Aardwolf MUD Blog

PK and Other Changes this Reboot:

• The level range at which you can attack other players has been modified
  to include tier in the calculation. For every tier difference between the
  attacker and there target, the allowed PK range decreased by 2 levels.
  That means if the target is 4 tiers lower than you, the lowest level you
  can attack is your level - 2. At 7 tier difference, the lowest level is
  your level + 4 which is the standard 10 level difference adjusted by
  2 levels per tier. This change does not apply in a clan maze.

  If you find ways to attack someone out of this range that is a bug and
  should be reported. The next reboot will include the code to prevent
  interference in a fight outside of your range based on these new
  limits.

• The above change makes it more difficult to figure out who you can
  attack at any point in time. There is a new ‘who pkrange’ option that
  will show people in your PKable level range. That doesn’t necessarily
  mean you can kill them, it just means based on level and tiers they are
  in your range.
• The grace period after being PKed has been increased to 15 minutes
  for regular PK and 30 minutes for OPK. There is also no longer an exp
  penalty during the grace period but you will not receive OPK bonuses
  while you are immune to PK. Along with this reduced risk of having
  your game interrupted by OPK, the bonus rewards for being OPK have
  been reduced. Don’t want to blame the reduced rewards entirely on the
  grace period change. It seems like too many people who don’t much like
  PK are OPK only for the rewards which is not good for the game.
• The cause of the crash on Thursday has been identified and solved.
  Not sure how much I want to get into trying to explain it but it was
  an obscure combination of commands too long and in-game aliases. (Nasus)
• When you use ‘enter [item]‘ targeting an object in the room, if
  there are other items in the room with the same keyword as the portal,
  portal items will still take precedence. (Fiendish)
• There are some socials that are quite dark or could be considered
  harassing and should probably only be used if you really mean to use
  them (if at all). For example, ssuicide and french. I have added a
  ‘norandom’ flag to prevent these socials coming up when using random
  socials. I’m sure there are many more that should be on this list,
  please post suggestions to typos. (Kharpern)
• Paladin ‘Test of Faith’ ability no longer has a recovery. Your
  ‘affects’ might still show one until it wears off but casting it
  next time won’t add a recovery.
• The duration of the sleep effect part of strangle, and the duration
  of the Sleep spell have both been reduced when used against players.
• The ‘Hand of Justice’ spell no longer requires you to be outside to
  use it, but will do less damage indoors.
• The ‘mobdeaths’ and ‘areadeaths’ commands now update every 15 minutes
  rather than real-time. Top marks for creativity but these commands were
  meant to give people an idea of most popular areas / where to find a good
  area for their level range and align. They were never meant to be able
  to be spammed to see what is being killed in an area that you know your PK
  target is in.
• There is a new option to whois. ‘Whois [target] pk’ will show their
  PK stats (Wars). Allowing this defaults to ON but if you want to turn
  it off you can use the ‘SHOWPKSTATS’ command. The current setting of that
  also shows in ‘config all’.
• Other player’s QP on hand will no longer show in whois.
• The bug with hunting through a portal for navigators not working when
  the portal is in the same room should now be resolved. (Redryn)
• Removed the ‘Objects left’ section from ‘gquest progress’. Object
  gquests won’t be coming back so, like the idea note said, this was just
  confusing for people. (Wars)
• The ‘Conceal’ spell is now level 26 and can also be used on keys.
• GMCP ‘worth’ data now includes QP Earned. (Mendaloth). GMCP ‘base’
  now includes level (Eroe), and this mort / total powerups (Mendaloth)
• There is a now very small lag on ‘consider’. It is not enough to have
  any impact on playing the game. Generally speaking, any plugin that spams
  a command in every single room is going to get lag added to that command.
• Using ‘quest appraise bag’ will now correctly show a level 201 bag
  once you have remorted and all your bags are 201 by default. (Tial/Rezit)
• The ‘title’ command will now show number of characters when you go
  over the max limit of 40 excluding color codes. (Tymme)

New Goals in 4 areas:

   Into the Long Night        - Teleron
   War of the Wizards         - Iker
   Kul Tiras                  - Tymme
   The Archipelago of Entropy - Teleron
   

New Ranger Spell - Gaias Totem:

There is a new spell called ‘Gaias Totem’ that allows a Shaman to summon a totem into the room. There’s quite a lot to this spell so lots of detail below. There are three types of totem:

    Ent     : Reduces damage taken when you have a totem in the area.
    Bear    : Increases damage inflicted when you have a totem in the area.
    Owl     : Increases exp when you have a totem in the area.

