AC2:Announcements - 2003/01 - Cacophony

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Episode 2: "Cacophony"

Original Link (now dead) - microsoftgamesinsider.com/AC2/Guides/epguide_01-03_index.htm?nc=1


January 2003

Teaser

Original Link (now dead) - microsoftgamesinsider.com/AC2/Guides/ep2-teaser.htm?nc=1


Episode 2: "Cacophony"

January 2003

Telkhe, Jasi, and Thukkos paused and surveyed the scene. Sclavus corpses lay strewn around them, steam rising from the bodies in the brisk morning air. The Preceptor's corpse lay at Thukkos' feet, its tail still twitching.

"A well-fought battle," Thukkos declared. He smirked. "Are the both of you still alive?" He followed this with a sound Telkhe had become very familiar with since joining their fellowship: a boisterous laugh. Expressive and animated, Thukkos wasn't quite like any Lugian Telkhe had met before-others he had met tended to be impassive and serious.

"I'm fine," grumbled Jasi. "No thanks to you, charging into a cabal of Sclavus like that."

Telkhe did have to agree with her sentiment. The battle had been quite intense, and if not for the timely healing spell from Jasi, he might just now be waking up at his Lifestone. He and Jasi had been traveling together for some time now; the temporary companionship they had forged to push back the Drudge threat had evolved into a close friendship. Many times already they had saved each other's lives. "I'm fine as well," he nodded.

"Bah! A battle such as that makes one feel alive… To appreciate life!" Thukkos bellowed, then turned his attention to the corpse that lay before him. He knelt next to it, planting the point of his sword in the swampy ground. It stood swaying as he looked up at his companions. "Let's see if this fellow has what we are looking for."

Thukkos began ripping off sections of the Preceptor's armor, throwing them in no particular direction. One piece, a notched and blood-soaked shred of breastplate, flew straight toward Jasi and struck her in the lower leg, leaving a sizeable stain. Jasi jumped back and let out a yelp.

Apparently not noticing, Thukkos continued searching the corpse. Finally he reached down and held up an item so Telkhe could see it. "Here we go. This is it, isn't it, my friend?"

Telkhe stepped closer. It certainly looked to him like the item that Seskri had described.

"I believe so," Telkhe said. "We should bring it to Seskri and see what insights it can give her into the Sclavus activity."

Ever since the Drudges had overrun portions of Osteth, the voices of the land had sounded uneasy to Telkhe, but he couldn't define exactly why. Now that the creatures on Omishan, his ancestral home, seemed to be following the direction of some unseen hand, the land's spirits seemed even more troubled.

"Agreed!" Thukkos nodded, then grasped the hilt of his sword and used it to brace himself as he got to his feet. He pulled his sword from the ground, then said, "While we are in the village, perhaps I can transmute some of that treasure we found and improve this sword of mine."

"And perhaps I can get a new robe dyed," Jasi muttered under her breath as she summoned a portal.

Telkhe shook his head and stepped through.

 

Teaser Video

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Letter to the Players

Original Link (now dead) - microsoftgamesinsider.com/AC2/Guides/lttp-01-03.htm?nc=1


"Cacophony"
January 2003 Letter to the Players

Here's a summary of some of the major changes and additions we're making in our January Episode, "Cacophony." There are a number of changes made for January not discussed below; you'll see these changes noted in the January Developer's Notes. A number of new quests centered around the Tumerok continent of Omishan are not discussed here either, since we don't want to spoil them. Happy Holidays, and we look forward to presenting the January Episode to you in a few weeks.

1) Global Chat Channels
The essence of any massively multiplayer game is the ability to communicate with the other people who share your gameworld. Whether you're coordinating resources to finish a quest, or finding someone to hunt with, or just generally chatting, global and regional chat channels are indispensable tools. To that end, we've introduced three new types of chat channels for players: general, regional, and trade channels.

