[X] My Assistant

New Season Notes (2021 S2 -> 2022 S1)

The following things have carried over from the previous Isekai season to the current Isekai season:

- Credit balance + value of item + equipment inventory, capped to 1 million

- Leftover trophy value for Snowflake's Shrine


The following things have been added to Persistent:

- Peerless equipment and all soulfused equipment

- Any unspent peerless vouchers

- Credit balance + value of item + equipment inventory exceeding 1 million

- Primary stat bonuses and a global damage bonus depending on the number of tower floors cleared

- A peerless voucher for everyone who reached Floor 100, or Top 20 Floor Clears:

CODE

Floor 205: youshi1 (3146277)
Floor 205: Ming28561 (3775954)
Floor 205: Bolide (2309354)
Floor 204: Xeda (4388600)
Floor 201: sssss2 (1843795)
Floor 200: gehelife (1070629)
Floor 180: raraha (4071895)
Floor 177: Treesion (707354)
Floor 161: sabregimp (188779)
Floor 155: Nero-Arc (700155)
Floor 145: HT862 (1751283)
Floor 139: newzhenterzzf (5585303)
Floor 139: conatime (5595606)
Floor 130: BlackPantsu (586593)
Floor 130: accelkatana (4012458)
Floor 122: NeoAlden (5940217)
Floor 121: P-Killer (2968580)
Floor 120: Scarlet Tear (5159860)
Floor 120: ashlikt (2309737)
Floor 115: ace_amuro (896192)
Floor 112: unikwind (2480915)
Floor 108: eomivan (808303)
Floor 106: Altair.AC (3905888)
Floor 105: Chizuru Ichinose (638489)
Floor 104: Ass Spanker (1068757)
Floor 103: chanman2021 (5678409)
Floor 101: ex-homehome (1284678)
Floor 101: XMike (8053)

Isekai Changes

- Minor correction to the difficulty calculation for Tower difficulty. It should now actually reach PDUFOR at Floor 40 rather than a few floors earlier.

- The season rewards (Peerless Voucher) for The Tower now cap out at reaching (not necessarily clearing) Floor 100, or Top 20 if less than 20 people reach Floor 100. A toplist will still be posted at the end of each season, and you can still proceed past Floor 100, but it is only for bragging rights.

- You can now attempt/clear The Tower 5 times per day until you reach Floor 20.

- The stat bonus thresholds are now for reaching the floor rather than clearing it, since the readout makes it a bit confusing.


Riddlemaster

The pony riddles are now multiple-choice and can have several correct answers. The generated image will always show three ponies; these can all be the same pony, or be two or three different ponies. To solve the riddle, check all the ponies you see in the image and hit Submit Answer within the time limit.

The riddlemaster no longer tells you if the answer is correct or not. It will always give the buff if you answer within the time limit, as well as the heal if the answer is given within the bonus time limit, both of which were adjusted. A spirit heal was also added.

Instead of valuating answers as binary "right" or "wrong" it will internally calculate an accuracy score based on how many unique ponies were displayed and how many right and wrong answers you made. Instead of docking stamina directly, the recent average of these accuracy scores is used interally to adjust the per-battle stamina cost. If your accuracy is low enough to sustain a stamina penalty, the "Stamina" readout at the top of the screen will show in red.

If you fail to answer within the time limit, you will be docked 10 stamina directly regardless of your riddle history. (It will not affect the per-round stamina cost.)

If you do not submit the answers to the riddle within the time limit, it will automatically submit it and use the checked answers unless the answer is more than a couple seconds overdue; if it is, it will be considered a blank answer for accuracy purposes. You do not get the buff in the latter case.

The obfuscation factors (blobbiness and graininess) are now dynamic and adjusted interally based on various factors, primarily your level and how much you played lately. Most other aspects of the generation have also been reworked.

Because the images are all randomly generated, you may occasionally (rarely?) encounter jumbled riddles that are difficult or near-impossible to fully discern. Due to this, you will still keep the normal stamina consumption up to some margin of error.

In other words, while it is more difficult to answer perfectly, it is also more forgiving of occasional mistakes.

Detailed internal numbers (accuracy calculations/requirements, stamina cost factors, obfuscation factor thresholds etc) are not disclosed and no readout will be provided for them.

Note that soliciting people to submit riddle images with answers as well as providing such are now bannable offenses - riddle images can be traced to the account they were generated for. (This doesn't disallow "look at this stupidly impossible riddle lol" kind of posts at a small scale.)


Salvaging

When salvaging Legendary and Peerless equipment, you will now gain "Equipment Cores" - these will be used for a future mechanics where you can improve the base stats of legendary and peerless equipment. See "Future Changes to Equipment Mechanics" below.

