Official Update Thread

[Cryptite]

Quests Released!
Get all story'd up!
​

After almost a year in development, we are finally proud to launch the first phase of our Quests system update! Formerly known as Jobs, Quests are a far more story-focused feature and don't function nearly like Jobs used to. Because completing Quests don't reward the Quest-Maker with any actual items, we decided the feature needed a rename in order to bring it more in-line with what people are familiar with.

The Jobs-functionality that Towns once had will be migrated to a new system in the near-future as we recognize they can no longer create Jobs that require town members to, for example, gather ores for them. We have plans for this, but wanted to get Quests out so that we could start advancing Loka's story and let our PvE team get crackin'!

As this is a major feature update, we do expect some growing pains as we online the system. Quests isn't just a replacement for Jobs but also included a fundamental rewrite of our Accounts management system. It's preparation for the future, but also a big, big change and we except some buggos, so hang with us throughout the coming days while we iron out any wrinkles in the systems.

As for what's new, here's a rough list of the big changes. We do encourage you to watch the Feature Preview if you haven't as it gives a more visual overview of how Quests work. Let's get into it!

• /j is gone, now it is /q!
• You'll note there are very few commands:
  • /q create - Make your Quest! No name required, you can do that later.
  • /q l - List the Quests you're on. /q also does this by itself.
  • /q e - Edit the Quests you've made!
• Quests are no longer limited to certain types.
  • You don't decide up-front whether a Quest is a travel/hunt/gather quest. You merely add as many Objectives as you want.
• Quests are almost 100% managed in GUIs rather, except for text-entry here and there. Rejoice!
• All Quest interaction will take place in Book GUIs, for sanity, and to keep you out of fighting with public chat all the time.
• Vendors can also give out Quests and have a menu to choose between a quest or browsing their wares.

Quest Objectives
What you gotta do to complete the quest.​

These can be roughly broken down into categories. Gathering, Discovery, and Hunting (for now)

• Gathering:
  • Up front, like before, you pick the item you want gathered. You can either choose an item in your inventory already, or choose from a list of items in the game.
  • There are/will-be many new ways to define how an item can be gathered:
    • Mob Drops
      • Define which mobs, and where they drop. Define Territories, Worlds, or Areas!
      • Specify drop rates for each of the above; useful if you want some locations to yield higher rates of things than others.
    • Found on the ground
      • Gathering Items can be found floating on the ground in varying numbers (Find anywhere from 1 to 3 of an item floating there, for example). Think Firestone quest.
    • Found when breaking a block.
      • Any block you want. Anywhere you want. Any droprate you want!
    • And many more coming soon:
      • Fishing
      • Find in a container (chest/hopper/furnace/whatever!)
      • and more!
  • Gathered Items are SOULBOUND and aren't "real" in traditional terms.
    • Gathered items for Quests go to your Quest Items Bag in /b and can only be found there at this time.
    • Items dropped for quests can only be picked up by their owners. They also shimmer with subtle particles.
  • Turning in Gathering Quests is immediate now and no longer requires you to manually drop them in an NPC's inventory, cause that's tedious.
• Location Quests:
  • Loads of ways to define these now. You can create quests to Discover:
    • A Specific Location (like the old way)
    • An Area (We call anything that pops up a title in your face an Area)
    • A World
• Hunting Quests:
  • Pretty much the same except you can specify where the mobs must be hunted, vs just "A cow".

Other Notes

• The ability to require a player to manually verify a quest turnin has been removed.
• Bounty Quests (Jobs) are no longer possible. Nobody used it for reals anyway.
• Town Quests can now be assigned to ANY existing Town NPC
  • Instead of just signs and then one "Big All Quests NPC", you can assign quests in your town EITHER to a Sign OR a Town NPC including:
    • TGen NPC
    • Any Industry NPC
    • Any future NPCs we may or may not add in the future for towns.
  • You can also assign a different "Destination NPC" for quest turnin. You must do this with quests assigned to Signs.
• Public Quests cannot be presently made. We will add support for this soon, but for now you must make them town quests by converting a newly-made quest to a town quest if you have perms.
• There are tons of things coming to Quests over the coming weeks. We'll keep you posted!
• Unrelated to Quests, it is now possible to attempt to recover a lost VS chest (for bug reasons) by replacing the VS Marker in the same place it used to be. This should successfully reload a missing VS chest if its stored items aren't already found elsewhere.

