Shotbow

Hello Survivors!

Since our last update, major changes have taken place across the entire network. The network has changed, with many new faces being welcomed onto the staff team and some other staff resigning. Lead developer, DocCodeSharp, was among those who have resigned.

DocCodeSharp began his time on Shotbow as a player and ended his time here as one of the most influential people on Shotbow. He came to MineZ and Shotbow at our lowest point and raised us back up. We owe him a lot. While we are sad to see him go, life must continue. The end of one’s journey, no matter how large and impactful, cannot be the end of our journey; so Shotbow goes on.

Now this change took some time for us to get used to, and any staff were called upon to serve new roles. Now that the dust has settled and our path is clear, our first steps can be taken.

So, what’s next for MineZ?

Future Development Plans

Previously, MineZ was fortunate to have one dedicated developer. Plans were drawn up for a large schedule of updates that were made public. Of course, only Hestril knew the progress on these, and many pitfalls befell us. Now that developer has parted ways.

Many devs will now be taking over for Doc, working together to bring a slew of updates. It is our hope that we will continue to churn out new features, bugfixes and quality of life Improvements at a good rate over the coming months.

This update is an amalgamation of many changes to the game – some big, some small. In time, we will lay out a new roadmap for you to follow along. For now, please trust that MineZ is in capable hands and we will do right by you.

New Challengers Appear

Previously released during the Origins update, Revenants and Husks were the first addition to the MineZ Zombie catalog.

Though, interaction with the entities of MineZ have always felt a bit bland. Having been influenced by other popular zombie survival games, we set out to add to this catalog.

Step 1

Teased some time ago, we needed to make good on the promise of Forsaken. They were teased some time ago and needed to be brought into the fold. These frightening, roaming zombies found in the north, are cursed. Forced to wander and given great, lingering power to enact a final judgement on any that cross its path, they should not be taken lightly.

Step 2

With the Forsaken complete, we needed to make this mob, and others like it worth finding and fighting. Unique mobs(those with nametags) now carry with them the ability to drop special loot. These mobs now carry with them a unique drop that should be pretty interesting and compel you to find them!

Step 3

With mobs and loot addressed, we needed to consider some mechanics that players utilize; zombie headshots, and bows to an extent. These are both valuable tools to quickly dispatch any pesky threats to your life, though you'll find not every zombie comes in the same shade of green now. You’ll have to get more creative, because these unique mobs can’t be killed with a headshot. They are protected…

So with that being said:

• Added Forsaken
• Added Scorcher
• Improved Revenant

Now you might be wondering….What is a Scorcher? Good Question!

These are only the beginning of the expansion of mobs we have planned to help expand the world of MineZ.

All Natural, Produced Fresh for your enjoyment

Now, I’ve wandered around the world for a good time, and I should note, this world is in the midst of a zombie apocalypse. What’s that you say, survivor? You don’t see any zombies out there in the wilderness? Well neither did I.

Fret no longer, coming to a wasteland near you, zombie spawning is back! Be careful where you hide, be careful where you look, natural zombie spawning has returned.

This has been tested, though it might prove to be too many zombies for a zombie apocalypse survival game. If that should happen, we can tone it down.

Prized Possessions deserve to be useful

We have taken our time to modify a couple of legendaries that have been highlighted as problems. These were either too strong or outdated. While we can not get to every legendary in one update, we hope that doing these legendary updates piecewise will slowly introduce more useful items to the game.

Truth Bow:

• Requires a full charge
• Consumes 3 durability per shot
• Shooting a player will mark and give them a glowing effect for 10 seconds
• While marked, the player takes 15% more damage from all melee attacks from players
• The shooter will be given Slowness 2 for 10 seconds

Binding Bow/Slow Bow:

• Consumes 3 durability per shot
• Slowness effect duration now depends on how far you shoot a player from, starting from 1 second (less than 5 blocks) up to 7 seconds (more than 40 blocks)
• Now does damage

Vampyr:

• Fixed an issue where the healing chance was incorrect
• Does 5% less damage than a normal iron sword
• Works against zombies. Healing chance is 15%.
• If Vampyr heals, it loses 2 durability.
• Vampyr now notifies the attacked player in chat so they can counter against it.

