Strange things are going on in Alharth. You'll receive more information as soon as you log in.
Slow-Boxes Optimization Turned Off By Default
If you have noticeably worse framerate after this update, read on:
In this update we disabled one of the experimental optimizations known as "slow boxes". This optimization *does* improve framerate when lots of selectable things are on-screen, but the improvement often isn't worth it: the targeting selection-boxes can move around randomly, which can be deadly in combat situations. We've turned this optimization off while we improve it. If you want to re-enable it (which might be needed on low-end machines in busy areas), open up the settings window in-game, click "Special", and type SlowBoxes into the special settings box. This will reactivate the slow boxes optimization.
(The old special setting NoSlowBoxes no longer does anything, since slow boxes are off anyway.)
Changes to Damage Formula
We've corrected a problem with how damage is calculated for target-conditional modifiers that increase damage by a percentage. Target-conditional modifiers are things that only apply if the target is a certain way. For instance, "+X% damage to non-Elite targets", "+X% damage to undead", "+X% damage when the target's rage meter is 66% or higher", etc.
Previously, if these modifiers added a percentage of damage to your attack, that percentage wasn't added to your other percent-boosters like other mods; instead it was multiplied separately, very late in the calculation process. These percent-boosters are now included with other regular percent-boosters.
In other words, if you had two mods, "+25% damage all the time" and "+25% damage if the target is Elite", the combination will now result in +50% damage. Previously that combination would result in +56% damage, because they were multiplied together instead of added together.
"Dangerously Improve Weapon" Recipes Return
The three blacksmithing recipes to "dangerously" improve an item have returned. (The "danger" is that the item may shatter and be destroyed.) The chance for the item to be destroyed has increased from 2% to 3%, and the weapon now gains simple damage, not regular damage. Simple damage is not multiplied by any other gear mod benefits, but it is still multiplied by the enemy's vulnerabilities, or lack thereof.
There is now a cap of 300 simple damage that can be added to an item, and to prevent these items from being used as insanely overpowered newbie gear, the weapon must be at least level 30.
Weapons that were dangerously improved with the old recipes have been updated to use simple damage and have a cap of 300.
To sum up, the recipes now read like this:
Add +2 Simple Sword Damage to a sword, up to a maximum of +300. The sword must have enchantments of at least level 30. Simple damage is added to the total damage after all other multipliers. This recipe does not use Enhancement Points, but there is a 3% chance the weapon will shatter and be destroyed. (Must be near a forge.)
Item Rafflers & Item Vendors Changes
Ultra Item Rafflers with timers set to greater than 1 hour could sometimes be garbage-collected by the server before their timer was up (causing a winner to be immediately chosen from the people who had already bought a ticket). Large-Capacity Item Vendors and Fancy Item Vendors that are deployed in busy areas will now last longer before being garbage-collected by the server (and unsold items mailed back to the owner).
A note about how these work: when there are a lot of items in an area, the server deletes old items based on internal priorities. If the server decides to delete a vend-o-matic, the remaining unsold items are mailed to the creator. If a raffler is destroyed before all tickets are sold, a winner is immediately chosen from among the sold tickets. If no tickets were sold, the raffle items are mailed to the creator.
Most gadgeteering items will last about an hour in a busy area, but can last much longer in areas that don't have a lot of items on the ground. The above-mentioned high quality vend-o-matics will typically last 90 minutes in busy areas.
Other Changes
All pet damage is increased noticeably. This is especially true of necromancers' skeletal pets. The most dramatic example is high-level skeletal mages, whose base damage increased by more than 50%. (The adjustments in this update are a "bulk" formulaic change; further adjustments will be made in the future.)
As of the last update, Elite monsters that are killed with only area-effect attacks are no longer combat-locked. But if a group killed an Elite with ONLY area-effect attacks, the elite would incorrectly act like non-elite for turn-based looting. Non-combat-locked elites now "faux lock" themselves to the group of the main killer when they die so that the group's turns are honored.
Higher tiers of the ability Spade Assault did not correctly have the lower tiers as prerequisites.
Fixed a scenario where you could skin an illusion of a dead werewolf if you were really, really quick.
Fixed weird particles appearing when drake worms burst out of the ground.
Fixed a client display bug that caused some damage attributes to not be updated after equipment was taken off. This was only a tooltip display bug.
Fixed a server-side rounding error with base-damage multipliers that could cause attacks to deal 1 less damage than the client tooltip indicated it should.
Stuffed toy bears can now be deployed for others to be able to hug. (The bear is not destroyed; only one bear can be deployed per 15 minutes per player.)
The map in the casino was shifted over a bit to include the new party room. The fog is reset, and any map pins in the casino will be off by a small amount. Sorry about that!
Added signs to the Red Wing Casino to help guests navigate more easily.
Added a "secret" entrance/exit to Gazluk Keep.
Update Notes: September 21, 2018
[H1]Red Wing Casino[/H1]
The Red Wing Casino is now open! You can find the entrance to this "teleportation-accessible luxury resort destination" in Rahu. (And perhaps there are easier ways ...) To help us test the games in the casino, type the command /redeem RedWingTickets in chat to receive some free game vouchers!
[H1]Storage Cleanup[/H1]
In this update we've tried to clean up a lot of storage-related weirdness. For example, one big problem was that many ingredients couldn't be stored in storage for "ingredients" -- because every ingredient had to be manually flagged by us and we often missed some. Now we've switched to automated tagging of ingredient types.
We've also cleaned up the categories. Several NPCs stored "Ingredients for any skill," but now that all ingredients are being tagged automatically, this is far too large a category -- nearly everything is an ingredient for something! In practice, only food items were reliably tagged as ingredients in the past (and not even all of those), so "ingredients for any skill" storage were effectively cooking storage. As such we've converted "ingredients for any skill" storage into "food or cooking ingredients" storage in this update.
We've also changed the storage of Joeh in Serbule. He offered a large amount of storage for equipment, but Serbule is the newbie town. Newbies don't have a lot of extra equipment to store and it's a much better idea for them to sell or gift any excess equipment instead of trying to store it! So Joeh was actually hurting our newbie experience by teaching newbies that they should hoard low-level gear. Joeh now has storage for any type of item, but fewer storage slots than before. (Tyler Green remains unchanged because his equipment storage doesn't open up until players reach Best Friends favor level, at which point they aren't likely to be newbies.)
We've added more Equipment-specific storage in the new casino area (along with tons of other new storage), but it's been tweaked a bit: Equipment storage now also lets you store ammunition. This includes things like arrows (obviously) but also includes anything consumed by an ability: throwing knives, first aid kits, diamonds (used by a certain ability), and many others. The intent is to let you store all the items for a particular combat skill in one place.
In all cases where a storage vault changed, existing items are still there. If you take those items out, however, you won't be able to put them back in if they no longer meet the requirements for that storage.
Specific notes:
[LIST]
<*>Laura Neth: "ingredients for any skill" ==> "Food or Cooking Ingredients"
<*>Selaxi: "ingredients for any skill" ==> "Food or Cooking Ingredients"
<*>Julius Patton: "Food or Cooking Ingredients" ==> "Food, Cooking, or Brewing Ingredients"
<*>Joeh: "Equipment" ==> "any item". Max slots reduced from 64 (at Like Family) to 40.
<*>Tyler Green: "Equipment" ==> "Equipment and Ammunition"
<*>Charles Thompson: "Alchemy [potions]" ==> "Potions and Alchemy Ingredients"
[/LIST]
[H1]Monster Crits[/H1]
High-level monsters needed to do a bit more damage, and high-level combat also needed to be a bit less predictable. So instead of just buffing monster damage as we've done in the past, this time we've introduced monster crits. Monsters now have a chance to critically-hit for double damage. The chance is based on the monster's internal combat level. For every level after 30, monsters gain 0.25% chance to crit. This means that by level 70, they have a 10% chance to crit for double damage. Elite and Boss monsters have an extra +5% chance to critically-hit. (This is a flat bonus that's the same at every level. This means that even newbie bosses will occasionally lay the smackdown. It's for your own good! Dying builds character.)
[H1](Non-AH) Pet Crits[/H1]
Some of the pet skills are in an awkward place right now because high-level player damage is still so high that pets can't contribute very usefully. We're still working on high-level player damage scaling. In the short term, the tech for these new monster crits give us an interesting way to buff pets a bit.
For every pet-level above 30, the pet gains 0.25% chance to crit. Note this is not YOUR skill level, but the pet's level. (Each summoned pet has an inherent level; to get a higher-level pet you need to use a higher-level summoning ability.) Pet crits deal +100% damage at level 30, plus 1% more for every level above that.
[LIST]
<*>Example: the pet summoned by Raise Skeletal Archer 4 is level 47. Thus it has a 4.25% chance to critically-hit, and crits deal 217% damage.
<*>Example: the spider summoned by Incubate 5 is level 70. Thus it has a 10% chance to critically-hit, and crits deal 240% damage.
[/LIST]
This change may not be permanent, but it will help high-level pets in the short term. Note that this applies to all pets EXCEPT animal-handling pets. Animal-handling pets use a different critical-hit mechanic already. So this affects necromancy pets, baby spiders, summoned deer, minigolems, etc.
[H1]Other Changes & Fixes[/H1]
[LIST]
<*>Monsters no longer notice players before the player's loading screen finishes.
<*>Area-of-effect attacks no longer "loot-lock" monsters hit by the burst.
<*>Added a button to sort storage vault contents. (This uses the same sort order as the inventory-sort button does.)
<*>About 200 new Work Orders have been added to the game; there is a new Work Order sign in Red Wing Casino, and all existing boards have at least a few new ones.
<*>In addition, many old Work Orders have been moved from one city to another (to try to make things a little more sensible... but it still needs more reorganization in the future). You may want to check your active Work Orders in case they now need to be delivered to a different city than before!
