Patch 77 - September 12th, Guard Functionality Hotfix, Ocllo & Vesper Town Regions

Vesper

The vesper town limits have been adjusted.
This will address the issue of lazy region design with this town as it included vast amounts of non town related land.
A land rush event will be announced very soon to open this land for placement and will include a large scale town invasion event.
For more details about the change check here
Note: Any houses that a player managed to place in the adjusted town region will be removed. (This should not be possible due to a temporary region in place). However this should serve as notice placement is only valid during the vesper land rush event. ​

Ocllo

The guard zone on the east side of town (near the bank) have been expanded to include the miners guild and reach to the Ocllo Moongates.
This will provide a more sensible town region for the town and players unfamiliar with Ocllo.
This will have the side effect of including two houses inside the new guarded region.
These locations will be grandfathered and some restrictions will be placed upon the current owners to account for the increase in value.
Note: Such as transfer rules, sales rules, etc. ​

Recall

Murderers (players with more than 5 long term counts) will no longer be able to accidentally recall into a guarded region.
This is to account for the changes to the regions listed above as there can be spots that were safe before that would be covered by guards now.
This change will be in place as long as it takes for these runes/region changes to become more common knowledge.
This however happens rarely as it is so the effect on player activity will be minimal.​

Clothing Bless Deeds

Clothing bless deeds will no longer auto bless themselves after each reboot.
These items should always be considered stealable. Any existing items will be reset to the proper loot type.
Since for some reason no blessed tag was ever shown when single clicking these items this was deemed appropriate - Thanks Peace ​

New Account Restrictions

The restrictions in place for new accounts in regard to the poison spell, poison field spell and purple potions have been updated.
New players will not be able to cast these spells in town limits until their account reaches a reasonable age.
A change has been implemented as well to make sure regions that might be a type of guarded region, but without guard protection are no longer included in this restriction
(Buc's Den, Duel Pits, etc)​

Earthquake Spell

This spell can no longer be cast in town by accounts of any age.
This is most likely a temporary fix and will be open for review as we work to address the issues listed below.
Some strange mechanics in relation to our town guards was discovered that requires much more research into how this spell affects them.​

Client Menu

Renaissance staff (gamemasters) will no longer be able to manually approve 5th anniversary gift bags for players.
I will however retain this ability for the last few players that have yet to have their bag appeal resolved. ​

Town Guard Mechanics

These changes are related to this thread - PSA on Town Killing
Initially we thought we would have to make sweeping changes to how town killing worked, what was allowed etc.
However after some research a critical bug was discovered that was allowing almost all known methods of mass town killing to take place.
Roughly there were situations in which NPC's in the general area should have called the guards attention to aggressive criminal acts.
However due to a mistake in how the guard timers were handled there were situations in which this would never happen.
This accounted for 99% of the methods in which players were able to avoid punishment while killing players in town.
We have addressed this issue and now NPC's in town will be much more active in reacting to aggressive acts that happen in a reasonable range around them.
Note: The mechanics in which the guards react to criminal acts (stealing, corpse looting, etc) have not been affected by this change. A NPC will still need to visibly witness one of these acts taking place in order to call guards. ​

Not without extreme confusion. I tried a variety of options and only a straight line was understandable when applied. Other than a small square around the moongate that was already there.

If we were not dealing with a few players as dedicated to VPN'ing new accounts to subvert our player protections I would not have made the change. But even with my fixes for everything else, I would have been able to cause problems due to how close the guard line was to the Ocllo bank.

Additionally with the new guard protections in place, keeping the guard zone so close would inevitably lead to a player feeling safe about a criminal combat situation having the guards called on them as they were close to the edge but not in town limits. We wanted to avoid this problem before it happened.