Hurter:

• Each use of the Hurter consumes 40 durability now.

Overkill:

• Overkill has a brand new effect.
• You can use it like a diamond sword, but also right click to charge Overkill's legendary effect.
• Charging takes 50 durability.
• The next attack after charging deals true damage based on the enemy's missing health. The more health they are missing, the more damage they take.
• The active effect lasts 5 seconds, or until you hit an enemy. Whichever comes first.
• After using a charged Overkill, all melee damage is reduced by half for 10 seconds.

Added one new legendary item.

Added two new Utility items.

A Hot Location

Remember that small little encampment north of Carmi, and south of Afaya? Did it start with an S...? Hmm. Nobody knows for sure. Either way, there is burning rubble there now, and nobody seems to remember what was there before.

In other news, a new location has been spotted in the now nicknamed Dungeon Desert. Check out one of the first photographs of this area below.



Indeed, Saens has been rebuilt and relocated to the desert just north of the Tristitia forest. Built by community member EnderMCx, this beautiful re-imagining of this old location was a community build we just couldn't pass up. Special thanks go out to EnderMCx for this build!

Now, if you're wondering why the image is so dark, well, we just want you to go explore it for yourself! Where's the fun if we show you all of the details before you can experience it yourself?

A Quality Experience for Quality Players

Now in addition to a wide variety of reworks in the code, we have been targeting to release more quality of life features and bugfixes for some time now. The team has been working very closely with players to note what features and changes would be appreciated.

• Axes now damage all non-player entities. We'll see how this plays, and adjust as needed, but this one made a lot of sense to us.
• We have modified Paluster Shrine again, this time more closely aligned with what works well for players. The changes are light, but should help!
• We have removed Abandoned Mineshaft, and promptly readded it as a Tier 1 dungeon, fully rebuilt. You may find that it has also been relocated to better fit the Tier 1 ranking.
• Arbreton and Geuten have been relooted. A handful of other locations have had some loot altered. More information in the changelog.
• Fixed a couple of duping bugs and other potentially dangerous exploits.
• Ghost Ship has moved again! Good luck finding it this time!
• Spawnkit Speed Potions and Grenades can now be used in the south again. We'll see how this feels!
• Horizontal Grappling has been made a bit more strict. Grappling at a height of 4 blocks will now count as a horizontal grapple.
• The potion chests in Al Hasa can no longer be "griefed" by standing near them to prevent them from spawning. The respawn timer has been increased to compensate.
• Bags can be opened while looking at the ground now.

In Closing

"In three words I can sum up everything I've learned about life: it goes on" - Robert Frost

While the past couple of weeks have been quite strange, we have emerged with a redefined team. Once more, we have committed ourselves to transparency, communication, and an overall increase in fun and exciting features to MineZ. We yearn to make the game interesting to explore, to fight in and to survive in

We remain committed to making this game for you, and will continue to do so as long as we can. Looking to the future, October is only a month away. What sort of surprises may we be planning for you? Well, we have a ton we are planning for this Spooktacular Halloween and we'd love to share some of this with you in our last thread of September(coming soon)!

But for now, as always,

Thanks for flying Shotbow!

日本語版, Español

Annihilation Update - Nifty Boron (2.8.0)

As promised, now that Annihilation has moved to a 1.12.2 base and all major bugs have been ironed out, we are now back to our regular schedule of "small but frequent" updates. And as such we are pleased to announce a brand new content update, Nifty Boron!

This update addresses the most controversial class balance issues, and provides changes that will hopefully leave the meta in a better place. Most of these changes are based on community feedback, and a lot of thought and reasoning has gone into them. And while some changes may seem small, we ask you to please give them a chance before passing judgement. As always, nothing is set in stone and things can be tweaked where necessary.


