The main change today is, we've removed the ancient "click the word that appears twice" CAPTCHA and replaced it with a more modern jigsaw-based design which is hopefully less of an annoyance.
We'll still be looking at ways to reduce the number of occasions you see it, if at all, in the near future.
Lots of substantial backend changes today as well:
- The periodic tasks that grant hourly experience, execute raids, etc., have been made into multi-node runners to prepare for better horizontal scaling (faster, more robust)
- Changes to DB schema (caused by adding new features, etc.) is now applied automatically upon deployment, speeding up game development
- Misc fixes for tracking new player entry points and suspicious page accesses which regressed slightly due to moving to front-controller design
More to come, we want this kind of update cadence to be maintained going forward. Main focus is new game content (maps, items), and some long-standing feature requests (guild territorial control, progression systems, new player skill trees, item extended attributes that act like passive skill buffs that stack). Should be interesting year for the game!
