The closed beta has started, so this is a good moment to show you what the first day of the new realms really looked like. Not the graphs. The bloopers.
Nobody staged any of this. When a person hits something stupid in a game, they get bored and do something else. An AI resident keeps going, and so do a thousand others, until the logs read like a comedy sketch. Unless we say otherwise, the numbers below cover about the first 22 hours on both realms together.
The elves who could not land
Clerics and Archers are Winged Elves, the race born with wings. When one of them gets stuck against something, it can hop over the obstacle by air. A perfectly sensible trick.
On launch day they took off 160,361 times: 102,513 Clerics and 57,848 Archers. 44,152 of those takeoffs happened on one patch of Bamboo Village about 20 metres across. The usual routine was to take off, hover about two metres above the ground for some forty seconds, land, wait three seconds and take off again. The record we found was 89 takeoffs in twelve minutes.
The town itself was to blame. The residents' map of central Bamboo Village showed the rooftops instead of the street, so the Teleport Master, the Banker, the Mailbox and the shops all seemed to stand somewhere nobody could walk. An elf who went in could not see a way out on foot, so it took off. Worse, a hop that got stuck could start another hop, inside the first one.
That was funny for about a minute. Then we added it up. Below level 20, Clerics spent 31.6 % of their time standing idle and Archers 26.2 %, against 12.5 to 14.8 % for everyone else. By that evening 376 Blademasters had reached level 20, and 162 Clerics. If you have ever spent a night looking for a healer, now you know what it looks like from the healer's side.
The man on the boat
The Shipyard Owner stands on a boat. His deck is at a height of about 222 metres, the water at 216 and the sea floor at 199.
Residents had a walking route to him, and the walk ended where walking ends in that spot: on the sea floor, some 23 metres below his feet.
With the fix, winged residents fly to him. In our test one got there on the first try, in 96 seconds, and stopped two metres away.
The tailor nobody could reach
At Walled Stronghold a few craftspeople work on a terrace nine to sixteen metres above the street. Before the fresh start nobody noticed a problem, because by then the residents had flyers. After it, everyone was low level and on foot.
On launch day residents failed to talk to these NPCs about 64,000 times. They succeeded zero times. Most of the gear purchases that failed because the seller was out of reach were aimed at two people on that terrace, Tailor Han and Craftsman Ling.
The wolves nobody would fight
Around level 20 the residents hit a wall, and it had fur. In a sample of 900 residents on the Russian realm, the quest Wolf Infestation was started 652 times, finished 20 times and failed 365 times.
Before a fight a resident estimates how bad it could get if the pull goes wrong. For the monsters of levels 22 to 25, that estimate said two to four times their whole HP. So they refused to fight and did the sensible thing: they called for help. 1,329 calls expired unanswered and 2 got an answer. Everyone who could have come was just as scared.
The real fights told another story. The Heartless Wolf had killed 7 residents in 2,815 fights, and in fights with these monsters a resident's HP typically never fell below 65 to 85 %. The estimate is meant to learn from real fights, but its record dated from before the fresh start and was too thin for these monsters.
We rebuilt it from 370,589 real fights. Replaying the refused pulls against the new numbers, about 91 % would go ahead instead of 34 %. That is a replay and not the live world: the fix comes with the next update.
In the middle of all this Max spotted a resident calling for help with a quest whose next step was talking to someone. That fix comes with the same update.
The shopkeepers
Some residents are born traders. On launch day they opened their cat shops, put out goods worth a few hundred coins and waited.
In about 22 hours the cats stood open for a combined 836 hours and made 53 sales for 27,810 coins. That is about 33 coins an hour. The same character out questing at levels 10 to 19 makes about 25,000. At least 96 % of the stalls sold nothing, and every single buyer was another resident.
The keenest traders spent about a third of their time online in a cat and ended up about five levels behind everyone else. Of those with five hours or more online, 6 % had reached level 20, against 53 % of everyone else.
This may be the most realistic thing they have done so far. You have met this person at West Arch.
With this update, some residents work out what an hour in a cat costs them before they open one. If it pays less than questing, they go questing.
Why we are telling you
None of this showed up with a few dozen test characters. It took thousands of residents starting from level 1 at once, with crowds, empty pockets and no flyers. A world only shows what is broken once it is lived in, and that is what the closed beta is for. It runs until 6 November, in a short development cycle that ends with the open beta launch.
Where the fixes stand as we write this: the endless hops, the boat, the terrace NPCs on their quest routes and the shopkeepers' new sense of value are live on the English realm. The walk out of central Bamboo Village is on there for most residents. The wolves, the lone quest caller and shopping from the terrace come with the next update, which also brings all of this to the Russian realm. We will know they worked when the numbers above change, and we will tell you if they do not.
If you are in the beta and a resident does something no person would do, type !break and a few words. So far we have found the best bugs by reading what residents did. The next ones are yours.