In a blog post today, the Legends of Aria team outlined a number of changes to rulesets.
The post begins with,
“With the move from Shards Online to Legends of Aria, we tasked ourselves with the goal of attempting to bring a return to open PvP in a full loot sandbox environment. This was a shift from our original design and one which we added the disclaimer that this was founded upon a desire to bring an environment which appealed to all players. We have learnt a great deal in this time and all of our experiences are telling us the same thing. To understand where we’re headed when we launch next month, we need to take a bit of a step back in time to understand how we came to this place and the upcoming changes.”
The post continues by looking back on MMOs and how PvP was handled in the typical “wolf vs sheep” meta, wherein the wolves were player-killers who sought out flocks of “sheep.”
They cite the changing landscape of MMOs as justification behind their impending updates to rulesets,
“All areas of Celador will serve as a non-consensual protected area, allowing only consensual Guild and Allegiance fighting within its borders. The Barren Lands to the west is now exclusively a non-consensual PvP zone.
So in realistic terms, what does this mean? We have rebalanced and tweaked large areas of our content to facilitate this change, moving previously tested content to appropriate areas, improved and balanced existing content, and found homes for entirely new ingredients and items. We have left no stone unturned in balancing these changes.”
Karma, too, has been simplified with the Karma toggle, “toggle features now only in the Barren Lands to protect players from accidentally committing unlawful acts.” They end the post assuring, “This is not an end to open PvP, this is still prevalent through our wilderness zones, starting with the Barren Lands which will be more active than ever.“
For the full post of all changes, click the link above.
Full Disclosure: Team Critical Hit, the company handling PR for Legends of Aria, is run by former Managing Editor of MMORPG, Bill Murphy.
