Age of Conan Game Director Craig Morrison wrote his November letter to the community in airport lounges while traveling to Korea for the GStar event, and he was able to give players some information on the upcoming 1.06 update. The patch should be hitting the test servers this week, and the team is looking forward to getting feedback on Guild Renown and tier three raiding.

Morrison mentions that patch 1.06 will attempt to balance crowd control and stamina usage between melee characters and casters. Casters will have their crowd control range reduced and will no longer be able to use stamina potions. These changes will be made available on the test servers to make sure the balancing act is fair.

You can read Morrison's full letter after the jump.

This month has been a bit hectic with work on the next major update alongside the work on the expansion and managing to wedge in a trip to Korea for the GStar even in Busan. This has meant that it was a little bit of a rush for me between all the travelling to prepare this text.

Trying to write a coherent text from airport lounges is always a little challenging! I didn’t want to miss the month though!

Postcards from Busan

The show in Busan went very well. Our partners at Neowiz did an amazing job of presenting the game. The show-floor booth was very well put together and they put on a wonderful show for the Korean players. It was great to see people enjoying the localized version and getting to grips with Age of Conan for themselves.

Online gaming is more established and the number of choices of available titles for the Korean gamers is wider. It is a very competitive market and it will be really interesting to see if we can make some inroads into that market with our own game. It's definitely a daunting challenge, but an enjoyable one all the same. We make games for the people that play them, and one thing that visits like the one this week confirms for me is that there is definitely the appetite for good online games there!

What’s coming up…

The team is busily preparing the 1.06 update for the test servers this week. Prepare to see a lot more information on the update as soon as the update is available for testing. We will have full preliminary release articles for the features for you all to digest. We are really looking forward to getting the feedback on the Guild Renown and the tier three raiding. It has been a few weeks of hard work resolving the technical issues that popped up after 1.05.6 and we are looking forward to catching up with the 1.06 progress.

Looking at the balance.

The next major update to the character development system will be in the form of the Alternate Advancement system that comes with the expansion. That said, we are looking at a few areas where we can make some minor adjustments prior to the alternate advancement system. In the course of the 1.06 series we will be making a series of changes based on the balance concerns surrounding the balance between melee users and casters, in particular on two areas – crowd control and stamina usage.

In terms of the crowd control we are going to be making some significant changes to the crowd control abilities. Specifically we are looking at reducing the range on the majority of the casting class’s crowd control abilities. The intention is to not have those abilities be something that allows people to keep someone at range, rather they will become escape abilities more than ‘pinning’ abilities as they will require your target to already be inside melee range.

Combined with this we will be preventing the casting classes from utilizing stamina potions. This should significantly reduce the duration of the casters ability to ‘kite’ melee players, while still reserving it for escape situations or well timed usage.

Obviously we will be testing these changes during the course of the 1.06 cycle testing on the test servers.

The remainder of the feedback is being taken into consideration when the systems team is working through the new feat trees, combos, spells and abilities for the Alternate Advancement system.

See you in Hyboria!

As we head into December I am really looking forward to being able to get the 1.06 update really put through its paces. Keep your eyes out for the preliminary update articles very shortly and I hope you all enjoy the month in Hyboria!