[Admin Lvl 5 USWestGoblinPosts: 75]

Fixed this today, thanks!

[Admin Lvl 5 USWestGoblinPosts: 75]

k

[Admin Lvl 5 USWestGoblinPosts: 75]

Oops, note to self: do more notes, also release an update this week 😀

[Admin Lvl 5 USWestGoblinPosts: 75]

Hi all, sorry for the delay. It’s been incredibly busy! Thankfully I’ve started training another developer who has been helping out with a few changes over the last week.

One big change I finally finished was switching all clients and servers over to secure encrypted connections by default. This helps for people who are on spotty phone networks (which throttle or block unsecured connections) and also allows me to launch on some other platforms. Other than that there’s been some bugs fixed and a few changes being tested for improving player retention. Here are some of the updates:

-Fix the bug where you couldn’t type in the full screen chat field
-Changed max infamy penalty from 15 to 30 minutes and cap from 2 hours to 4 hours
-Enabled Wellington recall tiles
-Added the ‘Interface’ window which lets you adjust the UI, and it saves the settings now
-Newborn sheep can’t be sheared until an hour old (this is temporary while being reworked)
-Fixed a bug related to dropping ability books while researching

I also updated the beginning quests a bit and added an on-screen dialog to help guide newer players through the first few quests. If you experienced a bug related to this window while the updates were taking place just make sure to refresh your client.

There is still a lot of work to do, and some bugs I’m working on fixing. Keep the reports coming if you have any new information so we can get everything taken care of. I’ll try to put together dev notes every now and then. Thanks for all the testing and support!

[Admin Lvl 5 USWestGoblinPosts: 75]

Testing out another little update (4.8.3):

-Fixed music not working on mobile
-Reduced size of action button and made pickup button permanently visible next to it
-Wood planks now show as invisible to pick up (like a trap)
-Moved d-pad over some to reduce thumb strain hopefully
-Added an ‘Establishing connection’ window which attempts a couple connections to a server
-Optimized map updates somewhat for better fps and less of a jolt on weaker hardware

I still have more optimizing and polishing to do of course but we are making progress. I also discovered (thanks to a mobile user who helped me debug this) that some cellular data networks (Sprint for example) can block the client from connecting to any server. When I establish a secure socket (like https) it gets around this problem. So I may transition the whole game over to SSL soon. Let me know if you run into any new bugs, thanks!

[Admin Lvl 5 USWestGoblinPosts: 75]

Hey guys I quickly got another client build out for you (4.8.2) with some basic commands that will let you customize your UI. These commands are not saved across different play sessions YET, as I wanted to get this out without too many delays. That’s also why these are just commands at the moment and not settings in a fancy dialog window 🙂

This will be great for PC users especially as they can basically replicate a better version of the old UI by turning off and resizing elements:

– /dpad toggle now extends chat window down like before
– /action toggle will turn off action circle and place the info panel in it’s place
– /quickuse will turn off the quick use buttons
– /invicons will turn off the build and backpack buttons (toggle the inventory with TAB)
– /chatwidth will let you set a width percentage between 30 and 100
– /chatopacity will let you modify the transparency of the chat background (0 – 100)
– /pickup temp command to force a pick up until other issues are fixed (get traps on mobile)

Chats last a bit longer before fading. The quick buttons now show a red background when durability is low. Also I have switched the use and drop buttons to prevent accidental thumb drops for touch screens (something else to get used to I know).

So I’ll try to get these settings saved soon, fix some more bugs, etc – as time allows. Thanks!

[Admin Lvl 5 USWestGoblinPosts: 75]

Thanks for all the reports on this.. It was a major pain to reproduce. I think it was caused by certain items in quick slots (like rafts for example). Please refresh your client to get version 4.8.1 and try again to see if it’s still happening. Once this is taken care of I can move onto some basic UI customization.

[Admin Lvl 5 USWestGoblinPosts: 75]

Everyone was asking for transparency, so I made the game transparent!

