Valkyries Fall

Crackdown

18 August 2021

There's been exploitation of our old security tests. Due to the way it was initially written, it was possible to purposely fail a test by letting the timer expire and then pass said test, to lock it out and not receive any more tests.

This meant that you could not get tests and then exploit the game by using automated programs.

I started punishing people for this, but then realised it was most of the active playerbase. Rather than kill my own game by wiping out half of the small community we do have, I've decided to let it go.

I have however completely rewritten the bot test system.

It is now a completely self hosted challenge (doesn't require google now). It will always challenge you. It is completely randomised, and it can be difficult to see the characters, so I've also added in the ability to refresh, or for it to be voiced out.

I removed the timer, but they're still timed. The time is shorter than before too. Refreshing the test does not reset the timer.

I have also massively decreased the amount of failed attempts before a jail occurs. I was always too lenient on everyone because I don't like to have to use the "power" i do have. The leniency has to end however, as the majority of you have ruined it, and I can't trust you anymore.

Don't worry though. there's still plenty of time in the challenge to be able to pass it without issue.Just ensure you refresh the test so that you can clearly identify the characters/numbers there.

Other changes:

• Added admin ability to identify exactly what a player is doing by adding a watcher to their actions.
• Added discord link to Navigation, make it more prominant.
• Added a null reference check to some previous changes to prevent some non-error errors appearing in the logs.

Upcomming updates:

There's not been much lately in terms of updates. I'd like to explain why. I'm working on a few massive features, such as the rune system. But that's not all. I am also rebuilding the games codebase in a newer version of the language used. This is primarily so we can host it on a linux system, rather than relying on a windows server. Not only is this cost effective, it will also inherently be significantly faster.

Runes, new sets of Valkyries (beasts), loot/drop tables for normal mosters. Big Tings.

Hand over those Shards

14 June 2021

New features in the blacksmith! (Not the settlement one)

• You can now spend Valkyrie Shards (and gold) on upgrading the base power of your equipment. This power isn't weapon specific, so you can still upgrade to new items and keep these bonuses.
• You can also now smelt down ★ items into valkyrie shards! This should give those mid tier ★ items some more relevance and be useful for everyone.

Custom Titles - You can now spend some diamonds to create a custom title. This will replace your normal rank title. If you want to return to your rank title you'll need to change your rank again and leave it blank. Any title that goes against the games guidelines, IE being racist, harrassment, or suggestive of being game staff, will beremoved without refund. Repeated offences will be punished more severely. As is stands you'll only be able to use alphnumeric characters and spaces. I will look at adding things like emojis as possibilities in the future.

QoL

• Reversed the sorting of buy orders so that the highest price is on top
• Added hover-over tooltips to you equipped items. This will quickly show you your items power (yes, finally!), and equipment training bonuses from the above update to blacksmith.
• Added a descriptive tooltip to each skill, so you can see what they do easier.
• Highlight of yourself in top list rankings, if you're logged in.
• The ability to refresh your auto attacks mid auto, without having to cancel and restart. Be warned that when you restart them, you can get a security test, just like when you normally first start an auto. You won't get them during, as normal.

Fixes/Changes

• Fixes spelling error in a label on settings page
• When you log in from a device/browser, the game will now log you out of any other devices/browsers that you may have that user logged into. Having multiple tabs open of the same user will now push the older tabs back to the index page of the game, preventing multiple tabs open of the game for the same user as well. These changes were made as having these open can cause issues with sockets and break your chat. Or worse yet, doing actions in multiple tabs at the same time can cause race conditions which could make you lose your gold/diamonds etc. This wasn't abusable, but should prevent some random inconsistencies ingame.
• Added a new rank, Æsir. There's a couple people close to the requirements so i figured I'd add it in as a nice little bonus.
• Updated Skills help page to be more accurate since changes previously, lifting the skill cap.

Generic Rebirth Perks

03 May 2021

Generic Rebirth Perks are here!

These are perks that can be upgraded infinitely to further progress your character along side the class specific perks available. Anyone can get these 4 perks and level them up at any given time.

Initial Health - Increases your base health by 25,000 per level. This is BASE health so is before any effects take place such as your vitality skill or rebirth bonuses.

Critical Chance - Increases your Critical Chance by 2.5% additively per level. Bear in mind that going over 100% doesn't mean you'll always crit. The more times you crit, the less chance you get for more criticals in the fight.

Critical Damage - 1% additive bonus to critical damage. This does stack with perks like double trouble and berserkers rage.

Skill chance - 0.5% additive chance to gain skills per level!

Other Changes:

Reverted luck bonus on diamonds to its original state. It won't have any affect after 10k on diamonds, but it will affect skill chances continually.

Switched Raid order so that the longest available raid appears on top.

First Anniversaary

01 May 2021

Wow, how has it been a year already?

We've come so far in this seemingly short period of time.A lot had happened, a lot has been changed and a considerable amount of new features have been added. To think, when we first started, all that you could really do was attack, buy/sell items, move around the map, kill beasts and talk.

We're on our 3rd server after the first server died and then the second server being inadequate.

So many optimisations made. when the game first came out, if you were in america it apparently took 5 seconds to load an attack, if in Europe it was 1-1.5 seconds. Now, regardless of where you are it'll load is 100-250 milliseconds. A huge difference. Not just in attacks either. I've rewritten the whole game multiple times and made everything faster throughout.

It's been a learning experience. With all my years of experience as a developer, it just shows that every day is still a school day, regardless.

There's been many ups and downs. There's been a few points where I've considered just giving up because things got so hard. Perserverence is key, and I've managed it. Looking back, I've done so much work to the game, and there's still so much more to do! There's surely some more great times ahead in VF for all of us.

I'd like to thank you all for playing, for sharing your thoughts and most importantly for being patient with me when there have been issues.

To mark the 1st anniversary, I'll be making the event 3x instead of x2 for the rest of the day (until i turn it off to be precise). There may also be some giveaways in chat today for some diamonds, gold and resources, so keep a look out!

Much love to all of you, Hazonko (Dave).

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