The New Britannia Herald

In this episode

• A dragon that pulled players out of its zone
• The Focus school catches up with its sisters
• Eight new fish, and the release they broke
• Twitch Drops failed on one invisible space
• Crusader Village doors, hinges, and house sizes

Transcript

Hail and well met, citizens of New Britannia. Lord British before thee, with an accounting of what thy makers were about upon Friday last. A dragon of the Blackblade Mountains had learned to hurl his challengers clean out of his own mountain, and hurls them no more. The school of Focus is lifted up to stand level with its sisters, and Mind Wipe now grants thee a second thought upon the hand it deals. Eight new fish swim the waters, a great white shark among them. And the whole sorry business with the Twitch rewards was one empty space, no wider than a breath. We begin with a door, because I am the one who complained about it.

So. On Friday morning I sent the team a picture of a door knob. I did not file a bug. I sent a photograph and a short question about which side of a door the hinge belongs on. The knob in that picture was sitting directly on top of the hinges, in one of the twelve new Crusader Village homes, which meant the door was folding in half around its own handle every time it opened. I expected one bad door. There were twenty-six of them, across ten of the twelve houses, and every one had been wrong since the day the houses were first built.

Now, the dragon, because the dragon is the better story. There is an Ancient dragon in the Northwest Blackblade Mountains. On the twenty-fifth, on the twenty-ninth, and twice more on Friday, he wandered into the southeast exit of his own zone and simply stood in it. His spawn points sit about a hundred and twenty metres from that doorway, which is comfortably inside the distance he is allowed to roam, so nothing ever told him to go home. He was not stuck in the sense of being broken. He was stuck in the sense of standing in a doorway.

And then, from that doorway, with a player out of his reach, he used his long pull. Fifteen metres of it. He dragged the player who was fighting him straight into the exit, and the exit did exactly what an exit is for. It sent them to the overworld. At half past one on Friday afternoon he did it to somebody mid-fight, and the logs are perfectly clear about it.

So let us be honest about what we had built here. A dragon who had worked out that the strongest move in the game is not a breath weapon. It is removing the arena. He never had to finish anybody off. He won by forfeit, over and over, from the doorway, like a doorman.

The fix has two halves, and I like both of them. On your side, anything that moves your body without your consent now says so as it happens: a knockback, a pull, a throw. While something is shoving you, zone exits refuse to fire at all. Once it stops, you have to walk out under your own power, measured from the deepest point the shove carried you. If you were thrown clean past the doorway, the game sets you back just inside it. Your own dash, your own charge, following a friend out of a zone, all of that works as it always did. On the creature side, anything that is not a pet, standing in a live exit or just past one, now gets sent home. There are exemptions, and they are the interesting part: pets, escorts, creatures chasing a siege, creatures tied to something that moves, and any creature whose own home happens to sit inside an exit, because that poor thing would walk back and forth forever.

The Focus school got a long pass on Friday, and it starts with something embarrassing. Every school has a specialization that raises a mastery rating, and the school's own skills read that rating to decide how strong they are. Focus had been carrying a worse one than everybody else for as long as anyone can remember. Eight tenths of a point at level eighty, where every other school had a full point, and a full point at a hundred where the others had one and a quarter. Nobody had ever written that down as a decision. It was a number that had been wrong quietly and for a long time. It now climbs like every other school's, and every Focus skill that reads it got stronger on Friday without anybody touching the skill itself. At full specialization, Mind Lock holds a rune for forty-five seconds where it held it for forty, Mind Wipe's cooldown falls from about twenty seconds to under eighteen, and the window after your own spell critical grows from six seconds to six and a half. The tooltips say the new numbers in every language.

Mind Lock also learned to reward training, which it never did before. Twenty seconds at level one, thirty at fifty, forty at a hundred, sixty at two hundred, still multiplied by your specialization, and still capped so that nobody holds a rune forever by casting it over and over.

