TGIF! Development News for January 11, 2019

Happy Friday, everyone!

We have a rather lengthy update this week, so let’s get right into it.

But before we do, new Legendary Crates are now available! Make sure to pick up a Master Three-Pack for a guaranteed Legendary item!

Planned Server Maintenance

On Thursday, January 17, we’ll be performing maintenance on our Memcache servers. This means that any cached data will be wiped out. Luckily, this is only temporary data and everything else will be recalled from our databases. Here’s a quick run-down of what will be wiped in the upgrade.

- Sort/Filter/Dropdown preferences (these will revert back to defaults)
- Alert counts, ex Messages, pending Skill Points etc
- Boss Feed
- Minigame Feed

While this does cause some temporary inconvenience, it is essential for our games to keep our servers up to date and performing as best they can. Thanks for your patience next week when we go through this process, and we’ll drop another reminder in the News feed closer to the date.

Mobile App Improvements

We have a rather lengthy list of improvements we made to the mobile app this week.

The biggest change this week is that we’ve revamped how in-app notifications work. You may have noticed that in the past you had pending notifications that can’t be cleared no matter what you do. This is no longer the case, and we’ve made a bunch of other changes that make that system more efficient.

• Footer More Icon - tracks alerts, messages and faction messages and will updated more intelligently as you view these notifications
• Header Alerts Icon (Bell) - should now properly clear out alert when you visit
• Goals Icon - Now tracks Daily Reward to collect, Syndicate, Guild, et al reward to collect, or free Lottery Ticket to collect
• Home Jobs/Challenges Alert Bubble - Removed as the count is displayed on the home row
• Home Boss Alert Bubble - This is now blue instead of red and serves to keep count
• News Footer Icon - Updated behavior. As you view the News, Social and History tabs, the footer alert bubble will only partially clear out for the content that you have seen, instead of disappearing altogether after hitting the button.
• News Header Tabs - Updated Behavior. Instead of the old yellow bubbles, this has been switched to a red alert bubble on the tab itself to show how many unread messages there are in each category.
• Performance - Notification data is now optimized such that we'll use less data when you have no new notifications to report. Because of this, we're able to poll for new alerts more frequently (30 seconds -> 15 seconds with this change).

Aside from that, we also re-organized the Boss screen this week as well which helps clean it up and enables us to display more of the Boss art which was previously covered by a lot of the interface. We also took into account the feedback we got last time from changing the Boss screen.

Here’s what it looked like before:



And here’s what it looks like now:



Much nicer! Let us know if you have any feedback around this change.

A few more updates to note!

Loot Case random upgrades now have the proper behavior on mobile. Loot Cases have a random chance to upgrade to Level 2 for free when you open then, but on mobile this would display a grey screen instead of the new Case. This is now fixed.

If you’ve sent a public message on mobile using the pre-made phrases and it never got a response, you can now delete those messages.

And last but not least, Destructives can now be upgraded on the Zombie Slayer mobile app.

Chat Group Update

Not as lengthy as the previous update, but Chat Groups can now accommodate 50 players up from the previous 20!

Frozen User Count:

17

Lame Joke of the Week

How do snails fight?

Spoiler

They slug it out!

 

since this week is all about mobile............(did you mention the mobile note in chats showing someone on phone btw?)

Any chance there will be an update to the raid bosses on mobile so one can see their progress toward minimums without backing out and guessing?

Or is it there and I missed it in my searching..........

 

I think we missed the mobile icon in chat, nice catch.

As for minimums for Raids we will discuss this and look to add it in if it is missing. Do you mean the min attack/heal actions? I am assuming so.

 

That would be my guess, and I would like to be able to see that as well.

 

I gotta say I hate not being able to stack, the daily boosts, I keep finding I am missing days collect my energy and I play ever damn day on and off all day long, from the phone, the ipad the laptop and I still miss collecting and now did it two days in a row in my main game cause raids keep taking all my attention. hate hate hate losing them.

 

After the recent change to SW i sent in a ticket about the mobile token count still showing 300 instead of 400. No way to tell if u getting close to max; i see that isnt yet fixed.
and i agree kirsten! kano said they did it to make it less "confusing" but what they meant was they want us to buy more FP during raids and arena to make up for it. ive stopped buying FP because of it. we want stacking back kano! and we want the daily reward fixed so that if u switch from energy to stamina it doesnt go back to day 1 rewards! and when i say we i mean every single player ive talked to about it! im tired of wasting stamina on junk bosses just to collect the next days boost! and tired of not having enough stamina to compete in arena or do as many raids as before. and i repeat im not spending FP to make up for it!

 

put some new world bosses. also u can make even smaller bosses in pc , in 2 rows, much easier to play

 

I'll chat with the Support team to get more info on this. We can get this UI cleaned up. Thanks for letting us know, again

 

LOL Smack - I really liked how you picked out the first sentence to respond to. Can we please have any word back on whether you guys will allow us to have our stack back. I too seem to miss my daily boost somehow. Not always but occasionally. Or how about (in ZS especially) when we do get a boost and then we level that we get to keep the whole boost and what was already there instead of capping us out? I mean we earned it so why cap it? I know this is about Mobile....but we really need some feedback on this subject as well

 

Stacking is not coming back however we made an adjustment a few weeks back that allows you to collect a boost when you are beyond 100% of your max stamina or energy by raising this threshold to 160% Max Stamina and 200% Energy. Basically you can stash 1 day's worth of Stamina/Energy.

As for missing boosts we can certainly look to pop up the collection interface once per day like we do on mobile but we didn't want to make this too intrusive for our established desktop players. But if more than a few of you are forgetting to collect your rewards I think it makes sense to get this in front of players.

I forgot to address this point. You can do this currently when switching between Energy <=> Stamina when on Day X.

For example, I am on Day 8 with a 100% Energy reward.

1. I collect my 100% Energy for Day 8
2. I change my reward preference to Stamina
3. Day 9's reward will be 60% Stamina

Edit: I think we need to fix up the language here to reflect that your rewards are not being "reset" in this case. However switching to "Random" rewards will reset you back to a Day 1 equivalent.

 

How about the Loot Cases? Will thy be wiped out too?

 

Do you mean by the planned maintenance this week? If so no. And overall, any Loot case you have in your possession will remain in your possession. They are yours, you have earned them, use them as you see fit.

 

Will unused skill points still be available?

 

Yes, those too belong to you. The notif for how many are left unallocated may disappear until your next level up (or achievement) has been earned but they will still be there.

 

So with the planned maintenance will that include you fixing the issue with stacking that has disappeared since some faulty deployment last year

 

nice try, but no.

 

damn, had hoped this reset of the memcache would solve a big problem like the missing stacking.

 

What is the problem with returning stacking ? Over 95% have asked for this - or is no body monitoring the forum comments ?

Your reply to Kimbella sucks

Boo hiss - we want stacking back

 

This week was about mobile app upgrades, so how about rival list, to hide rivals? Just like desktop.

While at it, re-instate stacking

 

Good suggestion. I'll bring that to the team to look into for a future round of mobile improvements.