There's so much more to the system that it would be unwieldy to post it all here. We will begin to populate Aladra with some Official Quests once again soon. It's a deep system and we look forward to what you all do with it. Please please /report bugs and bring up feedback about the system!

Get out there and Forge your Stories!

 

[Cryptite]

The vast majority of the work done over the past week or so have just been fixing/polishing/updating Quests. Most bugs aren't noteworthy, but it's worth pointing out what's fairly new over the past week. We have deliberately not announced notable changes/updates to Quests because we've been taking our time testing them to be sure they work before telling everyone. That said many things should work these days, so here's a small update on what's new/changed!

• NEW: Fishing Requirement - A new way to get a Gatherable Item drop. Be in an area and fish to get the drop!
  • This is a "Regional Objective". Regional Objectives mean you can define an area/world/etc as how to accomplish the objective. In this case, the item will drop so long as you're Fishing in any area(s) you define, including drop-rate percentage.
• NEW: Achievement Objective- An objective that uses the same logic as its achievement to complete.
  • Whether you have the Achievement or not is irrelevant to this objective.
  • Excluding Legacy Achievements, all achievements are possible here.
  • A good example is the achievement to "Touch the Artifact". You can now have "Touch the Artifact" as an objective to your quests!
  • You also have the option to rename the objective. Given the above example, if you wanted the objective to instead be called "Punch the Artifact", you can! The freedom is yours!
  • This opens up a TON of options for Quest Objectives that don't just boil down to "Gather X, Hunt Y, Discover Z", etc.
• Expiring/Repeatable quests can now have their time set in seconds.
• Quests that expire in 5 minutes or less will show a Boss Bar Timer (top of your screen) as a countdown to finishing the quest.
• Unknown Ruins can no longer be used for Regional Objectives. These break things.
  • We need to get rid of Unknown Ruins anyway, so if you know the name of one, /report it up.
• We're still looking into/fixing issues with Beacon Warps to Conquest battles. One new thing is that you'll now get a message in chat if you're too far from a Beacon when it warps.

Go Forth and make Quests! Give feedback! Report bugs!

 

[Cryptite]

Still fixing various things with Quests as well as various fallout from the overall update.

• /lore and /ch now use tab-completion.
  • NOTE: The syntax for lore has changed slightly. Instead of /lore line1 <some text> it is now /lore line 1 <some text>. Now a space between the line and the number.
• You can now define the "drop" rate on Areas chosen as regional defintions for Item drops. Previously this only was on for Worlds as a whole.
• Item drops from Gathering Objectives now have cool particles and sounds!
• And some smaller less notable fixes of varying things.

 

[Cryptite]

Most of the work these days is on updating Loka to 1.15 and working with some specific players to address the performance problems it has. Making a lot of headway though!

In the meantime, just a couple new Quests Features:

• New Toggle Option (in Advanced Section): Complete on Accept
  
  • Melchiott's Bread quest does this now. This is the formal way to have a Quest complete instantly when accepted. These Quests naturally don't require any objectives.
    
• New Reward: Accept Quest
  
  • This is the new way in which you can have Completing Quest A instantly accept Quest B for a player.
• And a few small quest fixes as well.

 

[Cryptite]

The April Update​

The biggest changes surround the April Conquest Update. Since that is already a nice big post, just click on the link to read about that. This post will be a summary of all the rest of the changes that have gone in up until today. Much of the latter-half of March has been working on updating to 1.15 with the past week(ish) doing the April Conquest update. Some of the work in prep for 1.15 has been going live in pieces as they're important to have working ahead of time.

