World of the Living Dead

Hunger and thirst deaths are back, but the two of us have done extensive testing to make sure there won’t be a repeat of the widespread carnage that resulted last time. We’ve also made some other small tweaks and changes to other areas based on our tests - including missions, the tutorial and visibility - and tried to deal with the main bugs that have been interfering with play.

To cushion the hardship of survivors again facing death from starvation and dehydration, we’re resetting all health (injury points) to max and also resetting Hunger and Thirst levels to zero. This gives everyone a chance to find supplies and assess the situation.

• Survivors will suffer an injury point loss after 24 hours at max Thirst, or 96 hours at max Hunger.
• Hunger and Thirst will no longer penalize injury recovery rate, but being at max Hunger or max Thirst will completely prevent injury recovery. The error which was making Fatigue and Fear not recover due to max Hunger or Thirst has already been removed.
• Only a single notification will display when one or more of your characters is at max Hunger and/or Thirst and you click to check recovery status.
• Test subject delivery missions are now only specific as to the Blood Type required by NECRA researchers.
• Scavenge location visibility has been increased to 750 meters for all users.
• Only one scavenge location - the Red Cross Tent - is created for the tutorial. This now has its own map marker and the yellow exclamation marks are no longer used.
• A bug which was generating NECRA missions at excessive distances has been fixed - however, some missions are still being generated with errors and we’ll try to deal with these soon.
• New player squad icons are hidden from the map until they are level 5 (at which time they can be attacked). Lower level players can see squads belonging to players over level 5.
• An existing route on map load was showing incorrect end marker - a standard Google maps marker. This should be fixed.
• Armor filter should now work on the manage inventory pages.
• PvP attacks should now generate a notification as well as incrementing the attacks count and adding the yellow border if no existing attacks.
• All membership options removed and replaced with “SCUGS Upgrade”.

After listening to your feedback, we took the decision to remove the three membership options. We agreed that the SP boost and other features of the membership packages were too powerful so have replaced them with a single SCUGS Upgrade option which lasts 30 days. 

The SCUGS Upgrade can be bought with NC. This makes it possible for players who complete offers to get the most important aspects of the interface upgrades. Thanks to everyone who supports development of WotLD by buying NECRA Credits - we really couldn’t have made it this far without you!

You can comment on the changes over at 

Mostly bugfixes today. We’re working on other bugs that have been reported.

• Fix to not allow non-armor items to be placed in armor slots. These items would not have remained in the slots upon refresh, but it was visually confusing.
• Fixed the ration timer.
• Adjustments to some left menus which had broken after yesterday’s release.
• Strikeouts on NC purchase page that Task Force and SCUGS Elite members get 50% and 25% more NC when purchasing credits.
• Disabled premium membership purchase if player is already a premium member.

We’re looking at changing item deterioration so there might be another release soon.

This update took a while to get out as it includes a big new feature which we wanted to get right. Armor!

Armor

Armor provides protection from bites, general injuries and also against PvP combat. Survivors can now be protected in four areas: head, torso, legs and arms. 

Each type of armor has different strengths against different types of attack. A football helmet might be great at stopping a zed from biting off your face, but won’t do much to stop a round to the back of the head. A kevlar combat helmet will do the opposite, exposing the face but giving better protection in combat versus armed survivors.

You can scavenge armor at various locations around the city. To incorporate the new items, we’ve also changed the balance of the existing items, so you may see some changes in what you find.

Armor takes damage as your characters move through z-density, and also if your survivor is injured from PvZ or PvP, as this reflects the fact that the damage was absorbed by the armor but failed to protect the character. The protection offered decreases as it becomes damaged. We will be adding a skill soon to prevent damage to armor.

You can equip armor from the inventory management page, where you can drag and drop specific types of armor to slots for each character. A helmet can only be placed in “Head Armor”, a vest in “Torso Armor”, while the arms and legs also have their own slots. Armor items show up as dark blue. 

Good luck with the new armor and we look forward to hearing your stories from the field!

Item damage

Damage to items has been significantly changed so as to take into account z-density. Your items should now last much longer if you only expose them to lower z-d areas. 

Easter Egg Prizes

We delayed the egg rewards partly because we wanted to give out armor as prizes, so Easter Egg rewards are finally being delivered around Los Angeles County. 

Each type of egg will create a named cache (e.g. Blood Egg Cache) which will contain the items awarded for the threshold of eggs you collected. The thresholds are 1, 10, 20, 50, 100, 150, and so on. If you have eggs over a threshold, you will receive the items from the that and all previous thresholds, so some people will be collecting a lot of items! Eggs will disappear from the game.

Premium membership

Based on some extensive and appreciated feedback from players, we have made some changes to the way the 30 day premium membership works. 

Premium membership has been divided into three levels: NECRA Task Force, SCUGS Elite, and SCUGS Lite.

Everyone currently with active SCUGS Elite membership will receive all the great new benefits of SCUGS Elite, including free NC, a discount on buying NC, boost to earning SP and even a special bug-out bag, character mission and free meds!

Each level is discounted to half price for closed beta and we will continue to add features to all three levels as we develop the game.

NC item catalog

Firearms, melee weapons, armor and ammo can now be bought for NC. Items will use the new NECRA delivery system. Bug-out bags and items can be delivered directly to a selected character. The new range of bug-out bags are filled with items at a massive discount and aimed at rapidly getting a survivor equipped for the zombocalypse.

Bugfixes

• The message flashes when your survivors are too fatigued to scavenge.
• Grave Digger changed from 50 items looted to 50 bodies looted.
• Bookmarked locations do not disappear on moving squads.
• Cancel button on create marker infowindow works now.
• Survivor info in safehouses fixed.
• Changes to achievement categories
• Fix for errors with Halligan Bars