Project: Gorgon News

The Red Wing Casino is now open! You can find the entrance to this "teleportation-accessible luxury resort destination" in Rahu. (And perhaps there are easier ways ...) To help us test the games in the casino, type the command /redeem RedWingTickets in chat to receive some free game vouchers!




In this update we've tried to clean up a lot of storage-related weirdness. For example, one big problem was that many ingredients couldn't be stored in storage for "ingredients" -- because every ingredient had to be manually flagged by us and we often missed some. Now we've switched to automated tagging of ingredient types.

We've also cleaned up the categories. Several NPCs stored "Ingredients for any skill," but now that all ingredients are being tagged automatically, this is far too large a category -- nearly everything is an ingredient for something! In practice, only food items were reliably tagged as ingredients in the past (and not even all of those), so "ingredients for any skill" storage were effectively cooking storage. As such we've converted "ingredients for any skill" storage into "food or cooking ingredients" storage in this update.

We've also changed the storage of Joeh in Serbule. He offered a large amount of storage for equipment, but Serbule is the newbie town. Newbies don't have a lot of extra equipment to store and it's a much better idea for them to sell or gift any excess equipment instead of trying to store it! So Joeh was actually hurting our newbie experience by teaching newbies that they should hoard low-level gear. Joeh now has storage for any type of item, but fewer storage slots than before. (Tyler Green remains unchanged because his equipment storage doesn't open up until players reach Best Friends favor level, at which point they aren't likely to be newbies.)

We've added more Equipment-specific storage in the new casino area (along with tons of other new storage), but it's been tweaked a bit: Equipment storage now also lets you store ammunition. This includes things like arrows (obviously) but also includes anything consumed by an ability: throwing knives, first aid kits, diamonds (used by a certain ability), and many others. The intent is to let you store all the items for a particular combat skill in one place.

In all cases where a storage vault changed, existing items are still there. If you take those items out, however, you won't be able to put them back in if they no longer meet the requirements for that storage.

Specific notes:

• Laura Neth: "ingredients for any skill" ==> "Food or Cooking Ingredients"
  
• Selaxi: "ingredients for any skill" ==> "Food or Cooking Ingredients"
  
• Julius Patton: "Food or Cooking Ingredients" ==> "Food, Cooking, or Brewing Ingredients"
  
• Joeh: "Equipment" ==> "any item". Max slots reduced from 64 (at Like Family) to 40.
  
• Tyler Green: "Equipment" ==> "Equipment and Ammunition"
  
• Charles Thompson: "Alchemy [potions]" ==> "Potions and Alchemy Ingredients"
  

High-level monsters needed to do a bit more damage, and high-level combat also needed to be a bit less predictable. So instead of just buffing monster damage as we've done in the past, this time we've introduced monster crits. Monsters now have a chance to critically-hit for double damage. The chance is based on the monster's internal combat level. For every level after 30, monsters gain 0.25% chance to crit. This means that by level 70, they have a 10% chance to crit for double damage. Elite and Boss monsters have an extra +5% chance to critically-hit. (This is a flat bonus that's the same at every level. This means that even newbie bosses will occasionally lay the smackdown. It's for your own good! Dying builds character.)




Some of the pet skills are in an awkward place right now because high-level player damage is still so high that pets can't contribute very usefully. We're still working on high-level player damage scaling. In the short term, the tech for these new monster crits give us an interesting way to buff pets a bit.

For every pet-level above 30, the pet gains 0.25% chance to crit. Note this is not YOUR skill level, but the pet's level. (Each summoned pet has an inherent level; to get a higher-level pet you need to use a higher-level summoning ability.) Pet crits deal +100% damage at level 30, plus 1% more for every level above that.

• Example: the pet summoned by Raise Skeletal Archer 4 is level 47. Thus it has a 4.25% chance to critically-hit, and crits deal 217% damage.
  
• Example: the spider summoned by Incubate 5 is level 70. Thus it has a 10% chance to critically-hit, and crits deal 240% damage.
  

This change may not be permanent, but it will help high-level pets in the short term. Note that this applies to all pets EXCEPT animal-handling pets. Animal-handling pets use a different critical-hit mechanic already. So this affects necromancy pets, baby spiders, summoned deer, minigolems, etc.

• Monsters no longer notice players before the player's loading screen finishes.
  
• Area-of-effect attacks no longer "loot-lock" monsters hit by the burst.
  
• Added a button to sort storage vault contents. (This uses the same sort order as the inventory-sort button does.)
  
• About 200 new Work Orders have been added to the game; there is a new Work Order sign in Red Wing Casino, and all existing boards have at least a few new ones.
  