There are six types of Equipment Cores; Legendary/Peerless, corresponding to the equipment quality, and Weapon/Staff/Armor, corresponding to the equipment type. Shields count as Armor for this mechanics.

"Rare" equipment types (Phase/Shade/Power Armor as well as Force Shields) give 5 cores, while other equipment types all give 1 core.

Equipment Cores obtained in Isekai will be transferred to Persistent at the end of each season.

Peerless Cores are not tradeable, primary due to the lottery, which when this update hits persistent will have an alternative 1st prize with cores based on the equipment 1st prize. Legendary Cores may however be traded freely.


Misc

- IW stamina cost now rounds to the nearest .1 decimal rather than rounding up to the closest whole digit.

- The base durations for most debuff spells was significantly increased.

- When shrining trophies for armor, you can now select the armor slot of the generated equipment. (The new UI also saves 1 whole click over the old way.)

- Catalysts are no longer tradeable. They will likely be retired in the future, with the forge charging credits directly instead.

- The limit for primary attribute reassignments was removed. You can now freely reassign EXP at any time.

- Replaced the old "system message" popup. You can now click anywhere to dismiss it, and it no longer lets you click through to the background outside the box.

- Various UI tweaks and improvements.


Future Changes to Equipment Mechanics

Future updates will rework the internals of how equipment is generated and stored to, among other things, allow base stats improvements. Base stat improvements will be limited to Legendary and Peerless equipment only; the ultimate goal being to increase the odds of being able to obtain the ultimate equipment set to a level slightly above "mathematically insignificant" while still preserving the value of existing equipment and not making any existing ways to obtain equipment pointless.

The long and short of it is that with a lot of credits (in the hundreds of millions range) and legendary cores, or a lot of peerless cores, you will be able to turn a Legendary equipment into a Peerless equipment. Peerless equipment will (probably) also be possible to upgrade further.

The "base stat improvement" and "upgrade" mechanics are separate, though there will be various changes to the "upgrade" mechanics as well; you will no longer be "upgrading" stats individually, and tweaks will be made so that "upgrading" below-Legenday equipment is still viable. Existing upgrades will be converted, but I'll get back to the details on that later.

All existing equipment will be converted to the new system, and there should not be any differences between old and new equipment. After the conversion to the new system, any future changes to equipment can also be made retroactively, meaning that the concept of "prepatch" and "postpatch" equipment will no longer be a thing. Various disabled equipment types will also be re-enabled as rare drops.

These changes will also involve replacing the existing "potency" mechanics with a different (less random) system. Existing unlocked potencies will not carry over in any way. The Item World will basically work like The Tower, and will be used to increase an equipment's upgrade cap.

Due to the scale of the changes, it is unlikely that it all makes it into one update. Until the changes have been fully implemented, the updates will be deployed to Isekai only. In other words, this won't be be relevant for Persistent for at least one year.

When the changes eventually reach Persistent, it will no longer be possible to get a refund on upgrades by salvaging, due to a combination of conversion complexity and the fact that equipment stats will be permanently altered. You will of course have the option to do until the updates make it to Persistent.

Further details will be made available as the updates are deployed to Isekai.

If you fail to answer within the time limit, you will be docked 10 stamina directly regardless of your riddle history.

Can we get a reason for this? It's a quite huge punishment, the player can just randomly choose the answer rather than let it expire. And what if someone accidentally unplugged his network? It just looks like a punishment for unfortunate situation.

These changes will also involve replacing the existing "potency" mechanics with a different (less random) system. Existing unlocked potencies will not carry over in any way. The Item World will basically work like The Tower, and will be used to increase an equipment's upgrade cap.

Althought it's said that we will get more details later, does this mean that hp/mp bonus is gone?

Also would like to know if the stamina cost bug for IW is fixed or not.

Can we get a reason for this? It's a quite huge punishment, the player can just randomly choose the answer rather than let it expire. And what if someone accidentally unplugged his network? It just looks like a punishment for unfortunate situation.

That one works the same as it used to, except with a fixed value.

Althought it's said that we will get more details later, does this mean that hp/mp bonus is gone?

That would be in the new system.

Also would like to know if the stamina cost bug for IW is fixed or not.

It was, should be added to the patch notes shortly.

When the changes eventually reach Persistent, it will no longer be possible to get a refund on upgrades by salvaging, due to a combination of conversion complexity and the fact that equipment stats will be permanently altered.

Instead of creating a material sink this will just turn the whole system redundant, as players will avoid upgrading anything until they get their BiS equipment.

Just introduce item crafting, as it's a much better mat sink for those seeking a perfect piece to upgrade, and tie the salvaged amount to the player's forge level, so there's a point in leveling it up.

Instead of creating a material sink this will just turn the whole system redundant, as players will avoid upgrading anything until they get their BiS equipment.