Any group members (in level range) with you in the same room (as you) also get some benefit from the totem but half as much. Multiple totems of the same kind do not stack, but three shamans in the group each with a different totem in the area will add all three benefits. If both you and a group member have the same totem in an area, yours will take priority so you get the higher bonus. You cannot leave a totem in a clanroom or combat maze.

You can use the new ‘totems’ command to see if you have a totem in the game, where it is, and how long until it expires - although it doesn’t actually go away until the first tick after it expires.

Totems are “kind of” mobs and can be attacked by anyone who can attack you, but it is based on if they could kill *you* at that point in time. So if you’re not OPK and not in a PK room, your totem can’t be PKed even if it is, and vice versa. Aggro mobs will not attack totems and they are not a valid target for transportation spells. Your totem will not join a fight if someone attacks you, but if your attacker uses an area spell they will hit the totem and pull it into the fight. If a totem in another room kills someone, it does not count as a PK for you.

The duration of a totem will increase with stats and the recovery is always 2 minutes longer than the duration. This means that the percentage of uptime will go up as your character grows but will never quite reach 100%.

Temporary situation - when you gain extra exp because of an owl totem, you are not going to see it in the exp message - it is just part of the first number. There’s too many numbers in there already and I don’t want to add one more. Next reboot will have a way to see the breakdown of each kill in your history and simplified exp messages.

Other Ranger Related Changes:

• The Ranger ‘Gaias Revenge’ spell no longer has a recovery. Your ‘affects’ might still show one until it wears off but casting it next time won’t add a recovery. (Just about every Ranger ever).
• Gaias Revenge now has an additional random damage type - Electric. (Quadrapus / Ilbrost). Gaias Focus has also been modified to allow this to be selected.
• The ‘Energy Ball’ spell is now level 36. (Viar)
• The ‘Call Lightning’ spell no longer requires you to be outside to use it, but will do less damage indoors. ‘Rainbow’ also no longer needs you to be outside, but no difference in damage on this one. (Viar)
• Significantly lowered the recovery on the ‘Summon Life’ spell that resets an area.
• Crafters now have a chance to roll bonus stats on skinned equipment. Chances of getting anything are about the same as regular game load. The odds of getting the much higher bonusloot items are lower because this gives you basically unlimited tries, but still very doable over time.

This Subclass merge and changes:

Some pretty big changes to thief. The main one is that the Assassin subclass has been merged into Bandit and anyone who was previously an Assassin is now a Bandit. All thieves also have a subclass timer reset. These are the overall changes to each thief subclass:

Ninja:

• The ‘Stalk’ and ‘Quickstab’ abilities have been moved into Ninja.
• Lag free strangle is now a Ninja ability.
• Ninja has a new ability called ‘Veil of Shadows’ that allows them to become immune from to magic damage for a few seconds. The duration and the recovery are both based on dex, str, and luck.
• They also have a similar ability called ‘Veil of Stone’ that allows them to become immune to physical damage for a few seconds.

For the purposes of this skill, ‘magical damage’ is anything not bash, slash or pierce, so can still be weapon damage if it is a magical type.

Both abilities are combined under a single skill and command just called ‘veil’. They can both be used in combat and are lag free, but cannot be used at the same time.

Bandit:

• The ‘Assassinate’ ability has been moved into Bandit.
• The extra (up to 5th) attack on Backstab has also been moved into Bandit.
• Pilferage has been significantly increased. The old range of gold bonus was 10-30% and maxxed out at 300 luck. The new range is 25% to 80% and maxxes out at 600 luck.
• Moving through a room that has been entrapped will now be slightly slower than before. Kind of a niche use but mudinfo #1929 has more info on why this matters at all.
• Bandit can now backstab while in combat, but in a different way than Ninja. Ninja can start a fight with a mob then still backstab it while bandit can only backstab *another* target not already in combat, so this is useful to initiate combat with one mob while already fighting another.
• Bandit has a small chance (based on dex and luck) to insta-kill a mob with a backstab. Mobs with extremely high HP for their level may not be outright killed but will still take significant damage.Mobs that cannot be assassinated can also not be killed this way, or mobs immune to your damage. There is also a level check in here but it won’t impact anyone not trying to use this feature to repeat backstab / flee on massively higher level mobs. Nocrit mobs can’t be affected by this either.

Do you ever wonder where NPCs go after they have been wounded in battle, then suddenly reappear as if nothing ever happened? They make a visit to the Tilule Rehabilitation Clinic! Here, patients receive medical care to heal their wounds, and even have surgery performed on them to correct those more serious ailments.

Things are not as they seem at the Tilule Rehabilitation Clinic, though. The owner of the clinic, Tilule, needs your help completing various tasks to help clean up the clinic and ensure it continues running for many years to come. If you are up to the challenge, find the owner on the third floor of the clinic. He will be happy to accept any help that comes his way.