Changelog


Class Changes:

Alchemist

Reducing the duration of Tier 3 potions in a previous update helped in making Alchemist rushes more manageable, 2 players can now no longer take out a team on their own. But the problem with larger groups still remains. It's not uncommon to see very large, heavily geared rushing groups with Tier 3 potion effects. That kind of rush can be near impossible to counter, there needs to be a limiting factor. We've made the following changes to address this while retaining the team aspect of Alchemist, i.e. not forcing Alchemist to brew 2 sets of potions:

• Alchemist Tier 3 splash now only gives Tier 3 effects to the Alchemist that splashes the potion.
• It now gives the Tier 2 equivalent (with T3 durations) to everyone else that is splashed.
• These changes are intended to go hand in hand with the recent rework of enchanted golden apples.

Builder

Engineer can make short work of defenses that may well have taken most of the game to build, this can be very demotivating for builders. In their original concept (although this did not make it into the final implementation), Delay Blocks could defuse Engineer's TNT. This has now been added giving some much needed counter-play to Engineer. That, along with the recently added Team Doors, will allow builders to create highly defensible and practical defenses that can endure. Changes are based on community feedback across multiple forum threads, including this poll.

• Any Engineer C4 or Nuke placed within the effective radius of a Delay Block (5 blocks) is automatically defused.
• Delay Blocks do not defuse Dynamite.

Dasher

Added two more block types that Dasher cannot dash onto. Changes are based on community feedback in the Optimistic Hydrogen Update. Block types added are:

• Red brick stairs
• Red brick slabs

RiftWalker

Prevented RiftWalker from being able to rift to:

• Invisible players
• Vanished Spies
• Vampire bats, by default (see Vampire class changes)
• Added a chat notification to alert if a rift cannot be made due to the above
• Added a chat notification for the person being rifted to, alerting them of an incoming rift.

Particles and sounds for rifts is something that was discussed by the team. There are a couple of problem with this: a) rifts are not consensual, it could potentially expose somebody's secret base or compromise their rush, and b) clans often use RiftWalker to travel to secret brew/loot rooms which they may not necessarily want the rest of their team to know about.
We believe that these changes will prevent unannounced visitors, while still requiring vigilance by defenders. If this proves not to be enough we can re-visit RiftWalker in a future update.

Vampire

Probably the most controversial class due to its ability to bypass defenses, the Vampire Bat's fast untimed flight also afforded it the ability to; be an immediate counter to sky bridges; undermine team-oriented classes such as RiftWalker and Transporter; and circumvent game-play on sky based maps. It would have been difficult to fix all of these things without removing much of the fun. The general consensus from the community was remove/rework, and that's what we've done.

This class has undergone a complete re-vamp! We have removed the bat-form and re-implemented it as a strong nighttime combat class. And as some of our veteran players may already have guessed, this is the very popular retro version of Vampire, with the addition of a brand new active ability.

• Comes with a stone sword.
• At night, every hit you deal gives you a 30% chance of stealing half a heart (1 HP) and healing yourself with it.
• You take 25% more damage during the day (light levels are not taken into account).

In addition, it now has a new ability called "Blood Sense". This is an active ability, which when used plunges the Vampire into darkness as it enters a state of sensing rather than seeing, allowing it to detect its enemies life force. Enemies will begin to glow, visible only to the Vampire; unless they are sneaking, invisible or vanished Spies.

• Comes with a class item called Blood Sense.
• This ability can be activated whether there are enemies nearby or not (so use it wisely).
• Will reveal enemies within a radius of 10 blocks horizontally, and 5 blocks vertically.
• This ability lasts for 13 seconds, with a 60 second cool-down.
• Note: Enemies who enter the effective radius after activation will not be revealed.

Succubus's little known passive life drain on hit has been removed. This ability is now uniquely with Vampire.

Other changes:

Boss Items

• Boss items with the mending enchant (e.g. Boots of Grace) will now be repaired by mined XP.

Class Changer

• Prevented all movement while in the class selector GUI.

Players changing classes are now immune to movement (e.g. Scorpio hook, Wizard Whirlwind etc), in the same way that they are immune to damage while re-spawning. It's not fair to be Scorpio voided while you are in your class selector GUI.

