The New Britannia Herald

In this episode

• Ardoris houses stopped loading their doors
• Three separate ways to lose a house
• A siege army trapped in a flower bed
• Charge knockdown got worse as skill went up
• Books read aloud onto wax cylinders

Transcript

Good evening to thee, citizens of New Britannia. Lord British, with an accounting of what thy makers were about on Tuesday. The houses of Ardoris would not open their doors to the people who own them. Lots were sold with houses standing upon them, and the houses did not arrive. A besieging army was taken prisoner by a flower bed. And thy books may now be read aloud in my own voice, shouldst thou care to pay for it. We begin with the doors, for a man shut inside his own home has waited long enough.

So. Tuesday morning, Ardoris. You log in standing in your own house, exactly where you left yourself, and the front door will not open. You click it again. Nothing. You click your chest. Nothing. The lights do not answer either. And there in the chat window sits a red line of server text handing a piece of your own account information back to you, which is its own problem and we will come to it.

Welcome home.

Here is what was happening underneath. When you arrive in a town, the server hands your client a list of everything placed there that you can touch. Doors. Chests. Lamps. Every decoration with a switch on it. The client walks that list from one end to the other and wires each thing up as it goes. On Tuesday one item in the Ardoris list threw an error while it was being wired, and the walk stopped dead where it stood. Everything after that point in the list never got connected to anything at all. Your door was still there. It was drawn, it was solid, you could walk up and put your hand on it. It had simply never been told that it was a door.

And the thing that stopped the list was not placed by a player. It was a decoration our own team had put down in town. One object, in a public square, took the doors off an unknown number of homes behind it. The repair came in two parts. The list no longer gives up when one item misbehaves, and the error it prints no longer sends any account information to the client. A follow-up an hour later covered the other half of the same trouble, which is that lamps and other switchable things the team places in a town now keep their on or off state for people who arrive later. Before that, a light we had switched on came up dark for everybody who showed up after us.

Now the part of Tuesday I like least. Three separate ways to lose a house.

The first. You buy a lot with a house standing on it. The sale moves the lot, takes your gold, and never writes down that you are the new owner of the lot and the deed. So the house, standing on ground it now believes belongs to nobody, folds itself up and files itself in your Property Manager. You paid for a home and received a plot of land and some paperwork. Every sale of a lot with a house on it in the last twenty days on the test shard did exactly this. The sale now records the lot and the deed properly, and if a house has nowhere to go, the sale stops and refunds you rather than moving it.

The second. You win a lot at auction. You pay. You walk to the lot. The sign says the lot is up for auction, and there is no Claim Lot button anywhere on it. The sign refreshed itself whenever the deed or a sale listing changed, which sounds thorough until you notice that the auction closes somewhere else entirely and never told the sign a thing. The sign now catches up within about a minute of any bid, close or claim. And a one-time repair is going out: anybody who won a lot and lost it to that sign gets the lot back with a seven-day hold on it, or their gold back if someone else has claimed it since.

The third is the worst of them. Storing or restoring a house through the Property Manager could delete a furnished house outright, if the server's copy of the lot had gone stale. It now checks that the stored house is really there before it deletes anything, and a restore that cannot finish leaves the lot and the stored house exactly as they were and says so, where before it put up a blank house and dropped the stored one off your list. On the happier side of the same window, a stored Town home can now be restored onto a City lot with every decoration in place, the way a smaller house from a deed has always been allowed to do.

Tuesday also went looking for places that had wandered off.

Arx Draconis Lowlands is a player town, and like many player towns it has a shrine, and that shrine sits inside a low walled flower bed. The town came under siege, and the siege put the Cabalist Dolus at the shrine, as it does. Dolus arrived inside the flower bed. So did his entire army. They formed up among the flowers, shoulder to shoulder, unable to reach a single defender, and every blow aimed at them landed on the wall of the bed instead.

This went on for an hour and a half. A full invading host, held at bay by gardening. The siege now checks that the Cabalist's spot connects to the rest of the town, and moves him to the nearest open ground when it does not.

Ivory Stronghold went missing in a quieter fashion. The town had been moved to a desert entrance beside Oasis, and then a later save of the overworld restored the old island right on top of the move. The town was no longer there. You could not enter it, you could not discover it, it was absent from the teleport scroll list and absent from Find Town on the world map. It stands beside Oasis again. While we were in there, the siege camps for Astoria, Mount Midir and Erak were pointing at old town records, so those appear during a siege once more.

