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91

Update Notes / Updates - July 31st 2016 - Game Balancing

« on: July 13, 2016, 09:31:07 am »

Hey guys,

I've got some larger changes ready, so please take your time and read through them. They're targeting the wilderness and protection prayers!

Protection Prayers
Yes, we have to nerf them, 90% damage reduction just seems too much. We don't want to make protection prayers super bad, so their protection value will now be 80% instead of 90%. Bosses still won't hit a lot, but it's noticable now.

Freezes and Binds
I've identified that with the protection prayer changes, binds and freezes are just too low. When protecting from magic, your opponent can easily escape when binding / freezing them. Thus, I've increased spell's freezing timers and protecting from mage no longer reduces them by 50%, but by 40%.

• Bind: 5s -> 10s
• Snare: 10s -> 15s
• Entangle: 15s -> 20s
• Ice rush: 5s
• Ice burst: 10s
• Ice blitz: 12s -> 15s
• Ice barrage: 15s -> 20s

The freeze of an ice barrage, with a magic protection prayer on your opponent, will be 12 seconds. You take the freeze timer and reduce 40% of it, so 20 - (20 * 0.4).

Spectrals
These monsters are too easy to be killed and have too good drop rates for obtaining the actually best armours in-game. I want to address the problem of ancient items overflowing the market and thus following things will be changed:

• Corrupt parts drop chances: 1.6% --> 1.2%
• Normal parts drop chances: 1.2% --> 0.8%
• Doubled the repair costs for ancient items.
• Corrupt parts now have 1500 charges instead of 3000
• Spectrals combat power increased. They can run and will do pathfinding and have more accurate hits. Their punishing prayer mechanic has been removed, you're free to pray against them again.

Performance Improvements and Shadows
You'll find yourself getting higher fps rates in the game now. I've optimized the engine to support dynamic shadows and higher detailed lightening. You can read about all the details here.

New Donator Items
With this update, we're releasing 3 new donator items: Skeletal wings, tail and cape.


Smaller bugfixes and changes:

• Planting guams now requires level 3 Farming and planting potatoes now requires level 1 Farming.
• Korasi's and Obsidian claws' special attack is now correctly displayed as magic attack.
• Watchmen in Burthorpe's castle have finally gained the ability to walk.
• Trolls now drop big bones.
• Troll general has received a drop table. There's now also 3 different troll generals around Trollheim, they're all equally strong and share a common drop table.
• Burthorpe wall and roof textures have been updated. This includes the warrior's guild too.
• Further fps improvements, especially in crowded areas and with large rendering distances. The animation system was majorly reworked to properly support distant animations. Animations far away from your character are rendered in a worse quality, which is hardly noticable because of the objects being far away from your view.
• Obsidian claws accuracy bonus increased from 120 to 140.
• Tormented demons have had their elemental crystal drop chances doubled. To cope with this change, they've been made significantly stronger (accuracy boost + new mechanic). A bug was fixed where damage deflection didn't properly work. Moreover, they gain combat power depending on the deflected damage and temporarily get level 0 defence when their damage deflection spell is active.
• Soul altar teleports updated. You'll now be teleported directly to the altar instead of having to walk a path.
• Binds and freezes are now removed when teleporting somewhere.
• By operating your full slayer helmet you can view how many monsters are left for your slayer task.
• The following weapons have been tweaked in their accuracy: Vesta's spear (special buffed), Morrigan's javelin (nerfed), Dark bow (buffed). Accuracy means the chances of inflicting a hit on your target and does not affect the height of the hit. These changes better reflect the current status of the weapons, their attack speed and their stats compared to other level 80 weapons.
• You can now link to individual forum threads by typing "::forum id" ingame, where the id is the forum page id.
• You can now remove your ironman status at tutorial island, including directly after you decided to become an ironman there. If you do this without finishing the tutorial, you can choose to select ironman status again. If you already finished the tutorial and come back to remove it, you cannot regain it! If your ironman status has been removed due to griefing (hack) you can post a ticket in the helpdesk, after verification of any player interaction your status may be restored.

Ancient Caves
I'm sorry to say, but I was unable to finish the new dungeon. I can already present some details about the new cave though. You'll be able to obtain 6 new items dropped by 3 new monsters. These new monsters will be a new and tough solo challenge. Each of them has a unique combat mechanic that you need to learn in order to be able to kill them effectively. Below is a picture showing all of the 3 new monsters:


All the best,
Thomy

92

Update Notes / Updates - July 13th 2016 - Game Fixes & New Hit Splats

« on: July 04, 2016, 02:22:24 pm »

Hey guys,

There's quite some larger changes, please take your time to read through it. You'll probably be affected by it.

Protection Prayers
We've identified that 60% protection from monster attacks is not enough, because bosses do have multiple attack styles (range/mage and melee usually). So, good protection from at least 1 combat style seems reasonable. Thus, I've increased the protection value to 90% for monsters. The protection value of 40% remains untouched for PvP combat.

Dragonfire
With the changes in the previous update to how dragonfire works, it has become too strong. Thus, I've decreased the overall combat power of dragonfire by 10-15 max hits depending on the dragon type. With this change, I've also adjusted the dragon drop tables of lower level dragons. Green and blue dragons especially had really good drop tables for low level monsters. We don't want players to be forced to kill only these monsters to obtain good items, thus their drop tables have slightly been reworked. The changed droptables are available on the wiki.

Hit Splats
I've reworked the hit splat system. You'll now see more hits currently active on your character and information on what type of hit it is (melee, range, mage). I've always found it confusing to know which monsters attack with which combat style, which will now be crystal clear. Don't worry, if you don't like it, you can completely disable it and use the old system. It's toggleable via the game settings.


Player Attackability in the Wilderness
I've reworked parts of when people are attackable in the wilderness. When a player is fighting a monster, you cannot attack them. However, after a fight ends, you're immediately able to attack that player. Moreover, when you're attacking a player or when you are attacked by another player, all monsters become unaggressive. That means, that it's now impossible to protect yourself from players by attacking or being attacked by aggressive monsters.
Moreover, the agility exit near the spectrals is now only usable out of combat.

