We're exploring the causes of server latency (when the server is slow to respond to interactions with NPCs or entities). That's probably the most serious kind of "lag" because it means the whole area you're in will be experiencing the same lag. However it's not immediately obvious what's going wrong. It seems that a particular "thing" people are doing is causing much higher impact than usual, and it only happens under high loads. It could be something like the poetry podium, or the player work-order board, or perhaps player shops, or... well, lots of other things.

I may end up creating a debug build of the server with lots of logging enabled, and run that for a day or two to see if we can track it down. That will mean worse performance in the short term but hopefully will let us find and fix the culprit.

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The chance of dropping items based on your active skills is exactly the same as pre-patch. The chance of it being exactly mapped to your two skills (and not generics or randomly-picked skills) is only like 65-75% or so, and always has been, so we often get reports that it's broken after each game update. But it's just random, so give it a bit of time to average out some!

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RE: panthers - we haven't altered spawn density or anything like that since the update. Spawners have random spawn profiles, so sometimes there will be more or fewer panthers than at other times. It should average out to a fairly high number of panthers in general.