Just kidding. Thanks for the great feedback so far after testing the first UI draft. Remember this is just the first version, I have a lot of work to do still! Despite that I appreciate all the people who expressed gratitude for the new interface. It seems to address the frustrations of mobile users especially. For PC users I was already planning to add in more toggles, sliders, customization options in general so they can get things they don’t need out of the way and highlight the things they do need. Though adjusting opacity and sizing will help tablet/mobile users as well. Besides that I need to look into fixing a couple bugs, re-positioning some elements, and adding some general polish to future iterations. For people with small d-pad issues remember to update your app to get the updated graphics. Also a couple people mentioned a black screen issue so I’ll look at that soon.

I’ve been working some long days to get this draft out for you guys to test so give me at least half a day to recharge and I’ll get back to work 🙂 Also going forward I might have the mods try to merge posts into one feedback thread and leave out duplicate suggestions just to keep things organized and easy to read through. Thanks!

[Admin Lvl 5 USWestGoblinPosts: 75]

Sorry about that 🙂 Some things are temporarily in transition is all – I did my best to explain here:

http://www.mysteralegacy.com/forums/topic/july-dev-notes/

[Admin Lvl 5 USWestGoblinPosts: 75]

Going to be experimenting with some numbers for a bit and recording the results. So test things out and maybe sharpen your pitchforks ahead of time. Keep in mind all of this may be adjusted depending on my retention data.

First up, now that Wellington is working well for it’s purpose I’d like to reduce infamy length considerably.

-Infamy cap reduced from 8 hours max down to 2 hours.
-Max amount of infamy gained in 1 kill (when at large level differences) reduced from 1 hour down to 15 minutes.
-Combat penalties due to infamy no longer affect PVE.

Don’t quit just yet fearful newbies and Galebrook tourists, I have changes for you too.

-Death penalties for persons without infamy are reduced based on how powerful the murderer is compared to the victim.
-In PVP, drop rates for lowish level players have been reduced a bit more regardless of the attacker.
-Infamous persons have a slightly higher drop rate on death and have less defense based on how much infamy they have (does not affect PVE).

This means very little loss and risk for the victim in unbalanced fights. There are various scenarios with different skill, myst, and drop rate penalties depending on the matchup. The killers have less consequences but increased risk instead, while the weaker players can be more bold.

Also before any massacres begin, keep in mind:

-Assassin XP is scaled down if the victim hasn’t been alive very long (a number of hours).

There are other numbers I’ve tweaked for this experiment but I want to go over another big change:

-Items no longer drop when burdened. Instead you lose more and more speed depending on how burdened you are. You also have a dodge penalty.

This will show a visible ‘sweating’ effect on your character while you are moving.

That about wraps it up. So don’t feel as bad killing that pour soul who just finished a mining trip and is limping back to Wellington, sweating and bleeding before you. But also don’t feel bad if you are on the receiving end, because chances are you wont lose much if anything. Who knows, maybe as a group some lower level players will be able to do some damage eventually. Either way I’ll keep an eye out and make adjustments if necessary.

[Admin Lvl 5 USWestGoblinPosts: 75]

-Fixed a bug where towers incorrectly identified attackers as noble vigilantes when the tower owners had infamy.

This was a side effect of another fix from a week ago where neutral tribe towers were attacking executioners. Let me know if there are any other issues with this.

Thanks for everyone who sent in kind words about the recent updates. I’m sorry I haven’t had a chance to personally respond but I do appreciate it.

For those who are worried about the rise of PVE focused players I just want to reassure you that I will be continually balancing the game to serve all play styles as much as possible. Things that work will be kept and things that don’t work out will eventually be adjusted or removed. The latest patch didn’t change anything with PVP, and the world will keep expanding with both white and green maps to explore.

I do apologize for how slow things can move at times. I still haven’t been able to quit my normal job just yet, but I’m happy to be able to work on this game in my free time and keep it free to play for you all.

Last month Google contacted me and said that the Mystera Legacy mobile app shows a lot of promise. They offered to showcase it for a period of time, which helped bring in a lot of new players. That time ended about a week ago.. so to keep app downloads and exposure high I hope to invest a little more time into marketing and developing for new platforms, alongside fixing bugs and working on the upcoming UI improvements. The exclusive costumes are showing promise, so if we can keep the game growing and improving I will be able to quit my job soon – and maybe even expand the Mystera team to get these updates out faster for you all. As always, thanks for testing 🙂

[Admin Lvl 5 USWestGoblinPosts: 75]

-Underground walls can now appear on dirt floor, without being adjacent to other dirt walls
-Now when the negative water digging event occurs it keeps the water shallow, rather than going straight to dirt, and adjacent water has a 50% chance to go shallow rather than 100%

[Admin Lvl 5 USWestGoblinPosts: 75]

Here’s the latest:

-Fixed a bug where towers wouldn’t give infamy to a raider if they recently hit an infamous player
-Made the depth recall only work from underworld maps, as it was before the new maps were added

Thanks to Therieth for the detailed reports on those. Kay is investigating server logs related to the past reports on the tower issue. Feel free to send any more details through the contact form.

