The New Britannia Herald

In this episode

• Dungeon Master mode and traps that can hurt
• The bard stops silencing his own song
• A cleared siege leaves the overworld map
• Tamer gear finally pays its four bonuses
• Sixteen school deep dives, sixty defects filed

Transcript

Good evening to thee, citizens of New Britannia. Lord British before you, with an account of what your makers were about on Friday. The masters of the player dungeons may now run their halls by hand, and their traps have learned at last to draw blood. A siege thrown down is a siege gone from the map for every soul in the realm, and not only for those who broke it. The gear your tamers have worn since the beginning has been promising your beasts four gifts it never once delivered. And the bard, poor soul, is finally permitted to finish his own song. That last one first. It took us four attempts and I have not stopped laughing.

Here is where we stood on Thursday night. A bard takes out a lute in a tavern. Strikes up a song. The song plays, and it sounds lovely. Then the bard casts one of his own bard songs, which you would think is the entire point of being a bard, and the music stops dead. We had already fixed this. Twice. There is a note in our own log from the second attempt saying, with great confidence, that the song now plays through the bard's own kit. It did not. What we had actually fixed was the instruments you sit down at.

Somebody found the real reason on Friday afternoon, and it is one line. When you cast anything in this game, your character is put into a combat stance so the cast animation has somewhere to play. And the thing that keeps an instrument in a bard's hands ends the performance the instant the body enters a stance it does not recognise. Combat is one of those. So every bard skill, every single one of them, killed the song on the very next frame. That is why the report from the test shard read, word for word, "all of them". A performing bard now casts without leaving the playing pose.

The morning's attempt was not wrong, by the way. It was simply standing in the wrong place. The exemption we wrote was handed out two lines after the state change that had already ended the performance. It worked exactly as written. It never got a chance to matter.

The other half was worse. Readying an instrument puts your weapon away first and then enters the playing state, and putting a weapon away was also ending a performance. The only reason any bard has ever heard a note is the order of those two lines. Drawing a weapon still stops the music, as it should. Putting one away no longer does.

The three entertainer moves had their own comedy. Flourish, Dance and Group Dance got proper animations in the morning and lost them again by the evening, because an emote is a whole-body animation that replaces the instrument-playing pose. A bard who used a dance stopped looking like a bard playing, which is roughly the opposite of the point. Each one is shown by a ring of coloured music notes now, lasting as long as the ability. Amber for Flourish, teal for Dance, pink for Group Dance.

Three more things went in around all that. Entering a fight now puts the instrument away, which nothing had ever done, so bards are no longer left standing there with a lute in one hand and their weapons drawn. The bard bar holds the whole school, all eighteen abilities instead of the town entertainer's four, sized to what you have actually trained, and a bar you empty on purpose stays empty instead of refilling itself at the next login. And the on-screen note keyboard is off by default. It shipped switched on, so anybody who took out an instrument to play one piece of sheet music had a piano across their screen until they went hunting through the options for the switch.

Now the thing I have been waiting all week to talk about. A player dungeon owner can put their dungeon into a live event and run the place by hand. We are calling it Dungeon Master mode, for reasons I suspect need no explanation to this audience.

There is a console. A Live Event button sits beside the mode switch an owner already uses, and it opens a panel with a Start Event button, a button for every trap channel wired in the room you are standing in, a Speak button, and Release Reward. Pressing one of those channel buttons runs the exact same path a visitor stepping on a pressure plate runs, so every player in the room sees it from the same state. There is no second route into the dungeon's plumbing. The host is standing on the plate, so to speak, without being anywhere near it.

Nothing is recorded while an event is running. No visit, no clear, no entry in the dungeon's record. That is the server refusing rather than the client asking politely, so a run that a person was animating cannot turn into somebody's leaderboard time. Two other rules were learned the hard way. An event cannot start unless the dungeon is already in Adventure Mode, because switching modes reloads the dungeon for everyone standing in it and would take the event down along with the room. And an event always ends when the host leaves, so it cannot outlive the only person in the building who can fire anything.

The Speak button was the interesting design problem. A host wants to put a line in a monster's mouth. Free text spoken by a creature in a stranger's dungeon reaches every visitor attributed to a monster rather than to a player, which is a moderation surface with nobody's name on it. So the host picks from a curated list, and what travels between machines is the index rather than the words, which means every visitor reads the line in their own language. Release Reward has a similar shape. It unlocks a chest the owner filled and locked before the event, instead of adding the guests' names to the chest's access list. The access list holds ten entries. Your eleventh guest would have stood there watching everybody else collect a reward they had just earned alongside them.

