In the red rain-stained streets of Fury City, the local denizens can be
heard singing a song.

There once was a place of charm and grace,
With streets of hope and endless faith.
But one dark day, a wicked man
Strode into that hallowed land.
With endless rage and a clenched-tight fist,
He brought a storm none could resist.

With a flip of a switch, the charm was gone-
Madness and disgrace lingered on.
He renamed the city after his name.
From that moment, nothing stayed the same.

The red rains fell from skies once blue,
Soaking the heads of many and few.
The wicked marched east-there, death was found.
To the west, not a soul around.
Southward lay a bloody mess.
Northward left them breathless, clutching their chest.

No way to dig-the earth too stiff.
So he looked to the sky for one last gift.
They built a tower from bricks to dishes,
Crushing all hope, all dreams, all wishes.

If he escaped, his reign would spread-
A nightmare born of fear and dread.
His cruelty knows no bounds or end.
He must be caged, or all will bend.

Now nervous souls still fret and worry,
Ruled beneath the thumb of Heartless Ted Fury.

Level Range         : 200-201
Goal Difficulty     : Difficult
Goal Recommended at : 201
Goal Converter      : Madrox & Myrkul
Area Author         : Madrox

Note:
Find the planetoid in southern Vidblain and join the crew!

Coords 11,26. (see ‘help coords’ and ‘help vi-vidblain’.)

Adventures in Sendhia Quest (Goal):

A nexus created by the three moons of Andolor opens a gate upon a world
you have never before visited. Upon entering, your adventure begins with
a mysterious shipwreck in the Sendhian Sea. From there, you island hop
and meet with a variety of strange characters and creatures. You will
need to use all your wiles in order to escape the perils you face in
Sendhia!

A strange adventuring guide named Alan is ready to guide you in your
Adventures in Sendhia! He has quite the itinerary for those who dare
to endure his PUNishment.

Level Range         : 5 to 50
Goal Difficulty     : Easy
Goal Recommended at : Level 40 
Goal Converter      : Kelaire
Area Author         : Lumina

Note:
This area replaces Ultima.

Find the blue star in Vidblain and type ‘moonrift’.

Coords: 5,6 (see ‘help coords’ and ‘help vi-vidblain’.)

• There are now two wishes for bypass available to all players. When you have bypass via a wish, the area will bypass as if you had the skill at 100%. If you have the wishes and you are a navigator without the skill at 100%, make sure those most important to you are at the top.
• The max slots a navigator can gain from bypass naturally has been reduced from 4 to 3 – they still get the default two slots plus one more slot at 800 combined int+wis.
• Instinct can now be trained in bypass up to a max of 100. Once you have instinct in bypass you have another bypass slot. The percent effectiveness of that Bypass slot will be how much instinct you have. Keep in mind that instinct also adds to base skill so if you have 80% practiced and 20 instinct then your effective skill % is 100.
• The ‘bypass’ command itself now shows the % effectiveness of each slot as there are three types:

  Wish         : 100% 
  Skill based  : Skill + instinct. (Navigator only)
  Instinct Slot: Instinct only.    (Navigator only)
  

• Because the bypass positions you have from wish are the most important there will be times when you want to put something at the top of the list without having to redo everything. Using the syntax ‘bypass [area] first’ will do that.

The purpose of these changes is to make some amount of bypass availableto all players while still giving navigators more slots overall.

Once, long ago, there was a land ruled by Ratazhal, a wise and noble baron
whose strength and wisdom made him beloved by his people. By his side was
Xelthar, a gifted necromancer who, unlike others of his kind, practiced his
craft for the good of the realm. Xelthar was a trusted advisor, using his
knowledge of the dead to counsel the living, ensuring balance between life
and death and preserving harmony within the Baron’s lands. His magic was
pure, his intentions honest, and his loyalty to Ratazhal unwavering.

But fate has a way of twisting even the noblest of intentions.