Level Range         : 50 to 80
Goal Difficulty     : Medium
Goal Recommended at : Level 75
Goal Converter      : Rhuli
Area Author         : Rhuli

The Western Halo Mountain Range’s shadow’s edge looms over an ancient burial ground known as Shadow’s End. Wind whips through the pass and gives a chilling voice to the skeletal remains trodden deep into the dirt and they scream hollow tales of generations of warfare. Over the years, bloodied victors, maimed survivors and their distant kin raised many mausoleums to house the remains of the luckless victims of such senseless bloodshed.

The beautiful, gracious and noble queen of Lamentia named Lailah possessed a heart of gold. Lailah cared deeply for each of her few followers and gave generously, despite her own poverty. On the 147th day of the Season of Piety, of the Year of the Followers, Queen Lailah entered Shadow’s End to pay her respect to the fallen.

As she walked among the burial grounds with her friend Starburst, the sun goldfinch, Queen Lailah chanced upon the swept marble landing of an open tomb. An open tomb, this long after the hostilities, drew her attention and roused her suspicions. The Queen carelessly approached the tomb and stepped into the prison of a powerful, deceitful being of shadow known as The Dread.

The Dread offered Lailah endless riches in exchange for shared possession of her own body. Lailah, who had borne witness to the greatest depth of poverty possible in the war-devastated lands over which she reigned, gave in to The Dread’s temptation out of misguided hope. During their unification, The Dread leeched the generosity of Lailah’s heart, at once feeding off her loss and twisting her soul toward corruption, greed and darkness.

Lailah’s humanity withered under The Dread’s corrosive influence and her body followed the perverse degradation that started in her mind and soul. The queen’s heart still beat with a golden light, however, and her soul, not wanting to leave the world with a twisted reminder of its foolish pact, compelled Lailah to design an end to her master’s reign even as she fell under his power.

Lailah designed a map to lead her followers to the treasure chamber. Sensing her betrayal and hating that golden fragment of humanity that remained to her, The Dread viciously ripped Lailah’s golden heart from her body using her own twisted hands. Lailah’s corrupted shadow immediately shredded the map but was blinded during its work by Starburst, who stole the remnants of the document and distributed the tattered pieces across the land. Only one who possesses great wisdom and strength will be able to reclaim
Lailah’s treasure.

Welcome to Shadow’s End, adventurer.

Level Range         : 200 to 201
Goal Difficulty     : Difficult
Goal Recommended at : Level 201
Goal Converter      : Trepid & Robbo
Area Author         : Trepid

Note: Two people working together are required to complete this goal.

A long time ago, there was a group of individuals who followed the God Njord and his struggle to destroy the Aesir. These were the Clan of Vanir. Ultimately, the Aesir tore the Vanir asunder and their fight was ended. The only thing left behind is the ruins of their former Clan Hall. Recently, a team of Aarchaeologists, lead by the Professor, unearthed their ancient Clan Maze.

This is a test raid that can be unlocked with the completion of the first test in raiding, the Testmaze10 raid. Please see Goals Testmaze10 for more information.

This is a tribute to the Vanir clan, which disbanded in August 2014.

• Have made some changes to gquest timers and extended time. If a global quest is won within the first 10 minutes, the timer will now be extended for 5 minutes. It was previously 5 minutes with the timer extended for 3. (Throxx / Mendaloth)
• You no longer need stormy weather to use Call Lighting, but you do still have to be outside. Many people have suggested this over the last year or two no not putting a specific name next to the idea.
• The delay between shots while using ‘volley’ has been increased and the duration of the skill itself has been extended. Overall amount of damage will be the same but a little more spread out giving people a chance to escape. If you can’t because you’re not paying attention or stacked too many commands then that’s on you. Triggering recall on combat is not legal and this does include ranged damage.
• The addition of critical hits impacted the balance of some high end epic areas a little too much. We now have a flag to ignore critical hits completely for certains - they won’t do critical hits and critical hits will not happen against them. This won’t be set on too many but I will ask the imms to post to mudinfo as they are identified and flagged. Builders, you can’t set this flag yourselves, an imm has to do it for you. (Quadrapus / Koala)
• Critical hits were not showing when the weapon damtype was just the generic ‘hit’ message. Now fixed. (Ocho)
• The cause of the last crash was pretty obscure - forcing an animated object to talk on a channel while we had the code on that requires new players to be ‘approved’ by an imm/advisor/helper before others can hear them, but is now fixed. Related bug causing special characters in mob names to throw a GMCP error when they talk on grouptalk also fixed. (Fiendish)
• Chance of retreating / fleeing from a high percentage in web have been reduced.
• The ‘reown’ command was not sending a GMCP update after the trivia points were charged, making it look like you didn’t get charged at all if you were only looking at client stat windows. (Shemyaza / Anaristos)>

