'Mesmers just wanna have fun'

Blood and Thunder!

Some guys posted a nice video about smaller lev npc-s getting PEW-PEW-d with Mesmers. (Actually, Mesmer is the game's high lev Magnetic robot.) Hit the video for some 1 shot-half hp magic tricks.

+1 Joker: Pvp movie

Patchday

Newest patch is released:

• Terrain Container, Dropable&lootable
• Gui Updates
• Bugfixes
• Minor terraform modifications on the terrain.

The new EW mechs still need a bit work, but the mission system goes pretty well, i hope we can fill it up with contant, and release the missions in 2 weeks.

Just messing around.

Christmas soon.

So we approved another 100 beta registrations.

Have fun&Happy holidays to everyone! :)

Info time.

Hello there everyone! :)

Another week goes by, and a few information's leaked out, so I guess I should give you some nice pictures&info about everything that's currently on the work.

First of all, we heading quite well with the mission system. Actually it's in testing, and it's working pretty well. We have a few type of mission objectives: gothere, collectitem, shootsome. These objectives can be known at the start, or we can update your objectives when the time arise. All missions can have standing requirements to the faction that offers it, or it can be linked together, as chain missions, where you can advance in story&mission. We have repeatable missions too, as we currently don't have time to create so huge number of missions to be enough for decades, we will have at least the 25% of the missions repeatable (I think). [like, go shoot those things because we hate them] Mission reward can be any thing: From money to items, and of course standing modifiers to factions. (It both can be negative or positive, we can grant you as many faction modifiers in one mission as we want. So it's possible that you gain + with a faction, and in the same time loosing standing with another one. (because they don't like each other)) There will be some missions, where you can choose where you want to finish the mission: multiple finishing points will be allowed, where you can deliver the mission, with different rewards.

Minor update: Waypoints are now shown in the landmarks, and got nice icon too. Its still just temporary, but I really like it.

Okay, other thingy. Many of you heard about "hybrids" and that we doing something about the production system. Well, first things first, hybrids. What the hell is that?

It's a kinda old feature, what we didn't implement into standard gameplay because of multiple reasons... But still, we have it. We can mix the robots head-chassis-legs, in any combo. It means you can grab a robots chasis, put a different head on it, with a different leg: Tada, Woooow. :)

So here's an example picture gallery: I grabbed the Arbalest Chassis, put on different heads&legs.

Intakt-Arbalest-Cameleon

Baphomet-Arbalest-Waspish

Argano-Arbalest-Laird

Okay, now all of this is "cool", but whats good in this, why is it soo cool? Well the trick is, that each component (head-chassis-leg) has it's own stats, it's own slots, and it's own bonuses. So it means, that when you see the whole robot, as a complex, pre-created set, i mean the original robot, the robot bonuses are coming from it's parts. If you tear it apart, each part will have a part of it's bonus, in %, or maybe a part takes a whole bonus. This way, if you mix up robots, you will be able to create new robots with new specialization: A rocket-laser user, because you mix pelistal and thelodica robot parts. It will not have the same amount of bonus, but it will work well, giving bonus to both weapon types. Or you can create a hauler, that can actually use EW modules. Of course not every combination will be allowed, to avoid graphic bugs... But many combinations will be able to get produced. But beaware: because the parts brings the stats too, it's possible to have an EW bonused robot, but if it lacks the CPU capacity, it will be unuseable.

Okay I think that's for today, see you guys later!

Interview with Enigma guild

Many players have spoken of the problems of the production system, so I looked around, to find someone who's actually successful in it. Luckily, I found two players, named Ecma and Faradel from Enigma guild, and asked them about a few things, mostly about the production system, and how's their business going so long.

Mancs: Who are you, how long have you played the game, and whats your main focus in game play?

Faradel: Well I'm a 22 year old ex-biochemist and upcoming math-student from the Netherlands. I have played for roughly 5 weeks now. And our goal in perpetuum is to be independent arms dealers.

Ecma: I’m 43 year old, played PC games for far too many years, second in command of Enigma. I got the not so nice jobs to do with human relations in the guild, I’m disabled so I have lots of time to play. Just loving perpetuum and the way it is shaping up!

Enigma: What we mean with independent arms dealers is that we will stay independent as a corp and will not join an alliance but will do business with everyone.