• We've fixed (and still are) a lot of various bugs surrounding Restricted Resources. There've been lots of ways to get restricted resources with indirect block breaking (see below). Given 1.15 will introduce new restricted resources from 1.14 and 1.15, it's important to fix these before launching them. Please continue to /report any ways you can get around these restrictions. Things we've recently fixed that were ways around getting restricted resources you don't own are:
  • Placing a block next to cactus to get the cactus.
  • Breaking the block under a crop to get the drop.
  • Breaking Nether Wart with pistons/water in order to get more than 1 back outside of the Nether.
• Fixed biome-specific animals spawning on Resource Isles (Horses etc should not be spawning there)
• You can no longer THROW a pearl in a foreign town.
  • We used to only block where pearls land; now you are unable to throw a pearl within a foreign town at all (You know, so walls have a purpose).
  • This should've been fixed a billion years ago.
• Admins can now Permamute Players
• You can now right-click Player Heads to see which player they belong to.
• Fixed Radars pinging their own players because they had an invalid conquest lock.
• Fixed a bug preventing Ender Pearls being sold on the Market.
• And then all the Conquest stuff.

Go Forth!

 

[Cryptite]

• Several long-standing bugs with Docks Combat fixed:
  • Pearling into a player will no longer engage them in combat.
  • Hitting somebody's horse (or other vehicle they're riding) will no longer engage them in combat.
  • Hitting somebody's Wolf (or other tameable) will no longer engage them in combat.
  • You can no longer attempt to fish-hook somebody in docks to pull them if they are out of combat.
  • Lastly, All Sanctuaries will behave like Docks in terms of combat protections.
    • This is probably self-explanatory and not likely a noticeable change, but part of our preparations for Future Things, we're trying to unify how our various "zone types" work. Docks in this respect are just also Sanctuaries.
    • So, TL;DR, all Sanctuaries will have the dock-combat protections you're used to.
• Adding somebody as a Temp Builder to your town now requires a confirmation from that player.
• Fixed a bug where clicking the Beacon Button in your town would also give you a permissions error if applicable. Everybody can always push the beacon button.
• Loads of various tiny bugfixes to various other thingies

 

[Cryptite]

• The Return of /AFK
  • You can /afk now, isn't that neat? You also go afk after 5m. Pretty neat.
  • The only difference really is it doesn't spam public chat (only you see the messages) and you'll see (AFK) next to a player's name if you /m them (which is also neat)
  • No plans to kick afk people or anything so don't worry bout all that.
• Fixed Beacon Warps not knocking back enemy players.
• Whenever a new town is made, foreign players who are logged out in within the town territory will be automatically moved to spawn on next login.
• Few various bugfixes with Coalitions have been fixed.
• Additional performance improvements have been put in.

 

[Cryptite]

The vast majority of the work over the past week has mostly been diagnosing bugs popping up from new stuff (Cap Bountifuls) as well as deep dives on performance so we can try to handle these Very Big Fights. Work continues on that as there seems to be a notable cliff right around the 90-110 player mark where TPS drops substantially. Rest assured this is a top priority right now. In the meantime, however, here's a catchup of bug fixes since our last update:

• Conquest Battles (town-v-town) now post to the new #conquest channel in Discord.
• Achievements no longer broadcast globally.
  • Now, Achievements only broadcast:
    • Globally if it's a Legendary achievement, otherwise...
    • To all players near you
    • To all players online in your same town.
  • Some of these frankly give away your location, others may just get too chatty, especially in the future when we begin to add hundreds and hundreds of new Achievements.
• The tooltip for Cap Bountifuls on our map now show the time they will end (5d from when they start).
• It is no longer possible to use fishing rods on players in certain areas (Dreadfort, etc).
• You can no longer place any inhibs server-wide if there is a Capital Bountiful inhib already onlining. This does include new towns. We want everybody to be able to fight in these, and not cheese it up.
• /find now has a tooltip/clickable link for a player's town and also shows their alliance in parentheses next to their town.
• Hopefully fixed the over-eager player-name autosuggests possibly kicking players for spamming.

