The New Britannia Herald

In this episode

• The guild and town desk goes live
• Why alpha wolves froze mid-fight
• Lamech's Bazaar pirates learn to reflect damage
• Castle lots stop reloading and teleporting you
• Slayer of Legends and honest boss records

Transcript

Hail and well met, citizens of New Britannia. Lord British here, with word of what thy makers were about this Sunday past. Thy guild hall hath gained a desk, with thy kinsmen's notes stuck upon it and a quiz for the tavern. The wolves of the frozen north have remembered how to howl. The pirates of the bazaar have taken up mirrors, and I would counsel thee not to strike one too hard. No castle in the land shall carry its lord back to his own front gate ever again. And for all these years, when thou hast sat down upon a chair, no other soul has seen thee upon it. We begin there.

So. You walk into a tavern, you find a chair, you sit down. On your screen you are sitting on the chair, exactly where a person sits. On everyone else's screen you are sitting beside it. On the floor. Legs bent, hands resting on nothing, the posture of a person in a chair with no chair under them. Benches, stools, tavern seats and beds, all the same. This has been happening to every one of you, the whole time, and the only person who could not see it was you. Other players see you on the seat now.

Now the large one. The community website has had guild pages and town pages for a while, and they were pages. You clicked a link, you got a page, you clicked back. Yesterday they became a desk.

Open your guild or your town on a computer and you land on a desktop. The wallpaper is one of the game's own loading screen paintings. Your community's board, its calendar, its roster, its chat, its lots and its pages are windows on that desk. They move. You drag one by its title bar, resize it from any edge or corner, throw it at the side of the screen and it snaps to half the desk, double-click the bar to fill the whole thing. A strip along the bottom shows who is online and what the next event is. If you would rather not touch the mouse, the arrow keys move and size windows and Escape puts them back where they were. On a phone you still get the plain pages, which is the correct answer on a phone. The window manager underneath all of this was written from scratch, with no outside library, which I am told was the fun part.

Then there are the notes. Any member can stick a note on their community's shared desk. A couple of hundred characters on colored paper, dragged wherever you like, and every member sees it. Officers and governors can pin one so it stays put, and an unpinned note fades out two weeks after its last edit, so the desk keeps itself tidy without anybody having to be the person who tidies the desk.

It did not all go smoothly in public. For a while there, if you picked a new wallpaper in the desk settings, the desk would put the old painting back a few seconds later. You would choose a sunset, admire it, and the desk would decide that it preferred the castle. And the button marked Start my desk afresh did not start the desk afresh. Both sorted before lunch.

The chat window was rebuilt to behave like the one in the game, with tabs for Universe, Trade, your guild and every player town you live in, and a dot on any tab holding lines you have not read. Universe and Trade are read-only from the website on purpose. A change went in yesterday morning that would have let the site post into those two channels, and it was withdrawn the same afternoon, which I think was the right call. The calendar grew up as well, with list, week and month views, a click on a day or a time to put an event there, filters, and the World Calendar's Calls to Arms and game master events sitting beside your community's own. Members can propose events now, and a proposal stays invisible to everyone but its author and the officers until an officer approves it. There is a map window holding the website's world map, and an Oracle window that answers the way the Oracle does in game and takes your complaints about the website itself.

Right. Let me tell you about the wolves, because this is the best bug of the day and it has been hurting people for weeks.

You go to the den at Jotungrund. You find the Rime Mother and the Rime Sire, two alpha wolves, and you expect a fight. Instead they walk up to you, stop about two meters away, and stand there. They do not bite. They do not move. They keep you company. A player reported it, we fixed what we thought was the cause, and it kept happening.

Here is what was actually going on. An alpha wolf wants to rally its pack, so it reaches for its howl. The howl is cast on itself, so the game looks for a target, finds the wolf, and then checks whether that target is far enough away to cast at. The distance from the wolf to the wolf is zero. The minimum casting distance on that howl is a tenth of a meter. To rally its pack, the wolf had to be at least ten centimeters away from itself.

So the cast was refused. Because it was refused, no cooldown started. Because no cooldown started, the very next moment the wolf looked at its options and picked the same howl again. And again. Forever. That animal stood in front of you for five minutes trying to begin a sentence it could not physically start. The wolves reported themselves stuck more than eight thousand times in a single week. Call the Pack accounted for five hundred and seventy-four of those. The Lupine Alpha down in the Panopticon seized up roughly half the time it was fought, because its howl only comes out when a packmate is standing nearby, which in the Panopticon is most of the time. Self-cast abilities skip the distance check now, and seven different calls and howls across wolves, satyrs and the undead work for the first time.

