PBE Announcement

PBE will be available September 5th at 3 PM ET.

What's New?

A lot. Way too much to cram into this post, so I will go over everything at a high level here, and we'll have more detailed posts come out before Map 8's launch.

Realms

We've broken up the map to span across multiple servers.

Barracks: Hub/Spawn Realm. You will spawn here upon connecting for the first time and can revisit it anytime by entering the gateway at 0,0 in the Wilderness Realm. You can come back here to buy/sell items at the Marketplace or use it as a hub world to travel to other realms.

Wilderness: This is a traditional Survival world that operates identically to how HCFR always has. You enter the realm, farm resources, sell them at the Marketplace, and use that currency to claim land for your faction. When you enter this realm for the first time, you will be placed in a Safe Zone at 0,0. When an event is active, you can enter a gateway at 2,500x2,500 in any quadrant.

Events: This server is only accessible when an event is active. When an event is started by the scheduler, a staff member, or a Premium+ user, it will activate the gateways located at 2,500x2,500 in the Wilderness Realm. When you go through any of those gateways, you will be warped to the corresponding gateway in the Event Realm. You are not safe when traveling to and from the Wilderness and Event realms. I'll include more details about how Events now work below.

PBE (Public Beta Environment): This is the server you'll be able to access on September 6th. We've rewritten all of our systems to be interchangeable, and the PBE server is where we test them. For now, it will be structured like a Kit Map, but later on it can be something else depending on what we need to test.

Events

If you read the Event Realm description above, you're probably asking, "John, what the heck? I gotta go through a whole gateway now to play at a KOTH?" Here's why we did that:

Events can now enforce a player limit per event. For example, the faction cap can be 30, but some events may only allow you to bring a squad of 4. Large-scale events like Palace and Conquest will still lean toward larger groups.
More freedom to create new event types.
The ability to create more one-off scripted interactions within events.
Event servers can now be spun up in different regions.
Events become a database we can pull from instead of having to build new events each map.
Premium users can create private events with other factions to compete without interruptions, but without event rewards.

The main issue I was trying to address here was that having events openly accessible in the Overworld makes it very difficult to properly police bad actors. A system like this makes that much simpler.

Event Types

At launch, you can expect the following:

KOTH Tickets
KOTH Classic
Palace
Conquest

KOTH Tickets has also received some enhancements:

When checkpoints are enabled and a faction reaches the last checkpoint, they can no longer be contested.
When enabled, the cap can switch factions if an opposing faction has more members in the cap zone than the capturing faction.

Deathbans

When you die, you are not kicked from the server.

If you have a faction member online, you will be able to spectate them in first-person mode.
If you do not have a faction member online, or you are not in a faction, you will be sent to the Barracks. Attempting to join the Wilderness Realm once you have a faction member online will still let you spectate.

You can no longer buy lives.

Deathban durations are reduced depending on your premium rank. Non-premium users are deathbanned for 60 minutes in the Wilderness or 15 minutes inside active Event Realms.

Server Boosts

This is an old feature from HCFR Map 2 that I've decided to reintroduce here. When you have a premium rank, you will receive Server Boosts, which you can check by typing /boost on any server. From there, you can purchase a Server Boost with those credits, and the entire network will receive the benefits of your boost.

We currently support the following boost types:

Boost	What It Does
XP Boost	Significantly increases XP gained
Mob Drops Boost	Significantly increases mob drops
Cheap Repairs Boost	Lowers anvil repair costs

We will be adding more boosts over time as we continue to balance the system. See the Server Boosts Wiki for more info.

Factions

Factions is exactly how you remember it, with one significant balance change.

DTR is back to Power.

We moved back to this system to get away from the 1 death = -1 DTR concept and give us a wider scale to work from. We also reworked how you get to max power and how you regain power. Here are a few important facts:

Your max power is capped when you first create a faction. Your max power grows over time, not based on member count.
Your max power decreases if you cycle players.
Your power increases if you have players online and actively playing.
Your power does not increase if you have players sitting idle in the base.
Your power decreases when a faction member dies.

Was Anything Removed?

I wouldn't say removed; I'd say not added yet or still being carefully considered. I'll list them out here:

Tank Class
Diver Rain Summon
Mythic Items
Boss Mobs

Again, these features aren't exactly cut; they just aren't added as of right now.

More Information

I've started a Wiki here. If you have any other questions, feel free to ask in Discord.

Arena is now live!

PBE Launch Announcement