So today someone decided to question my omnipresence, astounding I know. Without informing my new bosses, I have taken it upon myself to remind you that I am indeed alive and well, albeit lonely in the realm of the wiki. Although to be perfectly honest I haven’t been spending much time working on the wiki as there happens to be a more important task at hand: the forum.

Long ago a wild server admin appeared and told us we would be upgrading our forum software to vBulletin 4.1.0. To this the crowd of moderators took joy, and immediately began making plans for all the new gadgets, widgets and functionalities that would soon lie at our fingertips. One even took the liberty as signing up as co-community manager, since one does not simply gain access to the AdminCP. There was only one problem – it is rapidly approaching one and a half years since that fateful day with no sign of the promised land. Out of all this mess, when the time came that I should resign from the post of community manager to free time for my personal life, it so happens I was roped in again to aid converting our forum style to become vb4 compatible. It has proved a wonderful opportunity to practise my coding skills, although no-one forewarned me that a drunken monkey wrote the backend; in retrospect there was probably a reason the whole project was delayed for several months.

Now after that cool story: the blog. At present I’m not quite certain who shall continue to operate the blog, but until Mista Twista or Desi Boukerse come and remove my rights I guess I’ll continue to be yours truly for a bit. It is quite fortunate that I can not have my rights entirely removed whilst I continue to work on the forum and wiki, so perhaps I may put them to good debatable sneaky popular demand usage and spoil a few 1.34 goodies. As I mentioned in my farewell post, already existing in the beta is a hidden feature I’ve been pushing our product manager about for many months. I’m sure you’ve already guessed it, but if you haven’t, I may jump in more formally before the official announcement comes in. It is on the public beta, after all ;D

I’ve received an SOS! But what could it mean?

e0fcdba5 dc2adeff 2114d76d 2c5dfc42 fc4de4ba 7eaa100c c9d13482 8181e364 22922ec0 f2cc6262 0c314a2d 46e0b08c 0793fce1 8b520a09 05accc1e fdd7e843 f775ec82 035665da 1bd58456 3bf3a9ce 8a08ce8d c32ac28a 5ffcd0f5 180a919b 6aed360e dbd1a6dc b600677d 3271a178 16262254 279b5c92 d4602893 f4c9fcd1

Anyone know what to do with it?

We’ll be rolling back all worlds on the… lol jks, incase you didn’t get that already. (It wasn’t me who posted that “announcement”!)

It seems WordPress has a little undocumented feature where anonymous users are allowed to select any username they like, without checking the selected text against the registered users database. Really, what the hell WordPress… that’s about as secure as the pin code 1234. It looks like the only way around that little problem is to make all commenters register, damn right pain in the arse! Sorry guys

So now all the wannabe posers have had their loophole closed, you may want to know who to knockout right? As usual I cannot, shall not and will not disclose such information on the grounds of privacy; however I can assure you that all violators involved in the impersonations have had bans enforced upon their ingame accounts. As usual, this crappy blogger gets the last laugh hehe.

Sorry for the confusion guys!

Version 1.33 is not far away from release now, and we’ve received some important news: the new duel formula is planned for activation! The exact formulas have always been shrouded in secrecy and this revision will be no different, however we have been informed of the basic changes. According to the developers the formula is more a series of tweaks than a new invention, with the following skills expected to be balanced:

Stronger: Aim, Dodge
Weaker: Appearance, Tactics, Toughness, Reflex

These changes should favour “traditional” ranged duellers with high aiming, shooting and dodging in exchange for appearance and tactics taking a hit. (Perhaps that is favourable where “split skills” for challenging and defending are no longer as influential…)  Resistance duellers and dedicated charisma builds may feel a pinch though, arguably not a bad thing in terms of game balance.

Tip of the day: your stance greatly affects your aiming and dodging ability!

Translations are more than underway – I’d even say more than half finished! Whilst the changelog for this update won’t bear as much new content as the last few versions, I’m sure you’ll appreciate the various bug fixes, nagging improvements (particularly to achievements, sceptics will definitely to check it out) and further rollout of the new screen design. Oh, not to mention the new quests!

