Chewett

I am currently looking to start discussion groups relating to various areas that I see as important to improve in MagicDuel. I want MD to work a bit better by encouraging meaningful activity that changes the game. Putting the "player ran" back into MagicDuel and hopefully making it stand out from all those other games. These groups will work with be privately to flesh out some of the ideas before we present them more publicly or add in features. I will listen to all the ideas of those involved but at the end of the day I shall have the final say. This is your big change to influence MD in a dramatic way for the better so please do come at this with an open mind. Anything is open for change so do not worry about how things currently work, if we can improve it we can change it, and I am sure we can improve a lot of things! I intend to slowly add in changes which will hopefully allow them to be tested and tweaked to properly fit into MD. If you want to get involved please post on the respective topics: Land Loyalty - A project to review how land loyalty works and make it more relevant. Resources and "job tags" - A project to review what we are doing with resources and then how we can make a "proper" economy. Illusions - A project to review what illusions currently do and what we think it would be interesting to do with them. Gateway Island Rework/LHO/Tutorials - A project to review the Gateway Island and the tutorial

For full details of what the MD Rework 2021 project is please read the main thread. Land loyalty is somewhat of a silly concept because it does not relate to how loyal you are to a land. As the current implementation is it is better described as a "land presence". The aim of this project is to: Review how land loyalty is gained Review what it is used for (so we have a list) Discuss whether we think its uses are useful (or whether we need to change them to work with something else) Discuss ideas to improving it, or splitting it into multiple metrics I could quite easily see this project removing the "original" idea of land loyalty and instead creating a new "land loyalty" system which would more accurately describe loyalty to each land. We shall see how the discussions pan out! If you wish to be involved with this please post here and I will contact you all when I am ready to begin. We have been having some of these discussions on Discord so if you haven't joined it, this would be a good idea to if you wish to get involved. We may have meetings on Discord to facilitate faster replies depending on timezones.

For full details of what the MD Rework 2021 project is please read the main thread. An economy needs inputs as well as outputs, if you have too few inputs them your system will be starving and not function properly. However if there are not enough outputs there will be less reasons for people to participate in the system and items will accumulate inside the system. A good example currently is that gold and silver is piling up in the MD economy (I believe) as there is less to spend/use it on. This project aims to attempt to create a small economy which encourages people to use it and then slowly improve on it. In doing so we need to review what it currently does well and what we could do better. As an example, one idea that Sunfire has proposed that I had been considering from another game is land buildings. This could be something that would require continual upkeep. This is one of the ideas that will be discussed in the later stages. The rough stages of the project will be: Reviewing the current distribution of resources in active members (this will be done via an admin interface to see how resources are in the game and may be very interesting for those interested in stats). Reviewing the current tools and methods to inject these resources into the game Considering how the resource skills are progressed and how that could change Discussing "job tags" to force people to specialise Discussing "end goals" for the system to see if we can create something whereby resources are removed from the system because people actually want the products. I could see a big change in resources coming from this project because resources currently are somewhat under-utilised. It is quite likely this may result in the current resource methods changing and having skills degrade to reflect the change in how skills work. Possibly your current resource stats/items may become useless in the new system (although we may consider "moving" them over or compensating them. If you wish to be involved with this please post here and I will contact you all when I am ready to begin. We have been having some of these discussions on Discord so if you haven't joined it, this would be a good idea to if you wish to get involved. We may have meetings on Discord to facilitate faster replies depending on timezones.

For full details of what the MD Rework 2021 project is please read the main thread. Illusions are currently somewhat underused, primarily because they are buggy and have "zeroed" out people's accounts so they have lost everything. There is currently a manual process to backup accounts put into illusions but restoring it is complex and time consuming. Part of the work I plan to be doing on this is stabilising the system so it is easier to use and not likely to break an account. The project has two halves, the first will be something I will be working on behind the scenes: I will be slowly pausing all illusion entering methods so I can safely "pause" illusions Once done, I will carefully bring out every account from an illusion (some really old accounts are stuck so we need to handle it carefully) Then rework the core code to properly let illusions "work" The second half is where I will want ideas and opinions: I will be wanting to hear from people about how illusions "should" work and what people want from them In additional a discussion about what an illusion should/shouldnt be able to do will be very helpful in their re-implementation. I can see this project being very fruitful for both those who know how they work or those who want to learn more. Illusions allow you to radically change someone's account temporarily and this can have a lot of interesting and useful side-effects. If you wish to be involved with this please post here and I will contact you all when I am ready to begin. We have been having some of these discussions on Discord so if you haven't joined it, this would be a good idea to if you wish to get involved. We may have meetings on Discord to facilitate faster replies depending on timezones.

@Ledah and MagicDuel (Originally posted to Discord)

Interesting opinions, thanks Ungod! Whats problematic about the loading times? The "not in your scene" bug is probably A25 bad sceneloading, I probably need to do some performance optimisations on it after it was implemented by Mur. It is what it is, but it can change. I always listen to those who listen to me

I didn't get around to summarizing it so I shall do that now, apologies all: Some people were unsure of the change, to be clear it was after various complaints about specific people grabbing large amount of tools and gathering large quantities of resources. One comment was that some people were unsure if it was known that independent tools would not work alongside shared/public tools. This is an intentional change which means that an independent tool cannot be utilised alongside additional shared tools. The next stage (detailed later) will focus on reviewing the current available tools and resources. We had a discussion about whether independent tools should be excluded from the restriction. Some people favoured this however I will not be making this change until I (and those helping me) have reviewed and discussed the distribution of tools and resources. Some discussion about the stages of the resource rework which I will discuss on a secondary post (to be posted later). Thank you everyone for putting forward your opinions, I will reply to people above now.