And then there are the players who went missing inside rocks. If your character got wedged into a boulder or a wall, the game saved that as your position, so every login put you back inside the boulder, unable to move or jump. The command for getting unstuck would shift you a short distance, which quite often meant into the next rock along. A login that lands inside solid scenery now starts you at the zone entrance, getting unstuck no longer relocates you into neighbouring geology, the Options window has a button at the bottom that simply says Stuck so you need not know the command at all, and the particular crack between a boulder and the zone edge by the bear and wolf cave in South Majestic Forest, where one player got themselves thoroughly jammed, is closed off.

On to combat, where the theme of the day was numbers that had stopped telling the truth.

Charge is the shield skill that knocks an enemy down. Past skill level one hundred and fifty, the chance of knocking anything over began to fall as your skill went up. About ninety eight percent at a hundred and forty. About ninety five at a hundred and sixty. And if you had been clever enough to masterwork your shield for extra stun chance, you reached the problem sooner than that.

So the reward for training the skill and improving your equipment was a worse result. The roll the game actually made in the fight had the same fault, so this was never merely a display. It holds at a hundred percent now, where it belongs.

Rend's bleed, the part of the skill that reaches a second enemy, had been choosing its two targets in no particular order. The one you aimed at could finish the swing with no bleed on it at all, while the second bleed wandered to a different creature each time. Crates and barrels counted as perfectly good second targets, so a well-placed barrel could soak up half of your skill. And a Rend that missed outright still applied a bleed, which vanished two seconds later, and on an enemy already carrying three bleeds that phantom shoved a real one off the stack. Missing was helping the enemy. The target you aimed at now always takes the bleed, the second goes to the nearest other creature, and a miss does nothing whatsoever, which is the correct amount.

A Corpion stings you. You kill it. You loot it, the body disappears on the spot, and the poison still working through you carries on counting down in grey, doing nothing, for its full duration. A looted body now stays where it fell for up to thirty seconds so its poisons and bleeds can finish their business with you, and then it fades. I am aware this is a repair that makes the game worse for you. It is also right.

Two more from the same pile. A buff cast outside a zone with a skill cap kept its full strength once you walked in, which made casting on the doorstep strictly better than casting inside, and it now drops to the capped value while you are there and recovers afterward. And nothing in the world can be slowed by more than half its speed in total any more, after several slows stacking past a dead stop left creatures shuffling along at the minimum. A summoned Ice Elemental was the chief offender there, refreshing its slow on every single swing and holding a creature still for as long as it cared to.

And now the piece I am most pleased about, for reasons that will become obvious within a sentence.

Wax cylinder recordings are switched on for testing. You take a book, you take a blank wax cylinder, and you have the book read aloud and recorded, and that recording becomes a thing in the world that can be played. There are three tiers of narrator. The Town Criers, who work for gold. The Narrators, who work for Crowns. And me.

Lord British will read your book in the voice you are listening to right now, with a Game Master reading it over first, which strikes me as a sensible precaution for all concerned. I am told the first test recording came back nine seconds long. We all begin somewhere.

Blank cylinders used to require carpentry to make, and music merchants sell them now, so anybody can buy one. Which was fortunate, because for a while every single recording failed. The server was reading the blank cylinder's identity in the wrong format and turning away every cylinder handed to it. The one mercy is that it refused before taking any payment.

The larger piece of work under all of that is the nightly bake. There are hundreds of narrated books in the library, and when somebody edited a page or fixed a pronunciation or changed a narrator, that book went quiet until a person remembered to record it again by hand. There is now a nightly pass that finds every book whose words have changed, records it, publishes the audio and files the paperwork, with a three dollar nightly ceiling that hands anything larger to a human being. Its first run brought back forty one books for thirty two cents, among them the New Player Handbook, the combat and fishing and deck building guides, and the thirty two prophecy books, which all pronounce "bone steel" the same way at last. Last night's run quietly did twelve more.

One piece of housekeeping from the same corner. The Places to Live letter, which sits on bulletin boards in six towns and exists to help new players find somewhere to live, had been pointing them at a rental forum with no posts on it since twenty twenty four. It has been rewritten to explain how you actually find a home in the game today, translated, narrated again, and the same dead link was pulled out of a hundred and one old house descriptions in the web store.