Go Forth!

 

[Cryptite]

More bugfixes!

• Fixed the vast majority of bugs surrounding Embargoes/Restricted Items. You should be able to harvest all the things you own and get the right amount(s) of the item when breaking them.
  • Also added more info + helpful tooltip for restricted item info messages.
• Fixed town renames forcing every member's conquest lock to the new town name, regardless of their actual lock.
• Fixed Creepers not dropping 2x gunpowder when killed with the Double Mob Drops buff
• Fixed player death messages falsely claiming to be Conquest-related, particularly when a lot of time has passed since you were "last beamed by a laser", etc.
• The command to change a Town's Industry Level is now /g i level <level> <industry-name>
  • Swapped the last two arguments, and no longer asks for the category of the industry, now requires the name (Mine, Lumber Mill, etc)
• Successful defends of Neutral Fights no longer let the core-fight keep going strangely.
• Fixed the bug where deleting a Barn/Windmill also deleted the blocks of the other industry building. This will not retroactively fix, so only newly created Barns and Windmills will work, old ones may still delete each other.

 

[Cryptite]

Proving Grounds Changes
It's the wild west of chat in there...​

• All public chat and private messaging has been disabled in Public Proving Grounds​
  • There's really no two ways about it; chat in public FFA arenas is rarely ever kind and this is no surprise to anyone. Additionally we don't have sentries sitting in PG all day monitoring chat and so it's (expectedly) one of the most saucy chats we'll have on Loka.​
  • As a result we have added Quick Chat options to PG. These are few for the time being but more will be added over time. They are all accessed by /command (ie: /gg, /gf, etc). /qc will provide a list of current options.​
  • Understandably this may be controversial, but PG is a very popular place and we want everybody to still feel like they can join without seeing the "worst" of what Loka has to offer in chats, especially considering the increased popularity of the arena with lots of different new players who most only come for PG.​
• As above, this Quick Chat feature only applies to public PG. Chat and messaging is still available in private PG's (town/alliance), which is why we have finally...
• ADDED a new Private Proving Grounds!
  • Accessible by clicking the new Ender Eye button in the PG menu in /pvp.
  • You can now create your own private PG where you can either invite players from live with /invite, or share the invite code provided when you join. Players with the code can just type /pvp <code> to join your private PG at any time (from the Live server only, not hub yet). Chat is free and you can do whatever you want!

On a separate note, one source of lag identified yesterday with the Bountiful fight is that the fight was pretty laggy for the first couple minutes of the fight. On Loka (a 1.13 anyway), we delay chunk unloads by about 30s because it's common for players to go back/forth to town/spawn frequently and it helps a bit to keep your town loaded if you're coming right back to it.

However, because of this, when 100 people warp to a fight, you suddenly have BOTH 100 players fighting AND all the towns they came from still loaded for awhile (+lag, which makes the 30s last a lot longer) and this explains some of the frequent early-warp TPS loss.

So, we've lowered that number from 30s -> 10s to see if getting all those big/heavy town chunks unloaded faster gets the TPS stabilized before the majority of the fighting begins. But, you know, we'll see.

Go Forth!

 

[Cryptite]

Loka has updated to 1.15.2!

Please read this post to learn all about the changes.

 

[Cryptite]

Mostly just bugfixes lately and stabilizing some of the wonkier systems since 1.15. But a few notable updates/changes:

• Average Pricing is back on the Market - You can see this when creating orders.
• Covered Chests now work again and work better! They should feel entirely like opening regular chests now.

Shooting down Flying Players!

