World of the Living Dead

Expansion

We’re making a change to how registration works today. We’ve consistently seen problems with new players supplying invalid email addresses, adding spaces to the end of the beta key or just losing interest when it takes time to receive the key. 

WotLD is still in closed beta but we’re removing the beta key requirement so that, at the moment, anyone can sign up and start playing immediately. We need more players to test the world and this seems like the best way to do it. As most of you will confirm, the zombocalypse is currently a lonely place.

Getting more players will help us troubleshoot and improve areas which aren’t getting much attention at the moment, such as PvP and faction features.

The beta key invitation system has been changed to a straightforward invite a friend system, and I’m archiving the beta key invitation thread on the forum. Feel free to get your friends involved.

You can now log in by clicking the green login button on the top right.

Item deterioration

Thanks for all your help with testing items over the last few weeks. We finally tracked down a rounding error which was having a massive effect on how rapidly items would get damaged. It was a tough one to find. In itself it was a tiny thing but when applied to thousands of steps, you would have seen a noticeable effect.

Firearms, weapons and armor should now correctly see damage based on the surrounding z-density. The condition of the item also has a significant effect, so be careful when relying on fair or poor items. Armor will continue to be damaged if an injury gets through to your survivor, which means that you still need to consider fear and fatigue, along with all other factors, when pushing squads beyond their limits.

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

Our recent newsletter highlighted the new operative comms feature, along with silenced weapons (crossbows!) and SCUGS Elite (which will keep improving). The chat interface has been especially useful for new players trying to get into the game. WotLD can be complex, unforgiving and brutal but, hey, it is the zombocalypse! Communicate with your fellow operatives to get the hang of things, but watch out, some of them may be hunting you…

Exploration achievements, free NC giveaway, silenced weapons.

Some bugfixes and a few new features today.

• Three new achievements added for travelling to landmarks around the Los Angeles County region. Just write on the wall to check in!
• The game now includes suppressed and silent weapons.
• Archer skill added for use with bows.
• The Neptune and Quartermaster achievements have been permanently removed. They’ve been too difficult to reliably track.
• Grave Robber achievement added for extensive looting of Lost Property
• Safehouse achievements now require the safehouse to be constructed and then all defense slots filled.
• The infocard found dialog box now opens again on the map page.
• Fix for the stuck squads problem.
• 10 free NC for liking WotLD on Facebook or tweeting about WotLD!

Today’s World of the Living Dead update includes lots of bug fixes, introduces in-game chat and SCUGS Elite!

Bug fixes

• Missions problems, mostly to do with completing item missions
• Stuck squads problem should no longer happen. Please let us know if you have any stuck squads.
• Fix for squad shown as ‘moving’ when coming out of safehouse
• Cannot move items to collect mission locations. Items can only be moved to mission locations if they are a delivery location
• Fix for route planning outside visible z-density blocks
• Can enter broken safehouses regardless of original capacity
• Can’t write on the wall in private safehouse until it is either shared with faction or destroyed
• Fix for ration break bugs, although please tell us if your timers go above 24 hours! Because of the recent problems, we’ll be resetting hunger and thirst to zero for all survivors.

NECRA Operative Comms (aka chat)

There is now a small red radio to the right of the top menu. You can enable global chat with any other operatives online at the time. Be nice to each other (or don’t, that’s your choice as NECRA operatives).

SCUGS Elite

We’re introducing a new package for anyone who wants to support the game and get some bonus features. SCUGS Elite won’t give you a material advantage over other operatives, but it has some useful and fun elements - all accessible from the command page - and we’ll keep adding to it as we develop. SCUGS Elite currently gives you the following for 30 days, and we’re keeping it half price during closed beta!

• Custom larger squad icons (choose from an initial selection of over 100 icons, including flags of Europe and the Americas, and alphanumeric icons for the minimalist)
• Remove advertising (removes the top ad for the duration)
• Rename squads (rename at any time)
• Rename characters (change the full name or just add info)
• Strategic downloadable map (in KML format, for use in Google Earth)
• Downloadable spreadsheets (in csv format, can be opened in Excel or Open Office)

Find out more details about SCUGS Elite: http://worldofthelivingdead.com/account/subscriptions

New achievements

There are dozens of new achievements now available for you to unlock! Some of you will already meet the criteria for these, and you should see those unlocked already.