A shadow crept into Xelthar’s mind, fed by whispered promises from the dark
corners of existence – power, immortality, and the secret to bending life
and death to his will. Despite his once benevolent intentions, Xelthar could
not resist the allure of such forbidden knowledge. He became obsessed with
the idea of resurrecting those long gone, harnessing their essence not only
to prolong life but to fortify the Baron’s lands against future threats.

He shared his discoveries with Ratazhal, but the baron, sensing the growing
darkness within his advisor, warned Xelthar against such reckless pursuits.
Yet, Xelthar was undeterred. He believed only he could see the true
potential of his newfound power. Frustrated and fearful, Ratazhal sought to
end his advisor’s experiments. A great conflict ensued, a clash of wills
that left Xelthar cursed, his body twisted and corrupted by dark magic, he
was cast out from the Baron’s lands to wander as a tortured outcast.

Betrayed and embittered, Xelthar fled to the lands now known as Skeletal
Remains a desolate, haunted place at the edge of the world. There, in the
shadow of his former greatness, Xelthar began to unleash his dark arts. He
became the overlord of Skeletal Remains, ruling over a macabre army of
undead abominations. Each of them was a soul twisted and bound by his dark
magic, forever enslaved to do his bidding. Xelthar was not content merely to
rule his dismal domain. He sought to expand his reign of terror beyond the
confines of Skeletal Remains. To do so, he created portals to invade other
lands.

Level Range         : 150 to 185
Goal Difficulty     : Easy
Goal Recommended at : Level 180
Goal Min Level      : Level 150
Goal Max Level      : Level 185
Goal Creator        : Radrat
Area Author         : Riot & Radrat

A few other changes in this reboot

• Tpspend token how has an option for ‘tpspend token [amount]’ to buy multiple tokens at once. You will need to use the ‘confirm’ option for more than one. (Sath).
• You can also use ‘gtrivia [amount]’ to convert the tokens back to trivia. If you are converting more than 1 then the command will use items in inventory so a quick ‘hack’ to convert 1 token without hold it would be to use ‘gtrivia 1’. This command does also require the confirm option. (Sath).
• Using ‘invsort timer’ will now show the time remaining next to items that do actually have a timer. ‘Invsort timers’ will also work. (Castiel)
• If you try to skin a corpse too low level, the corpse will now be destroyed so will effectively be a failed skin. You do still get the message about it being too low level but I changed the message slightly so that anyone with a ‘sac corpse’ trigger on that message doesn’t end up ‘double sacrificing’ after this change. (Myth)

• There is now a ‘tags where’ option that will put {where} and {/where} tags around there ‘where’ command. (Ylidene)
• There is a new board called ‘epicruns’. Automated posts that would have previously gone to the ‘epics’ board will now go here leaving that board free for epic announcements / discussions. (Djvoltron)
• Revenge now works differently than before:
  • Revenge now lasts for 3 hours and no longer prevents you from quitting if someone has revenge on you.
  • The timer only counts down while the target is in the game.
  • Revenge will save over a reboot / ice age but is cancelled if a week has passed since the revenge was triggered.

  We are going to try this for a while and possibly experiment with other ways
  to do revenge. Another option we discussed but didn’t jump straight into yet
  is to have more like 30 or 60 minutes but the timer only counts down when
  the target of the revenge is not in a safe room or clan room.
  mob or player they are fighting, simply healing it is a good way.

• Just a convenience change, using ‘pkstats revenge’ or ‘pkstats r’ will show only revenge info without all the other stuff.
• It is now possible to have color codes in whonames, including xterm and even including @256. (Zephyr)
• Premonition now has a much higher chance to work on campaigns and will be 100% when the skill is 100%. The use case that Sath mentioned on general to reroll a target that someone killed was interesting so the window of time that you can use premonition on a campaign has been increased from 1 minute to 5 minutes. You also no longer need to be in the same room as Commander Barcett to reroll a target. (Sath)
• Using Solidify with both Enchanter’s Focus up and with the Arcane Source item will now give slightly better results. Keep in mind there is still randomness – the last update added some random rolls to get more stats when Focus is up so there will be times when a really lucky roll with Enchanter’s Focus added is better than the boost from the Arcane Source without Focus kicking in. On average, casting Solidify with both will still be far better. (Korendir)