In-game changes and fixes:

• Bones to bananas and bones to peaches spells update. They now transform any kind of bone. Bananas heal increased to 5 and peaches to 9. The spells can no longer be used when not having at least 1 bone in your inventory.
• Sacred clay strength bonus scaling was fixed.
• Iron and bronze melee weapons now have accuracy bonuses.
• Vesta's spear special attack has been reworked. Its special attack will now deal 135% of a normal hit damage split up into 4 hits. The first, second and fourth hit make up 25% of the total damage. The third hit, being the strongest, deals 75% of the total damage.
• A bug was fixed that kept switching your attack style from long ranged to rapid.
• Game admins and higher can now enable double rewards for minigames, this should help in hosting minigame events since we terminated double XP weekends!
• When playing Castle wars, only the base reward was doubled by double ticket circumstances (double xp time, double token time, double xp scrolls), extra tickets earned through extra score and kills are now also doubled. Read more about how you earn Castle wars tickets here.
• Brutal green dragon slayer tasks are removed from Vannaka.
• Low level cooking rates are adjusted to make every fish worthwhile for training.
• Ironman accounts will no longer be able to sell member tickets on the Grand Exchange.
• You can now withdraw items that cannot be noted from the Grand Exchange, even if it is more than your available slots.
• You can no longer lose your items when dying in the duel arena. There was a bug that made some people lose their items upon death while duelling.
• Droptables of the following monsters are updated: Green dragon, Blue dragon, Red dragon, Black dragon, Lesser demon, Greater demon, Black demon, Obsidian dragon, Aquanite, Tower archer (lv 49).
• Tasks amount are tweaked and fixed (arrow tasks). Generally your tasks are slightly shorter and better tailored for your current level. Smithing and crafting tasks now also take bars and hides needed into account and adjust accordingly.
• Alpha values of certain in-game graphics and animations have been fixed.
• Experience gains are no longer hidden for combat stats that have 200M experience. It's useful information regarding your next hit.

Dungeon Sneak Peek
Last but not least... a preview of the new dungeon I'm currently working on. This is not yet finished!! I'm doing my best to make the combat experience unique in this new environment. So every monster will have a unique set of combat styles and mechanics. I'm not going to talk too much about it, but there'll be some slayer monsters and new unique drops. In the screenshot below I was hit by a rammernaut and got knocked back. Don't worry, this has nothing to do with dungeoneering, I'm only using the models!


All the best,
Thomy

93

Update Notes / Updates July 4th - Ironman Mode

« on: June 26, 2016, 03:43:51 pm »

Hello everybody,

I've got quite a few things ready, so please take your time and read through them. Some updates might be of great interest for you!

Ironman mode
Many people have continuously suggested the famous ironman mode. You're now able to make yourself an ironman account on tutorial island. The quest guide (last npc to visit) will offer you the option to become an ironman account. With this update, I've also reworked parts of the Hiscores. The page's layout was updated and an option was added to view ironman accounts only. Ironman accounts cannot get any items from player interactions, they have to get everything themselves (with the exception of membership tickets).
Moreover, ironman accounts have a special icon in front of their name to show off their efforts.


Protection Prayers
The way protection prayers used to work was confusing and I also don't wish to explain it. This update overhauls protection prayers. When fighting an enemy with a protection prayer, your maximum hit is reduced:

• You get 40% less damage from players with an activated protection prayer.
• You get 60% less damage from monsters with an activated protection prayer.

With this update we have a fair and easy to understand protection prayer system, the maximum damage is simply reduced. Monsters that cannot hit more than 25 will ALWAYS hit 0 with an activated protection prayer. This means that protection prayers give you full protection from weak monsters.

In-game fixes / tweaks:

• The map loader has been rewritten. Presenting you a much smoother map transition when walking into newer areas. When teleporting somewhere, the game will pause until the region is loaded. Resulting in an overall smoother gameplay.
• The minimap is now rendered faster and won't lag anymore when moving around. It's now making use of multiple cores on your system to share the workload.
• Two additional obsidian dragons have been added to their caves.
• The way how dragonfire protection works has been changed. Dragonfire will now hit you more often and cannot be fully protected anymore. Dragonfire damage can always hit a maximum of 3 now, no matter how much protection you use.
• Vesta's spear special now works correctly again.
• You will now also get double tickets when using double XP scrolls during the Brimhaven agility arena minigame.

In other news
I'll now start working on the next huge update, which is going to be a new dungeon with a new boss. I'll most likely combine this with a quest series that continuously gives you more access to the area. I'm not 100% sure on the outcome though, just letting you guys know what I've got in mind.

All the best,
Thomy

94

Update Notes / Updates - June 25th 2016 - Obsidian Terror & Game Improvements

« on: June 15, 2016, 11:13:16 am »

Hey guys,

I've got quite a lot of things ready for today. So let's start...

Obsidian Terror
I'm proud to present you our first quest that is fully scripted! I've intensively been working on our scripting engine, which will allow us to deliver quest content much faster in the future. You can start the quest by talking to TzHaar, who can be found in the eastern part of the obsidan caves. It's marked with a quest icon on the minimap.

Obsidian Terror contains a bit of everything. You'll explore unknown caves on your own and will be rewarded with access to a new area that contains new monsters to be slain! There's also a new unique item drop, which you can see on the screenshot above.

Following things have been updated:

• Chronozon now has a rare hell kitten drop
• The Karamja Agility Arena has received a new ticket gain system. You now no longer share the arrow of your dispenser with all other people. Everyone gets a custom location and it will immediately reset when you tick a dispenser. Thus, you're now able to gain tickets at your speed.
• PID shuffling has been added. PID is the internal Player IDentifier you get when logging into the game. Lower ids sometimes have advantages in the game. Although we do our best to avoid these advantages, they can still happen. The only way to make this fair, is to shuffle the PIDs. You still keep your PID, it won't change, but the server will now randomly process them instead of ascending order. Players will notice this in how the game registers your attacks in places such as the Duel arena.
• The hit system has majorly been reworked. Before the update, the hit on an entity (player or npc) was registered 0.5 secs before you could see it. This delay has been removed with this update. You're now able to heal yourself before the hit is actually registered on your character. This won't allow you to avoid death in every situation, it merely gives you a 0.5 second time span to react on an incoming hit.

