The New Britannia Herald

In this episode

• The moon indicator that sealed the skill bar
• Vanish computed fifty where it promised ninety
• Water specialists finally do something for the group
• Moving your house around your own lot
• Thirty songs hidden in wax, with a songbook as the map

Transcript

Hail and well met, citizens of New Britannia. Lord British before you, with word of what your makers were about on Monday. The moon that half of Moon Magic answers to is at last drawn where you can see it. Vanish has been concealing you at half the strength it promised, for years, over one missing pair of brackets. Your house may now be lifted off its spot and set down elsewhere upon your own lot. And thirty songs, written for us by one of your own number, lie hidden about the world in wax. There is also the small matter of the morning we sealed every skill button in the realm. We shall begin there, for it is the finest tale of the lot.

Around the middle of Monday morning, a good many of you found that your skill bar had stopped answering. Nothing on it would fire. Not the glyphs, not your potions, not the menu on a chest or a piece of decoration. Every press came back with the same line. You are already performing another action. Which action, the game would not say. Zoning did not clear it. Logging out and back in did not clear it. And it only happened to characters who had trained Night Vision, which is the detail that gave the whole thing away, because earlier that same morning we had given Night Vision a moon.

Let me give you the feature first, because the feature is a good one. Moon Magic runs on an actual moon, up in the sky, rising and setting on a schedule of its own that has nothing to do with day and night. Half the school's spells are stronger while it is up. And in nine years the game has never once told you where it was. Players read it as meaning nighttime. So did our wiki. So did one of our own bug moderators. Half a school of magic asked a question no player could answer. So now anyone with any Night Vision training at all carries a permanent Moonlight effect on their buff bar, and hovering it tells you whether the moon is up and counts down the minutes to the next moonrise or moonset. It reads the same orbit the spells read, so the icon cannot tell you one thing while your damage does another, and a character carrying Moon Eater sees their own widened moonlit window instead of the standard one. There is a toggle in the Interface options if you would rather not look at it.

And then it shut the game. Two separate faults, both inside that one small addition. The first is that the client sorts every skill into a category, and this new one belonged to none of them, so a lookup raised an error. Every frame. For the whole session. That error escaped out of the work the client does for you on each and every frame, and everything below the point it escaped from stopped running, including the gate that decides whether you may press a glyph. It was left latched shut.

The second fault is the real culprit, and it is the better one. The moon effect shipped marked as a held stance. That is the flag for something you hold down until you cancel it, the way you dig in and brace for a charge. Exactly one skill in this entire game carried that flag. Now there were two, and the second was a passive buff that the client puts on you at every login and that nothing anywhere ever cancels. So the game settled in to wait for you to let go of the moon. It waited for the rest of the session, and then it started waiting again the moment you logged back in. The game believed you were in the middle of casting something. What you were casting was the moon.

I will give you the humbling part too, because it was sitting there in writing the whole time. We keep a test whose entire job is to name which skills are allowed to behave that way, and it went red the instant that thing shipped. Nobody ran it that day. It now pins the one skill in this game permitted to be a held stance, so a second one cannot wander in by accident.

Now to the same school and a very much older problem. Vanish is the Moon school's stealth spell. Its own description says it hides you at ninety percent under a dark sky, and a hundred and ten percent under the moon, which is to say completely. What it computed was fifty point two, and fifty point three.

The cause is a missing pair of brackets. Our formula machinery has no operator precedence, which is to say it reads left to right and does exactly what you wrote, in that order. Vanish ends with a division that was meant to apply to the training term, and with no brackets around that term the division swallowed the whole sum in front of it. The school's signature moonlit bonus, the entire reason you cast this spell at night, was worth one thousandth of a point.

Here is why that mattered. How hidden you are shrinks a creature's awareness, its hearing and its side vision, all three together, with no floor under any of them. Fully hidden and a creature loses the lot. At half, it keeps half. Meanwhile Subterfuge has Camouflage, which sits at full concealment, unconditionally, with no specialization asked of you. So the Moon school's flagship stealth spell was the weaker twin of the other school's, which is precisely what the stealth threads on our forums have been saying for years. They were right about the outcome. Nobody could see the cause, because the number printed on the tooltip was correct.