I don't really think a lot of people are upgrading magnificent and below equips today anyway, but they will not have an overlap in materials with legendary+ gear so it should still avoid that.

Just introduce item crafting, as it's a much better mat sink for those seeking a perfect piece to upgrade, and tie the salvaged amount to the player's forge level, so there's a point in leveling it up.

The big problem with equipment crafting in every MMO ever is that it is always binary "useless" or "makes everything else useless". If the best equipment in the game is crafted then all drops will be worthless, and if the best equipment in the game is dropped then why bother adding crafting at all?

There are multiple specific goals with the stat improvement system:

- Have a crafting-like system to give people a better chance of getting exactly the equipment they want, but still require a fairly rare equipment drop to work from, to avoid making everything else pointless.

- Make less-optimal legendary and peerless drops (from FoS in particular) be worthwhile since they can be used to boost a desired equipment piece.

- Work as a credit sink.

That one works the same as it used to, except with a fixed value.

Most of the time this kinda stuff happens rarely though. In the last months it happened to me once that something took my attention away and it just so happened there was a (timed out) riddlemaster when I put my attention to it again. Barely timed out, but still.

I can see some troubles with this given the change of pictures as well. I'm no pony expert, and only really got used to things over time. Not sure if there are new ones, but even without that, a longer break could make it very hard to restart, when you have like ~20 seconds for 3 ponies and you need to check a chart as well.


We'd need to see how this works out of course, but 10 Stamina really is quite a lot.


edit: I also kinda hope cores will be tradeable. Otherwise people will have to sell equipment for cores and things become very messy. Regardless, it will make it impossible for players to get legendaries from the Bazaar after that change.

This post has been edited by killi890: Dec 21 2021, 13:12

How will upgraded Legendary equipment work when the current Isekai season ends?

Do we get to keep it, or are all materials/credits essentially lost?

I know there's soulfusing, but that pretty much means a single legendary per season if we don't buy Soul Fragments, which is just a waste of credits in itself.

Can we expect the future legendary->peerless upgrades to actually upgrade the rarity in the name to Peerless when all stats reach 100%, or will Legendaries only ever be a 'pseudo-peerless' with maxed stats?

That one works the same as it used to, except with a fixed value.
That would be in the new system.
It was, should be added to the patch notes shortly.

If the time limit is still same as the old ones, I've failed some in random encounter if I play on phone, yes I don't master it well and don't use script so take a lot of time typing the answer, even some wifi problem makes me lost some seconds. Seems all my fault, but this changes will troubles me
btw when will this adapt to persistant?

I don't really think a lot of people are upgrading magnificent and below equips today anyway, but they will not have an overlap in materials with legendary+ gear so it should still avoid that.
The big problem with equipment crafting in every MMO ever is that it is always binary "useless" or "makes everything else useless". If the best equipment in the game is crafted then all drops will be worthless, and if the best equipment in the game is dropped then why bother adding crafting at all?

There are multiple specific goals with the stat improvement system:

- Have a crafting-like system to give people a better chance of getting exactly the equipment they want, but still require a fairly rare equipment drop to work from, to avoid making everything else pointless.

- Make less-optimal legendary and peerless drops (from FoS in particular) be worthwhile since they can be used to boost a desired equipment piece.

- Work as a credit sink.

upgrading magnificent and below should happen very often in isk, unless we can sit on piles of legendary

does stat improvement made legendary can improve past not improved peerless?

do the new tower-like iw has a cap?

If you fail to answer within the time limit, you will be docked 10 stamina directly regardless of your riddle history.

That one works the same as it used to, except with a fixed value.

Sounds bad for me. I sometimes fail to answer in time in RE too, because the network that I play RE is bad on HV. In the past it may not be big problam as it sink me 1 or 2 stamina only, but if now always 10 it would be too heavy for me, that's a lot. Seems the RE is not going to change in short time I should maybe stop play RE if this apply to Persistent

That one works the same as it used to, except with a fixed value.
Sounds bad for me. I sometimes fail to answer in time in RE too, because the network that I play RE is bad on HV. In the past it may not be big problam as it sink me 1 or 2 stamina only, but if now always 10 it would be too heavy for me, that's a lot. Seems the RE is not going to change in short time I should maybe stop play RE if this apply to Persistent

just buy an energy drink and move on. It does happen that the connection fails when you start a RE, but that's just that. It does no more harm than one energy drink. Lasting effect will only happen when you fail regularly. Try not to fail regularly.

- When shrining trophies for armor, you can now select the armor slot of the generated equipment. (The new UI also saves 1 whole click over the old way.)

Does this apply to weapons too? If not, is there a chance this could apply to weapons (and staffs) too?

