Etaew
Bunnysaurus - Artist/Designer Interview 
During gamescom we had the chance to sit down with Avarem and chat about some of the new updates coming to Trove.
Shadow Towers
The Shadow Tower update is mainly for end-game players, ones who have progressed far enough in other areas to need more things to do. They are basically Shadow Arenas 2.0. At the moment it's fun but there isn't as much variety as we want. So we're adding bigger bosses, more modifiers.
Our community is voting on one right now that they came up with, we have a couple more that we are working on, we're going to keep making more after this update goes out.
We'll have 4 or 5 Shadow Titans when we launch sometime in September.
The winner was chosen, congratulations to FriedSushi for winning the contest.
To play through the tower you use a key, you will face a series of arenas and then fight a Shadow Titan. There are normal rewards and once a week are randomized Shadow Titan Modifiers for everyone playing the game.
There are leaderboards for how far you can progress through the Shadow Tower. Normal mode of the tower is from Uber 1 to Uber 5, and Hard mode starts at Uber 6 and gets higher. Same series of bosses but harder.
For every titan you beat, you get a special kind of currency to spend and unlock new rewards. The aim is to progress as far as you can. We're going to set it up so the top 100 people are going to get a purple name, with the tie breaker being how fast you can clear the last floor.
It's targeted for hardcore adventure players, something they can show off, work on and do with their friends.
For those who prefer solo play at least the first level, the first boss, or first couple bosses will be soloable.
Lunar Lancer
New class, pretty cool has transformation, spear user.
Mac Client
Will be coming out with the update.
Steam Workshop and Mods
We aren't planning Steam integration right now, as we don't want to exclude people who aren't on Steam.
I like the community mod hosting, especially when our community gets into it and makes tools for it. It makes me happy.
The community for us is everyone playing the game, those on Glyph, Steam, and maybe somewhere else in the future.
If there is a huge gain for us on doing it, I could see us doing it. It seems fine the way we are doing it right now. People are building tools themselves and we would rather support that.
Data Mining
We're sorry / not sorry
Data mining bothers some other people on my team more than it bothers me. That said we always talk about trolling you guys and putting some stuff in there that we don't intend on releasing and we don't release everything we work on and put in there.
That's mostly why I want to be cautious. When you see those files you don't know how they are going to be assembled or what they are going to look like. I don't mind and I sort of like the hype and the buildup, but it's important to have context.
It gets people excited, that's cool. When things start showing up in the files and people talk about it, then we talk about it and start to reveal it.
Adventure World Locks
Discovered in a previous database update.
The idea we're toying around with, to aid with challenges and the idea of crafting a portal to a world that your club owns and is focused around one type of biome. So if you want to go and farm something in a specific biome you can craft a key and a lock and you can go and do that. We're still working on a system for it and it may or may not go in.
Patch Day Stability
Long delays and problems on patch day is obviously not what we want. Recent issues are revolving around the database at the moment. With normal mmos you have a database per server, but because we have everyone playing together we have a database for everyone in the game, with everyones club worlds and world state being saved that causes problems.
We fixed the queues at this point, we have a load more people able to play the game. It's awesome.
I'd have to look at the numbers, we're approaching 2 million people who have played the game since we launched.
We also back up all our of data on patch days and that is taking longer and longer. Which is part of the reason why patch days have taken a long time recently, we are also trying to upgrade our database to improve it and be faster. We used to run game services on our database hardware and we aren't anymoret.
Everytime we make changes there is a risk involved, even if it goes a little bit wrong it can take a while for us to recover. We want to be really safe, if something goes wrong with it.
Our number 1 priority is saving peoples information. That is our commitment to people.
Club Worlds
A handful of club worlds had issues recently, as soon as we saw it happen we literally turned off the servers.
Two of our best engineers had to spend a couple of weeks now writing code specifically to fix that data for not that many clubs.
But because we have to make sure the integrity is there for these worlds. It's bad for people in those worlds, it's bad for us. We'll get over it, it's getting better.
Dungeons that spawned in club worlds were a result of this bug, you have the world data itself, and club meta data. You don't want to load the entire world when you want information about the map, so the meta data, the information about the world itself got messed up.
The world was fine, but the information about the world was not fine. When the world started generating new areas, it was like, I don't know what type of world I am so I'm world type 0, which is our original alpha world. I must be world type 0 and start generating that, but that's wrong, so we had to say that was the wrong metadata and write something that updated that, which was the fix we gave this week.
Now those bugged club worlds are a little unique, they have lairs, ore and cornerstones in them.
Cornerstones in club worlds is something I would like to do. It's a commonly requested feature, but need time for it. That and multiple cornerstones that you can switch between. We may still do something with different sizes.
Auction House
I would like to add an auction house in the next big update, no promises. The Auction house would be a buyout focused system without bidding.
Right now we have fewer gold spammers than I would expect. It's hard for them to liquify their assets, so I want to be cautious about adding it. Also you can see other games like Diablo where they added it and it changed how the game felt, but I know it will a nice benefit to people who want to do this.
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