The general chat channel is accessible to everyone on the server. This channel will default to your chat window 4, but you can configure the channel to appear on any chat window you wish (as you can with all of the channels by going to your chat options.) To speak on this channel, type /cg message. Messages from this channel will appear as [General] Player_Name: message.

The second type of chat channel is the regional channel. All of Dereth has been divided up into 21 different regional channels, the names and scope of which correspond to the 21 different playground names (i.e., the names you find on the continent difficulty maps accessed through the Map panel). For example, while you are in the Drudge Citadel area, you will be able to send and receive messages on the [Citadel] channel. The format for this channel follows that of the general channel. To speak on this channel, type /cr message. This channel will default to your chat window 1.

The third type, the trade channel, is assigned to a small region around each town for players trading and seeking items. These channels will always be called [Trade] even though (for example) the [Trade] channel around Cavendo is completely different than the [Trade] channel around Mayoi. To speak on this channel, type /ct message. This channel will default to chat window 1.

Note that a message will appear in the chat window when players enter or leave a regional or trade channel.

We hope that these channels will help bring people closer together and find each other more easily. Keep in mind that if a channel serves no purpose for you (e.g., the [General] channel may be too active and spammy for you to get any useful information), you can elect not to have any messages from that channel displayed at all.

For the future, our next step will be to implement user-controlled channels. This would allow players to create their own chat rooms for their own use, whether it be for friends, or for coordinating multiple allegiances on a quest. The details of the implementation are still under discussion; one possible path may be that every player can create one channel which they own and control who is invited to that channel. We hope to do this in the next few months.

2) Other Chat Changes
All chat channels, including "allegiance" and "fellowship," now have the same format: [Channel_Name] Player_Name: Message. So, allegiance messages now look like [Allegiance] Pectar: Hi!

We've also added an opacity slider to each of your 4 chat windows. By pressing the button on the upper left corner of the window, you can modify the opacity of your window from complete transparency to complete opacity. In a future month we will extend this functionality to the radar as well.

Also, for each type of chat message category, you can now elect to have those message windows "pop up," or become visible, when you receive a new message. For example, you can put your allegiance messages in window 2, minimize that window, and then that window will pop up only when you receive an allegiance message. (You must minimize it again after every popup if you wish to keep it off the screen). Select the popup option in your Chat panel category options to turn this on.

3) Treasure Tweaks
In January we focused on addressing the "gaps" in the treasure system that had occurred. At certain experience level ranges, players sometimes had difficulty finding useful armor and weapons in the loot system when fighting creatures of the player's level. To this end, we have smoothed the curve considerably for the treasure system. We've adjusted the specific values of items, such as damage and armor level, to ensure that players are finding more useful loot for their level more often.

In addition, weapons used by many specialized classes, such as Claw Bearers and Hive Keepers, are now be generated with damage values akin to their non-specialized cousins. Players will also find that the level restrictions on many items are roughly equivalent to the level of the creatures that dropped them. This means that items coming from a level 20 creature would have restrictions a few levels above or below level 20. The traits given on many items have been revised as well.

For the future, we will be concentrating on making the "cool" loot even cooler. Weapons and armor will begin to affect a lot more statistics than just combat delay and vigor cost. Also, powerful weapons and armor will do a much better job of immediately communicating to the player (through the Examine panel) that they are items of significant power.

4) Crafting Tweaks
We've examined and improved a number of areas affecting crafting.

First, we revised the items created by the Armor and Weapon crafting skills to make their damage and armor level more compatible with the treasure system. Generally, all crafted items should be slightly better than the average range of loot items for that level, although rare treasure items can be more powerful. Crafted items will also have higher gold values, depending on the skill tier of the item. Along with this, the cost of crafting weapons and armor in tiers 7 to 10 has been reduced by 30%. Toolmaking has also been revised so that it is easier to progress to more difficult skill tiers.

In Osteth, the more difficult variants of the creature types that drop trophy items now have an equal chance of dropping that trophy item. For example, all Reedsharks above the Reedshark Runt can now potentially drop the Reedshark Spike. Also, Mimbu Carapaces now drop on additional creatures.