• In addition, many old Work Orders have been moved from one city to another (to try to make things a little more sensible... but it still needs more reorganization in the future). You may want to check your active Work Orders in case they now need to be delivered to a different city than before!
  
• Some melee abilities were not flagged as melee, so buffs/debuffs applicable to melee attacks did not work on them: Phoenix Strike, Bun-Fu Strike, Rabbit Scratch, Doe Eyes.
  
• Some burst attacks were not flagged as bursts, so buffs/debuffs applicable to burst attacks did not work on them: Wave of Darkness, Song of Discord, various minigolem abilities.
  
• Druid ability Cloud Sight did not benefit from equipment that boosted druid base damage by a percentage.
  
• Stopped damage-reply effects (such as Fire Shield Potions) from activating due to friendly damage (e.g. from Restorative Arrow).
  
• "Fight Me You Fools" had untyped damage instead of Crushing damage.
  
• Some healing abilities that normally deal 0 damage (since they're heals) could inflict damage when flat damage-type boosts were added (e.g. a Ring of Psychic Pestering, which adds +2 psychic damage, would cause some mentalism heals to deal 2 damage).
  
• Corrected the Causes of Death from Priest attacks.
  
• The sidebar ability Fish Gut has been completely redesigned: it no longer uses fish scales as ammo and instead uses a skinning knife (with a 5% chance the knife will be lost). Creatures with Fish anatomy take double damage. This is considered a (non-bleed-inducing) variant of Gut for purposes of equipment and combos.
  
• Renumbered the IDs of poetry appreciation effects to allow room for new effects in the future; if you had a poetry appreciation buff on, it has been dispelled - sorry!
  
• Recipes for exotic mushroom substrate have fewer ingredients but only yield half as much substrate.
  
• The cow ability Chew Cud now only consumes regular "Grass", and not other grasses such as "Evil Grass" or "Barley". This is because chewing something besides regular Grass is pretty much always a mistake, and sometimes a tragic one (like when you chew up your Eternal Greens).
  
• For similar reasons, the ability Organ Displacement now only takes basic Aquamarines, not things with aquamarines in them (such as Aquamarine Rings).
  
• For similar reasons, the ability Resuscitate now only takes basic Diamonds, not fancy diamonds (such as Winterprize) or equipment with diamonds in them.
  
• The recipe for some alchemy potions has been simplified: Persona Reducer Potion, Memory Inhibitor Potion.
  
• Reduced the ingredients needed for high-level Shamanic Infusion recipes.
  
• Fixed recipe icons that did not match the items generated by the recipe.
  
• Bottles of Fertilizer now stack to 5.
  
• Rennet now stacks to 5.
  
• NPCs that like specific flowers (e.g. Brianna Willer likes Dahlias) now really like bouquets containing just that flower (Dahlia Bouquets in this case).
  
• Fae Felt can now be dropped by all killable fairy enemies. It is an extremely rare drop for low level fairies such as fairy slaves, and an uncommon drop for higher level fairies.
  
• Crazed Alphas are more dangerous.
  
• Fixed missing icons (shown as all-white squares) when viewing player raffle boxes or vend-o-matics.
  
• NPCs that interact with lamps (such as Sir Coth does at night) can once again actually turn said lamps on/off.
  
• Slightly shrank the default NPC dialog font text from 18pt to 16pt. (This does not affect existing installations. You can always manually change the font size in Settings->GUI->Font Sizes.)
  
• Upgraded to a new version of Unity, 2017.4.10
  

This is a server-only update to fix some networking and database performance problems.

The only gameplay change is the following:

• Bard treasure mod: "Whenever you take damage from an enemy, you gain Song of Discord Damage +6% and Song of Resurgence Healing +6 for 20 seconds." => This now stacks up to 12x (instead of infinitely)
  
• Bard treasure mod: "Whenever you take damage from an enemy, you gain Bard Base Damage +8% for 15 seconds." => This now stacks up to 10x (instead of infinitely)
  

That's it for now, but we're hard at work on a new content update which will be ready in a few weeks. More info soon!

You can now find Catalog Golems in the hall of player-run shops in Serbule Keep! These adorable little constructs will be happy to search the player vendors for specific items on your behalf, and let you know which shops have what you need.

The golems can't tell you how much the price is, and they don't deliver the goods, but they also don't demand tips. So stop by and take advantage of this free service today!




Some NPCs can now install Augments for you! By using one of these NPCs, you do not need to have learned the various Augment Installation recipes from Nightshade. Learning Nightshade's recipes will eventually be a cost-savings for max-level players who do a lot of augment-installing, but at the current max level of 70, most players will find it cheaper to just use these NPCs.

