Let's start with the honest part. The first days of the closed beta were rougher than we wanted them to be, and rougher than you deserved. You came in to play, and too often you ended up debugging the world for us instead. We are sorry for that.
Some of you sent reports at five in the morning. Some of you went into the same dungeon again and again with a party of residents that kept letting you down, and then wrote down exactly how. Some of you lost progress to a restart, logged back in, and kept going. Every one of those messages was read, line by line, and most of them have already turned into a change in the world. This post is about what you found, what we did about it, and what is still on the list.
Residents that said one thing and did another
The worst problem was not a crash or a lag spike. It was trust. A resident in your party would shout a skill it had not learned. It would say "щас ресну" and then stand still while you lay on the ground. It would write "кидай трейд" and then refuse the very trade window it had asked for. A guild full of residents would read your question in guild chat and say nothing at all.
A person stops trusting a party member after one lie like that, and you were right to stop.
So we changed the rule the residents speak by. A party line about a skill, a cooldown or mana now needs something true behind it: the skill was really cast a moment ago, the mana really is almost gone. If there is nothing true behind a line, the resident does not say it. Since that update reached both realms early this morning, 3,202 of the 3,203 party callouts the residents made were tied to something that really happened (the one exception was a warning about a mob thief). There are also about a third as many of them as before, because the untrue ones are simply gone.
Party play changed too. When you lead and pick a target, the residents in your party now follow your selection directly instead of waiting to see you fight it, which is where the "they react after five seconds" feeling came from. In guild chat, a line from a person is now answered by one resident of that guild, in guild chat, instead of being ignored. On the English realm, the residents' trade lines no longer carry Russian item names: before the update almost one in five of their chat lines had Cyrillic in them; since then, not a single one.
When you have a kill quest and stand idle with a party of residents, they now go and pull the monsters your quest needs on their own. To do that they read which quests you have, and every such read is logged.
The world itself
Not everything was the residents' fault.
Restarts rolled you back. If you were online during a restart, you could lose the last few minutes of play. The cause was in how the server saved characters on shutdown. Restarts now wait until everything is safely written before the server stops.
The gold shop showed one price and charged another. That happened between the server update and the client update: the server already had the new shop, your client still showed the old one. Selling some items to NPCs failed with a "wrong price" message for the same reason. The client update that brings the two back together is out now: let the launcher update.
Meditation did nothing. It belongs to a later era of the game than ours, so its stones were useless here. Quests no longer hand them out.
Gold was too expensive and there was nothing to wear. Gold at the Treasury now costs around 14,000 to 15,000 coins instead of 50,000 or more, quest coin rewards are three times higher, and spirit from monsters is ten times higher.
Updating was slow and silent. The new textures were big downloads, and the launcher could sit on one file with no sign of life. It now shows the file, the megabytes, the speed and the time left, and a download that breaks tries again by itself.
The crafting Training chests said "insufficient level". The chests sold in the gold shop belong to quests that our era had locked away. Those quests are open again, and the chests open, including the ones bought before.
Flying with the auto-route went in straight lines and hitched once a second. The flight route was rewritten and the stop-start loop in the air and water is gone. A walking route could also take off by itself; this morning's client update fixes that.
How we read your reports
Until this week, every report meant hours of digging through logs by hand. Now one command builds a single page for one play session: what you wrote, who answered and how fast, which residents promised to come and whether they arrived, where you died and why. The first thing it did was find its own mistakes, and we fixed those too. The second thing it did was show us problems nobody had reported yet: a companion that could not join you while a resident was leading your party, and helpers answering an "LF healer" from six kilometres away and never arriving. Both are fixed and on their way to the realms.
What is still not right
We do not want to pretend the list is empty.
- A resident that asks you to open a trade should now take the window it asked for. We have not seen that happen on the realms yet, so if one still refuses, please tell us.
- Your companion does not understand every order yet. "Не понял" is honest, but it is not good enough.
- Dungeons with residents are still far from perfect, and party orders in a dungeon need work. How the night's dungeon fixes went is in devlog 24.
- Some connections still drop. The ones we could trace were network resets, not the game kicking you, and we keep working on them.
Thank you
This world exists so that people can play in it. The closed beta was the first time that really happened, and you were the people. You played through rollbacks, lying party members, a shop that showed the wrong prices, and residents that answered an hour-long dungeon attempt with silence. You did not just leave. You wrote it down, sent screenshots, told us what you expected to happen and what happened instead, and came back the next day to check whether it was fixed.
Thank you. Truly. The world is better today than it was on Friday, almost entirely because of you, and it will be better again next week for the same reason.
The closed beta runs until 6 November. If you are in it: please keep the reports coming, including the small things. They are not small to us.