To make mining more lucrative and appealing, players will now tend to receive higher trait motes from mines than in the past. Also, mines flagged as producing uncommon motes will generate these more often. Distilling materials has been enhanced as well, with distilled uncommon motes, such as the mote of Elariwood distilled from a mote of Wood, receiving traits equal to 35% of the original mote's traits. We've also doubled the number of times you can mine a specific resource to 10 times a day.

Item Improvement also received attention. Skills now offer more benefits and are more accessible to all players. The first tier skills should now be accessible to players level 10 to 25, tier 2 improvements should be accessible to players 25 to 35, and tier 3 should be accessible to players level 35 to 50. To improve accessibility, we've reduced the trait values required for the various recipes. We've also instituted new caps on the maximum possible benefit each skill tier can provide, which should motivate players to continue to improve their skills as they increase in level.

Another crafting area addressed in this episode is dyeing. The dyeing vocation has been completely removed and all dyeing recipes have been moved to Item Improvement. In addition, all characters now have access to all of the dyeing recipes by default. These recipes can be found in the Item Improvement section. Finally, the dyeing recipes have been simplified and now require only two things: a dye plant found randomly throughout the game world, and gold. The gold costs for dyeing have been dramatically reduced. Since the difficulty of some of the dyeing recipes has changed, players will find that they may not have the same skill level in dyeing that they had previously.

Workshops and recipes now display more information for crafters. When examined, workshops now display the amount of the bonus they provide along with the amount of fuel needed to reach the next skill bonus level. Recipes now display the difficulty of the recipe, letting crafters know if their crafting skill level offers a high enough chance of success to risk attempting to craft an item. Additionally, the reset timer on nearly all of the recipes has been removed; those timers still remaining are displayed when examining the recipe.

5) Skill Examination Panel Changes
When you examine a skill to see its description, you will now see a lot more information, including:

  • The minimum and maximum base damage. The minimum damage would be the damage done by the skill with a rating of 1, while the maximum would be the damage of the skill with a rating of 50.
  • The actual damage of the skill at its current level.
  • Vigor cost.
  • Range, both the minimum and maximum, in meters.
  • Reset, or cool down, timer between uses.
  • Vulnerable time, or how long after using the skill before you can use any of your skills (such as when using a recall skill).
  • Additional effects, such as if the skill does damage over time, its area of effect, or other special effects.


6) Tweaks to December Content

  • All of the "killquest" creatures now initiate Fellowship-propagative quests.
  • On Osteth and Omishan, you will now see another type of rare quest creature: the dungeon quest creature. Killing this creature will give you a quest to go to the bottom of a local dungeon and kill the "boss" creature found there within a certain time period.
  • The treasure found in the Order Caches, Shadow Hoards, and Singularity Troves have all been significantly improved.


7) Miscellaneous Tweaks

  • The Fellowship panel now refreshes its information much faster than before. This should help group and healer play significantly.
  • When you complete a quest, your experience point reward for the quest will be displayed in your Chat panel.
  • When you are hunting outside of a Fellowship and kill a creature, the amount of experience points gained is displayed in your Chat panel. For January, you will not see such displays while you are in a Fellowship. This will be added in a future month. Also, if you are hunting with a pet, you will typically see two such messages every time you kill a creature. The total these messages indicate is your total experience point reward for the creature. These messages will be combined into one in February or March.


8) Some Fixed December Bugs
(full list to be available in the January Developer's Notes)

  • The bug where your Chat panel stops autoscrolling has been fixed.
  • There is now a "Smaller" option for your font size, approximating the size of the display font at release.
  • The bug where Aunmauri's Vengeance increased one's run speed by 500% has been fixed. There is no longer any speed buff associated with the third obelisk, only the damage bonus that had been originally intended.
  • Characters that had names of a single letter have been restored and are playable again.


