During the first two months Permia - Duels has been online, we have already done a lot of updates for the game and have much more planned or under development right now. In this post I will shed some light on what's going on with the updates.This far we have concentrated mostly on fixing bugs and improving the technical side to work well. We had some hiccups at the beginning where increased number of players caused the service to slow down and get "network error" notifications. Another major issue which has been fixed in the latest release is the freezing of the shop screen, which prevented some players from making purchases. Several smaller issues have also been fixed and we will continue the technical optimization of the game. If you encounter a problem, please let us know so we can fix it!
A Facebook page for Permia - Duels has just been opened. In addition to having the game related information, it's a place to go for discussions about Permia - Duels with other players or us.
Ranking system
The ranking system has had some major tweaks. The starting player has a disadvantage and statistically wins less often that the second player. To balance this out, we have biased the ranking system to favor the starting player. The biasing formula is based on a real game data and is thus able to efficiently balance out the effect of player order.
Another recent change is that now new players start with score 0. The old system, which started from 15000, resulted for new players being matched against more experienced from the start. As a result the difficulty curve should now be more reasonable for new players.
We want to allow players to always play without too much waiting. For this reason the match making will pit one against a computer opponent, if a suitable human player is not found in reasonable time. The decks of the computer opponents are based on decks of human players of similar level. We have already done lot to balance the computer players to offer a suitable challenge for players of different levels. This is an ongoing task and we are still finding new ways to do it better.
Platforms and Localization
A big news for us was the recent announcement from Habbo Hotel that they are going to close their game center, in which Permia - Duels is available. In order to allow Habbo players to retain their game progress and continue playing, we have implemented the possibility to link the Habbo accounts to a Seepia account. When the Habbo game center closes, we will open a web client which can be used to play the game using the Seepia account credentials. In future we will allow also Windows Phone players to link their game accounts, so that the game can be played in different platforms alternately.
For the additional platforms we are planning to release a Windows 8.1 version of Permia - Duels in near future. Android and iOS versions are also planned eventually.
The game was originally released only in English, but currently we have localization for total of 13 languages. We are very grateful for any reports of language mistakes in the localizations.
Next updates
We are constantly developing the game and will be releasing new features regularly. We also want to listen closely the feedback we get from the players. In the last update we added the possibility to buy unlimited vigour as a feature desired in the feedback we received. Related to that we have had feedback wishing for more ways to speed up the upgrade process of units. That is something we are considering at the moment, but have not yet definite plans.
We want to make the game experience more rewarding for the active players. As a part of that, we are planning to decrease the season length and slightly increase the comparable season rewards. Additionally, we will be adding a daily rewards system, which will allow players to gain special rewards for the first victory each day, including Qual rewards.
At the moment we are preparing a major UI update for the deck editor. It will be possible to get a detailed view for each unit including the currently missing unit information. These will include full sized images as well as flavour texts to properly link the units to world of Permia.
Another wished for upgrade we are planning to add are "golden directions", which will provide a way to boost a single direction of an unit.
Future
We of course have lot of plans for developing the game after the next few updates. One thing which needs some love is the tutorial, which we plan on upgrading piece by piece to be more interactive than now. Additional content, such as single player mode, new units, new special powers, ability to see other players information and player clans are also high on the list of things to add to the game.
This is by no means a complete list of updates we will be doing in future. Some may be left out, some new will emerge, but it gives a bit of idea we are planning to do next. If you have a great idea how to make the game better, please let us know!