Bug Fixes

These are all quite obscure this week so recommend skipping unless you *really* like detail or see your name below:

• Fixed a minor bug in put/get messages with no argument given. (Morn)
• There was a bug with ‘campaign reroll #’ not correctly matching what is shown in ‘cp check numbers’ if a campaign mob had already been killed. Now fixed. (Sath)
• Using ‘slist learned’ was only showing combat skills/spells. Now fixed. (Deathr)
• When using ‘bid’ the amount must now be a valid number. It was possible to put something like ‘5000x’ in there before and still have it count as 5000. (Zephyr)
• Using the syntax “remove ‘123456789’” to remove an item by ID with quotes around the argument will now work. (Ylidene)
• There is a help syntax to read a helpful as if you have blindmode on, for example ‘help scan blind’ which was added a while ago to allow us to quickly test with the new color codes. This had broken the ability to do a ‘help search blind’. Now fixed. (Guinness)
• Fixed some inconsistency when using socials that have the target’s deity name on a channel. You would have only seen this if you don’t use GMCP channels. (Aberrant)

Centaur:

• Centaurs will now run faster and anyone following them will move at the same speed.
• Centaurs now have 5% solo exp bonus.
• The Centaur lag-free kick will now happen automatically in combat rather than needing to be entered. Centaurs can still manually use kick if they prefer as long as they do not have the cooldown.

  When kick is automatically used as a Centaur, you won’t see a recovery wear-off “You may now use…” message like you do when it is manually used.

• There is a new AUTOSKILL config command that will turn off the automatic Centaur kick. For most players, there really is no reason unless you specifically want to time exactly when you kick.
• I wasn’t going to add this to Tigran but a few folks on the test port pointed out some high-end scenarios where this would be helpful so it also works for the Tigran slash/bite now.

Ogre:

• There is a new passive ability for Ogres – the more hurt an Ogre gets, the more enraged they become. This means that ogres will see increased damage as their HP reduces:

      - At 50% of their health they will do 5% more weapon and skill (excluding
        backstab) damage.
  
      - Below 50% they will do an additional 1% of damage for each 5% health
        reduction with a max of 15% additional damage at 5% health. This is
        on top of their standard 15% bonus.
  
      - Below 5% they will do an additional 5% damage for a total max of 20%
        extra damage at 1% health.
  

• The Ogre training cost for Str has been changed to -2 which makes it cheaper for Ogres to train STR at higher values.

Gargoyle:

• The -10% healing self penalty of Gargoyle has been removed.
• Gargoyles will now do 5% additional damage against targets that are not also flying (does not stack with air sector bonus).
• The Gargoyle stat training costs have changed – the wisdom and con penalty are gone and the int bonus has changed to a +1 cost leaving Gargoyle with a simpler +1 int, -1 con training cost (minus is better).

Dwarf:

• Dwarves now inflict 10% more damage in hills, mountains and underground rooms.
• The Dwarf 10% hp penalty has been removed and the -20% HP Regen has been moved to move regen.
• The -1 wis and +2 dex training costs have been removed. The training costs are now -1 str, +1 int which more closely aligns with the other attributes of this race.

Naga:

• Nagas are energized and even healed by being poisoned themselves. Whatever damage poison would have normally inflicted on them will instead heal them. The negative effect on regen also does not apply.
• Naga race cannot be harmed by Toxic Cloud. This includes mobs.
• The +1 luck training cost has been removed. This leaves Naga with a favorable training cost imbalance (-1 int, -1 dex, +1 con).

Tigran:

• The Tigran solo exp bonus has been reduced from 15% to 12% and the group exp penalty has also been reduced from 15% to 10%.

