MMORPG Tycoon 2 News

Hi folks!

New in this update:

• It's once again possible to have regions support multiple levels of player. How this works is that buildings will all support the whole range of players supported by the region itself, and monster zones and elite monsters can have a level set on them when they're placed. (They can also have their level modified after being placed by selecting the elite monster or the zone and using the controls in their Info window)
  
• Updated player AI so that they'll find a correct region for their level, even if there isn't a directly accessible region of the right level. So your newly level 3 player needs to travel out of their level 2 region, through a level 1 region, then through a level 8 region, in order to finally reach a level 3 region, they'll now find that and do that (they might not be happy about the long journey, though!)
  
• Quests now are assigned a level range based upon their destination. A quest which sends people to a level 1-3 weapon shop will be a level 1-3 quest, while one that sends you to fight a level 3 elite monster will be a level 3 quest. Players will not attempt to do quests which are higher level than them, but they
• will* collect the quests and hold on to them until they've gained enough levels to do them.
  
• Monster zones now paint on with the left mouse button, and erase with the right mouse button, instead of having UI buttons to click to swap between "place" and "erase" modes.
  
• Adds 11 new achievements to the game. (yay!)
  
• ...plus a bunch of bug fixes!
  

And with this, I'm moving on to the combat system revamp that I've been talking about for a while, which should deliver improved combat editing, plus improved combat visuals and AI, as well as improved performance for games with a lot of logged in players. I'm really excited to get stuck into it!

Plus we have some new and revamped artwork coming within a few days, which I'm super excited to show off as well! :D

Hi everyone!

This is a small update with some new buildings and quality of life feature updates:

• [h2]Zoinks![/h2]Adds a suite of 'spooky'-themed buildings to the buildings list.
  
• [h2]Your party will not save you now![/h2]Fixed a bug which made it impossible to issue warnings to or ban players who were inside a party. Now you can ban people with impunity, again!
  
• [h2]Party Exploration[/h2]Fixed a bug which caused most parties to usually prefer to fight monsters in the same monster zone; now when there is more than one monster zone available, not every party should go to the same one.
  
• [h2]Explanations of Cheating[/h2]When inspecting players for cheats, cheating players now have a label drawn over their heads which actually explains what cheat they're using, and the effect it has, so you can decide whether or not you want to warn/ban them.
  
• [h2]Tier List Metagaming[/h2]Fixed the character class ratings to no longer be thoroughly dominated by the class's "health" rating. This should fix the problem of tank-style classes always floating to the top of the tier lists. Note that tier lists are only regenerated at the start of each in-game day, so you won't immediately see this change if you load into an old saved game; instead, it'll update at the start of the next day.
  
• [h2]More employees![/h2]By popular demand, the cap on number of developers and GMs has been increased from 30 to 50, for all you folks with really big games.
  
• [h2]Moving the Buzz[/h2]Moved the information about positive/negative buzz from the main header into the 'Rating' tab of the Overview report. This gives me a bunch more space to show useful information and explain what the values really mean, instead of jamming the values into a tiny meter and leaving folks to guess.
  

...and a whole bunch more localisation work, and other general bug fixes and improvements!

Next up is work on getting multi-level regions back in and working properly, and then onward to the Combat 2.0 update! Thanks so much for all your comments and feedback, everyone!

Hi, folks! Since we released the 'Party' update a couple weeks ago, we're starting another short period of smaller changes and "quality of life" features before we start work on Combat 2.0, the next major new feature update. Over the coming week or two, expect to see a bunch of quality of life improvements, plus we'll continue adding new models to the game.

New in this build:

• [h2]I don't always construct buildings, but when I do...[/h2]Adds a suite of functional buildings in a new "Elegant" theme. Also adds three new types of landmark building.
  
  
• [h2]If you love something, set it free[/h2]In edit modes, the camera is now allowed to move over unowned regions. This means that you can much more easily do fancy things like sending flight paths to travel across a water region and into a different island (which was difficult before because the camera wouldn't let you move over the water). We also now let the camera zoom out about 50% further than before, in edit modes.
  
  
• [h2]What is that other set of stairs for, anyway?[/h2]Players can now exit a starting point via either the front or the back, instead of always exiting toward the front. (They'll use whichever exit they think is more convenient for wherever they're trying to go)
  
  
• [h2]If you love something, tie it up and never let it leave[/h2]The camera is now constrained to the main map area; no more flying off infinitely over the empty oceans and then getting turned around and having no idea how to get back to the game.
  
  Sorry.
  
  
• [h2]At last I can hear myself think, again![/h2]Adds an 0.2 second delay to the "MegaTooltip" window opening and closing, so that it doesn't noisily pop up as your cursor brushes past a button on its way somewhere else, and similarly doesn't noisily close and re-open as your mouse is briefly in between two buttons while you're moving the cursor from one to the other. Did I mention that there are small quality of life features in this update? This update contains a lot of small quality of life features.
  
