Valkyries Fall

Announcements

Skills, quest prep and fixes

13 April 2021

Skills

  • Skill limit has been lifted.
  • Criticality has been changed. Every time your crit, your chances go down a little. This is how I've decided to make it work for numbers above a 100% chance.
  • Competency has also been nerfed slightly. This used to make your min damage match your max damage at 10k skill. which made it a stringer skill than Dominance. They are now both equal. Which means some of you high players will see some randomisation back into your damages.
  • Luck now affects diamonds drops less, but the initial rate of their drops has been increased. You should see more drops all around. There is a limit to how much luck can affect diamond drops. But it will always affect skill gain chances to the maximum extent.

New diamond Item: Book Of Hávamál 2x chance for gaining skills multiplicatively. Also grants the ability to choose a single skill to concentrate on. If concentrating on a single skill, then this item grants 4x chance for gaining skills instead of 2.

An example with this: If you had all ther skill bonuses and your skill was at 10,000 you'd have 1:400 chance of a skill. With this item, you'd have a 1:200 chance, or if you chose to concentrate on a skill (in settings), that single skill would have a 1:100 chance of being gained instead. Makes for good tactics, like raising luck a lot first, to make other skills easier to get ;)

Quests

Some groundwork has been done in preparation for quests. Mostly behind the scenes, but now the quests are split into chapters or side quests.

The move functionality is now also quicker after rewriting how it detects if you're standing on a quest spot.

Certain quests can now trigger a global message. The only one so far is at the completion of the tutorial, so those in game can welcome them :)

Alliances

Added an online status to alliance members.

  • Green: Online - Made an action in game within the last 20 minutes.
  • Grey: Offline - not made an action in over 20 minutes, but not been offline for 2 days or more.
  • Yellow: Away - Been offline for 2 days or more.
  • Red: Innactive - Been away for 7 days or more.

Added the ability to change the leader of the clan.

Rebirth

Added the ability to hide completed perks.

Changes/Fixes

  • Added a maintenance mode for when i do future updates. (Which seems to be half broken, but still works as needed)
  • Admin stuff: 13 features, 29 changes
  • general optimisation
  • Market had an issue where it would not only remove items that had expired to keep things clean, but also the resources. This has been resolved, but I'm sorry to say that I have no way of knowing what was lost. There are 3 known cases of this having happened, but the records were completely deleted rather than marked as deleted.
  • There are now tooltips on the alliance leader actions, describing what they do. Also added them to the tabs for maps, skills etc. If you can think of anywhere else that could benefit from these, let me know!

Achieve this!

29 March 2021

New achievements have been added. Including a new type for total beast kills which reward valkyrie shards. VS will soon have additional uses so maybe hoard a few ;)

Added a list of people you referred to the game to the settings page. Along with your referral link, so it's not all the way down in the footer.

QoL:

  • Added toggle to hide completed achievements
  • Added current progress to achievements for monster and beast achievements
  • Cancel confirmation when cancelling a mission (player request)
  • Added ability to cancel raid, also with confirmation (player request)
  • Formatted remaining auto's so it shows a comma if over a thousand remain

Performance:

  • Removed some unnecessary code from achievement stuff.

 

Edit:

Forgot to mention that a double event and sale have been scheduled for Easter. 1st April - 5th April. The event time is in addition to the time added from donations the previous month.

First Class

17 March 2021

Added the option to send people Gold, Diamonds or resources directly through the mailbox. Opens up a plethora of possibilities like RWT and xtrade if you like.

Other Changes:

  • Rewrote alliance chat to no longer use connection id's and grouped chat. This was causing a memory leak and now works like the rest of chat using the permanant chat id's and instead of broadcasting to group it works in a similar way to pm's directly broadcasting to each alliance member.
  • Fixed an error when attempting to donate if you don't have a settlement.
  • Hide upgrade button for Seer research "Harbouring" if it is at max level.
  • Fixed an issue with reconnect to chat server getting stuck in a loop and hammering the server.

