Developer Log A.9.0

[chunky_dog]

A.9.0
18/07/2024
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Gameplay:

• Huge buff to archaeology. Rare loot drop chances have been increased. Loot pool has been adjusted to remove carrots and potatoes. All sell prices of loot have been increased. Drop chance of treasures and danger have been increased, reducing chances of 'nothing'. This has increased the gold yield of archaeology approximately x3 on average. This should make this world activity far more viable economically.​
• We have added a new GUI-based reward system if you type /reward or /rewards. This will open up a panel that allows you to access all sorts of different rewards, including for voting, playtime, holidays, and one-time rewards (such as a welcome bonus). It also provides prompts when you have rewards to claim (including in TAB). This will be used thoroughly for some future things. Really excited for it.​
• Several new custom mobs have been added, including some awesome new Druid ones (such as mini mobs, bosses, NPC type mobs, etc). These will be amazing for some upcoming event lines, and we're really excited to show you guys!​
• Three new PvE / Slaying sites have been added. Firstly, a new and larger bandit camp nearby Manaan Port with more spawns. Then, a swamp area with new types of insects and critters to slay that are easier but drop smaller amounts of gold. Then, a gnoll camp nearby Lunthorpe that offers the highest gold yield but the hardest fights.​
• Foraging has been added. This is a huge thank you to MyceliumHoney. Several nodes have been added including mushrooms, berries, flowers, and so on. Craftable recipes for foraging equipment have also been added, which are required for some nodes. Some issues have been identified with drop chances, and are being worked on (see Known Issues below).​

• The mining nodes in the spawn mines have been fixed. The issue was caused by node crashes during cooldown, so the cooldowns weren't saved / persisted through the crash. Staff have been advised on how to rectify this should it become an issue again (hopefully not). I've also set some precautions in place as well.​
• Mob spawning has been tweaked again. Passive and nautical mobs have been decreased so that 40 sheep aren't appearing in your peripherals at any one time. Instead, the mob spawning is more realistic and aligned with the current economy.​
• Although it literally does not affect anyone whatsoever except me, the way voting works has been changed. Previously, a standalone plugin handled the reward provisioning for voting. But now that has been integrated with another plugin to minimise resource usages.​
• Playtime has also been integrated into the above plugin. This means that no longer will you get a big 'ding' and a ring every 3 hours for your token. Instead, you will get a notification and you can claim your token at any time. No more pesky RP interruptions!​
• The minimum gold a person can hold before their gold is dropped has been changed to 10 gold from 20 gold. This is due to increasing gold gains server wide across the different activities and so we want to balance it out by ensuring that only new players or those that are strategic about their gold carrying don't lose out.​
• There was an issue pertaining to warps for staff being missing. This has now been fixed. The issue has been identified as a poltergeist in the machine.​

Website / Lore:

• A major rework for Spellcrafting has been published. We are very excited to be releasing this, as it is designed to make the original concept and idea of Spellcraft, being that you 'create unique spells', much more prominent. You can read more about this under 'Concepts' > 'Spellcrafting'. Specifically, the 'Runes' page is completely redone, which details 'Spell factors' which can be used for each rune. Then, the 'Casting' section has also been reworked to implement the new changes with spell factors, rolling, and so on. Any questions about this, feel free to message us!​
• Some may have noticed already that our server map has been readded! You can view this at: http://map.mortalsandmythos.com/. It is a 3D map with a lot of detail in it. We'll be making some changes regarding zoom, distance, viewability, and other settings as we go through the week.​
• A new 'Gold and Shops' article has been made with massive thanks to SoulReapingWolf. It is an intensely detailed article on how shops work, and provides a full walk-through on how to use them. In addition, a summarised version has been added to the Getting Started. You can view the article on 'Mechanics' > 'Gold and Shops' on the wiki, or by viewing the summary on the wiki's Getting Started page.​

• Spellcrafting Transfiguration (enchanting) has been updated. The amount of enchantments that any one person may carry is now based on a points system which corresponds to the tier of enchantments that the person holds. For example, a Tier 1 enchantment is 1 point. A Tier 2 enchantment is 2 points. And a Tier 3 enchantment is 3 points. Characters have 5 total points of enchantments that they can hold on their person before suffering essence poisoning.​
• A new section on the Druidism passives has been added, which regards to the Bearer of Lifebinds.​
• The first change to the combat system regards AC. The amount of damage mitigation that AC offers has been reduced, in order to provide better balancing. As previous mechanics of AC made some opportunities for almost invincibility.​
• There has been another change to the combat system regarding horses. They are now a lot more durable as their HP has been increased from 4 to 15.​
• The final change to the combat system regards movespeed. Movespeed can also no longer be lowered under 2 blockspeed.​

Building:

• Manaan has had an improvement with the farms being built a lot more widespread, as well as a graveyard having been constructed. This is following some roleplay storylines that are currently going on, and should also help to promote some more roleplay scenes toward that section of the city.​
• Lunthorpe has been created to the north of spawn! A new bustling town that has already featured a number of great roleplay stories.​
• A large forest has sprouted up between Manaan and Lunthorpe. Judge it harshly, Azula made it.​

Other:

• Server resources have been upgraded! A pretty minor change, but we had some hardware improved over the past couple weeks. This should help keep the server loaded, latency down, and TPS consistent even in high-stress events or situations. We've been stress-testing it a bit and have been pretty happy with it so far (other than node issues which are unavoidable given the server location, we are looking into this).​
• New Discord bot has been added! Although it does very little at the moment (other than feed us some server statistics and information in the background), there are some massive plans for the integration between Discord and the server. Which should also hopefully reduce the problems with Tebex.​
• Not that it really affects anything server-side, but we did a massive fix to databases which will help feed information to and from the server a lot better. Really excited, so I wanted to put it on here but I know no one will care .​

Known Issues:

• The issue with show item still remains where if you show an item, there is a small period of time (a couple minutes) before you can show a different item. Struggling to fix this one. I have to recode the functionality directly into our existing chat system. So may take a lot longer than expected - but I am working on it!
• There is an issue with the new implementation of Foraging. Although we have kept it in its current state, we have had to remove some drops from it due to skewed drop chances. We are working on a fully custom plugin that will provide us with the tools we need to make Foraging perfect.
• Tebex (the store) has some drop-out issues when applying roles to the server. Sometimes requires manual overrides. This is being fixed ASAP.
• Very rare mass time out issues or rare temporary crash cycles on restarts have been identified as a hardware issue caused by the node that the server is hosted on. Although we have encountered similar problems in the past, we are looking at potentially moving locations in order to hopefully rectify the issues.
• OOC toggle and OOC switch are kind of messed up. This is being fixed ASAP.

Coming Soon:

• PvE / mechanical representation for magic users is coming very soon... Super excited to be showing this off. The implementation of it will also allow us to adapt it to other magics and increase our pool of available kits when facing PvE.