Oct 27, 2021

NosTale - Anime MMORPG - [CM] Daveius GF

Tiny spideys are creeping in, more and more of them.
‘Where could they all be coming from?’ you ask aghast.
You answer the door, and find a cheeky pumpkin grinning back.
What’s this gloomy mood that has overcome you?
You check your calendar and see the date.
It’s the end of October. Time to celebrate: Halloween!

Get ready: from 27/10 to 10/11 NosVille and Port Alveus will be decked out in eerie Halloween decorations and the mad Professor Macavity, Foxy and Jack O’Lantern will be causing all sorts of creepy mayhem in NosTale! An additional quest, a Halloween costume and a title with powerful effects are also waiting for you!

Your new creepy costume

Give friends and enemies a good scare: during the event period, the Plague Doctor/Nurse Costume will be available in the NosMall.

When you use an attack skill while wearing this eerie outfit, you have an 8% probability of receiving a 10-second healing effect which restores your HP by 5% of the damage dealt (maximum of 1,500 HP per skill). You also benefit from a 20% increase in champion experience and an additional +1 movement speed.

The Cursed 13

Talk to Mary in NosVille to start the quest and earn yourself a new title by successfully completing all three Halloween raids 13 times! The ‘Monstrous’ title gives you a 2% chance of triggering ‘Horror’ when you attack.

Titles with powerful effects

In reward for each of the three Halloween raids there is one of these titles in the raid box:

Test Subject: Increases resistance to Bleeding by 1%.
Sly Dog: Increases max. MP by 300.
Horror: Deals greater damage to low-level undead monsters by 3%.

Mad Professor Macavity

The mad genius feline is back! Rally 7 players around you and start the raid. Two of the eight players will be transformed into Professor Macavity and the Test Subject. Let the hunt begin!
Full details on the raid:

Mad Professor Macavity’s Raid Seal drops in Foxy and Jack O’Lantern’s raids.
The raid can only be attempted 5 times per day. There are however reset tickets.
Exactly 8 players are needed to start the raid.
Players who want to play must bring a pet.
Professor Macavity can drag the Test Subject to him. Both need to work together to capture enemies.
Only the hunted players can open boxes during the raid and receive handy items for the chase.
Hunters can freeze opponents for a short time.
Before hunted players can leave the raid, they must find a key in one of the boxes.
The hunters must prevent the hunted from leaving the raid. For each player caught, the hunters earn a raid box. Caught players leave the raid without a box.
If a hunted player leaves the raid successfully, they earn a raid box.
White Witch Laurena’s Wand appears if the hunted player with the wand is caught.

Foxy and Her Brood

Challenge Foxy and her sneaky brood in the raid! Use Foxy’s Raid Seal to confront her. If you’re successful, you’ll earn her Wonder Chest in reward. With a little luck it might contain Foxy’s Specialist Partner Card!Foxy is a raid boss with super skills, as well as being a new partner. Tame her and she’ll be your loyal companion forever!

The raid seals can be picked up in daily quests. Plus you can earn more rewards by collecting flasks.

Jack O’Lantern and His Minions

Defeat the evil pumpkin Jack O’Lantern in the raid! He’s supported by his Pumpkin Bushi and Pumpkin Bomb minions. In reward for victory, you can claim a Halloween raid box.Amongst others you can pick up a Glowing Pumpkin Hat and creepy Tarot Cards from the raid box in this event.

Daily quests from NosVille NPCs

Talk to Eric, Eva Energy, Malcolm Mix and Teoman Topp and pick up handy items in the Trick or Treat Quests! For example, you can get Yellow and Black Pumpkin Sweets, the Halloween Blessing, a Glowing Pumpkin Hat or a Halloween Costume Scroll. Playing the quests will also get you Bags of Sweets which can be exchanged for Jack O’Lantern’s raid seal.