Fortune Enchant
The drop rates for diamonds for all levels of this enchant have been slightly reduced. It was very easy to get large amounts of diamonds with fortune 3 in a very short space of time. This change will increases the time players spend at mid, prevent teams from gearing too quickly or uncontested, and make mid gameplay more challenging.
Note: This only affects Diamonds.

Private Brew Stands

• Private brew stands that you buy from the shop are now no longer SoulBound.
• They still work as a private stand for the player that places it.
• Can be dropped or put in chests for other players to use.

Bug Fixes

• Fixed a bug that caused players affected by BloodMage's Corrupt ability to re-spawn with only 8 hearts (16 HP).
• Fixed a bug that sometimes caused the class-ability timer to get stuck when you rejoined a game.
• Fixed a bug where rejoining a game gave you an extra set of spawn tools.
• Fixed a bug that caused Builder's Delay Blocks not to work.
• Fixed a bug where if a Scorpio died while hooking an enemy, that enemy was sent to the Scorpios spawn.
• Fixed a bug that allowed Immobilizer to work on vanished spies.
• Fixed a bug causing Immobilizer sound to be global instead of local, can no longer be heard over long distances.
• Fixed a bug that prevented Scout's grapple from working in 1 block deep water.
• Randomized enchanting, the first enchant is now no longer always the same.
• Prevented tree leaves from growing into the void.
• The square brackets around the team character in global chat are now white rather than grey, for consistency.
• Various Anni lobby bugs caused by 1.12, such as missing hot-bar items, chat tags etc.
• Various Admin related fixes and other nerdy dev stuff.

Credits:

As always, many thanks to:
Our amazing devs, Mosh, Galap and MissHilevi, for their hard work and dedication in bringing us these updates. And also Robertthegoat, Lazertester and Adam for their assistance.
My wonderful Co-Lead and technical guru, JTGangsterLP6, who manages update-testing and finds bugs that nobody even knew existed.
The Anni admin team for all their hard work testing and bug hunting.
And all of you who offered suggestions, reported problems and gave support along the way.

Many of the changes we have made in this update have come from you the community, and our wonderful Admin team who continue to strive to make Anni the best it can be.

We have plans for many more exciting updates and new features, so stay tuned!

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Letter from the Leadership

The following is a message from lazertester, our Lead Developer, who has returned to his position after a short hiatus.

Hey folks. First off, I would like to thank Doc for everything he has done for MineZ and Shotbow as a whole. Without him, Shotbow would be in a very different place (or no place at all), and I wish him the best in his future endeavors. Leaving can be difficult given the amount of blood and sweat we pour into making what we hope are awesome experiences bringing a community together, but sometimes it is vital to step back and focus on what's important to us.

Stepping into this role again, my focus this time is going to be boosting every developer's ability to make the changes they know need making, and continuing Doc's efforts on improving our feedback loop with you. Some of the improvements planned won't be immediately apparent, but I hope you'll feel the impact soon enough. I have a couple of network-wide improvements planned that should be visible to everyone, including a social framework, but I can't get into many more details at the moment as it's something that will take some time to realize.

Progress will continue on When in Rogue, but as you can imagine, I will have other areas of focus that will take away from my availability to work on the game. There are other developers who have volunteered to contribute, and I look forward to seeing what they bring to the When in Rogue experience.

For those of you who have been around since the olden days, hello again. To those just joining us, welcome. I hope everyone is as excited as I am for Shotbow's next chapter, and I hope that my contributions help to make it as awesome as I know it will be.


Hey folks! Mistri here — welcome to the September edition of Dentril's New Moon! I'm personally super excited for this month's newsletter. It's jam-packed with updates and I can't wait to share them with you! Without further ado, let's get started!

Updates
Network Updates
Network Version Support
This month, we upgraded our network-wide base version to 1.12. This change enabled us to support any connections from 1.12.2 to 1.16.2, which is an integral part of being able to get new players. We will continue making backend efforts to improve the code quality and efficiency to make the experience better for all. If you haven't already seen it, check out the announcement thread here!

