Potions, Gates and Twenty-Two More

Everything below was reported by a player, fixed, and then checked in game by someone who went back in to look. That last step is the one that matters, and it is why these leave the test board and land here instead.

Two of them could not be fixed on the server at all. They needed the game client itself changed, and the launcher installs it for you.

Your quick bar keeps its potions

Drink your last Painkiller and the F-key slot used to empty itself, so a shortcut you set up before a fight was gone by the middle of it.

Now the slot waits. The icon stays, its counter reads 0, and the moment you buy more of that potion the shortcut works again -- no dragging, no re-opening your bag.

This one took three attempts. Twice we tried to solve it on the server and twice the client cleared the slot anyway: it drops a slot the instant the count reaches zero, and no message we can send changes that. So the client itself was changed. There is a new Quick Bar guide.

A gate you have opened looks open

Guild leaders and deputies could already open and close their gates, and it really did govern who walked through -- but both states looked identical, so the only way to learn a gate's state was to walk into it.

• An opened gate now visibly stands aside, and closing it puts the leaf back.
• The whole map is told who opened or closed which gate.
• A gate left standing open when it was destroyed now comes back shut after its owners pay to re-lay it, and so does one captured from a rival.

The siege fights back properly

• A spell besieges the pole on its own. Casting at it always worked, but nothing ever engaged it, so every hit was a click you made yourself -- two quick hits and silence. Now one cast keeps going, exactly as when you fight a monster.
• One hit, one number. A spell on the pole was being drawn twice: the spell's own effect, plus a weapon-swing on top of it.
• Weapon procs fire on the pole, so a Rage or an Earthquake counts toward your guild's score.
• Death, prison and the rewards on the war map now work as the Guild War guide describes them.

PvP

• What your gear carries, a duel carries too. A freezing arrow now freezes a player, a poison weapon poisons one, an arrow is spent when you shoot someone, Reflect answers a player's blow, and Dash strikes, stuns and shoves. A stun against a player is deliberately short, and you cannot be chain-stunned.
• The battle-power gap is no longer a chasm. It used to swing a blow between 200% and 10%, so two players a hundred points apart hit each other twenty times differently. Weapon and stats now own four fifths of a blow, and battle power the remaining fifth.
• Nobody in matching gear dies to a single hit -- about six blows to kill. A full gear tier still decides a fight, as it should.
• A star marks your team leader. The client had always been able to draw it; nothing ever told it who the leader was.

Combat and auto-attack

• Melee is about 30% faster. The pace was stored as a whole number -- "three times the weapon's raw speed" -- which cannot express another 30%. It is a percentage now, so a 1000 ms weapon swings every 230 ms instead of every 333 ms, with a floor that keeps the fastest weapons sane. If it feels wrong in either direction, say so: it is one number.

• Thunder, Fire and Tornado keep attacking after the first cast instead of stopping.
• A cast holds the target you clicked instead of hopping to whatever happens to stand nearest.
• Area spells no longer repeat themselves -- a Tornado firing on its own pulls half a map.

The world

• The Water Lord is a boss again. One map carried 59 copies of a level-120 lookalike crowded onto a single islet, while the real boss -- the one that carries Clean Water -- had no spawn anywhere at all. That quietly made Clean Water unobtainable, and with it the first rebirth. There is now one boss on each of eleven islets, back every fifteen minutes, dropping Clean Water three times in ten.
• The second world can be walked to. Five more maps were populated so the whole far chain hangs off the desert road, instead of depending on a single teleport.
• The Twin City swirl that claimed to lead to the stable now leads to the stable.
• The Wandering Guide moved into the open. He stands four squares east of the Welcomer in Twin City, a few steps from where you arrive, instead of tucked away by the Conductress.
• The Conductress sets you down beside the swirl on your own map, and you step through it yourself.

A message board, at last

Your client has always had one -- five tabs, Trade / Friend / Team / Guild / Other -- and it had been asking the server about it the whole time: twenty unanswered requests in three days. Now it answers.

Write one line on a tab and it stays there while you are offline, until you take it down or write a new one. One notice per person per tab, so nobody can bury the board under twenty of their own. Newest first, eight to a page, and clicking a line shows the whole thing. There is a Message Board guide.

Chat and the client

• Chat stopped eating letters. Polish characters -- and animated emotes -- were being destroyed on the way through the server: any byte that was not valid UTF-8 came back as a replacement character, which is why a word could arrive mangled and longer than it was sent. The relay is now byte-exact.
• The Ice Crypt has all its tiles. The black squares were textures the client simply did not have: the map asks for 1,921 and the installation held 923, with two whole folders missing. Every one of them was checked against a working copy before being added.
• Two things your client had been quietly asking for were never answered -- inspecting a friend's gear from the friend list, and the little card at the top of a private conversation. Both work now.
• The button strip under the top icons follows the rest of the HUD at high resolutions, instead of being left behind. That one went out earlier, in launcher 1.5.1.
• Broadcast works. The channel existed and was never handled, so anything sent there simply vanished. A line costs 5 CPs.

Smaller things

• The market says what an item is -- class, slot and level, under every listing.
• Every guide now ends with a table of where to find the NPCs it mentions.
• The Unknown Man asks for a week, not a day. His favour was costing him twelve hours, which made it a DragonBall a day traded for experience. It is weekly now, resetting on Sunday -- and the rule is told as his story rather than as a cooldown message: he swears off drink every week and breaks his word every weekend.
• Praying together. A prayer reaches everyone within eight squares and charges them at the same rate, with no skill of their own needed -- and when the person praying sits down, the whole circle sits with them.