<*>Some melee abilities were not flagged as melee, so buffs/debuffs applicable to melee attacks did not work on them: Phoenix Strike, Bun-Fu Strike, Rabbit Scratch, Doe Eyes.
<*>Some burst attacks were not flagged as bursts, so buffs/debuffs applicable to burst attacks did not work on them: Wave of Darkness, Song of Discord, various minigolem abilities.
<*>Druid ability Cloud Sight did not benefit from equipment that boosted druid base damage by a percentage.
<*>Stopped damage-reply effects (such as Fire Shield Potions) from activating due to friendly damage (e.g. from Restorative Arrow).
<*>"Fight Me You Fools" had untyped damage instead of Crushing damage.
<*>Some healing abilities that normally deal 0 damage (since they're heals) could inflict damage when flat damage-type boosts were added (e.g. a Ring of Psychic Pestering, which adds +2 psychic damage, would cause some mentalism heals to deal 2 damage).
<*>Corrected the Causes of Death from Priest attacks.
<*>The sidebar ability Fish Gut has been completely redesigned: it no longer uses fish scales as ammo and instead uses a skinning knife (with a 5% chance the knife will be lost). Creatures with Fish anatomy take double damage. This is considered a (non-bleed-inducing) variant of Gut for purposes of equipment and combos.
<*>Renumbered the IDs of poetry appreciation effects to allow room for new effects in the future; if you had a poetry appreciation buff on, it has been dispelled - sorry!
<*>Recipes for exotic mushroom substrate have fewer ingredients but only yield half as much substrate.
<*>The cow ability Chew Cud now only consumes regular "Grass", and not other grasses such as "Evil Grass" or "Barley". This is because chewing something besides regular Grass is pretty much always a mistake, and sometimes a tragic one (like when you chew up your Eternal Greens).
<*>For similar reasons, the ability Organ Displacement now only takes basic Aquamarines, not things with aquamarines in them (such as Aquamarine Rings).
<*>For similar reasons, the ability Resuscitate now only takes basic Diamonds, not fancy diamonds (such as Winterprize) or equipment with diamonds in them.
<*>The recipe for some alchemy potions has been simplified: Persona Reducer Potion, Memory Inhibitor Potion.
<*>Reduced the ingredients needed for high-level Shamanic Infusion recipes.
<*>Fixed recipe icons that did not match the items generated by the recipe.
<*>Bottles of Fertilizer now stack to 5.
<*>Rennet now stacks to 5.
<*>NPCs that like specific flowers (e.g. Brianna Willer likes Dahlias) now really like bouquets containing just that flower (Dahlia Bouquets in this case).
<*>Fae Felt can now be dropped by all killable fairy enemies. It is an extremely rare drop for low level fairies such as fairy slaves, and an uncommon drop for higher level fairies.
<*>Crazed Alphas are more dangerous.
<*>Fixed missing icons (shown as all-white squares) when viewing player raffle boxes or vend-o-matics.
<*>NPCs that interact with lamps (such as Sir Coth does at night) can once again actually turn said lamps on/off.
<*>Slightly shrank the default NPC dialog font text from 18pt to 16pt. (This does not affect existing installations. You can always manually change the font size in Settings->GUI->Font Sizes.)
<*>Upgraded to a new version of Unity, 2017.4.10
[/LIST]
Update Notes: July 9, 2018
This is a server-only update to fix some networking and database performance problems.
The only gameplay change is the following:
[LIST]
<*>Bard treasure mod: "Whenever you take damage from an enemy, you gain Song of Discord Damage +6% and Song of Resurgence Healing +6 for 20 seconds." => This now stacks up to 12x (instead of infinitely)
<*>Bard treasure mod: "Whenever you take damage from an enemy, you gain Bard Base Damage +8% for 15 seconds." => This now stacks up to 10x (instead of infinitely)
[/LIST]
That's it for now, but we're hard at work on a new content update which will be ready in a few weeks. More info soon!
Update Notes: June 20, 2018
[H1]Catalog Golems[/H1]
You can now find Catalog Golems in the hall of player-run shops in Serbule Keep! These adorable little constructs will be happy to search the player vendors for specific items on your behalf, and let you know which shops have what you need.
The golems can't tell you how much the price is, and they don't deliver the goods, but they also don't demand tips. So stop by and take advantage of this free service today!
[H1]Augment-Installation Services[/H1]
Some NPCs can now install Augments for you! By using one of these NPCs, you do not need to have learned the various Augment Installation recipes from Nightshade. Learning Nightshade's recipes will eventually be a cost-savings for max-level players who do a lot of augment-installing, but at the current max level of 70, most players will find it cheaper to just use these NPCs.
The following NPCs can install Augments for you:
[LIST]
<*>Joeh in Serbule can install level 0-20 Augments for 50 Councils.
<*>Kalaba in Eltibule can install level 21-40 Augments for 250 Councils.
<*>Urzab in Amulna can install level 41-60 Augments for 650 Councils.
<*>Rick Snapley in Gazluk can install level 61-80 Augments for 1000 Councils.
<*>Torgan in Gazluk can install level 61-80 Augments for 900 Councils. You must know Orcish.
<*>Preta in Sun Vale can install level 0-50 Augments for 350 Councils. You must be Close Friends or better.
<*>Tyler Green in Serbule Hills can install level 0-25 Augments for free. You must be Friends or better.
<*>Amutasa in Rahu can install level 0-70 Augments for 650 Councils. You must be Friends or better.
<*>Nightshade in Kur can install level 0-100 Augments for 2000 Councils.
[/LIST]
[H1]Skill Changes[/H1]
These changes are a continuation of our DoT (Damage-over-Time) ability revamps. We are now mostly finished with the conversion, except for a few DoTs with special behavior that can't be converted. Those handful of unique DoTs will use the older system for the foreseeable future. (And of course we may have missed some or made mistakes!)
[U]Archery[/U]
[LIST]
<*>Treasure: Mangling Shot deals 330 Trauma damage over 10 seconds => 462 Trauma damage over 12 seconds
<*>Ability: Fire Arrow deals damage over 15 seconds => same damage but over 10 seconds
[/LIST]
[U]Crossbow[/U]
[LIST]
<*>Ability: Fiery Bolt 6: Deals 468 damage, plus 230 damage over 20 seconds => 418 damage, plus 288 damage over 12 seconds
[/LIST]
[U]Druid[/U]
[LIST]
<*>Treasure: Cloud Sight covers the target in insects that deal 170 Nature damage over 15 seconds => 252 Nature damage over 12 seconds
<*>Fixed bug that caused Heart Thorn and Poisoned Thorns DOTs to deal 5 more damage per tick than listed.
<*>Treasure: Rotskin deals 190 Trauma damage to health over 15 seconds => 282 damage over 12 seconds
<*>Treasure: Toxinball deals 114 Poison damage over 12 seconds => 186 over 12 seconds. Also note: this treasure effect was bugged and previously didn't work at all. Now it works.
[/LIST]
[U]Giant Bat[/U]
[LIST]
<*>Treasure: Virulent Bite deals 115 trauma damage over 10 seconds => 222 Trauma over 12 seconds
<*>Treasure: Virulent Bite has a 50% chance to deal +76% damage plus 120 trauma damage over 10 seconds => This effect has been overhauled. It is now: "Virulent Bite deals 192 Trauma damage over 12 seconds and also has a 25% chance to deal +76% direct Piercing damage"
[/LIST]
[U]Hammer[/U]
[LIST]
<*>Treasure: Latent Charge deals +200 Electricity damage after an 8 second delay => 240 after an 8 second delay. Also note: this treasure effect was bugged and actually took 15 seconds to activate, not 8 as intended. This is fixed.
[/LIST]
[U]Lycanthropy[/U]
[LIST]
<*>Ability: Sanguine Fangs 6: Deals 120 damage over 8 seconds => 140 over 8 seconds
<*>Treasure: Sanguine Fangs deals +144 Trauma damage over 8 seconds => 224 over 8 seconds
<*>Treasure: All Werewolf attacks have a 31% chance to deal 48 Trauma damage over 8 seconds => 64 damage over 8 seconds
<*>Treasure: Sanguine Fangs suddenly deals 240 damage after a 15 second delay => 280 damage after a 12-second delay
[/LIST]
[U]Spider[/U]
[LIST]
<*>Treasure: Grappling Web deals 224 Poison damage over 12 seconds => 300 over 12 seconds
[/LIST]
[U]Misc[/U]
[LIST]
<*>Various meditation combos that dealt DoT (damage-over-time) damage have been adjusted to new DoT balance.
<*>Various monsters with DoT (damage-over-time) attacks have been adjusted to new DoT balance.
[/LIST]
[H1]Other Changes and Fixes[/H1]
[LIST]
<*>Fixed bugs with Skill tree UI not retaining state.
<*>The item-tooltip for Augments now lists the skill level requirement of the augment.
<*>Augment-Installation recipes no longer have an extra-ingredient cost (e.g. fish scales, fire dust, etc.).
<*>When extracting an Augment from an item, you can now extract generic (non-skill-specific) powers by using any of the "desert gems": Turquoise, Sapphire, Emerald, Morganite, Sunstone, Tiger's Eye, Opal, Goshenite, Danburite, and Ruby. Previously these gems did nothing when used with extraction, so for now they are all assigned to generic-augment extraction. Eventually some of these gems will be needed for other things, though. So just to make it official, Sunstones and Goshenites are the permanent generic-augment-extraction gems. Some of the others may be reassigned to do other things in the relatively-distant future -- 3+ months from now.
<*>Adding augments to items no longer affects how much phlogiston or other resources are obtained when decomposing or distilling the item.
<*>Using Shamanic Infusion on an item now adds a Shamanic Infusion requirement equal to the level of the recipe. (Previously all infusions accidentally installed a requirement of Shamanic Infusion level 1, even for max-level infusions.) This fix does not affect existing items... UNTIL those items are used in transmutation. Transmutation (and a few other crafting processes) automatically recalculate the item's wield-requirements, and this can cause the correct Shamanic Infusion requirement to appear.