New “Mindflay” Skill:

There is a new mentalist ability called Mindflay which allows you to damage a target in a nearby room by channeling the power of your weapons into a ranged mental attack. The attack works similarly to ’shoot’ but does not require any special equipment and, while it does require you to be close by, does not require line of sight. This is a skill rather than a spell and will not work on other Mentalists. The attack will do the equivalent of a single hit from each of your weapons. The only dodge that works against it is ‘Time Shift’ but you can still “miss” the hit based on stats or just bad luck. The attack does the damage type of your weapons, but if a mob is immune to mental damage will not work. Adding instinct in Mindflay will increase the chances of additional hits.

There is no lag on success on the attack but there is a small recovery - it is intended to be more of a slow steady damage from a safe distance than a major attack. The mobs will not hunt you down so feel free to sit 3 rooms away and safely kill something. Similarly, if you see someone OPK idling somewhere they shouldn’t, feel free to mindflay them down. I can see an obvious temptation to bot with this skill - please don’t do that, getting removed from the game will not help your character progress.

Expect changes to this as it’s pretty experimental. Damage may be too low, too high, just right, I don’t know. I won’t be at all surprised if I have to limit the potential for 20 mentalists to sit in a room and waste an epic by remote control. If certain mobs really need to be immune to mental because of this let us know. There’s a few additional pieces of information on the mechanics in the skill helpfile.

Critical hits and other skill / spell changes:

• There is a new critical hit feature where each weapon hit in regular combat has a hitroll based chance to do a critical hit. Primary class thieves have a higher chance of doing additional hitroll critical damange and can also critical hit with backstab. Mobs can also get these but at a lower rate, and they also tend to have less hitroll anyway.
• If you are displaying full damage message you will see this with a ‘*’ at the start of the damage message. If you have combined / average damage on then it will just be rolled into the totals - you will see a “*” if any of the attacks that caused that message were a critical hit.
• I wanted to make this high enough to be worthwhile at higher HR but a 15 to 25% buff to melee damage at high level was too much. It’s still a buff overall but base damage against mobs at higher level has been reduced to account for this. Note that none of this affects spells or skills other than backstab. (Watlok)
• Holy Reprisal has been turned down by a few percent to counter the effect of the HR hits as I’m not adding even more damage onto Avenger. Righteous Anger has been changed from double damage to be more around 60% because it was OP, and probably still is with crit hits but we’ll see.
• I have changed the way Amnesia works. In addition to targeting a single skill it will now also do a lower amount of reduction to all skills and spells so it is like a longer-lasting mini daze. It does also stack with daze. The duration has been increased and, when used against players, the timeout has been increased by the same amount.
• A venomist using the ‘envenom’ skill may now add the argument ‘poison’ or ‘disease’ to the command which will set the damage type of the weapon to poison / disease for the duration of the flag. When the weapon affect expires, the item will go back to its previous damtype. The duration of the effect for venomist has also been increased. (Tymme)
• The previous change with illuminate was to make it still possible to cast the spell even if an item already has a (Glow) flag. It was supposed to still set the Illuminate flag on a successful cast but was only doing that when stats were added. That made it possible to keep casting until you land stats and making enchanter’s focus pointless. This has now been fixed.

Equipment Capacity Changes:

• When you have saved superhero stats, and your saved Dexterity and Strength are higher than your current Dex / Str, then your max item and weight capacity will be determined based on your saved SH stats. You won’t have the full capacity you had at SH because you won’t have the benefit of stats from SH equipment and spellups, but this should at least help a lot with inventory issues right after remorting. Using the ‘weight’ command will show when your saved SH stats are being used. (Redryn)
• Once you have reached level 201 and remorted, your aard bags will stay at level 201 but Tiers won’t get the full benefit of bag over level 201 until they reach the appropriate level. Main reason for this change is to help with the equipment weight problems after a tier / remort / redo without increasing carry capacity overall at high level. (Redryn)
• You can now ‘quest sell’ a bag back to questor for 1,000qp. This seems like a fair price given that people have had use of the bags but now may have more than they need with the above change.