Clans & Teams Section
Our Web Mod team is doing a cleanup of the Clans & Team section. If you are a clan owner who has posted in this section prior to June 2020, you should read the announcement here.

Discord Bot Updates
Our Discord Bot, Chat Bot, has received significant attention in the last few weeks. Other than backend deployment changes, Chat Bot has received a shiny new command: !support, which allows you to open support tickets for MineZ and Staff Abuse Reports. Go check it out in our Shotbow Discord if you haven't already!

Internal Localization Efforts
If you have a sharp eye, you probably noticed that our recent announcement posts have started to support many more languages. We've been doing some internal restructuring of the Localization team to ensure our Localizers are recognized for their effort. In addition, we brought a few new Localizers on board this month. Go show them some love!

Annihilation Updates
Prior Updates
The Annihilation 1.12 base update has been released. This update enabled Annihilation to take advantage of 1.12 features, and was an important step towards new features and better balance. You can read the changelog of updates here as well.

New Map Rotation Format
Annihilation now has a new Map Rotation Format, which allows you to play the maps you want to, more frequently than ever before. Check out the announcement here!

Future Updates
Work on Nifty Boron, the next Annihilation Content Update, is nearing completion. We should have it ready for you very soon!

Community Events
The community-run Annihilation Clan War has continued, with staff commentary available for your pleasure. This month, we premiered matches 12, 13, 14, and 15.









MineZ Updates
We released "The Adventurer's Update" for MineZ earlier this month. It included:

• MineZ Admin Applications
• Civilian Loot Overhaul
• Knockback changes
• Map changes
• Summer Screenshot Contest Results
• And much more!

If you haven't already read the thread, you can check out the announcement here.

Mine Theft Auto Updates
The Heartrow Police Department is giving away security footage of a robbery that has taken place at the Royal Bank. Four suspects were seen leaving the bank entering a green vehicle and leaving the area. If you have seen anything please contact the police.



SMASH Updates
This month, we hosted a SMASH Map Building Contest. It just finished, and the results are in!

1st Place - 1 Month Shotbow Subscription + 50,000 XP

• Map Name: Olympian Heights
• Builders: EnderMCx

2nd Place (tie) - 50,000 XP

• Map Name: Freezeflame Cavern
• Builders: ChickenMac7

2nd Place (tie) - 50,000 XP

• Map Name: Endgame
• Builders: jckrawling and LordGarmadon2006

Congratulations to the winners, and great job to everyone who built a map! The Shotbow staff truly loved seeing all the submissions. Prizes will be distributed within the next few days!

Statistics
SMASH Rankings
The summer season ends soon, so be sure to climb up the leaderboards for ranked matches! Current standings are:

• 1st - Sonicboom_ with 1154 ELO
• 2nd - Viral333 with 1103 ELO
• 3rd - Yesus42 with 1091 ELO

Network in General
Staff updates:

• lazertester was promoted to Lead Developer
• halowars91 joined Network Leadership team
• aet2505 rejoined the team as a Developer
• 97WaterPolo and Bjarn were promoted to Full Developer
• halowars91 joined the Development team as a Jr. Developer
• Murgatron rejoined the team as a Full Admin
• Roquel, Veghetto, jiren74, dange, and Ktrompfl were promoted to Full Admin
• Limepaj2 was promoted to Full Builder
• HumorlosLP, Archi_, and Napoleon__1er joined the team as a Jr. Localizer

Other statistics:

• A total of 114,540,090 XP was earned by players this month
• There were 2,120 players banned in the last month
• This month we achieved a peak playercount of 419 on August 1
• 138 ban appeals were resolved in the last month
• 7,487 in-game reports were resolved in the last month
• 9 Rank Upgrade Requests were handled in the last month
• 3,000 support emails were handled in the last month

Closing Words
That was one heck of a newsletter! There's a lot more going on behind the scenes that will be released in the next few months, so stay tuned on our forums, Discord, and Twitter!

I hope you enjoyed reading this newsletter as much as I enjoyed writing it! As always, comments are appreciated. I'm your host, Mistri — thanks for flying Shotbow!