RO-WIZARD V2.0.5 CHANGELOG
Hello! This update is very late, and I would like to start by apologizing for this. This update was meant to be out before the start of October, but my personal life has been very chaotic and stressful this last month. I’ve tried to squeeze in as much time as I can working on an update, and I unfortunately had to pivot away from my plans on doing a full halloween update. A rework of Dark Wizards and the Prison has been overdue, so I’ve spent my free time putting together an update to rework some of these mechanics. There are a lot of changes to reputation, bounties, the prison system, and dark wizards. The testing environment is limited, so I look forward to any feedback to continue adjusting this part of the game after changes have been observed.
Previous update: Ro-Wizard V2.0.4 Changelog
NEW
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Dark Wizard Rework
It’s long been a complaint that compared to Light Wizards, Dark Wizards have no benefits. With this update, I’ve done the first steps towards improving this. In fact, I would say the Light Wizards will need their own overhaul in the future as Dark Wizards have a lot more going for them now.
- A separate team has been created called ‘Wanted’. This is for players who go below 0 reputation and can be captured for a bounty. ‘Dark Wizard’ is now its own separate team.
- A secret hideout has been added in the Dark Forest for Dark Wizards. Has a secret entrance, an exclusive dark wizard shop, a dining room, living quarters, and spawns.
- Players can join the Dark Wizard team once they’ve met the reputation, year, and fee requirements. You can decide to leave after joining.
- A new mechanic has been added for Dark Wizards. Once you enlist and complete your initiation to get your mask, you will be able to wear it and hunt down targets marked by the Dark Wizard organization.
- Non-dark wizard players will only start appearing as targets once they reach Year 5 and will be worth a base value of 500 points. At Year 10 this base value is 1000 points. At Year 13, it is 1250 points. If the target is a light wizard, they will be worth 500 additional points. Additional points starting at 0 and going up to 250 will be added based on reputation. After killing a target, they will not appear as a target again until 20 minutes have passed.
- To kick off the new Dark Wizard role, 7 exclusive introductory quests have been added - mainly for orientation.
- The black particle effect marking dark wizards has been removed.
- As a dark wizard, your reputation cannot go above 0 and you do not gain reputation from doing quests.
- Faceless Sorcerer’s and Dark Wizards will not be hostile towards Dark Wizards unless you attack them first.
- Bounties can no longer be claimed while a Wanted player is dead in a dueling arena or in the game arena. (You can’t use the capture pyramid but you could sometimes catch someone at the very edge). This applies also to dark wizard targets, e.g can’t claim dark wizard target rewards during duels and so on.
- Lions are now an endangered species
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Prison Rework
- A giant impassable magical dome now surrounds the prison.
- Prisoners are now free to walk around the prison. Cell bars will lift automatically when approached.
- A Warden NPC has been added into the prison.
- Prisoners may reduce their sentence in the prison by brewing a soul cleanser potion and turning them into the Warden.
- A checkpoint has been added outside the prison with a Light Wizard stationed at it. Students may pay to visit the prison for a fee.
- An energy core being powered by tethers has been added onto the top floor of the prison in a secure room. This room can be infiltrated, and when all tethers are destroyed the prison’s security will be disabled for 2 minutes. Those who disable tethers will lose reputation, and light wizards will be alerted when the prison’s shield falls.
- Prisoners will be allowed to use certain tools in the prison, including their wands. Certain spells are allowed to be cast in the prison to assist with labour.
- Prisoners that run far enough away from the prison while the shields are down will automatically escape.
- Prisoners will be forced to wear prison attire during their stay.
- The lobby of the prison has been remodeled slightly. The fireplace used to teleport into the prison has been moved to the checkpoint outside.
- Prisoners will not be auto-released from prison and must check out at the Warden.
- It is possible to bribe the Warden, but it’s not financially practical and only for emergencies.
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Safe Zone Rework
- Regions now have properties for if they’re safe zones for light or dark wizards. For example, the Dark Wizard hideout will count as a Safe Zone, but only amongst Dark Wizards.
- By default, all regions will no longer provide Safe Zone protection to players that are in PvP unless defined otherwise. This is to prevent cases where people who get put into PvP flee to safe zones to escape combat. I know this change is controversial and may cause problems, so please give feedback on how this feels to play – I wanted to experiment with it.
- Whenever you attack a player, both of you will be put into combat, whereas before only the person who took damage got put into combat.
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Combat Logging
- Systems have been designed to detect and punish combat logging.
- By default, in PvP there is no punishment for leaving during open world combat.
- If a Dark Wizard has been combat tagged by a Light Wizard, leaving will result in the Dark Wizard being sent to prison with 2 minutes added on top of their sentence, and the light wizard will get full credit for capturing the bounty.
- If you’re in combat with a Light Wizard while Wanted, a banner will appear at the top of the screen with a warning about combat logging.
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Quest Indicator Rework
- Quest Indicators have been reworked to improve clarity when doing quests.
- Quest indicators will show how far away you are from them.
- Quest indicators that are not visible on your screen will be snapped to the edges with an arrow showing the direction to the objective.
- Dynamic quest indicators will be calculated for quests with object-specific objectives. If a quest has you hunting a specific type of mob, the nearest mob of that type will have an indicator on it. If a quest asks you to brew a potion, the nearest potion table will be indicated. If a quest needs you to cut down beehives, then the nearest beehive will be indicated - and so on. These have been defined for most quests in the game.
- If a quest objective is very far away, the nearest fireplace that you can use to fast travel will be indicated on your screen.