With the brackets in, Vanish hides you at ninety percent under a dark sky and completely under the moon. That is a jump of seventy nine percent in the dark and a hundred and nineteen under the moon, and we are recording it as the balance change it plainly is rather than filing it as a typo repair. Shadow Form is the other half of it, the Moon stealth you can walk about in, and it was stuck at thirty seconds however hard you trained it, against eighty seconds for the Subterfuge equivalent, on a longer cooldown besides. Its length grows with training now: eighty seconds under a dark sky, a hundred and sixty under the moon, and the cooldown comes down to twenty.

Two more from that same sweep. Celestial Blessing had been charging its price to the person you blessed. It hung a lasting focus penalty on your ally, and at grandmaster without the Lunar specialization that took a hundred focus off them for the ten to twenty minutes the blessing ran. Blessing a party of five cost you forty focus and cost them five hundred between them. The price has moved onto the cast itself, where your own skill raises it and your specialization pays it down. It costs you sixty five now, and costs them nothing. And Vanish and Cocoon of Night refuse before the cast instead of eating your focus. Both of them only hide a caster who is standing still with nothing targeting them, and a cast that failed either test used to spend the full focus and start the full cooldown anyway. You get told no up front now, and the glyph greys itself out while the condition holds.

Water Magic had the largest single pass of the day, and it opens on a complaint I think is fair. A Water specialist brought nothing to a group. Every other specialization does something for the people standing beside you. Water made ice. So a chill laid down by a Water specialist now leaves its target taking extra damage from every melee attacker in the fight, a tenth of a percent for each point of specialization, capped at fifteen percent however many cold effects are piled on the poor thing. All four of the school's cold spells write it, and it lasts exactly as long as the chill it rides on. The whole mechanic sits behind a live setting we can turn to zero without shipping a patch, which is a sentence I have learned to insist upon.

Water's slows also stopped deleting one another. Every movement slow in the game shared a single slot, newest wins, so casting Ice Fist and then Ice Arrow left you holding only the arrow, and a passing archer's shot erased both of yours. Water slows have their own shelf now, three deep, with each one trimmed by about a quarter to pay for the company. One slow leaves a target at seventy eight percent of its speed, two at fifty six, three at twenty six. That was requested by Garfunkel Humperdinck, and first raised on our forums back in twenty sixteen, which tells you something about the patience of water mages.

Water answers to water, besides. Every cold spell in the school, and Soothing Rain's healing, gains twenty percent while it is raining where you stand or while you are standing in water. And you can cast while wading now, which you could not before, because the game counted ankle deep water as swimming and refused you everything. Soothing Rain has become the school's cleanse, pulling fire off everyone standing in it on every tick and rolling separately to strip one other harmful effect of any school. And Douse leaves a charge behind it, so the next fire effect an enemy lands on you is swallowed whole and does nothing at all.

Which brings me to the funniest thing we found all day. Stand in lava. Cast Douse. The burning comes off you, exactly as it should. And then the lava fails to set you alight again for forty seconds, while you stand in it. The forge fire at Hilt handed out six seconds of the same immunity. The hazard had been asking itself when it last applied the burn, which is only the same question as whether the burn is still on you for as long as nothing takes it off early. Douse takes it off early. And the same fault had a second half that was about to double that gap to eighty seconds, and a hundred and twenty for a specialist, on account of the new charge. Hazards ask whether the effect is still on you now, and the burn returns on the next pulse about a third of a second later.

While we were down there we met the Fire Elementals who live in the lava at the bottom of Hilt Fortress. They are immune to fire. The lava had been hanging a burning effect on them anyway, which did nothing, ticked twenty times doing nothing, expired, and was put straight back on. Fire elementals, on fire, unbothered, forever. A damage field now leaves alone a target its damage cannot touch, so they stand there with nothing on them, and an undead creature in a poison cloud gets the same courtesy. A field that also slows or roots still lands on everything, and anything taking even a little damage still takes it.

