New Dev Blog: Q3 Sprint Four: Dragon Pet Sightseeing, Defend the Realm

Can’t you just make the cap something that the casual player will never reach, but a dedicated player can with the extra effort?

Oh for sure Riley but at the same time I don’t want our success stifled by server population. Based on the severity of the goal we’re going to have to have large squads of people. 50 people are always going to be more productive than 5. That’s just about how high the bar is. But if you can only contribute so much people are going to log in, get their points and leave. Without a cap it’s a continuous effort until we hit the goal. You’ll have people with 5k points on the first day grabbing a group of less experienced people to multiply their point gain. Otherwise that person hits 2k and comes back next week.

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Relatedly, I’ve been hearing chatter than some players feel that if the realm is doomed and it doesn’t really matter anyway, that they are going to sit on/stockpile their resources so they have a leg up in the new world and not participate in defending the realm. This could potentially impact the viability of hitting global targets and exacerbate the issues Quinn is raising. Imagine a scenario where we don’t make the goal, despite having enough resources to hit it, if the cap wasn’t in the place.

If something like that happens, I really hope it makes it way into the game lore. Having tensions between people choosing to defend the realm and supply highsteppe vs those stockpiling personally for the apocalypse sounds awesome.

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Anyone who has played with me or has read my 3 forum posts will know that I’m a veteran of the Horde (played some world of Warcraft in my day) and this reminds me of the Ahn’Qiraj pre patch event. Esentially what happened was that in a deep ancient ruined city, swarms of these bug like humanoids were ramping up arms production for an all out war with the mortal races of the game world. Players on both of the two warring factions needed to gather trade materials in order to fund the war ahead and “earn” the raid patch essentially. The defend the realm event has such amazing parallels with this, in my opinion, and I couldn’t be more excited. So first I’d like to express my appreciation to the development team for making such a cool game. Also I think a weekly cap would be nice so it could feel like everyone was participating, but if some super dedicated people wanted to clock in double hours and potentially earn “exhausted points” maybe like repeatable quests that award half the points, that should totaly be something. I’d for sure do that.

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Riley plays WoW. I’m sure a tad of inspiration was taken from that event :slight_smile:

Do we know what faction he plays? I’m not going to sit here and play some game that some Alliance fiend had made fun or not.

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Will the defend the realm missions also reward exp for those of us still trying to get our alt classes to 20 before reborn starts?

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Yeah important question here. Will these work like daily quests and reward xp?

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About when should we expect the patch to drop?

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The patch will go out later today, most likely around 1 or 2 PM Central.

The Defend the Realm tracker is now live on the website as well:

https://orbusvr.com/leaderboards

It does not, however I forgot to mention, we are turning on a global 50% XP boost for everyone throughout the event.

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I like the caps. If people want to make sure we hit goals you will have to get others to help. I think it is a great way to get the hardcore to work with the rest of the community.

Edit: just saw the goals, wow that is a lot.

So…it’s hard to know what to set the goals at. I don’t want them to be so easy that they are done in the first 3 weeks, but I don’t want them to be so hard that they are unobtainable. I am very sure that the first two should be doable, and that’s the reason we have “???” for the rest. After we see how the first couple of weeks go and how many people are participating, we will release those.

Keep in mind this is a 15-week event so 1 player could contribute up to 30,000 points toward the total.

True, so 1.5M would be 50 maxed out players. That seems possible, plus a couple hundred players with between 30k and 10k. PLus the hardcore will likely max there alt toons out too. SO I am thinking 5,000,000 would be a doable number if the community sticks out through the whole event.

I notice the rewards are, "the cape and “the pet”. Will there be story driven goals like: HIt 3M and you save the lakewood inn from burning down or “2M and you get to fight the mutated mushroom and worm at the same time in downtown guild city”.

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Don’t know if it’s just me, but the defend the realms portion of the leaderboards isn’t working on mobile.

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Same here regarding how it looks on mobile

There’s nothing as on the nose planned as “Save the Lakewood Inn” but some of them will unlock in-game events, yes.

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The client-side patches are available to download now and the server-side patch will be going live shortly.

Defend the Realm

A few notes on this feature in particular:

  • Your journal has a new page that will show you the current amount of points you have earned total, and for the current week. There is a cap of 2,000 points that can be earned per week per character.
  • There is a special new vendor who you “sell” the resources that are being gathered for the week, and receive points instead of dram.
  • You will receive credit for killing the correct type of monster that is required for the week without needing to do anything extra (e.g. there’s no quest you have to go accept or anything like that).
  • The weekly point totals will reset every week on Tuesday at 12:01 AM (the same time that the Raid lockouts reset). Note that the first reset won’t happen until a week from tomorrow, though, so you actually have “a week and a day” for this first period of time.
  • The event is meant to last 15 weeks total, and you have to earn a minimum of 18,000 points on your character in order to receive the rewards that the entire server unlocks. So for example, if the entire server earns enough points to unlock the Windup Pet, you will only get it if you have at least 18,000 points by the time the event ends. Note that all rewards that are items will not be given out until the end of the event, even if you earn your 18,000 points sooner than that (just like how a Kickstarter campaign works, basically).

Thanks!

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The Defend the Realm vendor is located inside of Highsteppe next to the bell tower on the far end of town.

Server-side patch is now deployed. Thanks!