Small changes and bugfixes

• You can now realistically obtain cake ingredients and complete realistic cake tasks (goodbye baking 5000 cakes!)
• Smithing items that usually come in stacks now have realistic tasks (bolts, knives, arrowtips)
• Menaphite cosmetic sets are now dropped in full by bandits.
• Mutant tarns now count for their full combat level when doing slayer or combat tasks.
• You can now KO players and monsters with vesta spear specials (before it would only do 90% of your hit, and since Emps does not use overkill you were never able to kill something with the special)
• The way special attacks work has been adjusted. You should no longer find yourself in situations where your special attack won't activate when you quickly switch your weapon.
• Players will now be able to find hunter skill items in the skill items exchange just like all the other items.
• A bug was fixed where entities (players and npcs) were partly or completely invisible.
• Air spell animations updated.
• Abyssal demons have had their droptable reworked because of the new Obsidian dragons.
• Obsidian items are now solely dropped by Obsidian dragons.

All the best,
Thomy

95

Update Notes / Updates - May 24th 2016 - A new pet!

« on: May 16, 2016, 06:57:49 am »

Hey guys,

Here are the changes for today, with some tweaking, neat new additions and new content.

Following things have been updated:

• Arrows you pickup now directly go into your quiver if they are of the same arrow type, regardless if you have free inventory space or not.
• The fail chance for Agility has been reworked. You should find yourself failing less often with lower Agility levels now, especially in the Karamja Agility Arena.
• Several Agility animations updated for Karamja Agility Arena.
• Corporeal beast now has a chance of 0.1% to drop a Baby corporeal beast version. The pet is not tradeable.
  
• A completely new tutorial has been added to the game. This content is fully scripted with our scripting engine. You can use a portal from Barbarian village to Tutorial island if you want to visit the place. Or just register a new account and check out the full tutorial.
• New players do no longer get 24h of double xp. We want to move double xp completely to the daily task system and have it be rewarded to those players that spend a lot of time in the game.

Small changes and bugfixes

• Farming tasks are slightly longer, slayer tasks have been made shorter, since you have less choice in what you can kill.
• Several other tasks were removed, such as bread, sweetcorn, rabbit and bird meat, rabbit foot amulet crafting.
• KBD standard drop of 3 dragonhides is now noted.
• Bandits now drop menaphite clothes.
• You can now slice watermelons again.
• Bandos helm on male and female will no longer glitch on certain platebodies.
• Mining now counts ores for tasks and not rocks mined.
• Lumbridge dungeon entrance at the lumbridge castle can now be used properly.
• Fletching task amounts were lowered.
• Hellhounds no longer drop obsidian cape, this is replaced by lamps.
• You can no longer use the alchemy spells on the runes the spell needs.

All the best,
Thomy

96

Update Notes / Updates - May 13th 2016 - I'm back :)

« on: April 05, 2016, 10:34:53 am »

Hey guys,

It's been a while since the last update, but I really needed that break. I'm glad to finally be back and will start working on more updates from now on. You can find all the details regarding my break here: https://emps-world.net/forum/index.php?topic=16406.0

We have a lot of new changes for you, including new content, small changes that'll make your gameplay smoother, crucial bugfixes and drop updates!

Following things have been updated:

• A Duel arena bug was fixed, where some players could instantly attack without having to wait for the countdown. The overall duel arena system was also updated to avoid such problems in the future.
• Overall monster defence / accuracy slightly increased. This change only has a larger effect on stronger monsters. We've identified that a lot of monsters are too weak with the new tier 80 items and thus need to be made stronger a little bit.
• Boss monsters have higher accuracy and defence now, on top of the global buff. They will hit more often and take less hits. The aim of this update is to make bossing a challenge again, even with maxed out items, and to avoid endless solo trips.
• Drops rework, read more below!
• The homepage's play button popup was reworked. You're now able to download all types of the game client (jar, exe and mac) and do no longer only present the default one for your OS.
• Barbarian village now contains 3 copper and iron ore rocks. Also, the pottery oven has been renamed to furnace to make it more clear that you can use it as a furnace to smelt bars. This enables players to train early mining and smithing in barbarian.
• Freezing immunity is slightly reduced (players can be frozen more quickly now after they have been frozen before), and npcs now also have a freeze immunity timer.
• New items have been added to the EC shop. You can now purchase a King black dragon outfit:
  
  The outfit can also be trimmed with Dragon (g) kits, just like other dragon armour parts! The armour scales with your character up to level 60.

Daily Task System
It's been a while, but it's finally there, the daily task system! Every player gets 1 daily task, members get 2. There's also the chance of earning a 3rd task simply by playing the game. It's random when you receive the 3rd task, the only requirement is a daily online time of at least 2 hours. Daily tasks are closely related to skilling, they all involve the creation of some items or killing specific monsters. Every task has a short description what needs to be done, in order to complete it. You can see an example of the tasks interface below:

I've also added a new guy to the Grand Exchange. His name's Matt and he'll help you with the daily task system! He can be found at the south-eastern area of the Grand Exchange. Now, one might say that daily tasks aren't worth the time? Well, you get 1EP per task AND a nice amount of xp when the task is completed! You'll also get additional EP for the completion of every 10th and 50th task. A list of all possible tasks can be found on the wiki: https://emps-world.net/wiki/DailyTasks


Drops changes
A lot of monsters had an overwhelming or underwhelming drop table. These changes mostly affect those monsters that have been overly popular. In general we removed a lot of items that you would need to alch or leave behind, a lot of mid tier items have been more unique divided over monsters (dragon, barrow gloves, onyx, robin sets and other uncommon item drops that were shared by a lot of monsters). You would now have to pay more attention to the drops to see what you're getting and if it's the current meta for trading.
In exchange we added a couple more useful items that everybody enjoys getting, whether it is for trading or personal use. Examples are lamps, rare stacks of resources (crafting, smithing, fletching, herblore) and range items.
In the list below I included the most important changes. The wiki will be updated asap with the correct droptables.

