All five heroes are available to play for free this week, through Tuesday, April 19. Log in now to give them a try!

Want to get your first look at the next map we'll be releasing for Survival mode? Join us on Tuesday for Insider Access with lead Survival designer Jerome Jones for a walkthrough and first video, as well as an open Q&A at the end of the show!

Watch Insider Access at http://www.orcsmustdie.tv at 3pm CT on Tuesday!

Attention War Mages:

This morning it was discovered that daily log rewards reset unintentionally for North American players, resetting everyone's progress back to the first day of rewards. The daily login reward schedule is meant to be monthly and was not intended to reset at the beginning of April.

We've updated everyone's log in reward progress to remedy this situation. The next time you log in you'll be granted the day 5 reward (oak chest). If you were logged in this afternoon while the change was made, please log out and then back in.

Thank you for your patience this afternoon while we resolved the issue!

Reminder:

Orcs Must Die! Unchained is currently in Open Beta. We’re listening to you. Please check out our forums and let us know how we can make the game better for you.

War Mages!

With the number of games and new players we have now, we’re getting a lot of actionable data and feedback (thanks). We’ve started tuning.

Matchmaking has generally improved with the last few rounds of changes, but there are some new wrinkles.

In Survival Mode (PvE), we are seeing fast games with players of similar level ranged but also smaller team sizes. This is because we had some aggressive settings there. We’re going to loosen these a bit, allowing the matcher to search for a slightly longer time – this should produce games with full teams more often. (Note that, for survival, we adjust content to suit the number of players, so if you get in game with less than five players, the game will tweak things to suit your party.)

In Siege Mode (PvP), we are seeing far more drops at the hero selection and far more games canceled by a player who does not ready up when a match is found. There’s a problem with removal of players who do not accept matches, meaning that one absentee player cycles through multiple times ruining multiple games – this is getting fixed now and will be live soon.

Some players were apparently trying to complete some of the “play 10 games as” quests and dropping when they didn’t get the correct hero. We’ve since replaced these with a hero neutral “win five games” quest so that that motivation isn’t there. If a player had one of the old quests, it’ll still be valid until they complete it, so this change will take a little while to filter.

Siege was also seeing some good groups of players that were assigned to teams in bad ways. We have changed the algorithm so that it does a better job of creating the fairest possible teams.

On rewards, one of the things we’re seeing (both in numbers and comments) is that some of our rewards aren’t working as intended. In a few places, there are just errors, but in others things aren’t working as we intended. We are tuning this (and please expect more tuning in the weeks to come).

One of our main issues is that there are parts of this that are missing. For example, you don’t have a good way to steer yourself toward rewards with consistent progress (to say “I want this trap, so I’ll do X to earn it”) and you don’t have a way to exchange stuff you don’t want for stuff you do want. Some new parts will be happening, but we’re going to tweak things to improve this while we’re waiting.

One of the big issues right now is the hero chase. We recently eliminated all of the quest rewards except for skulls or rift embers, which is intended to make it easier to earn a hero. We’re also going to adjust early level up rewards to include rift embers so that players can work toward unlocking heroes. (For players who have already leveled up, we’ll be going back and granting the embers you would have earned.)

The hero recipes were also all set to a baseline and had not been adjusted. If you look at the store, you’ll see we offer heroes at different prices but the recipes do not have this same spread. That’s being adjusted and will be in after the next update.

Trap upgrades and parts are in a similar boat – these are also getting a look and I expect tuning there too.

Thanks for playing!

Reminder: this announcement pertains to the North American service only. Please stay tuned for updates to the European service from the Gameforge team!

Attention War Mages:

Thank you all for your feedback and participation in the OMDU open beta! Over the first day, we’ve collected a lot of great data and feedback (thanks). Based on what we’ve been seeing, some changes were rolled out this afternoon at roughly 5 p.m. CST on the North American Service.

Survival Matchmaking
We allow a large span of account levels to match together and the random level selection has freedom to pick maps from above or below the average level of the party. This is causing a number of games where higher level players get matched with lower level players and then end up defending against hordes of orcs far below their level. A lot of players have commented about not feeling challenged when this happens.

• We have lowered the allowed range, which will mean more players of similar levels get matched together.
• We have allowed survival games to match with fewer than five players instead of putting players with very different levels together just to make a five player group. (The difficulty adjusts, so if you get in a three player group, you’re fighting attackers meant for a three player group.)
• We have changed the maps that can be selected to exclude maps below the average party account level. You’ll always get something at or slightly higher than the party’s average account level.

Siege Matchmaking
As far as we can tell, everyone on the planet hates getting games with bots (not the good kind, I mean). We did this, and also had two matchmaking buckets, to try to give new players a better introductory experience. But, what we’re seeing and hearing makes us think we’re doing more harm than good.

We have killed the buckets and the bots along with them and test how this plays out. So (for the time being) -- everyone looking for a siege game will search together and you will never get bots.

Rift Embers
Everyone wants to earn the heroes they don’t have. This requires rift embers. You can get rift embers in a lot of different ways, but only a few of these are guaranteed. That makes working toward a hero frustrating. We have a number of improvements in the works to allow earning materials and such to be more guided but we wanted to get a change in for this quickly.

For now we've dropped all other rewards for the quests aside from skulls and rift embers. There were a lot of other rewards there before – all of them except for skulls and embers will go away. This means that, for heroes, players will always have a guaranteed way to make progress.

This is not ideal or the full solution, but this change can be made right now and will make things better (we hope). Note – if you already have quests, they’ll remain with the old rewards. If you decline these quests(the “x” in the upper right), you’ll get new ones with the skull or ember rewards. (You can only decline one quest per day.)

Thanks again for all of the games, data, feedback, chats,emails, and so on – we’re cranking on a lot of things that will make you happy.

OMDU is currently in Open Beta. We’re listening to you. Please check out our forums and let us know how we can make the game better for you.

Orcs Must Die! Unchained is currently in Open Beta. We’re listening to you. Please check out our forums and let us know how we can make the game better for you.