we have news for you about our upcoming update to version 1.4.1.
The update will be installed on BattleKnight.de on Tuesday, 07.05.2013. As usual if all goes well and no major issues are found after the update on the German live servers we will update the other countries shortly afterwards. In this plan the update will be installed in EN, ES, FR, IT, PE, PL, RU, TR and US on Monday, 13.05.2013 and on Tuesday, 14.05.2013 the rest (AR, BG, BR, CZ, DK, GR, HU, LV, LT, NL, PT, RO, SK) will follow.

Version 1.4.1 consists of the following fixes and changes:

• The regeneration rate of life points has been increased from constitution * 0.3 to constitution * 0.6
• A tool tip now shows when a castle has reached its maximum upgrade level
• Players now get a message with a link to the war duel when the preparation phase has ended
• If a multi connection is created between two accounts (by the user or by the GO) and they’re both in the same order the weaker account will be removed from the order unless the weaker account is the order leader. The weaker account is the one that looted less silver.
• There was an error message when trying to remove a member from the order that is in a war saying that you lack access to do so. This was replaced by a more appropriate message saying that the member is in a war or the order is in the preparation phase.
• Mercenaries now only see the war overview in the tavern when the preparation phase has ended
• Players who were logged in in the last three days before a war starts are now recruited automatically. A minimum of 5 knights are still required to not automatically lose the war.
• The number of duels you can perform per day has been raised to 3. Each round gets separated into 3 new rounds to accomplish that. Therefore wars now consist of 9 rounds of 8 hours each. The total salary for mercenaries does not increase due to that.
• The mount inventory was increased to two tabs.
• Hints didn’t check if a companion was still in the loot box and therefore sometimes gave out certain companions again as they have not been in the inventory yet.
• Due to a rounding error the actual regeneration of life points sometimes didn’t match the regeneration rate, this has been fixed.
• The display for life points showed “NaN” after changing your mount, this has been fixed.
• The description of the mystic shield has been changed.

Your BattleKnight Team

our survey has expired and we analyzed your answers. Of course we’d like to show you how you all voted. We had a total of 3815 complete responses which means we had 3815 users who actually completed the survey and answered all 4 questions.

First question:
The first question was ‘Should mercenaries be able to see the list of war participants only after the preparation phase has ended?’. 2477 users voted for yes, which sums um to 64.93% of all voters. 1337 voters (35.05%) voted with no.

Second question:
The second qestion was ‘Do you think mercenaries are too expensive?’. A total of 1617 voters thought they were, which sums up to 42.39% whereas 2198 voters (57.61%) disagreed.

Third question:
Question number 3 was ‘Should all members of an order that were active and online in the last  3 days before a war be automatically recruited?’. 63.98% of the voters (2441 votes) fount that to be a good idea while 35.99% (1373 votes) didn’t think so.

Fourth question:
Last but not least we had a fourth question, asking ‘How many duels per day would you like to be able to perform in future order wars?’. For most voters that one appears to have been the most easy to answer. An overwhelming total of 3048 voters (79.90%) voted for 3 duels per day. Only 767 voters (20.10%) thought that one duel per day was enough.

We will now discuss these results and take them into consideration for further planning of the next version. We’ll inform you as soon as possible about our further steps. Stay tuned for more information, great things are coming up and you surely don’t want  to miss them!

Your Battleknight Team

in order to give you a better way of taking part in the further development of Battleknight, especially in improving the order wars system, we set up a survey we’d like you to take part in. By answering those 4 questions in the survey you’ll help us greatly in deciding our next steps. The survey starts on Thursday, 28th February at 00:00 CET and ends on Friday, 8th March at 00:00 CET.

You will be reminded about the survey on Thursday by server messages and an ingame banner. A link to the survey will be provided once it started.

Your Battleknight Team

we tested and fixed, retested, changed, adapted, listened to your feedback…
Now the time is right to let each and everyone of you play the new version on your own servers and not only on our test server.

Tomorrow, 19.02.2013 between 15:00 and 16:00 CET version 1.4.0_pl1 will be rolled out on all BattleKnight servers. For more detailled information about fixes and changes please check your respective community’s forums.

Enjoy the new version!

