Dogs of War Online

Hey there!
As you can imagine, we've been very busy since the opening of the beta. After the initial rush and the very early fixes (remember the email incident...) we took the time to analyse how much the players were enjoying our game and work on a patch that would adress what we identitied as the major issues. After a massive amount of work from the team, this next patch is currently being reviewed by the Q&A team and it should be live early next week. While they review it, I figured it would be a good idea to share with you some details about what's to come.

Right now, our main issue is that too many players who showed a real interest in the game are leaving it after just a few battles. We think that this is mainly because of gameplay and balancing issues and focused on it. We have plans for additional content and competitive endgame but right now our goal is to provide a solid and fun tactictal game so this patch will focus on the "basics" of the game : gameplay, unit balancing, bug fixes and ergonomic improvements.

I'll post the changelog with all the details below, but know that we adjusted the AP of many units, skills and traits as well as the stats of some units. We adressed the issue of the Predator of Blood and the Knight, among many other things. We know that the balancing of the units is key for Dogs Of War Online so we'll keep on monitoring this very closely but hopefully, we won't have to make major updates like this one too often.

We also reduced the injury ratio, from 25% to 15% chances of being injured, lowered the guild rank needed to play on new map, added Lanever DM and VIP maps, and tweak our matchmaking formula. Beside these major changes we fixed and tweaked tons of other little or less visible things that should make the game more enjoyable for all of you. Check the changelog below to get all the information.

Thanks to all of you for playing Dogs of War Online
See you all next week, for the release of this new patch !

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Changelog
Gameplay
- Added some AP scaling on Traits/Ranks regarding the unit rank
- Updated basic AP for unit types
- Updated Crossbow and FangWarrior (replaced Bloodlust and Precision with Ferocious)
- Updated unit stats
- Increased miracles difficulty for Warrior-Priests
- Fixed Harassment (consume walk)
- Fixed invalid trait for Worg
- Fixed StunningStrike to not apply its malus if attack failed
- Fixed AssaultStrike ability to allow a pursuit movement without attack after a charge kill
- Updated DivineFavor, BadOmen and FavourableAuspices
- Updated descriptions for Bad Omen, Favourable Auspices, Mastery of the Arcana, Exalted
- Reduced needed GuildRanks to play every maps (Ranks 3, 4, and 5)
Combat
- Fixed attack estimations showing random big numbers
- Removed injuries and XP rewards from Friend Challenge as it was intended
- Added a new unit rank for some units: "Special"
- AP balancing for few traits and skills
- Added Lanever DM and VIP maps
- Lots of matchmaking formula adjustments
- Lowered matchmaking successive win/lose protections from 60s to 25s
- Reduced matchmaking search time to extend the GuildRank search from 30s to 15s
- Turns limit changed to 14 for DM, 10 for VIP
- Changed the number of points required to win in KOTH mode to 5
- Reduced Injuries ratio from 25% to 15%
- Protection against Coma added for new and intermediate players
Lobby
- Fixed help on Play, Armory, Missions, Guild and Company page
- Updated injuries and LvlUp display in PostMatch
- Added server message highlights
- Fixed loading company name and picture during loading (heading-heading bug)
- Added email format check when recruiting a friend
- Added 2x click support on GuildManagement to activate company
- Fixed XP display in unit tooltips
- In Buy Units popup: removed talent display on information on the left, and aadded talents tooltips on the right
- Default focused field in Login set to password when login is filled
- Added password recovery interface
- Added Support and Forum weblinks
- Updated the "Lose/Lose" event: only 1 injury, added XP earnings on Ducats loss, no consequence for 3rd choice
- Fixed "Rank 0" in ladder

Misc
- Improved servers charge balancing
- Improved mail saturation issues
- Fixed game states where players could be stucked waiting for match result after login
- Removed badword checking for account creation
- Localization fixes

Most of this seems good, including Harassment. If I understand the line correctly, it says that whenever you shoot, it'll consume all of your move, so Harassment only allows to run after the shot. Would it be too much to ask for this change to be applied to warrior-mages too? IIRC, they can move a bit, cast, then move+run.

- Fixed AssaultStrike ability to allow a pursuit movement without attack after a charge kill

This line has me puzzled, i'm not sure that I understand it's meaning.

There's an other issue I'd like to see you change pretty fast in a way or an other: It's the "cowards".
I've had this game, just now, that was decided on turn 6. The only thing that stayed on the enemy team was a sparkling. Until the end of the game, he kept having it run, and I never had any chance of catching it (only one shot at it, and it missed). I had an archer, a Skûll and a Priest of Salauel remaining, but never stood a chance of killing it. The only thing I could do was, on two occasions, to run in contact with it hoping it'd fail its fear test and fail its disengagement test. And since he always won the initiative rolls, I never got the chance of hitting him (would still ahve needed two sucessful hits).

This is very frustrating and uninteresting for players and may see many leave because of that. There may be units that can counter this sort of tactics, but they're fragile (assault category) so targeted by the players that play like this.

Something should, and I dare say must, be done.

Sounds Great!

almost all changes sounds great but im little afraid of Updated DivineFavor and FavourableAuspices in one sentence - it would be nice to not overnerf the lions.

Deuzerre wrote: - Fixed AssaultStrike ability to allow a pursuit movement without attack after a charge kill
This line has me puzzled, i'm not sure that I understand it's meaning.

This means that if a wolfen crossbowman uses this ability and kills his target after the charge, he will have a pursuit movement but will not be able to attack. Just reposition himself.

Concerning the problems with draws and "cowards", it's in our top priorities, but we can't fix everything at the same time. We intend to do something as soon as possible.

Deuzerre wrote:
There's an other issue I'd like to see you change pretty fast in a way or an other: It's the "cowards".

We agree and we're working on it. We have many heated discussions about this and as you can guess it's not that easy to find a solution. Running away from a stronger opponent can't be altogether banned from the game, after all, avoiding the fights you can't win is a big part of tactics.

Dr.Ido wrote:Running away from a stronger opponent can't be altogether banned from the game, after all, avoiding the fights you can't win is a big part of tactics.

I know and I agree, but it's frustrating when the odds are so heavily in your favour and nothing allows you to catch up with the other guy.

Preventing the last survivor from disengaging would be a good thing for example. Many things could be done without hampering the "last stand" guys.

i like the mistery about the changes on Favorable auspices (did you also change bad omen? was it that OP?).

other than that i wonder if you fixed the issue of 200 AP players enjoying to farm newly made companies / beginners. This is also a serious issue that scares people away.

Deep Blue wrote:other than that i wonder if you fixed the issue of 200 AP players enjoying to farm newly made companies / beginners. This is also a serious issue that scares people away.

It's not included in the patch log, so not for this patch I fear.

But since I only play 300-400, I forgot about it Good to bring that back up.
No Legendaries below 400 points!

Deuzerre wrote:

Deep Blue wrote:other than that i wonder if you fixed the issue of 200 AP players enjoying to farm newly made companies / beginners. This is also a serious issue that scares people away.

It's not included in the patch log, so not for this patch I fear.

But since I only play 300-400, I forgot about it Good to bring that back up.
No Legendaries below 400 points!

400 included or excluded? i think at 400 they are fine