We had a fruitful discussion on Discord with Mur, Mag, Mallos and Myself which I will summarize later today.

If I haven't sent you what you need please bump the read or the PM.

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Pin badges given to people: ID 1 - Chewett ID 2 - Ungod ID 3 - Redneck ID 4 - nadrolski ID 5 - Trola ID 6 - Muratus del Mur ID 7 - Aia ID 8 - Tissy ID 9 - Antyvas ID 10 - Jubaris ID 11 - Steno ID 12 - Miq ID 13 - Demonic God ID 14 - Ledah ID 15 - jakubhi

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Handled I make this 109, can you verify please. 10 - Item 2: Anni custom pin badge (first of a collectable series). Price: 10 plushies (limit: 1 p.p) 50 - Item 3: Avatar goldening Token (can be used to make any avatar gold), Price: 25 plushies 15 - Item 5: Send to Gazebo - 15 plushies 10 - Item 6: random rp item. Price: 5 plushies 14 - Item 7: Acoustic remains stone. Price: 7 plushies 10 - Item 13: 1 token (of your choice) applied to one creature, Price 10 plushies You corrected it later, I will handle this tomorrow!

All rewards have been distributed

Item 1 - Custom Item, no usability - 45 Plushies @Lazarus Item 2 - 7th Anni - CID 58 - 776716 - 65 Plushies @Aelis Item 3 - 9th Anni - CID 60 - 822371 - 34 Plushies @Ledah Item 4 - 11th Anni - CID 63 - 851617 - 35 Plushies @Steno Item 5 - 13th Anni - CID 65 - 863559 - 20 Plushies @Clock Master Item 6 - Wind Drachorn egg - 2836 age ID 793846 - 140 Plushies @Demonic God Item 7 - Angien Egg (normal), 2836 age ID: 793911 - 27 Plushies @Ungod Item 8 - Darkling, 2836 age ID: 793858 - 70 Plushies @Lazarus

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A spoiler for those who exchange their 15th year plushies for one, artwork is coming. There will be one this year and each of these items will be numbered with the name of the person that claimed it. Full description:

@jakubhi then said:

This has been resolved.

No screenshot was posted but don't worry Fang I have fixed it. Thank you for reporting it.

This has been resolved.

Fixed Ann. 5158 - [2021-03-18 12:47:33 - Stage 15] - Permalink - Posted By Chewett 666 likes Like The recruitment cards shown when recruiting creatures are now fixed and correctly display their image.

Summary Today at 18:08 a member on Discord made comments which seemed to imply a number of players were abusing bugs to attack them when offline. After significant investigation it was found that the issue was not due to bugs but because the player was using two devices to play MD and had not logged out of both. During this investigate I disabled the combat system to preserve evidence. This was re-enabled at 19:27 after the appropriate information had been gathered. We take accusations of bug abuse seriously and if you believe anyone is abusing bugs please report it to a game admin. No bug abuses have been found and no further action will be taken. Full Report Today one member of the MagicDuel family made a comment on Discord stating that seemed to imply people were cheating and attacking them while offline. This was concerning given Aia's latest contest so I immediately stopped what I was doing to investigate this. This comment was as follows: This was accompanied by an image that was suggesting a number of players were abusing this with an accusatory tone: The colours indicate each player who was accused, since these accusations have been proven false their names have been removed. Sadly the player did not include information about the times the attack occurred to aid the investigation so it took significantly longer then it should. Fetching attack logs First I correlated the data in the screenshot with the database and reproduced the information I did not have: blue - Sun Mar 14 2021 11:48:17 GMT+0000 orange - Sun Mar 14 2021 11:50:02 GMT+0000 green - 1615722923 - Sun Mar 14 2021 11:55:23 GMT+0000 red - 1615722938 - Sun Mar 14 2021 11:55:38 GMT+0000 orange - Sun Mar 14 2021 11:59:38 GMT+0000 green - 1615723593 - Sun Mar 14 2021 12:06:33 GMT+0000 orange - Sun Mar 14 2021 12:15:10 GMT+0000 Here you can see that the last attack on the player happened at 12:15:10 GMT+0000 Checking logout time I was not provided any details of when the player making the comment had logged out so I correlated their IP address used to log in with the access logs. From investigating this I discovered that they logged out at 11:51:57 +0000 with the browser Chrome 88 Checking browser access logs To finish the investigation I cross-referenced the data against any other account actions and found that there were two browsers accessing the account. The final account access was at 12:17:49 +0000 with the browser Chrome 76. It seems that since the player was logged onto two devices they did not log out from both and was only removed from the online players list when they stopped accessing MD from the second device. This meant they were attacked after pressing logout, but before closing all browsers. Note to everyone Please note that using multiple browsers with MD may cause unpredictable behaviour and confusion to yourself such as this. If you are using multiple browsers you will want to make sure you log out from all of them when logging out. Names have been removed from to preserve privacy because they are not important to the investigation or report.