Dev Tracker

Nope. The tertiary color layers over the primary and secondary, so it will cover up the shiny belly on iridescent with the new color.

New Gene:

I can confirm that that particular dragon will not be a new breed. It was a pre-existing sketch of a dragon to put on the dragon designer level badge. :) The breed that was created through the kickstarter was Skydancer, designed by Scorpius. There will be new dragon breeds in the future, but they probably won't look like this!

This is a very common issue that happens with IE and Firefox browsers; we've had trouble nailing it down because it's so inconsistent. Does the issue still occur if you try a different browser than what you're currently using?

@DarkAngelGenesis

I very much apologize if you have ever received a reply from us that indicates that we do not care when it comes to helping out our players. That is not and never was our intention. It is true that we are currently swamped with some large, long-standing performance issues, but we'll always do our best to investigate someone's problem. The best contact channel for customer service issues has and always will be through our email system, as that is a place where everything can properly be chronicled and seen by the staff. While the bug report forums are a good place to go to report site-wide issues, individual one-off situations may easily get buried. I apologize for that, but with the volume of people we have, this is true.

A lot of the issues that have occurred thus far have been directly correlated to periods of web service interruption or performance loss, wherein data either doesn't make it to or back from us. This is entirely our issue, and something we have been tirelessly working to correct for three months. We feel we are on a much better track than we were even days ago, and I have high hopes that these issues will become less and less frequent. Until then, I can only thank everyone for their patience (which I know can be a stale statement on its own, but I do mean it. WE do mean it.)

As for the issue described in the thread - we will be happy to do as much looking into both the incident, as well as what may have caused it. While I can't guarantee we'll dig up anything (if data is lost, it's not there for us to see in logs), we'll do our very best. We don't want anyone to feel like they're unimportant or ignored.

Please accept my humblest apologies that it took so long to get a response to you.

Corrected this!

Extending the window on the skin retirement to a month and a half instead of 2 weeks.

Skins need to leave the shop. If you could see the que of skins that we have lined up, there simply won't be room to do repeats unless we stop making new skins and have a largely static, cycling stock. The amount of skins we accepted (and COULD have accepted) was pretty high, and that's awesome! Having a lot of variety in our skins shop is great for the artists, the site, and the players who want choices. (Perhaps not so great for collectors.)

While there's a log for familiars, there will never be a log or tracking/check-off system for skins if that's a concern.

Harpy's roost isn't really worth it yet. It just had one thing bumped. It needs some custom items added to it D=

Rebalancing is WIP.

New Apparel - Bandanas
Click here to read more about today's updates.

New Skins

Starfall Celebration Skin Contest:


Skin Retirement

We're not nearly done with coliseum rebalancing, hence no talking about it. We changed a pair of things in the first zone (the big one people are likely to notice is the leafy moth sell value, which was grossly out of proportion with any other familiar) and one in harpy's roost. There's over a hundred things that need changing for the rebalancing to be complete, but in the end, higher level zones should offer a much more attractive payout. :-)

No rebalancing has been done in over 2 weeks, so it could just be luck D=

The currencies will be either reusable, or tradeable at an exchange rate for next year's currency. We're not sure yet. But I'd hang onto them either way!

Thanks for the report!

We're hoping to bring search and subscriptions back up after we've made some additional improvements to the server. They're down as they're pretty heavy things for the site, so we need to recode pieces of them to be a little bit lighter.

V iewing the dragon in the icon or forcing a redraw of its image will usually resolve this issue. It sounds like folks have a bad image.

Haha. Even if things stay fast, there's still a few areas of the site that Lightsky has found that need work. But we're hopeful that today will see a pretty noticible performance increase. The real telling time will be peak hours (14:00 - 21:00) to see how it performs under the heavier load.

Hatchlings only age if they are already 5 or older during the midnight rollover. This hatchling will become an adult tonight. :)

9/9/13 Scheduled Downtime:

• 8:36 - Today's changes have been completed, and we're opening up the site for play. Lightsky will be monitoring the server throughout the day to see how things went. If issues arise additional downtime is possible, but we're hoping things will go smoothly! All dragons have been fed for the duration of the downtime. Thank you!
  
• 17:16 - We will be putting the site into read-only mode beginning 23:00 on September 8, which will continue through the night and into the morning of September 9th. We are giving the team at Lightsky a chance to pull the site down and make changes to our database structure. It is our hope that these changes will be a step in the right direction to allowing us to support more concurrent online users with less latency.

9/6/13 Downtime:

• 15:12 -Today the web development team at Lightsky has made some good discoveries with the operating system on our database and how it's not using all the power our server has available to it to process pages. They've laid out a good plan for moving forward, but ultimately this will take some time to implement and is not good to do right when we're about to enter a weekend.
  
  Today was an enlightening day of testing and research, but no significant changes have been made; expect the site to perform at the same slower pace as yesterday. Our apologies. We hope to have the site running at a better clip after the Lightsky team has had the chance to implement some of their suggestions.
• 09:37 - LightSky is progressing with further optimizations. We do not have much new to report, but want to thank everyone for their exceptional patience.
• 06:22 - Flight Rising will be undergoing maintenance starting at 6:30 on Friday September 6th and proceeding into the afternoon. We are putting the site into read-only mode to allow the team at LightSky the opportunity to make changes to our table structure to help better handle our new traffic and performance issues.