<*>Fixed Fire Shield Potions and Acid Shield Potions so that their reflection does not stack if you drink multiple potions.
<*>Fixed ingredient errors in crafted Priest Staff recipes.
<*>Fixed rounding and calculation problems that caused a number of converted DOT effects (from the last update) to deal 1 or 2 more damage per tick than intended (and more than the tooltip said it would deal).
<*>Enchantments that boosted movement-speed attributes by a fractional amount were displayed as adding a whole number. For instance, items that add +0.5 to Sprint Speed would say they added "Sprint Speed +0". (This was only a display bug.)
<*>Fixed invalid locations where monsters could spawn, notably under Marna's shop in Serbule.
<*>Additional texture memory optimizations.
<*>Removed yellowish hue to the specular layer of Elvish Armor. (This will affect how the armor looks when dyed. It should look closer to the dye color, and less yellow. Unless you dyed it yellow, in which case... who knows.)
<*>Fixed texture error with female dwarf NPCs that made their faces look extra wrinkled and weird.
<*>The 3rd-party tools JSON for treasure mods now includes the minimum level-requirement for each tier of each treasure mod.
<*>Added a bit more documentation for the 3rd-party tools files.
[/LIST]
Dev Blog: June 18, 2018
Hi guys! The next update is coming in just a few days. I've been focusing pretty heavily on the update, but I had some time today, so I wanted to give you a status update.
Remember, this is a dev-blog. It's not an official announcement about future changes, it's just me talking about what I'm doing and thinking. I like to share my current plans, but these plans change often. Speaking of which...
[H1]About That Treasure Rebalancing[/H1]
The last dev blog talked about some major revisions to treasure balance. And then the next two updates came out, and there were no revisions to treasure balance. The revisions aren't going to be in the next update either. What's going on?
Well, after I implemented some of the changes, I wanted to sanity-check them... and realized my gameplay data metrics were out of date. The game server normally collects anonymized combat metrics that let me answer questions like "How long does it take a player using skills X and Y at level Z to kill a level-appropriate monster?" or "If a player is using skill X in area A, how often do they die?" These insights are very helpful in making sure my changes aren't insane. But I don't have that data right now, because metrics-logging was turned off.
After we launched on Steam we had unexpected server stability problems, and the very first thing I did was to turn off all non-essential functions to rule them out as the cause. So metrics logging has been turned off for months, which means the data I have is pretty old and doesn't reflect recent changes to the game or the player-base.
I realized this problem late last month, but at that time we were STILL having occasional server problems, and it seemed dumb to turn the metrics back on while I was still hunting for problems. The server has been extremely stable after the last batch of server fixes (on the 8th), though, so I'm going to turn the logging back on in this week's update. Then it will take about a month to collect new data.
I don't always use metrics data when making changes, because it takes a very long time to analyze that data. For situations like the AoE nerfs (see below), it's pretty easy for me to test what will happen when I make the change: I can create some AoE characters and try them on my local server. But this upcoming rebalance will impact a LOT of skills and treasure effects, and I can't predict all the side-effects. There will inevitably be some weird issues stemming from this change, and that's fine, we'll fix them... but I guess I want more reassurance that this change is moving the game in the right direction. And I need more data for that!
So long story short: there's been some delays. In the meantime, I've focused on more client optimizations and new game features.
[H1]Client Optimizations[/H1]
The next update doesn't have any of the large-scale Serbule optimizations that I talked about in the last dev blog, such as replacing the sky/weather system, but it does have a lot of more traditional optimizations: the game's texture-memory footprint is reduced by over 100mb in most areas, which will help users with integrated video cards (or any video card with less than 2gb of RAM). We've also done a bunch more LOD optimizations in Serbule and Serbule Hills, which will help framerate on mid-tier video cards.
The impact of these particular optimizations will depend entirely on your computer's hardware, so they might make a big difference for you, or they might not. We'll watch your feedback to see what you think. And there are many more optimizations in the works, of course!
[H1]Vendor-Stall Searching[/H1]
The next update will add a way to search player-run-shops. There will be little Catalog Golems in the shop hall, and you can ask them to list all the shops that are selling a particular item.
I'm walking a fine line here, and I wanted to mention the reasoning behind it. The golems' results are intentionally pretty simple: they tell you who sells it, but don't tell you the price they're charging. Why not? For one thing, it can be very difficult to show a price because player shops can sell the same item for lots of different prices at different quantities. But the main reason is that I don't want to make shops compete on price alone. That would drive costs down extremely quickly, instead of the slower market adjustments that I want to see, and it's basically not any fun for player shop-keepers. And it would ruin my long-term plans to let shopkeepers compete in innovative ways.
For instance, in the future shopkeepers might be able to offer frequent-buyer discounts that reward repeat customers. Shopkeepers might also be able to set up raffles contingent on purchase: "Buy any _____ and automatically be entered for a chance to win _________!" The shop system was designed to have little features like this added in pretty easily, and they'll eventually let shopkeepers be really creative. But if catalog golems showed the cheapest price, most players would just go for the cheapest stall regardless of anything else that other shops had.
This is also why we don't have an auction house: it's super convenient for consumers, but it drains every drop of fun out of being a pretend fantasy merchant. For a game with this much crafting in it, I need to protect shopkeepers and make sure they're having fun, even if it means there's a little more hassle involved in buying something.
However, the current shopping process, which I guess can be summed up as "if you want to buy something right away, first you have to browse 100 player shops" is FAR too difficult and irritating. I'm okay with there being a [I]little[/I] friction when shopping, but not anywhere near that much. So this vendor-stall-search feature is a step in that direction, and we'll evolve the game as needed, until we find a good balance of buyer convenience and shopkeeper control.
(If you're interested in this topic from a game-design point of view, I wanted to direct you to some of the old blog posts I wrote about Project: Gorgon's economic plans... but unfortunately our old pre-alpha dev blog is offline right now. So instead let me point interested readers at a great old blog-post by Raph Koster, of Ultima Online and Star Wars Galaxies design fame. Just to be clear, not everything he talks about is applicable to us! Star Wars Galaxies was a very different game from ours, with permanent item loss and a bigger focus on crafting than we have. But he explains some underlying design ideas that will help you understand where I'm coming from. His post is called [URL="https://www.raphkoster.com/2012/03/20/do-auction-houses-suck/"]"Do Auction Houses Suck?"[/URL] )
[H1]AoE Nerfs[/H1]
Some players felt blindsided by the changes to area-of-effect abilities in the May 25 update. Which is understandable since it was definitely an abrupt change: I decided that it shouldn't wait any longer, I needed to drastically reduce the power of AoEs. Not in a subtle "maybe we'll reduce this one a little bit" kind of way, either -- they were so overpowered that they were creating new farming playstyles that shouldn't exist at all, with players able to safely kill eight or ten monsters at once.
This isn't new -- for a long time a small number of players have been using "AoE Death Builds" to kill dozens of monsters at a time. And that was obviously a problem, but it hadn't really been at the top of my to-do list. To be frank, there's a lot of overpowered stuff in the game right now, and I intentionally try to avoid making knee-jerk adjustments just because somebody found a way to abuse something. Since the game's balance is still changing pretty dramatically, an overpowered ability may suddenly stop being overpowered a bit later. So I try to focus on the big picture.
I do try to tackle balance problems if they're getting out of hand, though, and I should probably have jumped on this one earlier. These AoE builds had started to become really popular, and more and more players were using them. Listening to players talk in global, it's clear that most of these people realized they were overpowered, and were rushing to exploit AoEs before they got nerfed. So I nerfed them.
Let's talk about AoE balance a little bit. Most AoEs are balanced around the idea that they hit 1.5 people on average. That means we expect that half the time they'd hit a single target, and the other half of the time they'd hit two targets. If they hit three or more targets, that's "free" damage, but of course there's a lot more risk when fighting so many monsters.
And that's the underlying balance problem: players were using AoEs to hit more targets than I originally intended, and with less risk of dying than I expected. I'm not just talking about the really crazy builds that could kill dozens of monsters at once. If you talked to any player using an "AoE build", it's clear they didn't plan on hitting a mere 1.5 monsters on average!
The obvious fix would be to nerf their damage, Power costs, and other effects, rebalancing AoE abilities around the idea that they'd be hitting more enemies on average. But I'm resistant to that idea because it turns AoEs into very specialized, very boring abilities. Instead, AoEs were changed so that if you hit more than three targets, the damage is lowered dramatically. If you hit six or seven monsters, the AoE does almost no damage. But if you take care to only hit three monsters at a time, the damage is unchanged, and it's still FAR more efficient than single-target attacks.
I prototyped some other ideas before using this one. One idea was to increase the reset timer based on the number of enemies hit, so if you hit six targets, the ability would be on cooldown for 3 extra seconds. In practice this doesn't work -- the AoEs still do too much burst damage, and if they don't manage to kill the enemy, you have no recourse except to flee because your abilities are on cooldown. I also experimented with increasing the total Power cost based on the number of targets you hit, with similarly crappy results. I eventually settled on the current solution.
And I like the current solution -- it's not perfect, but it's the best I've come up with so far. It means AoE builds are still extremely powerful in the right hands, but they're not the mindless death-buttons that they were before. You need to be a bit more situationally aware, and that takes a little bit of skill. That's nice!
I think the most serious problem with this solution is that having a bigger radius isn't as big a win anymore. There are a handful of abilities with 10 meter burst radii (or even bigger!), and these abilities are much harder to use now. They hit so large an area that you can't always predict how many monsters will get hit. I may end up just reducing their radius, but first I'm trying some experiments to see if I can find a better approach for these abilities.
Anyway, I'm letting the current solution stand for another update or two while I ponder the issue, gather feedback, and prototype some more ideas.
Oh, and one more thing: monsters currently use the same AoE code as players do. If you're in a large group and fighting AoE-spamming monsters, keep that in mind.