• Robin sets have been moved from black demons and smoke demon to most wildy bosses such as wildy wyrm and corp beast. Obsidian capes are now only dropped by wildywyrms and obtainable through the tzhaar shop.
• Highest level revenants only drop 3rd age leg and body pieces, you can obtain the other pieces from lower leveled revenants
• Aquanites now drop several crucial herblore ingredients such as snape grass and toad's legs
• Banshees and Cockatrices had their herblore drops buffed but they no longer drop gloves.
• Most smoke dungeon monsters now drop lamps regularily, and dragon drops have been nerfed
• The burnt chest in the smoke dungeon now also has dark dagger as reward (removed from the boss)
• Bone items have returned to kharidian desert monster drops
• Comp ogre bow has been moved from KBD to General Graardor
• GWD bosses now each drop crucial noted herblore ingredients such as potato cactus, crushed nests and wine of zamorak
• Barrelchest anchor has been moved to the warriors guild and can now be obtained for 3171 tokens. It is still tradable.
• Onyx have been removed from a lot of monsters and can now only be obtained through mining, tzhaar shop, chronozon, Kalphite queen and KBD. To make up for the loss you can now obtain more onyx tips and bolts from several monsters that used to drop onyx
• Dragon items, including dragon boots, chain and gloves, are now more rare overall. They are mostly only dropped by dragons and several bosses, but you would have to check the actual monster to see what kind of dragon items you can obtain now.
• Magic watering can has been removed from bosses, you can only obtain it from the crystal chest!
• Dragons and metal dragons have had a huge change of drops, making them more interesting and less alch-focused (frost and mithril are untouched). Each kind of dragon has their own unique set of dragon drops now, shifting the focus around some popular traded dragon items (dragon dagger and boots for example)
• KBD now drops less alch value but more useful and interesting drops, such as resources. KBD no longer drops infinity robes, but Chaos elemental still does.
• Crystal key drops have been nerfed
• Dagannoths have had quite some changes, they are now worthwhile sources for herblore and prayer xp. Moreover the dagannoth cave now contains some snape drops lying around.

Small changes and bugfixes

• Certain npcs in the wilderness are now correctly aggressive again. (Wildy wyrms as prime example)
• The winter logo was removed, we're now having the original Emps-World logo on the homepage and on the client.
• A bug in Barbarian Assistance quest was fixed, which made Galahad constantly teleport to you.
• A bug was fixed where the client loader wouldn't start and some people were presented an 'unable to access jarfile' error.
• Special attack effects now also apply on 0 hits (if the special is not dependent on the hit). An example is Statius' warhammer.
• Taste Vengeance now doesn't trigger on hits that deal the killing blow. Go risk your items and get your revenge!
• Several typos fixed

Double xp weekends and Event Points (EP)
Please don't get this the wrong way, but we're removing Double Experience weekends. They're destroying the overall game in the long run. We don't want to force people to play during special times and make it feel like a waste if they train outside the weekends. We're not destroying the Double Experience concept, but we want to let you choose when to use it. As some of you probably know, you can purchase 20min of double xp for 1EP. With the daily task system release, you can gain EP per day and thus collect a sufficient amount of double xp time when it's yours to spend.

With this update, I've also reworked the scripting engine for quests completely to make it more flexible for usage. This doesn't change anything in the game, but will make the development of new content faster in the future.

All the best,
Thomy


Updates 14th of May:

• Several useless daily tasks removed.
• Slayer and Fletching tasks are now completeable.
• Ice barrage now correctly freezes again.
• You need at least a combat level of 10 to get Slayer and Combat tasks now.
• A bug was fixed where your pet disappeared when you dropped an item.

97

Update Notes / Updates - February 21st 2016

« on: February 12, 2016, 10:10:08 pm »

Hey guys,

Following things have been updated:

• A bug was fixed where the Ahrim's set effect didn't work with freezes.
• Ban details are now shown at the login screen.
• Barrow repair costs increased. Repairing an entire barrow set now costs 990.000gp. The total hits on a barrow item until it degrades has been increased to 1250. It now needs 5000 hits in total until a barrow item completely breaks. All in all, the items now last longer and the repair costs have thus been adjusted as well.
• Barrow brother's hitpoints reduced to 140 from 180. The last update that increased their hitpoints was just too much.
• Improvements have been made to object and item clicking. Small items on the floor are no longer difficult to click on. There's now a minimum clicking radius for small items such as seeds, vials, etc.
• Some agility course animations have been reworked and will look smoother now.
• Projectile animations have been fixed. Some projectiles (arrows, spells) were bugged because of looping their animation twice. Good example for these bugs were the dark bow special attack or distant dragon fire breaths.
• Distant dragonfire attacks now deal damage again. There was a bug that completely nullified their damage when wearing any item that blocks any amount of dragonfire.
• A bug was fixed where anti-poison timers lasted forever.
• Several Grand Exchange tweaks including a fixed duping problem. Don't worry, this one was found in secrecy and fixed at the same day. No damage was done to the economy! Still, I'm thankful to the users who cooperated so nicely.
• Runecrafting rework was planned but due to an urgent update, I have to put a half-released Runecrafting into the game. We're planning an abyss expansion and adding talismans, a quicker way to enter the rune altar instead of going through the abyss! Though, talismans and the abyss expansion (ability to get rune pouches) has to be delayed. Please bear in mind that the Rune and experience gains aren't final, I had to rush this update because of complications with the Grand Exchange.
• Crashed client instances now generate a log file that I can use for further investigations.
• Loading the map in-game is a tiny bit faster now. The game will now load more models at once and the lag spike after the entire loading process will now be gone.

