Hi guys,

We have good news for you: We are going to announce the open beta for the upcoming Fall Expansion soon. And we will post developer diaries more frequently now, before the open beta starts, to help you prepare for all the new features and changes coming.

In my next few posts I want to tell you about one important problem with the game, how we plan to improve it and how it will affect almost every aspect of the game. All you guys do one thing in CrimeCraft almost every day,and that thing is waiting – you wait for a battle to start. It’s not that critical during peak hours, but it is a pain in the [filtered] when the population is low. No one likes this aspect of the game and one of our core goals for this expansion is to reduce the waiting time – we want players to get into combat faster, and I mean much faster.

The answer here was quite obvious. First of all, a player should be able to join any match and be competitive against players of different levels. Secondly, a player should be happy to play a match of any kind, so they will join it as soon as you create it. Not that hard to figure it out, so we started designing the details and that was a challenge.

Why can’t players of different levels play with each other now? You guys know the answer to that – they have different skill levels and different equipment. Player skill is something that we can’t affect and we definitely don’t want to negate. But we can do something with the equipment. Currently, low level and high level equipment differs dramatically and here's one plan we looked at to balance the system.

The most obvious solution was to keep equipment strength the same when a character levels up. We decided to develop this idea although some would think it’s too much. Here we found the following: previously a player unlocked items of better power and it served as a reward for leveling up. We would have to replace this reward with something else – so we designed a system where the reward would be the items themselves. The Jericho Armageddon GL unlocks at level 20, the R-Sys Sabertooth GL unlocks at level 35, etc.

A player would only be able to use limited sets of weapons, boosts, etc. at low level, but he’ll unlock more and more as he levels up. So now we have to do something with those existing players who already have that equipment and who won’t be able to use it after the expansion because their characters don’t meet the minimum level. Those players will hate such a feature. Moreover, we found that we would have to redo crafting completely – currently crafting is heavily based on the fact that the item’s power increases when the character level goes up. And we would have to redesign the whole loot system for the same reason. The game economy would be completely different and we couldn’t predict how it would change.

We learned that changing this one feature would force us to change ten other features. It started to collapse out of our control and we got a feeling that this is where we have to stop and take another look at the problem. Do we want to remove 50 percent of the already purchased equipment from our players? Many players worked hard to get those items. Do we want to redesign craft and loot? It would delay the expansion release for months and it would consume a lot of our money to implement it. Also we still had a strong feeling that item power increasing with character level stands at the heart of CrimeCraft.

So that idea was thrown out.! Someone wrote on the forum that “Vogster is greedy”. He was right – we are greedy and that is why we won’t remove the equipment you guys already have. Greediness is a good thing sometimes.

So we found ourselves starting from the scratch at this point. We still want to make low-level players competitive against high-level players. And the equipment is the problem. We can’t get rid of the equipment progress when the character levels up, so we looked at trying to reduce the difference. We just have to determine how much it should be. It wasn’t that hard to be honest. Let’s observe a matchup of level 40 players against level 50 players, level 20 players against level 50 players, etc. Looking at it this way we discovered that the level 1 equipment should be close to what a player can get at level 25-30 now. So we increased the power of low level equipment and kept the level 50 equipment as is. This solution was approved, and as an example I can share some details: a level 5 green AR sight in the expansion will increase weapon accuracy by 19% and a level 50 by 29%.

Once we decided to rebalance all those items, there was no reason not to fix other balance issues as well. All of you would agree that some clothes bonuses are great, when other clothes bonuses suck. Some boosts are really awesome but others aren’t popular at all.

So the clothes came first. We rebalanced all clothing bonuses, improving some and cutting others. To give you guys a feeling of what we have, here is some more specific information: Level 50 non-set hats can have following additional bonuses: +10% to splash radius, +10% to healing effects, -10% to headshot damage, -10% to negative boost effects.

Next we looked at the boosts, but here we wanted to seriously revise the whole system. One problem is that most new players forget to use boosts in combat– this is one of the reasons why they would lose in combat. They remember to shoot, to take cover and to toss grenades because they do those things in many other shooters, but boosts are a new mechanic for them. Knowing this we decided to introduce a new type of boosts –passive boosts – that have a smaller effect, but it doesn’t expire and the player won’t even have to remember to activate them. We found that they work great for newbie players, so we assigned passive serums to all classes available for low-level players. The next thing that we wanted to do with boosts was to further develop the idea of short term effects, similar to what Bess has now. We found this mechanic fun and interesting for experienced players, so we decided that such boost should be available in each category.

We investigated the server statistic and chose the least popular boosts and redesigned them all. At the same time we did our best to balance the rest of boosts – we improved some of them and nerfed others (Indura LiquidStone is the #1 candidate to be nerfed).

This is the end of the story: We started thinking about making low-level players competitive against high level players, we redesigned how all items improve their stats when the character levels goes up and we rebalanced the clothes and the boost at the same time. Player skill still makes the biggest and key difference, but now we believe that low-level and high-level equipment are competitive. Stay with us and we will tell you how we achieved another goal – players should join your match asap on one hand and you should play against the players of about your skill and your level on the other hand.

But for now, here are some more character class details to check out.