Six more trap pieces went in on the same day, which takes the kit to nine. There is a message plaque, wired like an effect rather than standing there readable, so a plate in the doorway can make the far wall speak the moment somebody walks in. There is a sealing door that shuts when its trigger fires and opens when it clears, and which you can always open by hand from either side. A trap should cost a visitor some time. It should not cost them a corpse run. A boss door starts closed and only ever opens, so the room it guards cannot re-close on the people who have just cleared it. And then three that can actually hurt you, at the gentlest tier: a dart wall, a flame jet and a spike floor, built on trap decorations that until Friday were scenery with no damage in them at all.

The clever part is the accounting. A rule about how much one hit may do is not enough, because a builder could ring a corridor with four of the meekest traps in the kit and take a visitor apart while obeying every per-hit rule in the book. So there is a running ledger. One trap over ten seconds, one room over ten seconds, and a whole dungeon over a minute each have a ceiling, and the traps stop paying out when the account runs dry. Twelve tests sit behind it, and one of them is a corridor built to be as nasty as the rules allow, with a player standing perfectly still in it for a full minute. He lives. Somebody had to think of that test, write it and run it, and I would like that person to know I am delighted.

On to something you will feel the next time you go to war. When you and your friends fought your way into a siege and killed the cabalists, the instance closed itself a few minutes later, and outside that instance nothing at all changed. The camp stayed on the overworld map. Everybody else was still routed around the town through the siege lines until the astrology clock moved on by itself. Clearing a siege was a private achievement.

It sat that way for a while because siege state has no server authority. Every client works the whole thing out for itself from the shared clock and a shipped table, and the assumption was that fixing this meant hauling the entire astrology system over to the server so it could work out which towns were eligible. It does not need to know that. It only needs to know that one particular siege was cleared, and when that clear stops counting. Both halves of that were already arriving.

So now, when the cabalists go down, the camp comes off the overworld map for everyone. The town stays free of its siege for a full hour, then rejoins the normal schedule. A cleared town also keeps its place under the cap on how many sieges run at once, so clearing one takes a siege off the map instead of handing the slot straight to the next town along. Player-owned towns and the realm's own towns behave the same way. Cora Cuz'avich asked for this, and it is a better request than it looks, because it turns a private fight into something the whole map can see.

Now, an apology to the tamers. Nine artifacts, three imbued gems and a promotional cloak have been advertising four bonuses for your pet since the day they shipped. Tame Creature Strength. Tame Taunt Power. Tame Move Speed. Tame Creature Dexterity. Not one of them was read by anything in the game. You could stack the lot and your pet would not notice. They all reach the pet now, so the Helm of the Wolf Spirit, the Ringmaster's Vest, the Ring of the Ringmaster, the Boots of the Energetic Tamer and the rest of them pay what they print.

And then, while wiring the taunt one up, somebody looked at the numbers. Threat is multiplied by one plus that value. The values written on the gear run from ten to thirty. Every other threat bonus in the game sits between about a tenth of a point and six tenths. So the Ring of the Ringmaster, had anybody ever read it, would have granted your pet twenty six times the threat of everything else in the room. All thirty four values were divided by a hundred before any of it was switched on. Your pet remains a pet. It does not become the most fascinating object in the province.

Two more dead numbers fell out of the same pass. Your pet's critical hit rate on its character sheet was running a copy of the spellcasting formula, so the figure it printed for you was never the one the pet was rolling. And the dexterity line was being overwritten twice in a single pass before anything could read it. Both show the real values now. While we were in there, the Collar Recovery skill stopped describing itself as a percentage, which at skill one hundred was reading a hundred and eighty four point seven. It was never a chance. It is how far your collar holds out against a creature's level, and it says so now.

Here is the thread that ran through the whole day, and I think it is the best thing about it. Sixteen deep dive pages went up on Friday. Water, Sun, Air, Moon and Chaos magic. Focus and Tactics. The Bard school. A second edition of the taming dive. Polearms, Blades, Bludgeon, Ranged, Light Armor, Shield and Heavy Armor. Three whole rings of the skills window are now written end to end. Every page carries a comment thread and vote arrows on each individual proposal, so you can argue with us card by card, and I very much hope you will.

The reason these matter to your evening is what writing them costs. You cannot write one without reading a school's shipped data line by line against thirty days of real casting from the live server, and every time somebody did that, something fell out. About sixty defects were filed on Friday. A good number of them were fixed by the same evening, which is why this episode has so much combat in it.

Some of them are wonderful. The Gust spell's knockback was wired as a visual effect, which means the version you cast has quite possibly never pushed anybody, while the creature version and the weapon version have been shoving people about happily for years. Chaotic Confusion was granting its victim so much resistance that two casts made that target permanently immune to Chaotic Confusion. The Air specialization elixir was granting the wrong stat altogether, and the stat it granted added about a hundred and fifty six metres to your lightning range for the full hour. I notice nobody reported that one. And the shield audit found that an empty off hand out-blocks every shield item in the game. Every single one. A thousand years of smithing, and the correct answer was to put the thing down.

