STICKY: Small Updates and Tweaks

[Mooncalf]

Raids are now quite a bit harder in some ways. Here's the changes:

Harder stuff...
* Raid bosses are much harder.
* The number of enemies has been significantly decreased, so you have to hunt around for them more.
* The frequency of keycards drops has been decreased from 1 in 10 to 1 in 15.

Easier stuff...
* The chance of NPCs successfully giving you wounds has decreased.
* Once the boss is killed, everyone on the top floor (presumably those who worked together to get there) are able to loot 10,000 dollars worth of stuff from the top floor, each. All people on the top floor gain this 10k automatically, and it appears as cash on hand (so escaping without it being stolen from you might be tricky).

More raid stuff coming soon, including more map variations, different raid types, different floor loot, security doors which require hacking, and possibly other stuff to make various skill sets and powers more useful, such as the ability to pick the pockets of NPCs to gain keycards.

[Mooncalf]

Summoned fadebeasts were buggy but have hopefully been fixed. If you'd killed a summoned fadebeast and were all happy about it, don't be. They were basically the weakest enemies in the game due to this bug.

[Mooncalf]

I did a little database cleaning today in order to speed up load times. The database now gets auto-cleaned each day to remove certain old entries that are no longer needed.

Some of you might be missing some alerts that shouldn't be gone yet, but it shouldn't be anything important. Let me know if anything serious is wrong.

[Mooncalf]

Added a relic into the shops called "Reaper's Amulet". This powerful item halves any death wounds you receive (if you have it when you die), but will set you back 95,000 in game dollars.

As with all relics, owning more than 1 of the same type is useless, and will not count.

[Mooncalf]

A wiki article on the wraith guides and their training process has been created.

http://www.mooncalfstudios.com/pathofth ... ith_Guides

As the article might indicate, you will soon be able to talk to the wraiths in-game, and they will actually talk back automatically (responding to keywords in the "speak" command). The better your characters charisma and speech craft, the more interesting the replies you will get from them. It will be possible to learn lots about them, their opinions, and the pre-holocaust history from them.

That update will come within a couple of days, and will help people make their chapter choices.

[Mooncalf]

Crafting has been tweaked slightly to make it slightly less severe. Although it's still very hard to craft certain items, your chance to break the components (if you fail) is now much less likely.

[Mooncalf]

I'm going to lower the bounty list cap (the bounty amount which you need on your head before you appear visible) to 1000 in 24 hours time. The safety feature has been making the bounty list empty recently, which defeats the purpose of it.

Bounties will also only drop 50 per feral killed, and 25 for mooncalf / greater mooncalfs (down from 100 and 50 respectively).

Additionally, I'm going to be re-balancing the alert shift triggers, so you might find the city alert level going up slightly.

[Mooncalf]

Just a small change for roleplayers (been fixing bugs and replying to PMs today):

The "world" area of the game now has a live location-based roleplay chat area for it. Roleplay here is supposed to be descriptive where possible, but it's generally not absolutely strict on that.

Alternatively, you could roleplay on the crownet chat room (if you're a vampire). Crownet main menu now shows the number of people currently in the crownet chat room, which should get more people in there, hopefully. Roleplay here is the same as the crownet forum; it should be treated as if our characters are talking over a computer (in this case, on chat rooms), so it doesn't have to be descriptive. It's fun to just relax and chat as our characters once in a while, and can help us to build up an idea of who they are. Try to stay IC where possible.

I'm going to have Hellequin hang out in CrowNet chats when I can, just to encourage some live RP (even though it might not be descriptive).

[Mooncalf]

You can now only have up to 50 items on auction at once.

You can now only have 1 copy of each tome up for sale at any one time.

[Mooncalf]

The magic shop owners have come up with some unique rituals, and have these rare tomes up for sale for $50,000 each. As there is no other way to get them, somebody is going to have to buy them.

These rituals are "Vitality Shift" (body) "Spirit Shift" (spirit) and "Apprehension Shift" (mind). They allow the ritualist to shift all of their experience points to one area, depending on the ritual used. For example, the ritualist could shift all of their mind, body and spirit exp to body experience if they performed the Vitality Shift ritual. Alternatively, the ritualist can cast the ritual on a target, if the target is an ally and if they are in the same square as them at the time.

Roleplay-wise, you could describe these rituals simply sacrificing knowledge for power, or spiritual energy for understanding, and so on. The roleplay effects would be very slight though, as we're talking about a single level here.