The following NPCs can install Augments for you:

• Joeh in Serbule can install level 0-20 Augments for 50 Councils.
  
• Kalaba in Eltibule can install level 21-40 Augments for 250 Councils.
  
• Urzab in Amulna can install level 41-60 Augments for 650 Councils.
  
• Rick Snapley in Gazluk can install level 61-80 Augments for 1000 Councils.
  
• Torgan in Gazluk can install level 61-80 Augments for 900 Councils. You must know Orcish.
  
• Preta in Sun Vale can install level 0-50 Augments for 350 Councils. You must be Close Friends or better.
  
• Tyler Green in Serbule Hills can install level 0-25 Augments for free. You must be Friends or better.
  
• Amutasa in Rahu can install level 0-70 Augments for 650 Councils. You must be Friends or better.
  
• Nightshade in Kur can install level 0-100 Augments for 2000 Councils.
  

These changes are a continuation of our DoT (Damage-over-Time) ability revamps. We are now mostly finished with the conversion, except for a few DoTs with special behavior that can't be converted. Those handful of unique DoTs will use the older system for the foreseeable future. (And of course we may have missed some or made mistakes!)

Archery

• Treasure: Mangling Shot deals 330 Trauma damage over 10 seconds => 462 Trauma damage over 12 seconds
  
• Ability: Fire Arrow deals damage over 15 seconds => same damage but over 10 seconds
  

Crossbow

• Ability: Fiery Bolt 6: Deals 468 damage, plus 230 damage over 20 seconds => 418 damage, plus 288 damage over 12 seconds
  

Druid

• Treasure: Cloud Sight covers the target in insects that deal 170 Nature damage over 15 seconds => 252 Nature damage over 12 seconds
  
• Fixed bug that caused Heart Thorn and Poisoned Thorns DOTs to deal 5 more damage per tick than listed.
  
• Treasure: Rotskin deals 190 Trauma damage to health over 15 seconds => 282 damage over 12 seconds
  
• Treasure: Toxinball deals 114 Poison damage over 12 seconds => 186 over 12 seconds. Also note: this treasure effect was bugged and previously didn't work at all. Now it works.
  

Giant Bat

• Treasure: Virulent Bite deals 115 trauma damage over 10 seconds => 222 Trauma over 12 seconds
  
• Treasure: Virulent Bite has a 50% chance to deal +76% damage plus 120 trauma damage over 10 seconds => This effect has been overhauled. It is now: "Virulent Bite deals 192 Trauma damage over 12 seconds and also has a 25% chance to deal +76% direct Piercing damage"
  

Hammer

• Treasure: Latent Charge deals +200 Electricity damage after an 8 second delay => 240 after an 8 second delay. Also note: this treasure effect was bugged and actually took 15 seconds to activate, not 8 as intended. This is fixed.
  

Lycanthropy

• Ability: Sanguine Fangs 6: Deals 120 damage over 8 seconds => 140 over 8 seconds
  
• Treasure: Sanguine Fangs deals +144 Trauma damage over 8 seconds => 224 over 8 seconds
  
• Treasure: All Werewolf attacks have a 31% chance to deal 48 Trauma damage over 8 seconds => 64 damage over 8 seconds
  
• Treasure: Sanguine Fangs suddenly deals 240 damage after a 15 second delay => 280 damage after a 12-second delay
  

Spider

• Treasure: Grappling Web deals 224 Poison damage over 12 seconds => 300 over 12 seconds
  

Misc

• Various meditation combos that dealt DoT (damage-over-time) damage have been adjusted to new DoT balance.
  
• Various monsters with DoT (damage-over-time) attacks have been adjusted to new DoT balance.
  

• Fixed bugs with Skill tree UI not retaining state.
  
• The item-tooltip for Augments now lists the skill level requirement of the augment.
  
• Augment-Installation recipes no longer have an extra-ingredient cost (e.g. fish scales, fire dust, etc.).
  
• When extracting an Augment from an item, you can now extract generic (non-skill-specific) powers by using any of the "desert gems": Turquoise, Sapphire, Emerald, Morganite, Sunstone, Tiger's Eye, Opal, Goshenite, Danburite, and Ruby. Previously these gems did nothing when used with extraction, so for now they are all assigned to generic-augment extraction. Eventually some of these gems will be needed for other things, though. So just to make it official, Sunstones and Goshenites are the permanent generic-augment-extraction gems. Some of the others may be reassigned to do other things in the relatively-distant future -- 3+ months from now.
  
