AMA Kronos Staff

[krutopatkin]

What do you guys watch on TV?

 

[jorim]

It is said that the classic original mounts will be added into the game as donation items. Does this mean that if I get my epic horse training, I can save 90 gold by purchasing an original/classic Palamino?

Yes you save 90 gold by doing that, but the riding still costs you 900g so your advantage is small.

Reminds me of that retarded horse, 20€ lol.

 

[filvorja]

Would somewhere in February be a realistic estimate of the lauch, or too early?

What do you want us to say here? Give a release date then have everyone upset if we can't make it?
Every answer to this question is wrong. Even if its just an estimate players will take it too seriously and treat it almost as a deadline. I could tell you my personal estimate and even then players would take it seriously.
As soon as we are confident with a release date we won't hesitate to tell you, till then please stay patient.
Sorry you didn't get the answer you wanted.

I'd like dev opinions on how quickly people will hit 60? Not the very first person. But how long in do yall think it will take for a good chunk(100 people) to hit 60?

100 should be arround the first 1 month. Leveling on a true 1x rate server takes time.
3 months after launch everyone who started from release on should be 60 or close to it, even casual players.

http://forum.twinstar.cz/showthread.php/90650-Freezing-Band-Boss-Proc?highlight=freezing+band
Someone linked a Vanilla video of 35+ mages doing Rag and the proc happening quite a bit. So since it was confirmed it will likely be implemented

As mentioned already, this is a frostbite and not the freezing band. I also heard rumors about https://vanilla-twinhead.twinstar.cz/?item=4388 working on Rag turning him into a giant green gnome.
A little bit of research brought me to an old page where someone states that "The thing about Ragnaros is that roots work on him". According to that it is a specialty of this encounter and not a general rule for bosses. As cursedsilence said its highly unlikely. We will investigate this.
That beeing said, its okay that you reply to each other from time to time, just don't let this thread turn into a discussion.

Even though this video is out there, I don't think that either Frostbite or Freezing Band should procc on a boss,
...
The only reason why Frostbite could have been possible is that Blizzard maybe didn't bother to make Ragnaros immune to Roots since he isn't moving too fast anyway

See above.

Can players expect this same level of drive for an authentic experience on the Twinstar 2.4.3 BC and the 3.3.5a WoTLK servers?

The other Twinstar servers are all ran by different teams. It happens that a developer from 1 team helps out the others. An example would be Chero optimizing code snippets for Twinstarts wotlk realm to make them more performant.
All Twinstar realm are in a really good condition and every team improves their server continually. Yes, you can expect high quality from all their servers.
Vanilla is a special field though. The community is way smaller then for the expansions so you have to go hard or go home.

 

[filvorja]

Could I/somebody do something for you to consider giving some official support to your VKontakte fan-group

Forwarded.

do the npcs on Kronos give the player the proper buffer zone in a fight?

The distance that an NPC leaves between him and you depends on the configured size of his hitbox.
I just tried it with a few NPC and it seems that this so called buffer zone is missing.
Mobs aren't exactly face to face with me, but it also does not look like this here
https://www.youtube.com/watch?x-yt-...ature=player_detailpage&x-yt-cl=84359240#t=87
It seems like this started happening when Chero reworked the movement generator. From chipping come chips.
Fixes can have sideeffects, seems like thats the case here. Reported.

My one serious question for Kronos staff would be: How do you see this server in far future and how do you reckon its longevity?
Assuming everything goes right, launch, starting population, first raids progression etc., what do you expect happens next? Are you willing, each of you, to provide support for this server in the time span of years? Do you see yourself in a couple of years still working on this server? And after all content is cleared by majority of guilds (or earlier), when the population will start declining, do you have something specific in mind what happens next? And how far from now do you reckon this situation will occur, given Vanilla lasted only for 2-3 years on retail and we can expect much faster raid progression and have only so many raids to do.

And related to this, how do you guarantee players that they won't lose their investment in playing on this server by another wipe? We know it already happened twice because of low population, does that mean we can expect all characters to be deleted when the population drops under 200? 100? 50? How much? For how many people, for you, is it worth it to keep the server up?

