This Week's Schedule: More Info About the Weekend and the Challenge

Hi there!

As I mentioned in the previous update, we've been working on getting people unstuck after loading a broken challenge map during the past 24 hours as our absolute priority. We are still doing some final implementations and check-ups, but pretty much everybody should be able to log in to the game by now. If you are still not able to log in or know somebody who cannot, please send me a private forum message with the in-game nickname and guild, and I will attend to it right away!!

As the situation now is closer to being stable with accessibility of the game, there is more time to focus on the current in-game affairs. We're very sorry that we couldn't address it earlier, as all of our resources were put into fixing the situation with people unable to log in.

So! Due to the repeated technical issues with Round Passes and progress in Challenges in general, together with the 6-day boosters that were added for claiming yesterday and 5 second upgrade events, we are going to have something special this weekend (plus one extra day, as the Challenge has also been extended until Tuesday, March 19). These changes could not be applied right away (meaning today), as these events require some time for setting up, while our team is still busy making sure that absolutely everyone is able to access the game. This is why it will start tomorrow and continue until Tuesday!

Here is a list of the events and things that will happen in the next several days, starting from tomorrow (March 15) at 9.00 UTC, and until Tuesday (March 19), at 13.00 UTC:

- Radioactive Event + Jackpot Deluxe events together
- 250 Gold sent out to everyone
- Healing Cost reduced by 50%
- Guild Gift prices halved

Also, 3 special calls will be available during that time on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, which combine parts of the special Christmas Call we had last Christmas and 4x4 Calls:

- From 9.00 UTC Friday (March 15th) to 13.00 UTC Saturday (March 16th), Double tokens for Scout and Shooter Heroes Hero-Fest Call (full list: Survivalist Rick, Huntsman Daryl, Aaron, Merle, Gabriel, Carol, Carl) AND Double tokens for Scout and Shooter survivors, plus 1 extra roll on top!
- From 13.00 UTC Saturday (March 16th) to 13.00 UTC Sunday (March 17th), Double tokens for Bruiser and Assault Heroes Hero-Fest Call (full list: Riot Gear Glenn, Abraham, Rosita, Negan, Morgan, Governor) AND Double tokens for Bruiser and Assault survivors, plus 1 extra roll on top!
- From 13.00 UTC Sunday (March 17th) to 13.00 UTC Monday (March 18th), Double tokens for Warrior and Hunter Heroes Hero-Fest Call (full list: Sniper Morgan, Michonne, Sasha, Dwight, Jesus) AND Double tokens for Warrior and Hunters survivors, plus 1 extra roll on top!

*(it means that on the according day of the doubled survivor class tokens the base scrapping token value of survivors (original rarity at which survivors were obtained) is also doubled, but it doesn't double the tokens invested into survivors)

The current Survivor Fest call will end on March 15th, at 9.00 UTC.

Due to being locked down during the past day, some players also were in a situation where they could not collect daily Spring Tokens. This won't be addressed this weekend, but we will come back to it later, likely next week or the week after that!

(I do understand that some players currently have a lot of extra XP due to the current setup of 2x XP and unlimited gas together, especially after having it last week, and combined with the Jackpot Deluxe event it doesn't make the situation better, but unfortunately I don't have a quick solution for it right now.)


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Personal thoughts from Vane:

It is of course a very troublesome situation that these things happened with the Challenge during the past 2 weeks, especially in parallel with the Guild Wars issues that we are still working on. I want to say personally sorry for every person affected by this; these problems deeply touch me, too, and it can be sometimes difficult to find right solutions and communicate things very quickly and right away. I am very sorry if someone felt let down by us due to these errors, lack of communication during the hours we spent figuring it out and resolving the issues

I want also to share with you a bit of background on what has happened during the past 2 weeks, so everyone is more aware of what has been going on. The reasons for both issues that happened with the Challenge are in their nature very different and caused by totally separate factors: first issue with the Slaughterhouse challenge was caused by an identification error in the Challenge timetable on our side, which was quickly fixed as soon as it was found, but the Challenge has already started. With Season 7 Challenge, the map Daryl's Nightmare was broken - and while we had this Challenge several times before, this time the Challenge map was somehow found out to be missing from the client, completely unpredictably. We are still investigating what is the root cause of this and when exactly it happened. And unfortunately, once the Challenge is started and maps are loaded, changing them causes the whole Challenge to be unplayable (so the only way is to restart the Challenge), so maps in the Challenge cannot be changed on the fly. It is extremely sad that these problems happened in the first place, and even more sad that it so randomly happened 2 weeks in a row, which nobody could foresee. The Challenge that is going on right now is the Challenge that was in the schedule for the next week, but now thinking retrospectively, it could have been switched to something different for this week (we unfortunately can't change it anymore).

And please by no means take that as my (or our) justification of these problems, I am not trying to take away the blame from ourselves, I simply want to share more information with you as I feel that it is your right as a community to be in the know of such things. You guys also offered a lot of great solutions, some of which are unfortunately not possible to be implemented technically (for example, changing the Round Passes dynamically for different number of Rounds played, right now only fixed number of Round Passes can be given for the whole Challenge), but I do keep notes of your suggestions and ideas and always try to bring them forward!

It really sucks it happened at a time like this, while I am still getting to know you guys better and trying to establish more communication with you. Being on this position during the past few weeks, I have been working on some really interesting things I want to announce and share with you, some of which are happening thanks to your help as a community, and very unfortunately, these recent events are taking the focus away from it. I really hope that we can live through it together and start a better and cleaner streak as soon as possible, working in a direction for more game improvements and better Walking Dead experience, it is just that times right now have become quite troublesome, and I do take it very personally, too. I really enjoy being here with you and I love our NML community, your warmth and friendliness, and I am really sorry again that these errors are spoiling your gaming experience, and most importantly taking more of your own time, as no one here deserves this kind of thing.

Myself, I think that I am going to take a break from playing the game for today's evening to take a step back and cool off after this, and continue playing tomorrow when the events are on & running for the weekend, to get some Jackpots and radios!