A handful of smaller things now, grouped by how you would meet them.

Your machine. There is a new Render Scale setting for people on slower graphics cards. The world can be drawn at eighty five, seventy five, sixty seven or fifty percent of your screen resolution and stretched back up, while menus, chat, nameplates and combat numbers stay at full sharpness. At fifty percent the world draws a quarter of the pixels. The stretch uses an edge-aware upscaler from AMD with a sharpening pass behind it. Separately, Grunvald Shardfall used to drop to single-digit frame rates when you faced west, because thousands of dry grass tufts along that edge were being drawn as full models out to two hundred and twenty five metres, including the ones standing behind a cliff. They switch to their distant version at fifty metres now, which cut the work facing west by roughly three quarters with nothing visible changing.

Your belongings. House chests have Quick Deposit in their right-click menu, topping up the stacks the chest already holds. Dropping an item onto a chest on your lot now puts it in the chest, opening it first if it was shut. A container with enough bags in it to need a scroll bar keeps an empty row at the bottom, so you can drop something into the chest itself instead of into whichever bag happened to be under your cursor. And experience taken from a loot window can only be taken as experience.

Before this, dragging part of a stack out with Shift held turned your experience into an item, which sat in your bag, and which you could hand to another player. We have closed the experience market.

Your bearings. Bards giving a performance now appear on the town map and minimap as a gold lyre with their name on it, following them as they move, and clicking it sends your guide wisp to them. On the overworld, a town with a performance going gets the same lyre at its entrance, with a count when several bards are playing. And right-clicking a town teleporter signpost marker on the map offers to teleport you there. Both of those were asked for by Barugon, who has had a productive week. Seventeen older zone maps also got their water back, after being captured in the days when the map tool could not see water and drew lakes as gravel.

Your standing. Every leaderboard has a day, a week, a month and All Time on it now, including the eight career boards that had only ever shown a lifetime total. The Dungeons board records each dungeon's best time and who set it again, and double-clicking a dungeon there offers to teleport you to its entrance. Chat has Unsend: for two minutes after you send a line to Universe, Trade, Nobles, Roleplay, guild, town or party chat, a button in the corner of the chat log takes it back from everybody. Your most recent line, once. Use it wisely. And thanks to a request from Ceal Astra, crafting now tells you when lot storage stood in for materials you were carrying locked.

The lightning round. A hundred and eighty four tracker issues closed on Tuesday, two dozen of them at the highest priority, and I shall not be reading you a hundred and eighty four of anything.

A good number of them were things that looked or sounded wrong. The Clockwork Attack Cats in K'rul had been dying with a low whimper that sounded like a dog, because two of their three death cries were pitched deep enough to pass for one, and about a third of their deaths made no sound at all, so what you usually heard was the Clockwork Attack Dog standing beside them. They meow now, every time. The palace gates in Ardoris, which are enormous and made of metal, had been playing the little click of a small wooden door. Vikland's banana leaves had been see-through and lemon yellow ever since an engine upgrade earlier this year lost the link between forty two old models and their own materials. The butterflies were blurry. A group of men in Vikland and Grusk had been cast with women's voices because the field was never filled in, and a hundred and eighty five lines were recorded again to put it right.

Another good number were words. The Crown Shop said "horf" four times where it meant "horse", and did so in Italian and Japanese as well. Two recipes were called "Recipe: Recipe:". A scavenger in Southern Grunvald Barrens has been saying "I'm kill you before the dragon shows up", which I shall miss. And the window that greets you at login had been listing double experience as an event, which it cannot be, since it never ends.

One last item, and you did not hear it from me. Somebody built a mount with no mount. You hold an open umbrella, you rise about fourteen inches off the ground, and you travel at the speed of a horse, tilting as one piece into whatever direction you are heading. Take a hit and you drop for three seconds. It is in no store, no loot table, no recipe and no spell, and the floating only works on a developer account, so there are two entirely separate reasons you cannot have one.

That is Tuesday. A hundred and eighty four issues, a great many of them about houses, and a day whose biggest troubles were all about things being in the wrong place. Doors. Deeds. Armies. Players. Rivers.

I am looking forward to the first wax cylinder somebody puts up for sale in a player shop, and to watching a gold lyre light up on the overworld because a bard somewhere decided to play.

And as for that umbrella. I did ask when players might expect one.

They tell me the design is still up in the air.

Good night from Britannia.