ACE 1.5.5
Hey everyone, we’ve been receiving a ton of feedback about the recent changes, it’s been quite polarizing! We’ve seen people love and hate the change quite extremely on both ends. We have been paying close attention to all of your feedback!
The tl;dr is that we just shipped ACE version 1.5.5. In 1.5.5, we’ve reverted parts of the system back to how we had things in 1.5.2. There were parts of 1.5.3/1.5.4 that we consistently heard people liked, so we’ve decided to keep those parts of it around in the contexts that it excels in.
Bug Fixes
Fixed an issue where the screen would scroll down when scrolling up or searching for older messages
Fixed an issue where new characters would not be created if you talked to them
Fixed an issue where NPC strangers would seem to know your character when meeting you for the first time
If you are correcting Franz, and then Franz forgets your corrections later on, that is an expected issue we are addressing in the upcoming Lore/Context Management update. 1.5.5 does not fix that issue.
User Feedback / FAQ
If all you wanted were the patch notes, you can stop reading here! Otherwise, I thought I’d give you all a little more insight into how we’re thinking about changes in ACE.
Of all the updates we’ve made, this was definitely the most polarizing one. We’ve gotten feedback on both ends. If you check out our #feedback channel in Discord, you’ll see about 80% negative feedback and 20% positive feedback. If you look at the survey we put out, it’s overwhelmingly positive.
That being said, the negative feedback we were receiving was so strong that we have decided the new models were not ready for prime time, at least not in full. I think a lot of people don’t submit bug reports or speak up because they think they will not make a difference, but it really does! When we hear the same thing from a lot of people, then we know it’s something we need to take action on. Playing a TTRPG with an AI game master is an extremely subjective experience, and the strongest signal we have of if the platform is improving is the feedback we get from you all.
These recent ACE changes should only be affecting narration style. Combat, OOC mode, memory, and game state updates have been unchanged since 1.5.2. We’re working to address those issues in upcoming updates.
Why don’t you just add a switcher so people can choose the one they like more?
We are considering doing this in the future, but every additional version we support means additional complexity for us. Instead of managing one system, we have to manage multiple. Our platform is quite complex, its not just a single LLM responding to you like other chat services. ACE is an interconnected system of prompts, models, and normal code. If we supported multiple versions, updates would be a lot slower. We’re also still not finished with the core product. Once things are more stable, we may introduce a switcher.
Why didn’t you test the changes more before setting them live?
Before shipping 1.5.3, we had it out to alpha testers for a couple of days. The response was overall positive, and there were a few issues that were called out. For example, alpha testers identified that 1.5.3 was using bulleted lists. The problem is, we didn’t know how much that would annoy everyone until it was live for a few days. Bulleted lists themselves are not necessarily a bug, and we only know it is something we need to change once we receive feedback from enough people that they are annoyed by it. Friends & Fables is still in beta. We really appreciate all of you playing and supporting the platform, but we’re still experimenting a lot to find what works, and the only way to truly know sometimes is to set it live. You can expect that we’re still going to be making changes like this until we’re happy with it and stabilize, but you can also expect that we will respond to the feedback quickly!