You might not expect devs of an MMORPG in testing to be quite this excited to be perpetrating a wipe of the game worlds, but Stars Reach is still deep in pre-alpha, so it kinda makes sense.
“Now that the Kickstarter campaign is complete, we are restoring the new character experience so that it’s more like it is intended to be for the full game,” Playable Worlds says. “Characters start with fewer tools, XP boxes need to be earned, etc. Please note, however, that our intention now is to do fewer resets of the worlds and characters. We do not intend to reset the servers again unless a) we have to because the new features/code we add aren’t backwards-compatible, or b) your worlds get so torn up that they’re no longer useful and need to be reset.”
The reset and patch both dropped last night, and now testers will find they have the five core tools (omniblaster, pathfinder, terraformer, harvester, and grappling hook) along with a range of consumables. You’ll have to regrind your skill trees, too.
The accompanying dev blog teases that while character customization isn’t in yet, it is en route; in the meantime, there are new character variants for all the species for testers (now a total of 32). The devs have also buffed combat XP for harder mobs, tweaked projectile smoothness, stopped people from cheesing with camps, implemented homestead waypoints, and added a new boss named Fear the Fungusamungus that will definitely get all the tweens excited. Finally, Playable Worlds has addressed experience sharing.
“We’ve changed the way combat experience is shared. The way it was implemented previously was just a quick-and-dirty first implementation and not conducive to long-term gameplay within an MMO. Now, your share of the creature’s XP is loosely based on the aggro you generate. Not every type of aggro accrues points at the same rate, but in general, the angrier you make a creature, the higher your reward share of its XP will be once the creature is destroyed. The creature is worth only a certain amount of XP, and that XP will be shared out to individual players depending on what percentage of the total aggro they created during the battle. You can gain points by damaging the creature, healing enemies of that creature, being in proximity to the creature, attacking its Maker, and more. This system is likely to need balancing and iteration, but should work quite well going forward.”