Mind Wipe, though. Mind Wipe is the most trained active skill in the whole school and about the least cast, and the reason is simple once somebody says it out loud: a blind full redraw is rarely worth a slot on your bar. You throw away a hand you understand for a hand you have not seen yet. So now, for five seconds after the new hand lands, you can right-click one rune and swap it for the next rune in your deck that the slot will accept. Once. At no cost. The runes you are allowed to swap glow pale violet so you are not guessing, locked slots and stacked combos are left alone, and the rune you threw back goes to the deck with no cooldown on it. A full redraw with one deliberate decision on the end of it is a different skill from the one players were ignoring.

Three more out of the same pass. Spellbinder Stance now survives a walk, so you can reposition without losing it, though running or sprinting still ends every part of it, and the icon says so. Tranquility now makes running cheaper as you train it. Running costs ten focus a second; Tranquility takes an eighth off that at a hundred and a quarter off at two hundred, in any armor. It is the first skill in the game with any say over that discount, which until Friday belonged to a potion and a raw banana. It stacks with the banana, and the whole thing stays capped, so running can reach free but will never refill you. And if you hover Focus on your own character sheet, you now get an itemized bill: your pets and summons named rather than folded into other bonuses, your regeneration in and out of combat, what skills like Inner Calm take off your rune costs, what a deck swap costs for each gear slot you changed, and what one second of sprinting costs. All of it read from the same calculation the game charges you with, so the sheet and the bill agree.

And one more, late in the afternoon, which I did not expect. There has been a number sitting in the skill list since the very first skill list, with nothing attached to it. No rune, no trainer, no words, just a gap where a skill should be. It is a skill now. Eidetic Memory. Cast it and it replays the last rune you played out of your hand, without spending a card, at half again that rune's focus cost. This first version has no memory of combos, channelled spells, reaction runes, anything cast from a consumable, or itself. That last one matters. A skill that can replay itself is not a skill, it is an afternoon.

Eight new fish went into the water. Wels Catfish and Walleye in northern fresh water after dark. Arowana and Golden Dorado in tropical fresh water. Redtail Catfish in the swamps at night. Nurse Shark in tropical seas at night. Humboldt Squid in any sea after dark. And a great white shark in the northern seas, at a tenth the frequency of the Tiger Shark, which was my call and which I stand by. Every one of them was built out of models already sitting in the game, each new species cloned off a shipped one's whole kit, so none of them arrived half finished. They all have sized catches, a length on the card, fillets, trophies, wall mounts for the sharks and their own fishing achievement. Five hundred and twenty files in a single piece of work. The fresh water tables became regional along the way, so tropical and northern waters keep their own lists.

And then the release fell over, hours in, after a full round of client builds, at the very last step. The new fish were copies, and the copies had kept the item identifiers of the fish they were copied from. Two things in the catalog claiming to be the same thing. The release now checks that no two item classifications share an identifier before it builds anything at all, which takes a couple of seconds, and the same check runs on every commit and every night. That is the cheapest check in the world, learned in the most expensive way available. There is a companion to it from the same afternoon: a test that makes sure the item name list lines up row for row, because one hand-added row in the wrong place will hand every item after it its neighbour's name.

Twitch Drops. Every viewer saw Connect where Claim should have been, whether or not they had linked their account, and no claim ever reached Twitch. The cause was a trailing space. Our own Drops settings held the account link identifier with one empty character on the end of it, and a campaign copies that value at the moment it is created, so the live campaign had been carrying that space since the day it was born. Viewers were authorizing the real identifier. The two never matched. Twitch was answering "this account is not connected" for everybody, forever, and Twitch was right.

