New Update 4/11/2014: Fight Strategies, Conquest, Bug Fixes and more!

[Nate]

Greetings Pit Masters!

We've gone live with a new update, please see below for all the details.

FIGHT STRATEGY PRESETS
On the fight strategy screen there is now an option to select various fight strategy presets. These presets are meant to help out new players until they become more comfortable with how things work and then they can go off and create more involved custom strategies. As a gladiator levels new presets will be unlocked and each specialty has presets only they have access to. Using a preset and then manually changing anything will set your gladiator to "custom". All current gladiators have been set to "custom" and their fight strategies have not been altered.


CONQUESTS
The healing bug in conquests has been fixed. Players should no longer see their gladiators hang at 1 health when leaving the resting screen and coming back later.

The number of gladiators that appears in the ally lists have been doubled offering a lot more choices for team composition and increasing the chance top gladiators will be included at each level range. In addition ally cooldowns are now tied to your stable instead of the individual gladiator. If any of your gladiators uses a specific ally, all your other gladiators will need to wait for the cooldown to expire before being able to use them again.


TRAINING POINTS
A training point cap of 40 (increased from 20 based on feedback) has been put in place and the removal of unused training points each day during the server reset has been removed.


HELP TEXT
New help text has been added to each screen with a TL;DR section at the top to help give players a general understanding of what is written.


TRIGGER CLARIFICATION
The "tired" and "injured" triggers have had their text modified to better describe how they work. The underlining mechanic has not changed. For example "I am slightly tired" has been changed to "I am slightly tired or more". This is important when multiple "tired" triggers are in use. If a strategy uses "I am slightly tired or more" and "I am very tired or more", the "very tired" trigger would need to have a higher priority than the "slightly tired" trigger otherwise it would never trigger due to the fact that if a gladiator is "slightly tired or more" they are also "very tired or more". The same holds true for the injured triggers. The reason it works this way is if the "or more" part were removed in the game engine it would create a condition where the "slightly tired" trigger would be false once the gladiator is "moderately tired" and the gladiator would drop out to another strategy (probably their default strategy) which isn't likely to be what the manager wants. Once again, NOTHING has changed in the game engine, only the text description on the trigger.


MISC BUG FIXES
Clicking on the parchment paper that enables you to write a in-game message has been fixed.

IE11 will no longer register as an unsupported browser.

Good luck in the Pit!

-Nate-

[Nate]

Looks like there was a bug with preset strategies. If you happened to log in and view your strategies a few minutes after the update went live your strategies may have been changed to presets. I've disabled this until I fix it. Sorry for the inconvenience. If you were affected by this and don't remember what your strategies where let me know and I'll look through the most recent backup and let you know.

EDIT: Ok, I think I squashed it. Again, apologies if any of your gladiators were affected.

[Prinny]

Awesome stuff Nate but I do wonder, why the training points cap of 20?

I am happy this is finally in place and I can see how it should be capped now that the removal of unused training points has been removed but 20 is abit to low and I believe it would be best to heighten this to 40-50 points.

The reason for this being that if you have the training points membership the 20 tavern runs alone give you 20 points. Include the arena token membership and that makes another 16 points + another 2 per lvl up your gladiator receives. This means your gladiator gets 36 points per day + lvling and arena challenge fights.

I know that this just means that you should go train your skills after you do your tavern runs but I can easilly see it happen that I or another player forgets this and end up wasting alot of points by running our arena fights before checking up on the skilltree. :p

[oedi]

agree with Prinny.
In my eyes this is a leap back:mad:, early in a glads career with the right memberships a glad can easily get 50 and even 60 skillpoints in a day. What this means is just more clicking back and forth to keep track of things, and if its ONE thing this game dont need its more mouse clicks.

[Adoede]

I agree with Prinny and Oedi about the training points.