At least, I thought it was:

Registered forum members can set these up by going to their UserCP and selecting edit my details from the left menu. Scroll down and you’ll see a nice set of checkboxes to indicate which worlds you play.

If there is one post that’s received comments, it has to be the post on merging worlds. Thought I’d take the time to reiterate some facts and give a status update:

Firstly, with Zet’s semi-departure as announced on the DevBlog the team will need to redevelop some experience before anything drastic such as merging worlds can be attempted. Even with the 2-1 switch, our “agile” approach to development means the loss of a team member with the “know-how” will take a while to get the team fully up to speed. Of course, once our new developer and trainee have some west experiences under their belt it’ll be right back to churning out new content, but now we’re in a consolidation phase where the team will be really focuses on improvements rather than additions.

Anyway, without further adieu:

Can we create a mega world?
Quite simply, no. You must remember the more worlds we merge the more players there will be with an excess of characters. Mega worlds sound fun, but would accompany mega data loss. The scale is exponential – merging a few worlds will affect a select few with characters on at least eleven worlds whilst merging several worlds will affect the majority who own more than one character.

Will I lose personal data?
If you play twelve or more worlds, under the rough plans I’ve envisioned you would indeed be affected. However, not all is lost – it is merged. More than likely you could send your experience points, recipes, cash and inventory to be ‘consumed’ by another character of yours. Or, in other words, we’ll be ensuring no character is entirely lost.

Will I lose my forts?
There is no other way to say this than yes, you would

Will my town be disbanded?
It is theoretically possible to retain town data by clearing all ghost towns, assigning new unique IDs to each existing town and redistributing them random coordinates on the map. It would, however, be a difficult task and something we’d only endeavour to do should it have majority support.

I play both World X and World (X + 1). I’ll lose character data!
By merging worlds, we really mean moving character and possibly town data from two worlds into a fresh world and closing the old two. By this logic, it means that whilst your two worlds (eg World 2 and World 3) would be merged, one of your character could still be moved elsewhere (World 4 + 5, for example) so nothing is lost. Completely new enemies to bash the hell out of, yay!

If not the upcoming version then… 1.34? Pretty please?
We’ll see Always remembering to stick a word in for its priority whenever an opportunity arises.

Unfortunately, there seems to be a lot of irregular people movement happening since alliances began to influence fort battle “sides”. Now that alliance members are no longer counted as outsiders they receive priority movement, which would include just about every person in the battle, there are many undesired effects such as a level twenty alliance member being allowed to move before a higher ranked level one hundred and twenty freelancer.

To account for this, we’ve changed the formula so it now works in the following order:

• Defenders move before attackers
• Higher ranks move before lower ranks
• Alliance members move before freelancers
• Players with higher leadership move
• Players with higher stamina move
• Players with higher dodging move
• Players with lower ID move

The change should come into effect with the next ninja update!

That’s right folks, after way too many energy drinks we’ve finished the English translations. With the coding almost complete, your most awesome product manager has allowed us to show you the preliminary changelog. Please note this is only a (seemingly incomplete) draft – whilst testing and further development occurs items may be added or removed.

Features:

• Miscellaneous chat improvements
• Miscellaneous fort battle improvements
• Miscellaneous town improvements
• Achievements
• Miscellaneous poker improvements
• Avatar generator
• Changes to old duel system (for beta only in initial revisions)
• Email reminders after inactivity (3, 7, 14 days of inactivity)
• New payment window

Improvements:

• New quest
• Show town name below character name in duel menu
• Poker / Texas Holdem guide
• Gentleman’s and Indian Set receive additional items

Bugfixes:

