This week's update probably included the most major change to the game since its inception, public upgrade/compound %'s and an accompanying roll animation!
This change makes upgrades more transparent, caps the lower and higher %'s so the economy will be more stable in the future - and slows down upgrades - making merchants more crucial and opens up the possibility of selling pre-upgraded basic +8/+9 items. Initially was going to make this new system available through Tracktrix, or a special NPC in a special cave or something similar to that, but since it's aimed to be a core part of a core system - in the end decided to make it just available - Trexnamedtom suggested a way to speed up upgrades, so it might be added through a unique item or achievement
The upgrade system is aimed to make upgrading basic items challenging, but allow "babied" items to have higher chances (so the gap between npc items and valuable items isn't so high) - and I believe this update fortifies this design too. You'll come to discover that wearing items slowly increases their upgrade % - and upgrades have a higher % after failures - so in the end, basic items usually get the lower cap of the % - while you can make sure you always upgrade near the highest % for valuable items
In July, planning to introduce a lot more items, armor sets, weapons, populate the existing token shops, maybe introduce new ones - so normalizing the upgrade system was a relief, seemed like a prerequisite - Until July, might concentrate on completing the cosmetics system
Second major improvement this week is the QOL improvements, one of the major shortcomings of the game was controlling your character and inventory while the Code was updating/changing things every second, the following improvements mostly solved these issues
Improvements:
- Inventory refreshes no longer closes open items
- New system: Focusing instead of targeting
- Your characters and others can be focused while the code targeting continues
- Upgrade, Compound, Exchange interface restores itself after an inventory refresh
As a result, even if your code is continually targeting new monsters, using potions, refreshing your inventory every second, you can now freely inspect your character, equip/unequip items, check out others nearby, upgrade/compound without the items resetting every second
Changelist:
- Arena is now a Safe PVP Zone
- Server reset cooldown now appears in game logs too
- New property: character.q - similar to .s or .c, for delayed actions
- "placeholder" item - placed in the inventory to reserve the inventory position
- upgrade/compound code functions updated
- New property: character.focus
- parent.xtarget points to the focused character