[2020] Community Devlog

: You can find the details for this event on the announcement page [url=https://steamcommunity.com/ogg/903950/announcements/detail/2492127969749914227]here[/url].

To start, we wanted to make it clear that communicating with our community is a top priority for us. We know that we haven’t been as vocal as we were at launch, and we apologize for that. The purpose of this devlog is to bring you more insight as to what has been happening behind the scenes at Donkey Crew since we released Last Oasis in Early Access.

Producer Lucas Stannis touches on some of the key points discussed in this post:



First, a little explanation about the development process: the content that we’re releasing has been in production for a while. It may not be what you are all wishing for at this very moment, but this patch has been planned for some time. Moving forward, you will see more community input within the additions and changes we make to Last Oasis. The team doesn’t stop to focus on one specific component at a time, there are tons of tasks and projects being worked on simultaneously.

We know that some of the marketing posts have not sat well with you, and we want to make it clear that marketing beats and the development process are separate things that often work in tandem. Social media posts, devlogs, and participation in events are just as planned out in advance as development. So, don’t worry, development is still happening and will always be our focus, even if there’s an ongoing marketing beat.

Due to the situation we dealt with during the weeks surrounding the game’s launch, on top of the global pandemic and the team shifting to a remote work environment, there has been a lot of transitions and adaptations happening. Until recently, we were in what you could call “crisis management mode” to recover from technical issues, both visible and invisible to the players. We’ve been dealing with resolving internal communication problems, plus giving our team much deserved and needed breaks after working long hours for many weeks in a row after the launch. This has culminated in some unplanned silence from us to the community. We’ve been figuring out what we want to share, how we want to share it, when we want to share it, and those plans have continued to change while we’ve watched the reactions to the things we put out.

We want this devlog to mark the beginning of a new push for better and more consistent communication moving forward. Our current plan is to do one of these community devlogs at least once a month, and there will be more ways for you to participate that will be introduced over time.

Like we mentioned above, this patch has been in progress for some time. It will be released next week, and we will give a far more in-depth write up about the content and decisions made in the upcoming days. We will also provide in-depth patch notes, explaining the reasons behind some of the changes and providing details on the purpose of the balance tweaks.

There’s one thing we know you’ve all been asking for: a Roadmap. We’ve been working on making it available to you all, and promise that it’s almost ready to be revealed. The technical issues we needed to deal with made a lot of changes to plans we had, so revealing a roadmap and promising something concrete wasn’t exactly feasible, but we do have some exciting plans for what’s to come after this Volcanic update. For a bit of a teaser: upcoming content patches will be centered around specific themes. The next theme is Commerce! And we can’t wait to share more of what we have in store!

There’s the point to touch on: the future of the game. There are so many plans and discussions and ideas that we can’t wait to develop, so be assured that Last Oasis isn’t going anywhere, we’ll keep improving this game to make it the best it can be!

Additionally, we wanted to touch on some questions we see asked frequently. There are more flushed out answers that may have only been glossed over in the above post. We know these won’t answer every question you might have, but we hope that it will provide you all with more insight.

QUESTIONS & ANSWERS

Q: Why did you stop communicating with the community like you were doing in the beginning?

A: We were overwhelmed with technical issues and the community response to the game (both good and bad). It was, and still is, a difficult time for us, but we think that we’ve reached a more manageable situation. In this next phase, we promise to be more vocal about the future steps and decisions we are making. We will also be more focused on the voice of you - our players. Moving forward, we will be doing two things (to start) to make sure you know we are listening: We will have an open Q&A available (soon) - where you will be able to ask questions and vote for the ones you want the developers to answer. All of these questions and responses will live in one place that everyone can reference. Our plan is to also include troubleshooting steps for some common support issues. Questions will be replied to weekly. On top of that, we will release a community devlog at least once a month - discussing things important to the game and to you.

Q: What’s the roadmap for the game?

A: We are almost ready to show you the roadmap for Last Oasis. It’s important to remember that any roadmap is dynamic — changes will have to be made and the ideas presented on it are not set in stone. It will give you a general look at where we’re planning to take the game and, of course, our players. We will prepare a separate post dedicated only to the roadmap in the coming weeks. What we can tease right now is that, beyond the Volcanic update (releasing next week!), we’re working on the Commerce update, which will greatly boost and expand the in-game economy and add loads of ways players will be able to interact with each other. The plan is to provide additional customization options, clan management features, and much more.


Q: What is your plan for the zerg problem/making the game more solo friendly?

