Dev Blog And we’ll roll the old chariot along

DeletedUser15368


February 21st, 2023 Diggo11

Thanks to everyone who responded to our last dev blog post, we are very encouraged by the positive feedback we received. Previously I planned to write this post about the experience changes and some other small utilities we wrote along the way, and that post will still come soon, but today instead I will mostly share some explanation on the next tranche of changes deployed to the beta server yesterday. Onwards!

Simply Irresistable​

Admin tools fort battle screenshot
Some of you wrote to us that despite the previous changes to our formulas allowing you to hit more often, many lower level players still registered 0 damage, which is no better than missing. To investigate this further, we did a deep dive into this battle, with a particular focus on the attackers. Looking at the players’ stats, we had some interesting observations.
Factoring in most sources of damage and resistance such as weapon average, item buffs, leadership, hiding, own sector damage bonus and resistance bonus (but not critical hits), we found that the attacker with the highest damage had about 3.5x the damage compared to the resistance of the attacker with the highest resistance. The players with the highest resistance tended to be high level and receive the majority of it directly from resistance bonuses on items, with only a small portion coming from other sources, ie skills.
We also simulated a ’round robin’ where every attacker fired one shot at every other attacker but couldn’t die. From our calculations, we found that approximately 10.6% of shots resulted in zero damage because the target had higher resistance than the shooter had damage. Of course, we cannot directly apply this number to an ordinary battle – not every player fires the same number of shots and certainly not at their own teammates – but it’s a helpful approximation and one we want to lower.
To achieve this, we decided to split the resistance formula into two parts, giving different priority to each. One part contains the direct resistance bonuses given by items and buffs, the other part contains the remaining sources of resistance (which you remember means skills). For now we’ve given these parts the names of secondary resistance and primary resistance respectively in our code but we’re interested to see how the community chooses to label them. At the moment we still show both combined in the battle interface but this may change in the future, if we decide to keep the change long term. The differences are shown below:
Damage SourcePreviously MitigatedNow Mitigated
Weapon DamageYesPrimary Resistance Only
Sector DamageYesYes
Shooter Damage BonusYesYes
Critical Hit DamageNoNo
Going back to our small simulation, we found that across the 19 740 shots, there were a little over 6 400 shots that resulted in some resistance being clipped, up from just under 1 900. (After all, once you resist all the damage, your extra resistance won’t heal you!) This resulted in an average damage increase of approximately +50 per simulated shot. Using some back of the envelope calculations, we estimate that would convert to an extra 76 000 total damage for the attackers based on the number of shots fired in our focus battle.
There are some caveats to these calculations. Firstly, this is only a rough guess – more incoming damage generally means more knockouts and fewer shooters in later rounds, but also less players available to block sectors – although we’re satisfied that the results appear reasonable and worth trying. Secondly, we must also bear in mind that our focus battle has an abnormally high number of lower level players for an established world; high level players with high resistance bonuses being shot at by other high level players with 3.5x higher damage bonuses are less affected. In particular, we expect this change will have the largest impact on the international servers.

All the Small Things​

Your community managers have been collecting feedback about the changes so far and we were pleased to see that most markets except one were generally positive about them. The rewards were a recurring theme in your messages to us, which will be discussed in a future post.
If you have any other requests regarding fort battles, please be sure to share them with us. Based on your earlier feedback, we already scheduled some time to change how the fort battle player caps are shown in the planning screen, which we hope to include in the next beta update. In particular, since converting our fort battle frontend from flash to HTML5, any interface ideas we may have previously passed over could be back on the table.

See you next time!
 

DeletedUser15368

If you missed the last Dev Blog, you can find it here: New year, new battles

Fort battle changes so far

Experience:
We have increased the maximum experience you can get per battle (to a maximum of 18k). Also we changed the formula to give more points for adventurers and absorbing damage.

Please note that now it is scaled by the median level of players in the battle, rather than your own level.
In the future, it is possible to implement further changes to the way experience is calculated during fort battles.

Distance formula:

We have changed fort battle formula. The Distance Penalty has been changed to be percentage based (like structures) but with a lower number than before. We have lowered the base value of the attack value (+10 instead of +25) but added a 1.15x multiplier.
And finally, to both the attack and defend value, there will be a base bonus of +15 that scales down to 0 as you level up.

The new formula can be found below:
new_fb_formula.png


INCOMING CHANGE Resistance:
We have changed way how resistance works.
Now it's split into primary resistance and secondary resistance.

The primary resistance comes from the battle formula using your trapping/hiding and health, and it will work the same way it does now.

The secondary resistance is the direct bonus given by clothes and buffs, and it will only let you mitigate damage from the shooter's damage bonus.

Below you can find damage formula:
Weapon Damage + Sector Damage + [(Weapon Damage + Sector Damage) × Leadership ÷ MaxHP]
The blue part refers to secondary resistance introduced above.

Below you can find resistance formula:
300 × (Hiding OR Setting Traps) ÷ MaxHP + Resistance Bonus

Now only direct resistance bonus on your clothes can mitigate sector damage and the damage multiplier.
Only the rest of the formula can lower the weapon damage as well.
Still nothing can lower the critical hit damage.
 

Dr Roth

The West Team
Fort Balancing Strategist
Forum moderator
Not sure if I understand this right, but looks like tanks with high resistance will always be able to take damage unless they have loads on hiding/traps. Not sure how this change will be an improvement to fort battles. I guess it will make battles more attractive for lower level players if anything.

Big shame that they resistance formula has been reworked and that it hasnt been made percentage based.
 

Ethereal

Member
Maybe I'm turning into a TW boomer, but who cares about low level FF participants? Nowadays you can level your account to lvl 130 in a week, 140 in a month or less, at which point I wouldn't consider them low level anymore. If it's a problem people stay low level whilst participating in PVP, consider increasing XP rewards (more) for PVP related content. 18k max in an ideal scenario FF is still a joke, duel XP is a joke, so what you're left with is church building or 15 sec spamming. Neither of which reward any skill in any sense of the word nor increase a community feeling, which you absolutely need in a game like this.

Anyhoo, the past two changes from Diggo at least show that he's allowed to do fundamental work on how things in TW work, so that opens some doors for the future. On their own I don't see them doing anything or they target the wrong issue(s).
 

Goober Pyle

The West Team
Fort Balancing Strategist
As I see it, the primary impact is that this "De-Nerfs" the beginner bonus: now that low level players are actually hitting every now and then, it didn't really change much since their damage was being zeroed out; this will allow them to hit for a small amount of damage and tanks will now die "a death of a thousand scratches". End resuld should be in the neighborhood of ~500-1k damage per round which over a 55 round battle with 1.25M xp should translate into being able to kill off HP 1-2 rounds faster.
 
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