 

On a seperate note, Congrats to Nickolaas for being the first player to reach 1,000 completed missions. Quite a feat!

Nickles and Dimes

15 March 2021

Today we see the release of the new marketplace. The market has been rewritten from the ground up and is magnitudes faster than before. Not only is it more performant, there are new features to it too!

You can now trade resources for gold. You are able to add either a buy or sell order for them as well. meaning you can add a listing saying you want to buy X Silver and someone can come to the market and sell them to you. Or if you're looking to sell X Silver, you're able to add your own listing saying you're selling them, or sell to an axisting buy order! Should make things move quicker :)

You can also sell/buy diamonds directly for gold too. No more trading Rotten Pikes repeatedly.

Resources do not have an expiry date like items do. (subject to change if it gets flooded)

But Haz, what about that infrequent bug that meant I didn't get my gold from selling an item?

This has been fixed too! It also introduces a new feature. The mailbox.

The issue was created by a race condition, meaning that the sale happened exactly as you did another action and 1 thing overwrote the other.

The mailbox is now where all your market gains go, ready for you to collect yourself. Circumventing any issues of multiple actions at the same time. You can access the mailbox via the action menu, or there will also be a convenient icon in the bottom left corner when you get a new mail that you can click.

The mailbox will also be where you can directly send people gold/resources soon™

Haz, PMs are still borked sometimes!

Hopefully not anymore! This has also been redone from the ground up and done in a slightly different way. No longer using an ID that changes with each connection to the chat server, but instead using a custom permanant id.

Other Changes/Fixes

  • Expired items on marketplace will be automatically removed from market on the next day change if you don't do it yourself.
  • fixed a potential minor memory leak when submitting an "action".
  • Some code was reorganised to suit the new market.
  • Maintenance: 12,946,298 obsolete logs and audit rows removed from database.

Birthday Celebrations

05 March 2021

Hey! In a few days it's my birthday. To celebrate, There will be an event held from 7th - 10th March, which includes double exp and gold throughout! 🥳

Zoom Zoom

08 February 2021

Do to the ever increasing number of players and the ever increasing size of the inventory tables, I've had to revisit a lot of queries involving inventory, or checks related to inventory.

Even with the query optimisation work done to inventory related requests, it still wasn't fast enough. I have completely rewritten everything related to inventories or inventory counts to use a lucene based index query for read operations, instead of SQL. This will increase the speed throughout the game by orders of magnitude.

For example. If you had a large inventory (already itself within a large table), it'd take around 6 seconds to load. Now, that same query takes around 35ms (on dev sever).

Most areas of the game are affected. Here's a list:

  • Teleport partial load
  • Teleport action
  • Buying special items in spend diamond page
  • Buying Star Items from beastiary with Valkyrie Shards
  • Buying Power Shard from beastiary
  • Buying shop items (Partial load)
  • Buy shop item action
  • Selling shop items (Partial load)
  • Inventory partial page load
  • Inventory equip/unequip action
  • Blacksmith partial load
  • Blacksmith star item forging (both attempt and guaranteed)
  • Market Partial load
  • Market buy item from market
  • Map: changing planes that require items to access
  • Map: moving direction (still has action timer on it to prevent spam)
  • Map: Special location checks
  • Quests: displaying items acquired for request quests
  • Quests: Complete quest action when a request quest

Database issue fix (permanantly)

01 February 2021

Just a moment ago an issue with the database caused the game to crash. This was due to what's called an Arithmetic Overflow Exception.This is where a table id number got larget than an int can take (2.147 billion). It's happened a couple times before in the games history and I always fixed it with a quick fix. Today I fixed it permanantly by changing the datatype of the id column on the affected tables. It will now take 4,294,967,298 times longer for this issue to occur again, so should be essentially permanantly fixed.

The Seer, plus performance fixes

01 February 2021

Seer:

The Seer is a new building in the settlement area. Once the Seer is obtained you can purchase upgrades for 9 different things, which all help boost your settlement and its effectiveness.

