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:




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.