The next wasteland map has been chosen based on the game vote. Bongo will setup the map on January 1st, 2022 at 12pm EST (server time).

We'll be playing the unnamed Option #3 map with 4 objectives (WL Shop, AA, Jammer, Hospital) that rotate clockwise between their positions every 6 hours. There will be 1 neutral square in the center.



The bigger Crater Expedition map was also pretty popular but it was clear there were some issues to work out there.

We decided that the wasteland round after the next one can be a big map one exclusively. This should give people time to come up with fun big map ideas and/or finesse Crater Expedition more for the next-next round.

PM Pie if you have any questions.

~Aldo

Are you ever in Wasteland? Do you find yourself, and your teammates, in low spirits AND low health? Don't have the credits to pay for a full heal AND your taxes?

Well, let me tell you, this product right here fresh out of X-Corp's oven is sure to make you feel better!

Presenting... the Deployment Kit, the earliest latest stolen development in medical nanotechnology! A scientific breakthrough of an intersection between drone technology and nanotech.

Use this bad boy (internally known as Good Boy) in Wasteland and find yourself and up to 4 other teammates basking in the glow of healing nanites!

Wondering how it works? Me too! Let's see:

• A little bit after this post, Deployment Kits will be available in the Warfare Shop for 200 Warfare Points.


• When a kit is in your held items, use /deploy heal in WL, immediately consuming the item, to spawn a visible gang NPC called 'Healing Drone'.


• Every minute tick, the healing drone will expend healing power (currently set at 100HP), consuming it from its own HP bar.


• If there are friendly gang members on the square, the expended healing power is split evenly among the gang players who need heals (up to a max of 5 players).
  
  (eg. If only 1 player needs heals, they get the full +100HP. If 2 players, 50 each..etc up to 5 players, 20 each,).


• Once its HP <= 0, the single-use drone will become useless (like my future).


• Higher gang ranks (not me ) can use /alert heal to explicitly create a new type of alert ("Healing drone"), but gang chat messages also go out when someone deploys a healing drone (also logged in Warfare log).


• Each gang can only have up to 3 of its own healing drones active simultaneously.


• Right now, anyone can deploy a healing drone once they have the item (which is also tradeable, fyi).


• You cannot stack drones/deploy a drone on a square that already has another healing drone (friendly or otherwise).


• War lords and above can go to a new drone management page in the citadel to destroy any active gang drone.


• Healing Drones are not combat-equipped other than having really strong armor! Defend them with your life!

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Feel free to discuss in the WL & Raids forum! As always, report any bugs or things that come up and I'll do my best to address them.

Also dev is down for ...erm reasons. Feel free to speculate, but I promise you it's nothing exciting.

~Aldo

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.