Eternia: Battlegrounds

Today's patch focuses on making parties a bit less pointless, as they were basically a glorified way to have PVP mode enabled without killing each other and nothing else. To remedy that there are now kill assists.

Kill assists are half-rewards for helping someone in your party kill an enemy without having to meet the requirements for a full kill reward. You simply need to inflict any amount of damage to an enemy a party member is attacking and you'll gain an assist kill when that enemy goes down. The next patch will add a kill assist system for healers as well, where you'll gain an assist kill if you've healed anyone in your party when they kill an enemy.


This update also adds NPCs to each town to change your spawn point to that town at the cost of 10,000 crowns. This is a pretty straight forward change and the NPCs are clearly marked and easily accessible, so no more having to wait around on me to change your spawns (yaaaay).

I've also removed the redundant town guard NPCs (until they have a purpose) and added more Bandits to the map, as I spilled the beans in-game last week, Bandits now drop a powerful set of equipment geared towards high agility builds, including a dagger-type weapon. So I figured adding more of those guys couldn't hurt the loot grind.

(These map changes were a ton of fun on a computer that can't actually open the map editor)

There's also been a number of bug fixes and runtime error corrections this patch, as well as a small aesthetic change to monster corpses that will make them fade away instead of instantly vanishing (they also vanish quicker now).

I'll probably compile in some BYOND v.511 features (like PIXEL_SCALE on the monsters that scale upwards in size) soon, so those of you still using 510 should think about upgrading soon.


I still haven't found a way to replace my busted old laptop and am still stuck using a computer that's 12-years-old (and it was a terrible computer then) but I'm coming up with more and more creative ways to manage updates and I plan to continue doing so as long as I'm able, until I'm either unable to pay the bills or this computer gives up on me too.


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On a non-technical note, I'd like to welcome AcidCore to the team, he'll be something of a community manager and bridge between myself and the people who play the game. His responsibilities will be things like talking to the players to see what kind of feedback they have, running impromptu in-game events to keep people entertained, spreading the word, and just hanging out and being a part of the community. He'll be playing the game with you guys to get used to what's what and where (he's an RP server oldbie, so he'll fit right in), so feel free to bug him about anything and everything, the worst that happens is he has to ask me about it.

Thanks for reading, and playing, hopefully I have a semi-major update ready for you pretty soon (it's taking time to piece it together with my hacky methods of working).