Eternia: Battlegrounds

Today's update has a bit more than I expected and that's a good thing, the first one being the PVP bounty event.

PVP Bounty Event

Every 20-40 minutes, if the game has more than 4 people online the game will pick the player with the most PVP kills and assign them as a bounty, which will mark them with an indicator and notify the world. When a person is a bounty they can be attacked by anyone with PVP mode enabled anywhere in the world, regardless of safety of the region, they can also attack anyone. They can be attacked regardless of whether they have PVP mode enabled. If a bounty logs out another one will be picked.

A sneaky dungeon

The next thing I snuck in was the first dungeon and related quests. It's nothing fantastic, and it's not an instanced dungeon, or even a closed dungeon. Regular players probably noticed the addition of the Grub Cave recently, this cave has been turned into a dungeon (well, it was already a dungeon, this just makes it proper), with keys and locked doors, and an ultimate goal to reach.

Quests can now also require specifically leveled monsters be killed now, I'll probably update existing quests to make use of this at some point, but for now only the new ones do.

The future...

I'd also like to discuss a bit of my plans for the future, now that there's quite a bit of combat content to be had I've got a lot of requests for things to do when you're not killing things, and while these things were planned from the get-go, the numerous requests for it have pushed it ahead on the list a bit.

So I've spent the last few days talking with players on what types of things they want and how they'd like them implemented and we've settled on a few non-combat skills that will work a lot like the existing spells/skills where you spend points to buy skills to utilize.

There will be a core set of skills for falling under two main branches, "Crafting", and "Gathering".

Crafting will contain skills such as brewing potions and creating equipment, and whatever else falls under the umbrella of generating new items for other players or yourself to utilize.

Gathering will be your general stuff like lumber-jacking, mining, farming, etc... With each subsequent skill down the tree being improved materials to gather, which can be used to create better and better stuff using the increasingly improving crafting skills.

Of course, none of this means anything if there's nothing to do with the items you gather and make, so another planned feature has been pushed ahead to give a reason for this entire thing. The Marketplace.

The Marketplace will be where players buy and sell items between other players, items you have in your inventory can be listed on the market at any price you want. If there's another player with a sell order placed that is met by your item it will be sold and you'll be able to collect your money from the market.

If nobody's buying at that price, the item will just sit there wasting a market slot. If your selling price is lower than the buying price the buyer will get the item and the money difference.

The system will keep track of all transactions and average out the prices so there will always be a baseline for people to go on when selling items, they can always choose to sell for whatever they want, and this freedom will drive changes in the average price based on what people buy and sell them for over time.

These are both rather large updates and it could take a bit of time for them to come into play, but I'm very well aware of their need and have placed them as very high priority items on my list alongside adding more combat content to enjoy.

That's about it for this update log, thanks for reading! :)