Overlord Retail

10.0.0

Overlord 10: the Forever edition comes to Retail

Overlord Forever started as an import of Retail 9.9.39 and has grown a lot since. This release brings it to Retail: its interface, ranking, gameplay systems, security, network engine and optimizations. It runs on Retail's own maps and travels through Retail's own synchronization: the Overlord Community takes the place of Forever's Battle.net bridges, alongside the realm channel and the group. Every player must update: several gameplay messages changed.

New ranking

• New ranking window: wooden frame, siege painting, faction crests, podium, own-row glow, race icons and rank badges. Only the visible rows are drawn.
• Up to 5,000 players, for everyone. Clients of this version exchange the ranking by resumable pages with online Community members (kills, captures and races), on a dedicated addon prefix with a bounded send rate. Every received row still goes through the usual checks. Clients on 9.9.x keep the previous catch-up.
• Reliable race icons: races come from the guild roster, the owner's own kill messages, the ranking pages and the players seen in game. Every Retail race and allied race has its icon.
• The last ranking shown appears instantly at login while fresh data arrives. A sync badge in the header shows when data is still arriving and when a full comparison found nothing missing.
• Guilds table with members and a guild rating counting every known player, member lists on hover, local search, and a weekly capturers and rivalries view.
• Nemesis: the week's top five enemies get a skull in the ranking, on their nameplate and in a chat alert.

Overlord Ranks

• Fifteen lifetime ranks per character. The first ten are earned with Glory (honorable kills and captures), the last five by finishing weeks near the top of the ranking. Ranks 11 to 15 are visible to the other players of your faction.
• The ranks get their own tab on the character sheet, next to the existing Overlord stats tab, which is unchanged.

PvP Groups

• An open-world group finder: a leader publishes a group (objective, place, size, minimum level), players of the faction sign up in one click, and the leader invites. Listings use the realm channel and are cut in instances.

Gameplay now follows Forever

• Level 90 is required to capture zones, outposts and fortresses and to collect mine gold. Characters below level 90 do not count in a capture contest.
• Honorable kills: 1 Blizzard honorable kill = 1 credit, everywhere in the open world, at level 90. Killing blows remain the proof for contracts, bounties and Nemesis. The temporary kill zones and the capital kill scoring are replaced by this rule.
• Guild Keeps are fortresses on the outpost engine: available at any time, contested by the other faction, held until retaken or until the weekly reset. The keep locations stay the same. The former Guild Keep data (sieges, daily scores, current holders) is cleared once and every fortress starts neutral; this week's held outposts and their capture counts are kept.
• Outposts follow the same rules. Every capture records who made it, and a capture claim is checked against its character and guild.
• Weekly domination counts front victories (+1% each).
• After a front victory, the conquest is kept; a second victory on the same front counts only after 6 hours.
• Captures require being attackable (War Mode or PvP flag). Mines are exempt.
• Call to arms: confirmed with a horn, no nearby-enemy condition, one call every 4 hours for the whole faction.
• The wood system, the daily battle report and the top HUD are removed. The Coiled Isle gold panel stays.

Interface

• Forever's main panel: next-objective dock, a domination bar with crests, a capture bar in the faction frame, and Forever's action grid with Community and Contracts added.
• Recent activity shared by everyone: fight sizes in honorable kills over the last 5 minutes (5+ up to 2000+), off-front fights and captures per front.
• World map in three modes (compact by default with the name inside each circle, full, hidden), adjustable icon size and opacity, breathing captures, capture stripes, points you can attack in yellow, and continent emblems on the Azeroth map.
• Alerts: guild rampages (enemy and allied), capture alerts naming the map, own-faction alerts only for your front, continent-only or worldwide capture alerts, an optional chat line on each honorable kill.
• A network health dot in the panel, /ov network for the summary and /ov relay for the relay details.
• Forever's tutorial, rewritten for Retail, and options in the native Blizzard layout, an optional Overlord chat tab, and ESC closing windows without touching protected keyboard state in combat.
• Portuguese (Brazil) and Simplified Chinese translations.

Network and payloads

• Forever's relay engine, with Community members as bridges between realms and factions: a bounded queue, a shared byte budget, priority lanes (capture results first), reserved catch-up lanes, fragmentation, duplicate suppression, coalescing and an election so that only a few members carry routine traffic. Its envelope is 26 bytes.
• Much less traffic: sync answers bounded to a few peers, no whole maps on the channel, a lighter login (3 targeted requests), own kill totals at most every 30 seconds, death notices kept to group and channel, and background traffic kept off the group quota. A capture result in a large event now costs less than before the relay.
• Nothing is sent while loading into or playing in an instance.

Security

• Forever's anti-cheat, tuned for Retail: per-level and weekly honorable-kill ceilings, growth bounds, first-contact caps, refusal of impossible names, classless rows and look-alike names, removal lists, guild and class hints that a third party cannot impose, capture rate limits per capturer, two sources before a map owner flips, front marks on captures, a suspicious-senders report and third-party inflation detection.
• Victories and domination are only accepted from group or online Community members.

Kept from Retail

• Community synchronization and its interface, cross-shard invites, gold contracts, bounties, World Defense, guild honor and its toasts, the lifetime Hall of Fame, Export, the stats sheet, the Coiled Isle gold panel and all Retail maps and locations.

Performance

• Forever's CPU, FPS and memory work: cached zone and map lookups, sliced ranking builds and a per-player index that survives incoming kills, a full saved ranking snapshot, fewer repaints, a lighter minimap driver, a world map without method hooks, cheaper network parsing and deduplication, and lighter saved variables.
• /ov perf opt-in profiler for frame spikes.

Validation

• Lua 5.1 syntax check on every file, runtime simulations of the relay on a multi-realm network, of the ranking pages, ranks, group finder, races, fortresses, persistent conquest, kill counting and anti-cheat, an end-to-end test driving the real sync code through the relay, and a login simulation on real saved variables.