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Wand Cosmetics
I haven’t been able to personally dedicate time to working on cosmetics. But a couple friends of mine you may know of - Egor and Calbus, have been learning Blender and volunteered to create some wands they made. I do not normally accept wand-requests or player-submitted cosmetics, but since these are close friends they have been added into the shop and are as follows:
- From Egor: Magepunk Wand, Dream Wand
- From Cal: Key Wand, Moon Wand, Star Toy Wand, Ice Crystal Wand
If you enjoy these skins, make sure to show your appreciation to Cal and Egor!
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Other
- Shield Shimmer potion added for Dark Wizards.
- Soul Cleanser potion added.
- Blackweed ingredient added.
- Scroll of Dark Passage added for Dark Wizards. Allows them to use brooms, flight, and any free movement in the Dark Forest.
- Always Cast After Load setting has been added to PC, it was previously only for mobile. By default this has always been on for PC, but I can see why some would prefer the option.
PERFORMANCE
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Custom Humanoids
- All mobs in the game have been remade with a custom humanoid system I designed for them.
- This should fix one of the major performance issues which was causing servers to slow down and lag to build up when several mobs are spawned at once. This will also allow the playercount per server to be increased experimentally.
- Unlocks much more control over mob behavior and will allow for more interesting mobs in the future.
CHANGES
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Map
- Reverted change to cobblestone material and changed it back to the old brick texture. I have kept the lighter color still.
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Quests
- New subject colors have been added for Light Wizards and Dark Wizards instead of appearing as Misc. Transfiguration color has been changed to orange to allow for the cyan to be used for Light Wizard quests.
- A category for quests called ‘Disabled’ has been added at the bottom. Dark Wizard Quests and Light Wizard quests will appear there if you’re no longer on the correct team. These quests are frozen in state and cannot be progressed.
- ‘Target Practice’ has been changed so that you only need to damage a single dummy to progress. The Dark Wizard statues can be activated via a prompt instead of with Alohomora, and have been moved upstairs so the quest is less clunky.
- The chests you need to accio in ‘An Introduction To Charms’ quest have been moved to the back of the classroom to make them less painful to pull down on mobile.
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Reputation, Bounties, and Prison Sentences
- Reputation loss for killing a player has been lowered from 175 → 125
- Reputation limits for normal players changed: (-1000 min, 500 max) → (-1000 min, 600 max)
- The above change means that with max reputation, you can get away with 5 player kills before becoming wanted compared to the previous 3.
- Reputation limits for dark wizards: (-1250 min, 0 max)
- Reputation limits for light wizards: (-1000 min, 1000 max)
- Instead of bounties always being worth 1000 points, the reward will now scale based on how low a player’s reputation is. The minimum bounty starts at 500 and goes up to 2500.
- Dark Wizards can reach the maximum bounty due to their lower reputation cap. Additionally, Dark Wizards are worth 1000 more points than Wanted Players if their reputation is lower than -300. If A Dark Wizard’s reputation is lower than -1000, they will be worth 2000 more. Maximum obtainable bounty will then be 5000 points.
- Now that Dark Wizards are a lot more menacing and the prison system has been updated, adjustments have been made to the prison system to make being a dark wizard very lucrative, but risky – while also not overpunishing newer players who become wanted.
- For clarity: previously, if captured your time to serve was 4 minutes. If your reputation was lower than -900 then it would be 6 minutes.
- Your prison sentence now scales directly with reputation. At -1000 reputation you will serve 15 minutes. At 0 reputation, the time is 4 minutes. Dark wizards will serve an additional 4 minutes when captured. Dark Wizards with a reputation lower than -500 will serve an additional 8 minutes when captured.
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Light Wizards
- The requirements for becoming a Light Wizard have been raised due to the oversupply of Light Wizards obtaining the role very early in the game and being underskilled or confused, leading to begging for quest completions.
- Year Requirement: 7 → 10
- Role Cost: 1500 → 20000
- The reputation requirement to be a light wizard is 500, and previously if you lost reputation as soon as you signed up you would instantly lose the role. The requirement is still the same, but you will only lose the role if you drop below 350 reputation.
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UI
- Map UI will start by default more zoomed in. I also have plans to improve the map UI soon to add zoom functionality + a bar on the side to select a destination from a list.
- To better synergize with the quest indicator changes, the quest tracker on the right has been redesigned.
- Minor changes to some text coloring on various UI. Some of this will look out of place for the time being.
- Fixed some autoscaling issues with different banners and UI. I’m honestly not entirely sure if this has fixed some of the issues, but I will see.
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Spells
- Persector cooldown increased: 12 → 18
- Focus point requirement for Legilimens has been removed
- Legilimens year requirement: 13 → 10
- Legilimens cost: 35k → 15k
- Hastio Default Duration: 10s → 20s
- Hastio Upgraded Duration: 15s → 40s
- Repello Personal Space Upgrade Range: 15 → 10
- Repello Personal Space Upgrade Stun Time: 2s - > 1s
- Damage reduction from being scaled up via Engorgio has been removed.
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Other
- If you’re a Light Wizard, Dark Wizard, Wanted, or Prisoner your name color will reflect this instead of just showing your house color.
- Server Size Increased: 25 → 40. With the humanoid rework, there’s more budget to hopefully increase the server sizes, but I have to observe and see if this will need to be reverted or not. If the game is performing well with a server size of 40, I will consider raising it further. This is already a huge jump though and may need to be scaled back, so consider this a public stress test.
- Added a delayed bar to mob healthbars to visually see damage easier.
- Ring of Bloostlust moved from Winkybink’s shop to the Dark Wizard Merchant.
- Morsmordre, Avada Kedavra, and Legilimens are now obtained at the Dark Wizard Merchant.
BUG FIXES
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General
- Fixed the dummies in the training room not being immortal.
- Fixed being able to brew a potion if you already had the maximum amount
- Quests will show an Updated banner once you advance a stage instead of only showing when you complete a subobjective.
- Fixed Immobulus working on players even with their shields up.