The class name: Assassin.
The idea: This class works well when you want to infiltrate through the frontline and suddenly strike your opponents from the spot which they believe is safe.
Primary weapon: Raskolnikov PRS.
Abilities: Active Camouflage System, PSP Rounds, Ambush Tactics.
Boost 1: Betadyne Rejuva. Level 30 of this boost heal for 22 hp per second for 8 seconds. 30 seconds cooldown.
Boost 2: Indura Convergence. Level 30 of this boost gives +13% non-splash damage. Passive.
Ability AUG: Nanocore ACS-PR.

Also you can notice some new details on the right side of the screen. Any ideas about what they mean?

 cool are those combat maps that are controlled by gangs?

Last Edited on: Oct 20 2011 04:33 PM UTC (214 Days ago)

This game will go from a mmo rpg shooter to a simple mmo shooter, and why all assassins must be ninjas or guys with a tuxido??? why not a improvised armor style, sunrice is a city in the middle os a wasteland if im right not in the middle of mall.

Quote | insane1888 posted on Oct 20 2011 05:09 PM UTC

This game will go from a mmo rpg shooter to a simple mmo shooter, and why all assassins must be ninjas or guys with a tuxido??? why not a improvised armor style, sunrice is a city in the middle os a wasteland if im right not in the middle of mall.

the tuxedo's are a reference to the italian mafia, which is cool and i understand, but i agree that there isnt enough different styles to choose from.

I am really looking foward to these new changes and extra content but i too would like to see more clothing styles come too, not to sound ungrateful in the slightest :)

I see 3 diverend coins icons, a new icon on the tab bar thats probably for bleedout missions, and the character icon got a arrow pointing to his head now.

The global map look more like google map. Butt instead of locations arrows with A or a B in google map. The global map has what i think are hideout characters balloon arrows.

Also i see that the tabs icon of the character map are changed in to icons instead of text tabs . I thing it looks much better that way.

Let the games begin.

I didnt read any of this ( well I did but not alot but its good! i think maybe I hope...yeah) BUT give females a suit and (if you can) something thats not heels k thanks bye.

True, biggest problem now is few battles because of the rank system, and spread of people across several servers. But, you guys, can allow that battles can be created across all servers (to gather team from any server, any player online (you can still have separate lobby rooms (cough, servers, cough) to decrease ping in lobbies)) and to REDESIGN THE HANDICAP for the high end players entering low level battle (maybe even give low level players boost for playing in the big boy league), that way you don't have to change the crafting/equipment that now exists (not that you shouldn't, just not for this reason).
About the difference between low levels and high levels: It never bothered me to play against higher level, or better equipped opponent. That only improves your skill, desire to win. If you make lvl5 and lvl50 equipment similar then the RPG part of the game will suffer (people play to get better equipment, improve their stats, basic rule of MMORPG).

Some very intersting plans there V, keep it up! :) Really feel like you guys are making use of what I (and the community) pay for this game, like I'm geting value for my money, its a refreshing attitude likely to keep me here for a while yet.

Just my 2 cents on the equipment:

The statement that "the level 1 equipment should be close to what a player can get at level 25-30" made me a bit worried. Yes, there are huge differences now, however that is the way it sholud be in an RPG style game. Are they so large as to be unreasonable? Not really. Do they scale in a way that exacerbates them? Absolutely.

From my experience I would suggest you guys to try to hit a balance between lowering the difference between your extremes and adjusting your equipment improvement curve. Right now, your curve becomes steep as hell starting at lvl 25-30 (coindicence? not really).

The main thing you should consider is to make the equipment stats climb faster over the first 30 levels and less over the next 20, currently it seems to me its the other way around. For example, only the really high level items give a + to stamina... why? Lower level items should give one too.

The fact is that the jump in stats between lvl 20 - 35 to lvl 40 - 50 gear (never mind the up to lvl 15 stuff, almost useless especially the clothing) is way too much, this means mid players getting their [filtered] handed to them by any half-competent lvl 40+ (even with handicap) without being able to do the same to those below them. Frustrating enough for someone playing their first character to consider leaving.

Making equipment scale slower (faster at the early levels) will mean lower levels are more competitive and the restriction on higher levels joining matches can be more relaxed too. Maybe you might want to even increase the power of lvl50 equipment since it so hard to get, to have more stat range to work with, and then spread it over the lvl range evenly.

Looking forward to the expansion! :)

 Are u Capo and Devs seeing this:

http://www.crimecraft.com/forums/General/topics/EUUS-ServersBad-Idea?page=1#post-178445

http://www.crimecraft.com/forums/forum-and-game-feedback/topics/Seriously-20534?page=1#post-178441

http://www.crimecraft.com/forums/forum-and-game-feedback/topics/Hargan-Shotgun-Ruined-this-GAME?page=6

what are ur plans for hargan SG? if u will nerf it or ammo, will we have to wait 1 or 2 months till the next patch? haven't u seen this film in turrets deal a couple of months back?

As a first step towards community welfare why u dont take out of the BM that glitched ammo?

show some respect for those who still support u...

 hey guys, how about making that we can have sepparate face masks for each profile? that would be sooo awsome :D