Greetings Pox Nora Players, We at Desert Owl Games are very happy to be back working on Pox Nora! Our first two priorities as the new owners are improving the New User Experience (NUX), and addressing long persisting issues that many of you have been having with the game in recent years. Once we have finished these tasks, we will then turn our focus to balance and bug patches. Our hope is that this takes place in the next month, but with software development you just never know! What we can promise is that we will share updates with you on how things are progressing, so that you’re not in the dark. Below you’ll find in-depth details on some of the changes, these are also listed in the current SOE Pox Nora forums. If you’re interested in the TLDR message, scroll to the bottom. New Tutorial We have taken the time to improve the tutorial, adding things like showing you how to click and drag a rune to deploy it, define what stats are, and how much nora is generated by a font. Upon completing the tutorial, the user will be given a free Public Deck. We have also updated the walkthrough campaigns to use the public decks they award for completing them. Public Decks Public decks are freely acquired decks that everyone can use. These are decks are supposed to be good -- even competitive in the right hands. Sound familiar? They are a selection of the decks you all came up with in each faction forum. Players unlock public decks - This can be done several ways, including beating walkthoughs, the tutorial, or unlocking them for a small amount of gold. Desert Owl manages the Public decks - This allows us to update public decks on regular basis, something we could not do before! This is done so when we get feedback that some public deck is OP or too weak, we can address it in more than one way. No “grandfathered” decks or alternate runes with different abilities. Public decks are public - You may play with a public deck anywhere! Training Grounds, bot matches & ranked play Public decks are replacing all the current introductory decks that work differently from each other (the precon decks, eval decks, faction decks, the “free deck” & starter decks). If you already own runes from these decks, rest assured, you’re going to keep them. Theme decks will still exists in the store. Training Grounds 3.0 We have decided to completely redesign the Training Grounds to level the playing field and make it fun place to learn how to play Pox Nora! In the Training Grounds players will only be able to use public decks. At the date of transition, there will be about 20 public decks. (This number will likely go up over time, but we will keep a close watch as we don’t want it to go out of control.) Each week there will be four (4) new public decks available for anyone to use in the Training Grounds. Playing games in the training grounds will give players gold, and a chance of getting a random core set rune. The idea here is that by the time a new player knows enough about pox to create their own battle group, they will have runes and gold enough to get them started. Ranked Play No major news here, its just getting renamed to Battlegrounds. The Create Game feature has been moved from Training Grounds to here, tho custom games will not be ranked. Thus the name change! Rune Checklist & Forge We have split up the player rewards page into two pages: The Rune Checklist and the Rune Forge. In the process, we decided it was time we gave our search features some love! Major upgrades to performance as well. The Rune Checklist will contain every rune in the game, and show you what you own. The Rune Forge will show you what runes can be crafted. The Rune Forge! The Rune Forge is where runes can be sacrificed to create crystals, which are used to craft other runes. Every rune in the game can be instantly deconstructed into a set amount of crystals. You can then craft common / uncommon / rare / exotic runes with these crystals. We decided on simple, fixed conversion rates for the Forge. This change normalizes the cost for runes. Under this new system that exotic rune you’re chasing has a fixed cost and is obtainable with enough of the “least” valuable rune in the game. Rune Sets There are a lot of expansions in Pox Nora, and it can be overwhelming to a new player when it comes to buying packs. We would like to straightmake things forward by combining all the packs into just a few sets. Core Set - This will contain the release set through Grimlic’s Descent Extended Set - This will contain Path to Conquest up to but, not including the most recent expansion Expansion Set - The latest expansion! (they are not available now, this is just a test banner! heh) So the pack distribution will remain unchanged. That is: All 10 Packs are defined by containing the following: (unchanged) XXX comes with 6 common, 3 uncommon, and 1 rare rune. Each rare slot has a 10% chance of becoming an exotic. Additionally, this pack comes with 1 token. All 100 Packs are defined by containing the following: (unchanged) XXX box comes with 10x XXX packs. The first pack is guaranteed to contain an exotic. All subsequent rare slots have the normal 10% chance of becoming an exotic. The major difference is that every set pack will be available for purchase with credits and gold. Player Rewards For packs, boxes, avatars and campaigns, we decided to remove the separation between the “player rewards” and the “store”. Most of the content will be available for both gold and “owl” credits in the new marketplace. We’re posting a range but, it is still subject to change. (100 owl ~= $1 ) Marketplace (These prices mean nothing! Its just a screenshot of the marketplace) We decided to bring back Visual fulfillment! In other words, you will be able to open packs and view what’s inside. This is an example of a feature that used to exist but got lost in shuffle. We all think this will add greatly to the player experience. Summary Avatars, most decks, and most campaigns will be available both for gold and credits. You can craft the runes you want from the ones you don’t want. Players will have access to a bunch of Public Decks. Training Grounds has been overhauled and is now more “New User” friendly. Note: the values in the screenshots may still be placeholders and may differ from final values. Post Feedback and Comments here: http://forums.poxnora.desertowlgame...s/comments-summary-nux-changes.194/#post-1954