Defeating monsters causes them to drop goodies like Yellow and Black Pumpkin Sweets. You can either gobble them down, or exchange them for a Halloween Costume Scroll or a raid seal for Jack O’Lantern.
Don your new Glowing Pumpkin Hat! You’ll be sure to set a new trend in the village! You can get the deadly smart headgear from the Halloween Horror Box or the raid box.
Halloween Costume Scroll: Transform into 10 different creepy critters which you know from the game. The new costume gives you 4x attack power and 2x defence power.

Wishing you tons of spooky fun,
The NosTale Team

Oct 26, 2021

Developer Diary: Tier 1-6 Rebalance Questions

Armored Warfare - Silentstalker

Commanders!

One of the hottest topics of the past days and weeks has been the Tier 1 to 6 rebalance and today, we’d like to tell you more about as well as explain ourselves regarding some of our actions and design choices.

The Tier 1 to 6 set of changes follows the same rules and subscribes to the same philosophy as the previous high-Tier adjustments. There were issues in the earlier game balance that we specifically wanted to address. These issues included:

Power creep between Tiers
Expected versus real armor behavior (also known as “the indicator was green, why didn’t I penetrate the armor?”)

The first issue seems obvious enough, but the second one might not be. The armor models of Armored Warfare were – or are – quite complex. This led to a large number of situations where the penetration indicator, which works like a beam, would target one small polygon where penetration was possible, but the actual shell would hit somewhere else – a different polygon with a different thickness that would bounce the shell off. In other words, you saw the green reticle, fired and the shell would bounce off. To address this issue, we simplified the armor model significantly – this is the “weird armor” you’ve been seeing in the Armor Inspector, but we’ll say more about that below.

We’ve been working on this concept for a very long time and somewhere along the line, we realized there were compromises we’d have to make.

One of the most important compromises was that of “realism”. There are other tank games on the market that either claim realism, or have at least started that way. From them arose a certain set of paradigms that apply to you as our community even though there’s no particular reason to do so save for legacy perceptions. A few examples include:

Poor armor of the Sherman
Leopard 1 should have very thin armor in absolute numbers
T-55 has 100mm thick frontal plate

And so on. We are aware that breaking such informal “rules” feels “wrong” to the community, even though, from our perspective, there’s no particular reason to adhere to them. We broke them already on higher Tiers, although there it wasn’t that visible – nobody knows how effective the depleted Uranium kit of an Abrams is (and for the record, please don’t leak any military documents to tell us).

Our concern is that of gameplay – the game has to be fun first and foremost, and any notions of realism come as a bonus. After all – realism? One of our most successful skins makes your tank look like half-ghost and half-octopus. In other words, we decided to ditch pretty much all realistic armor values and adhere to what we feel is the best for gameplay.

That’s not to say this all went without problems. There are issues that we still definitely need to address (the total firepower dominance of the M51 being a good example) but overall, the update went roughly as intended. However, ever since the launch, we’ve been bombarded with questions and today, we’d like to answer the most popular ones.

Why do all MBTs have the same armor layout?

This is a tough one because we knew this wouldn’t be popular with a certain group of players. The basic idea was this – statistically, typical gameplay against MBTs were two vehicles facing each other while standing and moving their guns left and right, up and down, searching for a “green” weakspot. Whoever finds one first, typically wins.

Our goal was to shift the gameplay focus from weakspot searching to:

Positioning on the battlefield
Proper shell type selection

To do that, we had to come up with an overall armor concept that would fit the following requirements:

MBTs shouldn’t have easily targetable frontal weakspots at mid-to-long ranges in order to be able to push forward without being immediately destroyed by long-range fire
MBTs shouldn’t have frontal weakspots their players can’t compensate for by playing, which is why we turned the lower frontal plates into weakspots since they can be hidden behind obstacles or by angling your tank
MBTs should be able to fight each other at any distance and with any standard Tier difference (that is, 2 Tiers), which is why the lowest part of the lower frontal plate is typically vulnerable to any tank gun of any Tier the MBT can face in battle under normal circumstances
MBT side armor should be vulnerable to medium and large caliber guns at any distance, but should be resistant to autocannons (we are currently reviewing the autocannons and preparing some changes, so take this point with a grain of salt) – either way, the idea here was to make fire support or sniper-style vehicles effective against MBTs when positioned right and to make flanking a viable tactic