Your BattleKnight Team

after we now had a brief overview over the new order wars system and simulated an order war step by step with each other we’d like to look at some feedback we received from the communities. Before we go on with that though we’d like to point out once again that nothing we introduced to you so far is unchangably carved in stone. A lot of the things that have been changed need to be observed in a live environment to see how the system actually really performs when thousands of players use it on a daily basis. This will then enable us to take your feedback as well as our findings and improve the system, fix bugs that won’t appear in the test environment and make necessary changes to things that might not yet be as good as we thought they would. Your feedback on this will be massively important so keep it coming.

One thing a lot of players mentioned is the inability to leave an order while it is in an active war. If an order is very active and performs many wars this may lead to players never being able to leave their order. Now while this may indeed create an unpleasant situation for some players we firmly believe that the scenario as such is a rather unlikely one in terms of becoming a real nuisance. Players who are recruited to the war can not leave their order, this is exactly as it was planned of course, no restriction there. However, this restriction also affects all other members of the order so noone can leave the order as long as a war is currently active. This is meant to prevent the usual order hopping in order to save. It remains to be seen in the live environment if this is a sufficient means to counteract saving.

Another thing that was mentioned is the war overview. Mercenaries can see it and possible provide the enemy with valuable information thus giving the enemy an advantage. At the moment we believe this can be happening but we also believe it to be an interesting feature as a mercenary should be trustworthy, reliable, active and strong. This would make it necessary for the order leader to actually pay close attention to whom they’re recruiting thus make it even more important for the mercenaries to make sure they’re worth their money or else noone will recruit them anymore in case they prove unreliable or even not trustworthy. Yet again, this will be closely observed and it remains to be seen if it works out nicely in a live environment or not. As you can imagine, your feedback is even more important on this one.

With the new order wars system saving will still be possible, that’s a thing that could be read often in your feedback so far. And it is true, obviously saving will still be possible. The point however is: it will be less lucrative as it will be much more expensive and require more effort. Due to the longer time periods inbetween and the fact that you can therefore not go into endless attack loops anymore as easily as before we believe this can already decrease saving enormously. Should it however not we will surely have to make changes to this part again. Some players suggested in their feedback to make wars cost silver in general. We believe this would be a bad idea as it could lead to disadvantages for smaller, active orders. Also with the new system an order war can already cost silver. All in all we believe that for the time being this is not an option. Another suggestion by players was to make the attacker lose his castle too. This is inacceptable as the defender can not decide whether he will be attacked or not and might end up with getting a castle they didn’t want, that is much worse than theirs, etc.  All in all this suggestion didn’t manage to be taken into consideration.

In general, for the time being we’d like to see if the existing measures maybe already decrease saving sufficiently. Unfortunately one can plan and test a lot of things in a test environment but real clarity and definitive proof if something will work out in a live system or not can in some cases only be gathered there: in the live system.

As for the release dates for the new systems we can only tell you so much right now: it will not be rolled out globally in one go but rather step by step. Inbetween those steps we will observe it and get your feedback and based on our and your findings we will adapt the system, change things that need to be changed and so on. So naturally your constructive feedback is very important.

And as they say…keep the best for last: on Monday, 28.01.2013 in course of the day we will install the current version which includes the new order wars system as well on the public test server at http://beta.battleknight.co.uk. For further information about this please visit your forums!

Your Battleknight Team

today we’d like to direct our attention to the end of an order war.

An order war ends with the end of the third round. Should the attacker fail to cause enough damage to the defender to win the war the attacker has to pay reparations to the defender. The amount of silver to be paid is 8-12% of the order’s treasury. A deuce has no consequences for either of the parties as none of managed to win the war. In a siege the attacker wins if they managed to bring the status bar to the second field from the right – we showed you the status bar overview in one of the last posts. The defender will then surrender and has to pay the attacker. The amount of silver to be paid is 8-12% again.  Should the attacker manage to bring the bar all the way to the right the attacker gets the castle, the conquest was successful. The defender accepts defeat and has to hand over the castle to the attacker who will henceforth be the new ruler of this mighty stronghold.

