Server and game performance improvements.

• Removed all enemy hunting limits. Characters can now hunt an infinite number of enemies.
• Enemies now slowly flee over time. The rate in which they flee entirely depends on the characters Hunting Mastery Level.
• The current decay rate is between 25% and 10% every three hours depending on your Hunting Level. As you progress your Hunting Mastery level, fewer enemies will flee.
• Improved Hunting Mastery EXP.
• Added sorting to the pet inventory.
• Removed “Pet Hunting” from the wiki (Wiki contribution by @thzunder via GitHub).
• Removed the following skills from the teleportation cost as they have minimal impact on the game's economy: Springtide Mastery, Shadow Mastery, Lunar Mastery, Guild Mastery, Yule Mastery, and Pet Mastery. This means you can level up these skills without affecting your teleportation costs.
• Fixed buffalo loot percentages incorrectly totaling 110%, not 100%.

• Improved hunting distribution to address the imbalance where certain enemies appeared significantly more often than others. Previously, even after encountering 1,000 enemies, some types of enemies would only show up a few times.
• Added Shadow Mastery leaderboard.
• We've hidden the health UI element on the app battle page during an active battle as it is no longer needed.
• Fixed an issue that always caused a minimum of one enemy to be defeated regardless of how much health was used.
• Fixed a bug that prevented some characters from accessing campaign locations.
• Fixed a bug that caused some food items to disappear when starting a battle.
• Implemented a temporary processing delay for world boss rewards, based on each individual character. This delay, randomly ranging from 0 to 10 seconds, whill distribute server load and reduce the stress caused by simultaneous requests when the world boss is defeated. However, the effectiveness of this change is unknown at this point.
• Fixed an issue where stance EXP was not properly distributed when the enemy's EXP was lower than 4.
• Fixed a bug that caused pets to not obtain any additional stats if their base stat was 0.
• Fixed requirements for gauntlets.
• Fixed notifications not correctly showing the quantity of loot obtained from a dungeon.
  
  

Frequently flagged issues that we are aware of. There is no need to report the following bugs:

• We are aware that the hunting EXP is significantly lower than expected and we are working on a fix. This should hopefully arrive this week.
• We are aware of intermittent server slowness caused by a bottleneck introduced in v0.23.0. We are actively investigating the issue.

This update includes several balancing adjustments based on feedback and observations from the recent v0.23.0 release. We're fully aware that the game requires ongoing fine-tuning, and we've approached these changes carefully - especially with regard to loot rates.

Our cautious approach is to avoid disrupting the in-game economy in the long-term. As we've mentioned before, it's much easier for us to gradually increase loot rates in the future, allowing more items to enter the game, than it is to roll back and remove items that are already in circulation.

Before moving on to the changes, this patch will be deployed over the next few hours. You may not notice the patch immediately - as it takes time for some of the values to propagate. It also will depend on when the skill was started as new values are only applicable when the skill is refreshed.

Enemy Stat Balancing Changes

We recognize that enemies are currently a bit too powerful, dealing more damage than intended. This is causing players to consume significantly more food than necessary to stay in the fight.

The balance between enemy attack power and defense was also slightly off, making it more difficult than expected to defeat enemies below your level.

We’ve implemented the following changes:

• Reduced enemy attack power by 10% to 15%, depending on the enemy's level.
• Increased enemy protection by 9% to 32%, also based on the enemy's level.

Enemy Experience Changes

While we significantly reduced enemy EXP values compared to before the update (e.g., the werewolf's EXP was lowered from 950 to 180), we’ve noticed that this adjustment still wasn’t enough across the board.

When players efficiently reach the 10-second cap per enemy kill, we observed that the EXP per second rate becomes disproportionately high.

For example, players could previously gain 7.2 EXP/s by fighting a mid-level enemy like the Dwarven Warrior, while other mid-level skills typically yield around 0.8 EXP/s. Although direct comparisons against other skills aren’t entirely fair due to the added investment required for combat (gear and food), they still provide a useful benchmark.