Furthermore, we wanted to make all standard shell types viable in various situations. In the new meta gameplay, shell switching is important, which is why we gave the ability to switch shell types to pretty much all vehicles. As for the specific shell types:

APFSDS (Kinetic): Universal shell type effective at shorter ranges in any battle
HESH: Specific shell type that doesn’t deal as much damage, but is effective against sharply angled armor, including upper frontal plate, and can therefore penetrate areas kinetic shells cannot
HEAT (Shaped Charge): Deals roughly 30 percent more damage across the board than kinetic shells but can rarely penetrate frontal armor, best used against MBT side armor or light targets
HEAT-MP: Deals roughly 10 percent less damage than standard HEAT, but can deal minimum damage upon non-penetration, making it not only effective against side armor and light vehicles, but also against stationary MBTs in defensive positions that would normally be invulnerable to your fire
HE (High Explosive): Deals much, much more damage than standard kinetic shells but has the lowest penetration values of all shell types. Usable against very light targets, vehicle rear areas, but also to flush out MBTs in defensive positions thanks to its ability to deal damage upon non-penetration

We also wanted to underline the differences between various classes. The result is the model you can see in the game right now. Yes, all MBTs have their lower frontal plates turned into weakspots, which is not historically accurate, but supports our vision of intended gameplay.

Why does the Leopard 1 MBT have so thick armor (and why are there other strange armor layouts)?

Yes, we do know the Chieftain armor doesn’t look that way on the inside, or that it’s missing its pike nose. We also know the Leopard armor looks differently. All these changes were designed to make armor performance more predictable and for all MBTs to adhere to the gameplay changes described above. We tried to preserve at least the general MBT styles – as such, the Leopard is the least armored of other MBTs of its Tier.

With that being said, there are some armor layouts that perhaps do not have the intended values. We are looking into them right now.

What about the autocannons?

As also stated above, we wanted to protect the MBT class from long-range autocannon fire. Unfortunately, in the process, we discovered that autocannon vehicles can no longer engage MBTs effectively, even at close distances. We are working at the moment to fix this.

Why does the same shell have a higher penetration or damage on Tier 1-6 than it does on Tier 7-10?

In short, this is a bug. It came to be since the Tier 7 to 10 rebalance process was for all intents and purposes separate from the Tier 1 to 6 one, which, as you know, came later. During the latter’s implementation, there was some friction between the two and we will fix any such inconsistencies as soon as possible.

Why did the Type 62 become an MBT?

Because we needed one more MBT on Tier 1 and of all the existing vehicles, the Type 62 LT was the best candidate since it kind of is a mini-Type 59. Now, you might be asking, why didn’t we just replace it with the Type 59? The answer is, that would create more issues than it was worth. We’d have to either completely replace the Type 62 (removing it from the game), or we’d be left with another legacy vehicle (like the PT-76) that serves no practical purpose, nobody would play it (as nobody plays the PT-76) but would represent more “dead weight” in a time when the costs of game development are at an all-time high.

On the other hand, we do recognize that the Type 62 has a completely wrong model anyway, but we need that MBT on Tier 1 for player acquisition reasons, so would you rather have us replace it with the Type 59? Let us know.

The same really goes for Rooikat 76. It’s a fire support vehicle, which typically translates into a Tank Destroyer in our game. That’s why we changed its class.

As for the rest...

Let’s get real. We do hear your feedback and recognize some things didn’t go as intended. There are bugs that we are still working on – 120mm AMX-40 low damage, insane damage output of the M-51, some Tier 1-6 tanks having more armor than a Tier 10 MBT. We’ll get them fixed in the near future.

And yes, this article should have been rolled out earlier. For all that, we apologize. Right now, the best thing we can do is pay attention to the lessons we’ve learned in the future features we are working on right now, such as the autocannon overhaul or in making armor more diverse.

We hope that you’ll stay with us and, as always:

See you on the battlefield!