• Adding augments to items no longer affects how much phlogiston or other resources are obtained when decomposing or distilling the item.
  
• Using Shamanic Infusion on an item now adds a Shamanic Infusion requirement equal to the level of the recipe. (Previously all infusions accidentally installed a requirement of Shamanic Infusion level 1, even for max-level infusions.) This fix does not affect existing items... UNTIL those items are used in transmutation. Transmutation (and a few other crafting processes) automatically recalculate the item's wield-requirements, and this can cause the correct Shamanic Infusion requirement to appear.
  
• Fixed Fire Shield Potions and Acid Shield Potions so that their reflection does not stack if you drink multiple potions.
  
• Fixed ingredient errors in crafted Priest Staff recipes.
  
• Fixed rounding and calculation problems that caused a number of converted DOT effects (from the last update) to deal 1 or 2 more damage per tick than intended (and more than the tooltip said it would deal).
  
• Enchantments that boosted movement-speed attributes by a fractional amount were displayed as adding a whole number. For instance, items that add +0.5 to Sprint Speed would say they added "Sprint Speed +0". (This was only a display bug.)
  
• Fixed invalid locations where monsters could spawn, notably under Marna's shop in Serbule.
  
• Additional texture memory optimizations.
  
• Removed yellowish hue to the specular layer of Elvish Armor. (This will affect how the armor looks when dyed. It should look closer to the dye color, and less yellow. Unless you dyed it yellow, in which case... who knows.)
  
• Fixed texture error with female dwarf NPCs that made their faces look extra wrinkled and weird.
  
• The 3rd-party tools JSON for treasure mods now includes the minimum level-requirement for each tier of each treasure mod.
  
• Added a bit more documentation for the 3rd-party tools files.
  

Hi guys! The next update is coming in just a few days. I've been focusing pretty heavily on the update, but I had some time today, so I wanted to give you a status update.

Remember, this is a dev-blog. It's not an official announcement about future changes, it's just me talking about what I'm doing and thinking. I like to share my current plans, but these plans change often. Speaking of which...




The last dev blog talked about some major revisions to treasure balance. And then the next two updates came out, and there were no revisions to treasure balance. The revisions aren't going to be in the next update either. What's going on?

Well, after I implemented some of the changes, I wanted to sanity-check them... and realized my gameplay data metrics were out of date. The game server normally collects anonymized combat metrics that let me answer questions like "How long does it take a player using skills X and Y at level Z to kill a level-appropriate monster?" or "If a player is using skill X in area A, how often do they die?" These insights are very helpful in making sure my changes aren't insane. But I don't have that data right now, because metrics-logging was turned off.

After we launched on Steam we had unexpected server stability problems, and the very first thing I did was to turn off all non-essential functions to rule them out as the cause. So metrics logging has been turned off for months, which means the data I have is pretty old and doesn't reflect recent changes to the game or the player-base.

I realized this problem late last month, but at that time we were STILL having occasional server problems, and it seemed dumb to turn the metrics back on while I was still hunting for problems. The server has been extremely stable after the last batch of server fixes (on the 8th), though, so I'm going to turn the logging back on in this week's update. Then it will take about a month to collect new data.

I don't always use metrics data when making changes, because it takes a very long time to analyze that data. For situations like the AoE nerfs (see below), it's pretty easy for me to test what will happen when I make the change: I can create some AoE characters and try them on my local server. But this upcoming rebalance will impact a LOT of skills and treasure effects, and I can't predict all the side-effects. There will inevitably be some weird issues stemming from this change, and that's fine, we'll fix them... but I guess I want more reassurance that this change is moving the game in the right direction. And I need more data for that!

So long story short: there's been some delays. In the meantime, I've focused on more client optimizations and new game features.




The next update doesn't have any of the large-scale Serbule optimizations that I talked about in the last dev blog, such as replacing the sky/weather system, but it does have a lot of more traditional optimizations: the game's texture-memory footprint is reduced by over 100mb in most areas, which will help users with integrated video cards (or any video card with less than 2gb of RAM). We've also done a bunch more LOD optimizations in Serbule and Serbule Hills, which will help framerate on mid-tier video cards.

The impact of these particular optimizations will depend entirely on your computer's hardware, so they might make a big difference for you, or they might not. We'll watch your feedback to see what you think. And there are many more optimizations in the works, of course!




The next update will add a way to search player-run-shops. There will be little Catalog Golems in the shop hall, and you can ask them to list all the shops that are selling a particular item.