9) XP Reduction for Tyrants and Gigaraths
As part of the January episode, we have made some AI pathing changes to help solve a bug that would cause monsters to get stuck on the landscape and subsequently not attack its foe. This would allow a user to get XP from the monster at little to no risk. This problem was very noticeable with Tyrants and Gigaraths. While we are hopeful that the fixes we put in will fix the bug, we are also aware that we could not allow this bug to present such an obvious exploitable situation in the game. As such, until we are 100% certain that the Monster AI has been fixed, and monsters are not able to become easily stuck on the landscape, we have reduced the amount of experience points tyrants and gigaraths give by 90%. This is only a temporary measure, and as soon as we are certain that the bug has been fixed, we will return the monsters to their normal XP. In the mean time, other good monster types to hunt would be Flayers, Shreths, Gurogs and Gear Knights. There are also a lot of other exciting battles to be had. We apologize for this inconvenience and we hope to be able to return these monsters to their full XP soon.

 

Dev Notes

Original Link (now dead) - microsoftgamesinsider.com/AC2/Guides/ep2-devnotes.htm?nc=1


"Cacophony"
January 2003 Developers' Notes

The chaos, first seen in the Drudge incursions on the continent of Osteth, has spread to Omishan, the ancestral lands of the Tumeroks. These threats may have seemed daunting just a few weeks before, but the ingenuity of the mortal races, tested and refined by the Drudge plague, has risen to the challenge.

Many crafters, not satisfied with the arduous nature of crafting some items, have simplified the process of creating and enhancing many of their products. Others have found better ways to obtain the materials needed for crafting items, making it possible for everyone to be well equipped to face the challenges ahead. It is even rumored that one ingenious crafter has found a means to craft powerful potions to restore one's health and vitality.

Improved lines of communication have developed as well, so that all can be informed of the latest threats found in the land. In addition, adventurers, hardened in combat against the Drudges, have better control of their skills and can more clearly discern how to use the items that they find in the field. Yet some wonder if these and the many other discoveries made will be enough to face whatever threats their unseen enemy has in store…

Highlights

Omishan Quests: The Tumerok continent of Omishan has received a number of quests and tweaks to existing quests. Players will find more NPCs who can guide them in the process of uncovering Dereth's secrets and the forces responsible for the heightened monster activity.

Monster Quests: Monsters on Osteth and Omishan are bestowing more and different types of quests. In addition to quests to kill certain numbers of monsters, other monsters will bestow quests to find and defeat boss monsters found somewhere in the land. These boss creatures have enhanced treasure and experience rewards.

More Chat Enhancements: Players can now adjust the opacity of the various chat windows found in game, from completely opaque to completely transparent. They can do this by selecting the new option button found on the chat windows and adjusting the slider bar found there.

As mentioned in January's Letter to the Players, we're introducing three new types of chat channels in this episode. Full details on how these channels work are in the Letter, but the table below briefly summarizes these channels:

Channel name Switch used to speak on Speaks to
General /cg Entire game world
Regional /cr Sub region the character is currently in
Trade /ct A small region surrounding each town

In addition to these changes, the format of the text displayed in the chat windows has been streamlined. Each message received in the chat window will indicate what channel the message is on (such as the trade, allegiance, or fellowship channels), and who sent the message.

Example - [Trade] Pectar: I'm selling all types Human armor, next to forge!

Along with these changes, two more minor changes have been introduced. Chat windows can now be set to "pop up," or become visible, when they receive a new message. This will allow players to hide windows that currently aren't receiving messages, such as a window that has been assigned to receive allegiance messages. Finally, chat messages can be assigned a new "smaller" font size (which is actually the same as the text size was when AC2 launched).

Treasure System Improvements: Almost all the values used by the treasure system have been touched upon in some form for the January episode, resulting in a number of improvements. For example, there is a more even distribution of usable weapons and armor for all levels of players, filling many of the "holes" that previously existed in the treasure system. In addition, weapons used by many specialized classes, such as Claw Bearers and Hive Keepers, are now generated with damage values akin to their non-specialized cousins. Players will also find that the level restrictions on many items are roughly equivalent to those on the creature from which the item came. This means that items coming from a level 20 creature would have restrictions a few levels above or below level 20. The traits given to many items have been revised as well, and now many of the uncommon traits no longer appear on lower level items.