• County is not renamed on minimap when updated
• Energy points were still deducted when duel is cancelled due to increase in duel level difference
• Fort/Town flags is aligned right, not centre
• Found fort missing minimap icon
• Display problems with conquistador sword mouseover
• Incorrect number of quests shown in statistics
• Separate chat channel option for manoeuvres broken
• Missing translations in chat /help
• Error message too vague when bidding outside of allowed range
• Allied forts marked red on minimap
• Players cannot bid on some recipes
• Time travel exploit fixed
• Sheriff statistics displayed wrong
• Bypass inventory limits exploit fixed
• Rare character level displayed as your own, not other player
• Crafting when queue full no longer freezes
• Character class tutorial reappears after removing it without a class
• Problems with fort construction
• Weapon chain and cooling cloth bonuses swapped

Technical Tasks:

• Flash connection tester for fort battles
• Fort battle recruiting: display total per rank and overall
• Fort battle maps lack highest tower level settings
• Fort Battles Ranking Page sort error
• Alliance affects fort battle joining and view
• Acoustic and visual chat alerts
• Fort battle report mouseover shows report summary
• Pre fort battle mouseover shows start in local and server time
• Select all telegram pages
• Show more recent fort battles
• Graveyard shows more fort battles than past six months
• Sleeping in barracks isn’t cancelled when the town leaves fort
• Wrong rank is shown in chat
• Option to turn of chat alerts
• Show detailed player info on fort battle recruiting page
• Inserting third player to alliance description prevents saving
• Wrong weapon used in some manoeuvres
• Fort overview flashes for global new fort battles
• Swapping no longer shown for enemy team

Pleased to note a few of player suggestions we submitted via Ideas & Brainfarts implemented, especially in regards to poker and fort battles. As usual I am sure more will come in Version 1.33, along with a few other things temporarily delayed due to time constraints.(Let the scrumming begin!)

Straight from the TW-Times, Mats and Hades2 combine to present you this article in English. Courtesy of Mats Brandt.

TW-Times: Hi Hades! Thanks for your time and hopefully you can answer a few nagging questions. I think you’ll agree with me that you’re currently on a bit of a roller coaster. You said you wanted to resign, then you changed your mind and now you’ve written a questline for the game?

Hades: Yes’ I’m also a little bit surprised myself. I didn’t expect that I’d become a quest designer.

TW-Times: Your questline is a continuation of “It smells like treasure”, making itself a high level questline. What inspired you to write this continuation?

Hades: One day I was looking through my inventory and found some redundant items – the gold coin, ash, pebbles and a broken spade. Then I thought to myself, what shall I do with a broken spade? Glue it together of course! This lead to the idea of the inscription.

TW-Times: Had the developers requested such a quest line or did you simply start writing with the hope of having your quest implemented?

Hades: I wasn’t asked by anyone. I seized the initiative and wrote it by myself. After I finished the quest line I asked our community manager what he thought of it, who said he thought it was pretty good, so I decided to show it to Ashock.

TW-Times: Where did you get these ideas about the quest line and how long did it take to prepare?

Hades: It took quite a while to write. I had many different ideas that I tried to incorporate into a story line that made sense. Overall it took about five hours, including later editing. I’m reading many western books and watching western films so they offered heaps of ideas to work from.

TW-Times: You haven’t given us many hints. Why so secretive?

Hades: I didn’t want to be a “know-it-all” giving out hints and risk making the quest series either unpopular or not taken seriously. There was another reason too – you know Rose from Two and a Half Men? I think the same would happen to me if the masses discovered I was the author… I would have thousands of stalkers.

TW-Times: I think the feedback for your questline is mostly positive, but there are also some concerns that you may give tip offs t your friends, which would be rather disconcerting for a secret questline… know what I mean?

Hades: I do understand this “negative feedback” however I assure you that I haven’t given any hints to anyone.

TW-Times: Last but not least, are you planning to write any more questlines?

Hades: In the future I will bring many new questlines, writing them alongside Ashock and his counterpart. Whether or not I’ll be writing any more secret questlines is a mystery though. The regular questlines are nearly finished for 1.32, including one that I wrote. It’s now on the public beta, so keep an eye out for it!

TW-Times: Hades, thank you for the interview. Have fun and good luck with the game and your quest designing!

Hades: You’re welcome