Mounts, player trading, and a bag that stops eating your things

The changes of the last few days, and the plain answer first: none of this is on the live realm yet. The realm is still running the September 28 build. Everything below runs on our development build, and we have played it with two clients logged in side by side.

You can ride now

Mounts get their own tab in the character window: one slot for the beast and five for its gear — coronet, armor, soul, saddle and tassels.

To ride, learn Riding from its book (level 40), wear a mount and cast the skill. It is a six-second channel that costs 50 MP. Walking, being hit or dying breaks it, and a broken cast costs nothing. Cast Riding again to climb down. While you ride you move roughly 20 to 28 percent faster, depending on the mount.

• Everyone sees it. Riders are drawn on their mounts for other players, including players who walk into view after the ride began.
• The rules are the game's own. Your level has to be at least the mount's, and the mount's at least its gear's. A refused equip answers with the original's error text, such as "Please remove the mount equipment first."
• Rentals run out. The 3, 7 and 30 day mounts start counting the first time you wear them and put you back on foot when they expire.
• Where they come from. There are 309 mount items, mapped onto 115 of the game's 117 ride looks: a vendor in Sparta, quests, drops, blacksmith recipes (the Greek Steed and all 45 gear pieces) and the Mount Feeder, who raises a mount to level 50-120 for Soul Stones, changes its look with a Mount Shifter and upgrades gear with Golden Gems. The prices and drop chances are our own choices. The original server's tables are not in the game files.

Trading between players

Select a player, open the Menu on their portrait and pick Trade. They get a popup for 30 seconds. Trading is off by default: both players type /trade on first, and /trade off takes it back whenever they like.

The table has 12 slots a side plus Silver and Gold. Any change on either side unlocks both. Press OK to lock; when both players have locked, the server swaps everything in a single database transaction, all of it or none of it.

What stops it being a way to get robbed:

• Only whole stacks of unbound items. B-Gold and warehouse items never trade. Gold trades need both players at level 65.
• After any change, OK is refused for 1.5 seconds, so nobody can swap the goods the instant before you press it.
• Anything on the table is locked: you cannot use, move, split, sell or throw away an offered stack.
• You have to stand near each other. Walking away, dying, disconnecting or changing map cancels the trade, and everything stays where it was.

How far we trust it. A script ran 82 hostile scenarios against a live server — forged frames, wrong sizes, disconnects mid-trade, request spam, double commits. 77 held. Four of the other five were real server bugs, all fixed since; the fixes are covered by unit tests but we have not re-run the live pass. Nobody ever captured the original game doing a trade, so this is built from the client's own code and the 2008 server source. We have watched our clients trade with each other, not the original.

A bag that stops eating your things

A double-click on anything that was not armor used to delete one from the stack. Copper ore, a key, a quest item: gone, with no message. We sorted all 3,418 item types using the original client's own rule for what a use does:

• 1,170 are worn gear. A double-click puts them on; they are never consumed.
• 652 cast a skill: potions, scrolls, bags, books. These are the only ones a use consumes.
• 750 belong to pets and crafting (pet books, recipes, the pet items that open their own windows) and are left to those systems.
• 272 are quest scrolls. A double-click now opens the quest window and keeps the scroll.
• 574 do nothing when used: materials, quest hand-ins, chests, keys. They stay put.

205 of the skill items cannot do anything yet (gift bags with random contents, honor items, hair dye and so on). They stay in your bag instead of vanishing.

What items do now follows their tooltips. The tooltip is what the live game pays: it agrees with both amounts we ever measured on the original (the Medium Money Bag's 100,000 Silver and the Giant B-GOLD Sack's 50,000), where the old 2008 script did not. So the potions changed: a Small Mana Potion restores 60 MP, as it says, not 250. The Silver and B-Gold bags, the EXP stones, the Talent Stones and 27 packages that list their contents (a Talent Package opens into twenty stones, an Antler pack into its antlers) now pay what they promise.

Small things came along with it. Using an item sweeps its icon and any quick-bar slot holding the same skill, the way the original does, and using another item inside the one-second global cooldown is refused with the original's message. The buttons in the player menu light up under the pointer.

What we have played, and what we have only tested

Played, with two clients on the development server: summoning a horse and a lion and climbing down; a second player seeing the rider; the Mount tab and its tooltips; the Mount Feeder's window opening; a full trade, from the request to both purses and bags updating, and the popup's Accept and Decline; a Small Money Bag paying 10,000 Silver; a gift bag staying in the bag; a quest scroll opening its quest.

Tested by automated checks only: rental mounts expiring, mount drops, the 82 hostile trade scenarios (scripted, not by hand), and the EXP and Talent Stone amounts.

Still to come

• Putting all of this on the live realm.
• Gift bags with random contents, honor items and the AP potions have no effect yet, so they stay unused.
• Item Mall mounts, and a relog while mounted, which starts you on foot.
• A real recording of the original game riding and trading, so we can check our guesses against it.