I’ve been testing different types of servers with different versions of Node over the last couple of days. 6 is still the most stable, and a few servers are running on it now. 10 is still very unstable and no servers are running on it, but 11 seems to run well for several hours with minimal pauses for cleanup. Sometimes there was no server lag at all for long periods of time, which was awesome to see. It loads up faster as well, but I did notice increasing instability over time with issues arising on SEA and USE especially. So unfortunately, until their code is more mature I’m going to be reverting every server back to 6.

The lag on the new hardware is still 2-3 times less frequent than it was previously. Currently It’s about 1/3rd of a second pause every 5 minutes or so, under heavy load. On version 11 that mini-pause happens about once an hour, but then over time the pause duration can increase up to 2 seconds(!), among other issues. So we’ll probably be fine on 6 while we wait for updates.

I’ll keep a close eye on that, but now that the population is better spread out I’ll shift to working on some new balance and content patches. There are a couple new accessories coming, along with maps, and costumes. I’m going to implement some exclusivity for the better looking costumes soon, to reward big supporters. That may help raise funds to add and upgrade servers even further, anticipating the population increase from the future IOS release. Hopefully I don’t get rekt by summer break before then 😀

[Admin Lvl 5 USWestGoblinPosts: 75]

Thanks for the reports, I’m looking into this.

Edit: Looks like most items were recovered. Not completely certain what the cause was but it may be due to some isolated testing of node 11 on this server. Doesn’t seem to be happening anymore after reverting to a slightly older version of node 11.

• This reply was modified 5 years, 10 months ago by  Admin.

[Admin Lvl 5 USWestGoblinPosts: 75]

Another update on server growth and stability:

I’ve added a new SA server since there are so many players coming from South America it will be nice to have a couple options. Plus we need more room to grow, as we keep topping our record for players online!

Last night I migrated the US servers to new hardware which reduced lag by quite a bit. I still have to migrate London, EU, and SEA which will probably be complete within the next day or two.

I noticed that USW lag had the biggest reduction – but USE and UST only had a moderate improvement. I’d like to get that better so it’s on par with the other servers.

I’ll get a bit technical to explain this. Basically the garbage collection on those servers is having some hiccups. It’s what causes the occasional rubber banding. The code behind that is not under my control, there are two other teams that manage that process and I’ve been following their progress.

So I’m testing a new version of Node (the code that runs the server) and I’m seeing some promising results. Basically when we were running on Node 8 earlier this year it caused large and progressively increasing delays when trying to reclaim memory.. some of you might remember how bad it was back then. I thought it was my code and spent two months optimizing everything, which has been great, even though it didn’t solve the problem I was looking for at that time.

I found out that going to an older version, Node 6, actually made the pauses unnoticeable most of the time. That’s what we’ve been using for the last few months which has been pretty decent – but it could be better. Version 6 is feeling less efficient as the servers grow larger. I’ve tested versions 4,7,8,9.. it’s all bad. Versions 10 and 11 seemed great but were buggy for a while. Now they seem to be working better, and the garbage collection performance is amazing so far. If testing continues to go well with 10+ and they’ve fixed the bugs then I will start switching some servers over to this new engine soon, and hopefully those annoying rubber bands will be behind us 🙂

Also, one quick change which is live – I made it so building fires in Wellington costs a lot less myst than other structures.

Since the patch a few days ago, across all servers there has only been one reported case of Wellington griefing that required admin intervention. It only took a few seconds to fix the issue, so I may not have to give Wellington citizens any extra tools after all. I’ll still keep an eye out to make sure everything is balanced and manageable. Thanks for your feedback, I’ll post another update soon 🙂

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