Hello, and welcome to WalkScape 103. I have a few new features that I want to highlight before we start today’s class, which is rather math heavy. I'll let you know when you can head out if you don't care about the behind the scenes math and design principles we are going for!

OTA (Over the Air) Updates and Maintenance Mode

A huge feature that schamppu has been able to fit into the game before CBT launch has been the ability to do OTA updates for a significant portion of content in the game.

The team can, from a phone, anywhere in the world:

• Add content to the game or edit existing content
• Push changes to the server
• In the next 5 minutes, players playing the game actively will be kicked to the loading screen and download the new OTA changes and associated files (usually less than 1 second)
• Players can immediately load back into the game with the changes

The one thing we want to add to the system in the future is to be able to do translation and localization over the air.

The OTA should let us react in a very rapid manner to various problems that might come up in-game. If items that have the wrong stats or loot tables that need adjusting we can do so rapidly. It also lets us add many new things to the game on the fly (new activities, items). It might particularly be useful a few days after launch, when the WalkScape team heads to London to present the game at the PGC London conference.

In addition, the game can now be placed into a maintenance mode. Maintenance mode kicks everyone from the game and prevents them from logging in. This will be used if there are exploits identified that are of a certain severity so that the team can fix them quickly in an isolated environment and then let players back into the game.

As covered in WalkScape 101, your steps will count towards in-game progress regardless if you have the game open and logged into your account or not. Don’t worry if you are kicked out of the game, as when you load back in all of your steps will be counted.

Crafting Outcome Chances System - A Brief History and Lessons Learned

The crafting outcome chances system in Walkscape has undergone intense iteration, with each design highlighting new goals that needed to be considered in future design. In one system, we learned that a player with 99 crafting could guarantee an Eternal outcome on low-level tools, and even one player at this max crafting setup would quickly crash the low-tier tool market with their outputs. This would ruin early game tool progression and fundamentally change early game money-making. Eventually, we came up with the following goals for the system:

• Make every crafting gear, consumable, and level upgrade meaningful
• Preserve the economy of low-tier tools by preventing accounts with level 99 crafting from printing out Eternal qualities
• Make Fine Materials valuable at all stages of the game
• Provide a level of predictability when unlocking a new tier of tool and crafting it for the first time

An Overview of Crafting in WalkScape

Crafted Items in WalkScape are of a certain tier and quality.

• Tier describes the level you unlock the recipe to create a tool, and is generally referred to by the main component for crafting it. For example, a Stone Axe is the lowest tier axe in the game, requiring level 1 crafting to create and use. A Copper Axe is the second tier of axe in the game, requiring level 10 crafting to create and use. Meanwhile, fishing rods are generally called by the planks used in their construction, such as a Pine Fishing Rod, as they are created mostly of wood.
• Quality describes how good of a product was created. Higher quality tools are always better than a lower quality tool of the same tier. For example, a Perfect Stone Axe is better than an Great Stone Axe. If you see someone say “rarity” of a crafted item, they are probably referring to the quality of the item and the terms are somewhat interchangeable.

In-game, there are six qualities of every crafted item:

• Normal - Grey
• Good - Green
• Great - Blue
• Excellent - Purple
• Perfect - Yellow
• Eternal - Red

I’ll try to use the proper names in this post, but if you see me or someone else say a “Green Copper Axe”, they are referring to a Good Copper Axe.

During the CBT launch, you can expect to get a new item attribute from each higher quality of tool, and also some upgrades to previous attributes that are found on the lower quality tools. I’ve released some pictures in previous posts that may give you a rough idea of what to expect.

Higher item qualities are rarer to obtain, but the chances to receive something higher than a normal craft go up with crafting levels, gear, consumable buffs, and the usage of fine materials.

Factors that increase the chance for higher quality crafted items:

• Crafting skill levels
• Crafting gear
• Using fine materials
• Consumable buffs (Will be covered in a future blog)

Factors that decrease the chance for higher quality crafted items:

• Higher crafting level requirement for the crafted item

If you aren’t interested in the specific math and design thinking, you can stop here! I’ll see you next week for WalkScape 104.