The housing work went from switched off to switched on for testers inside a single day, which is not our usual pace with these things. The goal is easy to say and awkward to build. You should be able to slide and turn your house anywhere on your own lot, rather than leaving it standing on the one spot it has occupied since the lot was drawn. The awkward part is that the inside of a house is its own walkable surface, separate from the yard, and your pets, your vendors and anyone you have hired all need to find their way about indoors, wherever indoors happens to be that week. So every house in the game needed its interior prepared on its own, at its own centre, along with a footprint record the server checks a move against. Two houses were done in the morning to prove it. By evening the whole catalogue was through: a hundred and ninety seven of them, from a two storey row house at about seventy six walkable points up to the castle class mansions at two thousand three hundred and forty eight points across three and a half floors.

Then it went to testers, and the first walk found three things. My favourite is that the new position of your house never survived the trip out to anybody else's client. It travelled inside the lot's own data as a list of numbers, and the delivery hands lists back in a shape the client did not recognise, so the client read nothing at all and drew the house where it was originally built. Your furniture travels a different road, and moved perfectly. So you moved your house, and what you got was your sofa, your beds and your chandelier standing out in the yard in immaculate formation, arranged around a building that had not budged an inch.

The second was that the Move House button offered itself on lots where no legal spot existed. The button asked whether there was slack in either direction, while the rule that actually accepts a move demanded slack in both, plus a reserved strip along the front edge that keeps your sign, your mailbox and your arrival spot clear. Twenty nine houses of the hundred and ninety seven opened a placement mode in which nothing could ever be committed, and a further thirty one had been built with their front edge already inside that strip, so they had nowhere legal anywhere near where they stood. The rule now says only that nothing may end up worse placed than it was built. That opens sideways slides and a full turn on the spot, and leaves a hundred and thirty one of the hundred and ninety seven able to move. The button hides itself honestly on the rest. And third, pressing Enter on a refused spot did nothing whatsoever, which is the cruellest answer a game can give you. It tells you why now, and every refusal writes down which rule refused it.

Now the part of Monday I have enjoyed most. One of you wrote us an album. Thirty tracks, a full song cycle built on the story of our own novel, and as of Monday it is in the game as thirty collectible wax cylinders, credited to the Avatar's Reliquarian Choir. Each one plays in a phonograph or a jukebox and names its song, its composer and its album when you look at it.

Two hours of music is a great deal of download, so it is not in the download. A cylinder carries a pointer to its track rather than the audio itself, and the song is fetched the first time somebody actually plays it, then kept on your disk. The thirty come to a hundred and eleven megabytes, down from a hundred and ninety nine as they were handed to us, and they arrive one at a time as people play them. Your install is not one byte larger for having an album in it.

And they are hidden. Each cylinder drops in the place its song is about. The Desolis song under Desolis. Opalis in the Opalis ruins. The Midras songs at Midras and at Hilt. The first pass had them attached to place names our server does not use, so not one of the thirty could actually have dropped, and all thirty are now checked as reachable where they belong. Collecting them moves a new achievement at one, five, ten, twenty and thirty, and the complete set grants the title Reliquarian.

Then there is the book. The full lyrics are in print. Songs of the Sundered Blade, with the choir's own introduction at the front, sold by the bookseller in Ardoris for fifty gold. And before each song the choir left a short note about where that song's cylinder was hidden. The notes are riddles, and they are honest riddles. Every one of them points at the real place that cylinder truly drops. A book of songs which is also the map to the songs, sold openly in a shop, for the price of a decent meal. I have been at this a very long while and I am not certain I have ever shipped anything more to my own taste.

Four smaller things you will hear rather than read. The Oracle speaks with one voice now. She has had five across the game, including a male one and the harsh automaton filter inside her own temple, and you voted between four candidates. The Ethereal Chamber won, and she is live in that voice across all seven of her conversations. Log in fresh to hear her. The old recorded greeting on the Isle of Storms that played on top of her lines is gone as well, so she has stopped talking over herself.