9/5/13 Downtime:

• 13: 58 - Web team is applying artificial stress to the server in addition to our natural traffic to see how the site performs. Complete.
• 13: 32 - We are taking the game out of read-only mode and allowing players to play. We will be monitoring the effects that the changes had. Additional maintenance is possible.
• 13:25 - A series of database optimizations have been made.
• 06:48 - Flight Rising will be undergoing maintenance starting at 7:15 on Thursday September 5th. We are putting the site into read-only mode to allow the team at LightSky the opportunity to make changes to our table structure to help better handle our new traffic and performance issues.

9/4/13 Downtime:

• 15:06 - We are opening the site again to monitor traffic's effect on some of the work we performed during the maintenance. There is a chance that slow-down may still occur, and that we may close for a bit longer, but we will make this known if we decide to do it. Thanks for hanging in there!
• 13:50 - We don't have much of an update yet, but we are working diligently to identify problem spots and communicate them to the web team.
• 10:159 - Flight Rising will be undergoing maintenance starting at 10:45 and proceeding into the afternoon. The main reason for this maintenance is to allow the web team at LightSky some time to work on the site to address some of the new performance issues we are seeing. We do not currently have a time frame for this maintenance, but will keep you updated on its progress via this news post. Thank you!

Rollover Error:

• 6:17 - The mass mailing system is chugging along. The care packages may take a little while to arrive. Your package will be arriving sometime later today, with earlier lair IDs likely to see theirs first.
• 5:54 - We are sending out a care package to everyone on the site with additional food items. These will be arriving shortly.
• 5:20 - We have corrected this.
  • All energy bars and clan bonuses should be set to full and active.
  • Gathering turns have been restored.
  • Pinkerton has been reset.
• 5:00 - Tonight at rollover energy bars were 0'd out and gathering turns did not roll over.

Let me know if it persists and you have absolutely caught it in the act. I am unable to reproduce this on my account or my test account.

I do know that fighting in the coliseum can cause dragon's energy bars to deplete if you flee or lose a battle, but this should only affect the dragons in the party.

They should lose one point of energy per four hours.

There will be new familiars with a new theme for the set. This set is the sprite set. :)

Festival apparel I will need to ask about. I know that some pieces are being retired, but I don't know which off the top of my head. D=

Love some purple, though I sorta wish we had a deeper, magentish sorta purple and a more desaturated, bluish purple (a variant similar to thistle, but cooler) XD

If an item is retiring, we'll use the word retire. If an item is cycling, we use the word cycle. We did not want confusion; We like it when folks know what they're buying. :-) I am sorry if this was misleading. We tried to use the best word we could. The other wording option we could have used was "leaving" but we thought that "leaving" sounded a lot like retirement. Cycle implies that it's coming back, because that's how cycles work! (cycle = events that are regularly repeated in the same order.)

One more item added to the gem shop as it is now would put us at 5 pages of gem apparel, so we need to start cycling things out or we're going to end up with many more pages of gem apparel then regular apparel. (Since gem apparel is always in stock and treasure apparel is a random stock chance.)

We do retire items, and will announce them as being retired, not cycled. For reference here's a list of our retired items so far:

Items that are retired include:

• Beta Familiar
• Beta Skins
• Beta Vista
• Kickstarter Clockwork Chest Contents
• Kickstarter Fiendish Chest Contents
• Kickstarter Cloudy Chest Contents
• Kickstarter Gilded Chest Contents
• Kickstarter Skins
• Imperial Scrolls
• Light Sprite
• Lightning Sprite
• Fire Sprite
• Light Contest Skins
• Lightning Contest Skins
• Fire Contest Skins
• Red-Footed Akirbeak
• Twice-Dyed Cowl
• Speedy

Hee hee. Well, the server was lagging when you posted, and it's better now. Runestones won't advance (in a timely manner) on a laggy server.

Akiri applied a fix for this before he left for the day. Hopefully after this rollover everyone should be awarded their appropriate amount of turns. :-) (If not, we'll keep fixing it until it stays fixed!)

The counting down thing is symptomatic of the lag. Runestones needs to talk to the database to award treasure at the end of each level. If we're laggy, it takes a while to do that. Sometimes you can leave it open after it counts down and it'll eventually make a connection to the database and award the treasure/allow you to advance to the next level.

We're hoping that once we resolve our latency issues on the site, Runestones will no longer have this problem.

As long as the trade still exists, you still have the otpion to try to collect it again. This is symptomatic of our lag. It has to send both dragons or the dragons + gems/treasure to both parties successfully for the trade to go through. If any part is missing, it drops the transaction and asks you to try again.

@SpiderKingShal THat's symptomatic of lag. Sorry about that. Try reloading the page again!

We are investigating this issue - it is likely related to the bad performance we've been seeing over the last few days. Thank you for the reports!

These are all related to the really bad congestion/load time issues we've been experiencing. Thanks for the reports!