Other Changes in this Reboot:

• There is a new goal and an extension to the Diamond Soul Revelation area (DSR), both were created by Teleron. More information in the DSR helpfile.
• When typing ‘friend’ you will now see players who are invisible to you and it will show (Invis) next to their name. This only works on people who are also friends with you. (Sammael)
• The login screen no longer shows date last rebooted. Not sure if it was good to show we’re stable enough to be up 3+ months or bad to show we haven’t rebooted for that long. Either way, I don’t think new users care about reboot time and existing players logging in after a reboot already know about it.
• Fixed the alignment for a player kill in ‘lastkills’ (Tymme)
• When you have autoloot / auto sacrifice on and couldn’t carry the items in the corpse, the autosacrifice would not go through. This was not working the same way with special “always loot” items. If you kill a mob with one of these and can’t carry the special item, the corpse will no longer sacrifice (Ocho)
• Some skills / spells that can remove all stats from an item when they fail such as sharpen and reinforce will now also remove enchants recorded on the item. (Roume)
• Using ‘runto kflag’ in Aylor was taking you to the wrong room. Now fixed. (Bitties)
• Fixed a bug with large gold amounts in market bid charging the wrong commission. (Ixultar)
• When a clan changes its tax rate, it will no longer be broadcast to the whole MUD on the info channel. (Tymme)
• When you ‘look’ and see another player in the room, the ‘is here’ will no longer be shown if they have a title set. You will still get the message if they are sleeping, resting, etc.

Removal of ‘rebuild trains / simplification of rebuild and superhero process:

We have removed the ‘rebuild trains’ mechanic from the game. When you rebuild or class change, all stats will now be available for instinct. Any trains you had that were ‘rebuild trains’ before this reboot are now also available for instinct. Reason for removing the mechanic is that it’s overly complex and really hard to understand for newer players, and many older ones at times too.

The downside to making this change is people can rebuild right before they SH to get their trains on hand back before stat restore, so I guess everyone now gets bonus trains per redo / remort. Rather than leaving this is as a hidden mechanic only existing players will have the benefit of, I have changed Superhero so that it will automatically do a rebuild and add the trains to your total when stats from the previous remort are restored. The superhero command now has a ‘norebuild’ option for if you don’t want this to happen although I can’t think of too many reasons you wouldn’t want it. Because of this automatic rebuild, superhero no longer give an actual free rebuild on stat restore.

• When a non-primary class spellcaster is using staves, there is now a limit on how many targets can be hit. This does also affect Rangers and Paladins, but their limit is higher. The same change has been made to AOE spells. When the spells belongs to the primary class casting, such as ‘Ice Storm’ with Ranger or ‘Wrath of God’ with Paladin then the limit does not apply.
• When object bonuses are rolled, resists will be randomly more weighted towards whichever one is chosen first rather than completely random. Stats already work this way and makes the items more useful for people focusing on one damage type or stat. The way the code works there’s plenty of chances for more distributed resists too.
• Using ‘channels curse’ will now act as a filter to show only channels where cursing is allowed.
• When using the ‘lastkills’ command, the output will now show the total exp received as before but also the base experience from the mob before any bonuses were applied.
• It is no longer possible to strangle a Ninja, applies to both players and mobs.
• The ‘Precision’ skill will now only work against dodges that the warrior knows innately when fighting other players - this means dodge, parry and shield block. It is unchangd vs mobs. (Castiel) I know subclasses need a lot of work. Not going to promise some big sudden overhaul but will try to focus on more steady changes on the long march to fill them out. There are quite a few subclass changes already coded for the next reboot including at least a couple of new skills, but I want to do more testing before putting them in.
• We have turned off mob name scrambling in gquests and campaigns so any newly generated campaigns / global quests from this point forward will not have scrambled mob names. It served a purpose for a while but it’s time to move on from this.
• The drop-off in Hammerswing damage now starts at 3 mobs instead of 4 and increases slightly faster.
• The effect of being ‘dazed’ has always been much higher on spells than on skills (50% vs 30% or so). I have lowered this so that skills and spells are affected the same.
• The Illuminate spell has been modified so it no is no longer blocked by a (GLOW) flag when cast by an Enchanter. The spell is only blocked if the item has already previously been illuminated. It will still set the Glow flag if none is present. Trying this out on this one and depending how it goes may do the same for Resonate and Solidify.

• Increased the width of mob names in the ‘mobdeaths’ and ‘mobkills’ commands.

Fixed a null message when trying to unlock a door that cannot be unlocked because there is no key defined, presumably put there to require people to use pass door for a shortcut.

• If you had info clanonly on then outcast with it turned on it was impossible to turn it off because you’re no longer in a clan. This is now fixed.
• Goal info was not being displayed for any player if you had clanonly or friendonly filters set for info goals. Should by fixed now.
• Fixed some ‘weirdness’ in missing damage output in very large epic groups. Nobody probably noticed anyway as I doubt many people have groupspam on, but fixed now.
• Fixed a bug in rebuild that showed the wrong amount under ‘Charging {amount} trains’. It charged correctly, just showed the wrong number.