We want to make a profit of other people's wars in other words

Mancs: So Enigma is basically a multi-gaming guild?

Enigma: Yes, but at the moment we have no real focus, once we do, we focus mainly on that game. But people are free to choose for themselves of course.

Enigma: Currently we have most people playing perpetuum but we also have a few DDO and LOtRO players.

Mancs: Let’s get to our point. What do you think of the current industry-production system?

Enigma: With the current system we feel that it does take a lot of time and money to start up production. The costs of developing a patent and producing the items is not something that we feel someone can do successfully on his own.

Enigma: On the other side we feel that as a group that work together to achieve this goal it is very achievable.

Enigma: As long as you split up your roles and have people focus on the different tasks that need to be performed. Say someone to develop patents, someone to produce bots, someone to refine and recycle. And a corp supporting these people with the money and materials needed.

Also a lot of the people who start for themselves don't seem to have a proper understanding of the of the patent/licence system.

Mancs: Hmm. How much player's cooperation it requires, to start a fully working crafting "assembly line"?

Enigma: In our experience we needed at least 1 person to specialize in each of those roles: Patent development, Builder, Seller/buyer, Miner, Recycler/refiner. This is what we think is a minimum.

Enigma: That doesn't stop those people from also mining/killing to get money and mats in. Also the developer can be the same guy who recycles/refines. Killers to bring money in will help a lot with bringing in money for development. This is roughly how we started...

Enigma: From there we got more people in and the process begun to speed up. But there is a period of time where you are mainly investing money in setting everything up. It does take a lot of time, effort and planning to get it done efficient. That is something we had.

Mancs: So finally its worth it? How much is your daily productions market price?

Enigma: Today only we have sold 34 mil worth of robots. We would have done more if we had them ready to go on the market. We then spend 21 mil investing in buy orders for commodities... From here on we can invest more money in buying materials instead of just mining them and that will speed up production.

Ecma comments: We made 11 bots today for sale, one being a heavy mech... Mats were the issue but they are poring in as we have 90 % of the buy orders for mats. So it will improve now, because we have 2 new builders, betting skill points so we can produce a lot shortly.

Mancs: Do you work on logistics? To transfer the created modules and robots, from one place to another, make sure that its findable everywhere? Or you post your sells on your home base?

Enigma: Till now we mined the materials on our own island and created the bots there to then bring them to the starter islands and sell them there on the same station as the infinite sell-orders are on. At this point where we are buying materials we move everything to doaden and craft the robots there now. The rare materials is different: we still mine it elsewhere, and then bring to doaden. And from daoden we distribute the robots to the stations that are affiliated with their clan. So the laser bots are sold on daoden, EM on attalica and missiles on NV. Our reasoning behind that is that not everyone has figured the market out yet and we don't want to miss sales due to people going for the infinite sell order. Instead of buying a cheaper bot at the next island over that they didn't know was up for sale. This way less nic and material leaves the game.

Mancs: You investing only into commodities? What about reselling used robots?

Enigma: All the robots we keep in corp are used, ones they move beyond that tier of robots they hand them back to us and we sell them. Or we give them to a newer player. Bit like your bigger brothers hand me downs.

Mancs: I mean, giving up buy-orders for robots in the market, then reselling them?

Enigma: We don’t have the funds available for that yet, but as we have more funds to work with we will look into that and other things. We did think about starting a trading lot, but that's for after terraforming comes in.

Mancs: Is there anything you would improve on, in the game’s production system?

Enigma: One thing that comes to mind is the increasing of time and material efficiency. At the moment you can only increase them 1 rank at a time. What would be nice it to have it work the same way as the license upgrades work, so request more then one at the same time. And when are containers ready? We are going trough a lot of tracks on those termis's!

Mancs: Ehehe, indeed its should be implemented soon ;)

Enigma: On buying an item: when you have a buy-order with multiple items the window takes the maximum number of items by default instead of just one. For example someone bought 3 arbelasts today meaning to buy 1. We bought the other 2 back for the same price. But not everyone will do that. Nothing else seems to jump out at the moment.

Mancs: Anything else you would improve on?

