Chat, three times the hunting grounds, and caravan escorts

A lot landed since the website opened. Here is what changes when you play.

Open to everyone

• Everyone who signs up plays at once. There's nothing to wait for.
• The game lives at amber-road.online.
• Up to 250 players are in the world at once while we test. If it's full when you arrive, you get a place in a queue, and the title screen shows your place as it moves up. If your connection drops or you reload, your place is kept for two minutes.

Three times the hunting grounds

There are now 51 hunting grounds with 342 foes, up from 17 grounds and 114 foes. The Glades have hunting grounds of their own for the first time, more grounds fill the open land along the Amber Road and around Aldmere, and the frontier goes from 2 grounds to 12. Each foe lives where its kind belongs: farm folk by the farms, wildlife and outlaws in the wilds.

Chat

Press Enter to talk. There are channels for Nearby, your Party, the whole World, Whispers to one player (`/w`, `/r`, or click a name), Raiders only, and one for Traders and Wardens together. You can report a line, and `/mute` hides a player from your chat.

Trading

• Only Traders buy goods at the market and from the stable master.
• Every crate rides on your pet. To pick one up, your pet has to be out, alive, near you and have room. Nobody carries crates by hand any more, so there's no slow walk with a crate on your back. If you die, the load stays on your pet, and it only spills if the pet is broken.
• Wardens can escort caravans. Select a caravan's pet or driver and press U to join its escort. Any number of Wardens can join, and every Warden who stays within 100 m of the pet for 70 % of the trip gets paid. The pay bar and the party window (G) show your share, and Rally takes you to the caravan you escort.
• Bandits come more often. A ★★★ load from Aldmere to Crossroads by the Amber Road now meets two to five packs. The market panel counts that in, so it shows what a road really costs before you set off.

Your interface, your way

Press Esc to put away what's open, then to drop your target, then to open the settings. There you can:

• set the interface size from 50 to 200 %,
• fit it to wide screens and TVs,
• show, hide or resize each part of the screen on its own, or show it only while you point at it.

The anvil

The odds of each + level have changed. A try at +0 now succeeds half the time, and each level is 5 % harder up to 5 % at +9, then 1 % harder each level down to 1 % at +13. With its 100 tries, a new item reaches +10 about 94 % of the time and usually ends at +11.

The questline

• Chapter 1 asks for more kills, so every job reaches level 5 before the step that teaches a new skill.
• Trips pay twice the XP they did.
• A Warden earns the whole trip's character XP for guarding a quest caravan.
• No fighting around a quest caravan in town. Its pet and its guard can't strike or be struck inside a town or village.
• A missed quest caravan starts over. Walk back to the stop and you get a new one, instead of waiting for the old one to finish its trip.
• The Warden's Reclaim and the Raider's portal steps now send their caravan, so they no longer leave you stuck.

Aldmere and the land

Aldmere's market square has been laid out again: the stalls stand along its north edge, each service has its own spot, and the people stand at the tools of their trade. Every farm lane now crosses the river on a bridge, and the mills' sails turn on their hubs.

PvP balance

• Frost Snare and Crippling Shot slow instead of root. Frost Snare slows by 30 % for 5 s, Crippling Shot by 30 % for 3 s.
• Any hit breaks Aimed Shot and Meteor, as it already broke Rapid Fire. A broken cast has no cooldown, so you can try again.

Fights look right

Many skills now show where they hit and when: area rings end where the area ends, warnings appear for Rapid Fire and Mend, Hunter's Mark stays on a moving target, a Charge lands as the Knight arrives, and a target only falls once the shot that kills it lands. The Knight, Archer and Wizard move better too: each sword swing has its own shape, and bows and staffs point where they should. A Knight's shield now glows with the sword.

Smaller fixes

• The arrow on the world map points the way you face, and stands out on snow and pale fields.
• The Contract board button opens the contract board, not the smith's order board.
• A dropped connection comes back on its own instead of asking you to reload the page.
• The website's 3D road no longer jumps while you scroll on a phone.