A: While the thirst modifier had some effect on the way clans organize on certain tiles in the world, it clearly wasn’t enough to “fix” the issues regarding zerging and solo experience. These issues are currently our top gameplay priority, so we want to take our time and ensure we get it right, instead of going with the first ideas that pop into our heads. This will involve thinking through multiple angles and scenarios, discussing various ideas, and then mocking up a few of those for testing before implementing a good solution. We hear all the suggestions to add hard caps to servers, but with the information, feedback, and data we have, we strongly believe that one of the main causes of these issues is that there’s not enough variety in the gameplay experience within the game yet. Large clans enjoy fighting each other or hunting solos, while solos are bored and end up either joining those clans or getting hunted until they quit. What we think is lacking in this equation is diversity in other activities for all kinds of players and clans in the game, which would make the current (and only) type of gameplay one of many. We’re working on designing all kinds of new gameplay loops and entirely new experiences, like unique mechanics on event maps, arenas, exploration-based dungeons, and many more.

We are, of course, also working on more direct responses to the issue. With the Volcanic update, for example, defenders of their claim will always have slots reserved for their clan members, ensuring no server capping by attacking clans. We’re also considering mechanics like the use of Flots to reserve slots on specific tiles, harsher clan cap punishments, and more.

Q: When will you add in clan perms/logs/alliance systems/other QOL things that the community has been asking for?

A: We’re continuously working on improving various aspects of the game and introducing Quality of Life features. The difficulty with those types of improvements comes from having to iterate over time to make sure the changes actually make a difference and provide a benefit to all players equally. The next planned improvement regarding clans specifically, which will come with the second Volcanic update, some weeks from now, will be an introduction of detailed clan logs that can be directly integrated into a clan’s Discord server. This will allow clans and their leaders to monitor their clan’s activity even while not playing. We’re also working towards a more expansive permission system for clans, but that will come after the logging feature, as it requires much more planning and iteration.

Q: Future Walkers: Will they be geared towards solo/small groups or larger clans?

A: Our plan is to continue adding new types of Walkers throughout the entire development process that are geared towards a variety of playstyles. There will be Walkers better suited for solo players, Walkers that focus on attack or defense, specialized Walkers that excel at one thing over others, and many more. The latest addition to the fleet was a small Walker geared towards escaping combat with increased defenses. Next one, called Domus, will be larger and provide the best protection out of all the current Walkers. It has multiple levels behind locked doors and will be useful to clans that bet on defense over direct combat.

Q: Why aren’t you doing more about cheaters/reported players or clans?

A: We’re continuing to actively address cheating issues, both with the help of our anti-cheat protection and your reports. By the time we did the last announcement, we had many new and reliable systems to detect and automatically ban almost any cheater in the game. By now there are over 1000 active bans and while new cheats occasionally pop up, they rarely survive more than a day (the last one was 11 days ago, which got around a hundred cheaters banned). We also routinely go through all your reports and take actions daily.

Q: When can we expect updates for private servers?

A: The feature to delete tiles will be coming with the Volcanic update next week. We’ll be also continuing to work on improving the entire private server system over time, prioritizing your requests first. Going forward, we’ll be looking into providing an experience that’s as close to official servers as possible, but also adding features to customize your experience, potentially also expanding the ability to host your private servers with other providers and self-host too.

Q: Will you be taking community feedback into consideration more frequently moving forward?

A: We’re working on the best way to collect and analyze all the suggestions and feedback that you give us. The passion and enthusiasm we see from you is amazing, but can also be overwhelming. We want to make this right, with your help. Keep an eye out for ways to participate!

Q: Will you start doing live Q&As again?

A: Yes, we have plans to do both pre-selected and live Q&As in the near future, on top of having the “living” FAQ page that we mentioned in the first question.

Q: What work is being done to reduce server crashes?

A: There is no single cause for occasional server crashes, but we’re including fixes for them in almost every patch. With the new public test version in place, the number of crashes introduced by new features should drastically drop by the time a patch is live, so we’re hoping to eliminate the last frequent offenders at some point soon.

Q: Wipes?

A: While we’re not excluding the possibility of wipes in the future, we’ve designed the burning system to function as a soft-wipe mechanic, getting rid of old structures and preventing stale clan-owned lands. We’re planning to continuously improve and polish the features that fortify that design ideology. We’re listening to your suggestions and concerns to adjust it to the way you play. Potentially, there could be some additional soft-wipe mechanics in the future that clear the persistent world on a deeper level rather than just destroying old maps, but we’d like to investigate more globally how any of those changes would affect the global map.

