Hello, beta testers! As always we are carefully reviewing your feedback. The difficulty of Nexomon: Extinction has been a major concern of ours. We've been working hard on a major rebalance of the entire campaign - there is a lot going on in the latest update! [h3]The Dynamic Difficulty[/h3] The backbone of our open-world-like experience is how the wild and the tamers appear to grow stronger in response to certain actions (the majority being story-progression). However, it appears we overdid it in our earlier versions of the game and some players felt like the environment was catching up to them way too quickly - it sometimes even felt like the wild encounters were magically being stronger than your party at all times no matter how much you trained. We've adjusted our dynamic difficulty system to be a bit more relaxed and not grow so quickly - but keep in mind that our priority is still to achieve a challenging experience. We don't want an easy game and after playtesting we felt that this update strikes a good balance. [u][b]However![/b][/u] If you were playing the earlier versions and were forced to grind a lot, then please understand that once this update is applied there is a chance that you will suddenly be overleveled compared to the immediate environment. [h3]Harmony Stat[/h3] We have introduced our first hidden stat, [b][i]harmony[/i][/b], which goes from 0% to 100%. Each victory will increase it by +1, and fainting will decrease it by -5. A maximized harmony stat can boost the EXP intake of your Nexomon by 35%. At the moment this is the only use for harmony, but this stat may be opening doors for lots of new features. Some players have already suggested having specific Cores get rejected if harmony is low. [h3]The Skill Cycle[/h3] A common concern among players was that, if the environment grows stronger overtime, you may catch a Nexomon whose some best skills were "already lost" since they are learned at low levels rather than high (that's right, all skills are sort of equally viable, which means that the most damaging ones might actually be learned early). For this reason we have revamped the skill learning algorithm. Each Nexomon has its own list of 16-or-so skills that they may learn in their lifespan: one every 2-3 levels. Once they reach the "end" of said list (e.g. at around lvl 40), they will simply start learning back from the beginning of the list. This solves two issues: [olist] [*] No more skills are "lost" because so long as you keep leveling up you will eventually repeat the cycle. [*] This allowed us to "compress" the learning curve to one skill every 2-3 levels. Some people didn't like how sometimes it took 6-7 levels to learn a new skill. [/olist] [h3]Cosmic Apparition Rates[/h3] We have tweaked the Cosmic apparition rate formula. The break down is: [list] [*]Starts at 1/4000 early-game. [*]1/3500 mid-game. [*]1/3000 late-game. [*]-1 for each uniquely Seen monster (so up to -381). [*]-2 for each uniquely Owned monster (so up to -762). [/list] That means that the best odds for a Cosmic spawn would be 1/1857 if you're lategame and own every Nexomon already. There is a lot more going on in this update, but those were the highlights. Other things were: [list] [*]If your Nexomon faints and you switch, the enemy will no longer get a "free attack". [*]Fixed a bug that would freeze the game if you picked the same language that you already had setup (e.g English to English). [*]The quest "Tree of Gifts" was supposed to give you a Vault Key, but it didn't in earlier versions. If you had already completed the quest, this version will automatically award you a Vault Key in your inventory. [*]The Dragon Whistles were having no effect on dragons. [*]Added basic footstep sounds. [*]Extra visual effects for caves. [*]Various sound effects added or improved. [*]Defeating a lower level Nexomon will now yield less EXP. [*]Fixed an issue where if a status effect like Burn faints a Nexomon, they might still attack you in the next turn. [*]Improved the skill selection of enemy bosses. Now it is less likely that they will use dumb skills against you, so be prepared! [*]Cosmic Nexomon now have a glowing status box during battles. [*]New players start off with 500 coins and a few potions and ethers to help kickstart their adventure. [/list] There is a lot more to do! And you can help us shape the future of the game with your feedback! Join our Discord server and share your thoughts now! https://discord.gg/bs659QD -JVemon