Eltharyon

Hello everyone,

With today’s patch release we decided to set the Gold market purchase fee introduced in August to 0% on both Albion East and West.

This means buying Gold from other players no longer has additional costs associated with it (apart from the fixed 10s order fee it always had).

There’s two reasons for this:

• The fee didn’t stop margin trading, the margins just moved further apart
  
• The fee doesn’t seem to have a significant effect on the price of premium (the introduction of new silver sinks in Wild Blood on the other hand seems to have pushed the price down quite a bit)
  

Obviously we’ll be observing the impact of this change and take other actions if the outcome isn’t as we expected.

Happy trading,

Eltharyon

Hi everyone,

After collecting about a month of data on the new Gold market purchase fee, we have to say it was unsuccessful in bringing down the costs of Premium the way we had anticipated. We're still figuring out where exactly our predictions failed, but at this point we have to admit that the fee simply isn't achieving what we wanted it to do.

^{However, the data we collected (and still are collecting) contains lots of valueable insights into how this fee affects the Gold market.}

For this reason, and also because we want to avoid market shock, we'll be adjusting the fee downwards in multiple steps, each time measuring its impact, until we reach a point we're happy with.

Our goal is to adjust it to a point where it remains active as a relevant silver sink to help stabilise the silver economy, but does not affect the gold market trade behaviour negatively.

In the first step we'll take the fee down from 30% to 10% and the... Read more

Hello everyone,

Today we've introduced a Purchase Fee of 30% when buying Gold from the Gold market (but not when buying Premium for Gold or Silver).
Since this may seem like a drastic measure to some of you, I want to explain our goals in this post.

Over the last months, many of you have expressed concerns about the rising price of Gold, as it makes it difficult to earn Premium as a free player.
Since our goal has always been to keep Premium for Silver affordable, we've spent a lot of time analyzing the reasons for the constant rise of Gold prices on the market.

We've noticed that most of the price increase seems to be based on speculation - players investing their silver in Gold in hopes of rising prices, which drives the price of Gold beyond its real value.

With the Purchase Fee, we want to slow down this price increase and move the Gold price back towards reflecting its value in premium.
We're looking forward to seeing the i... Read more

Hello everyone,

Beginning today, we have updated how the Black Market buffers items before transferring them to the open world.

Here's how it works:

• In order to prevent issues where high value chests would receive less than the intended value, we've improved the Black Market algorithm to buffer drops more effectively and thus always retain enough items to fill high-value chests effectively.
  
• To prevent shock in the system as we start to buffer items, the buffers will fill slowly, so this entire change will happen slowly over the coming days and weeks.
  
• During the adjustment phase, it is possible you may see slightly reduced drop chances for some items, as these are filling the buffer. However, fill rates have been chosen to keep this effect minimal.
  
• No changes have been made to the overall drop rate of items, and Black Market demand will continue to be generated as normal.
  

... Read more

Hello Adventurers,

The launch of Albion East has gotten off to a great start, with Albion's concurrent players reaching record numbers. However, as many of you have noticed, there have been an increased number of players attempting to cheat on Albion East, especially so called “speed-hackers”. It’s frustrating, it’s problematic and overall, we know it’s a pain and affects gameplay. I want to assure all of you that we are very aware of the issue and your reports, posts, chats, and comments have not gone unnoticed.

This is a top priority for us, and we will continue to make this a top priority.

We want to be as trans... Read more

Dear Albion Community,

Today we released Patch #3 for ‘Beyond the Veil’, which brings some pretty big changes to the Roads of Avalon and is a direct reaction to the feedback we’ve received from many of you, asking us to return high value solo PvE opportunities (i.e. green chests) to the Roads of Avalon.

Patch #3 returns those marked chest locations to the game and generally tries to return elements from the previous system (mobs in a camp spawning together with the chest) and combine them with the ideas introduced in ‘Beyond the Veil’, like chests upgrading over time.