The plan is to keep the server running as long as possible. Vanilla wow only lasted 2-3 years cause blizzard launched TBC. Otherwise there might still be people playing vanilla on official servers right now - I think.
How each staff members involvement in the project turns out over the years can not be predicted. You get a new job, start a family, who knows? Compare it to other projects. New members join the team, old members retire or take a step back.
We haven't thought about what will happen once the server ran for years. In all honesty, its too soon for that.
After all, we haven't even launched, why think about the distant future :wink:

Wiping our character database was never expected nor planned nor easy for us. Even though the call to make a clean slate came from within the community and never the staff we do not want to do that ever again.
Twinstar kept the previous Kronos up even when there was only 50 players online.
Now think about it. The staff, first and foremost Chero, wants this to happen so badly. He doesn't give up.
We learned from previous problems (advertising) and managed to solve them. Back then the activity and interest in Kronos was nowhere close to what it is now. Judging from the numbers of page/forum/facebook/youtube views and general interest (oh boy you wouldn't believe how many test applications we get) in Kronos this is bound to be a success.

Be careful, your poking a beehive.

True that.

 

[Azalus]

What you mean man, I thought they already decided that they were adding that?

They have not ruled on it yet.

 

[LaraDorren]

Is there any possibility or scenario where you guys would say "Screw this whole project, this aint gonna make sense!"?

No.

 

[filvorja]

Will Management do anything about ninjalooting? Or is that all on the palyers?

Everything that the community can sort out on its own should be left with no GM interference. In some cases this will not be possible.
If in a raid and the loot master fails to change the loot system before a boss kill, bad luck, we can't help you. If he deliberatly takes an item for himself over the legit winner we reserve ourself the right to intervene. If we do, we can only react if the case is crystal clear and there is valid evidence for a scam.
This was just an example of course.

 

[Lharts]

I was checking Kronos features videos, specifically this part:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yqr8boo7e1w @2:12

and i was quite surprised by that "NPC sleeps at night" feature

NPC did not sleep at night, i think this is very weird for who played back in the days.

(proof https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7usYjTsUVIA)


Is this feature still planned for release?

Its Cheros little baby.
It does not really change how NPCs work besides standing still instead of roaming and makes the environment look more alive and real. Looks cool and doesn't hurt? Why not keep it that way.

 

[filvorja]

What programs are you using for recording and editing gameplay footage?
Any freeware download tips?

Licensed products only, no freeware. Vegas and Frapse.

I wonder who makes these videos and we can expect in the future to showcase stuff that is usually broken on other servers.

I'm thinking off;
- mechanics in alterac valley probably
- ZF stairs event planned
- escort quests PM me with an interesting one
- cuergo's gold No (its working though)
- functional rare spawns with loot tables No
- functional rare vendors No
- working meeting stones Yes
- working herb and vein spawn system Hard to show properly, so No
- mob fighting distance (they don't stand on top of you) No
- BG multiqueue No

That would be me.
You mentioned good points and I understand why people are interested in them. As I see it, its a shame that working rare mobs or escort quests are already considered as something amazing or worthy to show off. That alone says it all in what condition vanilla private servers are.
We mainly focused on stuff that is not common or hard to achieve. Like lag a freeze free server - yes, I really like that.
I have a long vanilla private server history so I included stuff that blew me away when I first set foot on Kronos.
The videos more are less resemble my own definition of what makes a server good. Now to that, I am a PvP player :biggrin:. Therefore we have a lack of PvE content shown in the videos, but alot of game mechanics and PvP related fixes.

What does your checklist look like? What needs to be done before the release, besides finishing the dungeons?

Look at Twinheads Vanilla bugtracker and set the filters to New, Confirmed, Reopened and Need Retest. Then you get a list of open issues. Obviously we can't solve all till release. What you can expect is that there are no major bugs (that have been found) left on launch.
https://vanilla-twinhead.twinstar.c...[select]=&do_apply_issues_filter=Apply+filter
700+ issue? Seems bad, doesn't it? I can reassure you, its not! There are issues which other projects wouldn't even recognize let alone fix.
Checklist:
- Overhaul dungeons
- Get rid of major issues
- Get rid of minor issues
- Release

 

[Lharts]

Will different ranks of class created items be able to be held? Example: in retail Vanilla, a mage could create mana gems of different ranks because only the same rank is unique. This also held true with warlock health stones if you got warlocks to spec diffetent amount of points in it, you could hold more than one.

Yes you can and they also share the same CD. Tested it yesterday.

 

[filvorja]

Is the HK system going to be the same as back in the days, meaning that we will have to farm hardcore in order to achieve high pvp ranks. Or is it going to be a bit scaled down? Some private servers scaled it down, thats why i am wondering. In my opinion the original HK system would be nice.

The setting is exactly the same. You get proper decay each week and your rank points are calculated by the correct forumla.
This is a factor we as a team can change. What we can not change is how many players actively participate in PvP. We expect a flourishing and healthy PvP community, but even then it all depends on your peer players how competition turns out.
At this moment we do not plan to scale anything down. Future will tell.

Will there be seasonal events like brewfest etc.?