[H1]NPC Augment Installation[/H1]
I think the game is a bit unfair at higher level. There's an intentional power jump around level 50, then another one at 60 and 70, where the game starts to expect you to have decent gear and know how to use your abilities. The problem is that the game doesn't give players a lot of feedback on what's going on. Players often report feeling "stuck", unsure of why they seem unable to tackle higher-level areas. The game isn't giving them enough information to figure out how to advance.
So I've been slowly working on making this power transition smoother. NOT easier... just smoother. I think it's fine for the game to demand that you "get good" at high level, but the game has to give you lots of context to understand what's wrong and how to evolve your character. And ideally, it should do that well before you reach the point where you're saying "Huh? I can't kill these monsters in the desert. Why not?!"
One transition hurdle is that by level 60, the game is balanced around you knowing Transmutation and having access to basic Augments. Most players discover Transmutation on their own eventually (although I'll be making it easier to find soon, because it's really important! I expect every player to know and use Transmutation). But Augmentation is made up of several difficult crafting skills that I really don't expect every player to learn. Creating Augments is a pain, but USING Augments should be easy: you should be able to go to a player crafter and buy the Augment you want, then plug it into your gear.
This update moves us closer to that idea by letting NPC vendors install Augments into any piece of equipment for a small fee. This service is available even at low level: Joeh will happily install low-level Augments into your newbie gear if you want. I don't really anticipate that newbies will buy a lot of Augments (although who knows?), but I want low-level vendors to offer this service so players can discover that Augments exist and learn how they work.
This also means that players don't have to deal with that scheming elf Nightshade. Of course, he will still teach you how to install augments yourself if you have the cash, and I've made the augment-installation recipes cheaper by removing the extra recipe ingredients, like Fire Dust. But I expect most players will just use these NPCs, at least until they're very high-level.
The Augment skills have always been intended to be dedicated crafting skills: Augmenters create Augments, which can be sold to other players. So I'm hoping this update will jump-start the Augment economy a bit! We'll probably need more shopping tools to really make Augment-buying easy, but hopefully this will get things started.
The next update will arrive in a few days! In addition to the stuff I've talked about, it also has the usual bug-fixes and skill tweaks. It also lays the groundwork for the new Gorgon Shop. We'll be bringing the shop back online a few days after this update, so people who missed our Pre-Release Packs will be able to buy them. (But this time they're implemented as add-on packs, so they expect you to already have a Steam key. They just add features to your existing Steam account.)
I'll be back with more dev-blogginess soon!
Update Notes: June 8, 2018
This is primarily a bug-fix update. It includes important server-side bug-fixes, plus other fixes and improvements that happened to be ready to go.
[H1]General Changes[/H1]
[LIST]
<*>Fixed more server-side performance bottlenecks, and installed a new tracking tool to find remaining bottlenecks.
<*>The winners of the Steam Screenshot Contest will receive an in-game notification, along with a package of items, later today.
<*>To make finding the 3rd-party-tools JSON a bit less mysterious, tools developers can now just visit http://client.projectgorgon.com. This page will automatically redirect you to the page for the most recent game data, along with available documentation.
[/LIST]
[H1]UI Fixes and Improvements[/H1]
[LIST]
<*>The Skills window now remembers which parent skills you had opened/closed in the skill tree (between runs of the game).
<*>Fixed a timing bug that caused chat messages to be lost if they arrived during a certain part of the loading-screen process.
<*>Improved the Training UI so that it doesn't forget your scroll position when you train something.
<*>The tooltip for ability scrolls now shows a warning message if you need to learn an earlier ability before you can learn this one. (Previously the error message only showed when you tried to use the scroll.)
<*>Fixed a bug with the Last Seen time in the Friends list window. Part of the calculations were done in UTC time instead of your local time zone, so if a player had just logged off, instead of saying they were last seen a few minutes ago, it would say they were seen X hours ago, where X is how many hours you are behind UTC time. (If your timezone is ahead of UTC, it would say they were seen "< 1 Min ago".)
<*>Due to a bug, if you had multiple informational message boxes waiting for you when you logged in, some of those messages could have been missed. Only certain types of messages were vulnerable to the bug, including messages about e.g. shop items that didn't sell. The item would still be returned, but you might not get a message about it. (If you are worried you may have missed a message, note that you can always use the "/messages" command (without quotes) in chat to see recent messages.)
[/LIST]
[H1]Skill Changes[/H1]
We're in the process of converting all damage-over-time (DoT) effects in the game to use a new system that stacks better and has more information in ability-tooltips. (We're about 2/3 finished with that conversion as of this update.)
While doing this technical conversion, we're also recalculating DoT treasure effects using new formulae and guidelines that should make DoTs more useful and understandable. (One of these guidelines is that a DoT that lasts more than about 12 seconds is too long.)
We're also trying to normalize DoT tick count to every 2 seconds. Some DoTs would "tick" (deal damage) every second, while others ticked every 2 seconds, or 3, 4, or 5 seconds. This was done to work within other existing balance ideas, but when all DoTs behave so differently, it's too hard for players to understand what's going on and how to make their DoTs better. So we're unifying most of these DoTs to deal damage every 2 seconds.
Most DoTs will deal increased damage under the new balance guidelines, although a handful of DoTs that had 1-second ticks may effectively be weaker (depending on what per-tick buffs you had).
Aside from DoT changes, there are some other bug-fixes and problem-adjustments that were easy to fix while doing the conversion.
[U]Animal Handling:[/U]
[LIST]
<*>Ability: "Call Living Stabled Pet" did not work at all.
[/LIST]
[U]Archery:[/U]
[LIST]
<*>Treasure: Fire Arrow suddenly deals an additional 335 indirect Fire damage after a 15 second delay => 320 after 12 second delay
<*>Ability: Poison Arrow 6 deals 240 damage over 20 seconds => 180 over 12 seconds
[/LIST]
[U]Battle Chemistry:[/U]
[LIST]
<*>Treasure: All bomb attacks ignite the target, causing them to take 130 fire damage over 10 seconds => 140 over 10 seconds
[/LIST]
[U]Druid:[/U]
[LIST]
<*>Treasure: Heart Thorn coats the target in stinging insects that deal 180 Nature damage over 15 seconds => 306 over 12 seconds
<*>Treasure: Heart Thorn deals Poison damage (instead of Nature) and also deals 192 Poison damage over 12 seconds => 258 over 12 seconds
[/LIST]
[U]Fire Magic:[/U]
[LIST]
<*>Ability: Ring of Fire Deals 63 additional damage over 35 seconds => 150 damage over 12 seconds
<*>Ability: Fire Breath deals 80 damage over 40 seconds => 168 damage over 12 seconds
<*>Treasure: Calefaction causes 213 additional damage after a 20 second delay => 213 damage after a 12 second delay
<*>Ability: Flesh to Fuel: this ability was sharing an icon with a mentalism Psi Wave ability; it now has a unique icon.
[/LIST]
[U]Giant Bat:[/U]
[LIST]
<*>Treasure: The damage portion of "Drink Blood deals 96 damage over 12 seconds, and 50% of the damage becomes health for you" => this damage was applied to the caster, not the victim.
[/LIST]
[U]Hammer:[/U]
[LIST]
<*>Item: Flame Basher: All Hammer attacks have a 25% chance to ignite the target, causing 50 damage over 20 seconds => 33% to cause 30 damage over 12 seconds
<*>Treasure: Rib Shatter deals +160 Trauma damage over 20 seconds => 220 over 10 seconds
[/LIST]
[U]Mentalism:[/U]
[LIST]
<*>Treasure: Agonize deals +425 Psychic damage over 10 seconds => 576 over 12 seconds
<*>Treasure: System Shock deals +48 Psychic damage and 100 more over 10 seconds => 186 over 12 seconds
<*>Corrected icon coloration inconsistencies between the various Psi Wave abilities.
[/LIST]
[U]Necromancy:[/U]
[LIST]
<*>Treasure: Death's Hold deals +175 Fire damage over 15 seconds => 228 over 12 seconds
<*>Spark of Death deals 105 Psychic damage over 10 seconds => 168 over 12 seconds
[/LIST]
[U]Pig:[/U]
[LIST]
<*>Ability: Pig Rend 4 deals 75 Trauma damage over 15 seconds => 96 over 12 seconds
<*>Treasure: Pig Rend deals +238 Trauma damage over 15 seconds => +240 over 12 seconds
<*>Treasure: Squeal deals 266 Trauma damage over 15 seconds => 260 over 10 seconds
[/LIST]
[U]Priest:[/U]
[LIST]
<*>Treasure: "Exhilarate, Triage, and Invigorate restore +47 Health if you haven't been attacked in the past 15 seconds" only applied to Exhilarate, not Triage and Invigorate.
<*>The tooltips for various Priest abilities reported 0 healing when there were treasure mods that could make the ability provide that healing, but the treasure mods weren't in use.
[/LIST]
[U]Shield:[/U]
[LIST]
<*>Ability: Stunning Bash causes the target to take 145 Trauma damage over 15 seconds => 210 over 12 seconds
<*>Treasure: "Fire Shield causes melee attackers to ignite, dealing 42 Fire damage over 9 seconds" => 100 Fire damage over 10 seconds.
<*>Also fixed a bug with the lowest-tier version of this effect (found on level 1-10 gear); it did not work correct, instead briefly boosting your Fire Mitigation.
