World of the Living Dead

Two main changes:

• we’ve switched to using Xsolla as our payment provider, so there’s now a much wider range of payment options to pay for NC.
• survivors will be “greedy” if you put supplies in their backpacks. This allows the consumption of any item while attempting to avoid the waste of items that was a previous problem.

There’s a bunch of other small fixes but those are the main ones. If you have any problems, log out, clear your cache and cookies and log back in.

We’ve been a little quiet recently. We’re working on assimilating the data we’ve gained from the open beta so that we can improve the game. Thanks to everyone who’s playing!

We’ve been quieter than usual recently because there’s a lot to do and we have to just focus on getting it done. Here are the latest changes. Most of the translation engine changes will be invisible for now, but they took up most of our time for the past ten days, along with some essential bug-fixing and ongoing redesign.

• automatic consumption now occurs in order of injuries, so that the most injured eats first
• fix for left and right buttons on infocard page
• fix to preserve survivors lost stat
• fix for some errors with recovery of survivors, along with more automated tests for recovery
• fix to prevent combat vs. zeds from being triggered during PvP when z-density was less than 1
• fix to clear old hide locations after a squad has moved on
• fix to not show ads for NECRA Task Force members
• massive number of changes relating to translation - we’ll be sending out login details to all volunteers very soon

One of the bigger changes is that automatic consumption now selects items so as not to waste as many resources 

Jungly worked hard on coming up with an algorithm which would avoid waste. Selection is now based on maximizing the calories/litres consumed, while always consuming less than required. 

So, if required = 400, the character will consume 400 or less, e.g. if 150 and 300 value items are available, then the character will consume 300, with need still left at 100, in contrast to possibly consuming 150 and then still needing 250 more. 

The above example also highlights the difference between the new and the old system, where the character would consume both 300 and 150, wasting 50, sometimes resulting in things like an MRE being consumed to satisfy the last 100-200, etc.

We hope that this change addresses some of the problems with managing character supplies.

We have also slightly adjusted the quantity of items at scavenge locations, as depletion has been making the game impossible for new players. This isn’t a long-term solution, but is part of our testing during beta to find the right balance for the game.

#zombies killed: 1,070,987; survivors bitten: 947; survivors eaten alive: 10,832 http://wotld.com

Issue #2 is out! http://www.wotld-ladeadly.info/

Lots of changes and fixes!

Combat has been reviewed and errors fixed which were stopping ammo usage, especially for unskilled survivors, who should now waste more rounds - as intended. Melee combat was affected by a rounding error which caused a threshold effect. This should be gone but some low quality weapons will still fail to result in kills - although they will decrease fear and lower the chance of injury. Remember the importance of equipping a weapon even if you don’t see kills. Fear will go up more slowly. WotLD isn’t all about killing zeds, although now the zeds killed counter will go up as you move on the map and successfully wipe out the living dead menace.

Note that there is a lot more to combat than just firepower, especially for PvP. Every caliber actually has a modifier to reflect its relative effectiveness versus living and dead targets. .22LR and .44 will both put down a zed if your character gets a headshot, but that .44 will do a lot more damage to a living target, regardless of where you hit them.

Armor does not appear bugged, but we have removed the automatic damage received by armor when a survivor is injured. There also does seem to have been an error in how quickly armor was being degraded on movement, but we’re keeping an eye on that in case there’s not enough realistic degradation now. Z-density matters a lot for this.

The bug preventing infocards from allowing firearm and melee stats to go above the item max has been fixed. We’d appreciate testing of this by anyone who has a wide selection of firearms, weapons and infocards, as we want to make sure it works under lots of different circumstances.

The map icon set has been replaced with a more easily updateable collection. (A big thank you to http://mapicons.nicolasmollet.com/)

I’ve put in a new SCUGS icon listing in the PDA sidebar, so you can check out some of the most important new icons. Keep an eye out for unusual new icons.

Some of you may prefer the uniformity of the old icons but they were more time-consuming to make and also made it more difficult to identify locations at a glance, so I hope you’ll give these new ones a chance. Some locations have distinctive color schemes and overall the effect is to make the map more visually useful as a strategic interface.

