Welcome to last month's edition of
Patcher's Perspective, which will be running once a month from now on. Wait, "last month's"? Due to a few unfortunate issues, I wasn't actually able to write September's article until, well, October. Fortunately, I have a somewhat not-lousy excuse.
The Excuse
During my first attempt to write this article, about two weeks ago, I wrote the following paragraph:
In the first Patcher's Perspective, I promised that in the second article I would talk about changes to Gandalf's mounted attack, a relatively minor part of the game. In the second article, I said it'd have to wait for the third article. Now, at last it is time to understand changes to Gandalf's mounted attack! This will be epic.
And then I went off to take some in-game videos of Gandalf's mounted attack. When the first one didn't come out well enough (too choppy to follow), I decided I'd try again the next weekend. The next weekend, not only did I not find time to do so, but also my RotWK DVD, obliging Gandalf's desire to avoid publicity, cracked while in the drive (this is actually the second time it has happened now), delaying Gandalf's attack demonstration even more.
After learning that I could either send in my DVD to EA for replacement - plus a "nominal" $13.00 fee - I opted to buy a new copy of the game from EA Download Manager instead ($9.95). Of course this was the wrong choice, because I can't for the life of me figure out how to get it to start. Kind of incredible being unable to start a game that I've spent hundreds of hours modding, but I guess I'm just special. My only hope is that EA's customer service will prove a few thousand times better than their post-release support. (If you're interested, you can follow my plight in
EA's RotWK Tech Support forum.)
Anyway, I can't really delay the September
Patcher's Perspective indefinitely, can I? But I also don't want to discuss Gandalf's mounted attack without actually having video clips to show it. So we'll just have to have another article without him. Sad.
Heroes
The main point of this series is to talk about what is happening with the development of Version 2.1. And right now, that's not much, as I don't have much time to work on it these days. Still, things were getting done up until the point where my disc broke. Attempting to code without a working game simply is not worth the effort.
Fortunately, quite a bit has been done so far. 2.1 is making a lot more changes than I had anticipated, but, in keeping with my expectation, they're all small tweaks rather than anything large. When the patch is finally released (expected in late December), most players probably will only notice a couple changes, unless they read the changelog. However, there
are a few areas where larger changes are planned, areas that I'm particularly dissatisfied with at the moment and that I think the community is as well. At the top of that list are heroes.
Most 2.02 players can agree that the balance of the game has reached the point where heroes in general have become an annoying problem; they're powerful in battle and tough to kill. Balancing heroes is ridiculously difficult, however, because they're
already balanced in a sense. In 2.01, many heroes weren't even worth buying, which is why there wasn't much of a hero problem then (except for a couple of specific heroes, of course). The original 2.02 patches evened out the issues with heroes, so that, for the most part, they're all worth purchasing now, which is why we have more of a "hero problem" now than we did in 2.01.
What we've (read: I've) come up with so far (this is all still very much subject to change, especially from community input) is a major change in how fast heroes recruit and respawn. Right now, heroes are organized into five different "tiers" based on cost: weak heroes (Eomer, Arwen, Wormtongue) build in 20 seconds, most early game heroes (cost 1000-1400) build in 30 seconds (the normal hero buildtime in 2.01), more expensive heroes (cost 1500-1900, Karsh, Shelob) build in 40 seconds, late game heroes (Aragorn, cost 2100-3000 except Rogash) build in 50 seconds, and the most powerful late game heroes (Rogash, Gimli, Witch-king) build in 60 seconds. (These levels also organize how many command points they take up, how much experience they need to level up, and how many power points you get when you kill them.)
We're still experimenting with different buildtimes, but at the moment we're using 60/75/90/105/120 seconds (from 20/30/40/50/60 seconds). If you think that's a pretty big change, it's because it is. Waiting over one minute to buy a hero, while not unreasonable, is definitely going to be noticeable in-game. The hope is that longer buildtimes will hinder people from using heroes as a "quick way out", and will introduce some level of strategy in choosing the right time to purchase a hero. Right now, the right time is whenever you've got money to do so; perhaps in 2.1 you'll have to take into consideration the huge loss of money without immediate benefit. Drogoth rushing is a lot less-viable when you won't get him until two minutes after he's been purchased.
But an even bigger change than the longer buildtimes will be the longer respawn times associated with them. Right now, respawn times start at twice the buildtime, increasing by 11% every level to end at four times the buildtime (twice the initial revival time) at level ten. Obviously, if some heroes are going to take two minutes to build, we can't have them taking eight minutes to respawn; a change to the formula is in order. With the current setup, we've decided to go with a flat revival time for every hero, regardless of level, which is twice the initial buildtime. That means that the average hero that takes 75 seconds to build (generally 30 seconds in 2.01) will now take 150 seconds to revive (generally 60 seconds in 2.01).
This is huge. Now, when you kill heroes, they will at least stay dead for a little while, rather than being repurchased right away. Losing a hero will be much more damaging than it ever was before.
Do these ideas sound good to you? Bad? Got a better idea for heroes? Let us know in the
September Patcher's Perspective Discussion Topic!Download Page
As a side note, I've finally gotten my priorities straight and decided to sort out the
2.02 Download Page. The other day, Thorin fixed a pretty egregious copy/paste oversight upon my request (it previously read: "we strongly recommend downloading the Standard version
(below) instead"); then I noticed that the Widescreen zipped download actually contains
both patch's installers (+20% download time). My lame excuse: nobody ever told me it was wrong. (Lame!)
Anyway, here's the plan for the download page. For one thing, I'm going to get my friendly neighborhood Global Admin to upload all of the installers to GameReplays's ftp, so that they can be downloaded as executables instead of zipped files (at the moment, they're uploaded as normal forum attachments, and we're not allowed to upload executables unzipped), which will be handy since the executables are already compressed anyway and many people have trouble with zipped files. But I'm also going to (finally!) check the foreign language patches - Italian and Traditional Chinese - and get those up on the page as well. 2.0 has been out for
two months and I haven't posted the foreign language versions outside the forums... not exactly good on my part.
That said, I have to end this article with recognition (and huge thanks) for the 2.0 translators,
Mrak (Italian) and
choimo (Traditional Chinese). These guys put a
TON of effort into editing the strings file, using an editor so inadequate, unfriendly, and buggy that I won't even touch it anymore as it's such a waste of time, and I have repaid them by not putting their downloads up on the site. This proves a fundamental truth of our universe: clearly I am very cool.
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