The Repurposed Automaton on that same island says, and I quote, this unit has achieved satisfaction, bzzt. The voice was reading that last word out as three separate letters. B. Z. T. The word has no vowel in it, so the speech engine took it for an abbreviation and spelled it out at you. It buzzes now. Fixing it turned up two more automatons who had been saying nothing at all in the places their text buzzes, and twenty one lines were remade. Voice comes from our servers rather than your install, so all of that is already live with nothing to download. Music also steps aside while you are talking to somebody now, instead of playing at full strength over the top of them.

Three for the healers. Healing numbers scale with the size of the heal, the way damage numbers have always scaled with the hit, and a heal too small to round up reads one instead of showing nothing at all. Wasted healing is shown rather than thrown away: a heal of a hundred and eighty on somebody missing a hundred and forty two reads a hundred and forty two, with the thirty eight that went nowhere dimmed in brackets behind it. Healing somebody at full health used to give no feedback at all. And the hold to self cast key can be rebound, after years of being the one key in this game you were not permitted to change.

Three about your windows. The inventory panel drags down to four rows of items instead of the ten it always insisted on, and that same floor covers your bank, your loot bags and the containers you open out in the world. A container opened for the first time lands clear of your backpack instead of sitting across the right hand end of its own rows. And typing immediately after the game rewrites a text box no longer eats the keystroke, whether you are sending a chat message or recalling an old one with the arrow keys.

And three from the Isle of Storms and your pets. A tamed pet keeps its buffs through a zone change, which it did not before, so a two hour pet food could be spent by walking through a door. The tutorial step that asks you to lock a piece of gear completes whichever way you lock it, rather than only on a piece you were wearing at the instant it flipped. And a new character now knows every skill their starting deck is holding. All three decks opened on a skill that was never granted, so your very first combat slot came up empty and your first usable card sat in the second one.

Seventy seven tracker items closed on Monday, and a good few were the same complaint wearing different hats. There was a cluster of things pointing the wrong way. A knocked back creature travelling along whatever direction your camera happened to be facing, which a tester discovered by hitting a spider on the Isle of Storms and watching it depart twelve feet due west. A wagon in Central Brittany standing eight metres from itself, so it hopped sideways and spun as you backed away from it. An elf commander at Blood River who could see ten metres but was only permitted to chase eight, and kept breaking off mid fight to walk home. And, on a female avatar, an eyeball that swung sideways at the exact moment the eyelid shut during a blown kiss, came out through the closed lid, and sat on the cheek for about half a second.

Elsewhere, tooltips were caught telling stories. Ice Field promised close to thirty eight seconds of slow where a real enemy takes about ten, because a tooltip is written before you have a target, and it read that absent target as having no strength whatsoever. Eight spells with that wording now say up to, which is the truth, and the spells themselves are unchanged. Reported by Barugon. A build went out on Monday carrying a game breaking bug, so we pulled the whole thing back to the previous one across all three platforms, client and server together, and put the corrected build out that same evening.

Two last things worth your notice. Our tester leaderboard had been hiding people's work behind zeroes, because a good many testers changed their login at the account cutover last month and the board kept looking for the old one. Fourteen rows out of forty nine read zero hours, and roughly four hundred and seventy five hours were sitting behind them. Those have been handed back. And we have begun work on Twitch drops, which will put a cosmetic in your rewards window for watching a stream during a campaign. That one was requested by necronut.

That was Monday. A moon you can finally see, a stealth spell that hides you as well as it always claimed to, houses you can pick up and set down, and thirty songs a player wrote for us buried under the very places they are about. What I am looking forward to is the first report from a tester who moves their house, turns it a hundred and eighty degrees, and puts their front door where their back garden used to be.

One last thing before I leave you. I asked how long the moon had been sitting on the list of things we really ought to draw on your screen. Nine years, they said. Nine whole years. I suppose it went through phases. Good night to thee, and be well.