News

As alluded to recently, accuracy is the direct counterpart to dodge, and it is now live! All players start with 100% accuracy and can modify this both upwards and downwards with a variety of items. Monsters generally have 100% accuracy as well, although there are a few exceptions.

As to how specifically accuracy works, basically your accuracy and the monster's dodge chance get added together and that becomes the effective dodge chance. When monsters are attacking you, a similar process happens, but taking the monster's accuracy and your dodge chance, of course. So, if you have 125% accuracy and the monster has a 20% dodge chance, the effective dodge chance for that attack will be 5%. Similarly, if you have 60% accuracy and the monster has 10% dodge, then the effective dodge chance will be 50%. If your accuracy is high enough, it is possible to never miss now. Additionally, if your accuracy is low enough, it's also now possible to never not miss.

Speaking of items, several existing items have grown new properties, and there are also 5 interesting new weapons.

Finally, as a bonus, I've tweaked the vertical alignment of checkboxes and radio buttons so that they hopefully line up with inline text better. Aligning text and other non-text elements vertically is basically the most difficult problem in web design so I'm sure this will work horribly in some cases, but hopefully it's better overall.

The Wise Sage has decided to take note of the most diverse players, which is to say, those that have killed the largest number of distinct monsters. Unfortunately, the Wise Sage's memory isn't what it used to be and only kills starting from early 2009 count towards this. Nevertheless, moving forward he will be more vigilant.

So, since basically the beginning of Game!, the dodge chance for both monsters and players has been hardcoded to 4%, but today that changes! First of all, players got a slight buff to 5% dodge by default, but so did monsters. The main reason for that is because 5% looks better than 4% in your Profile. Speaking of which, your dodge chance is now visible in your Profile. 16.83% of monsters were rebalanced to have higher dodge chances (some significantly higher) to make things a little more interesting. Don't worry though, methods to counter these overly dodgy monsters are coming soon...

Of course, monsters don't get to have all of the fun. Items and sets can now offer increased dodge chances. Also, in totally unrelated news, there are 4 brand new items out there to find, 2 of the existing sets have been buffed, and 1 of the existing pets has been slightly buffed.

Additionally, the sidebar was slightly reorganized, to combine both Level and EXP into a single item. The raw EXP number is still visible in your Profile should you be curious, but I expect the Level progress bar is sufficiently informative for most cases. The main reason for this is to tidy up the view for smaller screens, as every row can have exactly 3 items now.

Finally, the action buttons and dropdowns (at the bottom of the screen) now become disabled when you execute an action, until the page reloads. Before, if you clicked fast enough, it was possible to end up with multiple requests simultaneously in flight, and that could land you into the next battle without you realizing what happened, as you would only see the results of one of those requests, but they would all happen.

In exciting news for all hungry Game!ers out there, there are now an additional 18 recipes, as well as 17 new items and 2 new combinations. That's a lot!

Also, in somewhat related news, quests have titles now. The main reason is so they can be displayed at the Quest Master a bit more cleanly. This is also handy if you want to refer to a specific quest by name rather than picking something about it.

Although it will be almost completely invisible if you're using a normal sized screen, the UI has just had a massive overhaul. The overall top and side bars will now behave somewhat better on smaller screens (those under 900px wide). Essentially, the sidebar gets smushed into the top bar, and most of it is hidden by default. You can click anywhere in the top bar to slide out a panel that has everything you would normally be able to always see on a larger screen, but on smaller screens needs to be hidden by default. The discoverability of this panel is very poor and definitely needs improvement somehow, but I haven't figured out a good method yet. So... for now, just make sure that if you haven't already read this news item yet, that you read this news item.

I haven't touched any other UI elements to account for smaller screens yet, and the usability of various screens will vary quite a bit (the Inventory in particular is going to suck), but most aren't extremely horrible. In general, they were designed from the beginning to scale to different widths and font sizes, but the small screened devices common today really push the extremes.