Episode Letter to the Players - End of Beta

Ken Troop on the AC2 End of Beta Episode

Greetings!

Hello everyone. I'm Ken Troop, the Turbine Producer for Asheron's Call 2. Ken Karl, the Microsoft AC2 Program Manager, and I are in charge of making sure that Asheron's Call 2: Fallen Kings is the best MMPORPG experience and service that exists now and in the future. Yesterday we unveiled a precursor to the Monthly Episodes, the Beta Event, for your enjoyment.

Normally with each Monthly Episode we'll be releasing a Letter to the Players, in which we explain the reasoning and process behind the changes/features we've made for that month. While we didn't do such a Letter for the Beta Event, we did want to take the time here to discuss what some of our goals for this Beta Event were.

Beta Event

First, exploring content and discovering the stories behind the events in the world is one of the main activities in AC2. The process of discovering, exploring, and ultimately revealing the secrets behind the Vaults is going to be a lot of fun for players. We wanted to build upon that theme in the Beta in several different ways.

The first thing you experience when you log into the world for the first time is a short vignette, a stream of images, text, and sound. The purpose of these vignettes is both to recap the events of the previous Episode, but they also set the stage for the main events in the current Episode.

Next, sometimes there will be a Quest of such importance to the world of Dereth that you will know about it as soon as you enter the world. Of course, even with these Quests, there will still be a lot to discover and explore, but we wanted to make sure that players didn't need to begin their AC2 playing experience by going to a website to discover how to start an important quest.

Finally, we wanted to make a dramatic impact on the environment of the world, so that we could highlight just some of the ways that Dereth may be changing over the months to come. Some of these changes will be set to take place in the interims between the Monthly Episodes. But some will occur directly in response to player activity, and will occur in the middle of the Episode.

In addition to making our story visible and accessible to our players, we also wanted to highlight our ability to introduce new and fresh content into the world on a regular basis. Just like in AC1, we are committed to bringing you new dungeons, new monsters, new items, and even new lands to explore, all as a part of your normal monthly subscription.

For this Beta Event, this content appears in two different avenues of play experiences. One of these avenues is the "Player vs. the Environment" theme. There are three sets of invading armies converging upon Shoushi, each army geared towards a different level range. Each army has its own Invasion General for players to find and fight. There have been some reports of the Generals being in more than one place at the same time, although the strange magic they might be using to accomplish this is unknown. In combating the hordes of invading armies, players will have the opportunity to find powerful weapons that they can use against the invasion.

The second theme is exploring the "Kingdom vs. Kingdom" aspect of AC2. KvK will be a fun and compelling component of play for many of our players and we wanted to introduce elements of KvK in the Beta Event by having players of different Kingdoms fighting over Altars which granted very powerful weapons. However, while we know many of our players enjoy KvK, we also recognize that many of our players prefer their experience in Dereth to be free of any direct PvP activity. Therefore, we designed this Event so that KvK play was purely optional, set aside from the normal landscape of the Event.

So those were the main goals of the Event. In the last day we have received a lot of feedback about players' experiences in the Event. Many of you are having a lot of fun, and we're glad that you're enjoying the Event. Some of you have brought up some very good points about what could have gone better in the Event, and we wanted to address some of the major points:

Kingdom vs. Kingdom Focus?

Many players were concerned about how essential a role KvK will play in the future of AC2. The important point to recognize here is that for the "normal" (i.e., non KvK or FFA worlds), KvK activity will be completely optional and will not impact most players' experiences in their everyday gameplay. We introduced a KvK dynamic in the Beta Event not only because it would help us analyze the PvP systems in general, but also because we thought players who wouldn't normally engage in PvP would enjoy trying it out in the last days of the Beta world.

Player vs. Player Systems

This Event showed us both some flaws in the general PvP systems, as well as problems with our specific implementation of the Beta Event design. Such issues as the power of turrets and portal camping will be addressed in future Episodes soon.

Camping of Invasion Generals

Too often in AC1, players grew frustrated with having to search for potentially long periods of time to find a specific coveted monster or item that randomly spawned. We also know how painful it is to wait in a long line for a specific statically spawned monster. In the Beta Event, we tried to get the best of both worlds by implementing three versions of each Invasion General in the hopes that this would spread out the spawns wide enough so that camping was not an issue. However, we recognize that there are problems with the current dynamic. In our future content design, we will continue to refine this dynamic to ensure an enjoyable experience for all players.

Conclusion

The AC2 teams here at Microsoft and Turbine are committed to providing you, the players, with the most compelling and fun MMPORPG experience possible. We look forward to showing you in the months to come just how exciting the land of Dereth can be. Thank you for playing Asheron's Call 2!