Hi Folks,

TLDR? See the last few lines at the end of the article.

Firstly, thank you as always for your patronage and doing what you do to support us and our development efforts. We are a little unique in terms of our game and platform, in that we are in development (early access) while you all put in the time and effort to play. Because of that, we always do what we can to limit the impact to players with the changes we make to get us moving closer to our vision for the game.

This news article is to announce that we are disabling enchanting as we know it. We appreciate that this will strongly affect those that have invested large amounts of time and effort into it. We have thought long and hard about this particular change, and wanted to share some of the reasons on why it needs to be done.

- The two developers that wrote the system are no longer with us. The complexities of this system mean that it is quite difficult to simply pick up and support/balance ongoing. We've tried multiple times to make this happen, but the fact is it's just too much work. That's why for example you saw Five Star General disabled, but never brought back or otherwise addressed.

- Some of the enchants are wildly imbalancing, and result in trivializing encounters that we don't want trivialized. This means we need to redesign these encounters to suit the enchants, which simply isn't sustainable. (We should be designing enchants to match encounters, not the other way around.)

- Moving toward Britannia we are no longer using LoA monsters and PvE balancing will be scaled toward UO. Enchanting in its current form makes this very difficult to accomplish for us.

- Enchanting in its current state isn't lore friendly and doesn't meet the current team's ongoing vision for the game itself, especially with the impending move to the Britannia map later this year, and the rebasing of everything involved in that process.

- Enchanting in its current form has a fairly significant performance impact on the game. This was one of the primary reasons for disabling Five Star General, which was an extreme case of performance impact.

- Our other, more extreme, alternative to this was an item/gold wipe, which we really wanted to avoid. While the economy is definitely not in a great state due to multiple challenges over the last year or so (yes we are well aware!), we want to avoid any sort of wipe wherever possible.

- We are working very hard on creating new systems which will empower our crafters and player economy, enchanting conflicts with our long term vision for this in its current form.

However, your characters will continue to track what enchants they previously had from 'Enchanting v1.0', and as we move forward and potentially introduce an 'Enchanting v2.0', we will look to make sure that characters that previously put in the time, money and effort are rewarded appropriately. Plans aren't set in stone for this part yet, but we'll share more detail as soon as we can.


Hang on to your enchanting mats too - we will once again look at a way in which we can make these worth something to you.


TLDR?

- Enchanting v1.0 is disabled for the short term.
- Enchanting materials will no longer drop off mobs.
- Enchanting may return with a v2.0 in the long term. It will be a ground-up redesign/rewrite
- Keep your mats, we will look to reward you for that investment and will advise on how we will do that later down the track.
- Your character will continue to track what enchants you had from v1.0, and we will also look to reward you for that investment as well.
- We have exciting overhauls to the player economy and crafting coming very soon!

Attention Tamers!
ZooKeeper will remain active temporarily while we move through this transition.

Thank you once again for your continued participation in our project, and we sincerely hope you'll enjoy everything we have in store in 2020.

During the next scheduled restart in about 20 minutes, we'll be upgrading the server to the latest version. Be sure to grab the latest client as this solves a desync issue and possibly other things. Client upgrade is not required however, so you may still log in with the old client until you've downloaded the new one.

The previously reported Known Issue involving animations, effects, sounds not working in the latest client is now resolved in this newer version.

  • An issue with some commands not working has been resolved: /myjail /enchant /myenchant -- if you find any other commands are not working please send a bug report, thanks.