Enigma: When we look at what started this conversation. Newer people coming into the game will run into a very steep learning curve when it comes to the current patent/license system. We are lucky enough to have people with the skills to come up with working models to predict the investment costs and profit margins and what would be the optimal rank of rank of material efficiency. We have set up a spreadsheet that can calculate all of this for us due to a combination between my math skills and mizpahs logic skills. A lot of people who come in seems to not understand the basic mathematical ideas behind the system and don't know how much to invest in the different upgrades available. We have seem people state in help that they are requesting licenses 1 at a time. Or upgrading Material efficiency to rank 100 and at that point you are actually making the licence more expensive.

Mancs: Its a kinda cool thing that u actually managed to create such sheet.

Enigma: As to answer your question: We think the system works fine. The question is whether people can work with it. We have discussed about releasing that spreadsheet as a tool after the game goes live.

Ecma comments: we all feel the same about the Dev's hard work, we see them from very early till very late more than we are on.

Enigma: Indeed everyone here has great respect for the Dev's and gm's and their dedication.

Mancs: oh my god, what should i say?! Thanks! :)

Enigma: Thanks for the opportunity. See you all in game! ;)

Mancs: It was my pleasure! ;) Goodbye!

Weekly summary.

Hello there!

We had a kinda interesting week, because of the new patch, of course new bugs arisen, and we had to patch them too...

First of all, I should mention, that at moment the game is kinda bug free so we decided to let in more player, if you waiting for an account, you should check your mailbox. (in other news: a low percentage of the registered accounts ain't confirmed, we can't accept such registrations. In some cases, you set too high spamfilter, so your email server drops it back to us. =/ If you didn't get confirm mail, this should be the main reason for it. Please also note, that not correctly filled motivation, will not be invited to Closed Beta. :) Thx.)

Just after the patch we had an annoying Police problem, player defense system was offline, making a few nasty pirate actions in starting zone. Plus npc-s looked at police towers as targets, so many player experienced tower gangbangs :D Nevermind, we fixed both issue, plus now we configured the system to give pvp flag even if you use EW, or energy manipulator (drainer/neutralizar). Many player had fun with this, so I hope you read this before the next demobilizer fun ^^

After a few hours of talk, we realized that, damn, leveling in the first few hours is pain. So we created a new npc class, called faction drones, dropping faction weapons, but on low chance, plus nice ammo for them, in a small number. (I hope this number will get boosted) On top of that we created Drone Kernel, which is now collectible from drones, increasing income. We hope that after a half hour of droning you can change your place of farm to these new guys... But we still want to balance their loot a bit, I think :) Because now the standard drones dropping the drone kernel, now even they dropping unpackaged loot.

It's my own Fail story, that I was such smart that i deleted some raw captions for the gameplay movie, but still, I think it's kinda nice, and watchable. Sorry because the rare plants/decors... The film is captured on the edge of the island, this is kinda like an Outer zone of the islands, and less plant is grown there Yet. (remember that we use algorithms for such job) Plus, I should reupload to Youtube... That one "kindafluffy animal"<-(DIE DIE) delayed the music under the movie. Why do I look at Youtube as "every1-s uploadsite" while at Vimeo like "for people who just want it done... just without stupid bugs." But still more people would view it on youtube, so its reupload time.

I started making a wiki page for our nice game, feel free to contribute, and update it as you wish. It's currently not publicated, so no worries about that. + I keep some saved versions on my PC too. Any contributes is welcomed!

Community news.
This should be a new type of article :)
Of course, like in last weeks there were some new "artwork" atleast from Mr. Blackomen, that gave us laugh. :)

Damn so true.

Hmm, I can't really argue with this.

Also, you may not know, but i keep track of fan pages you made, waiting for a few nice content so I can link you in the blog's menu. Keep up guys :)

I'm really happy that many player started using Sequer, our new hauler mech, in npcfarming or in mining, as part of a team, to carry the loot. So I looked around, and found a nice artwork, about a future content robot, that will be the exceeding mech to the Sequer. Allow me to introduce our artwork-plan hauler mech: Daidalos. (Please note that this mech will be implemented into the game after the release.)

See you guys later! :)

Gameplay movie

Perpetuum Gameplay Video from Gábor Surányi on Vimeo.

I uploaded it to youtube too, please rate it! :)

New patch is out!

Just a quick actual news. Newest patch is out.

Mining tutorial

Searching trough the web for our footprints, I found a quite nice mining tutorial from Blackomen. Thx Blackomen/Dehrios! :)