And I'm curious why the ally cool-downs have been changed to stable instead of individual - that means I'll only be able to do one conquest run with my preferred team at a time....and to get all my glads to do a single run in one day with said team would take 6 hours. I don't know anyone who has the time to do that. In fact, even with the previous system it often took me about 1 hr 30 min to finish conquest runs for all my glads - which was too long as well. I'd suggest to switch this back.

[Cynaidh]

Just adding in I agree with rest, the minimum that the training point cap should be is the max you can get in 1 day, 20 is just too low, if someone is supporting this game and paying for memberships it will be way to easy to loose training points now . Every time i play i do my training camps, do my arena fights, do my arena challenges and then spend points cause i like to see big jumps on the training skill by spending a lot of training points at once by holding down "a" while doing my training, my glads would have 20 from training, 16 from arena fights, 2 from arena challenges, another 4 if they leveled, and then any extra's from getting lucky with extra fight tokens. Seems to me this limit has to at least be 50 or its just going to lead to people forgetting about it and loosing out on training points which is crap. I don't get the point of a "new feature" that is nothing more then a potential penalty for people paying to support this game.

[Alba Kebab]

Agree with others on the daily training points.
20 points means constantly having to go back to the training screen to spend it, I'd rather do training in just one sitting once per day.

[Nate]

Awesome stuff Nate but I do wonder, why the training points cap of 20?

A 20 point cap was chosen because with full memberships the most training points a gladiator can get from the tavern in a single day is 20 and 16 from arena fights (not counting the few arena tokens one might pick up). I assumed most players did their tavern runs, trained and then did arena fights and trained again since that would be the optimal routine to ensure your gladiator is always fighting in the arena at the best of their ability (i.e. with the most skill points each day). If many of you don't do that, that's ok, I'll raise it to 40 if that better fits your daily routine. :)

Good luck in the Pit!

-Nate-

[Vertigo]

"In addition ally cooldowns are now tied to your stable instead of the individual gladiator." - this makes healing bug fix irrelevant anyway, ridiculous and none logic "upgrade"

[Apoca1ypse]

I like that the training points dont disappear at server reset. That will be great for new managers who would otherwise be caught off guard. I also feel like a cap of 40-50 is ideal.

With the gauntlet, is there any benefit for a manager to have their gladiator used by another manager? AFAIK there is no benefit, short of being able to use their gladiator in return.

[bruner29]

I am not sure why but today. after this update , on the same computer I always play on, I cannot access the site. I am getting the browser not supported message. I use IE and I just checked it is fully updated to the latest version.

[Nate]

The PoW community has always been one of the best and polite in online gaming in my opinion and as always I thank you for your feedback. Conquests is in Beta and when something is in Beta it means it is in flux with things changing, things being added or things being removed, etc. It is a time to try different ideas and test them. Some of you won't like the changes, some of you will and some will be indifferent. This is ok and expected. With the new change in conquests players have the opportunity to expand and experiment with different team combinations. There are a lot of great gladiators in the arena and I encourage you to explore the many combinations. However, if you have your heart set on a particular team for every run there has always been and still is an option to manually reset the cooldown list if you like. I do apologize if you are unhappy with any of the changes and if you are the sort of player that doesn't like change very much I might recommend you abstain from Conquests until it is finished to lessen the amount of changes you'll experience since while in Beta many changes will happen. Please feel free to send me a PM with your feedback if you like anyway as I read and consider all of them. Thank you for your understanding and patience as Beta is developed further, I appreciate it.

Good luck in the Pit!

-Nate-

[Nate]

I am not sure why but today. after this update , on the same computer I always play on, I cannot access the site. I am getting the browser not supported message. I use IE and I just checked it is fully updated to the latest version.

That's strange. What version are you using? Are you using IE11? What operating system and version are you using?

[bruner29]

I thought it was strange to. Here is what I'm using

You're using Internet Explorer 11 for Windows 7

Logged on to my laptop, same result.

[Nate]

I thought it was strange to. Here is what I'm using

You're using Internet Explorer 11 for Windows 7

Logged on to my laptop, same result.

Please try it again now and let me know if it works.