Craft System Improvements: We've examined and improved a number of areas affecting crafting. The first area is mining. To make mining more lucrative and appealing, players will now tend to receive higher trait motes from mines than they did in the past. Also, mines flagged as producing uncommon motes will generate these more often. Distilling materials has been enhanced as well. Distilled uncommon motes, such as a mote of Elariwood distilled from a mote of Wood, now receives traits equal to 35% of the original mote's traits. We've also doubled the number of times you can mine a specific resource to 10 times a day.

The trophy items dropped by various creatures will now appear more frequently and on more creatures than before. This includes the highly sought-after Mimbu carapaces, so these items shouldn't be as difficult to track down as they once were.

Item Improvement now offers more benefits and is more accessible to all players. The first tier skills should now be accessible to players level 10 to 25, tier 2 improvements should be accessible to players 25 to 35, and tier 3 should be accessible to players level 35 to 50. To make these skills more accessible, we've reduced the trait values required for the various recipes. We've also instituted new higher caps on the maximum possible benefit each skill tier can provide, motivating players to continue to improve their skills as they increase in level.

Another crafting area addressed in this episode is Dyeing. The Dyeing vocation has been completely removed, and all dyeing recipes have been moved to Item Improvement. This means that a character's Item Improvement skill will be used to determine that character's success at dyeing an item. While the character's previous skill in the Dyeing vocation will be carried over and applied to the Item Improvement skill, the difficulty of some of the dyeing recipes has been changed, so players may not see their skill points carried over to Item Improvement on a one-to-one ratio. In addition, unlike many other crafting skills, all characters have access to all of the dyeing recipes by default. Finally, the dyeing recipes have been simplified and now only require two things: a dye plant found scattered throughout the game world and gold. The gold costs for dyeing have been dramatically reduced.

Workshops and recipes are now displaying more information for crafters. When examined, workshops are now displaying the bonus amount they provide along with the amount of fuel needed to reach the next level of skill bonus. Recipes will now display the difficulty of the recipe, letting crafters know if their crafting skill level is high enough to have enough of a chance of success to risk attempting to craft an item. Along with this, the reset timer on nearly all of the recipes has been removed; those timers still remaining are displayed when examining the recipe.

Finally, the items created by the Armor and Weapon crafting skills have also been revised. For the most part, we have increased their damage or armor level. These changes should bring the crafted items on par with, or in some cases make them slightly better than, items generated by the treasure system. Crafted items will also have higher gold values, depending on the skill tier of the item. Also, the cost of crafting weapons and armor in tiers 7 to 10 has been reduced by 30%. Toolmaking has also been revised so that it is easier to progress to more difficult skill tiers.

Additional Skill Information: When examined, skills now provide information on how they work and their effects. This additional information includes:

  • The damage the skill does at its currently trained level.
  • The damage the skill does with a skill rating of 1 and the damage it does with a 50 skill rating.
  • Vigor cost.
  • Range, both the minimum and maximum, in meters.
  • Reset (or cool down) timer between uses.
  • Recovery time, or how long after using the skill before you can perform another action.
  • Additional effects, such as if it does damage over time, area of effect, or other special properties.


Enhancements

  • The snow has crept down the mountains of Osteth, covering the continent in a blanket of white and freezing many of the rivers solid! Snow can also be seen gracing the mountain tops of Omishan.
  • The various caches left behind by the Kingdoms are providing even better treasure!
  • We have increased the arc in which position-dependent skills (such as Backstab) do additional damage from 90 degrees to 180 degrees.
  • The types of musical instruments that can be found have been increased.
  • Various terrain issues have been found and addressed.
  • Fellowship members can no longer be the target of an area of effect skill, but they can still be harmed by these skills if they are within the skill's "blast radius" and are in a KvK or FFA zone. A complete fix for this issue will be introduced in a future episode.
  • Many NPCs will no longer advance the player's quest if the player has a full inventory and cannot receive an item needed to complete the quest.


