Game direction and objectives for Regnum Online (2008 version)

[chilko]

Dear Regnum Online players,

We strongly believe that certain aspects of the present and future game need to be put out in the open.

Our game is about to reach a year after commercial launch and to tell you the truth it has been a hard battle for a small team as ours, and as I've said in several ocassions this is probably the project of our lives.
I am here to tell you that we are redoubling our efforts and investing all of our energy (and money too) into game improvements, fixes and to grow this wonderful community.

Since a long time ago we have been debating about how to continue enhancing the game, analyzing it, gathering feedback from the community, talking between us and our partners about how to improve it, to make it more attractive, fullfiling our goals as developers and making the community happier at the same time, studying other games, the market and MMORPG's in general.
I hope you understand that this is a tough process, that takes time and that has its ups and downs.

I would like to explain some of the changes that will come.

Experience curve:

Regnum was designed to be a short game with a level cap. Why? Because the fun part is the realm versus realm aspect and we want the people to get there as quick as possible.

When we released the game with a new business model, we quickly realized that it was too short.

After making a deep analysis on the statistics generated by the game, we came to the conclusion that most players that reach level 50, do it in around 3 or 4 months. In fact, a lot of people has done this in less than a month. For a free game, this is a really short time.
The Experience curve has been modified in a way that it practically doesn't affect the leveling process up to level 30 and is steeper from then on.
The total amount of creatures that you will have to kill from level 1 to 50 has risen only a 15 percent.

Fatigue:

The fatigue mechanism is used by several games to discourage the irrational use of the game and to balance out users that may play several hours per day and those that have less time to play.

For starters, this is not only a commercial subject but a matter of social responsability. We recommend that nobody plays more than 6 hours a day and that every 2 hours a break is taken, as for any other videogame.

From a commercial standpoint, you need to understand that our costumers, the premium users, are usually people that doesn't have that much time to play, hence they buy experience scrolls. Also, it's important to understand that those that play free for 8 hours a day consume broadband resulting in higher costs.

Among other games that use this mechanism you may find World of Warcraft and StarWars Galaxies.

More attractive premium content

In NGD we pay close attention to recommendations made by the community in regards to Premium content. But, you must understand that this type of decisions require a deeper knowledge in terms of sale statistics, difficulties to develop certain features and what really works in the market.

The mastery scroll and the 200% booster were added due to them being the most demanded items.
Paints and dyes will ofer players the possibility of customizing their avatars and making them unique.
We hope that this feature is welcomed by the community being that it took us months of work and tuning.

Limits to the powers reset feature (Next version)

Regnum was never designed so that the characters would be able to change their setup on the fly. In fact, this generates a great unbalance among the
classes, due to some setups being better for "leveling", some better fit for hunting and others better for the war.

The idea of any MMORPG is that you have to be careful when assigning your points and that if you want the easy way you will get a weaker character at the end, but if you put more effort into it you will get a better PvP character.

The community got used so much to this "feature" (which sole purpose is to test spells and as a debug tool) that we cannot eliminate it completely, thus we are going to keep it in a limited form and unlimited as an item premium.

The details are not yet defined but we are making sure that everyone will be notified of this and all current users will receive this new premium item in gratitous form (with several uses) when we implement this new system.

Other features that we have in mind for this year

• Improvements in the PvP penalties/awards system (includes premium items).
• Improvements to the mounts system.
• New special creatures with magical powers.
• PvP oriented quests.
• Enhancements to the Realm versus Realm system (give purpose to the fort capture).
• Treasure system (War zone exploration).
• New premium items (gift box, lucky charm, etc)
• Invasions system.
• and last but not least, the source of the Xymerald will be revealed in a terrifying way.

I hope you are as excited as we are on this new stage and that you will accompany us as you did so far.

Best regards,

- Chilko