TKoK 3.0.4 has exited Beta! (Finally!)

http://www.hiveworkshop.com/forums/m...-0-4-a-146077/

Thanks to the hard work of everybody on the team (and especially curi and RaiN` for fixing lots of little bugs and annoyances in the code while I was on vacation the past 2 weeks), TKoK 3.0.4 - The Secrets of the Barrens is finally out of beta

I can also say this with some confidence this time: The map is very stable and for the most part, free of major bugs. The testing team has played from level one, and cleared everything with no major things to report, a good omen, finally.

Next up is patch 3.1.0: The Rise and Fall of the Emperors
This new content will feature 6 bosses, many mini bosses, and 2 full zones of content to clear + a continuing unique quest line and mini events. Along with all of this will be the final hero: The Druid

Cool. I remember enjoying this... It was still in beta? Sheesh.

The few things that I can't say that I like nor dislike about TKoK is that the over abundance of stats. All of the stats are nice, but at the same time when playing it, I felt that it was unnecessary and somewhat unnoticeable. Perhaps only because I was playing a Priest and got to level 20-ish. I'm not a big fan of "Lady Luck in your favor" being critical to survival.

The map attempts to mirror an MMO, which is good... and not good at the same time. The progress at the beginning of the game is good, but then that progress becomes exponentially slower. At one point, I asked my brother whom I played this with, "Why are we still playing this when we're not getting anywhere?" I remember that, because it was a four hour game, we were on level 24 when we started and were still on level 24 with an experience bar that gained almost nothing doing runs in a dungeon that was supposed to be for level 30's. I think I remember someone saying that experience was bugged... But still, not very fun times, I assure you.

Playing a game not feeling like you're getting anywhere or making any progress makes it feel like 1) a big waste of time and 2) puts you off the next time you see it or someone asks you to play with them. I quit playing TKoK and my brother got his character to the high 20's after another week or so. "Not worth your time," I told him.

It's still an amazing map. I can see how much time you guys put into this and I respect you guys for actually sticking to a project and finishing it after years. That's something that about 95% of other map making teams can only dream about. Great jobs, guys. I hope you can use TKoK sometime in the future... maybe a piece of your portfolio with projects you've worked on while looking for a career or something. Businesses-- especially now, are looking for people like that.

Each version (3.0.0, 3.0.1, 3.0.2, etc) comes out as a beta first, then the final copy of it is released as a non beta. Each patch includes a new zone and raises the level cap. If you out level the current content, chances are, you are going to gain such little experience that it does feel like you play and gain nothing.

I assume when you were talking about being level 24 and not gaining much at all, it was the last major patch before the Ancient Orc Temple came out (AOT). Level 26 was the level cap, and getting past level 23 was really hard. The current setup with the AOT all the way up to the boss of Muarki allows the players to get to approx. level 34. Of course doing so is going to feel like a total grind.

When the next content section comes out, getting up to and past 34 will be much easier.

I do appreciate the feedback though, good well structured feedback, such as yours, helps us improve the game!

There's def gonna be some more future with this. We have no intention of giving up before getting the 3rd generation(aka 3.xx versions) to where the 2nd gen was(which was actually finished) and improving it on the way.

Thanks for the kind words :)

Free of major bugs? That would be the first time since you started with TKoK 3. ^^

Heh, all the problems with 3.0 started when we introduced the new buff system. Took a long time to figure out why the system randomly broke during real games but not during tests.

Long story short, when a mini boss died, its bufflist wasn't being cleared and re-initialized before being recycled and reused on a new mob. Means new mobs were spawning with a buff list, so when they died and their list tried to be cleared, all the references didn't exist anymore causing incorrect structID's to be cleared or altered.

Played the new version a few times, a lot of bugs are indeed gone. =)

The game still crashes every now and then though....

And the green and yellow players tend to be in permanent combat mode (the lack of mana regeneration is pretty annoying).
EDIT: Okay, just had the same with teal, maybe it's not related to the colors and the game just hates me. Strangely enough it only happend to me in all the games I've played so far. I think Fled is behind this! :3


And since I didn't get an answer on the tkok forums I'll try my luck here: =P

The thing is that after barrens the mobs become more instanciated as you can see in ToS and AoT and instanciated groups have 1 roll for a blue item in total for the whole group to drop. I don't know why we still have that but yeah it's something that needs to be looked.