2 weeks vacation

This entry is going to be pretty short:

Today we (Roja and me) will be going over to Romania for a small vacation.
Being a vacation, I don't really plan to do much work, but I should be online every once in a while, depending on how good our mobile internet connection will be.
I do however plan to do some design work, especially with the astrology system, and some other stuff that I will talk about later.

If anything interesting happens, I'll try to post it here.

Astrology in EL

A few weeks ago, I came up with the idea of adding an astrology system in EL. I didn't start implementing it yet,and in fact I didn't even fully design it. I will do that on the plane, on my way to Romania for a 2 weeks vacation.

This is how it will work:
Every player in the game will be assigned a random star sign. I am not sure how many star signs there will be, probably 12. Those signs will be unique, not using any existing horoscope.

Players will not know what sign they are, unless if they go to some astrologer NPC that tells them, for a fee. That NPC will also (for a fee) tell you how the next week is going to be for you, from an astrolgical point of view.

There will be a number of planets; the number is yet to be determined, but probably around 7 or so. One of them will be the planet where everyone lives, and the other planets will influence some activity. For example, one planet will influence the defense, one will influence the chance to get rare items while you manufacture things, and so on.
Each planet will orbit around the sun at a different speed, just like in the real life.
Depending on the angle between the planet everyone lives on and the planet that influences a certain activity, and the star sign of the individual, a chance will be computed for each action.
I might even implement a moon, and the phase of the moon will weaken or strengthen the effect.

This whole thing will require a lot of math (especially trigonometry), so I'll make sure to bring some formulas with me on the plane, as I won't have internet access during the plane trip.

New invasions

Last year I implemented the automatic invasion system.
Most people enjoy it, but it's been pretty boring, with only one invasion route.
The system was designed to be easley upgradable, to allow multiple routes, randomly selected by the server. Unfortunately, until now, I didn't really have time to add more routes.

This has changed now. Today I spent most of my day by adding alternate routes, so now most of the important first continent maps are covered by invasions.
The continent two invasions will be even more interesting, but I won't give any details here. You will have to experience them :)

And now a little about an idea of mine that would give some limited invasion control to the players.
What I am thinking about is to have some "invasion stones", that are basically some sort of 'eggs' that players can place wherever they want, with some exceptions.
Then the eggs hatch, in a random time interval, ranging from 30 minutes to 300 minutes. When they hatch, monsters spawn.
There will be a few different egg types, each spawning a different monster. The quantity of eggs will be limited per day, to prevent abuse.
I am not done yet with the details, when I'll decide how exactly it will work, I'll post about it on our forums.

The PK top implemented

In my last post, I was talking about implementing a PK score, and a PK top as a measure to make PKing more fun/rewarding. Of course, this is not the only measure I plan to do, this is only one of them.

Now, the original idea was that each time someone is PKed, he would lose a point, and their adversary would gain one. Then some people came up with the idea of having an asymmetric system, where someone would lose more (or less) points than someone would win, depending on their previous PK score. Under this system, someone with a high score killing someone with a low score would not gain as many points.

Eventually, trollson came up with an even better formula, and some graphs too.
Since his formula was simple but elegant, it got implemented and tested. No one had any objections, so it's now the official formula, on the main server.

Now, another idea that I came up with.
Many people are complaining about the fact that since the rostogol stones were implemented (which cause you not to lose items when you die), the PK has never been the same. Other people were complaining about the cooldowns on using items, saying that after that has been implemented, people stopped PKing as much.

So I am willing to 'fix' those issues, by having a map where there are no cooldowns, and where the rostogol stones do not work. I am really curious if this will be a popular map or not.