[/LIST]
[U]Spider:[/U]
[LIST]
<*>Ability: Spit Acid 5 Deals 400 acid damage over 9 seconds => 400 over 10 seconds
<*>Treasure: Spit Acid deals 228 Acid damage to Health over 12 seconds => 270 damage over 12 seconds
[/LIST]
[U]Staff:[/U]
[LIST]
<*>Ability: Pinning Slash 3 deals 60 Trauma damage over 15 seconds => 180 damage over 12 seconds
<*>Treasure: Double Hit ignites the target, dealing 135 Fire damage over 15 seconds => 198 over 12 seconds
[/LIST]
[U]Sword:[/U]
[LIST]
<*>Ability: Hacking Blade: "Deals 210 Trauma damage over 15 seconds" => 252 Trauma damage over 12 seconds (but fewer Ticks)
<*>Treasure: Hacking Blade deals 120 Trauma damage over 4 seconds => 192 Trauma over 12 seconds
<*>Treasure: Hacking Blade and Debilitating Blow deal 126 Trauma damage over 12 seconds => 138 over 12 seconds
[/LIST]
[U]Unarmed:[/U]
Note: Slashing Strike's damage was calculated incorrectly; this affects the ability and all treasure effects related to it.
[LIST]
<*>Treasure: Slashing Strike damage +51% => Slashing Strike damage +35%
<*>Ability: Slashing Strike deals 120 damage over 15 seconds => 180 damage over 12 seconds (but fewer Ticks)
<*>Treasure: Slashing Strike deals +26% damage plus 45 Trauma damage over 15 seconds => Slashing Strike deals 126 Trauma damage over 12 seconds (w/ no direct damage boost)
<*>Treasure: Slashing Strike deals +23% damage and hastens the current reuse timer of Hip Throw by 2.5 seconds => Slashing Strike deals +15% damage and hastens the current reuse timer of Hip Throw by 2.5 seconds
<*>Treasure: Infuriating Fist taunts +460 and deals 150 Trauma damage over 15 seconds => Infuriating Fist taunts +460 and deals 138 Trauma damage over 12 seconds
[/LIST]
Additional skill and ability changes, including tweaks to how area-of-effect attacks work, will be in the next update (in a few weeks). The treasure-mod rebalancing discussed in the May 2018 Dev Blog will still happen, but we're delaying it for bit while we collect more up-to-date gameplay metrics.
[H1]Eltibule Changes[/H1]
[LIST]
<*>Bug-fixes and adjustments to Eltibule include:
<*>Tweaked arrival spot from Serbule. (Just a gentle tweak - it didn't move across the zone this time!) As a side-effect, one of the meditation pillars in Eltibule has moved a short distance.
<*>Adjusted map so that it covers the entire area. (Previously there were some edges that were "off the map".)
<*>Fixed scenarios where bird-form druids would stop being birds if they flew too close to certain edges of the map (and then fall somewhat hilariously to their deaths).
<*>Fixed scenarios where attempting to craft a map or survey could generate the error message: "You must be near an Eltibule to do that."
[/LIST]
[H1]Miscellaneous[/H1]
[LIST]
<*>Recipes for max-enchanted priest staves had incorrect (easier-than-intended) ingredients.
<*>Arisetsu Medallions incorrectly allowed the Familiar's Recall ability to be used by long-term animal players that had bonded to a master.
<*>The item-description for the necklace 'Treatment of the Poor' was lost and has been restored.
<*>Sidebar abilities that involve using knives (such as Poison Blade) require the user to have hands.
<*>Some musical performance abilities were grouped incorrectly in the skills UI listing.
<*>The "Neurotoxin" movement-debuff from Biting Vines always succeeded regardless of movement-speed debuff protections.
<*>Previously, tapped alcohol kegs showed a generic error if you were unable to drink for any reason: "Drink failed. You can only have 3 beer/wine and 1 hard liquor drink active at a time." Kegs now show more specific and accurate error messages if you are unable to drink for an unusual reason.
<*>Fixed a bug introduced with the new UI that prevented many alcoholic beverages from bestowing their special effects when drunk from inventory.
<*>If a chat message included items and had a spoiler-begins tag without a spoiler-ends tag, the chat line was displayed incorrectly.
<*>For our volunteer guides: when -Guide- or -Moderator- chat flair is enabled, speech filters are ignored and spoken Words of Power are not activated.
<*>Added internal tools to help us assist guilds whose guildmaster is gone.
[/LIST]
Update Notes: May 27, 2018
This is a hotfix update to fix some bugs in Friday's major update. (A "hotfix" is just our term for any update that doesn't require you to download a new game client.)
[LIST]
<*>"Bleeder Shiv" incorrectly boosted direct Poison damage by +500%. It was supposed to be a flat +5 boost. But while fixing the bug it was revised so that it no longer does any direct poison boost, instead it boosts indirect poison a bit more.
<*>Note: the previous patch notes were incorrect; you DO earn extra XP for re-exploring Eltibule, but this is "phantom XP" that will disappear in a later update (when we make the Cartography skill do something meaningful).
<*>Fixed data bug that prevented bard+priest gear from being generated.
<*>Righteous Flame specified that it restored 0 Body Heat (which is true, but it doesn't need to tell you that).
<*>The max-enchanted recipes for some items had the wrong prerequisites. This included: Crafted Cloth Shirts, Camouflaged Shirts, Cow Barding, Snail Coats, Bard Gloves, Crafted Winter Boots, and Spring Fairy Pants.
<*>Fire Rats had the wrong internal settings. They now have fiery attacks, fire resistance, and if tamed they don't turn into a normal rat. (Previously-tamed rats are unchanged.)
<*>Gloria Stonecurl was not appropriately peeved by the presence of necromancy pets.
<*>Some weapons could not be augmented (this is fixed retroactively for existing weapons): Mutterer's Katar, Flask of Chills, Pounding Cestus.
<*>The recipe "Amazing Cloth Pants (Max-Enchanted)" created max-enchanted Great Cloth Pants instead.
<*>The recipe to install Dirk augments required Fire Dust instead of Fish Scales, which is what off-hand weapons are supposed to use for some reason.
<*>Added the missing augmentation-installation recipes for bardic lutes and horns.
<*>The various recipes for Bard Leggings generated lower-level gear effects than intended. (This can’t be fixed retroactively; existing items are unchanged.)
<*>Previously, pets could attack monsters that were 'mezzed' if at least half the mezz duration had elapsed (the same time in which players can break the mezz). Now pets never directly attack mezzed or feared targets. Note that as a side effect, this means you cannot order your pet to attack a mezzed or feared enemy; pets now consider them "invalid targets".
<*>Fixed a bug that prevented monsters in some areas from fighting. (Fixed in an earlier reboot.)
[/LIST]
We'll have a bunch more bug fixes in a full client update soon.
Update Notes: May 25, 2018
There's a new combat skill in this update! The Priest skill is primarily a healer and is especially powerful in groups. Unlocking Priest requires either Compassion 25 or Psychology 25. A priest in Kur Mountains' inn area can assist you in learning the skill.
The Knife Fighting skill has also been improved. There is a new kind of knife for your off-hand. Off-hand knives are called Dirks. All pre-existing knives are main-hand knives, collectively called Daggers. You can wield a Dirk, a Dagger, or both when using the knife skill. If you wield two knives at once, you can take advantage of a few new treasure effects and a new dual-wielding-only knife ability found on loot scrolls.
[H1]General Combat Changes[/H1]
[LIST]
<*>Burst attacks (or "AoEs", that is, attacks that hit multiple enemies) now deal reduced damage if they hit more than 3 enemies at once. The damage drops off rapidly as the number of enemies hit increases. Note that this only applies to direct damage from the attack; debuffs and other special effects are applied at full potency to all targets
<*>DOTs (damage over time effects) incorrectly calculated their damage amount on every tick, instead of just once at the start of the DOT. This meant that if you poisoned a monster, then drank a +5 indirect poison potion while the monster was still poisoned, the remaining poison in the monster would magically do +5 damage per tick! While this this might sound like a beneficial bug, it actually made many small buffs worthless. For instance, Poisoner's Cut boosts indirect damage for 5 seconds, which is enough time to use one or two abilities. But due to this bug, after 5 seconds, the poison you'd just applied to enemies suddenly became weaker. This bug has been fixed so that DOTs behave like you'd expect: the damage of the DOT is calculated once, right when it's applied. (Note that this involved significant code refactoring, so please be on the lookout for weird behavior that may have cropped up.)
<*>Treasure and spell effects that boosted a certain damage type by a flat amount ("All Electricity attacks deal +7 damage") worked correctly in combat but the damage was not shown in the abilities' tooltips in the client
<*>Abilities with casting times (now called "Channeling Times") now show their channel times in the ability info tooltips
<*>Abilities that have Extra Taunt were displayed incorrectly; e.g. an ability that taunted +300 would be listed as adding +30000% taunt
[/LIST]
[H1]Recipe Prerequisites[/H1]
Many equipment-crafting recipes now have prerequisites, other recipes that you must already know before you can learn the new one. For instance, you must know the "Decent" version of a recipe before you can learn the "Nice" version, and must learn the "Nice" version before you can learn the "Quality" version.
There is one major exception to this rule: max-enchanted recipes. To learn max-enchanted recipes you don't need to know all the previous max-enchanted recipes in that line; you just need to know the base recipe. For instance, to craft a "Quality Leather Helm (Max-Enchanted)", you need to know how to craft "Quality Leather Helm", but you don't need to know how to craft "Nice Leather Helm (Max-Enchanted)".
Players who had already learned recipes "out of order" will still have the recipes in their list (so they don't have to re-learn it), but the recipes can't be used until their prerequisites are learned.
[H1]Player Titles[/H1]
If you preordered a deluxe version of the game that includes a custom title (such as the Kickstarter 'Duke' package, or similar packages from Indiegogo or the Gorgon Shop), that title is now available! (Assuming that you filled out the backer form to tell us what title you want... we are still waiting on those forms for dozens of people.)
All characters on your account will automatically receive the title when you log in. You can also give your unique title to other players if you want to. There are two ways: you can use the new chat command /entitle to give your title to a nearby player (e.g. type "/entitle Bob" in chat, without the quotes, to give a player named Bob your title). In addition, you can create scrolls that bestow your title on whoever reads one -- these can be sold or given away. You can create 5 of these scrolls every 7 days. Use the command "/redeem CustomTitleScrolls" to get a stack of 5 scrolls. (You can use the command "/redeem" without anything else to see if your 7 days are up: if it says you have no redemptions available, you still have to wait!)
