JimJim
Hi Lorfolk,
Back in May I said the next release would land in roughly two months, and that it would be Guilds & Live Chat. It's today, and it's Guilds & Live Chat! This is the second feature release of the bi-monthly cadence, and it's a big one — these systems have been in the works for a long time, and I'm glad to finally get them into your hands.
Guilds are live
Guilds are now open to everyone. You can found a guild for 500,000 pebbles, or browse the guild search page and apply to one that catches your eye. Guilds start at 25 member slots, and guild masters can set up custom ranks with their own permissions — who can invite, who can manage applications, who can touch the storage, and so on.
A quick note before the tour: to keep guild-hopping from being exploitable, there's a 5-day cooldown after joining a guild before you can join or create another. Choose your packmates wisely.
Guild Chat & Live Chat
Every guild has its own chat, right on the guild page — and it's live. Messages appear as they're sent, no refreshing. Alongside guild chat, the new live chat panel lets you open direct chats with other players from anywhere on the site, these live chat messages are still accessible on your My Messages page.
Chat comes with the safety tools you'd expect: you can report individual chat messages, block players you'd rather not hear from, and our moderators have the tools they need to review reports and keep things healthy.
Guild Talents
Your guild will earn experience to advance from level 1 to 99 whenever a guild member gains wolf or companion experience. As your guild levels up, you'll earn talent points to spend in the guild talent tree. Talents cover a lot of ground — better moonstone shard chances, profession speed boosts, guild features/expansions, discounts around the site, and more.
Talents may be selected by guild members with the appropriate rank/permissions (set by guild owner). Talent selections are shared across all guild members. Talents may be reset, but be mindful as the price of talent reset increases with each reset.
A few talents reference features that aren't live yet (like Archeology) — those are marked "coming soon" in their descriptions, so you can plan around them.
Guild Storage
Guilds can unlock a shared storage where members deposit and withdraw items, with access controlled by rank permissions. Deposits are announced in guild chat, so no sneaking things in (or out).
Guild Bosses
Guilds can unlock and fight guild bosses together. Boss health and rewards now scale into the higher levels — expect pebbles, moonstone shards, and Guild Shop Vouchers for taking them down.
Guild Shop Vouchers may be spent in the Guild Shop (unlocked via Guild Talent) for various game resources.
Explore Wars (Beta)
Explore Wars is our guild-vs-guild territory feature: guilds compete over map spots across Murkwood, Darkspine, and Goldsea, and the winning guild controls the zone until its next war begins.
Explore Wars is launching today, but in a beta mode. While it's in beta, war rewards are disabled — we want to gather feedback and balance the feature before rewards are on the line. Expect adjustments as we go.
Smaller things worth a mention
Real-time notifications. Notifications now arrive as they happen instead of waiting for your next page load.
Real-time arena features. You can now leave the arena page while in queue and will receive a popup when your match is ready. Additionally, users can lock-in their turn, when all non-bots have locked in their turn it causes the next round to begin early.
Apparel preview. Hovering an apparel item now shows you a preview of it on your alpha wolf, so you can see how it looks before you commit.
Email change self-service. You can now change your account email address from your settings page (requires access to both the new and old email address).
More dens. The max dens a user can obtain has increased by 3 from 10 to 13.
Standards Apparel. The community standards apparel has been added to the mole market.
Performance improvements. More caching and infrastructure work went out with this release. As always, if anything looks out of whack, a hard refresh should sort it — and let me know in Bug Reports if it doesn't.
NG+ no longer resets. Based on feedback for the NG+ feature, I agree with player feedback that progress does not need to reset when a new chapter is released, so it has been adjusted.
- NG+1/2/3+ has been relabelled as NG+Lvl10/12/14+ to separate it from max level and make it easy to understand as new chapters launch.
- When max level increases to 20, completed NG+Lvl10-Lvl19 will be removed while NG+Lvl20 and higher will remain active (but locked) for you if you had already reached them. You can unlock these existing NG+ levels to continue where you had left off once you complete the new storyline for the previous level.
- Rewards scale based on difficulty relative to max level (ie. NG+Lvl14 before Chapter 2 rewards similar bonuses to NG+Lvl24 after Chapter 2 is live)
What's next
Sticking to the plan: the next feature release lands in roughly two months, with bug-fix patches in between as needed. Explore Wars balancing and getting war rewards turned on are high on the list, and more of the Chapter 2 work will keep rolling out as its art lands. Same policy as last time — I'd rather ship things when they're ready than pre-announce a list and explain later why a piece slipped.
Closing
Guilds have been one of the most requested features since Lorwolf launched, and live chat has been close behind. Getting both out the door in one release feels good. Go found something, recruit your friends, and start arguing about what to name your ranks.
See you in Loria.
— JimJim
