Hi folks!

Well, the first announcement was greeted with the anticipated response, so now I get to give you some more details about a few of your concerns.

First, let's talk experience curve.

Currently, the experience curve for Diplomacy is quite a bit on the brutal side. The curve was built with the intent of including much more supplementary experience (such as quest experience, the archaeology/research system, raids, etc) than currently exists in the game.

Rather than continue to work under this more-difficult-than-intended-system, we're choosing to flatten the curve quite a bit for most skill regions. The bottom line is you will see faster progression where it counts - early and mid game - and a slightly faster end game as well.

As the more savvy Diplomats know, at the higher end, Presence is the true gatekeeper to content, not skill. Diplomacy is designed for it to be easier to gain skill than permanent Presence (we want you to seek out gear for the majority of the Presence). Thus, at the endgame of Diplomacy your play will center around chasing the Presence you need to do the content at that level.

This curve has some of the following features (I stole some numbers from the curve as a whole, the changes are at all skill levels 41-500).

0-40 - no changes
At 50, instead of needing 5 parley wins to gain a skill point, you will need 3.
At 70, instead of needing 10 parley wins to gain a skill point, you will need 5.
At 150, instead of needing 17 wins, you need 15.
At 200, this equalizes at 20.
Above this point, the average decrease of skill needed is between 5-15%.

The new curve is now a smooth progression, without the cliffs of doom that players noted in the old curve.

Next item: cards.

Players currently have access to, or play against, 160 cards. We want to increase this by a large amount - and this content upgrade is a great time to do this. Look for many more "one-off" quests that involve card gain, including "Civic Diplomacy Quests" that send you to collect specific Information and exchange them for cards.

There will be a lag in cards for a short time after the gameplay upgrade hits. We want to hit up the newbie end of giving cards first, and we will make these quests available to everyone to procure more cards. Our goal is that at skill 50 you will have a strong hand in 3 different colors, with some ability to play in the fourth.

NPC decks are getting a major upgrade. There are four categories which all NPCs fit into - Race, Station, Demeanor, and the Common Pool. Each NPC has deck (and soon decks) built for them based on their combination of these four categories.

This is intended to allow a player to have some role in predicting the deck of an NPC based on sight alone. A Dwarven Soldier who's hail text is angry and gruff should allow you to anticipate and attempt to thwart their deck with some level of confidence. This is part of the learning curve of Diplomacy.

This post is running a little long, so after this weekend, there will be a little more information to present to you in this update of Diplomacy Gameplay.

As always, I'm eager to field your questions.

o
A


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