This came from a discussion with LCR during our first meeting with the new group. The feeling with Elytra flight was that in Conquest fights, while flying players weren't necessarily changing the outcome of fights, their ability to shoot arrows that did a ton of extra damage was imbalanced by the lack of any counterplay. Presently you can maybe get hit with an arrow, but it won't kill you, won't drop you out of the sky, and you can continue freely bombing/strafing players.

Rather than completely remove flight in battles, it was agreed that you should at least be able to shoot down players flying. As a result, the following changes have been made to flying across the server (not just conquest fights)

• Taking any damage while flying will drop you out of the sky. The ONLY exception to this is Thorns.
• Hitting a player with an arrow flying will also drop them, as it does damage, but is still quite difficult.
• However, firing an exploding firework with a Crossbow at a flying player has a bigger radius and is thus easier to shoot down players.
• Hitting a flying player puts both players in combat, so the flying player will be unable to take back off until combat clears.
• You will take fall-damage if shot down, unlike when hitting town borders/no-fly zones, etc.

We will keep a close eye on this feature and tweak numbers accordingly, but felt Elytra Flying was a bit too OP and needed some counterplay.

Go Forth!

 

[Cryptite]

World Zones 2.0
Standardizing and Unifying the various Zones on Loka
​

We've had the various zone types on Loka for some time now, but haven't done a great job of communicating what they were or how they worked. Additionally, the names and colors of them have shown up in your face in all kinds of formats, colors, etc. None of those had really been standardized; mostly they were made up on the spot.

With this update, we have taken control over how we show/display every location on Loka so that all players old and new can become familiar with how areas work on the server. For the most part, very few things have actually changed in terms of how the Zones behave. The meat of this update is just communication.

All Zones are broken down into two types, the Zone Type, and the PvP state of the Zone. I won't go into the breakdown of them all here, as we're going to use the Wiki for that. There's one fairly notable change so we'll get into the list!

• Every Zone now has a standardized name, subtitle, zone type and pvp zone type.​
• These use your title and actionbar.​
• /here has been updated and will tell you the same things as you see in Title/Actionbar.​
• Tablist also now reflects the same information.​
• Zone Types are personal to you. You may see your town as Alterable while outsiders will see it as Eternal because of the difference in build perms.​
• The 3 PvP Zone Typeshave now been formalized:
  • ☮ Sanctuary - No PvP
  • ⛨ "Green" Wilderness - Keep on Death
  • ☠ "Red" Wilderness - Vanilla Wilderness (you drop everything if you die).
• NEW: JIT (Just-in-time) Tips​
  • In addition to the casual "Tip every once in awhile", we are going to start making more use of a JIT system that sends you tips that are relevant to what you're doing. Over time we will begin to migrate many our "Occasional Messages" to this system.​
  • One good example is moving the notice about having Speed on your Town Roads to this so you can learn the tip and never see it again.​
  • This is in large part preparation for redoing the Intro to Loka experience as we prepare for advertising in the future.​
• A few bugs with Regeneration and Protected Resources should come along with this update too.

Wild Coasts
Now Keep on Death until you get out into the real Territories
​

The notable change mentioned above is the introduction of Wild Coast Tiles (previously the "Dock Tiles"). These are the single tile that contains the Dock on each World (or ones with Territories). This is an uncontrollable territory and one that all players, specifically new players travel through frequently. In order to transition newer players into the world a little more easily, we're changing the PvP State of Wild Coast Tiles (Dock Tiles) to "Green" Wilderness (KoD).

Noobs often are killed or kill each other once they get a few feet outside of the Docks and drop all their things (ignoring their Kod gear). As well we know players like to duke it out outside the docks as well. We want a smoother transition from Sanctuary to Full Wilderness and we also recognize that the dock tiles are a kind of weird limbo so we felt this was a good move since the zones are already unique. Once you walk into a normal territory, however, you'll be back in the Red Wilderness and thus can murder each other for drops.

