Hi everyone,

When we launched Update 28 on PC/Mac back in November, some of you ran into an issue where the Soul Trap or the Werewolf Ultimate skills had unmorphed. When attempting to re-morph these skills, they would continually reset and cause you to lose a skill point each time. Each attempt to refund missing skill points in subsequent incremental patches was unsuccessful. As we continued to further investigate the entirety of the issue, we discovered numerous other bugs that were contributing to a much larger and more extensive problem. In this post, we’ll elaborate on the current issues and how we plan to address them.

First, we need to take a step back and look at the skill system itself, which reallocates skill points in two different ways:

• Respec-ing, which grants a full refund of all points based on system tracking, completely ignoring allocated points
• Refunding, which measures allocations against expectations, and only returns points that are missing

We introduced Refunding in 2018 when a change to the Werewolf passive Devour removed the purchase requirement, and instead automatically granted the ability when players first acquired the Werewolf skill line. At that time, we did not take measures to refund the point back to players who had already spent a skill point on it.

Fast forward to Update 28 in 2020, when a recent change to the way we count skill point allocations caused an issue where abilities that are automatically granted - but have purchasable morphs - were not correctly counted. This caused those abilities to reset back to their base state without refunding a point. We quickly addressed the issue to prevent players from losing more points, and with it, issued a skill point refund.

After this occurred, we continued to receive complaints that skill points were still not refunded. Upon further investigation, we suspected that some players actually had extra skill points for one reason or another – more than they should, and more than normal play would grant. This means when players lost a skill point, the system did not know to refund that missing point since they had extra points to begin with. To gather more information, we added some logging in an incremental patch to help us identify the players with extra skill points.

This brings us to today where we've identified an issue with the original addition of refunds. Since 2018, it appears that some players were erroneously granted extra skill points based on the number of Champion skills they purchased. Furthermore, our data shows that some players have earned more than 20 extra skill points this way that are unaccounted for by the refund system. The more Champion Points someone had, the more likely they were to encounter this issue. But to be clear, these are skill points that these players should not have been able to earn, and that are not obtainable by players through normal gameplay means.

To correct this issue and return us to a place where we can accurately give refunds when needed, we will push a full respec for skills and Champion Points to all players in Update 29. When that happens, all extra skill points should be removed from the game and all players will have access to the same amount of earnable skill points, as is intended. The amount of extraneous skill points we remove will range from 0 all the way up to 25, depending on skill allocation when these refunds were performed. We are taking additional steps to prepare for the future including improved logging for refunds, converting our refund process to match the respec process, and better precautions surrounding how we change existing skills.

We understand these actions may be pretty disruptive to your builds; to extend our apologies for all these issues, we’ll be offering a free Ambersheen Vale Fawn pet and free respecs for all players at the launch of Update 29.

We hope this gives some insight into this issue and the related investigation we’ve been tackling since Update 28. Thank you, and we appreciate your patience and understanding while we correct these issues.