A new raid has been released as part of the ongoing A Hive Legacy series! Chapter 2 is out now for Level 15+. If you don't see it, please complete Chapter 1!

I paintstakingly put together a raid editor GUI, in the same vein as the other extensive WL Map Editor. It uses the new map engine I wrote for wl (and eventually the actual raid system itself will soon use this map engine).

What this means is that it's much, MUCH easier for me to build new raids. Chapter 1 took a few hours start-to-end. In the past, the same raid could've taken a lot of tedious effort over days. You will see the Hive Legacy chapters come out relatively fast between each other!

The item you receive at the end of Chapter 2 is a quest item. You cannot sell it back to the game (yet). You will need it for Chapter 3. I made this raid doable twice so you could get 2 of the same item in case it's hard to complete Chapter 3 or for w/e other reasons.

Other notes:
- Halloween npc/jobs will be going away this coming Monday (Nov 9th).
- Reminder: Double Gains will start Nov 14th, 12:01 AM EST (server time, a minute past midnight).
- Check out Kraster's raid idea in the WL & Raids forum! I'd love to hear more discussion/thoughts on it.

Looking into remedies for the lag. I've pushed some code I'm hoping will help reduce server/database stress initially, and over time we'll try to make some more optimizations to help deal with the current load.

We are seeing unprecedented numbers in wasteland active at the same time (unprecedented in the sense that it's been a very long time since we've had this many online) so as activity evens out, it'll get a better there as well. That + live wl = server stress.

As a volunteer dev, without direct server access, it's tricky to do deeper, more granular debugging of the server or database utilization but generally the live WL is a problem so will keep trying some fixes over the course of this week, starting tomorrow.

As a little "sorry your day sucked in WL" token, I'll be running double gains for the game November 14th and 15th (Saturday and Sunday) starting at 12:01 AM Server Time Saturday (right after midnight) and ending at the end of the weekend at night - Sunday 11:59 PM.

Please stop pm'ing me asking me what is AM and PM which part of the day is which.

The latest warfare results are as follows:

Warfare: September - October 2020
1: Outcasts: 1,606,315 points
2: Chapter: 1,004,040 points
3: Dark Flame: 720,790 points
4: Blade of Dawn: 646,360 points

Congratulations to OC as well as to the effort shown by the other gangs!

Next map will start sometime around tomorrow (Sunday - 1st November) 12:00 PM ish, contingent on when Bongo and I are up.

WTF Mode will be active until then. Thanks for all those who joined in some of the manual events I ran. Right now there are halloween npcs and minimoos spawning periodically until tomorrow (with occasional world boss spawns).

This WTF mode showed the following (other than lag with the ~50+ players we had in WL all trying to attack/move/do things super fast ):

1. Maps can be ANY size now
This is one of the fundamental changes to the WL Map System I hinted at earlier and now you all saw.

2. WL NPCs can be big and occupy several tiles at once
This started out as a bug last night when I was adding the ability to show images of npcs on a tile, like we do in Raids. This turned into a feature when I thought it could be cool to attack NPCs from any tile they're on (and in the future, being able to cause damage to body parts individually for different effects). I'll be looking to add this into raids too.


3. We can have animated objects in the WL
The animations like the Off-Plane Being and the weird circle colored thing that X-Corp deployed earlier today are not gifs; I had to put some solid work into making those animations work in the WL system but they do! Even more interactive wl!

4. Fog of war/weather effects
There are weather effects and vision restrictions/fog of war-ish now supported.

5. NPC Spawner System
As many of you saw with the recurring NPCs, there is an actual spawn system for npcs now that's fully automated. Previously, stuff like minimoo and halloween npcs would rely on manual spawning or manual code for each new thing.

Happy Halloween and look out for more content and raids coming soon!

P.S: The lore implications from the ending of today's WL event are very real and tie into Domothar's storyline as well as the Hive's history. I think some people recorded it so I'll leave it to them to share/analyze.

Warfare reset will happen tomorrow (Friday) sometime around 6PM server time, going straight into WTF Mode. I've based this on the votes and the current gang scores as well as feedback from various players.

I see TC has been demolishing buildings to get GP back and I want to reiterate something that we probably don't mention often enough - we calculate the GP automatically you are to be refunded automatically when we reset warfare. So no need to worry about demolishing buildings, but feel free to do it anyway.

I was thinking we could go into Bob's map on Monday (either 12:01 AM or 12:00 PM, leaning towards the latter since most would be asleep during the former).

I do understand that some players would prefer starting on Sunday so that they have a day on the weekend to do this, so let me know in the comments if you'd prefer we go into Bob's map on Sunday (12:00 AM) instead of Monday. I'll probably start a game vote in a bit as well.

I've also updated the Combat box to show player equipment, show your combat abilities (henceforth referring to them as your stances; this will be relevant soon), and re-order the attack texts based on speed like we do in regular attack pages.
Speaking of the stances, when you're SDing someone, they will be fighting you based on your default selected stance (quick/aimed/cover) in options.

~Aldo