I'm walking a fine line here, and I wanted to mention the reasoning behind it. The golems' results are intentionally pretty simple: they tell you who sells it, but don't tell you the price they're charging. Why not? For one thing, it can be very difficult to show a price because player shops can sell the same item for lots of different prices at different quantities. But the main reason is that I don't want to make shops compete on price alone. That would drive costs down extremely quickly, instead of the slower market adjustments that I want to see, and it's basically not any fun for player shop-keepers. And it would ruin my long-term plans to let shopkeepers compete in innovative ways.

For instance, in the future shopkeepers might be able to offer frequent-buyer discounts that reward repeat customers. Shopkeepers might also be able to set up raffles contingent on purchase: "Buy any _____ and automatically be entered for a chance to win _________!" The shop system was designed to have little features like this added in pretty easily, and they'll eventually let shopkeepers be really creative. But if catalog golems showed the cheapest price, most players would just go for the cheapest stall regardless of anything else that other shops had.

This is also why we don't have an auction house: it's super convenient for consumers, but it drains every drop of fun out of being a pretend fantasy merchant. For a game with this much crafting in it, I need to protect shopkeepers and make sure they're having fun, even if it means there's a little more hassle involved in buying something.

However, the current shopping process, which I guess can be summed up as "if you want to buy something right away, first you have to browse 100 player shops" is FAR too difficult and irritating. I'm okay with there being a little friction when shopping, but not anywhere near that much. So this vendor-stall-search feature is a step in that direction, and we'll evolve the game as needed, until we find a good balance of buyer convenience and shopkeeper control.

(If you're interested in this topic from a game-design point of view, I wanted to direct you to some of the old blog posts I wrote about Project: Gorgon's economic plans... but unfortunately our old pre-alpha dev blog is offline right now. So instead let me point interested readers at a great old blog-post by Raph Koster, of Ultima Online and Star Wars Galaxies design fame. Just to be clear, not everything he talks about is applicable to us! Star Wars Galaxies was a very different game from ours, with permanent item loss and a bigger focus on crafting than we have. But he explains some underlying design ideas that will help you understand where I'm coming from. His post is called "Do Auction Houses Suck?" )




Some players felt blindsided by the changes to area-of-effect abilities in the May 25 update. Which is understandable since it was definitely an abrupt change: I decided that it shouldn't wait any longer, I needed to drastically reduce the power of AoEs. Not in a subtle "maybe we'll reduce this one a little bit" kind of way, either -- they were so overpowered that they were creating new farming playstyles that shouldn't exist at all, with players able to safely kill eight or ten monsters at once.

This isn't new -- for a long time a small number of players have been using "AoE Death Builds" to kill dozens of monsters at a time. And that was obviously a problem, but it hadn't really been at the top of my to-do list. To be frank, there's a lot of overpowered stuff in the game right now, and I intentionally try to avoid making knee-jerk adjustments just because somebody found a way to abuse something. Since the game's balance is still changing pretty dramatically, an overpowered ability may suddenly stop being overpowered a bit later. So I try to focus on the big picture.

I do try to tackle balance problems if they're getting out of hand, though, and I should probably have jumped on this one earlier. These AoE builds had started to become really popular, and more and more players were using them. Listening to players talk in global, it's clear that most of these people realized they were overpowered, and were rushing to exploit AoEs before they got nerfed. So I nerfed them.

Let's talk about AoE balance a little bit. Most AoEs are balanced around the idea that they hit 1.5 people on average. That means we expect that half the time they'd hit a single target, and the other half of the time they'd hit two targets. If they hit three or more targets, that's "free" damage, but of course there's a lot more risk when fighting so many monsters.

And that's the underlying balance problem: players were using AoEs to hit more targets than I originally intended, and with less risk of dying than I expected. I'm not just talking about the really crazy builds that could kill dozens of monsters at once. If you talked to any player using an "AoE build", it's clear they didn't plan on hitting a mere 1.5 monsters on average!

The obvious fix would be to nerf their damage, Power costs, and other effects, rebalancing AoE abilities around the idea that they'd be hitting more enemies on average. But I'm resistant to that idea because it turns AoEs into very specialized, very boring abilities. Instead, AoEs were changed so that if you hit more than three targets, the damage is lowered dramatically. If you hit six or seven monsters, the AoE does almost no damage. But if you take care to only hit three monsters at a time, the damage is unchanged, and it's still FAR more efficient than single-target attacks.

I prototyped some other ideas before using this one. One idea was to increase the reset timer based on the number of enemies hit, so if you hit six targets, the ability would be on cooldown for 3 extra seconds. In practice this doesn't work -- the AoEs still do too much burst damage, and if they don't manage to kill the enemy, you have no recourse except to flee because your abilities are on cooldown. I also experimented with increasing the total Power cost based on the number of targets you hit, with similarly crappy results. I eventually settled on the current solution.