New Area and Goal - Ookushka Garrison:

Long ago, when the Tairayden tribe first attacked innocent beach goers, one person decided to try to take action against them, hunt them down and get revenge for their horrible actions and crimes against humanity. Since then, she was able to locate the origins of the tribe where she gathered much needed information to assist in tracking down the current location of the tribe. Now, using that information, Cedyca found the tribe’s hideout, known as the Ookushka Garrison. She stands at the ready near the entrance of the garrison, ready to recruit followers into her rebellion clan.

Are you brave enough to face off against the tribe, at the same time increasing your reputation with the rebellion clan? If so, seek out Cedyca and let her know of your interest in joining the effort. Be warned, though, this will be no easy task.

Level Range         : 201 to 201
Goal Difficulty     : Easy
Goal Recommended at : Level 201
Goal Author         : Rhuli
Area Author         : Rhuli

New Area and Goal - Arboretum:

The arboretum was a pristine refuge for plants and animals that flourished as the diva, elves, and other creatures of nature protected and preserved it. Others that walked through it would talk about the magnificent plants and animals they saw and how glad they were that they were able to experience it!

After some time, strange stories started to come from the visitors. At first it was just how the ‘feeling’ of the land had changed and how the visitors no longer felt welcome there. These initial reports were written off, saying that the people who reported it were already not in a good state of mind and shouldn’t have been there in the first place. It wasn’t long after those reports were received that other things started to happen. People turned up missing, and the feel of the place changed from uneasy to a strong feeling of malevolent intent from there. In their desperation to discover what happened, an investigative party was sent there. No one has heard anything from them for quite a while.

When the lone survivor emerged, he was ranting things about carnivorous plants and strange plant/animal mutations that were impossible. Will you be the one to investigate and find out what happened here, as well as deal with the cause of the problems, or will you just walk away and pretend that nothing really happened?

Level Range          : 110 to 120
Goal Difficulty      : Medium
Goal Recommended at  : Level 115
Goal Min Level       : Level 115
Area Author          : Teleron

• The Cabal clan has merged into Loqui. Any members of Cabal will now be a member of Loqui and will receive a note explaining the change at login.
• Professor Ray Deanking has taken a sabatacle from his classes at Aylor University to assist players in the art of (Raiding). You can find him in the ‘Raiding School’ testmaze.

  This is a new goal added by Rezit for the first Test Maze. More testmaze related goals will follow in due course.

• Fixed a bug in berserk spell tags for ‘already affected’ which was coming through as spell disabled.
• Fixed a bad error message when you aren’t specific enough on choosing subclass in creation it was showing the race prompt. Amazing how stuff like this can sit out there for 12 years before anyone notices.
• The gold cost of Pray for Absolution and HP cost of Pray for Damnation were both slightly incorrect. Now fixed.

MUD Update - March 31st 2018:

• The main reason for the reboot today was to merge Dominion into Retribution.

A few other minor changes that made it in with the reboot but nothing really that important:

• The bug with OPK flag sometimes getting confused with the Augmented healing recovery should now be fixed.
• I have changed the delay on being able to remove the flag after you add it from 3 days to 12 hours, and, changed the delay on being able to add the flag back after you remove it from 24 hours to 3 days. The goal is to have the same overall timeout but give a people who try out OPK and get “griefed” a chance to get out of it sooner. This is instead of having limits on how often someone can be PKed hard-coded into the game.
• Might be some helpfiles that need cleaning up but otherwise have removed references to “nobles” from the game, including messages when someone reaches level 100, gamestat, who, etc.
• Using ‘runto kflag’ in Aylor now works as an alias to go to the Aylor forge.
• The GMCP ‘base’ set of data now has a list of your remorts in the order they were gained. The values are numbers that correspond to the order of classes in ’showskill’, so 0 = mage through 6 = psi. Some redundancy here with ‘class’ and ‘remorts’ but I didn’t want to change those and break existing plugins.
• Cleaned up the ouput of ‘deposit’ and ‘withdraw’ with no arguments to be a little more helpful.