While we were in there, the polar bears. A polar bear's Winter Coat takes thirty percent off the damage it receives. The game refreshes a creature's state constantly, and the coat was adding its thirty percent again on every single pass, with nothing ever clearing the old one. A bear a minute into a fight was at the floor, taking a quarter of every blow, and it kept that reduction long after the coat burned off. On a test build, one bear's damage reduction walked past minus one hundred and fifty. There is no coat that thick. A sweep of every ability in the game found exactly three more with the same hole, and they are all fixed. Elsewhere, satyrs in the Tartarus maze used to stand out in the corridors while the players waited in the tower, so somebody had to go and fetch them before the wave would end. They come to the fight now. And Body Slam no longer spins the creature it hits, because the turn was being written only on the attacker's own screen and the creature's owner yanked it straight back, so every slam swung the thing a different amount and nobody in the party could tell which side was open.

Here is a more interesting kind of problem. Three types of pirate at Lamech's Bazaar were paying out far more experience than anything else in the game. Not a little more. By a long way the most profitable fight in Novia, and one of them had a grand total of two attacks. The verdict was that they keep every point of their experience and simply become worth the trouble.

The Relic Hunters now cast Mirror. It is a one-second cast, it can be interrupted, and it wraps the pirate or its most badly hurt crewmate in a crystal shell for four seconds. While that shell is up, part of every direct hit you land comes straight back at you. Damage over time is never reflected, and the shell only goes up once somebody on their side is actually hurt, so this is not a wall you run into from the first second of the fight.

And my favorite part of the whole design. Half the time, the hit does not come back at you at all. It goes to a party member standing within ten meters of you. So you swing at a pirate holding a crystal shell, and your friend takes it. I have been assured this is intentional. I have also been assured that nobody will have the slightest trouble working out what happened.

The Privateers and the Plunderer Captain picked up Cutlass Sweep as well, a spinning cut at everything inside a ring drawn on the ground, with a wind-up long enough that you can see it coming and step out of it. Their health, their armor, their damage per swing and their loot are all untouched. The fight simply has teeth now.

On to an embarrassing one. If you own a large lot, a castle say, decorated the way people decorate castles, you walk up to it and the game rebuilds every single decoration on it. Every time. Not just the first visit. Seconds after your last one. One player's session re-downloaded the same lot twice in ninety-two seconds while they were standing on it. And if you happened to be standing on your own lot when this happened, the game picked you up and put you at the front gate. About eighty times a week on the test shard, somebody got teleported to their own doorstep by their own house.

The cause was a bookkeeping slip. The game tracks a revision number for each lot so it knows when something has changed. Events arriving for a lot that had not finished loading were being thrown away along with their revision number, so the lot's idea of its own revision went stale. The next time the server mentioned the lot, the two numbers disagreed, and the game's response to any disagreement was to tear the whole thing down and build it again from nothing, owner included.

Now a lot whose numbers do not match gets re-read in place. Each container that comes down is fingerprinted, anything unchanged is left alone, changed decorations update where they stand, new ones get built, and anything the server no longer lists is removed. You stay exactly where you were. And a lot you walk up to from outside now streams its contents the way an on-lot load does, instead of asking the server for another three and a half kilobytes and waiting, over and over. Large lots load faster for everyone, and castle owners get to keep their footing.

Last of the big ones, and it is for the people who like to be measured. There is a new achievement called Slayer of Legends, and it asks for all of them. Seventy-one bosses, every reachable one in the game, with the seasonal visitors left out because that would be unkind. Kills you banked years ago count. Hover the row in your journal and it lists exactly who is still standing. Finish the roster and you get the title, and a character wearing that title with every boss down carries an aura of ember wisps over a rune circle that other players can see. I rather love the next part. When we add a new boss, you keep the title, but the aura goes out until that one falls too, and you get a line of chat naming who is still upright. The crown is not permanent. The crown is a to-do list.

Alongside it, three world boss boards. One counts how many bosses each player has felled and how many different ones. One holds each boss's fastest kill and the party that set it. The third lists every player's best time against each boss. The clock starts on the first blow landed on a boss at full health and the server does the timing, so the records are real.

Which brings me to the part that had to be fixed first. Creatures in player dungeons, in player towns and from player-placed spawners were counting toward bestiary progress, boss achievements, leaderboards and prestige. They still give experience. They simply no longer count toward the thing you are being ranked on. And in the other direction, for years, the only fire elementals that counted toward the fire elemental achievement were the ones inside player dungeons. The wild ones. Out in the world. On fire. Did not count. They do now. The three zombie bosses also started paying portrait trophies at one, ten and a hundred kills, because until yesterday their Slain achievements unlocked and handed you nothing at all.