And I like the current solution -- it's not perfect, but it's the best I've come up with so far. It means AoE builds are still extremely powerful in the right hands, but they're not the mindless death-buttons that they were before. You need to be a bit more situationally aware, and that takes a little bit of skill. That's nice!

I think the most serious problem with this solution is that having a bigger radius isn't as big a win anymore. There are a handful of abilities with 10 meter burst radii (or even bigger!), and these abilities are much harder to use now. They hit so large an area that you can't always predict how many monsters will get hit. I may end up just reducing their radius, but first I'm trying some experiments to see if I can find a better approach for these abilities.

Anyway, I'm letting the current solution stand for another update or two while I ponder the issue, gather feedback, and prototype some more ideas.

Oh, and one more thing: monsters currently use the same AoE code as players do. If you're in a large group and fighting AoE-spamming monsters, keep that in mind.




I think the game is a bit unfair at higher level. There's an intentional power jump around level 50, then another one at 60 and 70, where the game starts to expect you to have decent gear and know how to use your abilities. The problem is that the game doesn't give players a lot of feedback on what's going on. Players often report feeling "stuck", unsure of why they seem unable to tackle higher-level areas. The game isn't giving them enough information to figure out how to advance.

So I've been slowly working on making this power transition smoother. NOT easier... just smoother. I think it's fine for the game to demand that you "get good" at high level, but the game has to give you lots of context to understand what's wrong and how to evolve your character. And ideally, it should do that well before you reach the point where you're saying "Huh? I can't kill these monsters in the desert. Why not?!"

One transition hurdle is that by level 60, the game is balanced around you knowing Transmutation and having access to basic Augments. Most players discover Transmutation on their own eventually (although I'll be making it easier to find soon, because it's really important! I expect every player to know and use Transmutation). But Augmentation is made up of several difficult crafting skills that I really don't expect every player to learn. Creating Augments is a pain, but USING Augments should be easy: you should be able to go to a player crafter and buy the Augment you want, then plug it into your gear.

This update moves us closer to that idea by letting NPC vendors install Augments into any piece of equipment for a small fee. This service is available even at low level: Joeh will happily install low-level Augments into your newbie gear if you want. I don't really anticipate that newbies will buy a lot of Augments (although who knows?), but I want low-level vendors to offer this service so players can discover that Augments exist and learn how they work.

This also means that players don't have to deal with that scheming elf Nightshade. Of course, he will still teach you how to install augments yourself if you have the cash, and I've made the augment-installation recipes cheaper by removing the extra recipe ingredients, like Fire Dust. But I expect most players will just use these NPCs, at least until they're very high-level.

The Augment skills have always been intended to be dedicated crafting skills: Augmenters create Augments, which can be sold to other players. So I'm hoping this update will jump-start the Augment economy a bit! We'll probably need more shopping tools to really make Augment-buying easy, but hopefully this will get things started.



The next update will arrive in a few days! In addition to the stuff I've talked about, it also has the usual bug-fixes and skill tweaks. It also lays the groundwork for the new Gorgon Shop. We'll be bringing the shop back online a few days after this update, so people who missed our Pre-Release Packs will be able to buy them. (But this time they're implemented as add-on packs, so they expect you to already have a Steam key. They just add features to your existing Steam account.)

I'll be back with more dev-blogginess soon!

This is primarily a bug-fix update. It includes important server-side bug-fixes, plus other fixes and improvements that happened to be ready to go.

• Fixed more server-side performance bottlenecks, and installed a new tracking tool to find remaining bottlenecks.
  
• The winners of the Steam Screenshot Contest will receive an in-game notification, along with a package of items, later today.
  
• To make finding the 3rd-party-tools JSON a bit less mysterious, tools developers can now just visit http://client.projectgorgon.com. This page will automatically redirect you to the page for the most recent game data, along with available documentation.
  

• The Skills window now remembers which parent skills you had opened/closed in the skill tree (between runs of the game).
  
• Fixed a timing bug that caused chat messages to be lost if they arrived during a certain part of the loading-screen process.
  
• Improved the Training UI so that it doesn't forget your scroll position when you train something.
  
• The tooltip for ability scrolls now shows a warning message if you need to learn an earlier ability before you can learn this one. (Previously the error message only showed when you tried to use the scroll.)
  
