Monsters and Memories (Project_N) - Old School Indie MMO

Kithani said:

Bro have you and your buddies considered not being shitbirds? I don’t think I’ve received 10-15 warnings total across all games in the 25 years I’ve been playing MMOs off and on

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Discord - Group Chat That’s All Fun & Games

Discord is great for playing games and chilling with friends, or even building a worldwide community. Customize your own space to talk, play, and hang out.

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# Launch Servers

With the world growing with every new module, we face a unique but not so unique problem:

As the geography grows, players are dispersed. As each server ages, players are spread out over the level range.

We are doing a few things to address this:

* Ultimately, we are strongly avoiding the typical paradigm of every module being: "Hey look, we just found this long lost continent!"
* Our plan is to fill out the world organically after 1.0, not by adding new hubs but by mostly revealing new POIs within existing zones, and additional zones and dungeons with existing regions.
* Still, a player in Night Harbor will be quite a distance away from a player in Easthymn, barring finding a Wizard or Druid to teleport them.
* As such, we will be publishing pre-determined server split/collapse scenarios.
* Our targets for peak and minimum concurrent user counts will determine the collapse scenarios, with the targets increasing as the server ages and geography grows.
* This is to try to ensure a minimum concentration of players around each geography and level range.

More details on these plans will follow as we get closer to Early Access, along with details on our "Home Server" initiatives

### Server Merges and Housing

When merging servers, houses may overlap. For any overlapping housing, the owner that has owned that property the longest will get to keep the house after the merge. The other owner will get their upkeep refunded and all the house contents delivered to the nearest customs agent.

We will be looking at housing pricing in the mean time, and may change what kinds of refunds you get after we settle on a pricing structure.

We will also look into reserving the ‘other owner' as the next in line, should the ‘merge winner' default on the property.

# Balance Intent

To start this update, we want to remind everyone that when you are playing in the Closed Beta, you are actually playing on what is essentially our Development Server. It is very flattering that so many people think of Closed Beta as a released game, please remember that Monsters & Memories is not yet in Early Access, let alone released.

The game is being developed by a small volunteer team of passionate developers, at way below Indie budget and it is, again, very flattering that people sometimes forget this fact.

We will continue to fight through our development bandwidth constraints while delivering the next few months of EA prep.

We wanted to declare a few things relating to intent, acknowledge where we feel we over-tuned things in this update, and also let you know that we have received your feedback. We appreciate all of it, and where it made sense for us, we have incorporated some of it.

## Difficulty and APM
Since the beginning, the intent for Monsters and Memories was for it to be a “Chat room with Dragons,” where we have described the combat intent as “Sandwich-y” - meaning you can play with one hand and eat a sandwich, drink a beverage, or whatever with the other. Most of the time.

This is still the intent. We will evaluate where we are pushing against the limits of these statements and make adjustments.

The game is not meant to be “difficult” or intense in its default setting (unless you seek that out).

The intention is for gameplay to be more about rhythm than raw mechanical skill. We, however, also want to provide the basis and tooling for players to be able to react to “bad pulls” or other situations, where they may want to put their sandwich down for a couple of minutes.

Soloing will always be more technically demanding than grouping, and there will be some group content that may be more challenging, requiring more concentration and skill. The above statements are meant to address the average content.

## NPC health and TTK assumptions
We have reviewed things after this last update. There are a few things working together which caused the Time to Kill (TTK) to be over-tuned, we feel.

We are looking at this and are leaning towards adjusting DPS up some. The intent is to not hit solo play so hard, and to balance group play for a smaller group size.

These changes should make it in the next couple of days.

## Burst Damage Intent / Soloing
Currently, burst damage spells feel too expensive. Solo combat with a blue NPC is causing you to run out of mana before the enemy dies. We are looking to adjust this. The intent is for you to be able to solo an enemy then require a short downtime to recover.

## Wizard and Druid DPS
Wizards before the update had one of the highest non-pet class damage potential. We had tuned their DPS down to where we thought it should be based on our TTK assumptions at the time. As our assumptions have changed, we ran more math and will be making some balance changes to Wizard spells.

Druids were the other casting class updated this round, and also are coming in a bit lower on damage, especially with their DoTs. Druid spell damage will be scaling with Wisdom instead of Intelligence, and some spell tuning will be done to get this in the right place.

## Gearing
The other thing to note is that gear is more important than before. Pure casters have been able to get away with very little Intelligence thus far (the character, not the player).

This is true for other classes too for their respective stats, but to a lesser degree.

We tried having Wisdom be a Healing stat while Intelligence is a Damage stat, but we ultimately didn’t like it. We have made Cleric, Druid, Shaman, Ranger and Paladin scale with Wisdom, while the pure casters scale with Intelligence.

While continuing to gear up does increase your effectiveness, we are tuning most content around a character in Common quality gear to be a good play experience in level-appropriate content. You do not need to have unreasonably high stats to do well.

## Experience
We knew that slowing down TTK would slow down Experience / Hour as a side effect. We wanted to quantify by how much before we started making changes. This is now an active topic of conversation and we will be making changes to compensate for the reduced kills per hour rate.

## Stances and other Complexities
As we are considering Closed Beta as a development environment, we are continuing to experiment on there to figure out what is just the right amount of “Sandwich-y” combat. We will continue monitoring this and will adjust as needed.

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GuardianX said:

HAHA that's a tall order!

NOT train for the named I want?

NOT KS?

Be courteous AND a good community member?

WAIT IN LINE?!?

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moonarchia said:

What if you didn't have breakfast this morning?

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GuardianX said:

I mean we have a whole thread dedicated to answering that question!

It's all making sense now, MNM is a FoH thread simulator!

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Kithani said:

I dunno it also feels dumb when an expac comes out and they’re like “omg we just found 5 new zones adjacent to Steamfont HOW DID WE MISS THAT FOR 10 YEARS”

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