Miscellaneous UI Enhancements

The health values for nearby fellowship and monsters now update at a faster rate; however, the values for players and creatures that are farther away from you will update at the same rate as before.

A bug that was preventing many avatars' heads from being displayed in first person mode has been corrected.

The setting for "Shore Details" will now be saved between sessions, instead of automatically reverting to "Medium" each time the client is launched.

All known issues causing "floating shorelines" have been corrected. In addition, shore effects should no longer be appearing in smaller standing pools of water.

To prevent them from being accidentally ignored, patron, vassal, and monarch messages are now classified as both allegiance and regular tell messages. If one window is set to receive allegiance messages while another is set to receive tells, the messages will appear in both.

Chat windows should be scrolling correctly again.

The delay that players experience when examining items should be reduced. This does not entirely remove the "inventory lag" many players see, but should be help reduce it quite a bit.

When changing game options unrelated to the chat windows, the chat windows should no longer resize or move.

To highlight which chat window has focus, the move bar on the active chat window is now highlighted.

The raise skill option is no longer shown for skills at their maximum level.

Skills can now be placed on more than one shortcut bar.

The "/alias shortcut" and "/shortcut" commands now places the alias in the proper shortcut slot.

If a character isn't a member of a fellowship, he will receive a message advising how much experience he's received from killing a monster.

Upon completion of a quest, players will now receive a message informing them of how much experience they gained from the quest.

The sack icon, shown in the inventory panel next to the amount of gold the character possesses, has been changed to a stack of gold coins. Visual metaphor is important!

The "/AFK" emote now displays floating Z's above your head, while the new "/Love" emote displays an animated heart. How cute!

Characters with a single letter name will be correctly displayed and can be selected in the character selection screen again.

In the character creation screen, Tumerok females are placed next to the Human and Lugian females. Girl power! Oh, and Tumerok males are over by the men now as well.

Fixes

The cool down timer on many skills, such as creating Turrets, can no longer be circumvented through unintended use of the skill system.

In our December episode, we corrected a bug that would cause many items in the process of being picked up to become "stuck" in-world, with no one able to pick the item up. However, many of the items effected by this bug were still in game in December and had the potential to crash the game's servers. This server-crashing bug has been corrected.

We have found and corrected a few areas in the client that could lead to it consuming more and more of the system's memory.

Players should no longer see situations in which skill credits are not immediately returned when a skill is untrained.

A bug in the combat system was causing it to ignore the damage special vuln attacks or damage over time attacks were doing to creatures when rewarding experience and determining loot rights. This has been corrected so that the total damage done by a character is taken into account.

Monsters and pets should now be able to follow you better, especially as you cross boundaries in the landscape.

The experience point reduction code for killing monsters that cannot reach a character or otherwise react has been enhanced.

Characters can no longer regenerate their health and vigor while in midair.

Falling humans now have the correct falling animation.

Several effects that stop all movement on an enemy (by setting the enemy's actual movement speed to zero) were not actually allowing the enemy to slow to a stop, causing the target to "rubber band" back and forth. This has been corrected.

The corpses of monsters killed by "misadventure" can now be opened by anyone.

The death messages for inanimate objects, such as barrels and turrets, now display that they are "destroyed" by players instead of being "killed." In addition, their remains are no longer labeled as "Corpse of (Item)," but rather "Destroyed (Item)."

When first introduced, it was possible for the various Kingdom caches to get into a state in which the chest opening animation was shown, but the chest could not actually be opened. These chests should now be working properly.

Health regeneration potions now have more accurate descriptions of their effects.

The damage of crafted bows has been lowered to be in line with bows generated by the treasure system.

The "Sapling Bow" Recipe is now called the "Basic Short Bow" Recipe.

Female characters can once again wear crafted robes.

Characters created before the December episode will now have the starter weapon recipes.

