::September 6, 2002 - BUILD NOTES::

We regret to inform you that we had to do a “character wipe” on the Red world—that is, all characters were erased. This was due to data incompatibilities created by the transition to Beta 2. We only do this when absolutely necessary. However, we feel pretty sure that we won’t need to do another character wipe on Red until the end of the Beta! Knock on wood…

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…
• Balanced rewards for quests. Feedback welcome: going on quests should be very well worth your time compared to random hunting.
• Balanced skills : Spec skills and paragons no longer bar each other from training. A buff! Positional skills (backstabs, etc) now give a damage modifier instead of ignoring a percent of the target's armor. Another buff! Damage increasing/decreasing effects are now multiplicative instead of additive. Big time nerfage. Acumen, how we loved ye...
• Transfer effects were acting weirdly at the cap of the caster's stat, allowing them to get free vitals. No more!
• Lifestone recall now 1) requires full vigor to cast; 2) now plays the magic charge up animation before it goes off; 3) drops your armor to 0 while you're casting it; 4) can be cast with any weapon in hand.
• Transport skills all take between 10-15 seconds to cast now instead of 30.
• Feign Death should now work.
• Fellowship XP bonus nerfed. Since AC2 has a lot less downtime than most games of this type, the overhead of being in a group is not as high as usual, so groups don’t need as big of a boost. Our goal remains to make play either solo or in a group enjoyable and productive.
• Some specialized weapons were not dropping until level 20+. Tumerok Jailais/Cestas were not dropping at all. Should be fixed now.
• Beetle Hunt and Wasp Hunt have higher quest item drop rates so new players will get the quest more often.
• The current selection is now cleared when the player gets more than 400m away from it.
• Skill shortcuts now grey out when you don't have the right weapon wielded to use them.
• In multiple resolutions, the GUI is more usable, and it’s harder to crash while picking resolutions and options your card does not support.
• Monster vitals now appear above instead of below so it’s harder to obscure with chat boxes and such.
• Mini-maps greatly improved!
• Monsters now regen in the same fashion players do. Kiters and perchers – BEWARE!
• Players now drown after being in the water. First their vigor is drained, then their health slowly drops.... glug glug. We are still tuning this so feedback welcome.
• Floating damage numbers for special moves now don’t overlap—you can better see how smart your tactics are.
• Your characters will actually stay the size they were when you first made them! For a long time, characters were all resetting to average size.
• Textures less likely to blank out over long play sessions.
• More copies of Training Hall to reduce crowding.
• Training Hall quest’s panel makes more sense now.
• Dance emotes work better! Get down! Hey!
• You now fire a missile straight ahead if you're not within 45 degrees of your target.
• Combat has been sped up overall—please give feedback on this! Do you want it faster still?
• Fixes for USB mouses. Mice? Mouse devices.
• Lugian armor improved in early levels.
• Lifestone protection does not protect you from falling damage any longer.
• Armor with effects on it now actually uses the effect—this was weakening crafted armor.
• You now “wait in line” to update your game data. See the following article for details

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

• We have scattered reports of an inability to properly update. You may not be able to connect or play, or you may see “holes” in the landscape as you play. If you uninstall AC2 (use the uninstall program in the Start Menu's Asheron's Call 2 folder) and reinstall from any Beta 1 setup program, this may help. We will investigate any other update problems you encounter.
• 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, especially with Tumeroks, 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”.
• You may see holes in the dungeons. You should leave the world to the character screen and jump back in; this will often fix it.
• You may “portal forever” as you enter a server with Problems. After you time out, for a little while your character may “already be in the world”. Keep trying every few minutes.
• 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. You may need to click to start chat.
• 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.
• In general, text can be jumbled. Chat can be hard to read as the name of the speaker gets overlapped by what is said.
• You can't click radar dots.
• 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, Guardian Spirit, Inferno’s Blessing.
• The following quests may not be completable: Sanguine Fang, Dillo Rustlers, Darkstone, Cleanse the Burial Mound, Slavetaker’s Head.
• Camera falls through dungeon floor at times.
• 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