The devlog.

Parry timing rollback

Two weeks ago we widened the parry window by two frames to help players on higher ping. It worked, and then it kept working, right up until Aegis builds stopped losing at all. Roughly 61% of ranked finals last week had an Aegis in them.

The window is back where it was. The real problem is that the wind-up animation reads differently on mobile, and adding frames was us fixing the symptom. A proper fix for the animation is in testing.

• Parry window back to 6 frames from 8.
• Aegis riposte no longer refunds stamina on a blocked follow-up.
• Fixed a case where the parry flash played twice on the client after a rollback.

Written by the combat team. Full ranked data in the Discord.

Export tier opens in beta

Shipping contracts and regional demand are live for anyone past the fourth factory unlock. Prices float based on what everyone on the server is producing, which means you can now sign a contract and lose money on it. That is deliberate, and it is the part we most expect to get wrong.

• Three export regions, each with its own demand curve and delivery window.
• Contracts can be cancelled once per in-game day at a 15% penalty.
• The prestige loop is not in this build. It needs the economy data first.
• Conveyor pathing rewritten, which quietly fixed the plush-in-the-wall bug.

If the pricing feels punishing rather than interesting, say so. We would rather tune it in the first fortnight than defend it for six months.

Containment becomes the default response

Flagged sessions now route into a non-persisting instance rather than taking an immediate ban. Nothing written there is saved, so a player we called wrong loses an hour of their evening instead of their account.

We changed this because the numbers embarrassed us. Reviewing two months of enforcement, about one flag in forty was a false positive, usually a legitimately very good player on a bad connection. One in forty is small until you multiply it by every session.

• New action Axiom.Action.Isolate, with onConfirmed for follow-up enforcement.
• Isolated sessions still generate telemetry, which is what confirms or clears a case.
• Moderator queue shows the isolation reason and a replay of the triggering window.

More detail on the AXIOM page.

The Saturday PlushX went down for 41 minutes

On 21 June, PlushX Tycoon stopped saving progress for 41 minutes during peak hours. No data was lost, but a lot of people played through it without knowing, and that is its own kind of damage.

The cause was a migration we had rehearsed against a copy of production that turned out to be four days stale. A schema field added after that snapshot meant the migration wrote a shape the read path rejected. Saves failed closed, which is the behaviour we want, but we had no alert on sustained save failures, only on error rate, and the errors were being swallowed by a retry.

• Snapshots used for migration rehearsal are now taken the same day, automatically.
• Sustained save-failure rate pages someone directly instead of counting as noise.
• Retries log at warning level rather than silently absorbing the failure.
• Affected players were credited two days of the daily bonus. It's not much, but it's honest.

Written by whoever was on call, which was not a fun Saturday.

Season 4 and the pantheon rework

Season 4 opens with reworked kits for three gods and a ladder that carries a portion of your rating between seasons rather than resetting you to the floor. Full rating decay was making the first fortnight of every season miserable for anyone who couldn't play it.

• Thanatos loses the instant reposition and gains a telegraphed dash. Easier to read, harder to panic into.
• Freyja healing scales off missing health instead of flat, so she stops being mandatory in duos.
• Ra unchanged. Every time we touch Ra something breaks two patches later.
• Rating carries at 40% between seasons. Placement matches reduced from ten to five.

Remote guarding covers argument signing

Guarded remotes can now require signed arguments, which closes off the class of attack where a valid call is captured and replayed with edited parameters. Rate limiting and schema validation were already there. This is the third leg.

Cost is about 0.2 ms per guarded call on a busy server, measured on our own economy remotes. If your title calls a remote sixty times a second, don't sign all of them. Sign the ones that move money.

Duplication exploit, closed the same day

Someone found that cancelling a plush order at the exact moment the conveyor handed off could credit the item twice. It was live for around five hours on 1 May before AXIOM's ledger reconciliation flagged the pattern and the fix went out.

• Duplicated items were removed. Nothing legitimately earned was touched.
• Six accounts that ran it in volume were contained, then banned once confirmed.
• Hand-off is now a single server-side transaction, so the window doesn't exist.

Credit to the player who reported it in the Discord rather than selling it. We sent them something for the trouble.

Why patches now land on Thursdays

We used to ship whenever a change was ready, which usually meant Friday afternoon, which usually meant someone watching dashboards on their weekend. Patches now go out Thursday evenings UK time, with the team around on Friday to catch what breaks.

Security fixes and anything actively hurting players still go out immediately. The schedule is for everything else, and it has made the games noticeably less bumpy.