Naturally the next question will be "How does Combat Tagging work" transitioning between the two. That system is still being developed, so basically for now wherever you die will handle how your gear drops or doesn't. The planned system is mostly a Combat Tag that can be "promoted" up and not down. In other words, if you're combat tagged in the Red Wilderness you'll drop your gear no matter where you die. Or, if you start a fight in a Green Wilderness, but keep fighting into a Red one, your combat tag will "upgrade" to Red. We want to communicate your combat tag status better so we'll handle this in a near-future update.

 

[Cryptite]

For the most part, we have been taking the majority of the lull in activity this month to fix bugs both introduced by 1.15 and its updates, but also start to chew through our Very Long List of old bugs/reports. The vast majority of these aren't very noteworthy, but a few things are worth pointing out as well as a pretty big one:

Adventure Mode in Foreign Towns
Something we should've done awhile ago
​

We've always tried our best to prevent the classic glitching/exploits that you'd find on most Factions-type servers because they're not what we want on Loka. We chose conflict to take place in the form of Conquest and not your typical base raiding/griefing/etc. Try though we might, there are still inherent glitchy bits of Minecraft like trying to cancel block breaking/placing. This is why things like Block jumping etc exist. MC has had Adventure Mode for awhile and for one reason or another we've put it off, forgotten about it, etc, but it's always been a bit of a no-brainer to use it since it prevents the things we have a lot of code in place to try to prevent all the time.

Thus, as of now, whenever you enter a Foreign Town, you will be silently put into Adventure Mode. As a reminder Foreign towns are any town you do not live in and are not a tempbuilder for. Adventure Mode simply prevents you from even trying to break/place blocks, which are the most common actions for trying to glitch in/around towns. It doesn't prevent combat, interacting with buttons/levers/doors, etc. It's really just a clean, smooth way to prevent players glitching blocks and hoping to accomplish something due to the nature of lag between client and server.

This will likely expand to areas around Loka as well (protected areas, etc). This is the notable big change of the day, otherwise we've just been trying to tackle bugs:

• The Arcanum should be functional again. It may not work 100% like it once did but should at least not be stuck with the same enchants.​
• Laurel (in spawn, underneath the Capital Halls) can now once again make Infinite Banners for you.​
• Lots of Regen fixes, Zone Type/Name fixes.​
• Many performance fixes including some lagspikes that we've finally identified (Industry cycles being an example).​
• And more!​

Go Forth!

 

[Cryptite]

Announcing Instanced Resource Isle Ores!
Everybody gets a piece!
​

Continuing on our efforts to unify the Loka Experience™ and take more control on the Ore Economy, one of the things we've talked about in the past is instancing Resource Isles. The key issue is that RIs were shared by everyone, with only one set of ores per isle that only regenerated once every 3 hours or so. All it takes is one player to deep-clean a RI and nobody else gets it for another 3h, provided that player hasn't straight-up logged out at the isle to relog 3h later.

Obviously this is a problem at virtually any scale. As of now, the Ores on Resource Isles are uniquely randomized for each Player. Basically, Daily Dock Blocks, but on the scale of each RI.

List time!

• All players get a randomized, unique set of Ores to mine on each Resource Isle every "day".​
  • In short, this means no two players going to a RI at the same time will get the same ore spots.​
• Resource Isles "reset" after 20 hours. When you show up to an RI and start mining, your ores mined will stay mined until 20 hours later when the RI resets for you.
  • TL;DR You get a full RI per day, come back the next day for your next random set of ores.
• Like DDB, mining ores doesn't really break the block, it just turns to stone after you finish mining it.
• The RI's use a more mature version of our new Instancing Tech which we wanted to prove out with RIs because it's tech we intend to use a lot in the future.
• We've also cleaned up the isles a bit and adjust ore distribution as well. Most notably, there are no longer ores underneath lava.
  • This should also mean Kalros RI isn't as poopy.
  • Additionally, ore distributions are not found at Vanilla Y-Levels on RIs. Because of the shape of the caves, etc, things can be found higher/lower than usual, but never under lava.
• Due to the nature of everybody getting ores, to the individual player, of course this will feel like a nerf. It isn't realistic to have 100% of players now able to walk away with several dubs of ores every day so naturally this will pan out

And that's it! There's not to much to this update beyond allowing all players a chance to get their fill of Ores from RIs rather than waking up to find them emptied by some super-miney bois.

