This week, Embers Adrift continues fixing some key issues, including addressing crash bugs, and a number of other issues. The Stormhaven Studios team is also working on opening up the QA build to anyone with an active account.
One of the major issues they've addressed in this week's update is cases where NPCs were one-shotting players. A fix will require them separating player and NPC riposte skills, but they don't have that in place yet so they've rolled back riposte damage for the time being as a workaround. Another issue addressed in the update is an exception that was causing zones to occasionally crash, and work on loot tables that were not dropping at the expected (and intended) rates.
When it comes to the loot table issue, the community noticed that the drops just didn't seem accurate. The team looked over the code to see exactly what was wrong, and they had trouble reproducing the problem. Sometimes this type of bug is hard to pin down, as noted in this week's patch notes, but they kept looking into what was going on.
Eventually, after much more work detailed in the patch notes, it became clearer why the drops were happening sometimes, suddenly stopping, and working for other players but not some. With this knowledge, they were able to verify the issue and set up the loot tables so they worked as intended. The full explanation is rather technical, but if you're interested in how game developers can sometimes narrow down a perplexing bug in order to fix it, it's worth a read.
Those are the main issues addressed in this week's patch, although there are a number of works in progress and upcoming changes scheduled to be either on the QA server or coming soon this month. Access to the QA server is soon to be open to all players who have active accounts, and they're hoping to open that access up sometime this week. Some of what's to come on the QA include more of the riposte updates, dueling by death rolls, more bug fixes, level 30+ abilities, and more