We have made the following changes:

• We’ve significantly reduced the EXP for all enemies. As an example, the new rates will bring mid-level enemies down to around 2-3 EXP/s when reaching the 10s cap.

Food Rebalancing

The health restoration per food item was not proportional to its value, leading to some lower-valued food items being more effective than higher-valued ones. As a result, many food items were not providing enough health or hunger points.

We have made the following changes:

• We've boosted the health and hunger restored by most food items, making sure they give you more benefits as their value increases.

With this change, we’ve fixed the imbalance between health restoration and item value, and it should also help reduce the need to use too much food during battles - a key issue we mentioned before.

Pet Changes

As stats have become increasingly important for defeating enemies, we want to place greater emphasis on the benefits provided by pets.

In the past, pet stats were continuously reduced due to bugs or being slightly overpowered.

As we noted in previous patch notes, our plan was to scale them back, monitor their impact, and make further adjustments based on how they affect the battle and travel systems.

As we focused on developing the new battle system, we held off on making further adjustments to the pet system until the battle system updates were ready.

Now that the new system is in place, we are introducing the following changes:

• Between 10% to 15% increase in pet growth stats across the board for attack power, agility, protection, critical damage, and accuracy.

Loot Changes

As mentioned, we intentionally set the loot rates to be low initially so we can observe the new battle system once it had been released.

We are introducing the following changes:

• All enemies will have a minimum of 25% chance of obtaining a loot. This will result in a significant increase for the lower leveled enemies. For instance, loot from a rabbit will increase from 12% to 25%.

Closing Thoughts

While we understand that some players are upset about recent changes, particularly the reduction in loot rates or adjustments in other areas in the game, our goal is to ensure the game remains balanced for the long term. We know there are concerns about receiving less loot in the current battle system, but our top priority is maintaining the game's health over several years, not just in the short term. Being too generous with loot now could cause long-term issues, which we are very mindful of.

On top of that, we’re also aware of a bug with hunting EXP, which is causing players to earn less than expected. We’ll be rolling out a fix for this next week.

All in all, the long-term health of the game is our top priority. To put it bluntly, we're not afraid to make tough decisions or cause short-term discomfort to ensure we achieve that goal. That said, we're also not going to stick our fingers in our ears and ignore feedback just to stick to a "vision." It’s all about finding the right balance - which, coincidentally, is exactly the purpose of this patch note.

We're always open to feedback and really value your input, however, a bit of patience is needed as we fine-tune these changes. Balancing is one of the hardest parts of making an online game, and it takes time to get it right.

We're committed to being as open and transparent as possible during this process. All we ask in return is that any feedback you share is respectful and constructive.

• Possible fix for edge case issue that caused some actions to get stuck behind-the-scenes.
• Fixed preview values on the market listing creation dialog window.
• Hidden market level limit message for banished and cursed classes.
• Fixed base movement speed for all characters. Should now be set to 3.
• Fixed an error that caused some players notifications to break.

• Fixed enemies not counting correctly towards tasks.
• Fixed some characters getting stuck in battles.
• Fixed pet not receiving the correct amount of EXP points after battling.

• Removed "Stance" from dungeons as it became overly powerful at higher levels.

This update is our biggest yet, featuring the highly awaited battle rework, a lot of quality of life upgrades, balancing changes, and bug fixes.

Due to the size of this update, and how much underlying mechanics we have adjusted - it’s very likely we have introduced a lot of new bugs into the game. Because of that, if you have experienced any new bugs, please report them in the #bug channel within our Discord server.

