World of the Living Dead

Interesting discussion on the forum. Your opinion?
http://forum.worldofthelivingdead.com/viewtopic.php?f=10&t=2247

2000AD readers react a little differently from the rest of the world when they see the words “Judge Dredd” in any title. Ol’ Stony Face could always be relied upon to bring the law to the living and the dead alike, and zombies are definitely within his jurisdiction, but I doubt he’d approve of modern time wasters. Check out the review over at El Reg to make up your own mind (just don’t let Psi Division catch you disagreeing with Dredd…)

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 

This release is primarily aimed at improving the tutorial, to help new players get into the game.

• Removed step zero (welcome to WotLD) of the tutoral
• Fixed problem with skull toggling getting stuck
• “Next” button pulsates when step is completed and tutorial pane reappears
• “GO” pulsates when first route is planned
• “Plan route to here” pulsates and is highlighted by an arrow when first step is completed (to indicate the first emergency cache)
• “Manage inventory” pulsates and is highlighted when squad reaches emergency cache
• Video added to explain drag and drop inventory management - shows until first inventory mission is completed
• “Manage team” pulsates and is highlighted when squad reaches first survivor mission
• Video added to explain drag and drop survivor management - shows until first inventory mission is completed
• Tutorial pops up after each step is completed, along with completion text

Features

• Safehouse integrity chart now shown on Command page
• Moved operative status update box to Command page
• Premium membership button on top menu drops down to show current membership and days remaining, along with list of pending NECRA deliveries
• NECRA Credits balance button on top menu drops down to show quick links to NC pages
• Zeds killed counter now shown under current SP in top menu
• New players can now register using Facebook, Google, Yahoo or OpenID
• URL change in free NC tweet
• Google +1 button added
• Multiple changes to how the tutorial works. Completing a step should now update the tutorial box without a page refresh and a notification will tell you when you have completed a step.
• Map filter drop down added to replace the previous click to filter. This allows us to more easily add to the filters and should make them more useful and obvious.
• Marker mode activation link moved to bottom of map PDA
• Faction rankings now computed by combining the ranks of the members, rather than simply the number of players in a faction. The faction rank shows a breakdown of these numbers in a tooltip next to the name.
• Faction chat added to game. Players can now chat privately with members of their own facton. Global or faction chat can be toggled by clicking on the tabs above chat. The red radio will also toggle between chats, or reopen them both if they were closed.

Bugfixes

• Changed the unassigned infocard box so that it doesn’t stick to the bottom of the screen for some users. This may mean you have to collapse some survivors in large squads to assign cards.
• Fixes for Firefox 5 login problems
• Multiple fixes for IE9
• Some players were getting minors on registration. This is now fixed so that only adults are in starting squads.
• Reworded premium membership to better explain that there’s a bonus to the number of NC given, rather than a discount on price.
• Fix for apparent icon visibility when a squad hides. This caused some of you to assume it was only related to the large premium squad icons, but was actually caused by the squad icon only being removed when movement occurred. This has been fixed, so you don’t need to be afraid of making use of the larger icons.
• Raiding a destroyed safehouse no longer allows SP farming from killing of zeds. Shows a message “Safehouse is destroyed” and no further SP is given.
• Fixed a problem where Super rewards was not showing the full range of offers, so there should be more ways to earn NC now.
• Deleting a squad should no longer cause the squad box to disappear from the Command page.
• Clicking the tutorial skull should now always work
• Successfully raiding a safehouse should now always allow raiders to enter the safehouse - the previous capacity is ignored
• Multiple left menu layout fixes to prevent elements from flowing into each other
• Fix for NECRA Delivery page errors for Task Force members
• Fix for not clearing map z-density overlay, which was caused by code to keep showing bookmarked locations. Z-density colors won’t make the map hard to read now.
• Fix for problems with the display of PvP attacks by auto-archiving reports older than 5 days

Following the dismal response from Leicester City Council on how a zombie attack would be dealt with, Bristol released a top secret document which contains a detailed “Contingency Plan For Handling Zombie Outbreaks in Bristol”.
The alert states are:

Ambient zombie level – business as usual, but be on the lookout fortell-tale signs
Enhanced activity level – confirmed zombie attacks on the populus
Major outbreak – zombie infection level in excess of 1%, multiplesightings across the city
Zombie pandemic level – concentrated outbreak, with infection levelsover 30%

1 – Fully disconnect the brain-stem from the body through either blunt force or full head removal
2 – Avoid all unprotected contact.
3 – Zombies are extremely aggressive. Do not approach unless adequately armed.

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.