• Fixed a bug with the Last Seen time in the Friends list window. Part of the calculations were done in UTC time instead of your local time zone, so if a player had just logged off, instead of saying they were last seen a few minutes ago, it would say they were seen X hours ago, where X is how many hours you are behind UTC time. (If your timezone is ahead of UTC, it would say they were seen "< 1 Min ago".)
  
• Due to a bug, if you had multiple informational message boxes waiting for you when you logged in, some of those messages could have been missed. Only certain types of messages were vulnerable to the bug, including messages about e.g. shop items that didn't sell. The item would still be returned, but you might not get a message about it. (If you are worried you may have missed a message, note that you can always use the "/messages" command (without quotes) in chat to see recent messages.)
  

We're in the process of converting all damage-over-time (DoT) effects in the game to use a new system that stacks better and has more information in ability-tooltips. (We're about 2/3 finished with that conversion as of this update.)

While doing this technical conversion, we're also recalculating DoT treasure effects using new formulae and guidelines that should make DoTs more useful and understandable. (One of these guidelines is that a DoT that lasts more than about 12 seconds is too long.)

We're also trying to normalize DoT tick count to every 2 seconds. Some DoTs would "tick" (deal damage) every second, while others ticked every 2 seconds, or 3, 4, or 5 seconds. This was done to work within other existing balance ideas, but when all DoTs behave so differently, it's too hard for players to understand what's going on and how to make their DoTs better. So we're unifying most of these DoTs to deal damage every 2 seconds.

Most DoTs will deal increased damage under the new balance guidelines, although a handful of DoTs that had 1-second ticks may effectively be weaker (depending on what per-tick buffs you had).

Aside from DoT changes, there are some other bug-fixes and problem-adjustments that were easy to fix while doing the conversion.

Animal Handling:

• Ability: "Call Living Stabled Pet" did not work at all.
  

Archery:

• Treasure: Fire Arrow suddenly deals an additional 335 indirect Fire damage after a 15 second delay => 320 after 12 second delay
  
• Ability: Poison Arrow 6 deals 240 damage over 20 seconds => 180 over 12 seconds
  

Battle Chemistry:

• Treasure: All bomb attacks ignite the target, causing them to take 130 fire damage over 10 seconds => 140 over 10 seconds
  

Druid:

• Treasure: Heart Thorn coats the target in stinging insects that deal 180 Nature damage over 15 seconds => 306 over 12 seconds
  
• Treasure: Heart Thorn deals Poison damage (instead of Nature) and also deals 192 Poison damage over 12 seconds => 258 over 12 seconds
  

Fire Magic:

• Ability: Ring of Fire Deals 63 additional damage over 35 seconds => 150 damage over 12 seconds
  
• Ability: Fire Breath deals 80 damage over 40 seconds => 168 damage over 12 seconds
  
• Treasure: Calefaction causes 213 additional damage after a 20 second delay => 213 damage after a 12 second delay
  
• Ability: Flesh to Fuel: this ability was sharing an icon with a mentalism Psi Wave ability; it now has a unique icon.
  

Giant Bat:

• Treasure: The damage portion of "Drink Blood deals 96 damage over 12 seconds, and 50% of the damage becomes health for you" => this damage was applied to the caster, not the victim.
  

Hammer:

• Item: Flame Basher: All Hammer attacks have a 25% chance to ignite the target, causing 50 damage over 20 seconds => 33% to cause 30 damage over 12 seconds
  
• Treasure: Rib Shatter deals +160 Trauma damage over 20 seconds => 220 over 10 seconds
  

Mentalism:

• Treasure: Agonize deals +425 Psychic damage over 10 seconds => 576 over 12 seconds
  
• Treasure: System Shock deals +48 Psychic damage and 100 more over 10 seconds => 186 over 12 seconds
  
• Corrected icon coloration inconsistencies between the various Psi Wave abilities.
  

Necromancy:

• Treasure: Death's Hold deals +175 Fire damage over 15 seconds => 228 over 12 seconds
  
• Spark of Death deals 105 Psychic damage over 10 seconds => 168 over 12 seconds
  

Pig:

• Ability: Pig Rend 4 deals 75 Trauma damage over 15 seconds => 96 over 12 seconds
  
• Treasure: Pig Rend deals +238 Trauma damage over 15 seconds => +240 over 12 seconds
  
• Treasure: Squeal deals 266 Trauma damage over 15 seconds => 260 over 10 seconds
  

Priest:

• Treasure: "Exhilarate, Triage, and Invigorate restore +47 Health if you haven't been attacked in the past 15 seconds" only applied to Exhilarate, not Triage and Invigorate.
  
• The tooltips for various Priest abilities reported 0 healing when there were treasure mods that could make the ability provide that healing, but the treasure mods weren't in use.
  

