VGInterface - Update #2 Information!

http://vgplayers.station.sony.com/ne...1&section=News
Game Update #2

1. Guild Halls
2. The Brotherhood System
3. Bind on Equip
4. LFG Improvements
5. Rest Experience
6. Level Based Diplomacy
7. Diplomacy UI
8. Deconstruction
9. Item Level Requirements
10. PvP bug fixes
11. Crash To Desktop fixes and Optimizations
12. Quest Journal and Quest Tracking improvements
13. Item UI
14. Scrolling Combat Text

1. Guild Halls
Guild Hall plots are now available for purchase! They operate in a similar manner to regular housing in regards to overall construction but require new components. Building a Guild Hall will require efforts from all three spheres of Vanguard.

Crafters will need to learn brand new recipes for all three continents. There are new quests for different key parts of the Guild Hall structure, the majority which are for the mineralogist specialization. Other crafting trades will have some component recipes as well though.

Among the new recipes, a special mortar assembly recipe is introduced. This recipe requires components obtained from high level adventuring areas. Fetching these items will be very dangerous. You will want to bring a group.

Diplomats will be needed to obtain permissions to construct the Guild Halls as well. Without the correct documents obtained from the local government, the land owner will not be allowed to build a Guild Hall. However, obtaining this documentation will not be a simple task.

Finishing construction of a Guild Hall will take much more investment than building a smaller house due to the sheer size and space. However, once completed, they will be a great place for your guild to gather and store treasures, in addition to being a mark of pride for your group!

2. The Brotherhood System
Brotherhoods are a method for you and your friends to gain experience for each other, even when some of you are offline.

Features
· All experience you earn is split amongst the members of the fellowship, even members who are offline.
· When you are in debt or have lost experience, your experience will be devoted to repaying your debt/loss before you resume contributing to the brotherhood.
· Brotherhoods are completely independent from groups; you can be a member of both at the same time.

Limitations

Brotherhoods can have a maximum of six members.
You must be within five levels of every member of the brotherhood in order to join.
You must be within a few meters distance to invite a player to your brotherhood.
If you leave your brotherhood or are removed, you may not join another one for four hours of online played time.
Members who are offline do not receive their experience until they log on. (Be careful when using the system to level up rarely-played characters, as their skills will fall behind, thus they will be very weak for their levels!)

Getting Started
Interested in creating a brotherhood? Simply target your friend, right click your defensive target window, and select "Invite to Brotherhood." You may then administer the brotherhood from the social window (default key 'O') "Brotherhood" tab.
3. Bind on Equip
All equipable items that were bindable are now either bind on equip or bind on pickup, with the majority of the items being bind on equip. Here is a quick overview of the affected items:

· All equipable items that were bindable are now BOE or BOP
· All uncommon and common items are BOE
· All rare world loot items are BOE
· All rare (and higher) items that are not on world loot tables are BOP
· All containers are BOE
· Quest rewards will remain soulbound as they were before this change

This change was made for a variety of reasons.

Removes items from the functional trade economy after the item has been used once.
Helps regulate economy as items are effectively removed from trade.
Changes to the deconstruction system allows all players regardless of sphere to feel a “gain” even after they have upgraded items in a slot, we did not feel that binding an item to our customers and presenting them with nothing back for its value was worthwhile.

4. LFG Improvements
There is a new LFG button that is located in the group area of the UI (left side of the screen), which brings up the new looking for group and looking for more tabs of the social window. This will disappear once a player joins someone else’s group, but it will remain for group leaders until their group is full. It automatically brings up the LFG tab for non-grouped players, and the LFM tab for group leaders.

The looking for group tab allows players to set which dungeon(s) or quest(s) (from the list of quests that the player currently has in their journal) they would like to work on, and then see a list of other individual players or group leaders. Players and group leaders in the list will be sorted based on their level relationship to you and how closely their preferences match yours, so those that are near your level and are looking to do the same dungeon or quest will be sorted highest in the list. The LFG tab also includes the option to auto accept group invites. If the player doesn’t turn on that feature, they will see the name, level, and class of the group leader and the name, level and class of each of the current group’s members when they are sent a group invite, at which time they can choose to accept or deny the invite as normal. If a player selects a group leader in the search list, they will get the new option to send a request to join that leader’s group, at which point the group leader will see the name, level, and class of the player that is requesting to join the group and the leader can choose to deny the request, or to send a group invite to that player.

The looking for more tab works like the LFG tab, except that it lets a group leader select the archetype(s) and/or class(es) that the group is looking for, in addition to setting the dungeon(s) and/or quest(s) that the group would like to find more members to do.

Both the LFG and LFM lists show individuals looking for a group and group leaders looking for more members. Hovering the mouse over a player in the list will show more info about them, such as what dungeons or quests they prefer, and if it is a group leader the tooltip will also show what archetypes or classes the group prefers and a list of all of the current group members’ names, levels, and classes.

5. Rest Experience
Heroes may now rest in Vanguard! Resting increases the rate at which a hero will gain adventuring, crafting, or diplomacy experience. As the hero gains experience in a particular sphere, rest of that type is exhausted. Rest for each sphere is separate, and is designated by a blue bar on the character sheet of the corresponding sphere. For adventurers, rest is also displayed on the experience bar. Camping allows a hero to rest, occurring more rapidly at outposts. A hero may tell if he or she is at an outpost when a tower icon appears next to his or her class icon.