Hunting Changes

• You can now hunt for much longer periods.
• How long you hunt for is determined by the Movement Speed and Hunting Mastery level. The higher these stats, the longer you can hunt for.
• The maximum number of enemies you can find in one hunt is determined by the Hunting Mastery level. The higher the level, the more enemies you can hunt in one session.
• When starting a new hunt, any new enemies will be added upon the existing stack of enemies that have already been hunted. For instance, if you have already hunted 30 enemies and you start hunting again, any new enemies will be added on top of those 30 enemies.
• You can only hunt enemies that are within their combat level.
• Due to the significant rework on how hunting works, pets can no longer hunt on the your behalf.
• When completing a hunt, a breakdown is given within the your notifications.
• The maximum total number of enemies you can hunt ranges from 200 to 1,300 per location. This maximum number is dependent on the Hunting Mastery level. Once you have reached this figure, you must either hunt in another location, or battle the enemies to reduce the pending number.
• When ending a hunt early, the game will calculate how many enemies a character has already hunted and will disregard the rest.
• More detailed information can be found in our wiki with examples on how the hunting system works.
• Added the ability to quickly refresh the hunting action.
• All existing enemies found prior to this update will be lost because the data cannot be transferred over to the new system.

Battle Rework

• When battling enemies, it now works automatically. It no longer requires any input from you as the battle unfolds.
• You will automatically battle the enemies up until one of these three things happen:
  • You are defeated (meaning they’ve ran out of effective health)
  • You defeat all enemies in the stack.
  • You reach the maximum idle time (which is determined by its Main Character status and membership status.
• When battling an enemy, there is the ability to view the stats of the battle to see how you are performing. It will display information like the characters hit change, how much damage is dealt per hit, the enemies hit chance, and more. These stats will help you make decisions in the future when it comes to upgrading your stats with gear.
• Before starting a battle, you can choose various food items to take with you. These items increase your overall effective health, allowing you to fight for longer.
• Ending the battle early will return any unused food.
• The system will attempt to priories the weakest food items first. However, this is just a general rule of thumb as it depends on the battle and the time in which it is stopped.
• The battle formula has changed to put a much higher emphasis on stats. Now you should notice far bigger differences when using better gear. Investing in better gear means you take less damage per hit, and can hit for more damage, resulting in faster battles, and more enemies defeated per turn.
• The battle formula change also will mean that you will now receive significantly more damage from enemies compared to pre-update.
• Because of the more idle nature of the system, there is a hard limit of 10 seconds set per enemy. Meaning it’s not possible to defeat an enemy under 10 seconds. Had it been lower than that, then it would’ve been possible for a high level character to blaze through lower level enemies in minutes, resulting in a potentially devastating economic situation.
• Updated the battle tutorial for new accounts.
• Agility has been updated and it now affects the enemy's chance of hitting your character during each round of combat. The higher your agility, the lower the chance that the enemy will successfully land a strike.
• Accuracy has also been changed determines your character's chance of landing a successful hit in each round. The higher your character’s accuracy, the better the chance of hitting the enemy.

Enemy EXP Changes

We’ve had to adjust the experience (EXP) rates for enemies because of the new battle system. The old system was designed to be more active, so the EXP per second was much higher compared to other parts of the game since it required frequent interaction and couldn't be idled for long.

Since we’re moving towards a more idle-friendly system, we had to adjust the EXP rates to match the rest of the game. Keeping the old numbers would have caused a major imbalance between the battle system and other activities. For example, stronger enemies like the Werewolf used to give 950 EXP per kill, which could lead to players earning up to 95 EXP per second - much higher than other parts of the game. This becomes especially obvious when you compare it to the highest dungeon, which only gives around 31 EXP per second.

Loot Changes

Because of a huge shift in the way the battle system works to a more idle system, it will ultimately result in far more enemies being defeated. Mainly because people can battle more enemies, successively, without the need of interacting with the game and it will also result in making the battle system more accessible to more players.