Equipment Bonuses Enhancements:

• The object bonuses are a little (just a little) more weighted towards DR over other stats and the base bonuses are upped a little.
• Items will now also have a chance for lower level when the bonus kicks in. This is on top of the regular level randomizing so it’s possible you get one that looks no better than usual if it repopped higher then the bonus lowered it, or one even lower level than previously possible.
• The max stats an item can get is now based on the item’s default level not it’s actual level. This means that a level 181 item repopping at level 178 doesn’t get penalized with lower potential max stats at level 178.
• It is harder for items with already close to max stats to get bonuses. I’ve changed this so the difference isn’t quite as high.
• Bonus items that are donated or sold will now last much longer. They will stick around for about 6 hours on average compared to just over an hour for donated items and average 45 minutes for sold to shop. Would like to make this even longer but need to balance with clutter in the shops and donate rooms so let’s see how it goes.
• Items with the ‘nodrop’ flag can now get bonuses. If there are “bad” items imms particularly don’t want to have bonuses there is a separate flag we can set.
• The amount of weapon base damange a bonus item can add has been increased slightly. There is also a minimum amount of damage that will be added to lower level bonus weapons when a percentage doesn’t really do a whole lot for it.
• Arrows will no longer get stat bonuses. They can still get bonus flags though and will get the added damage. Also a reminder that tempering arrows greatly increases the number of uses.
• When a bonus item gets player stats (str, con, etc), the stats will now tend to more weighted towards the first stat it picks. This means that items adding lots of stats will generally (not always) have more of one stat than completely randomly spread which makes them more useful to people trying to optimize for one stat. It is also possible for these stats to go a little higher than before.
• Items that get a bonus will also fetch a higher price when selling to a store or fencing them.

Other Changes this Reboot:

• There is a new command called ‘bonusloot’. Setting this flag will cause you to loot items that load with random bonus stats even if you have autoloot turned off. This defaults on ON.
• There is also a new command called ‘lootnext’ which will cause you to loot the next corpse only. The idea is that you can keep autoloot off but use this command to loot only the next mob you kill. You can also make an alias to turn this on then attack your target if you are going to use lootnext often.

There is a little extra complexity in how autoloot, bonusloot, lootnext and skipnext flags interact. You should get a message when the flags contradict each other. If you turn on skipnext it will cancel lootnext and vice versa.

• When you loot an item it will now get a hidden ‘looted’ flag. You can do ‘inv filter looted’ to show the items looted and, once the items are shown, it will clear the flag. This means that you can use the command to look at items looted since last time you checked. This only happens when you autoloot an item. Manually getting it from a mob corpse or acquiring it any other way does not count. Dropping the item, putting into a container or any other action that takes it out of your main inventory (including wearing) also removes the flag.
• Using ’shelp’ will now show how many times a social has been used since reboot. Something I wanted for my own reasons and figured there was no reason to not let everyone see it.
• There is now an ‘inv filter bonus’ that also works with ‘lbid filter’ but, unfortunately, will only work with bonus items loaded from this point forward.
• The ‘poison’ and ‘disease’ flags on a character will no longer prevent the full ‘Green Death’ from working, in terms of other skills only the green death skill effect itself will prevent it landing again.

Accessibility Features:

We are working on some features to make the game more accessible for players using screen readers. There seems to be some debate on which term is appropriate and I am told people are moving away from ‘vi’ and just going with ‘blind’. We can figure that out later but I don’t want it to get in the way of improving the game for screen reader users so I’m just using “blind” below.

• There is now a ‘blindmode’ command. Setting it to 1 means that other players can use ‘who blind’ or ‘who vi’ to find you. Settings it to 2 means it is private. Setting 2 doesn’t actually do anything yet, but over time the game will output commands to you differently based on that setting (see below).

After some discussion with a few people on the personal board, we are trying to figure out the best way to present some of the Aard commands that output tables of data into a format more friendly for screen readers.

To help get to some answers on that, I made a few new versions of the ’stats’ command. I picked this command because it’s a short table with a lot of data and totals at both row and column level.

I would appreciate it if the players using screen readers could try these out and give feedback on the ideas board on which works best for you and why. Please use ‘note replay 39108′ for that thread.

• The “stats vi” command is fairly verbose and describes each column each times it reads the data.
• The “stats vi2″ command tells you up front what the columns are going to be then just gives the numbers.
• The “stats vi3″ command is a combination of the two with a definition up front then a short letter prefix. I did this because if I were using
  only a screen reader on longer more complex tables I’d probably forget what each column was by the time I got to the end.

The inconsistent labeling of stats is intentional to see which works better for you.

If there is a better format than any of these then please post examples along with why. We need to get this as easy as possible for screen readers before converting many of our other commands to use the same format.

Thanks to everyone who took part in the early discussion on this as we would have definitely not gotten this far without you. I want to move the discussion to a public board now and involve anyone who wants to take part.

Equipment Bonuses on Game Load Items:

There is new code in the game to randomly add stats to game load items. This feature has a lot more code behind it than simple “add some random stats” and tries to be a lot more intelligent about what stats an item already has and the max stats items that level can have in which categories.

There is an initial dice roll for whether or not an item gets stats and, every time the roll passes, there is another roll. More rolls mean more stats are added. It’s all random but there are some levels of bonus (odds in the hundreds of millions) we are not likely to see, but you never know. Weapons will gain a damage bonus. It won’t show as a + amount in identify, it will just have a higher than usual base damage.