Other updates in this reboot:

• There is a new command that starts / stops a simple timer so you can see how long something took. I used this to test the centaur ‘run’ changes (below) but figured it might be useful to players for various reasons. Fairly simple command:

             timer start
             timer stop
             timer        : show current timer and elapsed time.
  

  This does save over reboots or if you quit / log back in later. It’s only going to be accurate to rougly 1 second so don’t try to use this for things where split second matters.

  As an example, this was a test of the command testing the new Centaur run:

        timer start
        run 30s30n30s30n20s20n
        timer stop
  
        (Elf)
        Timer started at: 16 Sep 18:47:11
        Current time is : 16 Sep 18:47:32
        Time Elapsed ...: 00:21
  
        (Centaur)
        Timer started at: 16 Sep 18:51:12
        Current time is : 16 Sep 18:51:26
        Time Elapsed ...: 00:14
  

• You can now use ‘fly’ and ‘land’ if you are wearing the Aardwolf wings.
• If you are flying you can use ‘land’ to cancel it. If you are flying because of the ‘fly’ or ‘levitation’ spells it will be the same as if you disrupted those spells. If your fly affect came from ‘Wraith Form’ it will remove just that line from the Wraith Form affects. If it is because of the Wings of Aardwolf, see above. (Tinypotato)
• Using “masteries totals” will now show your available funds that same as “instinct totals” does. (Ilbrost)
• Changed the formatting of ‘raceinfo’ so that the new bonuses show as ‘modifiers’ then include the + or – if it is a bonus / penalty. (Califan)
• Fixed an obscure bug with hammerforge/reforge. If you hammerforged an item, died, quit the game with your corpse then reconnected some time later the “previous weapon type” was not stored correctly which meant it could not be reforged later. (Rimno)
• Whois will now show redos next to the player’s Tier if they have any. (Reyn)

Builders Only:

• There is a new ‘brief’ option to mplist to show a more basic list of progs and triggers in use in the area. Also updated ‘help mplist’ to show a few options that were already there that you might not have known about. The new ‘brief’ option can be combined with objects/rooms/mobs filters.(Robbo)
• The room editor now has a new field for ‘map sector’ – when this is set, that sector will be used to display the map rather than the actual room type. In most cases there is no need to set this but we do need it for some cleanup. This is accessible in lua using ‘mapsector’ instead of ‘sector’. This will appear in the GMCP map messages as “mapterrain”.

Human:
Humans are still the basic race with no resistances or no stat cost modifiers but we did add something to make them a bit more interesting. This is from ‘help human’:

"Questmasters across the land favor recruiting Humans for their willingness
 to take on any challenge. Humans' ingenuity in overcoming obstacles is
 invaluable, leading questmasters to offer greater rewards to entice
 these capable adventurers.

 Comfortable in the hustle and bustle of cities and towns, the sights,
 sounds, and cultures of city life energize Humans, allowing them to level
 up more efficiently among cobblestone streets and bustling markets."

In simpler terms, this means:

• 1QP per quest more for regular quests.
• Humans do 5% more damage in city rooms.

Halfling:
Halfling hasn’t changed much – the +skill damage % has been lowered and the weapon/spell penalties have been lowered so weapon/skill/spells are now -5%, +15%, -5%. Keep in mind the the Halfling bonus to skills does include Backstab. The resistances on Halfling are also a little different than before.

The only other meaningful change to Halfling is they have a natural affinity for treasure – whenever a Halfling loots (not crafts) a bonusloot item, the bonusloot item rank and stat rolls will be one level higher. For example, if a Halfing rolls a (Polished) item it will become (Enhanced), if they roll a (Radiant) item it will become (Wondrous), etc. This means that you will never actually see Halfling loot “polished” any more.

Sprite:
As you already know, Sprites are a combination of the previous Sprite race and the Quickling race. As the ‘fastest’ race in the game, Sprites have the following perks:

• Permanent Haste, Hide, Fly and Invis.
• Due to their speed, Sprites have Second Attack as any class.
• Sprites are able to use ‘consume’ to convert corpses into mana.
• A Timeshifting type passive ability that will make all of their actions about 10% faster.