It's time! Britannia (well, Britain and its surrounds) is up on test server! A few things to be aware of:

This is still an early build, there will be things to fix. Feel free to report those in #britannia-chat
This is currently just Britain town itself, and only West Britain, along with the surrounding areas (Graveyard, farms, northwest forest)
The spawning/merchants are placeholders for the most part. There's a bunch of refinement still to be done
Did we mention there will be issues? There WILL be issues! Constructive feedback is appreciated.
Known issues:

This is what we are tracking so far. No need to report these:

Current Known Issues (01/16/20):

- Some textures missing, or temporary.
- Some Structures are missing or temporary (Ongoing effort, buildings, stairs, other)
- Some Structure Walls aren't 'pixel perfect' and may show tiny gaps.
- Cave Lighting needs tweaking
- Ocean Water is too dark (Fixed in next build)
- Some Britain Building Roofs have rogue pieces that won't disappear (Fixed in next build)
- Few buildings not finished (Placeholder) (Fixed in next build)
- Some Doors are darker than normal (Fixing)
- Slight performance hit at night (Lighting!) (Looking into optimizing this)
- World Spawns are not finalized, the current spawns are temporary and are being replaced with a permanent system

  • An issue has been resolved with Fish not being recognized with Gardening
  • A new command /refresh has been added to aid with some graphical glitches that occur occasionally; this command will freeze you in place for a couple of seconds, while refreshing the view of objects on your screen. This can help solve issues where a player appears naked and unmounted when they are in fact not naked and mounted. It also aids with decorating objects on plots that appear to move up while adjusting them; refreshing after adjusting these items will subsequently show the objects in their correct position.
  • an issue has been resolved with bandage buff-icon spam
    - an issue has been resolved with maker's mark being applied crafted items incorrectly or with someone else's name in some cases
  • Fishing while in a Guarded location will now only yield fish; for other Fishing rewards, you'll have to step out of Guards protection
  • An issue has been resolved with double clicking a fire beetle activating smelting ability instead of opening it's backpack as intended
  • An issue has been resolved causing mobs to sometimes continue attacking after a player becomes hidden; damage should still apply from delayed damage like Poison or other delayed spells, while hidden, but mobs should de-aggro properly now
  • An issue has been resolved causing the server to freeze in some cases when ejecting/banning mobs or yourself from a plot

Wanna show off your PvP skills, earn bragging rights, and collect a unique prize? We are hosting a 1v1 PvP tournament! This tournament is slightly different than traditional tournament rules so please be sure to read the rules carefully, then sign up at the link below! Please forward any questions to Scout or Smokey Rust.
Good luck, and GIT GUD
Sign-up ends January 10th, 2020 at 8PM EST.
Rules and Sign-up:
https://forms.gle/dSiaueJnXRRAPEie7

After being murdered, players should now, again, be given the option to punish or forgive a murder.

We just wanted to take a moment to remind everyone of our Natural Disasters policy with LOU Housing. If you or someone you know that plays LOU is affected by a Natural Disaster or other hardship in which they will be unable to access LOU for an extended time, please reach out and we will be happy to hold your accounts plots until you are able to reach them again. With every month revealing a new natural disaster on our planet, we cannot express our sympathy enough for those affected.

  • an issue has been resolved with earth elementals not decaying properly
    - an issue with poison not doing damage to hidden players in some cases has been resolved

Happy New Year everyone!

This is a quick note to say that we do read each and every bit of feedback we get, whether it's a bug, a suggestion, or a report of player misconduct. However, as we are a team of volunteers that do this for free in our spare time, who all have lives and families, it is simply not possible to respond to all of the reports that we get (and there are many!). Please do remember that this is not a commercial server, and no one is paid to do what we do.

In particular, please be assured that we investigate every report of player misconduct and take them very seriously. When required, we take the appropriate action against those players. While it may not always be visible to you, please be assured we do action each and every one of these.

Lastly, we'd like to remind everyone that if you have concerns with any actions of staff, then the correct escalation path is to email [email protected] - once again, we cannot guarantee a response to any emails sent to this address, however be assured they are read and actioned as required.

Thank you all once again for your support, and we look forward to sharing with you all the new features we have planned for 2020!

Santa has closed access to his workshop in order to start working on next Christmas. Bye Santa!

  • At last, the long-standing bug causing the server to freeze sometimes when players die while poisoned has been resolved

There appears to be an issue with some or all in-game feedback reports (bug reports) not being received. We're looking into the issue. In the meantime you can use the Discord Feedback Bot to submit bugs, as those are still being received.

  • An issue has been resolved preventing dead characters from using teleporters