Ten Ton Hammer - Taking MMO Gamers to the Next Level!

Ten Ton Hammer: What skills and/or abilities can you enhance with the study system? Is it focused on crafting skills, or will combat skills be included in the study system?

Statistics and alternate advancement are the prime foci of the study system.

Anderson: Studies can increase your character in two main ways. First, studies can add to a character's statistics. For example, a character can choose to study in Endurance Training and raise their endurance stat by 1 for each level of study.

Much like enchantments and gems in other gains, these statistic gains are much more advantageous to a lower level player. Those players who take a more casual approach will find that the stat gains they receive from studies help them to catch up with the hardcore players who simply have more time to play.

That's not to say that these stat gains are completely worthless to players who prefer to race to the endgame. One point of endurance may only grant you 10 additional hit points, but every time you look up to find you have nine hit points left, you'll be glad you set time aside for that one rank of endurance training.

The second way that studies effect characters is by providing alternate forms of advancement. This is most common in the crafting areas of study, but also assists casual players who enjoy endgame combat, but are unable to schedule time for raids.

For example, you may see a powerful soldier wielding a trinket like the Badge of the Peacemantle, and want one for yourself. Looking in the Library, you may find it to be a 10% drop from Warlord Ha'skik - one of the hardest raid-bosses in the game. Many players will get a raid group together, and charge the gates of Warfiend Karr in order to claim one of their own, but what if you are a casual player, whose real life activities prevent them from scheduling raid times? Or what if you are the type of player that prefers to stay in town and craft, and never play the raiding game? What do you do?

We can do the same for rare crafting recipes, allowing the more adventurous to obtain them from raiding, and the more "economically minded" to obtain them through a combination of studies and quests. This allows us to keep certain recipes rare and hard to obtain, but allow equal access to raiders and those players who choose to never leave the city gates.

Since we are able to use the study system to gate access to quest chains, training, crafting recipes, and even item use, we can provide players with alternate ways to remain competitive, without requiring everyone to run the same undead-infested fortress over-and-over-and-over-and-over again.

Ten Ton Hammer: When a player is "studying" are they learning passive enhancements that make their character more potent in everything they do with a particular skill? Or are they studying active items like different spells, different abilities, etc.?

Anderson: A study is usually targeted to a specific 'category' such as swords, tailoring, or tactics. This way there is no 'bad study' a player can put time into, just systems they can build upon as their character grows.

The initial release of Alganon will focus on studies that enhance basic skills related to combat, tradeskills, and a few other general topics. After the initial release, we will be extending studies to include class-specific areas.