Sprites have no direct skill or spell bonus but the 10% reduction in lag is the equivalent of skill/spell bonus damage and has other benefits. Note that it does not stack with Timeshifting. Also note that anything autoconsume related should also work for sprites now.

Triton:
Still a relatively basic physical combat race – Triton has the highest weapon+skill damage that doesn’t have a corresponding penalty, but they do also have a vulnerability to most types of magic. Other race abilities and affects are:

• Permanent Underwater Breathing.
• Inflict 10% more damage in Water based rooms and regenerate more quickly.
• Heal much more slowly in Desert areas.
• Does not need a boat or fly to travel over water.

Vampire:
Vampire is thematically still the same but has a few changes. They will do 10% more damage when fighting at night, 5% less damage fighting in the daytime and evening is neutral. When vampires consume corpses at night they will receive more HP – the same amount as consume before the nerf. Their full list of perks is:

• Can consume corpses for HP – receive more at night.
• Inflict 10% more damage during the night and 5% less during the day. Evening is neutral.
• Regenerates faster at night, slower during the day, even slower if outside during the day, neutral in the evening / twilight.
• Permanent Detect Invis, Night Vision, Flying and Intimidate.
• Vampires take more damage when caught outside during the daytime.

Note that for regeneration and the damage inflicted bonuses, inside or outside no longer matters – they regenerate more at night and less during the day regardless of room type. The only time indoors/outdoors matters is for the damage received penalty of 10% if caught outside during the daytime.

Room bonus flag:
Most races that have a bonus based on room type have a (*) type flag in the room header when their bonus is active. Because their bonus varies based on time of day, Vampire is a little different:

      (*) It is night time - full bonus in effect.
      (-) It is day time so damage inflicted and regen is lower.
      (!) It is day time and you are outside. Bad stuff happens.
          No flag means it is evening and your attacks/regen are neutral.

Wolfen:
The Wolfen changes are some of our favorites – it was fun to design this around the two main premises that moons greatly affect wolves and they work better in a pack than solo. The main changes are:

• Wolves do more or less damage based on how many moons are in the sky:

                 0 moons :  5% less damage.
                 1 moon  :  5% more damage.
                 2 moons : 10% more damage.
                 3 moons : 20% more damage.

• Wolves are slightly less effective solo (-5% exp) but work far better in a group, especially with a pack of other Wolves. Their group EXP bonus is based on how many other wolves are in the group and is 5% + 2% for each additional wolf in the group up to a max of 15% group EXP bonus.
• Permanent access to Detect Invis, Night Vision, Sneak and Hunt.
• As with Vampire, the bonus flag in the room header is slightly different for Wolves and shows how many moons are currently in the sky.

This is it for the main redo of races. We will be reviewing some of the earlier race changes and starting to make some adjustments based on what we have seen since they went live but are otherwise now moving back to Subclass balance.

With this update, Aardwolf we have updated 13 of 19 races for the new race bonus system. Some changes that affect all races are listed below then we will get into an update for each individual race:

• Sprite and Quickling have been merged to just Sprite – if you were a Quickling before you should now be sprite.
• Lizardman and Ratling have both been merged into Naga which is the new poison race. If you were either of these races, you are now a Naga.
• Shadow has been renamed to Wraith and is now considered undead.
• Half-Griffon has been renamed to Gargoyle and become a more tankish race.
• There is a new ‘Tigran’ feline race aimed towards Solo play.
• There is a new ‘Ogre’ race similar to Giant but does more damage and takes more damage, kind of the ‘berserker’ race.
• Programs have been run to convert all existing pfiles affected by this and do update roster so that the new races appear in roster even if players have not logged in.
• Gamestat 6 data has been archived into the helpfile ‘help gamestat6’ and the data has been reset so that we can see the information for the new races.
• For any races that now have bonus to damage, exp or resistance in a particular room type, the room name will be prefixed with @C(*)@w when you are in a room where your race bonus is active.
• There are a few changes to ‘raceinfo’:
  • Raceinfo all is now sorted and highlights only real values rather than a different color per line.
  • A new ‘raceinfo bonuses’ option has been added. This is a very wide table and you may need to adjust your main window size or font size to see it all. If you would prefer to look at a spreadsheet of the races updated so far, they are at:

    Google Docs – Aardwolf Races 2024

• By default, ‘raceinfo’ will show all values even if they are zero. Using ‘raceinfo [race] brief’ if you only want to see lines with values (does not include resists)
• At the time of this reboot, all racechange timers have been reset so that everyone can try a new race quickly.
• Helpfiles have been updated where necessary and the helpfiles that recommend a few races for each class in creation have also been updated. Feel free to suggest alternatives, I’m sure it’s not perfect.

There are quite a few things we are trying with races that we haven’t done before. You should definitely expect changes to some of these races as we watch them in action and learn what works well, what is OP, and what needs improving or removing. Also, expect more reboots over the next few days. We will need to make fixes. Don’t leave items on your manor floors.

The next post lists the changes to each race that has been updated…

Centaur is designed to be a decent all-round race with no negatives and has the following bonuses:

• 3% bonus to weapon, skill and spell attack.
• 3% physical and magic resistance, except: 15% electric resistance, 15% disease vulnerability.
• 10% moves bonus.
• Kick has no lag but has a small recovery. Kick damage is higher over level 100 and kick has a chance to stun.
• 10% more damage dealt in forest, field or hills type sectors.

Dark Elf:

Slightly solo leaning race that is more powerful in the dark. Very similar to what is already live with a few extra perks and some resistance changes.

• Still has the permanent night vision, detect hidden and detect magic.
• Regenerates 50% faster in rooms with natural darkness. Natural darkness means that the room would be dark if there were no player lights or items such as campfires in the room.
• Does 10% more damage in rooms with natural Darkness.

Remember that outside rooms (unless flagged otherwise) are dark at night. Because of the difference between a ‘naturally dark room lit by objects’ and an actually dark room, you might see (*) in the room even if the room is not actually dark. This is ok, the purpose of the flag is to show you when the Drow bonus is active.

Diva:

The healer/support class with a slight bonus to spellcasting. Better resistance in nature sectors (fields, forest, etc). Full stats in raceinfo, highlights are:

• Slight bonus to group EXP.
• 25% more hp and moves restored from spells, 25% more mana from black lotus.
• 10% more resistance in nature sectors.

Dwarf:

Dwarf settings have changed from what was previously live for testing the mechanics of the new races but they are still very much phsyical combat focused. List of perks for Dwarves are:

• Bonus on weapon damage and stats on tempering.
• Reduced damage received penalty on Berserk.
• Night vision.

The tempering average damage added to the weapon bonus will always be higher than before. For ores that add other stats, the random range is higher overall but it is still possible to roll lower values.

Eldar:

Based on mana efficiency and spellcasting. Check raceinfo for full stats, main perks are:

• Bonuses to spell attack, group exp, magic resistance and mana. Penalties to physical stats.
• Lore – it has changed slightly, shows the full info as if you have identify wish.
• Most spells cost 25% less mana to cost.

Elf:

Not much to say about elf. I think it’s identical to what is already live, or very close – group exp is a little higher I think that’s about it. I did keep the extreme mana regen but still not convinced about that longer term, we’ll see how it goes.

Gargoyle:

Gargoyle is the tank physical race replacing half-griffin. Gargoyles regen slowly and have a negative damage on skills and magic, but has 20% pysical resistance and 10% magic resistance. The only vulernability is acid. Because this is the race replacing half-griffon, it also has fly:

• 10% more damage in Air type sectors.
• Permanent Fly.