Go Forth and Mine!

 

[Cryptite]

The Great Unification!
Still buffing up that Loka Experience ™
​

A big part of the Arena Season ending was the first great step in modularizing Loka; something we've talked about the past. The short of it is that the Hub, and the PvP Server are, while still on the Loka network, part of varying plugins written long ago without most of the learning/optimizations that the main SMP server has. This is why the Hub and PvP feel like you're not in Loka anymore most of the time.

Season 9's ending launch actually brought forth the first few plugins that are now shared across the entire Loka network. /pvp and /talents are good examples of this. On Loka, Hub, and in the future even in the PvP server, you will see the same exact Queuing GUI network-wide. Specific to that plugin, for the next arena season, you'll be able to stay queued for ranked matches no matter where you are on Loka, even if you're just doing unranked duels or PG.

Future efforts will include "networkizing" chat (town chat, alliance chat for example), /reporting from anywhere on Loka, Tab list feeling the same everywhere, and more! All things we've needed to do in the past, but now we're doing it. So while this has be a ton of work, presently you as players won't really feel much change yet, but overtime, homogenizing the Loka Experience will make us look like a Real Mineperson Server!

Anyway, since then there have also been a lot of bugfixes/polish:

• From now on, at the end of Truce, the Capital of a continent is always, also the leader of its respective Alliance. Rather, if a capital town is in an Alliance, whoever is leader of that alliance will become the real capital when truce is over.
• Damaging/pearling your own town members in your town will no longer put either player in combat.
  • Also you will drop combat when leaving a /c train
• /find now works way better, more accurately, and will now autosuggest up to 10 players online or not so you can peep your friends easier and check on those permamutes (now show in /find).
• Muted players can now /link items in their own town chat (the only place they can talk)
• Various Regen and Restricted Item fixes
• Due the the RI update, Loka now reboots in like 75s or so, so that's cool (That's about 1 minute faster than before)

 

[Cryptite]

Network-Wide Chat!
Yadda yadda blah blah Loka Experience™
​

Town, Alliance (and soon Religion as well) is now network-wide! Whether you're in the Hub, or PG, Duels, or Survival, you'll remain in your alliance/town chat and hear it everywhere, including Discord!

Local Chat remains only for Survival and defaults to Public Chat everywhere else.

This feature is a bit rocky as, with most of our efforts, there have been a lot of rewrites to major core systems to bring this online. It'll stabilize over time and we intend to flesh out some QoL things to help the system along. A good example is the # that indicates a person talking from Discord. That will likely expand to reflect where they're talking from, be it Discord, or PvP, or Hub, etc.

Resource Isle Adjustments
Same ores generally, but 3x as much 1/3rd as often. Also no Vexes.
​

While there have been hot debates over RIs and their recent nerf, we do agree that going to an RI once a day for a comparably lower-than-before quantity of ores feels butts. As a result, we've tweaked some numbers and removed some mobbos:

• Resource Isles now reset every 64 hours, up from 20h (every 2.5 days).​
• As a result, each trip will now reward you roughly 3x the ores.​
  • Ultimately, you can go less often, but at least when you do, there's a lot more to mine.​
  • Of course this is still per Resource Isle, so it's your choice to run all 3 at once, or once a day, etc.​
• 
  
• Evokers and Vexes should no longer spawn down in the caves. They will still spawn up top because they do drop Totems of Undying and Recall Stone materials.​

 

[Cryptite]

Deferred Town Naming, and Profanity Filter in Private Chats
Consistency for a more positive community
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We have a separate post that details the Why of these changes. Please read that here. For now, straight to list mode!