There are three games on that new desk, which I did not expect to be reporting on. Flappy Bat flies a bat between rock spires in an underground cavern. Hungry Wyvern steers a wyvern across a stone floor eating eggs and growing a length longer with each one. Both are drawn out of the game's own item icons, and each window lists its community's ten best runs.

And then there is Tavern Trivia. Five hundred questions about Shroud of the Avatar across seventeen categories, from the virtues to where each master trainer stands. And then last night, another five hundred about the Ultima games and Ultima Online. Their virtues, their dungeons, their cities, their relics. Which means I can now be quizzed, by a website, about my own life's work, and I am told I should not expect to do well. The questions are graded on the server and the answer bank never reaches your browser, so no, you cannot look. All three are built and waiting to be switched on.

A cluster of work landed for players in their first hour, and I want to name why. Captain Kinsey at Solace Bridge Outskirts answers "help" with the main quest first now, and mentions each side job once rather than endlessly, because new characters were taking the fishing and gathering errands as the road to their free lot deed and a good many of them stopped there. Thirty-four repeatable quests now show a green exclamation mark over the person who gives them, so a quest you can do again stops looking like every other quest. Two were deliberately left unmarked, because we would rather not put a cheerful green mark above the errand that costs you virtue. Private Fleta and nine other quest givers were showing no mark at all while their task sat there for the taking. And a quest giver with another job ready now says that it could use more help after you turn one in, with the word help linking through to the next task. That line is spoken in all one hundred and ninety-six NPC voices.

If you do not play in English, this is your day. The translation backlog had been building for about three and a half weeks, and it is empty. Two thousand one hundred and forty-two new or changed lines in each of German, Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese, Russian, Chinese and Japanese, and one thousand seven hundred and eighty-two in Ukrainian. Loading tips, recent items, skill descriptions, interface text. A second reviewer read every new line and two hundred and ninety-two of them were corrected before they shipped. Some German records were put back to straight quotes and a couple of hundred Chinese ones had their punctuation set right next to the characters. That is unglamorous work and your game reads better for it.

Three things for your inventory and your options. Rows in your backpack, bank and chest windows can be starred now, which drops them into a Favorites category, searchable, kept per character, and merchants list your starred kinds under Favorites too. Quick Deposit finally counts what the bags inside your backpack are holding toward a keep amount, so the hundred and fifty Corpse Wax in your reagent bag stops the loose wax beside it from going into the chest. And Options has a Disable Weather checkbox that takes away the rain and the snow, silences the rain and wind, and stops the thunder, while leaving the clouds in the sky. Also, Leave Guild is gone from the menu on your own portrait and your name in chat, where exactly one stray click could begin it.

Another ninety-odd tracker issues went down yesterday, and I will not walk you through them. The pattern was things being mistaken for other things. A spider queen who had no name of her own and was being taken for a different spider queen entirely, now Vevmor. Two beetles that had always borrowed the tree bark icon, so in your pack they looked like more bark. A fire pillar who was filed with the bears, which meant animal slayer gear worked on her and elemental slayer gear did not. A map at Elad's Lighthouse drawing a walled keep across three empty grass lots, plus a fourth keep up on a plateau where there is no lot and never was a building.

The town crier in Grusk deserves his own sentence. He had been loading his conversation topics twice since the start of the month, which meant he would greet you warmly and then refuse to say another word about anything. A town crier who could not be drawn on current events. He is back, and there is now a check that refuses any conversation trying to load the same topics twice.

The rest, quickly. Eight log messages that were screaming about perfectly ordinary situations have been taught to use their indoor voice. The Lua add-on folks got three fixes, including one where a variable declared with no value was holding the contents of the loop it sat inside. Blink lands where the circle says it will. Slows and holds stick to the Hard and Extreme monsters the way they do to the normal ones. The magic shrines ask for a ring of their own school instead of a phoenix talon. You can fish while sitting on the ground. And the Shroud of the Avatar cloak can now be turned into an eternal pattern from its right-click menu, so you can put its look on another cloak.

That is Sunday. What I am most looking forward to is the quiz going live, mostly so I can watch my own guild discover how much of my work they have forgotten. Thank you for playing in our world, and for telling us when it is broken. You have an excellent record on that.

One last thing. We gave the bazaar pirates a shield that sends your own blows back at you, and I asked the team whether that was too cruel.

They said if I hit one as hard as I could, I would have plenty of time to sit down and reflect. Good night, New Britannia.