Giant:

Giant is similar to what is currently live but with the negatives and positives toned down a little to be more in line with what we are doing with other races:

• No longer gets fast healing.
• Gets a slight chance to stun with each attack. It’s a fairly low chance, just a slight perk, not race defining.
• The +10% skill attacks on Giant does not include backstab. This same restriction apples to Ogre and Troll and shows when you view raceinfo.
• Giants automatically have the blockexit skill which means you also have access to the blockexit config option which usually only appears when you have the skill. Note that this does not mean that blockexit works 100% of the time – stats and luck still play a part. It means that the skill acts as if you had it 100% practiced.

Naga:

Naga is the combination of Lizardman and Ratling. It is still the poison focused race and has some of the combined perks of both races.

• Detect Hidden.
• Can envenom weapons.
• When playing Venomist, bonus damage on envenom is higher for Naga.
• Deals 10% more damage against a poisoned enemy.
• Note: No longer has the forage ability.

Ogre:

Ogre is a new race and it is the basic ‘hits harder but takes more damage’ race. The idea is that they are permanently angry and in kind of a “berserker light”. We might do more with this later we’ll see how it goes. Ogres do 15% more weapon damage and 15% more skill damage plus a bonus to HP and moves regen, but they have a negative 25% physical and magical damage. Consider this one a little more ‘experimental’ than the others.

Tigran:

Tigran is a new feline race. Tigrans are loners and do better solo as they do not behave well in groups. Tigrans defining feature is the highest solo bonus exp rate of any race, and the highest group exp penalty. Tigran also has:

• An auto-attack racial skill that will bite or claw the target. There is a new ‘spamreduce noracial’ option if you want to turn off the messages for this. The hits are nododge which is something I’m not sure we want to keep but we’ll see how it goes.
• Permament sneak.

Note the training costs – they are negatively imbalanced due to their other
perks.

Troll:

Troll is this third mainly physical race and plays slightly differently based arond the natural regeneration. Their ability to heal via magic is limited but they have much faster regeneration.

Trolls have a smaller bonus to each damage category but no penalty which might be OP with their regen. The +50% hp/mana and moves regen replaces the ‘regeneration’ affect so that it can stack with ring of regen and troll also has:

• When they are in any state except fighting, they will regenerate as if they are sleeping.
• Trolls also have a certain amount of continuous regen, not only on tick. It is lower when they are fighting, but not disabled completely.
• Trolls do 50% more damage with bash.

The troll continuous regen is something I am considering experimental. It’s pretty cool to see your HP constantly increase every second but might be too much (or too little) on top of their higher tick regen.

Wraith:

Wraith is the Shadow race renamed and turned into a magic tank race to complement Gargoyle. It does lower damage but has 10% physical resistance and 20% magical resistance. Wraith is also considered undead (mobs included). Wraith has the following additional perks:

• Permanent pass door.
• Permament fly.
• Shadow form (sneak).
• Movement does not cost any moves.
• 10% more damage when dealing shadow damage type (includes weapons).

That’s it for the races. The remaining 6 races (halfling, human, sprite, triton, vampire and wolfen) will get their upgrades in coming reboots as there is still a little work to do on those.

Level Range         : 5 to 30
Goal Difficulty     : Medium
Goal Recommended at : 15
Area Author         : Tsubaki
Goal Converter      : Teleron

Other Changes in this Update:

• You can now put the current room sector in your prompt with %S.
• If you have noexp on, it will no longer consume a daily bonus exp mob and instead give a message:

  Daily bonus exp not used. You have 56 bonus exp kills remaining.