Most of the time this kinda stuff happens rarely though. In the last months it happened to me once that something took my attention away and it just so happened there was a (timed out) riddlemaster when I put my attention to it again. Barely timed out, but still.

Hm. Well, I might just change it so that it counts as an empty answer. There's probably no real good reason to penalize it worse than facerolling the answer.

How will upgraded Legendary equipment work when the current Isekai season ends?

Do we get to keep it, or are all materials/credits essentially lost?

You don't keep upgrades in the existing system, but stat improvements would remain in the future system. It's not unlikely that future upgrades will carry over too for consistency's sake, especially since you wouldn't be able to "salvage out" the materials anymore.

Can we expect the future legendary->peerless upgrades to actually upgrade the rarity in the name to Peerless when all stats reach 100%, or will Legendaries only ever be a 'pseudo-peerless' with maxed stats?

Names will be dynamically generated, so yes, they will change. (Though I'm sure there will be some fun edge cases with very old equipment..)

Does this apply to weapons too? If not, is there a chance this could apply to weapons (and staffs) too?

I know what you mean, but I'm just going to leave the answer as "weapons don't have slots".

Names will be dynamically generated, so yes, they will change. (Though I'm sure there will be some fun edge cases with very old equipment..)

Like the rare Equipment in Diablo 2 ?

Peerless equipment will (probably) also be possible to upgrade further.

I hope that peerless is just the top tier equipment so it don't have further upgrade. There should be a ultimate goal, or it's somewhat frustrating because of the long way of upgrading.

I hope that peerless is just the top tier equipment so it don't have further upgrade. There should be a ultimate goal, or it's somewhat frustrating because of the long way of upgrading.

The idea is probably that there won't be a limit like that. As far as significant differences goes, there's not really much of a reason to care about the rolls of your legendaries already. You want the right prefix and/or suffix. But with more money you could get better equipment that performs maybe 5% or even 10% better, but that's about that in most cases.
The more you upgrade, the less bonuses you get, that's already a thing so far. It's just going to be even more like that, so people still have something to sink money into. If you don't have a few hundred of millions lying around not knowing what to do with them, it's probably not really relevant.



To me the biggest problem here is just what it'll do to the general equipment market. At some point everyone is kinda reliant on buying gear, and I can see that becoming a lot more difficult for the low to mid price sector (aka not the gear you pay millions for). If cores maybe do end up as tradeable after all, people just salvage, and if not, equipment pricing gets most likely inflated. While I can't look into the future, I wouldn't be surprised if the core value is ending up fairly high.

This post has been edited by killi890: Dec 21 2021, 18:47

Great innovation, now we will lose stamina, and will not even know why... You won't even know if you answered correctly or not. It's just 100 out of 3 ponies.

I could be wrong, but as I read it, the only time you lose stamina is because of not answering riddlemaster in time.

You may consume more stamina per round, but there seems to be some leniency for error that most people probably won't get hit hard if at all by it.

(I may get corrected on this)

I could be wrong, but as I read it, the only time you lose stamina is because of not answering riddlemaster in time.

You may consume more stamina per round, but there seems to be some leniency for error that most people probably won't get hit hard if at all by it.

(I may get corrected on this)

Riddlemaster
Instead of valuating answers as binary "right" or "wrong" it will internally calculate an accuracy score based on how many unique ponies were displayed and how many right and wrong answers you made. Instead of docking stamina directly, the recent average of these accuracy scores is used interally to adjust the per-battle stamina cost.

If you fail to answer within the time limit, you will be docked 10 stamina directly regardless of your riddle history. (It will not affect the per-round stamina cost.)

The obfuscation factors (blobbiness and graininess) are now dynamic and adjusted interally based on various factors, primarily your level and how much you played lately. Most other aspects of the generation have also been reworked.

This post has been edited by KingArtson: Dec 21 2021, 22:34

Instead of docking stamina directly, the recent average of these accuracy scores is used interally to adjust the per-battle stamina cost.

If you fail to answer within the time limit, you will be docked 10 stamina directly regardless of your riddle history. (It will not affect the per-round stamina cost.)

What's wrong with the previous system?
The new system makes stamina calculations difficult and the thought of -10 is terrifying.
In addition to Random Encounter not launching properly rather often, my connection goes down at least once a day, usually for around a minute which is enough to screw up riddlemaster when it eventually happens at the wrong time.
And the unusually long downtime had to happen today just before I was able to soulfuse my Legendary Radiant Phase Pants that dropped last minute.

just buy an energy drink and move on. It does happen that the connection fails when you start a RE, but that's just that. It does no more harm than one energy drink. Lasting effect will only happen when you fail regularly. Try not to fail regularly.

You may be right from a credit point of view
but -10 penalty is psychologically scarring and I will probably cry in a corner when it happens