::September 11, 2002 - BUILD NOTES::

We have performed an update to the AC2 Beta. Please read on for details.

Monsters un-nerfed
A big bug was fixed where monsters at higher levels were invisibly capped in their skills, so that they did not have the skills that the designers originally intended. Those monsters were self-nerfing! No more.

We know this will come as a nasty shock to those of you who were able to reliably kill monsters far over your level, leveling a few times a night… but this was never the intent. We know it’s painful for you to take a step backward in relative power, but we also did not intend for anyone to be killing level 45 Gurog within a week of our character wipe.

Please play for a while before you make up your mind as to how fast and satisfying advancement is now. After you get a feel for it, please post your feedback. We do have plenty of time to adjust all this since we have a very flexible system for doing so. Don’t give up hope, and please take good, honest notes about exactly how long it is taking you to level, what monsters you are able to kill solo or in groups, and be ready to give us lots of data about it. On our new Community site at http://www.accmty.com in the “AC2 Beta Announcements” section you will see our solicitation for your hard data on your advancement rate. This will be posted on Thursday for you to read, and on Friday it will be open for replies where you can submit your data.
 
The Lag Beast still lives-- and so does "server full".
We slayed one cause of lag-- the funniest thing, it was a certain type of projectile that never got deleted, staying in the world, going faster and faster until the server went nuts! (Don't blame archers, now-- we don't know if it was an arrow, a magic bolt, or a monster weapon.)

But a mini-beast lives on. Once the population of the servers gets high enough, something else is overloading the servers. We are trying to find out what it is. But in the meantime, we need to keep the server population capped at about half of what it used to be able to handle, until we can find the problem. This will mean the Red and Green worlds will both be full quite often. It also still may get laggy in spots. We apologize for this and we are hard at work on a fix.

Here are significant changes/fixes. These are all the fixes and changes since the last build we had on the Red world.

• More Vaults, Dungeons, and quests are now more easily completable, and it‘s harder to get stuck. Unfortunately for you, same goes for the monsters…
• Success or failure at crafting produces visible effects.
• Balance changes to Self Gambling effects.
• Forges want more fuel before they give out a bonus.
• Quests that should be fixed now: Darkstone, Dillo Rustlers.
• Skills that should be fixed: Guardian Spirit, summoned Shadows, Inferno’s Blessing.
• Faction skills now stripped when you go neutral.
• There were far too many melee weapons vs. missile and magic from the treasure system. Simplified and added some tables so the three classes of weapons now have an equal opportunity to appear in loot. Prior to this change melee weapons were more prevalent.
• There was a disparity on weapon/armor/shield ratios between the three different races. In general terms, the treasure system would drop weapons 50% of the time, armor 30%, shields 10%, and all other items at 10% (i.e. rings, instruments, and potions). However, it used to be that the selection of items would generally pick a melee weapon associated with Lugians or Humans. Now, when the treasure system decides to choose a weapon, it will give an equal chance to every type of weapon. Same goes with shields and armor.
• Tumeroks have iron made more available to them for basic crafting. Sharpsticks and some spears now use iron instead of wood.
• Some effects were being removed on the event of the player's death. These effects are no longer removed: Statue Mender from Mend Statue Quest, Tanacha's Boon from Broth of Tanacha quest The Blind Dead from Lodrog the Forsaken quest, Blood of the Vermin from Rat Smasher quest.
• Added names and descriptions for the Ringway portals.
• Medium and Low frill radius now look different.
• The Basic and Quality Human Boots Recipes were creating hard leather boots instead of regular leather. Fixed.
• Game year changed (see map panel).
• Increased the magnitude of the run buff and debuff for the Emerald burden and Vakentu's Haste.
• Earrings from the Slavetaker's quest now equips in the player's head slot.
• Harder for Lifestone recall to fail if you are in “eternal fall” mode.
• Anytime you “charged” magic spells you would assert as a Tumerok. Fixed.
• There should be no more update failures in the Launcher. If you fail to update, especially if you happened to fool with any of the files in your AC2 directory or registry, please uninstall AC2 (using the Start Menu selection) and reinstall from any Beta 1 setup program.
• You can click radar dots again.
• You are less likely to fail to connect to the chat server.

Top issues are the following. We intend to fix all of these.

• Your client will crash. A lot. The fixes made to improve support for multiple resolutions introduced instability. We are hard at work on this one. Meanwhile, please bear with many crashes.
• If you crash a lot, one workaround that may help is to disable music. To do this, see the “configuration” window which appears when you start AC2 (or which you can start up anytime by quitting AC2, then double-clicking “ac2config” in your AC2 folder). On that window, uncheck the option “Enable music”.
• Your character is not getting automatically saved. If your server crashes (which will often happen) you will “timewarp” back to the last point at which your character saved. If your “client” crashes (ac2client.exe error), you may not timewarp, though it is still a danger. The only way to be sure you have saved your character is to the leave the world. Once at the character screen, you can jump right back in again.
• Cursor not visible even when chat is active. Chat mode sometimes does not begin when you hit Enter.
• In general, text can be jumbled. Chat can be hard to read as the name of the speaker gets overlapped by what is said. Given this and the above issue, we recommend hitting the / key to start chatting. Then, keep right on typing so you enter the command /e <WHATEVER say to want you>. So to say Hello, you would type /e Hello. When you send a /tell to someone, be sure to mention who you are since the receiver likely cannot see the name of who sent the tell message.
• You may not connect to the chat server properly, so friends and tell functions may not work.
• Audio can cut out during story quest scenes.
• As you leave the Training Hall you should see a nifty new AV sequence. However, at times this does not load properly. You will sit at a black screen with the "please wait..." message. You should be able to hit ESC to skip this.
• It is difficult to drag items to the right spot to turn them to gold. You need to drop them more on the word "Gold". Keep your eye out for when the gold bag lights up; if you drop it then, you should succeed.
• The Obelisk Quest does not tell you the coordinates of the Vaults. They are: in the Arwic Outlands at 35.4N 4.2E; in the Esper Reaches at 26.6N 22.6W; in Lost Wish at 49.4N 22.4E.
• Chat can get stuck in “single character” mode.
• The following skills do not work properly: Volcanic Rift, Exploding Arrow, Hypnosis,
• The following quests may not be completable: Sanguine Fang, Cleanse the Burial Mound, Slavetaker’s Head.
• Camera falls through dungeon floor at times.
• You cannot see what your Vitae is by clicking the icon. You have to just see it from your max health and vigor values.
• When you resize or swap out the game window (such as with ALT-TAB or ALT-Enter), the selected object can appear on the tip of your cursor.
• Shortcut scrollbars can be clicked even if not in view. For example, if you are on bar #2, bar #1 is still there, invisible, above it. If you click the empty space where a shortcut would be, it still activates. Try to use just the top (#1) shortcut bar, or be careful clicking around down there.
• Chat window scrollbar is not working well.
• Critical success in crafting does not help you make great stuff like it should.
• Crafted boots may have overly long combat delay values.
• Monsters still are not as smart as they should be about fighting back or running away when they cannot reach their target.
• Projectile-firing pets don’t work well—they cannot fire in certain directions.
• Many skills have suddenly lost their sound effects.
• Female Tumeroks may crash their client when they enter the water. We like to watch a fine Tonk female swim as much as anyone… it’s just a problem with the swim animation.