Hi folks! This is a stepping-stone build toward our upcoming Factions major update. The big changes here are the new combat logic subscribers are following, making them smarter, faster, and deadlier at wielding their abilities. As a warning, do expect to see your subscribers having substantially more success against your monsters with this update; you'll probably find that you need to beef up your monster designs to compensate for the smarter players!
Here's the full list of changes.
Major Changes:
Subscribers are now much smarter tactically in combat. You may find that you need to toughen up your monster designs to compensate!
Parties will now try to pull enemies one at a time, instead of barreling straight into combat.
During combat, subscribers now issue emoji "combat shouts", so what they're doing is more visible. (These can be hidden from the View Options menu near the top right of the screen)
Parties now can choose to do the party leader's quests. (If the party leader has the 'friendly' tag, the party will do other party members' quests, too!)
Subscribers are now aware of AoE effects on attacks and will be more likely to use abilities that would hit multiple enemies, and less likely to use abilities that would aggro new monsters into the fight.
Combat abilities which are likely to be used to "pull" monsters at the start of combat are now labelled as "Pull" or "Group Pull" abilities, in the ability list. (Ranged taunts can also be used as "pull" attacks, but will still show up as "Taunt" abilities)
Finally (finally!) found and fixed what I believe was the last way that players could squeeze through dungeon walls.
Slightly increased the size of obstructions around scenery items, to prevent some party members from appearing to walk through them.
Updated combat logic for individual subscribers and parties to use the new combat systems so they're ready for factions and world PVP, where they may not always be fighting only monsters any more!
Quality of Life Changes:
Several updates ago we updated the game simulation to have 7 days per 'month' instead of 5, and this meant that when loading an old save, very few subscribers would play on days 6 and 7 ("Saturday" and "Sunday"), since their typical play schedules had all been set back when there were only five days. Now the game notices that situation and rebuilds subscriber play schedules during the load to use all seven days, with a slight bias toward playing on weekends. Now weekends will likely be your *busiest* days, instead of the quietest ones!
You can no longer select a monster zone unless you're in the NPCs tab (this was often a problem when trying to select an object that was inside a monster zone or ran through a monster zone, especially roads)
Subscribers now have an approximately 10 minute timer for grinding and doing hunt quests. The timer begins when they reach the intended combat location; if it runs out, they'll give up on grinding or hunting, and will choose to do something else instead.
Made improvements to single-click selection logic to make it easier to select moving objects.
Fixed visible model preview during placement of NPCs.
Fixed subscriber behaviour when starting a new pathfinding request when already halfway out of a building. (Previously, if we were halfway out and then recalculated a new behaviour, the subscriber would first walk back to the middle of the building they had been leaving, and then start leaving again. Now they instead just continue leaving!)
Fixed desktop icons going invisible while being dragged, on the second and later visits to the in-game desktop interface.
Fixed incorrect character scaling inside dungeons.
Game logging has been moved into a background thread. None of you care about this but it's a huge deal for me! :D
Thanks for your patience, everyone; getting all of this combat logic working well took me a *lot* longer than I expected, especially around coordinating parties to fight well as a group!
-T