With that in mind, we need to be extremely careful on how the will impact the game’s economy. Because of this, we have made the following changes:

• Added a “chance to loot” percentage. This is a percentage chance that you will definitely receive a piece of loot regardless of what it is.
• All enemies have been given a collectable which sole purpose (as of right now) is for the player to sell to the vendor. It is a means of obtaining gold coins.
• For example, let’s say an enemy has a 30% chance of dropping loot. And, within its loot, there is a 80% chance of obtaining a collectable, and 20% chance to obtain a potion. This means there are two “dice rolls” here: first the game will determine if you are going to receive a piece of loot or not. The chance for this to happen, in this situation, is 30%. If you are successful in this, the game will then perform a second dice roll to determine which loot you will receive. In this roll, you have a 80% chance of obtaining a collectible, and a 20% chance to obtain a potion.
• This change may significantly reduce the number of materials that are dropped from enemies. We are being overly cautious with how the change will affect the economy.
• To make up for the loss, as mentioned, enemies will drop collectable items instead that are meant to be sold to the vendor.
• As there are so many factors and variables in to this mechanic, it’s going to be almost nigh impossible for us to get it right the first time. That is why we are being overly cautious with our approach. While, as mentioned, the change may significantly reduce the number of materials that are dropped initially, we will review the game in the coming weeks and make any necessary adjustments. It’s much easier for us to increase the rates in the future, giving more opportunities for items to be entered in the game, than it is for us to remove items that are already in the game.

Stance

• Stance lets you choose which stat you want to focus on when earning EXP rewards after defeating an enemy.
• There are five stances to select:
  • Balanced: Obtains EXP for every primary stat. For instance, if you get 20 EXP, then each stat will get 5 EXP.
  • Offensive: Obtains EXP only for Strength.
  • Defensive: Obtains EXP only for defense.
  • Agile: Obtains EXP only for Speed.
  • Dexterous: Obtained EXP only for Dexterity.
• A stance can be selected when initiating a battle with an enemy, or when starting a dungeon.
• The amount of stat EXP is determined by how much combat EXP you receive. For example, if a dungeon distributes 20 EXP, then that means 20 EXP will go towards combat, and a further 20 EXP will go towards your stats. Meaning that a total of 40 EXP will be distributed.

Location Distance

We've tripled the distance between locations to reduce the impact of each individual movement speed point. This gives us more flexibility to expand the system in the future without making the map mechanics feel irrelevant or unbalanced.

Since movement speed now plays a significant role in the new hunting system, we need to be mindful of how we balance the distribution of movement speed points. It's important to ensure that they don't become too overpowered or disrupt the balance of both systems.

Pet Movement Speed

Due to the increased distance between locations, we've tripled the movement speed growth for every pet to compensate for the change. Additionally, we've raised the base movement speed value from 2 to 3, so every new character will now start with a movement speed of 3m/s.

Fishing Balancing Changes

As we mentioned in a recent blog post, we noticed a significant imbalance in the value of fishing items, especially those at higher levels.

This created an imbalance in the game because fishing became noticeably more powerful than other skills. The issue stood out even more because fishing isn't a layered skill with dependencies, making it very easy to access and an overly lucrative way to earn gold.

As we've often mentioned, our goal is to keep the game as balanced as possible. Naturally, some skills will always be stronger than others, especially as the 'meta' evolves with ongoing tweaks. However, we're committed to making sure everything stays balanced as we make these adjustments.

Because of this, we are introducing the following changes:
- We’ll be reducing the vendor value for higher-level fishing items. Considering the time it takes to get these items and the cost of bait, this change will bring fishing more in line with, or even slightly below, other skills in terms of gold per minute.
- We’re significantly increasing the vendor value for many cooked fishing items. While this may seem like a big jump, it’s simply bringing the values to where they should have been. The previous prices didn’t account for the cost of bait for raw fish or the time it takes to catch the fish before cooking.

With these adjustments, the gold per second for cooking will be more inline with other skills. Also, since cooking involves a two-step process - first catching the fish (or buying them) and then cooking - it helps address our concern that earning gold through this method was becoming too easy.

