Many patch notes, forum wars, and misplaced croissants ago, Perpetuum’s time-based skill progression system was created with the premise that it should create equal opportunity for everyone to progress their characters, regardless of playtime.

Be that as it may, an often recurring fear that potential new players have is that they can never be competitive enough to take on old players who have gathered hundreds of thousands or even millions of Extension Points over the years.

Both us devs and a lot of our players try to convince these newcomers that they can quickly become as skilled as old Agents in a specific field, and that veterans only have the advantage of being more versatile, and of course this is true to some extent. But as the years passed by, this argument started to become more and more weak, up to the point where even we didn’t believe in it, as the differences started to become really apparent.

Thus, we recently made it a priority to provide a solution that would try to address these concerns. We have come up with an upgrade to the EP system that has two main components.

EP rewards

The idea to give players EP as a reward for ingame activities isn’t new, it’s been popping up on the forums for as long as I can remember. From a financial viewpoint, the idea wasn’t really feasible as long as the game was subscription-based, but since we dropped that, it slowly started to turn from “why not” into “this might be even good”.

Nowadays a lot of our players quickly log in and out of the game every few days with the only intention of getting their daily EP packs, probably in the hopes that they’ll be useful one day, when they have time to play, or it’s worth to play. Naturally, if a lot of players do this, the game becomes a ghost town of secret agents on standby, which is less than ideal for an MMO.

EP is probably still the most valued “currency” of Perpetuum, so ultimately it makes sense to incentivize it with the hopes of getting these standby players to actually play, and be rewarded with Extension Points by doing so.

Long story short, the activities that we currently intend to be part of the new EP reward system are:

  • Assignments: EP is given per objective, modified by the assignment level. Every assignment participant is rewarded equally, regardless of their contribution.
  • NPC kills: EP is given based on the rank of the destroyed NPC. Everyone on the aggro list of the NPC at the time of its destruction is rewarded equally.
  • Mining/harvesting: similar to how rare minerals work, mining and harvesting modules have a small chance of rewarding you EP with every actively working cycle. The chance is divided by the number of working modules, so it doesn’t matter how many you use.
  • Artifacts: finding an artifact rewards you with a fixed amount of EP straight up, regardless of level.
  • Production: factory, prototyping, and reverse engineering processes will reward you based on how long the process lasts without time bonuses.
  • Intrusions: everyone contributing to an intrusion event will receive a fixed amount of EP. Participants on the winning side receive multiple times more than the others.

Note that EP rewards will be doubled on Beta islands.

Of course we are open to ideas on what other mechanics we could use, but let me say up front that we gave some thoughts to including PvP, Gammas, or the market into the system in some way, but ultimately we decided against it because they would be too easy to exploit.

EP handicapping

While the EP reward system works equally for old and new players, the other mechanic that we’ll introduce is specifically aimed to favor newcomers.

EP handicapping is built upon the EP reward system, and as the name suggests, it will help those with low EP.

The way it works is that we designate an EP value that is deemed to be a “desired amount” that every player should have. To give you an idea, this will be probably somewhat less than the total EP that could have been accumulated since the launch of the game, and since this changes by the day, it will be a rolling amount.

Then, we compare this target EP amount to your account’s total accumulated EP. The less EP you have (ie. the further away you are from the target), the higher bonuses you will get for activities that reward you EP. This means that when you start the game, you’ll receive a lot of EP coming from rewards. But as time passes and you gather more and more EP, the amounts you get from killing NPCs or mining ore will slowly start to decrease towards a minimum amount.

EP handicapping

It’s important to note that the existing method of accumulating EP by either daily packs or EP boosters won’t change in any way, but those amounts will not be modified by the handicap mechanic.

TL;DR

  • You’ll get extra EP for certain ingame activities, on top of the daily packages.
  • The less EP you have on your account, the more EP you will receive from these activities.

All of this will be in our next patch, but we still have to work out some details, so it will hit the server probably around early June. Until then, feedback is welcome, as always.

Steam Trading Cards and emoticons

Steam Trading Cards for Perpetuum are now available!

If you are a Steam-dweller you probably know what these are, but here is a quick recap:

Playing Perpetuum on Steam will give you trading cards from time to time (every 30 minutes of gameplay to be exact). A set consists of 5 cards, and you can get half of this (rounded up, so 3) by simply playing.

The other half (and more) can be acquired by in-game purchases (Perpetuum Credits) or via the Steam community market. (I'll quote the Steam Trading Card FAQ here: "For every $9 USD spent (approximate) (...), you will earn one card drop. This card will drop at some point as you play.")

Completing a card set will earn you a badge, a random emoticon and profile background, and other stuff.

