Ladies and gentlemen, the party system is here 🙂

This is a large update that introduces many fixes and tweaks in many places, the healine feature however is parties – so lets take a look.

Firstly let’s talk about two major changes to how experience and loot is shared in Mirage by default:

Experience rewarded is now proportional to the amount of damage a player did to the monster

Only the attacker who did the most damage receives any loot

This means no more “killstealing” as it has become known. If someone runs past and hits your monster once, they will only get experience for the tiny amount of damage they did, the lions share (and the loot) will be all yours.

But what if you want to hunt as a group?

This is where the party system comes in. A party is treated as a single attacker, so:

The total damage dealt by a party is added up and counts as a single “attacker” on the monster

The experience points for this damage are then distributed equally to everyone in the party who hit the monster, with a 1% bonus for each additional player involved (so if you have a party of 6 and everyone hits it, everyone gets a 5% exp bonus)

If a party collectively did the most damage to a monster, everyone in the party who hit the monster receives a loot roll

This means essentially if you don’t want to hunt by yourself, you better join a party!

How do parties work?

You can start a party 3 ways:

Via the new Party UI in the inventory

Via the player details page of the person you want to invite

Via the chat command /invite playername

The new Party UI allows you to manage everything to do with your party, namely:

Invite players

Kick players

Promote players

Leave the party

As well as this, the player details screen will always show a contextual party action that makes sense depending on your party state.

So you can easily perform the following actions with other players without needing to use the Party UI directly:

Invite to party

Join party

Revoke party invitation

Kick from party

Once you are in a party you are added to a party chat where you can talk in private with the other party members. In addition, attacking party members does not count as a PVP action, so you will not receive a skull or be blocked from entering safe zones for attacking or even killing a party member! This means you can train without getting PVP flagged, which is going to be very important in a future update.

Party Icons

To help you easily know your current party state and the party state of other members around you a new set of shield icons has been introduced. These indicate (from left to right):

Party member

Invited to party

Party leader

Has invited you to their party

Other… stuff 😀

So as well as parties there have been a whole bunch of other tweaks and improvements as you might expect. The full change log will be listed out at the end of this post but I would like to highlight a few of my favourites!

Chat notifications

Ever found it annoying how unhelpful the chat notification icon was? Well, I certainly have, that’s why from now on the icon will show a different colour depending on the type of message you have received, these colours are in a priority order from lowest to highest, with the higher priority colours overriding the lower priority colours:

Yellow: Standard message in map chat or a public channel

Blue: Party chat message

Green: Whisper message

Social notifications

The friends list is kind of useful in that it allows you to check if people you know are online, but wouldn’t it be nice if something told you when friends started playing?

Notifications now pop up in the top left of the screen for common social events, and clicking them performs the obvious action (like taking you to the player details screen for that friend so you can whisper or invite them to a party etc). Above you can see our friend Coke has come online!

You will now receive notifications for (from left to right):

Being invited to a party

Someone requesting to trade

A friend coming online

A friend going offline

It is important to note that party and trade notifications will not be shown for players you have chosen to ignore 🙂

HP and Mana labels

The HP and Mana bars now label their underlying values by default, this can be disabled in the preferences menu if you prefer a cleaner look.

Full change list

Alas, going through every tiny detail with screenshots and explanations would take forever, so instead I present the full change log as a list for your amusement.

Party system

EXP is now rewarded based on damage dealt

Only the highest damaging attacker receives loot

Parties count as a single attacker EXP is rewarded equally to all involved party members If a party does the most damage, all involved party members get a loot roll

Party chat

Significant performance improvements to a number of server side systems (this was already hotfixed into live)

Boss monster HP significantly increased

Boss monster EXP significantly increased

Attacking party members does not count as a PVP interaction

Soulbound items are now account bound, meaning they can be placed in the bank

Chat notification icon now reflects the kind of message received in order of importance

Developers are no longer attackable with runes (Fruok you swine!)

On-screen notifications added for various social interactions

PC Client: Whispering to another player from the details screen automatically opens the chat UI

PC Client: Chat UI now remembers the last whisper chat you had open when it is hidden

Added chat commands for key party interactions

Changes to key maps where PVP blocking was being heavily abused

HP and Mana bars now show text values

Preference added for hiding the HP and Mana bar text values

A little update on me…

So what’s going on with me? Well, to cut a long story short the corona virus totally screwed up my plans this year. I am still 100% committed to going full time on the game, however this dream for me goes hand in hand with my passion for climbing – the dream is to convert a van and travel the country, working hard on Mirage and in my downtime climbing the best the UK has to offer. With Corona here and everyone stuck in lockdown, travelling and living in this way isn’t possible so for the moment I took my notice back and am working probably through until next year.

This isn’t such a bad thing, I mean, yeah it kinda sucks not being able to chase this project properly and every day I wake up and have to go to work (well, work from home) is a bit of a slap in the face when Mirage is all that is on my mind… but ultimately I am using this time to save and overpay my mortgage as much as possible so my monthly minimum payments will be a little lower when I do go for it. Lower payments mean I can survive for longer on a pitiful income, which buys me more time to work on the game and chase the dream.

As a result of me working full time once again I am unable to throw myself at Mirage as much as I’d like which means updates have certainly slowed… I will continue working though and dragging us ever closer to something good.

To everyone who has bought a scroll, thank you so much – the love and support I receive from the overwhelming majority of community is what keeps me debugging at 2am on a tuesday when it’s all going wrong.

All the best,

Liam