Q: Are you working on resolving insiding issues?

A: Extensive clan logs and upcoming overhauls of the clan permission system will most likely make it much more difficult to do serious damage to clans through insiding. We’ll keep looking for more ways to prevent unfair gameplay caused by game mechanics and consider your feedback on those features.

A note: We will be opening our Player Test Realm tonight ahead of our patch releasing next week. We know this isn’t the patch that will fix everything, but we’re looking forward to it being a step in our continued effort in improving Last Oasis.

We’d like to remind you that all the changes on the Beta Branch are experimental and in relatively early states, so it’s entirely possible that there will be significant changes to one aspect or another before the update goes live on public servers. We’re constantly reading your feedback and discussions, and checking statistics on everything that’s going on in the game to potentially balance or even overhaul some of the features.

There’s some exciting things coming in November and beyond, and we can’t wait to share more soon!

To kick things off, we wanted to say Happy Halloween, Nomads! We have two treats for you:

First, Last Oasis is available for 34% off until November 2nd!

Second, we have a new narrative cinematic to share: Possession.

Jakub, our video editor, made this just for fun. It is not a teaser related to development.



Some Clarifications

Performance, Lag, and Other Unpleasant Things

To clarify once again why you might experience more stuttering on BB than on public servers - we're using a development version of servers that allows us to test and profile them at any time. Unlike the version that public servers have, this one is much more performance heavy on average, but it means that we can identify and fix issues much easier, which helps with iteration speed and will ultimately bring the Commerce Update to public servers sooner and in a more stable state.

We're currently focusing on many aspects of optimization overall and we're confident that there will be a noticeable difference between the current public version and the one coming with the wipe. After that, we're still planning to continue optimizing over time to make sure the game runs as stable as possible on the majority of hardware.

Clan and Tile Caps

Regarding the clan/tile caps, we're still assessing their impact on the game during BB. We've had an overwhelming amount of requests to add clan caps in the past, and while we weren't convinced on paper that they'll solve all the issues, we decided to try them out, since it's a testing Beta Branch. When it comes to hard tile caps though, while they might have a larger impact on the zerging issue itself, it would likely introduce significant issues to the travel, make queues much more punishing, and in general cause many additional problems. That said, we're still considering different options and collecting more information on how the current solutions actually affect the game, so it's possible there will be some changes coming in the future.

BB and Private Servers

Private servers will be getting the Commerce Update and all other changes from BB as soon as they're available on public servers. Together with those, all private server owners will be able to host multi-tile realms at the same time.



This week: Our Merciful Lord and Savior, pogosan, Blessed be His Name:

We’ve seen a lot of positive feedback so far regarding the changes to the game meta introduced with the Commerce Update, but also quite a few questions about the gameplay intentions behind some of them. While we wanted to give you time to experience all the changes on your own for the first week of the Beta Branch, we’d like to explain some of the ideas behind the two most significant balance overhauls that we didn’t mention in the original Commerce post.

Bases and the Silur

One of the biggest shifts in the meta that occurred due to the Commerce changes must be the gameplay surrounding bases. By making it possible to build a home you feel secure in early on, many decided to invest in a base and store some of their belongings there.

The idea behind making bases a more viable option in a moving world revolved around multiple problems we’ve seen in the game. The main one was such a heavy focus on the edge gameplay, where a large portion of the game happened in the travel zone, as it’s much safer and every player would have banking Walkers there at any time to conveniently use. This resulted in tedious and boring interactions that didn’t require much thought or had any potential consequences. Other issues included most of the oases being always empty and lifeless, as there were no man-made structures around, and, as a side effect, almost every possession in the game was always safe, making exploration rather boring.

With the introduction of the Silur Walker, allowing packing of solid bases and moving them when oases decay, and affordable stone base structures, it is now much more convenient to have at least some form of a base deployed in the oasis. Even though it’s somewhat less secure than banking everything in a lobby, it’s a tradeoff of a little bit of security for convenience of having a place to spawn and store your loot right in the gameplay area. That results in the world being much more diverse and interesting to explore, since each oasis will now have unique bases and structures all around it. Some might be fortified and not worth attacking, some have glaring security issues, allowing to steal some things. In the end, it’s more convenient for everyone who wants to store things closer to where they play and more fun for those who want to try to attack it.