Crafting Outcome System Details

Crafting Outcome Score

Crafting Outcome score can be gained in several ways:

• The Level Difference between the main requirement for a recipe and your current crafting level
  • level 60 crafting versus level 40 recipe = +20 crafting outcome score
• Gear (as an permanent attribute, e.g. Crafting Outcome)
• Consumable buffs

Your Crafting Outcome score directly determines the quality outcome of item crafting, with increases in this attribute leading to lower chances of low-tier gear, and increases in high-tier gear.

This is accomplished through a series of weights attached to each item quality. With no gear or consumables and at the level you unlock a recipe, the weights are the following:

Crafting Chances with a Crafting Outcome score of 0. The Weights above can decrease to minimums of 4, 4, 4, 4, 2, and 0.05 respectively.

For example, this percentages be correct for crafting a stone axe at level 1 crafting (which requires level 1 Crafting), a copper axe at level 10 crafting (which requires level 10 crafting), etc. Eternal and even Perfect gear will be very rare during CBT. In the picture below, you will find that I have a few crafting levels and have reduced the chances for a normal craft slightly compared to the above table.

Crafting a Basic Pickaxe (Stone) at Crafting Level 3 - giving me a Crafting Outcome score of 2

As your Crafting Outcome score increases, the weights begin decreasing, capping at the weight of the next tier. There are a few things to know about this process:

Quality Bands

Crafting Bands

Bands have a set start point, but the end point scales based on the crafting recipe level requirement. This makes crafting gear essential for crafting high qualities of high tier items. The weights scale linearly through the Band Start and Band End, and have a minimum value of the weight for the next tier. For example, the chance for a Normal crafting outcome will never be below that of a Good crafting outcome. For an relevant CBT example, consider crafting a tier 40 axe at level 50 crafting, with 150 points of Crafting Outcome gear. This would give the player a 160 crafting score - reducing the weights of the normal craft to the weight of the good craft entirely, and eliminating a decent chunk of the weight from good crafts. This scenario would lead to the following bands and drop rates for different rarities.

Crafting a level 40 recipe with level 50 crafting, and equipping gear providing 150 Crafting Outcome for a total Crafting Outcome score of 160

It’s also possible to fully visualize this scenario across the entire range of gear and consumable buffs. With 400 Crafting Outcome score from gear (not possible in CBT - but will likely be towards full release) and consumables, added to your 10 free Crafting Outcome from the level difference, you would make the percentage change for a Normal, Good, Great, and Excellent outcome to be nearly equal.

Crafting chances over the whole spectrum of possible Crafting Outcome scores

Looted Items

On your journey through Arenum, you will find chests that enter your treasury while doing an activity . On opening the chests, you will receive four rolls on a drop table that consists of materials, coins, and many looted items. Looted items have a rarity attached to them.

In-game, there are six rarities of looted items:

• Common - Grey
• Uncommon - Green
• Rare - Blue
• Epic - Purple
• Legendary - Yellow
• Ethereal - Red

Unlike crafted items, looted items do not have different rarities of the same item. For example, Woodcutting Boots will always be of the Uncommon rarity, and the same item attributes will exist on every pair of the boots. The rarity of the item does not necessarily dictate how many attributes exist on the item - an Ethereal item could have a singular unique attribute that gives it a ton of power!

Horizontal and Vertical Power

In terms of design thinking, the initial balance of Crafted and Looted gear can be thought of as having horizontal and vertical power respectively.

Horizontal power gives you item attributes that benefit all rewards that you can give from activities relatively equally. The speed at which you can do the activity, the experience rewards, the increase in chest drops and fine materials are all boosted a considerable amount.

Vertical power gives you item attributes that benefit very specific parts of action rewards. Maybe you don’t care about much besides finding fine materials, and with Looted gear we are hoping that you can specialize towards a specific build that fulfills what you are aiming for. Vertical items can also have statistics that hurt you in some ways, in order to benefit you in other ways to a higher degree than normal!

Closing

We are getting close to January 18th! Always happy to answer questions in the comments or on Discord, and I’m looking forward to seeing y’all in game. It's been really fun working on these systems, and I can't wait to see them in use by so many!