This update may be quite a surprise to you, because we usually don't update the game on Sundays. I'm forced to update Emps-World today, because we fixed a duping bug in the system. This has to be as fast as possible to keep the damage of the dupes small. We've gone through the game, read plenty of logs and found out that only some people (< 5) knew of the problem and we could easily delete the duped items. Thus, a rollback is not necessary!

You may wonder why I'm reworking Runecrafting? The reason behind this is the daily task system, which is already pretty far. The exact details of the daily task system are yet to be thought of, but I can already say some things that I know. You'll be assigned 1-2 (members 2, non-members 1) tasks every day. Completing these tasks will reward you with EP and resources. Completing your daily task basically costs no money! You'll be covered with the resources in form of other resources having the same value. Thanks to the Grand Exchange's price system these kind of calculations are now accurately possible. The Runecrafting code was... ancient and it had to be mapped into the new skill system so that you can also get daily Runecrafting tasks! I also wanted Runecrafting not to be only trainable in the wilderness or via an Ancient magic's spell.

All the best,
Thomy

98

Update Notes / Updates - February 12th 2016 - PvP and PvE Balancing

« on: January 28, 2016, 12:51:31 pm »

Hey guys,

Following things have been updated:

• Donation Points (DP) are now called Emps Credits (EC). This name change is necessary to support other payment providers, other than that, there is no internal change but the naming. Yes, I'm working on other payment options to purchase Emps Credits.
• Rabbits necklace no longer increases your fail chance if your level has ~15+ level difference with the required level. It is only 10% more effective for players with a thieving level close to the required thieving level of the target npc and does not affect your fail chances on a higher level difference.
• The position out of synch issue was finally found and successfully fixed. You'll no longer find yourself inside of bank booths or clip through walls when following other players.
• You are no longer able to cast magic spells extra fast when you cast them manually. There was a bug which allowed you to spam click spells on players.
• Hit chance calculation (if you hit 0 or non-0) has been overhauled. The random value selection code was updated and should now be more accurate. The random value selection is now evenly distributed. You won't feel a big difference there other than the formula's fairness being 99% now instead of ~95%.
• Special attack buffs:
  
  • Darkbow special attack accuracy buffed: 130% --> 140%
  • Seercull special attack buffed: damage 115% --> 120% and accuracy 125% --> 135%
  • Dragon 2h sword special attack buffed: accuracy 110% --> 130%.
  • Dragon longsword attack buffed: accuracy 110% --> 130%.
  • Dragon mace special attack buffed: accuracy 80% --> 120%.
  • magic shortbow special attack buffed: accuracy 110% --> 125%.
  • Dragon axe special attack buffed: accuracy 105% --> 120%.
• Darkbow accuracy bonus increased from 93 to 115.
• A bug was fixed where magic prayers didn't give additional accuracy in the hit calculation code.
• Spam withdrawing items from the bank no longer has the chance to disconnect your client because of data overflows. Your bank withdrawals are now properly grouped and updated once per game cycle instead of being updated once per withdrawal.
• NPC's defence bonuses have been increased by 10% globally. We don't want the game to become too easy with the overall weapon buffs from the past year!
• Barrow armour effects overhauled. We identified that some set effects are unfair and some useless. So we tried to give every set a new and useful effect:
  
  • Veracs: Now ignores 25% of your opponent's defence bonus instead of 100%. It also ignores protection prayer damage reduction completely when the effect triggers. I've found the set too strong in PvE and PvP situations. It makes armours and high defence levels just worthless when veracs is used. The Veracs set effect has a 20% chance to occur.
  • Guthans: The overall heal is too big. I've removed the fixed amount of heal you'd get in every case. The guthans armour now heals you for half of your hit on the enemy. The Guthans set effect has a 20% chance to occur.
  • Karils: Additional damage removed. When the set effect triggers, your next auto attack will be 0.5 seconds faster. The Karils effect has a 20% chance to occur.
  • Ahrims: Additional damage removed. The set now enhances your spell effects by 25% (doesn't work for teleblocks). The Ahrims set effect ALWAYS occurs.
  • Torags: Reduces all incoming damage by 10%. The hammers are now also using the same attack style as warhammers. Moreover, Torag hammers' attack speed has been increased, it attacks as fast as longswords now.
  • Dharoks: No changes!
• Smite system overhauled. The system now properly rounds the prayer reduction values. Before the update, the amount of removed prayer points was always rounded down.
• Shadow barrage no longer reduces your enemy's attack level but your enemy's prayer points by a percentage of your hit. This effect can also be increased with the ahrims set bonus!
  
  • Shadow rush: -2% of your hit
  • Shadow burst: -4% of your hit
  • Shadow blitz: -6% of your hit
  • Shadow barrage: -8% of your hit
• Zamorak Godsword special attack nerfed. The special attack now freezes your target for 20 seconds instead of 25.
• Zuriel's hood, Morrigan's coif and Statius' helm accuracy and strength values buffed.
• Equal item drops (e.g. 10 fishes on the ground) will now be fully shown again.
• Experience gains shown on your screen have now received a fade out animation.
• Spam-clicking no longer allows you to use agility obstacles twice.
• Set autocast spells are no longer reset when changing attack styles of non-staves.
• Barrow brother's hitpoints increased to 180.
• Drop chances for barrow items in the chest have been slightly reduced.
• You can now get frogs leg from moss giants to make agility pots.

