About upgrades being removed from 1.11

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DarnYak
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Joined: August 12th, 2006, 2:54 pm

About upgrades being removed from 1.11

#1 Post by DarnYak »

I get this question a lot, so I'm finally making a big post about it:

As most of you know, 1.11 was severely behind schedule, for reasons related to EotA and reasons related to my own life. A giant chunk of time was due to the addition of Undead, without realising just how much needed to be added besides coming up with heroes and their skills. One of the most problematic turned out to be adding the undead upgrades, due to a mix of time to add them and the extra bloat they'd add to an already stressed map. With some reluctance, I decided to release Undead without upgrades, which naturaly demanded that the other races must have their own upgrades disabled to prevent the game from becoming horribly imbalanced.

This, however, was not the only motivation for removing upgrades, just what demanded a temporary removal untill I get a chance to reform the system (yes, another revamp of upgrades is coming up eventually). Among the reasons upgrades were removed:

- One idiot picking bad upgrades can doom a team
- While they aren't entirely equal all game, they tend to be for the vast majority of it, thus canceling each other out
- When they didn't cancel each other out, their power tended to be disproportionate to the effort and risk it took to get those upgrades
- When spent on specific spawn tower upgrades, resulted in too much emphasis to only build towers of that type

Most importantly though, they didn't truely impact gameplay at all. To clarify: they effected the games outcome, but very few effected the gameplay itself. Few upgrades interacted with you, the hero/player at all, and as such was largely just eye candy. Worse, the advantages they provided was in no way truely contested, resulting in the net thought put into upgrades to be minimal.

When will upgrades be returning? I'm not sure, but no sooner then 1.13. What will they be like? I'm not sure of that either, but I will say they will have far more of a focus to be both a gameplay element both sides struggle over, and one that hopefully impacts the way you think about and deal with both allied and enemy spawns.

DarnYak

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