one affected by the difference between the player's level and the monster's level. We will now be extending this approach to Prospecting and Uchronic Elixir bonuses as well. Being at a higher level than the monsters you choose to fight gives you an advantage, so it's fairly easy to "sacrifice" equipment in favor of Prospecting. At any given level of optimization, of course, a player who's close to the monsters' level will have a better chance of acquiring resources than a player at a higher level than the monsters they fight.

Here are a few examples of how resource drops would work before and after these changes to the formula:

Examples for a level 200 player with Prospecting 250 and an Idol score of 180:

For now, this is all purely HYPOTHETICAL.

 

Other steps

At this point, you may be wondering why we didn't just change the Idols and/or the loot drop formula.

The first reason is that we can't go changing everything at once. To get a bit of perspective and be sure we're making the right choices, we need to give the economy time to adapt to our actions, and we need your feedback on the results. The other reason is that we have deeper changes in mind for these two systems. Considering how important they are, we think it's essential to keep you involved in the process as much as we can.

Therefore, we'll now present the changes we're planning as a way of sounding out your thoughts on this first draft of our current plans.

Idols

The Idols system has been controversial for a long time. This feature has not entirely achieved the results we originally intended, and that's wound up hurting the in-game economy. But while Idols haven't worked all that well in practice, the intentions behind it were laudable:

• Provide an alternative to Prospecting and Wisdom for character progression.
• Offer a fun system to adjust the difficulty from one fight to the next.
• Incentivize risk-taking through increased rewards.
• Provide a way to increase rewards without compromising on characters' effectiveness.

Some of these points have worked out as intended, like offering an alternative to Prospecting and Wisdom. Others… maybe not so much. Over time, we realized that the intended increase in difficulty wasn't actually working. It's too easy to set up a combination of Idols that doesn't interfere with a character's fight strategy. To take one typical example, a character who faces their enemies in close combat can equip a Kyoub/Yosh/Dynamo combination to make ranged monsters more dangerous. In this situation, the character's existing strategy doesn't change, but they still get the increased drop bonus.

There are also problems that make it unclear and difficult for players to understand how Idols are supposed to work, especially when they start playing in groups. Another issue is the many incompatibilities (necessary though they may be) that require players to change their Idol combination when they move to a different territory.

Here are the major categories of improvements we have in mind:

• Change and simplify the Idols' effects so that they can't be easily worked around.
• Remove the different types of Idols (Minor, "Normal", Major, and Masterly), as well as group Idols, to bring more clarity to the system. The mechanics of these Idols would stay the same, but the concept of a distinct category of group Idols could go away.
• Eliminate as many incompatibilities as possible between monsters and Idols. To maximize the diversity of the fights available to you, we'll need to avoid asking you to switch up your Idols every time you change territories.
• Going further, we may even look at linking Idols more closely to temporal anomalies. Idols would still be usable throughout the World of Twelve, but they would become more effective and profitable when used in anomalies and in territories subject to anomalies.

Loot formula

We've already explained the changes we hope to make to the loot drop system. We'll keep an eye on the consequences, but be aware that we're looking at different paths forward that will make fundamental changes to the system in order to resolve the following issues:

• A so-called "rare" drop rate may not actually be rare at all.
• Common loot can often be obtained at a 100% drop rate once players have reached a certain level of optimization.

First of all, we are making a change to all the resource drop rates available from monsters in the game. Each basic drop rate will be associated with a second drop rate that represents its maximum allowed value. For example, a resource with a 10% basic drop rate would have a maximum drop rate of 55%, or another resource with a 4% basic rate would have a maximum of 23%. Of course, these values are only presented as examples.

Next, a new characteristic will be added to the game: Speculation. This characteristic varies from 0 to 100, and increases with the character's accumulated drop bonuses. The idea is to add up the Idol score, Prospecting, Temporal Anomaly territory bonuses, Almanax and the territory control bonus (via Alliances). These bonuses are then converted into fixed Speculation points: for example, a 50% challenge in the current system would grant 50 Speculation points, or a 90% territory bonus would grant 90 Speculation points.

The goal with this new characteristic is to group the various drop bonuses into a single indicator that's simpler and clearer for you.

This characteristic goes up and down dynamically based on the character's bonuses. The more bonuses you accumulate, the higher your Speculation will be. However, it will take more and more bonuses to reach the maximum value (diminishing returns). Speculation will then determine the drop rate for each resource at the end of a fight. The higher its value is, the closer your final drop rate will be to the maximum value set for each resource.

For those of you with a taste for numbers, here's one possible formula with a concrete example. Suppose your character has 50 Speculation and wants to pick up a resource with a basic drop rate of 10% and a maximum rate of 55%.
Here's the formula:

• Rate_basic+((Rate_max-Rate_basic)*Speculation/100).

In our example, this would work out to 10+((55-10)*50/100) → 10+((45)*0.5) → 10+22.5 → 32.5.

The final drop rate would therefore be 32.5%.

If we do go ahead with putting these types of changes in place, it will of course be necessary to review the base rates for certain resources accordingly. Our goal is not to artificially reduce your winnings or increase the time you spend in-game. To maintain a "healthy" balance, rare resources (currently 1%) might increase to 5% (with a maximum of 28.7%). Similarly, common resources (10%) might increase to 20% (with a maximum of 100%).

This system could give us a way to balance resource generation in the game – on the one hand, by maintaining a non-trivial advantage for characters who are more invested in the game, and on the other hand, by providing easier access to resources for the least optimized characters. It would also make it easier to understand what you can expect to get from fighting various monsters in-game, and how the different bonuses interact. We would also make UI changes along these same lines.

If you've made it this far, thanks for your persistence! We hope we've been clear about our intentions, and that our planned short-term or long-term changes seem appropriate to you. We're looking forward to reading your thoughts in the comments, so fire up your keyboards and we'll see you there!

[Sabbo] & [Kahl]