If a castle is not conquered both parties automatically sign a peace treaty. This peace treaty can be cancelled immediately by the order leaders or they just let it run, as they please. Remember, as we told you in an earlier info post, cancelling the peace treaty does not have an immediate effect. There is a 3 day cooldown until the cancellation takes place after clicking the button.

All players receive a detailled report about the war which also includes all actions the mercenaries actually performed and the salary they actually got. All silver for duels a mercenary has actually not performed gets recredited to the order’s treasury. All mercenaries are then dismissed and should they want to offer their service again they have to actively do so in the tavern.

This concludes our simulated order war which we lead you through step by step. Should you have any unanswered questions left do not hesitate to ask your respective team by using the provided channels. We will collect those and answer them in packages.

As soon as we have new information about a possible release date we will provide it to you.

Until then the Battleknight team wishes you a lot of fun with the game and a weekend full of medieval pleasure for you.

Your Battleknight Team

today we’d like to take closer look on conquering empty castles.

As with normal order wars a war lasts for 3 days with 3 rounds, each having a duration of 24 hours. Empty castles have a fixed defense value which is displayed in the overview. Players have to reach this value in order to conquer the castle by performing duels just like in a normal order war. For those duels the system will create NPC opponents just like in missions. The players themselves will not be attacked. While empty castles can be conquered they can not be pillaged.

The banner in the war status overview, unlike as with normal order wars, starts on the left and needs to be brought to the right side by the attacker to win. Should the order manage to bring the banner all the way to the right by the end of the war the conquest is successful. Should the order fail to do so it is – naturally – not.

In the next info post next week we will take a good look at the end of an order war, concluding our step by step example order war. Until then we’d like to wish you a nice weekend and a good enjoyable time.

Your Battleknight Team

the holidays are over and shortly before this year ends it is once more time to provide you with some more information about the new order wars system. After looking at the preparation phase in detail last week today we’d like to take a closer look at the process of a normal order war.

An order war lasts for 3 days and consists of 3 rounds with a duration of 24 hours per round. Each round a recruited player can perform one duel against a player from the enemy order. The damage done by the attacker will be credited to his order. The fight will be performed with the values, stats and equipment both players have at the time the attacker starts the fight. The choice of opponents is performed by a rather complex system which we will explain to you now.

When a player starts an attack the system calculates an average (AA) of his attributes and item bonusses. The same is done with the enemy players (AD).  Those values are compared for each single player as can be seen in the formula below. The closer the result of the formula is to 1 the more likely it is that this player will be the attacker’s opponent. Also taken into consideration for this evaluation are the levels of both players (LD and LA) as well as a weight for levels and attributes of both players (W). This weight can be adapted and altered later if necessary, currently it is 50:50, W therefore is 1.

The distance between D and 0 therefore determines the distance between attacker and defender.

Once it is known which 5 players are closest to the average values of the attacker the duel partner is determined. This also includes a random component where the player with values most similar to the attacker will be chosen with a likelihood of 50%, the 2nd with a likelihood of 30%, the 3rd by 10% and the 4th and 5th by 5% each.

Now the actual duel starts. It is performed like a normal PvP duel. Each player starts the duel with full HP and duel blocks do not influence an order wars duel. Except for the Mystic Stronghold all karma powers are in effect as usual, same goes for mounts and companions. As mentioned in one of our last info posts there will also be new achievements, one of which counting the damage the attacker did in the order wars duels. The attacker’s damage is counted for his order, however, the defender’s damage is ignored completely and therefore is not counted for his order. This ensures that only active knights who actually perform their fights are of value for their order. A strong knight who is not active and doesn’t perform his duels will therefore be more and more unlikely to be chosen for future wars. The war overview shows clearly how much damage and how many fights a single player has done in the order war. A 24h countdown is displayed for each round and when it reaches 00:00:00 the round ends and a new one begins in which each player can perform their next duel.  Depending on the damage done by the order the status bar in the overview will move and therefore display the current status of the war for each order.

At the beginning of an order war both parties haven’t done any damage yet, obviously the bar starts in the middle then. With more and more players performing their duels this bar will then move in the respective direction, the goal of both parties being to move the bar in their respective direction and therefore win the war at the end of the 3 rounds. The position of the bar at the end of round 3 determines the victor of the order war.