Improvement Workshops now correctly list that they take items with crystal traits for fuel.

Items labeled on the map as "Chemical Stills" and mines labeled as "Fumaroles" have been renamed as "Acid Stills" in both locations.

In December, players who did the new quests in an order different than the one intended could at times find themselves with a "Find the Person" quest they couldn't complete. We've corrected this, and now players should not be stuck with a quest they cannot complete.

The quest found at the Isle of Tears Drudge Fort is now more fellowship-friendly.

If the original member of the fellowship that picked up the Cragstone blueprints leaves that fellowship, the remaining members of the fellowship are no longer prevented from picking up another copy of the blueprints.

All "Kill Quests" (i.e., quests that are bestowed by killing a certain creature and that require a certain number of like creatures to be killed) are now fellowship-propagated. This means that the quest will be bestowed and advanced to all members of a fellowship.

All fellowship-propagated quests are now restricted to players equal to or above the minimum intended level of the quest. For the "Kill Quests," the minimum level is typically 10 below the level of the creature that bestows the quest. The minimum level for other quests is based upon the intended level found in the map panel.

The death of the creature that bestows a "Kill Quest" no longer decrements the number of creatures needed to complete the quest it bestows.

We've given the right name to a few unique and champion monsters.

Champion monsters are dropping better treasure.

We have fixed a generator in the Esper region that was producing a creature that bestowed a quest to kill creatures not native to the region.

The Thornling Master Rogue spawn has been moved from the Lost Wish Mountains to the southwest Mad Crone Mountains.

The quest bestowed by the Sneaky Drudge Robber now correctly says to kill normal Drudge Robbers, as was intended.

The "Revered One," a powerful Burun boss, no longer advances the Slavetaker quest or drops Slavetaker loot.

The Mistress of Madness, a powerful Crone, has been assigned the correct level.

Prior to this month, the Sclavus Faisi Fearbringer had been shown in game as the wrong type of Sclavus. This has been corrected in our January episode.

The Red Wasp Incursion quest now requires Red Soldier Wasps (instead of Red Wasps) be killed to complete it.

The Doomed Ero-bal Incursion quest now requires regular Ero-bals (not Cursed Ero-bals) be killed to complete it.

The "Aunmauri's Vengeance" effect given by the Obelisk quest now increases your combat damage by a few points, as was intended, instead of increasing your run velocity through the roof.

The pet Steppe Armoredillo, awarded to players who complete the "Dillo Rustlers" quest, now has 2,000 hit points.

The Inferno Drudge Monitor quest now gives less experience.

The experience reward given by Tyrants and Giguraths has been reduced to 10% of its previous value.

Tyrants now have a ranged fireball attack.

Gurog Minions now have a missile attack.

Many objects that can be dropped on the ground from the player's inventory are now ethereal and will no longer block player or creature movement.

Class Changes and Fixes

Human Ranger

  • "Bluff" and "Eye Rake" can now be used while wielding two weapons.


Human Enchanter

  • Impenetrability can now be layered on top of the default armor spell found on crafted armor.


Tumerok Feral Intendant

  • Soft Underbelly now costs 100 Vigor, increased from the previous 10 Vigor point cost.
 

January Hotfix

Original Link (now dead) - microsoftgamesinsider.com/AC2/Articles/hotfix-0103.htm?nc=1


From the Developers
Notice: Hotfix for January 2003

We're preparing a hotfix build to be propped Wednesday, January 22nd at 11am PST (7:00pm GMT).

Here are the issues that will be addressed in this hotfix:

1) There was a bug that caused severe server performance issues with the examination of potions and magical items, especially on Linvak Massif. This is fixed.

2) The armor values for crafted armor will be increased 20% from the values assigned to them when the episode launched. For crafted weapons, the maximum possible damage that can be given to a weapon has been increased by an additional 5%, while the lowest possible damage that can be assigned to a crafted weapon has been increased by 20%. This tightens the possible damage values given to a crafted weapon when it is created.