Any seasonal event is available on Kronos. Check https://vanilla-twinhead.twinstar.cz/? to see which event is currently running. Right now its https://vanilla-twinhead.twinstar.cz/?event=374


Honestly guys, get used to Twinhead :redheart:
Why? Cause it rocks!

And by the way http://www.kronos-wow.com/development-progress/ 83%

 

[Rockmaster]

I searched for it and I know it's been asked but I could not find the post and I could not remember what the answer was, but is it possible that while mounted, you can cast a spell or ability and it automatically dismounts you?

For example, a warrior running up on a mob or a player and instead of dismounting first, pressing their charge keybind and it instantly dismounting them and they charge their target? It's an issue that has been killing me on all other private servers...

Again, I searched but could not find it so please don't burn me...

It was like this in vanilla. There are addons for it: ezdismount or lazypig.

 

[filvorja]

Every class is 95% working, but hunters are at 90%

What is that 5% for hunters that is giving you guys trouble?

Also, have you guys polished off the finer points of pet mechanics and pathing?
If so it would make a solid proving point if displayed in an advertisement video.

There was actually quite some work done regarding traps and talents. Simple answer, it feels like we just forgot to update the progressbar. You see these numbers are arbitrary. 95% means that the class is in a really good condition, yet may still have some flaws. Undiscovered or not yet fixed issues for example.
Did a quick search on it and just found https://vanilla-twinhead.twinstar.cz/?issue=2930 as a specific issue regarding hunters (I did not take more then 2 minutes so bear with me if theres more).
Pets are a general thing and would reflect into warlocks progress too. The quest is also not considered a part of the class and thus is not contained in the bar either. The quest just recently broke again after mob scaling was introduced. The scripts work, just the damage values are off.

There was a video showing how succubus reacts to commands. How you are even able to interup channeled spells like Seduction. Pets and Minions are almost the same and therefore behave the same. Wtih some small room for fine tuning they can already be called polished.
An example:
You jump of a cliff -> your pet looks for a path. If it falls behind it accelerates to catch up more easily. Pets can run down steeper slopes then players. No problem in warsong gulch.

Now to know issues with the current pets:
- aggresive state makes the pet go nuts sometimes, you can't even call it back anymore (easy to solve)
- pet range is too small, it won't attack far away targets (this is correct to some extend, just need a correct range value)

https://vanilla-twinhead.twinstar.cz/?issue=3256

Any idea how much we will get disconnected from ddos attacks? Like how many times per day? Is there a possibility that it might be zero?

We expect attacks, but we do not expect these attacks to take our service offline. Twinstar has experience in dealing with DDoS attempts.
As other team members already pointed out we can not provide you with detailed information about our DDoS protection. All we can say is that it has proven its worth in the past.

 

[milkutin]

So I've been lookin on the development progress site, and I notice that you havn't finnished ZG,MC, Ony, BWL and several classic dungs.

MC, Ony, BWL and ZG are on 95%. Is nearly impossible to have everything on true 100%. Even Blizzard has often many bugs in released content.
Btw, don't forget that 95% on Kronos is like 195% on other private servers. :smile:

 

[Struckd]

Will there be 'multi queue' (be in queue for WSG, AB, AV at the same time)?

There was an issue with being removed from other queues when you entered a BG. This is deliberate as (due to the size of the server) there are constant cases of people queuing for multiple BGs and when the time comes to choose and jump into one there were matches that has 0/10 (H/A) of AB and 10/0 (H/A) for WSG because thats just how the game sorted you. This isn't an issue if you a highly populated server but for a niche private server...it is.

By not allowing you to join multiple BGs at one time overcame this issue.

Just found the bug report for it: https://vanilla-twinhead.twinstar.cz/?issue=1720 which confirms exactly what I said.

Edit: Corrected my explanation. Thanks jorim.

TL;DR - My post didn't answer the question but highlighted an issue that was resolved. According to the bugreport however, you CAN join multiple queues.

 

[filvorja]

To start this off, /slap to all of you. I know I repeat myself, but please try to keep this train on track and not turn the thread into a discussions. We want to give you an option to get information from us and not argue with each other.

Are you going to maintain main page progress bar even after release?

As the bar will not reach 100% till launch we definitely will.

I most likely know the answer but I'll ask it anyway. Would you even consider adding taunt for prot pallys?

Yes, you do know the answer :wink:. No.

What about legit but griefing behavior, like continuosly summoning Doomguard in the middle of Crossroad/Goldshire?
Punishable? Permitted?

There was another question before regarding ninja looting. We try to interfere as little as possible. Griefing was a part of mmo games since their introduction. This does not mean we support it. First we want you guys to solve your ingame problems by yourself.
If it is not listed in the FAQ/Rule it is not forbidden. Just try not to be dicks. Makes our and your life alot easier.