All the best,
Thomy

99

Update Notes / Updates - January 26th 2016 - Bug Fixes

« on: January 19, 2016, 10:59:11 am »

Hey guys,

Following things have been updated:

• Infernal mage's bind attack is now splashable and the duration of the bind was reduced.
• New rendering technique for animations added: 'Animation downgrading'. Distant animations are rendered in a lower quality to improve the overall fps rate. You're free to disable it though, if you find it annoying via the Game Settings. It's enabled by default and only works with the hardware renderer and VBO mode enabled (standard graphic settings unless you changed them or cannot run them).
• PJ timers have been increased by 2.5 seconds. This update has already gone live on the 21st of January. We're officially mentioning it here. (you can eat between 3 and 4 mantas after your last attack before your attack immunity runs out)
• Casting spells has become more responsive when fighting with multiple combat styles. You no longer need to wait the full delay of a weapon attack timer to be able to cast the spell. You'll now be able to cast spells 1.5 seconds after your last attack animation. You can now effectively chain spells and weapon attacks without losing overall damage or attack speed between attacks (spell travel time is between 1.5 and 2.5 seconds depending on the distance to your target).
• Major parts of the client's rendering engine (VBO mode and multi-model buffering) have been rewritten. I've also found a small memory leak which could have caused crashes after hours of gameplay. I've done a test where I put the client into a loop where it had to load and render random map regions. The test ran over 7 hours long without any crashes or interruptions. The client is now definitely in a very stable state.
• You can now properly withdraw a multitude of items again when you cancelled your order in the GE.
• Animated objects will no longer start to flicker (e.g. torches).
• Shantay pass is now clickable again.
• Movement speed calculation of entities is now more accurate. That means that the position the server and client have of your character are closer together. This should also fix some problems where other players appear too far away.
• Smoother ground color transitions. Here's a screenshot to compare the new (left) vs the old (right) ground:
  
• Plenty of bug fixes - Special thanks to everybody posting in our Bug Reports section!

You may notice that there isn't a lot of new things today. I've done a lot of work on the client's rendering technique last week to avoid crashes on some old GPU drivers. Moreover, I will pause the emps development for the coming 1-2 weeks because of irl projects. Don't worry, I'll still be around for tech support and of course bug fixes. There'll only be a short break on the development of new content! After that time I plan on releasing another large update. Any idea what that could be?

All the best,
Thomy

100

Update Notes / Updates January 19th 2016 - PvP changes and new EP shop rewards!

« on: January 15, 2016, 08:31:26 am »

Hey guys,

Following things have been updated:

• Event Point (EP) shop updated. You can now buy colored versions of the Staff of light and of Robin hood hats. You're also able to buy colored versions of Infinity robes. Colored items from the EP shop are all tradeable!
  
  We're already working on a system which allows you to get EP on a daily base. Our plan is to add a daily task system, where you have to mine a given amount of ores or kill a given amount of monsters. When finishing a task, you'll be rewarded with EP.
• The Christmas tree and its presents was removed! The snow drifts will still stay for a while though.

Bugfixes, QoL changes and improvements

• Further improvements have been made to the object spawning system. Some people were rarely having problems with resources not properly respawning. The assumption of the bug here is, that it occurs when an object is spawned while the map is loading. I've tweaked some code to avoid that case, but I cannot guarantee that it will fix the problem completely.
• Staff of light reduction timer is now saved when logging out.
• Antipoison timer is now saved when logging out. Moreover, the antipoison timer is now also reset when entering a duel.
• Barbarian dungeon's lava is no longer clippable.
• Multi model buffering (client-sided rendering technique) has received improvements. You can already test it out (via Game Settings), it will be made standard for everyone once it's completely finished. Welcoming feedback there!
• Dueling spawning code reworked. When not enabling obstacles, you and your opponent will now always spawn next to each other. It's also impossible that other dueling pairs spawn on top of you now. Dueling timers were also updated, they are now synchronized at every iteration to ensure both players can attack each other at exactly the same cycle.
• Teleblock timer was increased from 4 minutes to 5 minutes. Don't be upset though, when leaving the wilderness this timer is immediately reset now!
• PvP under attack system overhauled. It's a little bit complicated, but I'll do my best to explain the new system (RS style): In general players and npcs become attackable by everyone when they aren't hit for an amount of time. That amount of time is called the 'attack immunity timer'. When the under attack timer of an npc or player reaches 0, they can be attacked by everyone else. It's effectively able to steal idle fights now, providing the enemy hasn't fought back for the time of the 'attack immunity timer'.
• Your attack immunity timer in PvP zones when you lose track of your target has been removed. Losing track of your target means not seeing them anymore, that can either be a teleport, a death, using a ladder, etc. When you've lost track of your target, another player is able to attack you again within 1 second.
• Your attack immunity timer has been reduced by 3 seconds in general. If you eat 3 items in a row, you'll expose yourself to attacks from other people than from your target. The formula to determine the attack immunity timer was changed from 'weapon speed + 8 seconds' to 'weapon speed + 4 seconds'.
• Korasi's sword attack level requirement moved to 80. The sword's special attack has also been adjusted accordingly. It now has the combat power of a Vesta longsword.
• Hit splats can now show values larger than 255. Moreover, with this update we're now also able to send the exact amount of your opponent's hitpoints to the client. You won't feel any difference from this new mechanic but we'll use it in the coming weeks to develop a new hitpoints bar which will display your enemy's exact hitpoints.

All the best,
Thomy

101

Update Notes / Updates - January 12th 2016 - Grand Exchange

« on: January 06, 2016, 10:14:27 am »

Updates January 13th:

• Noted and unnoted items can now be combined when selling items on the Grand Exchange.
• Too long item names in the Grand Exchange now appear on a new line.
• Skilling resources (ores, trees, etc.) should now be displaying correctly again. There was a bug where trees and/or ores wouldn't appear anymore.
• Your character should no longer walk into random directions when talking to an npc.
• The search scrollbar in the Grand Exchange will no longer scroll when new in-game messages appear.
• The internal transaction system of the Grand Exchange is now shuffled to guarantee randomness when determining the person who buys items from somebody else.
• Fires and hunting traps can no longer be placed onto eachother causing them to disappear.

Hey guys,

Following things have been changed:

• New date layout for update notes to cause less confusion!
• Skillcape shop updated. The skillcapes and hoods are now specially selected for your account. Only capes and hoods that you're able to wear will be displayed.
• Master capes added to the skillcape shop. You need 200M experience in the respective skill to be able to equip them. Those are some real milestones to show off your effort in a skill.
• Mods and admins have their very own distinctive staff capes back.
• Multi model buffering technique finished. This feature will improve performance by grouping static models and re-using them for each new map you load ingame, rather than reloading these models with every map change. We're just giving you the status of the development on this mechanism, it will be standard for the game in the coming weeks. Nothing will change other than getting higher fps rates!