3) All tier 7+ crafted items will have their gold costs reduced by 75%.

4) All quests (with the exception of Rashan's Revenge) should now have a Fail timer, meaning that if the quest is not completed within a certain amount of in-game time, the quest automatically fails. This will help players who have a quest they cannot complete or fail. Those players who have been locked in a broken quest for longer than the new Fail timer should automatically fail the quest upon login. We will be investigating more direct means for players to escape from broken quests.

There are still issues with treasure chests getting stuck in an unusable state that we're working to fix. We will probably address them in this hotfix.

We're not going to be able to reinstate the new chat channels with this week's hotfix, but we are working very dilligently to have this fixed ASAP. Once we are sure that the performance of the channels is acceptable, we will reinstate the chat channels immediately.

We appreciate your patience with these issues, and we will update you on the date of the hotfix as soon as possible.

Ken Troop
AC2 Live Producer

 

Important notice

Original Link (now dead) - microsoftgamesinsider.com/AC2/Guides/notice_0103.htm?nc=1


AC2 Status Update

January 27, 2003

As many of you are aware, Asheron's Call 2 was affected by the recent virus attacks that the entire Internet experienced over this past weekend. (For more information visit: http://www.msnbc.com/news/864184.asp?0dm=C11KT). We'd like to take a moment to update you on what sort of impact this worm had on Asheron's Call 2, and what we are doing to rectify the situation.

The worm dubbed the "SQL Slammer" affected unpatched Windows 2000 SQL server database software. We want to make it perfectly clear that all of our databases used in Asheron's Call 2 were patched with the most recent updates, and were unaffected by the worm directly. Our bandwidth however, was affected by the worm because it crashed many other unpatched servers worldwide, and caused unprecedented network congestion. Unfortunately, because of the way this worm works, the ripple effect caused plenty of other problems, which many refer to as "collateral damage." What did this mean for AC2 over the weekend?


  • This network congestion created strange behavior for some players who lost items, could not interact with portals or chests, and were unable to use certain skills (grayed out). This was mostly confined to our US Datacenters
  • Many players couldn't even connect because of the bandwidth congestion
  • We lost the use of many of our customer support tools, and were unable to update the state of the network and even our message board during this time period
  • .NET Passport services were not functioning properly for a short period of time on Sunday
  • We needed to restart the worlds a few times over the weekend to try to clear up some of the anomalies people were experiencing in-game


The reason we haven't been able to communicate much with the players to let them know what was going on and what we were doing about it, was because of the fact that many of our tools were not functioning properly, and we wanted to take the time to carefully evaluate the situation and not make a snap decision. That said, we apologize for not using the accmty.com board to communicate with you in a timelier manner.

Over the weekend we gathered feedback through the message boards, support calls and emails. While you may not have seen many threads approved to the main AC2 community forum over the weekend, we did read each and every one of the bug submissions, complaints and problems that players identified. We want to thank the players for reporting these issues. This helped us to make our decisions what steps to take next. We also took the time to read your thoughts that many of you posted on other AC2 fan sites.

We mentioned on Sunday that we may be considering a rollback of the databases to the last backup made before the virus attack (Thursday morning), because we wanted to prepare players in the event that we needed to do such a thing. After careful evaluation, we confirmed that a relatively small percentage of the players have been affected with item loss or personal rollbacks, and to do a complete server-wide rollback would negatively impact the great majority of our player base. We have even heard from players who lost all of their items but pleaded for us not to roll back, because the XP they earned over the weekend is more precious to them than the items they lost. For these reasons we will not be conducting a rollback of the character database.

We are aware that there are still some residual problems currently in the game (like skills not resetting), and we are working hard to fix these problems in order to bring things back to normal in the world of Dereth. Most if not all, of these sorts of problems should be solved by the end of the day.

Once again, we thank you for all your feedback during this difficult weekend, offer condolences to those of you who could not play or lost progress, and thank you for your patience and understanding.

-- The AC2 Team

 
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