Several went out as fixes the same day. Ground Pound's three crowd-control riders were rolling at zero percent, with zero-second durations, for anyone without the Bludgeon specialization, while the tooltip cheerfully advertised all three. That one answers a player's bug report from April of twenty nineteen which never got a reply, and I am sorry about that. Every bludgeon user gets the riders now. Chaotic Shield had a stray divide where all six of its siblings have a multiply, so the school's flagship buff has been shipping at a quarter of its strength. Cone of Cold's slow was checking Sun resistance instead of Water, so a sun-warded target strolled through the slow while eating the damage.

Into the smaller things, and one of them was not small if it happened to you. Some players were seeing a red server error in chat after logging in or changing scenes. Behind it was the server rejecting an entire batch of achievement progress because it contained one counter it did not recognise, and throwing away every other counter riding along in the same message. Kills, fish caught, recipes learned, all lost at that moment. The server now keeps what it recognises, skips what it does not, and stops sending any of it to your chat window. The deploy step that ships those counter tables also refuses to go out now if the tables are missing, which was the shape of the original problem.

A handful of small indignities went with it. The mouse pointer no longer vanishes at the main menu for people using the larger cursor, which had made the menu buttons a matter of faith. Your I key toggles the backpack again while a container is open. The achievements list stopped drawing its rows too short, so names and progress bars no longer run into each other. On the social button, the friend count is a plain digit tucked into the corner of the icon rather than sitting on a notification pill it was borrowing from real notifications. And that floating price banner over a for-sale lot sign, which was rendering many times larger than intended and swallowing the entire yard, is now a readable size a hand's width above the sign.

The Summon Party Scroll now summons your party. I want to be clear that it has never done this. It was destroyed on use and then did nothing, from the first day it was imported. Everything around it was built and waiting: the prompt each party member gets naming you and where you are, the choice to travel or stay put, the checks for people who have blocked you. The loop that called all of it had been left commented out. Using one with nobody to summon no longer eats the scroll either, because it refuses the cast now instead of spending it and shrugging.

Several people in the world got new voices. Male satyrs move to a deep, booming bellow on a resonant base, pinned across every one of them from the Xenos guards to the Broken Echoes fighters. Male fauns get an impish, hoarse rasp, like a child with a sore throat, and that reaches Dozer, Fleck, Perri, Skitter, Dion and Bucket among others. Billy in Highvale Outskirts moves to a voice a tester agrees is a boy, having previously been on the highest voice in the boy family, which was built from a female base. Hyla, the refugee child there, was missing from the voice list altogether because of a typo in her conversation data, and she will speak after the next voice publish. And the Oracle holds the same machine voice through every path of her endgame scene instead of changing timbre partway through.

Switching your online mode to Open while standing in a scene now sends you back through matchmaking properly, with a ten second countdown announced on screen and in the chat log. The old behaviour borrowed a quiet sixty second window from party travel, which made the toggles look dead, and Vesper reported exactly that. It also closes the client's half of a hole around instances that the server started blocking back in June.

Seventy eight tracker items were closed on Friday and I am not going to march you through them. The bulk were tooltips lying about their own numbers, windows throwing errors while you scrolled them, and a satisfying run of things that only broke if you did them in an unusual order. A tea cup in the off hand no longer jerks about in combat. A container that opened at the wrong moment no longer leaves itself leased to nobody and refusing everyone afterwards. A swapped dungeon totem stops spawning the previous totem's creatures alongside the new ones, which rinaldi asked about. The summoned Water Elemental has its bottom half back. And the waterfalls at the Paladis Shardfall break up where they tip over the edge now, rather than ending in one hard line.

One story from that pile deserves a mention for how it ended. A tester sent in a run of client crashes, and we matched the dumps against the exact build they came from, expecting to find our own fingerprints. Four crashes, four completely unrelated failure points, and two of them holding a pointer that was correct in every single bit except one stray one near the top. That is not a shape a software mistake makes. That is a machine with bad memory. Three earlier crashes from the same player were ours and had already been fixed the week before, so the honest answer was a mixture, and somebody will follow up with them.

Two more for the team that you will never see and should still hear about. A warning our retired interface code prints when it tears a window down had grown into the loudest thing in a player's log. Two hundred and eight lines out of three hundred and seventy six in an ordinary session, and three thousand two hundred out of nine thousand four hundred in one crash log, which was pushing the last moments before the crash out of the file we upload. It is one line per window now and it still names everything it used to. And the build farm runs the whole editor test suite on every push instead of once a night, which will catch a class of mistake before it can reach a build you would download.

That was Friday. My thanks to the team, who published sixteen school studies, shipped a dungeon master's console, and still found the time to give the fauns a sore throat. What I am looking forward to is the first live event somebody runs in their own hall, with a host firing the traps by hand and putting words in a boss's mouth. Send us word when you hold one, and tell us what broke.

And before I go, the joke. What sort of music does a dungeon master listen to? Trap. I have been Lord British. Good night to thee, and be well.