• Upon finishing a Town Creation fight, players are no longer required to immediately provide a town name.​
  • Your town will be named after its owner to start with (eg: Cryptite's Town).​
  • You will be able to use /g rename to request a free name change pending approval (like with Alliances).​
  • Presently there's no time requirement for when to change your town's name.​
• Profanity and other filtered speech now applies in Private Chats
  • Profane words will be garbled. You can still get your point across if we do "Charge the #@$ Tgen", rather than hide the message entirely.
  • Presently this is town/alliance, but will also soon include DMs and Religion chat.
• With this there is a New /profile Setting in which you can personally see profanity in your private channels. Players will receive filtered/non-filtered chat based on their own setting.
• Racist/Derogatory and similar words will always be filtered and this cannot be toggled off. We're just okay with casual cursing in private chats.
• Other than these changes, we're still fixing/stabilizing the chat changes; they're a real doozie.

 

[Cryptite]

Some good discussions came up with the LCRs last night and we've made a couple changes to some things Conquest-related for QoL:

Beacon Warp Protection
A little more leeway loading in before you get roflstomped
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For the average player, and far worse for potatoes; the current 5s invuln after warping is woefully insufficient for players generally still loading into fights. Many newer players are getting gibbed without even comprehending what a battlefield is and we recognize players are taking longer than 5s to load in, pot up, etc. As a result, we've made some changes to how the protection works.

• The 5s Invulnerability period after warping to a fight has been increased to 15s with some new changes.
• The Beacon Warp Protection will automatically terminate if you do the following things:
  • You leave the constricted TGen/Inhibitor zone (the immediate area around the building).
  • You fire a bow/crossbow.
  • You engage in combat (usually melee hits, etc).
• Otherwise, after 15s you will no longer be invulnerable.
• Your action bar will indicate your Beacon Warp Protection remaining, similar to PG's (but with a timer).

Beacon Warp Status
See it gooder
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• Beacon Warp status indications have been moved from the Action Bar to the Boss Bar
• This is meant to help players, particularly newer ones, have a far clearer and less subtle indication of whether they are:
  • Waiting for the Beacon Warp to become available
  • Registered to Warp (Ready to Warp)
  • Warping in XXs.
• Hopefully this just communicates things more clearly.

Crossbow and Shield Stat Tracking
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• The stat for axe-breaking shields doesn't work yet; we're looking into it. Once we do we'll add it both to shields and axes.

Otherwise, misc fixes/updates:

• Fixed inactivity alerts not telling players periodically that their town is inactive.
• You can now break plants near TGens/Inhibs. Gogo pre-fight landscaping!
• Fixed some BattleZone bugs concerning re-entering fight zones.
• You can no longer release territories within 7d of Cap
  • There's no real reason to do this besides likely betrayal/strength-dropping of an alliance.
• All TGen NPCs will now tell you what module they require to mod, regardless of if you own the TGen or not. Just right-click them!
• You can no longer be shot down while flying if you have Warp Protection.

Go Forth!

 

[Cryptite]

Holy crap this is the 1,000th Update Post...

General catchup on some bugs:

• Variety of Stat Tracking fixes:
  • Axes now track Shields Disabled
  • Axes now track all variations of Logs (Log vs Wood, stripped as well)
  • Pickaxes now properly track Diorite/Granite/Andesite
  • Shields now track times disabled by Axe
  • Fixed some issues where Bows weren't tracking things correctly
• Restored a lot of missing Glowstone patches in the Nether. Hopefully regenerating correctly now
• Fixed dropping things either disappearing (Chorus fruit, a 2+ year old bug!) or turning to wheat (potatoes).
• Similarly fixed things broken from item frames doing the same thing (like potatoes)
• You can no longer steal things in pots in towns if you don't live there.
• Fixed boats dropping rails (hopefully once and for all)
• Fixed Kalros RI not refreshing its ores correctly