We’ve also clearly separated content in the Roads with green camps and roaming mobs being aimed towards solo and small group players, blue camps aimed at medium groups and orange camps aimed at larger groups. Finally, we’ve made sure to rebalance challenge and rewards to make the content worthwhile for you.

We wanted to bring these changes to you as soon as possible, so Patch #3... Read more

Hello everyone,

With Hideouts we’re introducing a really exciting new sandbox feature to Albion Online! You’ve probably heard that Hideouts are “open world bases” for your guild - but you may still have questions about how *exactly* they work.

Well, this document tries to answer that question in detail. This is not meant to be an introduction to Hideouts, but rather a guide to the details which may be important for enterprising guild leaders and players make plans for their own Hideouts after the release of Queen.

Enjoy, and let us know if there are details that we’ve left unanswered - we’ll extend this guide!

Placement

Hideout Construction Kit
To place a hideout, you need a Hideout construction kit. This is crafted at a Master’s (Tier 6) Toolmaker or higher and requires the following crafting ingredients:

• 10 Million Silver
  
• 3000x Limestone B...

Read more

Dear players,

Last week we announced a test we wanted to run on limiting Alliance size on February 26th. Then, on Friday, information leaked regarding changes to this test we were considering.

We deeply regret our approach to the communication and handling of this matter. We should have taken more time to evaluate the expected outcome of this test before making an announcement. For this, we would like to apologize.

The reason we're now announcing an adjustment to the test is that a hard cap on alliances size would trigger a “purge” of a lot of players from their existing guilds and alliances, cutting them off from their in-game friends and destroying their daily gameplay routines. A cap of 300 would not only have hit the top 4 power blocks, but also a very large number of more casual guilds and alliances. The resulting purge would have affected gatherers, traders and more casual players the most and would have done permanent damage to the game.
... Read more

Hi everyone,

I’m here to provide a quick update on our development progress and what you can look forward to in the coming weeks and months!

In our last roadmap update we gave you a first insight into our plans for Albion’s next Content Update. We announced that we’re planning to renew Open World gameplay in Albion Online, and since then, we’ve been working hard on making those plans become a reality. Soon we’ll be ready to begin sharing our progress in a new set of devtalks!

Next to these planned features, we’ve also looked at the feedback we’ve received on our Roadmap. Many of you asked us to also take a close look at power balance in the Outlands, and so we did.

The current strategic balance in the Outlands encourages large power blocks to form, and these power blocks in turn have an incentive to discourage conflict and raise a stable income by demanding rental payments from guilds under their protection. Enforcement of rental payme... Read more

Dear Albion Community,

Now that we have just released Oberon, our sixth major post-release content update, along with the massive announcement that access to Albion will become free, we think it is time to update you with our latest thoughts on Albion and the Roadmap for beyond the Oberon update!

Our vision for Albion remains unchanged: We want to deliver a flourishing player-driven economy which offers interesting and varied opportunities for crafters, traders and gatherers, and we want to deliver exciting, full loot PVP between individual players as well as on a large scale between guilds and alliances. In short, we want to deliver the best Fantasy Sandbox MMORPG experience out there.

We feel we’ve already come a long way since we started on this journey, but there is still a lot to do. Improvements can yet be made on every aspect of Albion Online, from its accessibility for beginners to convenience for long-term players. Most imp... Read more

Hello everyone,

With the launch of the Call to Arms update, we've upgraded the underlying Albion Online game engine version. In addition to providing a more optimized development process, this update should greatly improve some aspects of the game's performance, particularly a reduction of micro-stutters during gameplay. At the same time, there are potential new issues which come with any new technology.

We will continue to monitor the game's post-update performance and make any necessary adjustments. Please let us know if you notice any improvements or notice any new issues.

We wish you all lots of fun with the Call to Arms Update!

- Robin 'Eltharyon' Henkys

Hello everyone,

It's time for another update regarding the ongoing latency issues we’re experiencing.

Since Monday, we’ve finally made some progress on finding out what is behind these disruptions.
It appears that we are not actually the target of the attacks, but instead the attacks are directed against our datacenter in general and we ar... Read more