Have you totally ruled out the possibility of adding some completely new stuff to the game?

There are no plans to add additional content. There is already enough work to do as it is.

Will there be rollbacks, where the game goes down for like 5 minutes and your characters are rolled back 1 hr?

It is still possible that crashes happen that even roll the game back for several minutes. It rarely happens as one of our main focusses was to make the server more stable.
1h+ or even days? This only happens if your hardware fails. Kronos wants to deliver quality. Proper hardware and fail safe setups are part of this. So far we never had data loss due to hardware issues.

- Players are saved directly into the database every couple minutes (worst case, few minutes rollback)
- Daily database backups (never had to use those, but its good to have them just in case)
- Some actions also save a player directly into the database such as:
> looting (if you loot an item and server crashes you will not lose this item)
> trading
> mail
> completing a quest
> and so on (basically anything where items changed the owner)

Additionally, after a crash the server restarts in seconds. If the server "hangs up" the system will autmatically restart it. The timeout before is 30seconds.

 

[Chero]

Does the Twinhead database reflect the exact ingame drop rates? If not, why not?

It does.

 

[LaraDorren]

Is this npc, Kaja near the auctionhouse in orgrimmar offering repairs?
https://vanilla-twinhead.twinstar.cz/?npc=3322#sells
I remember that on release of vanilla it did not offer repairs. It was patched later.

Yes it is.

 

[Backpedal]

Now you can see online players on all 3 Twinstar servers together, but is there gonna be option to see Kronos online separately?

 

[Aieris]

Is the suppression room in BWL working properly?

I'm not dev, but yes, it works properly. I think that you can see a bit of suppression room in raid forum section. There are some videos from previous Kronos.

 

[Cyndan]

Do buffs/debuffs fade properly when they expire? On many private servers, debuffs for example will linger for a few more seconds (sometimes up to 10) longer than the timer displays once they reach 0. This leads to some debuffs that reduce your stats to keep them reduced for longer than the debuff is meant to last. I know it is also not affected by lag because I have healed/damaged enemies constantly while the debuff reads zero but is still affecting my character.

 

[Sizzla]

what ETA of launch date`s ETA could we expect?

 

[zarquon]

New video coming up later?

༼ つ ◕_◕ ༽つ Giff video please!

Sorry to announce the new showcase won't be up today due to some unfortunate team internal miss scheduling resulting in some of the content intended for showing to not be up to our standards.

 

[filvorja]

Will the priest-spell [Mind Control] be changed?

No, you can do the same shenanigans with it as on retail.

Do you guys present any form of census of the server? Playerbase and such for the public?

Later on, yes.

Is the suppression room in BWL working properly?

Absolutely. Spawnrates, trap disarm, immunites from mobs and the slow are all working as intended.

I am curious as to whether Kronos will award the player the correct amount of experience when grouped with a party.

Our groups use the correct EP formula. This also means that high level characters can not effectively push low level characters.

New video coming up later?

Define later? No really, my bad. I'm sorry guys.

CURSE THE SKY!

Actually he meant me :sad:


EDIT:
So you guys know what I had in mind.
- Cuergo's gold (working, but not updated to test server yet)
- https://vanilla-twinhead.twinstar.cz/?quest=1324 (you can complete it, but the even it not 100% right)
- https://vanilla-twinhead.twinstar.cz/?quest=5321 (model morph does not work properly, rest is okay)
- https://vanilla-twinhead.twinstar.cz/?quest=5944 (quest works and is completable, check tracker for what is wrong with it)
- https://vanilla-twinhead.twinstar.cz/?quest=2969 (Probably the most sought after quest in private server...)

I had a hard time finding any quests that are worth showing. At least from my perspective (am PvP nerd you know).

 

[Guessilldps]

EDIT:
So you guys know what I had in mind.
- Cuergo's gold (working, but not updated to test server yet)
- https://vanilla-twinhead.twinstar.cz/?quest=1324 (you can complete it, but the even it not 100% right)
- https://vanilla-twinhead.twinstar.cz/?quest=5321 (model morph does not work properly, rest is okay)
- https://vanilla-twinhead.twinstar.cz/?quest=5944 (quest works and is completable, check tracker for what is wrong with it)
- https://vanilla-twinhead.twinstar.cz/?quest=2969 (Probably the most sought after quest in private server...)

I had a hard time finding any quests that are worth showing. At least from my perspective (am PvP nerd you know).

Yeah, those would be good to show. But what about dungeons? Can't you show the ones who usually have bugs in them?