It is balanced with the goal of randomly loading decent items, more rarely loading really good items and even more rarely, items that could easily be the best in the game but with odds such that farming isn’t really practical.

Items that load with a bonus will have a flag that looks something like ‘(Polished)’. Those with red instead of green brackets are the most rare. These flags become part of the item name so they will be visible in auction messages etc.

Right now this only applies to regularly loaded items that are reset on the mob and looted. Anything loaded via a mob prog (where the mob usually gives it to you) will not have a chance for the bonus stats. I may add a lua command to fix this later. You can also only roll bonus stats on mobs close to your own level or higher. There isn’t much naturally loading tier equipment in the game but the few items there are do get similar bonuses up to the tiermaxes allowed.

I expect to have to modify this up and down in some level ranges but for now let’s see how it goes.

• Number of free rebuilds on hand is no longer reset when you tier. If you don’t have any rebuilds at all, one will be added, but if you have more they will no longer be lost.
• It is now possible to forward an empty note. (Fiendish). Also cleaned up the note prefix line a little on forwarded notes.
• The ‘nowar’ setting which toggles warfare message on / off is now visible in config all. Could make an argument for this to go in any of config, channels or info but at least it is visible somewhere for now. (Fiendish)
• The duration of each game season was off by a day causing it not to match the help file. Now fixed. (Endymion)
• Fixed a bug in an imm object list command that caused the last crash.

Winds of Fate Epic Area:

What are the winds of fate? Is it a flutter of air that passes over your brow that sends a shiver down your spine? Is it a smell of something fresh, anew, like freshly baked bread, or a warm apple pie? Or is it something dire, such as an assassin breathing down your neck, ready to slit your throat at a moments notice.

A steward now rests in an unholy grove. This grove was created due to those winds and the decisions of people before them. Navigate the winds and decide your fate. Hopefully those winds will be fair. The steward will assist you in your journey to figure out how those winds created the havoc set before you.

Level Range           : Level 200
Goal Difficulty       : Extremely difficult (Epic)
Goal Recommended at   : Groups of 8-10 people
Goal Converter        : Rezit
Area Author           : Rezit

Note:
This is a very high level area that requires a large group of powerful characters to complete. This area is a morgue area- unclanned/outcast players dying in this area will suffer usual death penalties but will wake in the Aylorian Hospital with all their equipment.

New Superhero Area - Crossroads of Fortune
Begin a journey with Lord Durkin who plays the part of the fool in this lifelong adventure. Walk in his footsteps as he travels through the Land of Major Arcana; a place where hopes and dreams are revealed.

Relive the lord’s life with him as he travels through the four realms of the Minor Arcana. The Realm of Spring is one of childhood and growth, the Realm of Summer reveals young adulthood and its challenges, the Realm of Autumn is a place for love and marriage, and the Realm of Winter tackles the struggles of a career and parenting.

When doubt and worry change Durkin’s path, he finds himself in the Land of the Major Arcana Reversed. Stumble through this land of pain and sorrow as the lord becomes lost in his own guilt and fears.

Lord Durkin could use some assistance in getting his life back on track. If you have the time and patience to help him, then it is likely that good karma will join you in your future travels.

Level Range         : 201
Goal Difficulty     : Easy
Goal Recommended at : Level 201
Goal Converter      : Robbo & Guinness
Area Author         : Robbo & Guinness

Long ago, in her anger with Zeus, Hera conspired with Gaia and Tartarus to create a monster capable of defeating Zeus. That monster was named Typhos. Zeus and Typhos fought a terrible battle that resulted in Typhos being defeated. Now, ages after that battle, Typhos is gaining strength and threatens to destroy our world. With the threat of Typhos emerging again, some of the gods have gone into hiding again.

Will you be the person to venture into the Zodiac and save the world?

Level Range         : 20 to 30
Goal Difficulty     : Easy
Goal Recommended at : Level 25
Goal Min Level      : Level 20
Goal Converter      : Teleron
Area Author         : Aardwolf Community

• When a player is outcast from their clan, if the ‘info clanonly’ flag is set it will be automatically cleared. (Rezit/Guinness)
• Increased the output limit on ‘owned’ from 500 to 1000. Any more than that and you’re just going to have to get rid of some stuff.
• Dying while in your own clan hall with a Hardcore flag now counts the same as dying anywhere else and the flag will be removed. Clan leaders may want to consider their own policies on attacking Hardcore clannies. This does not apply while defending against a raid.
• Fixed a bug where Avengers would get the ‘flail’ skill on creation but are actually given a whip. They now correctly get the ‘whip skill.