Game updates April 5th 2019: Major PvP changes

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Since becoming 'public', this will be the first update to AoD so far. PvP was a major sticking issue last weekend, so I spent a significant amount of time this week trying out some changes that should hopefully make PvP more healthy for the game. If these changes aren't enough to make PvP healthy, I have some further ideas for next weekend to try out. I'm hopeful that these changes should be enough (and might even be too much), but only time will tell.

So without any further ado, here is the list of changes.

PvP Changes
- PvP damage has been reduced by 50%. I'm hoping that this will make fights longer, more engaging, and give players enough time to react to player combat.
- PvP combat now triggers battle music.
- Bounties now increase much faster.
- EXP from player kills can no longer be shared with guildmates. This was an oversight and was never intended to begin with.
- Fixed some issues with karma calculations not happening when they should. This should make sure player killer status is applied in a timely manner now.
- Fixed player killer status not usually being reflected in player name color like it should.
- Player killer status is now reflected in your chat messages as well now. This will override donor green name if you are a player killer.
- Collecting a player's bounty now has a cool sound effect.
- Leaving a guild now takes five seconds, and guild members are warned when you try to leave the guild.

Spell changes
- Sunburst is no longer available in the town shop. They are now found rarely in dungeon shops. If you had Sunburst scrolls in your inventory, they have been refunded for their original value and removed.
- Sunburst now has an audible windup before casting.
- Sunburst base price was increased from 850g to 1500g.
- Sunburst will basically never be seen during this update. Depending on how the other PvP changes go over I may slowly re-introduce it by increasing its weight in dungeon shop tables in a future update.
- Recall channel time increased from 4.5 seconds to 6 seconds.
- If Recall would not cast for some reason, that is decided as soon as you attempt to cast it rather than just failing after the channel finishes.
- Recall no longer works for player killers during PvP combat.
- Earthstrike damage increased. Was 45 [+35], now it is 60 [+40].

Gameplay changes
- The town now has an orb that you can click to teleport to a random location outside of town. You can use this to prevent people from easily following you out of town.
- Opening dungeon doors now has a very short delay so that some brick generation can occur before you walk through the door. This might help reduce the frequency with which people were falling out of the world.
- Chests now always contain at least one item, and the chance for additional items now increases with dungeon level. (The base chance of additional items occurring has also been reduced, but this is significantly offset by the fact that you can't get zero items from a chest anymore)
- The Troll Boss area now has a ceiling to prevent people from becoming unwitting astronauts.
- The Spider Boss is slightly less dumb now.
- Doorways on level 4 are now more uniform.
- EXP potions no longer share EXP with guildmates. This was never intended.
- Compass price increased from 500g to 800g.

Login system changes
- When admins join the server, the player limit will increase on that world so that there is always the same number of 'slots' for regular players.
- Donors of $5 or more can now bypass the player limit.
- Fixed an issue where disconnecting while loading would not log you out, forcing you to wait 20 seconds for your session to time out before reconnecting.
- When you log in after an update, you are now given a link to the latest changelog. This is probably how you got here!

Other changes/bugs fixed
- Fixed apprentice bows showing up for 0g in dungeon shops.
- Fixed neutral altars deciding what items to give incorrectly. It might make some sense now.
- Shortened some sequence names further, which should reduce the frequency of Missing Sequence errors during loading. [aka. (Mis) errors]
- You will no longer get a tutorial popup as long as you are over level 1 when you join.
- /help now directs you to the game guide and reminds you about the /tutorial command.
- /donate now directs you to the donation page.
- There may also be some changes with secret content that are not documented here.

Known issues - These issues will be addressed in a future update
- Some armors don't have hats.
- Donors sometimes automatically equip a hat after spawning.
- If you crash while in the dungeon, it counts as a death. This is not a bug but more of an unintended consequence since leaving the game while in the dungeon is supposed to count as a death. Eventually I want to make it possible to rejoin the server within a short timespan to 'reawaken' in the dungeon where you left off instead, but this is a complicated feature that will take a while to make.

The worlds should be going up within a few hours of this post. As planned, we'll be hosting all weekend; and thanks to some generous donations last weekend I will be hosting a new EU-based world this weekend.