Even though the value of raw fish has been reduced, fishing still holds significant value because cooking depends on it. This is further boosted by the fact that cooked food will become much more useful with the battle changes.

To prevent potential gold losses on the market for players who have listed food items below the newly adjusted vendor value, we have automatically increased the price per item to match the new vendor value.

Classes

We’re introducing two new classes to the game: Cursed and Banished.

• Cursed: A class that has -50% permanent effects on its character and cannot access any market or trading systems.
• Banished: A class that only cannot access market or trading systems. You may commonly know this type of class to be referred to as an “ironman” class.

Metamorphite Item (Class Changer)

• You can now change your class by purchasing a Metamorphite item from the vendor. The item costs 500 tokens and has some limitations:
  • Any locked classes (currently Forsaken, Cursed, and Banished) cannot change class.
  • A character cannot change to a locked class.
  • A class can only be changed every 14 days.
  • The item is not tradable.


Namestone (Name Changer)

• You can now change the name of your character by purchasing a name stone in the vendor. This item costs 500 tokens.
• The item is not tradable.
• When you change your character's name, the old name will become available for others to use.

Account Security Improvements

• When signing into the game using a new network, you must enter a single use code that is sent to your email address.
• When changing the accounts email address, you first must confirm the change using the current email address.

Quality of Life Improvements

• Added various “EXP per second” badges across various elements in the game to help you find out how much EXP you are getting.
• Added quick link to the market when the food items list is empty after trying to eat food.
• Added a quick heal button to the enemy window when you have no health.
• Added “Total Gold Per Item” and “Tax Per Item” to the market listing window.
• Entering in a value when creating a market listing will automatically add commas to help with readability.
• Added a check box to the character switcher dialog box to return you to the previous page automatically (web app only).
• Improved the display of errors when you are unable to craft an item. This should help stop people missing the “You don’t have the recipe” error.
• The quantity field when attempting to forge an item will no longer be shown if the item can’t be crafted.
• Improved various UI elements across the game (such as the action bar and the toast notifications)
• New characters are given 10x untradable food items to help with their first battle.
• Dungeon lengths are now displayed in minutes and seconds.
• Improved UX when verifying an email address.
• Added guild member names to the character list on the guild page.

More

• Banned accounts will have their characters deleted automatically after 6 months.
• Added a cut off point for the shrine so people don’t end up starting the shrine just before it gets reset.
• Improved membership page to help clarify that the 50% off offer only applies to the subscription - not the item.
• Added push notifications to hunting, battling, and dungeon.
• Due to the changes to fishing and food, we have removed the food item from the vendor.
• Improved the campaign switcher button to make it easier to see.
• Added time when membership tokens are distributed every month (currently 12:17 UTC)
• Added total market volume chart over the past 30 days to the item inspection page.
• Fixed trading wiki examples (Contribution by @5fic on GitHub)
• Updated membership page to show lower tax in trades.
• Combat EXP effect now affects experience obtained from dungeons.
• The way we save some data has been reworked. As a result, you may see quick tip messages that you have previously dismissed.

Bug

• Fixed gap on the inventory item stats
• Fixed exhaustion bug that only caused the effects to be applied for 24 minutes instead of 4 hours.
• Fixed item database links that lead to pages that didn’t exist.
• Fixed issue where inspecting an item on mobile would open the page in the same window causing some players to be locked in.
• Fixed various wiki typos and errors.
• Fixed issue that was causing “Too many requests” error when on the battle page.
• Fixed UI error when the text is too long in a guild description.
• Fixed a bug that allowed people to accidentally tap the “purchase” button twice by mistake when purchasing on the market or purchase orders.
• Fixed a bug that allowed users to obtain more EXP when selling items individually to the vendor compared to selling in bulk.
• Various typo fixes.
• Updated requirements for all items to be displayed as “Combat X” instead of “Level X”.
• Fixed error message not showing on the battle screen when a characters HP is 0.