As you would expect, the development team is currently hard at work on revolutionizing the game yet again. With development progressing smoothly in the background, we are starting to consider the live game client, server and website as means to perfect the future.

One of the main concerns for both our team and the community is customization, whether its cosmetic items or the ability to make your playstyle your very own, our main goal is to provide as much variety as possible in balance with server costs and our ability to further build on a solid structure when it comes to game balance and weapon/skill design.

In this news post, we are going discuss changes and future plans regarding the web shop, ingame shop and game balance. Think of it as an information dump of sorts, or an update on the current state of things.

Today, the Limited tab will be no more. Starting now, the Items tab will be renamed to Featured and will contain most web shop content, including upcoming limited content as part of a temporary category or miscellaneous categories such as namechanges and boosters. Eventually, the web shop will be filled with permanent categories that can't yet be present in the ingame shop, from capsules to emotes, to clan related categories and much more.

Regarding the addition of capsules—as some might find them controversial—it has come to our understanding that they're part of the nostalgia that comes with this game, they also carry a viable monetization plan which is crucial to the survival and growth of any ambitious project, please rest assured knowing we will never introduce any pay-to-win elements, this time around we're even bringing out the PEN capsules!

We realize that there aren't many outlets for players to spend their PEN on minus the oversaturated ingame shop, which brings us to the next point.

In the near future, the ingame shop will undergo a myriad of changes, but not much can be said about that in detail yet.

The goal of any change from now on is for the game to be more in line with the future client in order to make the switch as seamless as possible. Since shop categories have more or less been finalized for Xero 2.0, here is a small sneak peek:



There is more where that came from and we're eager to share when the time comes, but that's for another devlet- *cough* ehm... news post.

Game balance is and always will be the main point of conflict in this community. In Xero, where playstyles can be so unique due to the nature of the game itself, players took it upon themselves to create specific rulesets and a variety of ways to enjoy the game. As such, we understand that the game will never be balanced enough to fit everyone's vision. That said, we believe that it's possible to get pretty close without destroying what makes the game fun at its core.

Now that we have the data needed regarding item usage, popularity and so on, we can accurately tackle balance issues and choose the core weapons and skills that are going to be the foundation of Xero's balance, all while simultaneously redesigning the least popular ones and bringing them back to the spotlight.

Expect a small balance patch to kick things off very soon.