NOTE: Once given out, you cannot take the title away from someone. So take great care!
If you do NOT have a title and you think you should have a title, don't panic -- this is just the first pass, and there may be data errors or omissions. Just let us know and we'll straighten it out in the next game update!
Note: Player-owned titles are colored yellow for now, but we are still deciding on colors, so that may change.
[H1]Graphics Changes[/H1]
[LIST]
<*>Each race now has slightly customized out-of-combat idle stances (all animations are works in progress)
<*>Fixed weird jerky foot movement in some Unarmed Combat animations
<*>Fixed the shininess of several metal armors that were set up as leather instead of metal
<*>Improved culling of distant particles
<*>Previously if you set your "Shadow Distance" to 0 in the preferences, the game engine still did some of the computations needed for shadows, even though none could possibly be seen. Now if you set it to 0, all shadow processing is disabled
<*>New special setting [U]ForceHardShadows[/U] makes the game use a simpler system for generating shadows, which can improve framerate. However, note that this is automatically enabled for all graphics levels up to and including "2: Fair". So this does nothing unless your graphics quality level is 3 or higher.
<*>Fixed the "T pose" of female avatars (when humanoids were past the animation cut-off distance, and had not yet had a chance to animate at all, they were supposed to be in a pose with arms extended, called the "T pose". Males were, but females were instead partially embedded in the ground)
<*>Serbule only: adjusted the animation cutoff for fellow players so that they stop animating at about 35 meters instead of 70 meters. This is roughly equivalent to setting your "Entity Animation Distance Modifier" to 0.5 in the previous update, except that this only affects players, and only in Serbule.
<*>New special setting [U]PlayerAnimationCutoff=100[/U]: sets how close other players need to be in order for you to see them animating. (Distance is in meters. Note that this value is multiplied by your 'Entity Animation Distance Multiplier', which can be changed in the advanced graphics settings.) By default, the game determines this setting on a per-area basis, with values ranging from 35 to 80.
<*>If you had manually overridden the "Entity Animation Distance Multiplier" graphics setting, it has been un-overridden, reverting back to the default for your graphics level. We did this because we changed the underlying distances that this setting modifies (see above), so it's unlikely you'd still want it to be set at whatever you had it set at! (You can, of course, override it again as you see fit.)
<*>Fixed the Thentree Helmet, which was using the wrong texture and looked like a monstrosity
[/LIST]
[H1]Detailed Knife Changes[/H1]
The knife skill underwent many subtle adjustments over multiple iterations. It's possible that small tweaks were made that are not reflected in this list. (But we probably found them all.)
[LIST]
<*>You can now wield a new kind of knife, called a Dirk, in your off-hand. You can wield either an off-hand knife or a main-hand knife (or both) to use Knife Fighting attacks
<*>Boosted how much Poisoner's Cut increases indirect (dot) damage
<*>There is a new Knife ability called Duelist's Slash. This is a variant of Slice that requires two knives equipped (dual-wielding). The ability can be found via loot scrolls
<*>When a monster is Feared, it is treated as "not looking at anyone" for the purpose of abilities that do more damage if the target isn't focused on you.
<*>When a monster is Mezzed, it is treated as "not looking at anyone" for the purpose of abilities that do more damage if the target isn't focused on you. (This was supposed to be true before, but was bugged in some cases.) [Note: previously there was a typo in this patch note that said it worked on Stunned enemies instead of Mezzed. Stunning an enemy does not prevent them from looking at you; this is intentional and is not going to change.]
<*>Knife abilities no longer generate the error message "The target is looking at you!" (even when it's true), because it was spammy and unnecessary
<*>Fixed several bugs related to the monster-looking-at-you system
<*>Lisi the fairy (in Sun Vale) now trains some Knife special abilities (instead of Bahdba): Poisoner's Cut, Backstab, and Surprise Throw.
<*>Lisi no longer trains level 60 knife; that's Rick Snapley (in New Prestonbule)'s job!
<*>Flia the fairy (in Serbule) also had redundant training for some Knife abilities; these are removed
<*>Lisi the fairy sells a couple of knife-related skill belts that had previously been unavailable
[/LIST]
[B]Knife treasure changes:[/B]
[LIST]
<*>Changed "Gut deals +48 damage and if target is not focused on you, also reduces rage by 800" => "Gut deals +48 damage and if target is not focused on you, Gut's trauma damage is increased 50%"
<*>Changed "Indirect Poison Damage +X%" => this now buffs both indirect Poison damage and indirect Trauma damage
<*>Changed "Poisoner's Cut deals 120 Poison damage over 10 seconds" => this mod was replaced due to technical limitations (the ability's purpose is to buffs DoTs, but it couldn't buff its own DoT, which is stupid). The mod now adds a Poison DOT to Slice instead.
<*>Changed "Fending Blade restores 24 Health to you immediately and reduces the target's Rage by 320 after a 10 second delay" => now a 5 second delay
<*>Changed "Slice ignores mitigation from armor and deals +65 direct health damage" => now deals +76 regular damage, not direct health damage (mainly a stylistic change)
<*>Changed "Surge Cut deals +146% damage" => "Surge Cut deals 205 Trauma damage over 10 seconds"
<*>Changed "Indirect Poison damage reduction +16 while Knife Fighting skill active" => "When wielding two knives, all Knife Fighting attacks have a 40% chance to restore 33 Power"
<*>Changed "Projectile Accuracy Boost +19% while Knife Fighting skill active" => "Thrown Knife attacks deal +39% damage and reuse timer is -1 second"
<*>Changed "Venomstrike has a 33% chance to deal 80 direct health damage and stun the target" => "Venomstrike has a 46% chance to stun the target and deal +48 damage"
<*>Changed "Blur Cut has a 50% chance to deal +160% damage" => " Blur Cut deals 105 Poison damage over 10 seconds"
<*>There are a couple of new treasure effects to flesh out the skill's repertoire
<*>When viewing a Knife ability that deals damage over time, you can now press the Alt key (the "more info" key) to see additional details about the DOT, including how many times it "ticks". These changes were made to the Knife skill first as a prototype and when we're happy with them we'll adjust all DOTs in the game to display in this manner
[/LIST]
[H1]Changes to Other Skills' Treasure Mods[/H1]
Note: in the newest developer blog, we discussed an upcoming adjustment to percentage-based-damage treasure mods. This change has NOT been made yet because it needs more internal testing; it will happen in a future update.
The following changes are side-effects of bug fixes or tweaks to how DOTs are calculated. There are more DOT-related treasure changes necessary; they will happen in a future update.
[LIST]
<*>Battle Chemistry treasure that boosted specific golem abilities did not work for the past few updates (e.g. "Your golem minion's Poison Bomb deals +50 damage")
<*>Ice Magic treasure that boosted the Cold Sphere's Rage Attack did not work for the past few updates
<*>"Virtuoso's Ballad restores X Armor" => this accidentally restored Power instead
<*>Changed "Heavy Shot and Heavy Multishot Damage +33%" => "Heavy Shot and Heavy Multishot Damage +21%"
<*>Changed "Mangling Shot deals +9.5% damage and 330 Trauma damage over 20 seconds" => "Mangling Shot deals 330 Trauma damage over 10 seconds"
<*>Changed "Mangling Shot causes target to take +14% damage from Piercing for 10 seconds" => "Mangling Shot causes target to take +11.5% damage from Piercing for 10 seconds"
<*>Fire Arrow's burn (damage over time) changed from 300 over 20 seconds to 210 over 15 seconds (this change was made so that archery DOT treasure mods can stack more elegantly in the future)
<*>Healing Injection, Revitalize: these Minor Heal abilities did not benefit from buffs that boost the healing of Minor Heals
<*>Strategic Preparation: this ability is supposed to have a 1.5 second channeling time, but due to a bug the channel only took 1.0 second
[/LIST]
[H1]Miscellaneous Fixes[/H1]
[LIST]
<*>Increased size of chat history log
<*>Fixed bug with dummy items from vendomatics
<*>Brewing: brewing effects that caused you to deal extra damage vs. specific types of enemies did not work
<*>Fixed a bug that caused some buffs to stick around for an arbitrary length of time after the caster had left the area (most obviously with Battle Chemistry mutations, since they last the longest). The intent is that any buffs that come from an ability (and that last longer than a few seconds) should abort if the buff's caster is not in the same server area as the person they buffed, OR if the caster switches to a different combat skill.
<*>Revised the heuristic that determines druid event size. When very few druids are online (at the moment of premonition), druid events will be easier and shorter
<*>Bellema Deftwhisper now likes Peridots, not Lapis Lazuli. People change.
<*>The weapon "Gut-Ache's Chopper" did not have crafting points and could not be augmented; this has been fixed (retroactively for existing weapons)
<*>Changed the map orientation, arrival point, and some of the spawns, in Eltibule. (The map had gotten turned all around; while fixing it we also tweaked and improved some spawns.) As a result the fog has been reset; apologies for the inconvenience! You will not earn Cartography XP for fog that you already cleared in Eltibule, but you will resume earning Cartography XP once you've cleared more fog than you had previously cleared.
<*>Fixed monster AI issues that slowed down server processing
[/LIST]
May 2018 Developer Blog
Hi, I'm Eric ("Citan") Heimburg, the lead developer of Project: Gorgon. It's been a while since I did a dev blog -- while we were crunching on the UI rewrite, and then the Steam integration, there wasn't a lot to say besides "we're still doing that thing we already talked about." But now that we have some space, it's time for a dev blog!
Before I start, though: What's a dev blog? It's a developer diary, a look at where we are right now. It's meant to give you some insight into how we're thinking and what we want to do. But the details aren't solidified yet. Dates and times, core details ... once or twice I've even mothballed entire systems that just don't work, right after having talked excitedly about them in the dev blog.