Summary:

  • 5 trading cards
  • 5 badge levels (plus 1 foil badge)
  • 5 profile backgrounds (3 common, 1 uncommon, and 1 rare)
  • 10 emoticons (6 common, 3 uncommon, 1 rare)

Happy card hunting!

The random assignment system seems to be working great so far, but the items that you can get with the token rewards are currently a bit lacking. Our newest patch brings the long-awaited upgrades to the token shop, otherwise known as Syndicate Supplies.

We supply the love

New additions to the token shop

So first things first, T2+ and T4+ modules will be directly available in the shop for a relatively high combined token and NIC cost. The NIC cost is a new addition to the shop, just like the minimum relation limit you must have to purchase an item.

Balancing the prices is not easy, since we still need to keep the normal way of acquiring these modules through looting a viable option, but still not make them so high that it would feel like an endless assignment grind to get them. We’re of course open to feedback here.

Oh, black bots you say? Yep, those are in as well. Don’t expect them to be cheap though.

As previously announced, in order to minimize the impact of the current stocks of faction tokens in the game (which were sometimes acquired using certain shortcuts in the past...), we’ll apply a one-time 10x inflation of both the token shop prices and the assignment token rewards. So you still have a little time until the patch tomorrow to buy some ammo or TAPs for the current prices.

I’m feeling lucky

Another new and hopefully interesting addition to the token shop will be the requisition slips. To quote their ingame description:

"From time to time the Syndicate does a sweep of its vast storages and hands out excess items to their hard-working Agents.

By purchasing and activating a requisition slip you can claim one of those items. The catch is that they don't really have an exact listing of their inventory, so what you get in the end can be a bit... random."

Requisition slips

We have requisition slips representing each faction’s technology: Pelistal, Nuimqol, Thelodica, Industrial, and Common. These correspond to the technology pages in the research facility, so you can refer to those if you would like to know what modules you can get from a slip.

Furthermore, each faction has 3 quality levels, making up a total of 15 different slips:

  • Bronze: includes T1, T2, and T3 modules
  • Silver: includes T2, T2+, and T3 modules
  • Gold: includes T3, T4, and T4+ modules

Bug me not

Last but not least, the patch will also include quite a few fixes: corrected token reward amounts for assignments, the missing notification about new assignments, various bug fixes when equipping your robot at a field terminal, some robots not occupying any space in containers, the item not found errors when reverse engineering from a container, the broken public chat channel blocking... just to name a few.

We're also fixing various gamma issues with emergency timers, energy levels, etc. being screwed up during a server restart, which basically had a common cause. Since the fix will be only applied after the server shuts down, do note that these issues might happen again, but hopefully for the last time.

Patch 3.7.3 will be deployed on Monday, February 1st, starting at 15:00 CET/server time (14:00 UTC).

Snowy stuff!

Good news! The annual make-your-wallet-cry winter festivities are underway!

Perpetuum is available at 75% off, credit packs and ICE at 50%, and you can even save 10% on the new premium packs and upgrade kits. This is true for both the Steam store and our own store, where the upgrade kits are also available since yesterday.

As mentioned in the previous blog post, the base game will receive a permanent price drop to 9.99 EUR/USD, and now I can also tell you that this will happen when the sale ends on January 4.

On behalf of the DEV team we wish you Happy Holidays!

Today we're introducing new premium packages and upgrade kits for Perpetuum. Our main goal here is to be able to reach a wider audience by permanently reducing the price of the base game, while still providing something extra for those who are willing to support us beyond that.

The upgrade kits contain varying amounts of Extension Points, Perpetuum Credits, Alien Improbability Devices, and also exclusive new sparks, and the Perpetuum original soundtrack.

These kits are organized into the above mentioned premium packages, which include the base game plus one or both of the kits - the picture below should give you a nice breakdown.

Premium packages

You might also notice that the base game will come with 200 credits and 1 AID from now on, in order to provide a less bumpy road for new players.

Of course the individual upgrades are also available outside of the premium packages. So if you are an older player, you can also purchase these in any combination* and enjoy the same goodies like someone getting a whole premium package for the first time as a new player. (Hence the name "Upgrade Kit".)

* Each upgrade kit can be purchased only once for each Perpetuum account.

Upgrade Kit Zero
Upgrade Kit One

Pricing

Soon after the introduction of the premium packages, the base game (aka. "Standard Edition") will undergo a permanent price reduction and will be available for only 9.99 USD/EUR.

Both Upgrade Kits go for the same 9.99 price tag if purchased separately, and if you decide for one of the premium packages, you'll enjoy a few bucks off on the package price compared to the individual prices. The Premium Edition goes for 18.99 (save about 5%) and the Superior Edition for 27.99 (save about 7%).

Note that these packages are currently available on Steam only, but we'll offer them in our own store soon as well.

Head over to our Steam store page to check them out now!