Dark Age Of Camelot: Trials of Atlantis and the Camelot Player

Taken from here

When we designed and implemented Trials of Atlantis, we wanted it to be a different experience from the standard Dark Age of Camelot (and Shrouded Isles) experience. We wanted to make encounters more challenging, make players think and choose between different content to explore, and in general, make it more challenging.

Now, after almost two weeks of being live, it is obvious that in some cases, the results of our design decisions were not exactly what the community expected. There is a lot of frustration in the community with the Trials, with specific encounters, with lack of information about the content of the expansion, and with bugs that went undetected until live players started exploring Atlantis.

The frustration with lack of information comes from the fact that we wanted players to solve the mysteries of the trials without a strategy guide, and without spoiler information on the Herald. We put off the usual strategy guide folks for a couple of months so that spoiler information wasn't available immediately upon launch. The problem with doing this, as we soon found out, is that it was very difficult for you, the community, to differentiate between a bug and a really complex problem. We've scrambled to fix the encounter (and other) bugs that cropped up, and now feel like we have them under control, so hopefully the next time you run into a dead end, it'll be a puzzle to solve, not a bug to report. We will continue to fix all bugs as we find them, as quickly as possible, and we apologize for the inconvenience that some bugs (especially Master Level encounter ones) have caused some of you.

We're working this week on alleviating some player complaints. We're doing a live version tomorrow morning that will have some updates in it; the rest will come when we've implemented and tested them.

What we will do for tomorrow's live version:

- We are addressing player dismay over the slow Master Level Encounter spawn rates by raising the percentage chance to spawn of specific creatures currently acting as bottlenecks. The average spawn time for these popular creatures will now be around an hour. Remember, that's an average - sometimes it will take more time, sometimes it will take less time. Watch the patch notes for specifics.

- We are increasing the number of monsters in Atlantis that give Master Level experience. Now, when you kill any Artifact boss (named), you'll get Master level experience.

- There was an issue where sometimes players in Battlegroups would not get credit for completing a Master Level encounter, where some others in the fight would. This is not a bug - some Master Level encounters are set up to be completed by one group, and others for larger groups of groups (i.e. battlegroups). The encounters that are designed to be completed by ONLY one group correctly give credit to the members of the group that actually complete the Trial. The problem is that there is currently no way for players to know which Trials give credit to everyone in the battlegroup, and which ones give credit only to the members of the group that actually completes the step. Now your TOA Master Level status window will note which encounters are group-based, and which give an entire battlegroup credit.

Other items that we are working on and will come to Pendragon in the extremely near future for testing:

- A way to give players that have already completed a Trial the ability to get Master Level experience for completing the trial again if they are helping lower-level players who haven't yet completed that trial step. This will encourage experienced Atlantis players to help out those who are completing a lower trial for the first time.

- Currently, players that die in in the middle of a Trials encounter do not receive credit for completing the step. Those that are alive at the end are awarded credit for completing the Trial step, but those that died are not. We are working on a change so that even the dead get credit for completing the trial step.

- We'll make it so you can tell if a monster gives Master Level experience by clicking on it - so you won't have to kill one first to see.

Stay tuned to release notes posted here on the Herald for information about them. And, of course, we'll stay on top of any more bugs that crop up. Please, if you find a bug, send an appeal with a clear, concise description of what you found (include such details as the /loc, the zone, the name of the quest or encounter, the name of any NPCs, and so forth). Most of the bugs that have been fixed already are the result of great bug reports from concerned players who took the time to spell out in detail what the problem was.

Just a quick note, I'm a bit slow today :), so this is last nights news