Duelling Changes

[Diggo11]

G'day everyone,

As you might be aware, duelling is an aspect of the game we have not been entirely happy with recently. This breaks down into two parts: the result calculations and the increasing spread of zero motivation duellers compared to experience duellers. Due to popular demand, today I am pleased to announce an upcoming update to address this second problem.

Where previous updates have attempted to solve this problem by adding disincentives or restrictions to zero motivation duelling, this next update instead tackles the imbalance between zero motivation and experience duelling. It is heavily based on community feedback, especially from beta testers who contributed in our previous discussions.

So without further ado, here are the planned changes:

• Duelling levels will be capped at four hundred and fifty.
  
  
  Once your duelling level reaches 450, it will no longer continue to rise. Like the ordinary level cap at 150, you will continue to receive duelling experience after you reach the duelling level cap, contributing to your duel ranking. This will allow high level experience duellers to challenge a broader range of targets across the world, so they are not limited to a needlessly small pool of possible targets.​
  
  
• Losing a duel will deduct a third of the duel experience you would have gained for winning.
  
  
  For example, Player A defeats Player B. If Player B had won, he would have gained 90 regular experience and 30 duel experience. For losing, he gains no regular experience and loses 10 duel experience. This will prevent duel levels from increasing exponentially to the detriment of experience duellers, who are then exposed to other duellers with far greater skill and attribute points. It will also ensure non-duellers retain a duel level around their character level.
  
  Please note that the duel rankings will continue to be based on all time duel experience, excluding accrued losses. In other words, this change has no effect on the duel rankings.​
  
  
• Active characters with no duel initiated in the past forty five days will lose 1% of their current duel experience each week.
  
  
  Once a week, characters who have not had a duel as challenger in the past 45 days (30 on beta) will lose 1% of their duel experience, provided they are still active. This will slowly decay the duel level of former experience duellers who reskill to play a different aspect of the game.​
  
  
• Duel motivation will never fall below 1%.
  
  
  When your PvP duel motivation falls to 1%, it will not decrease further and never reach 0%. You will still be able to duel without restriction. Over a period of years, this will gradually raise the duel level of zero motivation duellers on older worlds.​
  
  
• Job knockouts will no longer afford duel protection.
  
  
  If you are knocked out from job damage, you will no longer receive 48 hours of duel protection. This is to balance the effects of splitting PvP and PvE duel motivation and increasing the lowest possible PvP duel motivation.​

These changes will debut on the public beta with the next update, likely late this week or early next week. We hope you like them and enjoy testing them. Please feel free to share your thoughts in our feedback thread in the updates review forum.

Keep being the best and testing The West!

Diggo

 

[Diggo11]

Please excuse the slight delay to the update. We have made the following additional changes:

• Duel protection will be extended to seventy two hours.
  
  
  If you are knocked out in a duel, other players will not be able to challenge you for 72 hours instead of 48 hours.​
  
  
• Duel protection will be cancellable after twenty four hours by challenging another player at a reduced cost.
  
  
  Once the first 24 hours of your duel protection has elapsed, targets will reappear in the duel menu and be available to challenge. Challenging a target costs only 1 energy point instead of 12 and cancels your duel protection immediately, allowing other players to duel you in return.​

Furthermore, we have increased the minimum PvP duelling motivation and duelling experience rate of decay from 1% to 3%.

Watch this space for a release announcement!

 

[Diggo11]

These changes have been updated onto Alamogordo! Please note that Enewetak was also updated, however the mission is slightly different there: to check our disable flags are working correctly, so no changes slip through to live worlds before we are ready. Happy testing!

 

[Diggo11]

With the next update, the duelling changes will arrive on Enewetak too.