Most noticable bugfixes:

• A bug was fixed where bonus damage and accuracy versus slayer tasks wasn't working.
• Models inside interfaces have been fixed. An example of where this bug occurred was tanning or smelting jewelry.
• Shantay pass should be clickable for everyone again now.
• The Staff of light effect is no longer usable in the duel arena.
• Crafting requirement added for stringing a rabbit foot and added to the crafting skill interface.
• Enchanted bolts and dragon battleaxe now received hover descriptions for their special effects.
• Staff of light and spirit shield values slightly increased.
• Candy canes are now properly equipped on female characters
• All hit effects should now affect second or third hits with weapons like the dds spec and effects like vengeance and staff of light.
• Full slayer helm now works as intended, with stats and bonus.

Last but not least, the Grand Exchange is released with this update! We've done intensive testing over the past few months to ensure that this version won't contain any duping issues. Please bear in mind that we cannot prove that no duping issues exist in the system. We will guarantee a rollback if there's major bugs in the system that destroy the game's economy. If you find a duping bug at the Grand Exchange, silently contact a staff member so that we can get the system fixed as soon as possible. A backup was taken right before the update, so if the update totally goes wrong there's close to no progress that will be lost in case of a rollback!

All the best,
Thomy

102

Update Notes / Updates 04/01/2016

« on: December 23, 2015, 07:42:28 am »

Hey guys,

First of all a Happy New Year from our side. This is the first update in 2016!

Following things have been updated:

• You can now receive a Staff of light from Commander Zilyana instead of the dragon platebody parts. The Staff of light is a powerful new magic staff with a special activate effect! It requires level 75 magic to equip. It is the first staff to have a special attack!
  
• You can now string a rabbit foot into a strung rabbit foot with 95 crafting. This amulet will help you obtain more crushed nests while woodcutting, and gives you luck during agility and thieving.
• Tyras guard will warn you for the temptations of the Duel arena when you use his services.
• You can now find Emps-Scape's old dragon girl healer at GE.
• You can now use the ::guides and ::events command to go to their respective forum boards.
• Crystal bow has received a description about it's special properties.
• Infernal mages now drop hexcrests.
• Basilisks now drop focus sights.
• You can now combine a hexcrest, focus sight and a black mask with a slayer helm to receive a full slayer helm, with better slayer XP bonuses and stats. The full slayer helmet yields 15% more slayer xp per task and 15% damage and accuracy bonus versus task monsters. Black mask, hexcrest and focus sight also give damage bonus versus slayer task npcs. Black mask when fighting with melee, focus sight when fighting with range and hexcrest when fighting with magic. Creating a full slayer helmet requires 55 Crafting and 55 Slayer.
• All skillcapes now have a hover box which tells you the requirements for them to be worn. This was also added to the combination capes.
• The 2015 Christmas event has been disabled, Santa Claus is still at the Grand Exchange to thank everybody.
• Guthix and Zaros wings are now available in the donator store.
  
• Demon horns and tail are now available in the donator store.

Bugfixes and feedback changes:

• The additional accuracy reduction when your enemy has a protection prayer has been removed in PvP situations. I'm sorry for the update, it yields way too much protection from everything.
• Accuracy in PvP fights was slightly increased.
• Automatic continued targeting when you switch equipped items is removed after considering feedback.
• A possible fix for disconnecting players has been implemented. Please let us know if you still disconnect!
• The first forms of Kalphite queen and Corporeal beast kills do no longer count for your kill log.
• Fixes to the shop interface. Items will no longer disappear suddenly when scrolling.
• Following bug disabled in the Duel arena.
• You should no longer bug out when you change elevation levels in God wars dungeon
• You should no longer enter different dialogues when you continue the dialogue of various npcs.
• You're now able to cut down a fully grown willow tree.

All the best,
Thomy

103

Update Notes / Updates 21/12/2015 - Christmas Special

« on: December 18, 2015, 09:44:21 am »

Hey guys,

Following things have been changed:

• Ground item code overhauled. The system is now faster and you should no longer find items on the ground that don't appear or you cannot pick up.
• Projectile speed calculation overhauled. Projectiles (arrows, spells, etc.) will be much smoother overall now.
• Quality of Life improvements to combat:
  
  • Casting a spell no longer interrupts movement. You keep following your opponent also after the spell was casted.
  • Equipping / unequipping items no longer cancels combat.
  • Client-sided walking suggestions are now ignored when you are following a player in combat. That means that your character should no longer walk back a step when you click on your enemy.
• Protection prayers now also lower the enemy's accuracy by 25% in PvP situations.
• GWD boss droptables updated. We've made hilts rarer overall and brought more fairness to the droptables. The drop rates of zamorak and saradomin bow are now equal. The drop rates of all hilts have been equalized to their respective armour parts. A bandos hilt drop is no longer more common than a bandos armour drop, it's the same now.
  The droptable changes are live on the wiki: https://emps-world.net/wiki/Gwd
• The Christmas event is here:
  
  Talk to Santa Claus at the Grand Exchange to participate in the event. You'll be asked to deliver presents to people around Emps-World. You're rewarded with a christmas cracker for every delivery. A christmas cracker contains plenty of new cosmetic items, as well as a 1 in 1000 chance to receive a candy cane or a salty claws hat. These items will be officially discontinued rares and can be traded.
• Dragon (g) kit can now be used on a dragon pickaxe to make a Gilded dragon pickaxe.
• Improvements were made to the login mechanism. On slow machines logins have taken ages and could even get stuck at some point because of having to load so much data at once. I've properly adjusted this, logins will be smooth overall now.

