Albion Online Roadmap - Merlyn Roadmap

Robin Henkys, Game Director for Albion Online released a new dev video talking about an upcoming content patch to the game "Merlyn". In the video, Robin promises changes to Royal Continent cities economy to repopulate them again with some tweaks to refining and crafting. Sandbox also plans to introduce changes to the faction warfare so the cities will play a vital role in the revamped five-sided RvR. 

Making Caerleon a central hub for the red-zones and outlands has made PvP and GvG very accessible but at the same time, it has ruined one of the biggest features of Albion - local economy, making the other Royal cities irrelevant. That is why the main focus of the Merlyn update will be trade and the local economy.

Each royal city will get a special refining bonus for a particular resource and special crafting bonuses for certain types of gear. Caerleon will have none of this acting as "jack-of-all-trades but master of none" type of city. 
To improve local economy even further, the resource distribution will be changed to reflect the city specialization and their biome, at the same time Outlands resources will be reduced making other biomes much more important for gathering.

All the crafting and trade changes will also affect the PvP by introducing Faction Warfare. Each main biome city will represent one out of five warring factions of Albion. You can now support one of these houses and players of other four will automatically become your enemy no matter where they are with no reputation impact. As a reward for being part of a faction, you will earn faction points that can be exchanged for special resources and mounts. Resources obtained that way can be used for crafting special bags and, first time ever, capes with actual stats on them.

You can also raid and conquer opposing factions' strongholds and perform trade runs for yours to gain additional faction rewards. 

You can find out more in the dev video below