When it comes to balance of solid bases though, we’d like to achieve situations where they’re sieged only when attackers have a good idea that it’s worth the loot inside. If there’s a 2x2 stone box with a firefly nearby, it’s better to leave whoever is inside alone, as it’s likely just some wood and fiber, but if there’s a fortress with Cobra Walkers on alert, it might be a good idea to try to get inside.

Walker Combat and Farming

Another significant change that came with the Commerce Update is making all Walkers less sturdy, allowing to damage them with any kind of a projectile or even the environment itself. While hullbreakers still remain the obvious choice for battles due to their high damage over time, now every shot in a battle counts, which goes both ways.

What this change means is that every Walker engaging in a battle will likely be damaged and, potentially, destroyed. Whether it’s a small Mollusk going about its day farming bone or a large war Falco attacking it for some loot, both will likely end up with damages that need to be repaired and accounted for.

With the meta formed in the previous balance, it was clear that those with more resources will always have the means to pirate Walkers, no matter how much more difficult it is to obtain hullbreakers. While the new balance ideology doesn’t address this specific part, what it does is it puts the pirates at risk as well, no matter how well-defended their Walker is or how much ammo the nomad being attacked has. There will almost always be some losses on the side of the attacker, and the more they attack, the higher the risks.

The changes to the combat timer and the Walker repairs play hand in hand with the Walker balance overhaul as well. Combat timer makes it more dynamic based on how serious the attack is, while the new repair system encourages careful planning before a battle, as you won’t be able to repair your Walker until after a battle is fully completed and you’re able to stand still for repairs.

Since Walkers are essentially more vulnerable now and are likely to be lost more frequently than before, harvesting balance has been changed as well to accommodate rebuilding Walkers more often. While it won’t be noticeable early on, as low tier tools still harvest similar amounts of resources, once you start progressing towards larger Walkers, requiring more structures on deck, and have more items to lose, higher tier tools will provide much larger quantities of resources, allowing you to rebuild quicker and get back to your regular activities.




Remember to join our Discord[discord.gg] and submit your questions to the devs through the form in #announcements! Keep the questions coming, but be sure to check out our {LINK REMOVED}Living FAQ before submitting!

Q: Will there be new mechanics added to the combat system?
A: As we've mentioned in the Commerce Update post, we're currently working on a melee shields mechanic, which should provide some more diversity in combat. We're also considering some other features regarding that like new moves for nomads during combat and unique attacks for different weapon types.

Q: Why add the 3 day period where you are unable to join a clan after leaving one alongside adding a 50 man cap?
A: The main reason for this is to prevent switching between clans to avoid soft cap penalties and other potential clan system abuses. That said, we'll likely make this mechanic somewhat less punishing pretty soon.

Q: Are you thinking of adding any color blind settings?
A: Definitely. We'd like to add as many ease of access settings as we can to accommodate all kinds of players in the future.

Q: What sort of content do you have planned for small groups/solo players?
A: To add to what we already have in the Commerce Update, we'd love to make quests and other similar mechanics something that solo players and small groups can excel at more than large clans, essentially fueling the economy together with those large clans, who instead focus on wars and territory control for the most part. In general, we want to separate goals of different types of players to avoid confrontation between them, while encouraging symbiotic gameplay.

Q: Will the Main Branch wipe be a full one? When is that going to happen?
A: Yes, the main public branch will have a full wipe like we've announced before. It will happen once we're happy with all the changes and balance on the Beta Branch that we're doing at the moment. As we've estimated at the start of BB, it will likely take around a month of time in total.

Q: Could you add an option to leave the queue from a full server to return to your previous server?
A: Improvements to the queue system, including leaving the queue, are something we're working on right now and it will be available in BB before the wipe.

Q: Will private servers get multi-tile access before or after the commerce update phase testing?
A: Both the Commerce Update changes and multi-tile realms will be available on private servers as soon as they come to the public servers after the testing period.

Q: Can we get community events or play against devs at some point?
A: We can definitely look into community events in the future! As for playing with the devs, you may have already played with them and not known :eyes:

Q: How about introducing a leaderboard at the trading station? The clans that put the most proxy, burned them, or own a large number of oases?
A: We were mostly considering leaderboards for individual players, as clans are very often dynamic - they split, combine, dissolve, and so on. It even happens that a clan that once started with a group of players will change their roster so much that it'll be a completely different group, so any kind of statistics for a clan could be quite misleading. We'll definitely consider it though, and try to find a good solution.

: You can find the details for this event on the announcement page [url=https://steamcommunity.com/ogg/903950/announcements/detail/2958262581891238270]here[/url].