We proved it by building a test campaign with the corrected value and asking Twitch about the same viewer twice in the same minute. The test campaign said connected. The live one said not connected. Same person. So the setting was saved without the space, and the campaign was built again from scratch with the same four rewards at thirty, sixty, a hundred and twenty and two hundred and forty minutes of watch time, running through the twenty-fifth of November. Watch time from the first campaign did not carry over, and I am sorry about that one. Anything already earned there can still be claimed on Twitch for a day. Claims people made before the fix were hidden from us by the same mistake, and those are queued now and will arrive at your next login. Separately, twenty-two accounts had linked while the community site was briefly using our other Twitch app; the rewards service now accepts a link made through either one, the rewards page offers a Reconnect button when Twitch says the approval is on the wrong app, and each of those players got a letter in game about it.

Then at half past six in the evening, a second one, because of course there was. Twitch gives some entitlement identifiers a padding character on the end, an equals sign, depending on the length of the viewer's user id. Our worker refused any identifier with padding on it. So those viewers claimed their drop, and the claim was turned away. Seventy-three of them. Rejected for punctuation. They get picked up again as soon as the updated worker goes in, and they land in the rewards window at the next login. Twitch Drops exist in the first place because necronut asked for them, and I suspect they have had cause to regret that this week.

Back to the doors, because the reason they were wrong is better than the bug. Every door leaf in that building kit is modelled the same way, with the hinge edge at the model's origin and the handle hardware out at the far end. The builder that assembles the houses hung every leaf on the same edge, measured in the house's own space. That works right up until a wall piece is turned the other way around, and the kit's walls are turned both ways on purpose, all over these houses. Wherever a wall was mirrored, the hinge landed next to the handle. A door with its hinge and its handle on the same edge is not a door. It is a wall with ambitions. Each leaf now hangs on the edge its own model says is the hinge edge, and which way it swings still comes from which side is indoors. All twelve houses were rebuilt, and the closed doors stand exactly where they stood before, so the collision, the clear space around them and the walking paths inside did not move. There is a test now that refuses any door whose handle sits on the hinge's half of the leaf.

While the houses were open, two more things. A Crusader home placed from a deed now goes down at a hundred and thirty percent of its size, and on a village lot a House starts at a hundred and twenty and a Large House at a hundred and ten, because there is less room around the spot they normally sit. The ceiling came down from a hundred and fifty percent to a hundred and forty, which was my decision: a hundred and fifty was reaching past what these lots can actually hold, and nothing had ever been placed at it. Reset Position no longer shrinks a home you had grown. And offline play can now move, flip and resize a house from the lot sign. Those buttons used to appear only when you were online, which is a strange thing to tell somebody playing alone in a world that is entirely theirs.

Three things about the lot you live on. A governor or a Steward can now tick Open to Town Residents on a lot they own. Everyone on that town's resident list then walks in as a guest, past blocked doors, and can use the bank boxes on that lot and buy from its player vendors. It holds only while the owner still holds governor or Steward standing, and any role written on the lot by hand, a ban included, still wins over it. That one was asked for through the Oracle, in game, which I enjoy enormously.

Second, a player paid eight hundred gold crowns at a lot sign for a deed upgrade whose only effect was to remove No Trade, and from where they were standing that looks precisely like nothing happening. Every upgrade entry now ends with a list of what it changes: size, tax, water lots, where it can be claimed, trading. That one reads "Changes: Tradeable". The eight hundred crowns went back. Third, the search window reads an item's coordinates from where it stands right now, so after you move a house or restore it, the list and the compass stop pointing at the spot where your chair used to be.

Two things were quietly knowing more than they were telling you. Heal over time icons now say how much health each pulse restores. Cocoon of Night, Soothing Rain, the Potion of Regeneration, all of them used to give you the rate and the duration and keep the actual amount to themselves, and the estimate now runs through the same steps the real pulse does, your healing received included. Anything that restores focus over time got the same treatment. And twenty-two specialization descriptions stopped telling players they could set a specialization skill to maintain, which is a training mode we retired some time ago, in English and in all nine translations.