  
• [h2]Aah, this potion goes down smooth![/h2]I fixed potion shops so that their potions no longer look "chunky" when animating, which could get especially bad if the game had been running for a while. As part of this, I also made the potions brighter and more colorful, especially when the 'bloom' visual effect is disabled.
  

Thanks so much for your bug reports and suggestions, everyone! I'm really looking forward to getting started on all the new combat systems, but I want to knock over some of this little stuff first, since the combat system overhaul is going to be a big big change!

Hey everyone, the long-awaited Party Update is now here!

Here's what's new!

• [h2]Players now form parties![/h2]Your Subscribers can now form parties of up to four players to take on your MMO together! If you've developed the 'Parties' technology, you can enable this feature from the 'Design' window's "Features" tab, and then players will tend to gather around Taverns to form parties.
  
• [h2]New Artist, New Buildings![/h2]Adds a whole bunch of new building model variants. Almost every type of functional building now has two or three new versions of the standard model.
  
  We now have a new artist on the team, working on making heaps of new buildings and game assets, and this is just the first drop of those new assets; we're planning to continue with more regular art updates over the coming weeks!
  
• [h2]Unsubscription Report[/h2]There’s now a new “Unsubscribe Reasons” Report, which can tell you what players have given as reasons for unsubscribing from the game (along with tracking the total number of unsubscribers over time).
  
• [h2]Subscription Savings Plans![/h2]Previously, a lot of subscribers would unsubscribe when their subscription fees came due because they didn't have enough money in their daily entertainment budgets to pay the whole fee. Now, they'll save up toward the subscription fee in advance, so this should be much less of a problem!
  
• [h2]Solid Walls[/h2]Players should no longer walk through walls (or over mountains or etc), if you've completely walled off the place that they wanted to go to. (previously, if there was no legal way to reach their desired destination, they'd ignore obstacles in order to get there. Now they'll just fail to go there, instead)
  
• [h2]Littering is Bad, M'Kay?[/h2]Fixes the infamous “dropped weapons” bug, which would sometimes result in dozens or even hundreds of pure-white weapons being randomly strewn about on the landscape. (This mostly happened on larger games, when players bought weapons while out of view of the camera; the weapons were appearing wherever the character had last been visible on-screen, and stayed there until the next time you looked at the player who owned each weapon)
  

I'm really happy to have this update out for everyone to play with! Getting our AI systems to work reliably in parties was surprisingly tricky; this one is literally the third full implementation I did of the Parties feature, and the first one that doesn't terrify me to think about trying to maintain or extend in the future!

Please let us know if you encounter any issues with the new Parties functionality or with the new game assets, or with anything else in this update!

Next stop, the Combat 2.0 update!

Hi, folks! This is mostly a small update, just dealing with a few critical issues in the most recent update, and one big change (which I couldn't really separate from the bug fixes; I felt like a few of the bug fixes were important enough to push this update out to Steam early!).

Big change:

• Subscribers no longer play every day. Subscribers now play a different number of days per month, and the number of days they play varies based upon their addiction level (as their addiction level goes up, they'll play on more days per month and for slightly longer per day)
  
  This change will result in about half as many subscribers being logged in at once (on average), which will reduce pressure on your region population limits as well as your login queues, without changing your total number of subscribers or your overall subscription fee income. Plus, it just makes more sense in terms of real-world MMORPG subscriber behaviour.
  

Issues fixed in this build:

• Fixed a number of player AI issues while doing quests or grinding for XP, where every player could end up trying to fight only one monster inside a monster zone, and where sometimes newly placed monsters would not aggro against players until after a save/load.
  
• Fixed a bunch of broken translation strings in the German language.
  
• Improved player questing/grinding AI to prefer to fight closer monsters, instead of picking entirely random monsters within a zone.
  
• Combat ability changes were being lost if you switched from viewing one ability to another ability without clicking the 'Apply' button first. We already were auto-applying changes if you changed tabs or closed the window or clicked the 'back' button on the Design interface, but had missed the "switch ability" action. Now we're catching it and applying any unsaved changes at that time!
  
• Fixed the game's "No Sound" mode to invoke correctly, in the event of FMOD seeing audio devices during startup but being unable to open any of them. The game now successfully gets into 'no sound' mode, and displays a message on the desktop to let you know.
  
• New music track for the "version 1.0.0" cutscene.
  
• Fixed an issue which could cause a crash-during-load if you have placed a monster zone right up against a water border, and one of the monsters has wandered slightly outside of its region during the save.
  
• Fixed 'Focus On' camera movement, which could abort before you reached the target if you were trying to focus on an extremely distant target.
  
• Fixed a crash bug in the ability editor if you set an ability effect's modifier value to be "-.", which isn't a number. (reported twice ever)
  
• Fixed a rare travel bug which could cause players to spawn their own flight point raven for short non-flight-path movements, if their most recent long-distance travel finished precisely on a flight point.
  

Thanks for your patience, everyone! The next actual big feature update is coming!