There are a few issues with the game right now.
1) New characters created, seem to be created with skills of 0, when they should have some skill in at least some of the skills.
2) You get impervious to attack messages when the NPCClient, the brains behind all the npc related stuffs, is borked. So the game itself can be up, the the NPC Server part still be down.
Typically, after a new release, this'll happen for a little while, while the devs go to work fixing the new bugs and whatnot that a new release brings.