[Rokchewer]

Awesome stuff Nate but I do wonder, why the training points cap of 20?

I am happy this is finally in place and I can see how it should be capped now that the removal of unused training points has been removed but 20 is abit to low and I believe it would be best to heighten this to 40-50 points.

The reason for this being that if you have the training points membership the 20 tavern runs alone give you 20 points. Include the arena token membership and that makes another 16 points + another 2 per lvl up your gladiator receives. This means your gladiator gets 36 points per day + lvling and arena challenge fights.

I know that this just means that you should go train your skills after you do your tavern runs but I can easilly see it happen that I or another player forgets this and end up wasting alot of points by running our arena fights before checking up on the skilltree. :p

20 is a terrible cap for traing points. Since I often use the auto tavern option..i get 20 points in one shot..if by chance i level up during one of those tavern fights then i end up with 24 or whatever it is. Making the cap 30 or so would keep those of us who WANT to spend shield to speed up tavern fights on the days I dont have lots of time to do so without being penalized for spending real money.

[GUY21]

i dont understand why put a cap on training pts? usually i do my arena fights and then my tavern i usually get around 35 pts when i do that today i did the same think only got 20 pts... i lost like 15 pts on each character...

[Rhinocervs]

I think it would make more sense and be more in line with the new update that you reset the ally cooldown for your stable, not just gladiator, as the ally cooldown is now tied to the whole stable.

[oedi]

Nate I think you forgot something when you increased the training point cap to 40.
My glad Lesser Evil on the MOTU team just spent 8 fight tokens and 20 tavern runs, and ended up with 20/40 training points when it shouldve been 36/40.

[Adoede]

Nate, I've come to really appreciate your responsiveness to this community and your commitment to constantly improving the experience for the users. Thanks for switching the training point limit to 40 (though I would have preferred 50 since additional fight tokens found or won can easily push one beyond the 40 per day).

As for the conquests changes, I think expanding the pool of potential glads to team with is brilliant since that was a legitimate problem for people who didn't have well-developed friends/allies lists.

But the new cool-down change will certainly make things more difficult at the "Nightmare" level. I've tried nearly a hundred different team iterations over the last months and honestly, there are probably less than a dozen glads in blood gods that are "elite" enough to help get my team consistently through a nightmare run (And there are some builds that simply "don't work" in the conquests game very well at all). You'd need at least four of those "elite" glads on your team to stand a reasonable chance. Of those, a handful are "unique" - like Ahhnold (a rage with 3000+ hp and 170+ stamina for those multi-round conquest battles).

It is, of course, your prerogative to change things as you see fit. Just expressing that the reality is it's only worth doing a Nightmare run if you have the right team...otherwise you'll likely not succeed and end up wasting your time. My suspicion is that this may result in managers getting frustrated with the minimal results for the investment of time and start being less involved in conquests...which I assume isn't the result you want. Even with an optimized team, typically only 5 of the 8 teams I'd run would finish a nightmare run. And then out of those 5, I'd usually find one or two orange pieces. And I'd almost always sell those pieces as they rarely matched my build strategy. That's why I started doing conquest runs less lately - the time cost for the return wasn't as compelling as before. And now with these new cool-down changes...

Just my thoughts...

[bruner29]

That did it. Thanks!

[Apoca1ypse]

Of those, a handful are "unique" - like Ahhnold (a rage with 3000+ hp and 170+ stamina for those multi-round conquest battles).

Youre welcome :) Please send any tokens of appreciation to Team Win head office :P

[Adoede]

Ha - ain't got nothin but luv for the brute :p

[Nate]

Nate I think you forgot something when you increased the training point cap to 40.
My glad Lesser Evil on the MOTU team just spent 8 fight tokens and 20 tavern runs, and ended up with 20/40 training points when it shouldve been 36/40.

Forgot to post this earlier. Thanks for the heads up Oedi!

Good luck in the Pit!

-Nate-

[Dainoji]

Nice update Nate, should help the new kids out a lot.