Hello Travelers,

In today’s Hotfix, we are reverting the change to the cost of Despair Glyph Prophecies.

With this, we wanted to talk a bit about why this change made it into the last patch, similar changes, and a bit more about our specific reasoning behind them.

Glyph of Despair Prophecies

This change (favor cost for despair glyphs) didn’t have anything to do with Merchant’s Guild (MG) - at least, we weren’t aware of a significant issue being caused by MG players swapping to ‘abuse’ this. We believe MG already has a very good pathway to Despair Glyphs with Vault of Uncertain Fates, so wouldn’t have been benefiting from this prophecy by swapping.

This was actually something we had decided before 1.0, that the favor cost was too low for this reward along with other adjustments in a late pass. However with the post-launch changes/fixes, this was as soon as it made its way through the pipeline with other priority fixes pushing their way ahead of it. So this was purely in regards to its own balance within Circle of Fortune (CoF). One of the discussions this has started internally is regarding review of these delayed adjustments.

Our previous pipeline didn’t include design looking at the final patches when they went out, so unfortunately we missed this change and re-evaluating it. We have adjusted our pipeline to try to catch delayed changes so we can be more mindful of them and consider if they should go out, or be delayed to the next cycle. It’s highly likely this change will still happen with 1.1, but it may not be to the same cost as it was in this change.

TLDR: The change was made before 1.0, got stuffed in the pipeline, and just finally got out without further design review on timing. We’ll be keeping a better eye out for delayed changes like this.

Arena Key Sell Prices

With the Key value nerf, the impetus for it was as we had stated, that it was being leveraged by MG players with swapping factions. However, this was a change we had planned for some time, and it was really just the final push needed to prioritize the change. With the key values, originally they had a higher value on them so it gave them some value for players who didn’t have any use or interest in them (never played arena).

Keys were never intended to be a source of gold farming, which is something which crept up over time with them being easier to target in the Monolith. With the interactions in CoF, it was the straw which broke the camel’s back, so to say. We definitely agree we did not sufficiently communicate reasoning behind this change, and that’s on us creating that misunderstanding. We’ll be making an effort to include bigger picture reasons behind changes such as this, rather than the immediate reason, as we had.

TLDR: Arena Keys were never meant to be a method to farm gold, and it had reached a point of prominence that even MG players had begun to feel the need to swap to CoF to leverage it.

Mid-cycle Changes

In regards to mid cycle changes, we had approved these changes as they don’t impact moment to moment gameplay, and won’t suddenly cause a build to not be able to clear a certain difficulty of content it was able to previously. The survey we had previously gone through was about those kind of build impacting changes, rather than general systems. We should also mention this is our guiding star, not our railroad. In specific scenarios we may decide another route is better, such as this Despair Glyph change not being enacted during this cycle. For these kinds of changes, we will use our best judgment, and will always be receptive to hearing feedback on them.

We have also seen some feedback regarding the survey not covering bug fixes which result in buffs. The reason for this is that we have always had the intention to follow through with bug fixes that result in buffs mid-cycle, and did not feel that was controversial to be surveyed. We won’t be holding back bug-fixes that result in buffs.

TLDR: Our intentions with mid-cycle changes from the survey is to avoid nerfs to the power level of characters, or moment to moment gameplay. We will still do changes that are buffs. These are guides, not rules - we will exercise discretion.

Thank you

As always, thank you voicing your feedback to us - it is sparking discussions about the timing of these changes, as well as communication regarding them. We hope we can clear up that both these changes were things we had been discussing for some time prior and were not just due to abuse, and help to put to rest some of the conflict we’re seeing.

Changes

• Reverted Favor cost increase for Despair Glyph Prophecies

Please Note that for approximately three hours after the patch goes live it is still possible to connect to an old server which will charge the old costs. Please wait until after this timeframe before visiting the Observatory for specifically purchasing Despair Glyph Prophecies

They should still have a sale value, just not high enough to make focus farming them a ‘key’ strategy.

A change/fix being set forth prior to a patch release is unrelated to this distinction I would feel - It may or may not be a bug. As long as there isn’t an underlying bug, purely changing balance would be a change, as under this assumption, the numbers had met the intention at the time.

To clarify our intentions and statements:

As the survey was sparked by the feedback to our statement that we wouldn’t change the warlock’s ward generation mid cycle, in agreeance with the survey will not be making changes which impact moment to moment gameplay or build power, which can suddenly cause a build to not be able to clear a certain difficulty it was able to previously.

As per the survey, we will make bug-fixes which impact moment to moment gameplay, or build power, if those bugs are resulting in the build highly overperforming.

System changes and bug-fixes, such as to Item Factions, Vendor Interactions, or other systems, which are unrelated to a build’s performance, and would not cause a build to suddenly be unable to complete a difficulty level it was previously able to is unrelated to prior conversations. These changes are something we will be making judgment calls on as they arise.

These are also all guidelines, not forced rules. If we don’t agree a bugfix should go out to something highly overperforming, we won’t have the rule force our hand to. Conversely if we feel a change should go out that’s not resulting in it highly overperforming, we may still chose to push that change. A reason for this may be that it’s causing server issues.

Not at all to discredit, or disregard any feedback, I just wanted to try to be clear from our side as much as possible.

Reverting this change was extremely low risk, however as a general rule we don’t want to deploy on Fridays in case something goes wrong. While there is events where we may need to stay late, we don’t want to put employees through that if we can avoid it. We’re of course not alone in this, so not deploying on Fridays is a common thing for many companies. We will continue to have weekly patches including more bug-fixes,