  1. Agriculture. Increases efficiency of your Farm.
  2. Wood Chopping. Increases efficiency of your Woodyard.
  3. Stone Mining. Increases efficiency of your Stone Mine
  4. Iron Mining. Increases efficiency of your Iron Mine.
  5. Raiding efficiency. Increases the rewards gained from raids.
  6. Silver Detection. Increases the MINIMUM silver gained when raiding. (Can't go above the maximum for that raid)
  7. Offensive Prowess. Increases offensive power when attacking.
  8. Thrall Taxation. Adds/Increases gold gained when collection from settlement. This is based on available Thralls. Army and land tending thralls do not pay taxes.
  9. Harbouring. This increases the maximum level of the shipyard. It has a max level of 5 and therefore adds up to 5 additional levels for the shipyard.

A change has been made to the names of the Raiding locations. So that Vinland can be last in the list still (America being the furthest away from Norse homelands), I have seperated Northumbria and Wessex into different Counties of England.

Other Changes:

  • Market tables have been condensed for better mobile view (Vericode)
  • "Your Items" in market has been combined into the main market table. You can remove your items from within the single table now. This is to prevent repeated markup and increase performance.

Bug Fixes:

  • Fixed a long standing issue with chat. Sometimes the chat server would restart for one reason or another, causing a synchronisation issue between player and chat server. If this reconnection happens now, you should still be able to see Private Messages without need of refreshing!
  • Added a max level check to the settlement buildings, preventing it being possible to make a building a higher level than should have been possible.
  • Query optimisation for getting inventory items and getting a count of your inventory. This greatly increases performance on actions such as Inventory, Market, Buy/Sell Items, Blacksmith and Beastiary by up to 800%.
  • Along with the Inventory query optimisation, API output has been changed to include both the inventory information and the count together, preventing a double api call for 2 different outputs of the same information.
  • Query optimisation for checking whether you have a specific item, which affected the teleport feature. This also increased performance by up to 800%.
  • Bunch of other misc query optimisations that were left remnant from a previous version of the game. Some of the admin tool changes made in the past made it possible to query data faster and some queries were incidently left behind.
  • Fixed output for raid collection where it would display silver twice in the message.
  • Typo fix to settlement top list header
  • Typo fixed in tour description (Vericode)

 

Next Up:

  • Market rewrite to make it function better. This will include the addition of being able to trade resources for gold.
  • ability to directly send gold/diamonds to other players.
  • Quests
  • Maybe a diamond item/items for settlement (I keep flip-flopping on this)

Additional Developer

14 January 2021

Today marks the day that We have officially expanded the team to include an additional developer!

Ingame his name is Vericode.

While he's still learning the ropes and gaining understanding of the games mechanics and the codebase, he will initially be making minor changes, until he is comfortable in making larger changes.

He is an IRL colleague of mine and has been a developer for probably longer than I've been alive. He's a good man and shal hopefully see some good changes to the game with him with us!

If you see him around, be sure to welcome him :)

Miscellaneous Madness

06 January 2021

Subscriptions now also add bonus time to events.

Long awaited: Added a value for total defence to the Other Stats tab.

Retuned monsters attack values slightly. (making them a little easier)

Optimised markup on settlement pages.

Fixed a "phantom" bug caused when a/c'ing. Players never saw it but it littered my logs. This clears that and makes my error logs easier to navigate.

Another long awaited: Private messages and alliance messages now persist through refreshing!

Increased total chat messages held in memory from 200 to 500 to compensate for the extra items now in it.

Some alliance messages didn't have timestamps. Now they do.

Beast spawns have been changed. The tiers no longer favour the lower end. It was originally done this way as there was noone able to kill higher tier beasts. No longer an issue. Chances have changed from 30,25,20,15,10 (Feeble-Myth) to 20,20,20,20,20. Everyone gets a fair chance.

Beast spawn rates have been slightly lowered to compensate for the shift in variance spawning.

83 "other" changes/additions/fixes to areas unrelated to playing, such as Admin tools.

Groundwork has been done for the Seer, and will be the next update. Soon™