Shield:

• Ability: Stunning Bash causes the target to take 145 Trauma damage over 15 seconds => 210 over 12 seconds
  
• Treasure: "Fire Shield causes melee attackers to ignite, dealing 42 Fire damage over 9 seconds" => 100 Fire damage over 10 seconds.
  
• Also fixed a bug with the lowest-tier version of this effect (found on level 1-10 gear); it did not work correct, instead briefly boosting your Fire Mitigation.
  

Spider:

• Ability: Spit Acid 5 Deals 400 acid damage over 9 seconds => 400 over 10 seconds
  
• Treasure: Spit Acid deals 228 Acid damage to Health over 12 seconds => 270 damage over 12 seconds
  

Staff:

• Ability: Pinning Slash 3 deals 60 Trauma damage over 15 seconds => 180 damage over 12 seconds
  
• Treasure: Double Hit ignites the target, dealing 135 Fire damage over 15 seconds => 198 over 12 seconds
  

Sword:

• Ability: Hacking Blade: "Deals 210 Trauma damage over 15 seconds" => 252 Trauma damage over 12 seconds (but fewer Ticks)
  
• Treasure: Hacking Blade deals 120 Trauma damage over 4 seconds => 192 Trauma over 12 seconds
  
• Treasure: Hacking Blade and Debilitating Blow deal 126 Trauma damage over 12 seconds => 138 over 12 seconds
  

Unarmed:
Note: Slashing Strike's damage was calculated incorrectly; this affects the ability and all treasure effects related to it.

• Treasure: Slashing Strike damage +51% => Slashing Strike damage +35%
  
• Ability: Slashing Strike deals 120 damage over 15 seconds => 180 damage over 12 seconds (but fewer Ticks)
  
• Treasure: Slashing Strike deals +26% damage plus 45 Trauma damage over 15 seconds => Slashing Strike deals 126 Trauma damage over 12 seconds (w/ no direct damage boost)
  
• Treasure: Slashing Strike deals +23% damage and hastens the current reuse timer of Hip Throw by 2.5 seconds => Slashing Strike deals +15% damage and hastens the current reuse timer of Hip Throw by 2.5 seconds
  
• Treasure: Infuriating Fist taunts +460 and deals 150 Trauma damage over 15 seconds => Infuriating Fist taunts +460 and deals 138 Trauma damage over 12 seconds
  

Additional skill and ability changes, including tweaks to how area-of-effect attacks work, will be in the next update (in a few weeks). The treasure-mod rebalancing discussed in the May 2018 Dev Blog will still happen, but we're delaying it for bit while we collect more up-to-date gameplay metrics.

• Bug-fixes and adjustments to Eltibule include:
  
• Tweaked arrival spot from Serbule. (Just a gentle tweak - it didn't move across the zone this time!) As a side-effect, one of the meditation pillars in Eltibule has moved a short distance.
  
• Adjusted map so that it covers the entire area. (Previously there were some edges that were "off the map".)
  
• Fixed scenarios where bird-form druids would stop being birds if they flew too close to certain edges of the map (and then fall somewhat hilariously to their deaths).
  
• Fixed scenarios where attempting to craft a map or survey could generate the error message: "You must be near an Eltibule to do that."
  

• Recipes for max-enchanted priest staves had incorrect (easier-than-intended) ingredients.
  
• Arisetsu Medallions incorrectly allowed the Familiar's Recall ability to be used by long-term animal players that had bonded to a master.
  
• The item-description for the necklace 'Treatment of the Poor' was lost and has been restored.
  
• Sidebar abilities that involve using knives (such as Poison Blade) require the user to have hands.
  
• Some musical performance abilities were grouped incorrectly in the skills UI listing.
  
• The "Neurotoxin" movement-debuff from Biting Vines always succeeded regardless of movement-speed debuff protections.
  
• Previously, tapped alcohol kegs showed a generic error if you were unable to drink for any reason: "Drink failed. You can only have 3 beer/wine and 1 hard liquor drink active at a time." Kegs now show more specific and accurate error messages if you are unable to drink for an unusual reason.
  
• Fixed a bug introduced with the new UI that prevented many alcoholic beverages from bestowing their special effects when drunk from inventory.
  
• If a chat message included items and had a spoiler-begins tag without a spoiler-ends tag, the chat line was displayed incorrectly.
  
• For our volunteer guides: when -Guide- or -Moderator- chat flair is enabled, speech filters are ignored and spoken Words of Power are not activated.
  
• Added internal tools to help us assist guilds whose guildmaster is gone.