So I apologize in advance for any inadvertent misinformation. I'm an optimistic person -- you don't start making an MMO by yourself if you're a pessimist -- and I want to convey some of what I'm excited about. And your feedback is a valuable byproduct of that -- we often change direction based on what people say here.
Let's get started!
Client Optimizations
Framerate in Serbule is bad! We know. This isn't something that will get fixed overnight. There are some small optimizations coming, but nothing that will fundamentally fix the FPS issues. There's no magic code fix that will make everything good; it will take a bunch of steps to fix. But never fear -- those steps are in progress!
Animation Overhead
If you log into Serbule right after the server reboots, you will have a pretty good framerate. Not great framerate on lower-end machines -- see below for why -- but not abysmal, either. I get 60fps in Serbule on my personal test server... because it's a server with nobody else on it.
The problem comes when there's a hundred or so other people nearby. This creates bottlenecks in two areas: animations and UI.
The underlying animation bottleneck is a limitation of the graphics engine we use, Unity. Animations in Unity are all calculated in a single thread of the CPU, so when the game has to render 100 animating players, your performance will always be bad. And there's frankly nothing I can do to magically fix that.
In the longer term, this is a problem that Unity itself will fix. Unity added a feature called "graphics jobs" which fixes the animation bottleneck. Unfortunately, the feature is still labeled "Experimental", and the last time we tried to use it (late last year), it caused random crashes for random people. They've made bug-fixes since then, but it's still labeled Experimental, so I'm hesitant to inflict it on players again. But when this feature is finally ready for primetime, it will basically solve the animation performance problem.
In the meantime, what can we do? Well, we can reduce the number of characters that are animating. In fact, try this now: in the Settings window, under graphics options, click "Show Advanced Options" and then set the "Entity Animation Distance Multiplier" to its minimum value. This will cause players to stop animating when they're farther away from you, and you can see how it affects your framerate in busy areas.
One avenue I'm exploring is creating a fancy heuristic option that quietly disables animations on some players when the screen gets too busy. Getting that to work well is a hard problem, though, and it doesn't make sense to try to write this until after our upcoming Mecanim Update (see below).
UI Overhead
The UI system has to do a lot of calculations to tell if you can click on something. These calculations are not simple, and when there's 50+ selectable players on the screen, those calculations really slow things down. I've added some simple hacky workarounds to improve framerate already -- you might have noticed how sometimes the labels over the heads of people trail behind the people themselves? Yeah, that's one of the optimizations to keep it from costing too much CPU. But a "real" fix will require a more intensive rewrite. That rewrite is waiting on some other things, but eventually the UI system will handle the problem more effectively -- and then the labels will keep up with the people more reliably.
Serbule Assets
Not all of Serbule's problems are due to having a lot of players in one tiny spot, though. Serbule itself is still a messy place. Throughout our long alpha, Serbule was the testing ground for new technology and design ideas. It's suffered several cataclysmic rewrites that entirely changed the map... and I expect there will be one more cataclysmic rewrite in its future. Some of the expensive parts of Serbule include:
[B]Sky:[/B] The sky may just look like a sky, but it's actually a dynamic weather system. With the flip of a switch we can activate rain, snow, sleet, lightning, fog, high winds, and more! But those features reduce performance, even when they're disabled. (And of course they have a bigger impact on performance when they're enabled, which is why they aren't.) The sky is based on a conglomeration of some 3rd-party Unity sky libraries that just haven't proven to be efficient enough. I've been making optimizations to them, but ultimately I suspect we'll need to replace the whole thing with a different system. (This sky system is also used in Serbule Hills, and is some of the reason for FPS slowness there. Other areas use an older sky system that's very cheap but very primitive.)
[B]Ground:[/B] The ground itself is not very expensive, and the trees in Serbule are Speedtree trees -- reasonably fast -- but the grass, little rocks, and other small details are too expensive. There are 3rd-party graphical libraries we can use here to improve things, eventually.
[B]Buildings:[/B] Serbule has a lot of buildings in it, and they ARE optimized... but unfortunately they're optimized for an earlier version of Unity. That's one of the problems with making a game for five years: there's lots of moving targets in terms of performance. The building geometry uses too many draw-calls and there's not much I can do to fix them in code -- the assets themselves will need adjusting or replacing. That's something we're starting to plan.
So Serbule will continue to be a place where we experiment -- but now we're experimenting with new engine components for weather, grass, and so on. When we're happy with those underlying components, we'll either fix or replace the actual art of Serbule.
Fixing Overcrowding by Spreading Players Out, a/k/a "Serbule is for newbies!"
There's a lot of stuff we'll be doing to improve framerate over the coming months, but there's also a more fundamental problem. Serbule is the newbie town. New players show up here and learn how to play. They kill pigs and stuff right outside the gates. And Serbule is also, unfortunately, the only major hub city until level 60. There are many other mini-hubs in the world with vendors, storage, and supplies, but players aren't flocking there. Nothing is as central, as accessible, or as full-featured as Serbule.
And that's bad content design. If there's 500 players online, 200 of them should not be in the same small area.
So I think we'll need to prioritize adding another hub town between Serbule and Rahu, a home base for players after they get past the Serbule levels. There are two upcoming areas that might work: the elven city past Sedgewick Forest, and the dwarven city hidden in the mountains. These areas are currently slated to be mini-hubs (not much more elaborate than Amulna, another mini-hub), but we can expand one of them into a full city, and start reducing the game's emphasis on Serbule.
To be clear, there's no new city in development yet! There's lots of planning to do first. But it'll probably need to happen before we implement Statehelm, the level 80 hub.
Server Optimizations
There are many kinds of lag -- in fact, the word "lag" is not a technical term, it's just a slang word that players use. (That's why, when you report that you're having "lag", we always have to ask what specific problem you mean. Framerate drops, monster "rubberbanding", and slow NPC response times are three completely unrelated problems which players just call "lag".) We've talked about framerate problems, but the server can cause delays and slowdowns too.
Master Server Bottlenecks
After the last content update, I spent the next few weeks looking into the causes of server bottlenecks, and I managed to fix a bunch of them. This was a high priority for me because the master server shouldn't be under any real strain. It can easily handle 500 players without breaking a sweat, but it was getting jammed up pretty often. Why?
Well, the reason is bugs in the code. They're subtle bugs, though, that only show up when enough players try to do certain things at once. For instance, there was a bug where if enough players were downloading the contents of a storage vault at once, other NPCs in the area would stop interacting with players until one of the storage vaults finished downloading. (In java parlance, the NPCs were synchronizing on the wrong object.)
I've already found and fixed the most glaring and damaging of these bugs. You may have noticed that the server was rebooted every night for about a week -- each day I would add more logging to track down these problems, then the next day I would retrieve the logs, find bugs, fix them, and repeat. There are still some more synchronization problems in there somewhere which I haven't found yet, because they happen too rarely. But I'll track them all down eventually, and the remaining bugs are rare -- they aren't causing a lot of trouble (or else I'd be able to find them).
Sub-Server Problems
There's another component to server "lag", though: the sub-servers. These are separate processes that connect to the master server and control the monsters, pets, and NPCs in an area, making them move around and do things that the master server requests. There's a bunch of sub-servers, and they can sometimes get disconnected -- either due to a network problem or because they crashed from a code bug. When that happens, players often don't notice. The sub-server automatically restarts and reconnects.
But sometimes players DO notice, because their performance gets really bad. Why? What's happening? Well, that's a funny story. You see, there's a very fancy redundant system: when a monster needs to move but the sub-server is gone, the main server says "no problem. I'll just deputize a random player to do the work." It randomly chooses a nearby player and makes their game client perform the calculations to move the monsters! This is a powerful tool that we use internally during development and testing. And I figured, why not use it as an emergency backup system in the live game? It's not really much of a security risk to have a random client drive a random monster for a few seconds at a random moment. So what's the down side?
If your machine is a beast, like our development machines are, there's no real down side -- the overhead is unnoticeable. But if your machine is running near its capacity, even a little bit of extra work can drop your performance into the pits. And when there's only one player in an area (like when you're the only person in a big dungeon), that player's client gets tasked with moving ALL the active monsters nearby, which can be way too much CPU load for lower-end machines. If there's lots of players around, the work is spread between them randomly, which results in less CPU cost for each player, but can cause latency problems. If you ever see a monster "rubberbanding" (zooming around between several locations) it's usually because some player with a terrible ping has been tasked with driving the monster.
Overall, using this system as a backup seems to be causing a lot more problems than it's solving. I've been meaning to make improvements to it for a while -- maybe it could take your ping into account, and maybe keep track of how much CPU load it's using on each deputized computer, to keep from overtaxing people... but at the moment it doesn't make sense to focus on that. So in the next update, I'm just going to disable it. When a subserver disconnects, monsters and pets will just stand perfectly still for a moment until the subserver resyncs. I suspect that will be a lot less disruptive. We'll see how it goes!
Treasure and Skill Changes
So there's lots of engine work going on under the hood. But there's also a lot of very visible new stuff going into the next update: lots of skill and treasure changes. These fall into three categories.
Percentage-Based Treasure Mod Descaling
We aren't yet at the point where we're fine-tuning skills and treasure mods. I'll be fixing a few of the most problematic individual abilities and treasure effects, but most of the fine-grained balancing will happen later. Right now I'm still trying to get the "big picture" balancing done. And in the big picture, player DPS is out of whack at high level.
The problem comes from treasure effects that multiply a specific ability by a percent, such as "Fire Bolts Damage +37%". The percentages for these mods are designed in a very naïve way: they assume they're the only buff you have for that ability. To use Fire Bolts as an example, on my balancing spreadsheets that 37% mod is calculated as adding about 100 damage -- which is what it adds if you have no other mods for the level 60 Fire Bolt spell.