For the summoners and the salvagers. Mutton Stew grants twenty points of skeleton power and twenty of lich power, and those numbers only ever fed your summons' level and their health, so for two hours your skeletons were healthier and hit for exactly the same. It now adds ten percent to their damage for the full two hours, which covers skeletons, skeleton mages and liches. A player spotted that after we fixed the gem that grants the same pair. And the Dreadhorn Skull Helm, a subscriber reward, used to salvage into plain leather scrap and take the look with it. It gives back its own Eternal Pattern now, and the leather helm reshape accepts it.

Characters no longer hang in the falling pose beside stone house walls and their ledges. I like this fix because it stopped trying to understand the geometry. If you have been falling for a quarter of a second with gravity building and your feet have not dropped two centimetres, something is holding you, and the game finds it, slides you your own width off it, or steps you up onto it if sliding off is blocked. Rowboats also float higher, so the sea has stopped showing above the floorboards; the seats, the oars and the way aboard all came up with the hull.

A player wrote in to say the skeletons sounded like a too friendly sort of human. They were right. Every skeleton was already running through a bone rasp treatment, but that treatment is a texture, a bit of gravel laid over an ordinary man's voice. There is a new hollow one now, the voice doubled against itself and shaking twenty-four times a second, and the Pumpkin Head, who is a skeleton and had somehow never been given an undead voice at all, is on it too. Liches, zombies and ghosts are unchanged. It goes live with the next voice publish.

The lightning round, and most of it is about the machine that makes the game. Deploys to the test shard had crept up to between eighty-four minutes and nearly two hours, while the deploy itself still took about twenty. All the rest was standing in line: the nightly reports bake in front of it, and a backstop job that had decided a live build was missing and spent ninety minutes rebuilding something that was fine. The bake moved onto a second agent that sits idle most of the day, the backstop now protects whatever the live channels are actually serving, Mac builds moved off a laptop that had to be at home and awake and onto a machine that stays put, and there is a new small Windows build box standing by for a drive.

One more from that pile, because the shape of it is funny. A decorations file had grown to five hundred and forty-five megabytes, which is over the size our patch network will cache, so patching it in pieces had stopped working. The reason it got so large: one decorative figure inside it carried a reference to a sound, that sound reached the player character, and the player character reaches every animation a player has. Somebody added about two hundred and sixty emotes this month. So a decorative townswoman had been dragging the entire animation library into the decorations. It is split in two now, and anything that ships over four hundred and eighty megabytes splits itself on the next build.

The rest, swept fast. About five thousand errors in one night from loot sacks and corpses, all of them out of last week's fix for players floating next to ore nodes, because sacks and corpses have no authored appearance and no collision and the new code read an empty list for both. Ties at the last ranked place on a leaderboard are all published now instead of whichever one happened to come first in a list. Four books that townsfolk hand out for free stopped paying gold at merchants, and the check that caught them stopped miscounting offline stock, which cleared six false warnings. Pasted deck codes stopped inventing names for cards the game does not show you. The Oracle learned roughly twenty-five new answers across two passes, from how to claim a Twitch drop to where the ferries between the islands of Mistrendur run. A stack of player suggestions got read and filed properly, two of them new off the forum: a passive skill to soften the heavy armor casting penalty, and a monthly contest with rare, time-limited prizes. Crusader house deeds went out to the winners of the stream draw. And the new build went live on the test shard on Friday evening and on Steam right after, carrying the Focus pass, the fish, the taller houses, the resident lots and the November login reward's name in every language, with a day to spare before November.

That is Friday. What I am looking forward to is the first person who hangs a great white shark on the wall of a Crusader house with doors that work, and then whatever the testers do to that five second Mind Wipe window, because five seconds is exactly long enough to make a mistake with real confidence.

And before I go, one terrible thing. We gave the skeletons a new voice this week, and I asked why the old one never convinced anybody. There was nobody in it. Good night from New Britannia.