The elusive Nobleman’s Bundle is back in Duels, and as always it’s got a lot of cool factors going on.

Here’s the royal facts on this Noble offer:

* The Nobleman’s Bundle is a special offer, only a limited number are created and when they’re gone, the bundle goes away. It appears every once in awhile and never lasts long.

* This bundle is all about packs, and room for your new goods. It’s 50 (fifty!!!) Noble Set packs, and 50 Inventory Slots to boot, all for $49.95. That’s a really, really, really good deal- and that’s why these bundles sell out so quickly.

* At the time of this writing, less than 300 Nobleman’s Bundles were still available for purchase.

* One of Phyrra’s most beloved pets, the Recently Reformed Rat, is only available with a purchase of a Nobleman’s Bundle. When you purchase this bundle, you automatically receive a legendary Rat for free! (Limited one rat per avatar)

* The Nobleman carries a very special guarantee. If you purchase two Nobleman’s Bundle and do not receive a legendary or artifact in any of the packs, Shindaan Guardian Del will gladly give you one of his legendaries- and you even get to pick which one! The only items in his inventory that are not up for grabs are his Blade of Halstora, and the Crunchies (he really likes his Crunchies).

If you want to check out the nitty-gritty or go ahead and pick one of these Bundles up, head to the Nobleman’s Bundle page in the Game Store!

It’s been less than a week since the Shadowlands launched in Phyrra. The awe-inspiring art of the Shadowlands set has been the talk of the Arena, as well as the deadly weapon and armor stats. Hundreds of teams have formed and are tearing it up in our Team Battles ring. Tons of team battles have been waged and show no signs of stopping.

August’s Forum Contest has also started, and this month’s theme is Sci-Fi Costume Party. You can use any items in the game to dress up your Duels avatar as any science fiction character, then enter for free for your chance to win great prizes.

That’s the good news.

With the arrival of the Shadows, there has been a change in the mood of the Arena, and Phyrra in general. Regular Duelists are now fighting for the twisted amusement of the Shadows, Phyrra’s new rulers. The quarantine placed on Phyrra by the mainland remains in place, making it impossible to get off the island by the usual means.

Our city has turned in to a  psychotic circus for madmen, killers, and the seemingly unstoppable Shadows. And the outside world wants nothing to do with us.

A small group of well-trained Duelists managed to escape the initial corruption of the Shadows, slipping past the dark collars and leashes being snapped on all Phyrrans’ necks. The only safe place in our city has proven to be Tomb Town, where we’ve taken residence.

Join us every week as new chapters unfold. Take part in the Revolution by visiting your Quest Journal and clicking on the Revolution image. The Prologue is currently available, and new chapters will unlock this Thursday after our scheduled update.

It’s time to take the city back.

It’s  been a busy day in Phyrra!

Master Smith Voldur wandered the universe for centuries gaining wisdom and knowledge pertaining to item enchantment. Accompanied by his apprentices, Molov the Destroyer and Estaron the Enchanter, Voldur arrived in Phyrra and introduced a new system of energy extraction and enchantment with out latest set release, Noble Set VI.

Duelists can destroy items and have their essence transformed in to special Crystals. These Crystals are fused with specially-designed items, allowing the Duelist to enhance the item’s core set of attributes- be it Speed, Strength, Perception, Intelligence, Resist, or Stamina, it’s the Duelist’s choice in how to further develop the item.

Learn more about Noble Set VI, and the rest of today’s update, by visiting our Update Notes.

That’s not all the juicy news for today. After a gruesome showdown for the World Duels Championship title, Exponential and OJ Simpson were given the opportunity to create one-of-a-kind artifact items. Today marked the world premiere of their cutting-edge custom pieces! Exponential’s Antithesis of Thought is electrifying and sure to spark a following among the Mage scene, while OJ’s Gloves of Acquittal are brutally effective for Assassins in the Arena.

Tadius and I are also putting together the next volume in Duels Podcasts. This podcast will focus on the lore and stories throughout Phyrra, and special characters in our community.  We’re taking questions, feel free to ask away! Did you miss the first podcast? Check it out here!

Now, get back to fighting!

-Starry

Growing is hard. In the beginning, you sort of run straight ahead as fast as you can pausing to make minor adjustments and learning a lot along the way. It’s a lot of fun making up everything and you’re starting with a clean slate so you don’t have to worry about bumping into too many walls. When you’re working on cool stuff like us, you get a lot of positive energy when you’re showing off the product to your friends, early beta testers or whoever (people tend to get excited talking about games even if they aren’t players). There’s no legacy code, there aren’t any customers to worry about, there are very few people to keep track of and very little “management” overhead. However with a little luck and a great product things can start to get complicated very quickly and you’ve no choice to but to start growing (which is really hard just in case I didn’t mention that). It’s hard because no matter what you’ve done (no matter how big), people have bigger expectations. It’s hard because it’s hard to find good people (and as everyone who’s an A player knows - A players hire A players). It’s hard because compromising is difficult and you can’t progress without compromise. And it’s hard because you have to start planning instead of doing all the time and if you work for a start-up, doing is one of the things you enjoy most.

Planning is an item that’s taken a bit of a back seat for us but we’re actively trying to get better at it (and that basically means I’m trying to put together what we’re working on over the next few months). It’s not so much a foreign concept as it is just one that’s been in the back of the closet long enough that it’s a little dusty and seeing it reminds me that I didn’t actually take it to Goodwill and drop it off. Time to get it out, make sure it still fits, perhaps toss it in the washing machine and put it on.