The standard squad icon has been replaced with the larger format previously only available to SCUGS Upgrade users. This allows for faster recognition of your and other squads in the field. Visibility for squads has also been increased to 1.5km, as several firearms were of less use due to the visibility being less than the range. However, squads are now hidden when in safehouse of any kind, so there should be no confusion over the attacking of squads who are actually in a safehouse (this was the result of visibility mismatches).  Safehouses (all safehouses) and squads now share the same visibility. Locations are slightly lower to prevent map loading problems.

We’ve added five new sections to the customs squad icons you can choose from: Asia, Africa, Australasia, a small selection of Kanji symbols and a Tactical category which can help you to keep yourself informed of what your squad is carrying - or provide misinformation for your enemies. The selection of custom squad icons will be extended over time.

SCUGS Upgrade has been renamed to NECRA Task Force. We wanted to go back to having a cooler name to say thanks to all those players who help us keep going by getting 30 days of enhanced features.

The default avatar (previously known as the operative insignia) has been replaced with something much plainer. We really would love for players to choose some cool icons as their avatars and have even provided a couple of suggestions in the drop down that appears when you go to upload an icon. Stand out from the crowd!

There are other changes but these are the main ones. Good luck out there!

362,949 #zombies put down; 676 survivors bitten; 7,744 characters eaten by zeds… http://wotld.com

We’ve put out a patch to fix the bug which allowed safehouse scavenge bonuses to stack. This was never intended and was an exploit which crept in when we recoded for open beta. Thanks to those of you who reported it and especially thanks to those of you who were aware of it but didn’t exploit it. From now on, only the highest bonus from a safehouse will apply to a scavenge location.

Thank you to everyone who supported development of the game by buying NC and the Zed Hunter Bug-out Bag this weekend. We hope that the recent server issues have calmed down a little and that you should see better performance in the game.

For anyone who missed the sale of the SAW M249 recently in the Apocalypse Warrior Bug-out Bag, you can win one by entering a competition to describe a NECRA safehouse over on the forum.

Don’t forget to check out the excellent first issue of fan-created LA Deadly News. Rumor has it that the editor has incredibly found the resources in zombie-ridden LA to put out another issue soon, so look out for a copy on a corpse near you!

If you want to get some extra NC and help promote WotLD so that we can continue to expand in 2012, make sure you vote every day and also consider following us on Twitter or liking us on Facebook.

If you’re finding WotLD tough, remember to make good use of the amazing player-created and maintained wiki (thanks to those of you who put in so much time there!) and also tell us your suggestions on the WotLD feedback pages.

We’ll be adding a list of known bugs to the Developer Blog on the forum over the next few days. Now that things are a little quieter and the server hamsters can relax, we hope to regularly deal with such issues as the apparent combat threshold, ammo consumption, malfunctioning firearms, poorly-producing emergency gardens and purifiers, and other irritations which shouldn’t be part of the life of a NECRA Operative.

Good luck out there!

Projekt & Jungly

World of the Living Dead

http://worldofthelivingdead.com

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The WotLD Community

http://forum.worldofthelivingdead.com

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http://wotld.uservoice.com

WotLD Updates

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Something a little different for the player who prefers to focus on zombie hunting…

Log in and check out the unique Zed Hunter Bug-out Bag.

http://worldofthelivingdead.com/event/zedhunter

And 25% off the USD price of NECRA Credits bought with PayPal all weekend!

Chat was also completely overhauled for this release, so it should work for everyone.

We’ve added a SCUGS indicator on the map PDA. It will flash yellow when connecting and stay solid green if your survivors have a good connection to SCUGS. If green it means that the map is auto-refreshing and you don’t need to refresh. If red or yellow, please give it some time before reporting it as a bug.

In an effort to make the extra two servers pay for themselves, I’ve added Amazon affiliate links on the left. We probably won’t make much from these but if you’re considering a book or DVD anyway, please consider buying through the WotLD link. All links are hand-picked and are titles I’ve enjoyed myself. You might find something you like.

There’s also going to be a bug-fixing release going out tonight or tomorrow morning, so I’ll add the details of that separately when it goes out.

Thanks for your patience with the server problems we had last week. Good luck out there!

176,594 #zombies put down; 477 survivors bitten; 4,980 survivors eaten http://wotld.com