6. Level Based Diplomacy
Diplomacy is moving from a “skill-based” (1-500) system to a “level-based” (1-50) system. In this changeover, your skill will be automatically converted to level. For instance, if you were skill 120, you would now be level 12. If you were 123, then you would be level 12 with 6 bubbles filled. NPCs and items are also converted as well, as will be the difficulty of conversations. This move allows us to fit Diplomacy more easily into creating content for the game, greatly speeding up the way we make content and reducing the places in which bugs can crop up – while also increasing the opportunities for sphere interdependence.

7. Diplomacy UI

Double-clicking cards in your Diplomacy strategy during a parlay will now play them as if you selected the card and clicked the "Speak" button.
Cards in your Diplomacy strategy are now dimmed when unusable because they are still refreshing.

8. Deconstruction
Deconstruction is no longer process oriented. Deconstruction kits will be sold by vendors and each kit will have ten charges. Right-clicking the kit and then clicking on the item you wish to deconstruct will give you the option to convert the item to a resource or a dust.

Common items should convert into attuning dusts or common resources
Uncommon items should convert into resonance dusts, common resources and sometimes a rare resource
Rare items should convert into resonance dusts, focusing dusts, rare resources and sometimes ultra rare resources
Anything above rare follows the same rules as rare

9. Item Level Requirements
The rules for who can equip items has been streamlined, equipment expertise was too confusing for many players. This puts a stronger emphasis on gaining levels to allow players to equip more powerful items. It also restores demand for items that were trivialized due to the varied range of Equipment Expertise per item type and slot.

Items in Vanguard now have a minimum level required to equip.
This only applies to items that are equipped on the adventuring, crafting, or diplomacy tabs of the character sheets. Mounts are excluded from this limitation.
Equipment Expertise has been removed from the game.
Any items you were wearing that are higher then 5 levels above you will not be removed until you remove them yourself.

10. PvP bug fixes
We spent some time fixing some of the more egregious bugs

· Abomination grafts that produce a damaging effect has been reduced against players.

· Bards can no longer pulse an invis effect while in combat.

· See invis now functions properly – you can no longer see other players that are invis if you don’t have a see invis buff unless they are in your group.

· There is a new 40% damage cap on any single ability in PvP.

· Players may now rotate while rooted.

· Pets were previously hitting for full damage in PvP. They have now received a half-damage modifier to be in tune with the half-damage modifier applied to other damage types.

· You can now use abilities on pets in PvP. Previously, they would be immune to many types of abilities they shouldn’t have been immune to.

11. Crash To Desktop fixes and Optimizations

Reduced the frequency of garbage purges. They will now only occur once your client has under 100MB of system memory free, and there is more "stuff" to purge. This will reduce the amount of "hitching flashes" to only the times when you really need them to prevent the game from crashing.
Textures should now take up a great deal less system memory, reducing the number of crashes from out of memory errors substantially.

12. Quest Journal and Quest Tracking improvements
Some improvements have been made to the Quest Tracker.

The layout of the quest journal window has been changed to allow more info to be shown at once, your list of quests is on the left, and the info for the quest you have selected is on the right, making for less scrolling.
The Work Orders and Locations tabs have also been changed to the new layout.
A new button, "Auto-track" has also been added which brings up a new window to set options for the new auto quest tracker feature.
Auto quest tracking is on by default and in its default state, quests that you accept or quests that are updated during your play session will appear automatically in the Quest Tracker, but will be removed from the Tracker after several minutes if you don’t do anything to progress that quest (complete quest objectives).
There is now an option to have the Quest Tracker continuously list all of your quests at once
There is an option to filter out quests that don’t have counters (such as kill X / X).
You can still manually track quests as before, but the auto tracking options make the tracker a bit more useful now.
You can now mouse over the name of a quest in the Quest Tracker to see a tooltip that shows the summary for the quest, allowing you to refresh your memory about a quest without having to open the quest journal.
The details part of the quest under the quest name in the Tracker now get removed/collapsed once you complete a quest, which allows for more quests to be shown at once. Also note that the Quest Tracker display can be made larger in layout mode if you would like to have it show more quests at once.

13. Item UI

Items that contain an associated ability should now display the description of that ability, if a description is available.
Items with offensive and defensive “Rating” modifiers, in addition to the actual Rating, will now display a percentage for that specific modifier against an equal level NPC. This addition will add some clarity to the previously confusing Rating system.
Items will now display the actual percentage that an attached “Chance on Hit:” proc will activate.

14. Scrolling Combat Text

You can now switch on scrolling combat text in your Settings panel.
The Scrolling combat text will speed up and slow down depending on how fast text enters the world.
New Slider bar to toggle transparency of the scrolling combat text. This will allow players to choose settings where the text is less obtrusive, while other players can chose a setting so they can achieve maximum visibility of the text.
New option to use multiple layers of scrolling combat text (in order to place crits and more important text on one layer and less important information in another layer with a more transparent look).
New option to use multi-column scrolling combat text. This will slow down the necessary movement of text (since more text can sit on one line). This setting will be very useful in raids when there is a lot of damage spam.