Okay maybe not too extreme.. most of this month was spent on fixing back-end issues with servers and the website but I still fit in some things on my todo list that I’ve been meaning to implement. Read on for the changes:

• New decorative structure: Golden Candlestick – Just something to brighten up your home or draw attention to important areas
• New decorative structure: Walled Tree – Liven up the front of your base or your city center with a few trees that work like structures and don’t decay!
• Tilling now affects multiple patches of grass in front of you based on your skill level.
• Knitting and smithing chat notifications have been changed to a percent effect near your character to reduce chat spam.
• You will be prevented and warned from using stairs that are concealed by a stack of items (wood planks still work by themselves).

More decoration options are planned (maybe paint?) along with additional quality of life improvements. I worked on a number of bug fixes and other issues as well:

• Frostbite harass for infamy can no longer happen during duels
• No longer get infamy from open tower shots when fighting NPCs
• Myst costs were adjusted for low level repair alt type characters
• Fixed death loot sometimes being removed while an UW map is expiring
• Optimized and fixed some issues with the leaderboards
• Upgraded USW hard drive to SSD (more servers on the way)
• Fixed issue with received gifts sometimes showing wrong amount until re-logging
• Added website failover to increase availability when the site is down or slow
• Helped Node.js team discover a crash bug mostly affecting USW and SEA

Some items are too technical or not as relevant to your gameplay so I generally don’t write about those fixes but they do take time and help improve the game overall. There are still some rare back-end issues I’m monitoring but I’m mostly done with that so I can move onto more fun things.

Aside from working on more decorations and other popular requests I’m hoping to release some client updates soon with a few new graphics and UI improvements, such as a pvp toggle indicator and better dialogs. Thanks for all your support and play testing!