But, of course, there are lots of other mods that boost Fire Bolts, and during actual gameplay that 37% generates a much bigger number. This is all very intentional: the basic calculations are naïve on purpose so that you can find ways to crank up your damage. That's part of the fun of building gear sets!
The problem is the calculations are TOO naïve. There are more ways to boost damage than I originally planned, and the resulting big numbers are causing problems when making content. Those problems aren't too bad right now; it's a bit tough to create content that works for lots of builds, but it's still doable. But it will become a severe problem by the time we reach level 125 content. I need to ratchet the damage percentages down a few notches. This doesn't have to happen immediately, but I figure we should get this sort of thing out of the way ASAP, so that we have as much time during beta as possible to analyze the results and make more adjustments.
But fixing this problem is a little bit worrisome. The changes need to be made to the "average build" as if that's a real thing ... but it's not. If I drop the "average" player's overall damage by 25%, and drop monster health similarly, then the "average" player won't be affected much. But in this game full of weird unique builds, player damage is all over the spectrum. These changes will affect different builds very differently. Most skill combinations would still be fine -- maybe a bit slower to kill things, which is fine, as some are too fast anyway -- but some skill builds which are on the lower end of the damage spectrum might become unplayable.
To limit the number of unforeseen problems, I think we'll do the change in two or three steps. In the next update I'll lower those percentage-mods a little bit, and adjust monsters a bit. Then we'll see how it feels, and I can react to problems while they're still relatively small. In a future update I'll do it again, lowering mods and monsters some more. And then a third time if necessary. The downside is there'll be repeated "nerfing patches", which are always stressful and annoying. But the upside is that none of the nerfing patches is super traumatic.
Another option is to do all these broad changes at once, then help players to recover from it. During alpha when we had to make huge stat changes, we created a special "Cheap Transmutation Week" event, where Transmutation didn't consume durability. This let high-level players efficiently re-roll their gear to replace mods they no longer wanted. We could do that again, or something similar.
So there are two ways: slow incremental changes, or we could rip the band-aid off and do it all at once, then help accelerate the healing. Much more dramatic, but maybe less annoying overall? I haven't decided yet, but I am leaning toward the slow incremental plan.
Either way, this change will mostly affect players in the 50+ range, because that's when the mod-stacking becomes problematic. If you're lower level than that, you'll see changes, but not all that much.
Off-Hand Knife
We now have some basic animations for wielding a knife in the off-hand, and off-hand knives should be in the next update!
The Knife skill can still be used by wielding a Dagger in the main-hand (and all existing knives will be considered Daggers). We'll also be adding new off-hand knives (called just "Knives", or maybe "Shivs" or "Stilettos" or something similar, to easily differentiate them from the main-hand weapons.) You can wield a main-hand knife, an off-hand knife, or both -- and I may add a few tricks for people who want to wield two at once.
The more interesting thing to me, though, is the number of other skill combinations this opens up, such as Sword+Knife or Knife+Ice Magic or Druid+Knife. Lots of synergies to explore! Knife was always meant to have both off-hand and main-hand options, so this will help it reach its full potential.
Damage Over Time (DoT) Ability Changes
One balancing problem with the Knife skill is that it relies on DoTs (damage-over-time or "bleed" effects), and DoTs don't scale very well at high level. Why don't they scale? Well, in part that's because of what I mentioned above: monsters are getting out of whack to compensate for very high player damage. Bleed damage scales linearly, and there aren't too many ways to multiply how much damage they do. So in part, bleeds will be fixed by toning down direct damage. But there will also need to be new ways to buff bleeds and poisons.
So part of the work I'm doing for Knife is rethinking how DoTs scale, and adjusting Knife's abilities and treasure mods to work better at high level. I also need to make improvements to how DoTs are displayed on abilities, because right now they don't take your buffs into account correctly. (For instance, the "Gut" ability always says it deals "25 trauma damage over 10 seconds", even if you have trauma-damage buffs that actually make that number much higher.) Reworking this logic will make Knife a lot easier to use and understand -- and in a future update, we'll backfit those improvements to other skills that use DoTs.
New Skill: Priest
The next update will also introduce a new core combat skill, the Priest. This is a support skill that focuses on group healing and recovery, with a smattering of other things for variety.
We call it "Priest" for short, but the skill is specifically "Priest of Arisetsu". Arisetsu is the Goddess of Hope and Warmth, and she will be the patron deity of anyone that uses Priest abilities. Becoming a priest involves making a vow to Arisetsu that you will help her in the direst of times, "when all hope is dying in the world"... but practically speaking, that's not a day-to-day occurrence. Unlike "druid emergencies", there won't be any "priest emergencies" except, perhaps, during special events -- maybe a weekend event, or something like that.
Arisetsu is a well-liked and easygoing god, and anyone can become a Priest of Arisetsu. The only thing Arisetsu refuses to tolerate is the undead, and you can't use the Necromancer and Priest skills at the same time. Other than that, you can pair it with anything.
Priest has the most targeted healing potential of any skill, but some of the Priest's heals have a short "channeling time." If the priest is attacked while channeling, the spell aborts. In other words, Priests work best in a group, where they don't have to be on the front lines. But like most skills, Priest has versatility and room for customization. There's some unique debuffing abilities, some potent undead-killing tools, and a couple of fiery attacks related to Arisetsu's "warmth" aspect. These should allow for some interesting skill combinations. In fact, I'm excited to see someone try to make Fire Magic+Priest work as a deadly solo offensive combo! ... But in general, Priest is a support skill.
Mecanim Update On The Horizon
We have a custom animation synchronization system that's built on top of Unity's original animation engine. Well, a few years ago Unity added a new animation engine (called "Mecanim"), and we're working on upgrading all our code and assets to use mecanim. This is a big undertaking that involves a ton of work, and the work is being done in a separate branch of the code until it's ready. It won't be ready for at least a few updates... but when it's finally ready, it'll be a big deal.
First, it will let us finally fix some of the annoyingly terrible animation glitches that we just can't fix right now due to the rigidity of our old animation setup. Second, it will let us blend animations better, allowing for more reasonable-looking combat animations. Third, we're plugging in new animation features necessary for mounts. (Just to be clear, mounts will take additional work on top of the mecanim update. But that will be one of the big features we focus on after.)
I don't have any kind of an ETA on the Big Mecanim Update yet, but it's on the horizon.
(Unfortunately for us, the Mecanim system uses a single-threaded implementation under the hood, the same as the older Unity animation system. So switching to Mecanim won't magically improve the game's framerate in crowded areas... but mecanim looks a LOT better! That's the point of this update: laying the groundwork for better-looking animations.)
Other Changes
The next update will be in about two weeks -- hopefully less, actually, but let's say two weeks.
Time permitting, we'll also be tweaking some other skills, nerfing some problematic abilities and buffing a few others. But that's not the primary focus of the next update, so it may get pushed out to a different update.
I also want to make some incremental quality-of-life improvements to the UI, but I doubt too much of that will fit into this update; we'll see how it goes.
That's it for now. I'll be back soon with another dev blog. Thanks for playing and supporting us!
Update Notes: April 15, 2018
This is a bug-fix update.
General Fixes:
Fixed several bugs that could bottleneck the server. (You can tell when this is happening because NPCs take a long time to respond when they're clicked on, among other problems.) It's likely there are more of these bottleneck bugs that only arise when 200+ players are in one small geographic region, so special logging was added to help track them down when they occur.
Fixed bug that allowed you to switch equipment during combat.
Fixed bug that caused players to have collision with other players if they transformed into/out of an animal form.
If you died while submerged in an indoor body of water, the camera could remain blurry after you respawned.
Fixed bug with Hardcore Mode sign allowing players to temporarily keep using hardcore items and buffs after turning off hardcore mode.
When a guild officer toggled a guild permission, it was logged incorrectly to the Guild Audit Log. (Pre-existing log entries are unchanged; new log entries should be correct.)
Fixed bug that could turn other players' hair mostly invisible ("ghost hair") if they stood at a certain point between the camera and your character.
Fixed pet/monster AI bug that caused melee-centric monsters to stand idly until their global cooldown was up, even if their target was fleeing. They now pursue fleeing enemies so they can more quickly be in range to attack again.
Additionally, adjusted pet/monster AI so that they don't slow down as quickly when chasing fleeing (or backpedaling) targets, allowing them to actually get in range of their targets more often.
Animal Handling Fixes:
Fixed bug that caused Animal Handling pets to not respond to Sic 'Em/Clever Trick orders if their pet mode was changed.
Examining an Animal Handling pet once again lists the pet's unique abilities triggered by Sic 'Em and Clever Trick.
Animal Handling ability "Get It Off Me" referred vaguely to "potency is based on loyalty". Loyalty is now called Bond Level, and the ability was reworded to be a little more specific: "How well the pet focuses on your enemies depends in part on the pet's Bond Level." In other words, Bond Level determines how well the pet is "taunted" to attack your enemies, but other benefits of the ability are NOT based on bond level.
Increased how well pets stick to your enemies when Get It Off Me is used. (But this effect is reduced if the pet's Bond Level is low; see above.)
Removed obsolete references to pet Power in Animal Handling abilities.
Content Fixes:
Fixed visual bugs with ghosts
Ranalon Den map now uses the new style map pins.
Fixed some stone objects in the Ranalon Den that could be walked through.
All old references to "Enoeos" are now spelt "Enoyos". (He'd probably prefer the other spelling, but it's easier to guess how "Enoyos" is pronounced: eh-NO-yose.)
The "Strange Stick" used in the quest "The Eye of Fate" works again.
Map fog in the Crystal Cavern behaves correctly.
Velkort's furniture no longer floats. Neither does Ivyn's house.
Trees and grasses in Serbule Hills are visible again.
Killing some types of Winter Court Fey did not correctly advance the guild quest Storming the Nexus (50-person)
Eltibule is using the new terrain shaders, although the foliage is not yet updated to match, so it looks a bit weird