This concludes today’s info post. Next week we will be back, fully refreshed and recovered and with new information. Next info post will provide detailled information about the war process with empty castles. Until then the Battleknight Team wishes all players a good and enjoyable new year’s eve as well as a happy new year!

Your Battleknight Team

as announced last week we’d like to lead you through an order war in the new system step by step today to show you how order wars will work in the new system in detail. As with the information posts before we will provide you this information in handy small packages, easy to digest and process week by week.

At the beginning of an order war obviously all requirements are checked first. To be able to start a war the order member must have the necessary right in the order. The order also must have a specific amount of members which hasn’t changed so for the smallest castle 20 members are required, for the biggest castle the order needs 50 members. An order does not have to own a castle themselves to be able to attack another castle. The castle that should be attacked may not already be in a war at that time. This means a castle can only be in one war at the same time and gets blocked for other wars as soon as one war was started for the duration of this war. If all those requirements are met a war can be started and the first phase, the preparations, starts.

The leaders of both orders are automatically recruited for the war. Should a leader of an order already take part in another war as a mercenary he is not recruited for his own war. He can perform his duels as a mercenary in the tavern while he will see his order war in the order menu at “order wars”. Members of the order that have the right to recruit players for an order war receive a message notifying them about the start of an order war. The preparation phase lasts for 24 hours during which noone can leave their order, however, new members can enter the order and be recruited for the war.

During preparations the order can recruit 10 mercenaries. Mercenaries set up their price per fight in the tavern. Their salary is taken in total from the order treasury as soon as the mercenary is recruited. Should the mercenary not perform one or more of the fights during the war the respective amount of silver is returned to the order after the war has ended.

Beginning with preparations no castle feature can be demolished and the features wall and treasury can not be upgraded.

Each order has to recruit at least 5 players for a war. If one order recruits less than 5 players it automatically loses the war after the end of preparations. Should both orders recruit less than 5 players this automatically leads to a deuce.

Next week we will take a close look at the actual war itself and go through it step by step.

The Battleknight team wishes all the players a merry christmas and enjoyable free days!

Your Battleknight Team

as we gave you a brief overview over what exactly we’re going to change in the order wars system we’d like to lead you through a simulated order war step by step over the next few weeks and thus explain all the details of an order war using an explicit example.

Before we do so we’d like to show you a few screens of the new order wars system. The first package of images shows you how an image actually is created from the very first mockup (raw scheme, the vision of a screen) up to the final image which can later be found in the game.

Here we see the first step. Several parts of images are thrown together to resemble an example of what the new screen is supposed to look like. The mockup shows the status bar mentioned a few times already very nicely as well as a symbolic standoff of the two orders at war.

The graphics department now creates a raw scheme that actually already looks very similar to what we’d like to see in the game later. We can clearly see a nice background in front of which the both opposing orders are preparing for the war. However, there’s still some color missing and also some details.

As you can see nicely in the third image color makes everything look a little nicer. It also shows how much can change from the basic idea up to the final image. What first looked like a puny little building now reminds us of a big, impressive castle and the two armies look a lot more like a force to be reckoned with than before. Yet the whole thing is still not much more than a scheme and far from being final.

Here we can see that we’re clearly on our way to the final image. Shadows, colors and light effects fill the image with structure and atmosphere. This already feels like a battlefield.

To make the final image fit to the layout a few typical elements are added like the border at the bottom or the shadow on the left. This image could now appear in the game as it is.

In conclusion we’d also like to show you three screenshots from our dev server. Our developer kindly provided us with screenshots that provide a good first impression of how order wars will look like. Note that these graphics in the screenshot are not yet final and may very well change before the system goes live.

The first screenshot nicely shows what the order war will look like for the members. You can clearly recognize the status bar which will, depending on who’s currently stronger in the fight, move to either the direction of the attacker or of the defender. To start an order wars fight the member has to click the button you can see in the screenshot.

Here we can see the battle result after an order war battle. Our developer was victorious!

The overview shows which member of the order already performed a fight in the current round and how much damage they’ve done. We’re starting to think our developer is cheating there!

This concludes today’s post and the first real view of the new system. In the following weeks we are going to lead you through each step of an order war and explain all the steps in more detail.

Your Battleknight Team