All the best,
Thomy


Bugfixes:

• Santa cloths are now tradeable.
• A bug was fixed where presents couldn't be delivered to king percival or bob.
• You can now pickup 5 snow balls at once.
• Degradeable items are now correctly dropped and degraded when you die and lose them.
• A bug was fixed where you could do an infinite amount of present deliveries. Shame on those who abused it!
• Several resources and doors across the map now correctly work again (e.g. Slayer tower, rune rocks at Neitiznot, etc.).
• Amount of purple sweets gained from christmas crackers reduced to 5-10.
• Purple sweet healing reduced from 5 to 2-3.

104

Update Notes / Updates 15/12/2015 - Dragon Claws Nerf and Bugfixes

« on: November 27, 2015, 02:13:02 pm »

Hey guys,

Following things have been updated:

• A bug was fixed where some tormented demons didn't require level 77 Slayer to be killed.
• The client loader was overhauled, because it flickered on some computers. There's now also a native mac loader available! If you're using a mac, head to the homepage and re-download the game: https://emps-world.net/play (You don't have to use the native mac loader, but it's more enjoyable to have an Emps-World icon for the game instead of the java coffee cup)
• Dragon claws special attack nerfed. Accuracy 150% --> 120% and damage 125% --> 115%. We know this is quite a big nerf, but dragon claws are overall dominating other special attacks, which definitely shouldn't be the case.
• Granite maul special attack was buffed. Accuracy 85% --> 120% and damage 105% --> 110%.
• Pets are now able to run.
• A new fishing spot was added to Barbarian village (salmons).
• Castle-Wars can now be played with a minimum of 4 players instead of 10.
• You now require 40 Crafting to enter the Crafting guild
• You can now use various pottery ovens like a regular furnace (like the one in the Crafting guild and in Barbarian village)
• You can find the crafting shop and a tanner in the Crafting guild
• I've perfected pathfinding. I'm using an approach that cannot interfere with the game logic and thus perfect path calculations won't lag gameplay. That means that I can now calculate really good paths when following your opponent. You'll feel this change especially when chasing somebody in the wilderness.
• The Grim Reaper has left Draynor Manor.

I'm sorry, but I haven't worked much on the Grand Exchange lately. Other parts of the game required my attention. We will be doing the final test this or next week and after that test is passed, I can publicly release it. I really don't want to release a bugged Grand Exchange, because bugs in it could destroy the whole game's economy in the blink of an eye.

All the best,
Thomy


Bugfixes of 17/12/2015:

• Auto retaliate now works again.
• Clipping into walls in GWD and Barrow brothers fixed.
• A very rare client crash was fixed.
• Crystal bow and shield repair costs halved.
• A bug was fixed where degradable items were not fully degraded when you died ending up in confusion when using that type of item again. Any degradable item is now fully degraded upon death (providing you lose that item and don't protect it!).
• A bug was fixed where you had 2x Dharok Body 100 and could only repair one. Repairing the 2nd body now costs 1gp. The server internally stores the health of one item only. You can, in theory, have 2 Dharok body 100s in your bank but no matter which one you use, they share one degradation value.

105

Update Notes / Updates 24/11/2015 - PvP Improvements and New Skill Interfaces

« on: November 20, 2015, 09:40:40 am »

Hey guys,

Following things have been updated

• Galahad (Barbarian Assistance) now has the ability to run and to do pathfinding.
• Void knight helms are now wearable at level 45 in the respective skill. The damage boost remains at 10%, but the bonus accuracy was nerfed to 15% to cope with the lower skill requirement. The aim of this update is to make void available to berserker pures in the wilderness. It will also be a counter to rangers.
• Elite void parts now require level 65 Defence and give higher defence bonuses. The void accuracy effect with only wearing elite part increases from 15% to 30%.
• Skill interfaces completely reworked. They can now display more than 40 items and will provide a link to the Wiki for the corresponding skills.
  
• Mining and Woodcutting skill interfaces updated. The level table now includes pickaxes and hatchets.
• A bug was fixed where certain objects wouldn't appear on the map. An example for a not appearing object would be the entrance to ice wyrms.
• Further improvements have been made to the rendering engine. Certain regions will load faster now, e.g. Varrock. You'll feel this change especially on slower machines. Multi-buffering was also updated, it now serves a stabler fps rate. We will use multi-buffering as standard one day, but for now you're free to test it via the game settings. It yields 20-25% fps improvements for you!
• I'm trying to fix all noclipping issues with this update. Every step you walk is now verified twice (by the server and client) to ensure that your character doesn't walk into walls. This could cause issues in some areas. I've tested the most common ones and didn't run into any, but I cannot fully exclude them. If you find unwalkable spots, please just report them in the bug report section.
• Castle-Wars has received guards for every castle. There's 5 rangers / magers on the castle walls and 2 in the small middle island of the map. There's also 2 melee warriors in every castle's ground floor and surrounding area. These castle defenders are aggressive, are able to run and use improved pathfinding. You'll find getting rid of them really difficult unless you have freezing spells.
• Spells are able to splash again. A spell splash doesn't trigger any spell effect. That means, that blocking bindings and teleblocks is possible with high magic defences.
• Spectrals now correctly hit more when prayers are enabled. There was also a bug where the prayer detection code didn't trigger at distant attacks.
• GWD entrance level 60 strength requirement removed. Everybody's able to enter the GWD now.
• PvP following and attack timing code updated. This update makes hybridding more enjoyable. You'll no longer run into your opponent when switching weapons. Moreover, autocasts are now saved when switching weapons. If you switch back to a staff, you'll attack with the autocast you've set before.
• Further improvements on the map loader. The loading code won't freeze the client for 1-2 seconds anymore during loading times. You'll now see the game loading in front of you  (while being able to FULLY interact with the game!) instead of having to wait for it.

You're probably hyped about the Grand Exchange already. I'm glad to say, that with this update we're running another final test of the system. If everything's fine, we can release it next week. I assume there are no more duping issues in the code, but we want to be very sure about this. So I don't want to push the release until I'm 100% sure that the Grand Exchange code is safe to be used.

All the best,
Thomy