The West Dev-Blog

w’re just in the pre-release phase of the 1.22 update cycle. We’ll going to roll it out in the next days.

I just added a nice addition to the signatures. You can now look up the finished quests and got rewards.

We have some new improvements and changed like the sleeper set, that has bonus on sleeping in hotels. Additionally i will now release the public changelog:

features

• awards

1. players can earn awards
2. the requirements are not public
3. awards are only for the player profile and doesn’t get any bonuses

• new duel changes (toughness and reflex influence the damage by 75% instead of 100%)
• integrated holiday mode

1. - players won’t be deleted
2. - players can’t be attacked after 24 hours
3. - after 2 month the player will get an email and the holiday mode will be deactivated automatically

• new interface (it’s necessary for the chat in 1.23)
• You can reopen a town profile with a little link
• Skills have mouse popups
• new set “sleepyhead” (not available in shops).
• if a player reached level 99, he can earn duel experience and raise his duel level.
• new signatures with additional data

forts

• raised bonuses on wall by 100%
• show bonuses

Hey guys,

We are now testing a new build of PHP 5.3. Please revisit all kind of game features and test+report all kind of problems in the forum (yep, not here please). This helps a lot reducing problems when deploying the new version on the production machines.

1.22 is also getting a new minor feature in the battle preview (but alas not to the flashclient): it will show the actual bonus of a sector. It will show the attack, defense and height of a sector. And before someone starts screaming “These values are different from the help manual !!!1111″. Yes. They are – because we are changing them. The walls and towers will get a boost, so the influence to the battle should be more significant.

And by the way: from Thursday on I am going to be on Vacation for three weeks. As you might know, I am currently working on the chat feature for the west – or more precisely, I am working much more on the userinterface for it than on the technical details that is running serverwise (so this time I am less likely to be blamed for technical problems that might arise during the introduction phase of the chat).
Anyway: I am soon on vacation and I won’t be able to be present when the chat is being introduced. Unless it gets delayed because of technical problems of course. I already wrote the deactivation code so that the game can be released without the chat in case of troubling server software – don’t be disappointed if 1.22 is released with deactivated chat, I still regard the awards as the more important feature. Also a lot of features are still missing in the chat that you are certainly going to complain about… but the most important things are working by now: Townchat and fortbattle chat (for defenders / attackers).
Some people have asked why we did the chat now – the answer is a bit difficult. More or less, it’s because of the fort battles. Communication is an important factor in battles and so, the chat is an important strategical component, even if it does not affect the battle mechanics themselves directly at all. We were uncertain about the order of implementation – should we do the custom battle maps first, the fort shop, character bonus depending on the class of the character and so on. There are still a lot of features missing and we intend to integrate them one by one. So more or less, the battlegrounds are still being actively developed and thus changed. There are so many countless ideas around of what we can do with the battle system… but there’s simply a limit of how much we can do at a time.

So keep playing, I’ll look foraward to integrate the rest of all the still missing features after my vacation!

I can proudly present you some new series of pictures from the 1.22 release We will add some new game features like the chat (already pre-announced in the last post). Here is a new picture of the current UI. There are different channels where you can talk to. And the best: we will have some emotions and maybe smiles too (of course deactivateble).

Chat UI (click to enlarge)

And now, behold, the holy reward box is coming to YOUR profile We will have rewards in the future that will be spread when you reach some predefined (of course secret and hidden) statistic properties. Each player has a reward box integrated into the character screen where you can select max four rewards that will be exposed in the player profile. But it is possible to look into the reward box of a player, so its only some kind of pre-selection

Will be very funny when you start to think about some foreign reward how cool they are and favorable how the hell to get that

char (click to enlarge)

profile (click to enlarge)

Long time no blog
Still not much to tell
I have an idea:
I leak a screenshot!

Do I have to mention that I am still working on that?

I’ve seen quite a few requests for getting an image of the battlemap.  So here is it, free of any attackers. Feel free to use it for your battle planning.

However be warned: Sometime with the upcoming releases, we’ll introduce custom maps for each fort. Then the map will be layouted depending on the fort size and the building levels.

Since the introduction of fort battles, the players have developed a strategy to weaken the enemy by letting low level players join the opposite side. While this is a quite valid strategy, it is still nerving and not wanted. As a result we made a decision at the end of the development of 1.21 to pull a feature that we wanted to have in 1.22 into 1.21: The mustering page.
Since this feature got in so late it is not so well tested and the user interface is initially not so obvious. So let’s explain it here shortly:
When you are a member of a directly involved town (means the attacking town or one of the fort members) and you are a councilor or a founder of one of these towns, then you are allowed to muster the troops that are joining the battle. You will see the recruiting button once you are taking part in the battle (so you have to join). Then the screen shown above is opened and you can see everyone who has joined the battle already.
By clicking now in the status columns in the cells, you can give players a star or a red cross. The star means that this player has precedence to enter the battle. If the player has a red cross it means that the player will only allowed to join the battle if there is still space left in the battle. You can also remove a precedence by toggling the cell again.
Once you have changed the status, you will notice that it turns orange. This means that you have modified your list, but it is not yet sent out. To do that, you click on “muster” or, if you think you do not wish to change anything, on “cancel” so that nothing is changed at all.
You will also see who has changed the player’s precedence rating, so you might spot people who shouldn’t modify the status of a player (i.e. spies). It is of course possible that a member town has a spy that modifies the list to the attacker / defender’s favor right before the battle starts, but well, you should take care who you promote in your town or who you invite…

A minor addon to this feature did not made it into 1.21 yet – since such a spy could do such a change in the last moment before the battle starts, it would be quite hard to make out who changed the rating of the players. In order to keep this information, it’ll be sent to all players that are taking part in a battle. But this feature is not yet in 1.21.

Today we decided to open the gates again and let some of you join the public beta to experience new releases and help making the game better. Moreover i wanted to remind everybody that the public beta is a sandbox where we want players to test and try stuff out and report us the bugs and ideas.

Ah, almost i forgot to tell you about when we will open the doors

Proposed date: Fr, 07. Aug 2009 around 13:37

New limit: ~ 2500 (raised by 500)

I wish you all good luck

We have updated today the beta and a few additional smaller feature leaped into 1.21.

Fortbattle rule

First, there’s an overview on the rules for a fortbattle. That should clear any doubts on how the battle is being judged and when it’ll be a loss or a win. If we change anything in the future, i.e. the number of rounds that a battle takes, this will be automatically shown in this fact sheet.

Then there’s a still-to-be-improved feature that shows which towns are fighting on which side:

List of defending towns

In this case, you can see which towns are defending the town already. That list includes the main defenders (fort owners) and also every town that has at least one member having joined the battle already. Picking the right side should now be simpler.

Last but not least, there’s a security feature that should greatly help you to identify attacks on your account:

Login attempts are now shown when you log in.

By the time, most of all wanted features are now on the beta. 1.21 is running quite smoothly and we are looking forward to switch to 1.21 once we consider it stable.

A feature that still needs some tweaking is the XP gain for battle participation. But we should be able to fix this till the end of the week.

The gravestone overview

We are updating the beta world to 1.21