Anti has been extremely helpful in revealing plans for Survival.
I have gathered some of his posted details into one topic so we can better see the scope of his vision.
These are arbitrarily divided into Announcements and Comments
I'll try to keep these up to date with details as they are revealed.
Note: As Anti has said before, things are still in flux and things may change due to complications.
AWR: Official Updates Thread [31 Jan 2014]Announcement: Forest is fixed. Prepare to enjoy the alive and breathing forest
Announcement: We have fixed our e-mail robot. Now he will send you password reminders, e-mail notifications and other valuable stuff that would brighten your existence
Announcement: Payments via PayPal are now automated. This means it will take minutes or even seconds instead of hours and days
Announcement: Now game is running on more powerful hardware with one of the best in the world connection (200gb).The new data-center also have a fourteen redundant connections in case if main would be down. That means that game will be accessible for 99,9% of time and power/connection issues shouldn't prevent you from playing AfterWorld.
For many of you it will also give a better "ping" and less network lags
Skills trading denial (important) [11 March 2014]Announcement: The ability for a player to extract skills from avatar by converting them into a Skill Nano Intensifier (SNI) has been removed.
For the meantime, players with SNIs can continue to trade and inject these skills enhancement items.
Announcement: Buffs (mental chips) players can buy, craft or find in a drop are planned in the future.
Comment: Pay-to-win is not part of the game’s design.
Announcement: Changes to PVP rules planned. Newbies should not suffer from the high level players (if they won't go to the most dangerous places).
Announcement: We are developing absolutely different, unique RCE mechanics that you never seen anywhere else.
Comment: There are infinite skills growing. But there, at some point, should be situation where skills are too hard to train for most of the players - it would be the natural cap.
Comment: More about skills: we will work on them and rebalance them, their effectiveness and growth rate anyways.
Announcement: We are moving towards a more realistic way to fight. More realistic also means faster, without those 1-2 seconds delays between shots. Of course, damage per each shot would be nerfed, as well as armors and mobs damage. Those changes would also affect skills, death system, loot, PvP and almost everything else in the game.
Announcement: We are planning to remove SAU from the game, but keep the training skill as requirement. Payment would be in pnotes.
Announcement: We won't just nullify your SAU. When drop is rebalanced and prices of the skills tuned and fixed, we will convert SAU to the equal number of pnotes (or probably offer another way to use them).
Comment: Skill learning price will stay. But changing payment method to pnotes will remove the gaps between weapon levels and deadlocks, that you have been fixing via sni's. You'll be able to harvest/buy/earn/trade on auction instead of running around and shooting everything with the 'right' gun. Payment for learning skills is a natural way services are working in the world (schools, colleges and etc), and you have to pay to the education.
Comment: How it's going to work: when you kill, say, a wolf, you get a drop. For example, you got 100 grams of animal blood. Each gram of animal blood costs 4 pnotes (we are getting rid of micropnotes by multiplying them to x1000). So, you are going to the city, find a trader/terminal where you can sell animal blood and earn 400 pnotes. If you have time and do not hurry, perhaps you are going to the auction and sell 100 grams of the blood there, for a higher price - but it would be slower. Someone, who need an animal blood for craft, may buy it from you there.
If you are killing a tougher monster, expect to a much bigger drop and much bigger earnings. Now, you can pay for the skill advancement via the earned pnotes.
And you are doing all this with the weapon that you want to use, not have to use; you don't worry about SAU deficit anymore and going where you really want to go, not have to go. You are providing resources for the other players (auction), perhaps teaming up and hunting together.
Announcement: When SAU will be removed, researching won't generate SAU or pnotes.
Comment: At first, it's going to be a terminal that accepts all (or almost all) items and buy them for pnotes (PN). Later, there are going to be many different traders in the cities. Some would buy one items, others would buy different items.
Much later we are going to end with traders that would react to the items deficit and surplus, and changing prices accordingly. So if you sell tons of blood in one shop, prices would drop down for a while and you would better find another trader/city. This is why goods trading is going to be very interesting, as I said before. And robbing those traders is going to be fun as well. When this final system is going to work? Don't expect it to become part of the game too soon, but I sincerely hope it's going to happen before end of 2014, or maybe at the beginning of 2015.
Mobs and their drop: rebalancing [13 March 2014]Announcement: Currently, we are working on the mobs and their loot. Our goal is to make a system, where mobs would provide enough loot for players, so players would be able to sell that loot for pnotes (which are going to be secondary currency in the game, after AWD).
Comment: It will be rebalanced when drop and it's prices are done, mobs are tuned and their living areas are reworked. Weak monsters won't provide enough profit should you hunt them on high levels and should be interesting only for lowbies.
Craft items (ingredients) reset is coming soon [07 April 2014]Announcement: Items rebalance is in process and still will take a while, though it's getting close to the final version. When it's done we will have to remove every craft ingredient from the game (and your inventory too). So, if you have something to craft from your items - please do it until the end of may/june 2014, before they crumble.
After ingredients removal, we will push the new economy (pnotes economy), new loot rules, new items prices and slightly more balanced craft requirements. And, of course, new clusterization and steaming systems will be released before that moment.
The following is my summary of the category of items being targeted for removal:
Any loot dropped by mobs.
No items resulting from refining, mixing, crafting or charging.
Possible loot exceptions: Backpacks
Announcement: Let me try to explain it to you. While developers of Alpha/Survival made craft, loot and monsters with their drop, they, for test purposes, have put default numbers of the drop. So almost everything have been set up to drop from 50 to 950 (for cheapest things), from 50 to 350 for mid valuable and 1 to 3 for most valuable. After that, those drop rules have been copy&pasted to the rest of the items. As a result, items turned to the usual and, for a lot of them, useless.
Besides that, from 20 to 30 items are useless: those items can't be crafted into anything because there are no items that may be made from those items.
That system have been in game since Alpha. For 5+ years nobody had time/power/will to immerse into that system and, finally, balance it. As a result, players have tonns of items that they won't even be able to use, or got so many items that they can't digest them.
Now, I've spent about the full month learning that system, figuring out the right prices, right amounts of drop from monsters, right items to drop. I found items that can't be used and know how and when those items will be used in the future. Once I finish that balance, no items will be removed again: only tweaks would be done from time to time. Sadly, it can't be done via tweaks this time.
But, to make that system working I have to get rid of the past - of the hoarding abuse that was caused by the unbalanced, unfinished system. Only after that we would be able to move from the test stage to the release. If you aren't ok with that, well, there are plenty of other wonderful games that aren't on the test stage.
Comment: Flowers and trees - under consideration. If prices on them would be very low (0.01 pnote), that shouldn't cause any harm to the new economy and I wouldn't need to remove them, even if you have tons of them hoarded. From the other hand, flowers and trees may be purged later, when tree cutting would be available again. So I would convert those ingredients into something more valuable and get rid of the rest.
Comment (regarding craft ingredients): Those items won't have basic pnote prices and won't be bought by the NPC's - they would be traded only between players. Thus, even if someone have too much of those items, it won't trouble me at all. My goal is not to strip players from their precious treasures such as tree logs, but to prepare ground for the new economy system.
Comment (will loot be dependent on mob maturity): Of course. The tougher mob is - the more valuable items he is dropping and in a bigger quantities.
Comment (will loot be adjusted dependent on swings in economy): absolutely