The executive summary of this post is that I’m working on putting together a plan that involves monthly updates (we’ll still do the weekly patches when we need to). The goal being to communicate the up and coming exciting stuff that’s going on with Duels and even collect some feedback so we can alter our course if it’s way off. Here’s an idea of what’s coming in the next couple of months. There are some growing pains as we get bigger but we are definitely getting better.

We scrambled to launch duels.com last August, then fought mightily to keep our heads above water for the first 4 weeks or so. After some modicum of order had been restored to the 1 bedroom apartment we were working out of (servers located off-site) and our newborn Internet baby was able to make it through the night, we managed to put a sliver of process together: weekly updates. We’re all experienced tech people and (typically) know how things SHOULD be done but in the heat of battle, you sometimes do things the way they CAN be done.

Our sliver of process quickly burned up in the heat of launching feature after fix after feature. Well, we’re giving it another go. We’ll try to work with weekly updates and produce documented patch notes while we’re at it. Watch us pull a rabbit out of our hat. With any luck at all, we’ll do better than Bullwinkle.

The first patch notes are here: Patch 01.24.08.

I know all of you duelists out there are patiently awaiting Duels 2.0. We’ve been quite ambitious with this one and right now we’re wrapping up on Tournaments and Ladders. We spent so much time focusing on the gameplay for these that we didn’t even imagine how many architecture changes would be necessary. I wanted to share some of the difficulties I’ve been facing during these late nights of work.

In Duels 1.0 a challenge is very simple. There’s a challenger and a defender and some settings for the loadouts, openers, and scrolls of the two players in the fight. The challenge doesn’t actually exist until the challenger issues it to the defender. The defender then responds with an accept or reject before the challenger cancels the challenge. Keep in mind that rejecting and canceling have no adverse effects.

In Duels 2.0 a challenge is much more complicated. In addition to Duels 1.0 settings and the new action sets which must be replenished before a fight, there’s the complication of Tournament and Ladder fights.

With a Tournament, a challenge must be issued to both players at the same time and their individual responses to the challenge must be tracked. You no longer have a reject or cancel response, but either duelist can explicitly forfeit by taking that action or implicitly forfeit by taking no action before the current round of the tournament ends.

Ladder challenges are even stranger. When you request a Ladder fight you are matched with another player. You accept the challenge and it gets sent off to the defender, or you forfeit and lose Ladder points that your would be defender now gains.

New data models are necessary to track these multiple responses and old data models have to be modified to allow challenges to exist even while missing most of the information that’s normally been required for the challenge to be a challenge. Then once you’ve got the data modeled correctly you have to update the functions throughout the system that interact with those models.

These 300+ challenge touch points throughout the system are then quite unstable and have to be examined thoroughly before they can even be trusted on beta servers where beta testers are still working through actions and balance changes. Once that’s taken care of there’s still the matter of building out the Tournament and Ladder features that required those architecture changes.

And that’s what I’m doing now, once again at 3am. I feel like Santa… err… Senter Klas putting the finishing touches on the toys before Christmas. For now I’ll leave you with a simple screenshot from one of the Ladder pages.

EDIT: I’ve also added a screenshot of our Tournament viewer in a 64 player Tournament that we simulated.

One thing that we have wanted to do with Duels from the beginning is to make it more strategic and the Action System is designed to do this.

The basis of the Action System is, well, Actions. Originally we called them Action Cards, but they evolved beyond that.

Actions can come from several sources:

• Path / High Path: As you advance in level on your chosen Path/High Path various Actions will become available for you.
• Packs: Some specialized Actions will come in Packs (and possibly Quests). (Think of these as kind of like scrolls.)
• Items: Some items may enable certain Actions.
• Pets: A small number of Actions might be available based on what kind of pet you have.
• Race: Initially there probably will not be Elf or Human specific Actions, but as we introduce more races this will be an area where we add additional special Actions.

Actions are expended like scrolls, but you will be able to buy them in stacks of 10-20. If you have learned the Action you will be able to buy it from your Path / High Path trainer. This means that once you unlock a High Path skill, you will be able to buy more Action Cards as needed from your trainer.

Of course, now you are asking: how do I unlock them? As I said above, some Actions will be unlocked as you advance in level based on your Path / High Path. Other unlocks will be rare+ items in Packs, available from Quests, etc.

You will also be able to get special Actions from packs and vendors - think healing potions.

So that’s the basics. The next question is: How do I use them?

In the initial version you will be able to layout a set of 10 Actions. This Stack is then played out in a Duel. You will be able to save Action Stacks and make changes to them prior to a Duel. Which you’ll probably want to do since if you always use the same Stack people will figure out what you’re doing and mess up your combos.

Part of your 10 Actions are 2 Negates. A Negate effectively cancels your opponents Action for the Turn. This is quite effective for breaking up combos and generally messing your opponent’s strategy up. But remember, your opponent gets 2 Negates too.

I’ll try to post a screenshot of the Action Manager later today or tomorrow.

 In the actual duel:

Actions are used at the beginning of each turn based on initiative.  (IE:  Whoever won initiative uses their Action first - unless someone is using a Negate.)

— Oh, and all these names are subject to change.

Ok, here is a sneak preview of female avatars:

Also, at the same time we will release:

• Action System: This is a way to provide more choices for duels while maintaining the same challenge/response model. I will do a separate post on this in the near future.
• Balance Adjustments: Various changes to the skills of all Paths (high and normal) to better balance them.
• A New Set

These will be released after a limited beta program that will start around 10/27. So we expect to release this major upgrade on November 12 if all goes as planned. If you are interested in the limited beta, please e-mail beta@duels.com with your avatar name and why you would be a good tester.

We will also release tournaments and ladders between now and then, depending on a myriad of things. So if they aren’t out before then that’s when you can expect them.

Thanks for your continued support of Duels and, as always, let us know if you have any comments or suggestions.