GU06 Info and Feature Preview

Greetings Auraxians!

GU06 is right around the corner and has some pretty cool new additions to the game that I wanted to give you guys a sneak peek at. So, here are some highlights:

New Membership benefits:

• Members will have access to an additional 3 character slots
• Members will now have a new, exclusive Daily Sale in the Depot

Alerts System:
The new Alerts system is a dynamic server controlled system that initiates server-wide game events. When an Alert triggers, players will have a set amount of time to achieve the Alert goals. Players on the victorious Empire, regardless of where in the world they are, will receive a large bonus when the Alert is completed, and all players fighting within an Alert area will receive bonus XP. The first Alerts that we've implemented are continental conquests, but in the future we plan on adding more, such as: controlling the most of a certain facility type, or controlling the most of a certain type of resource.
There are two ways to win the Alert; a "Dominating Victory", in which the empire controls 100% of the goals, and a "Normal Victory", where they control a larger percentage to the other empires when the timer expires. In a Dominating Victory the Alert ends immediately and the entire Alert reward goes to players in that empire, in a Normal victory the reward is split based on the % of objectives controlled. Here's a preview of the UI displaying the current Alerts status. There is also a small notification in the main HUD letting you know the time remaining for the current Alert.



In the above example the reward is 3000xp, if the TR were able to rally and capture 100% of Indar before the time the Alert ends (good luck, guys!) each TR player on the server would receive 3000xp. However, if the territory control stays where it's at, VS players would get the victory and 1260xp, NC and TR players would get a consolation reward of 1050xp and 630xp respectively. Additionally, all players fighting on Indar during the course of the event will be getting a 20% xp bonus.


Alerts are designed primarily to fulfill two main goals for the game:

• Give players incentives and direction to participate in combat in other areas of the game than they normally might.
• Encourage competitive, exciting fights during offpeak hours.

As such, these events will primarily be activated when the servers are lower on population, during the offpeak hours, so more players online can participate. During the more crowded hours players have plenty of options and plenty of incentives to fight anywhere they want, so it's less likely this will activate past a certain server population threshold.


Service Ribbons:

We're also launching a new Service Ribbon system with GU06. The Service Ribbons system is primarily intended to give small, incremental goals to fulfill during normal moment-to-moment gameplay. Each Ribbon should take between 5-10 minutes to achieve depending on how you play and which Ribbon you're gunning for, but a lot of it is very situational. Ribbons can be earned for kills earned with Infantry weapons, vehicle kills with AV weapons, and support tasks (repair, heal, revive). Vehicle Ribbons are still being worked on and will be released with a future update. Each Service Ribbon you earn will give you 250xp, and the first 5 each day will give an additional 500xp bonus.

You can check out the progress of your Service Ribbons on the profile stats page:

In addition to Service Ribbons and the Alerts system, we've got a slew of balance, tuning and bug fixes coming along with this update. Full patch notes will be available as we get closer to releasing the update.
We hope you're excited for GU06 and as always, if you have any questions, comments, concerns let us know!
-
Matthew Higby - @mhigby
Creative Director, @Planetside2

Looking forward to the changes, giving people small goals to work towards is a good step in the right direction.

More XP is always a good thing.

sounds good to me! Cant wait

Oh no, in addition to getting every medal on every gun I'll now need to get every service ribbon

even though i'd much more care for a comprehensive list of balance changes & bug fixes for the game, i'm still very happy you constantly add new content to the game. keep up the good work so far!

Alerts, eh? I'm all for that.

Though I laugh at anyone who attempts to cap Indar.

I wish I had known this was coming - I didn't like deleting a BR26 to move to a better server, but I'm mostly over it already.

However, I like the rest of these details! Service Ribbons are being added exactly how I would have wanted them added - attainable but not obnoxiously so.

WTH? Awesome stuff coming in this update? This has to be the April Fools post.

Any chance of fixing the woeful limited redeploy system this update

What about fixing BUGS ? There are so many right now that whatever updates you may have planed will be for nothing if these aren't resolved.

SWEET! More goal oriented exp, this will give players direction and something to shoot for every day. This should increase player logins and participation. These goal oriented rewards work in MMO's, it should feel like home here. This should also boost casual gamer participation, which is always a good thing.

Major props!

Small goals are great! >.> It will help combat my ADD nicely.. Well. In theory, I suppose it could also make it worse <.<

But still! mmm xp

I think having the exp sharing between the (losing) Empires upon Alert failure is not so a good idea.
It kind of voids the incentive to fully complete the alert, and makes it moot, as everyone is still getting their share based on cap %.

You should consider a lower reward for losers or a higher reward for winners.

Nice. Helios NC are screwed, we are too terrible to win any battle.

Yeah, but it still brings the other empires into the fight, even when they only have 20% population like the VS on Connery.

You really should talk to Waterson VS. Everynight I'm told in leader how close they are to capturing Indar! They can't possibly go to another continent, they're so close!

3000xp seems rather low for something like "Cap Indar".

Capping an Amp station is already 1k, capping an entire continent should be more like 10-20k.

like it. more motivating

Question offered here: What about the test server

Status: Answered by Higby the post directly below this.