• Similar change, I have made the messages when you are effectively ‘noexp’ while in a gquest more consistent with the noexp messages and they will not use a daily double bonus if you have one.
• The ‘recon’ command is now available to everyone. When you use recon without having the skill, it shows only the room / area and sector. Sector is a little different because it also shows the sector flags if they are different than the sector name. Sector flags is what tells the code if, for example, a sector type is considered inside/outside or nature. For example, recon in a field shows:

  Sector type is : Field (field, outside, nature)

  The rest of the information shown by recon is like the skill, so there are three scenarios:

  • If you don’t have the skill, the command ends.
  • If you have the skill but fail the roll, you see a message and the command ends.
  • If you have the skill and it works, you see the rest of the normal recon command.
• The Quest MCCP bonus has been removed and the base rewards for all quests have been increased by the same 2 Quest Points. We no longer need this perk and it just makes people who can’t use MCCP for whatever reason feel left out.
• The base QP reward for all gquest wins has been increased slightly. The bonus for the lower tier of gquests has been removed – all three tracks reward the same now.
• You can’t invite someone to a group if you are ignoring them.
• Fixed a bug in keyring list/sort and vault list/sort where it showed the count of items out of order if you had paging on.
• Fixed a bug with entering a portal then getting immediately transferred by a mob showing the final room twice.
• There is a new ‘nofollow players’ option to remove any following players but leave pets. It does not change status like ‘nofollow’ with no arguments does.
• There is a new ‘vault status’ option that shows just a summary of what is in your vault.
• Nothing you can immediately see here but a bunch of mobprog / lua tools we added to allow mobs and areas to have variables assigned to them that can save over a reboot. These can be used to track many things but the immediate use is for preserving epic state / repop times over reboots. Robbo has already done a lot of work on [ AREAS ] for this so please send us a note if you notice anything unusual with repops or epic/goal state in these areas.

Just a few updates from the reboot last week:

• The timer for ‘race change’ is now three days. Please note that this change is temporary while we are working on races and will not apply to any timers already in place.
• Fixed the ‘group’ display for hp/mana/moves over 100k.
• Added some new building tools for tracking progress across reboots and testing if there is an upcoming reboot.

New Automated Reboots:

Usually when we reboot they are handled manually. There is a new system where we can set a timer and the game will start to warn when we are 30 minutes out then at various intervals.

As we get closer to the reboot, various game functions will be disabled – a list of what is restricted and how far out from the reboot is below.

30 minutes to reboot:
– Gquests will not start.
– Wars will not start and cannot use ‘startwar’
– Cannot start a poker game.
– Lasertag games will not start and a game cannot be manually started.

20 minutes:
– Cannot start a mafia game.

15 minutes:
– Cannot superhero loud.
– Cannot use daily double.
– Cannot use double exp christmas card.

10 minutes:
– Cannot use regular auction or remort auction.
– Donation double will not run.
– Cannot retier.

5 minutes:
– Cannot use oedit, medit, redit, zedit or mpedit.
– Cannot create a new player.
– Cannot quest request.

1 minute:
– Cannot log in to the game if not an imm.

There are probably other things that should be in here. Epics have to be managed individually. There are some new changes for mobprogs to know if we are near a reboot and to save data across reboots so more to come on that and epics…we are not close to rebooting daily yet anyway (except this weekend apparently).

These are a few other things that will be different while there is a countdown to a reboot:

• The commands ‘time’,’realtime’ and ‘weather’ will all show when there is a reboot scheduled.
• If you login and there is an ice-age pending, it will tell you.
• If double exp or doubleqp are running at the time of reboot, they will be saved and restarted after. With other doubles blocked this should only to hourly double and imm started double exp/qp for special occasions.
• The following now save across reboots:

  – Shopkeeper gold.
  – Mobdeaths, mobkills, areadeaths, etc … these reset monthly with the
  monthly rankings.
  – Channel history for global and clan channels. Personal channels like
  ftalk, spouse and group chat do not save.

We have changes the way races and stat bonuses work. In additions to the current variations by stat cost, each race can now have plus or minus percentages in each of these categories:

      Weapon Damage Inflicted
      Skill Damage Inflicted
      Spell Damage Inflicted
      Healing Cast on Self
      Healing Cast on Others
      HP Regen Rate
      Mana Restoration Self (spells and potions)
      Mana Regen Rate
      Move Restoration Self (spells and potions)
      Moves Regen Rate
      Exp Gained While Solo
      Exp Gained in Group
      Max Hit Points Bonus
      Max Mana Bonus
      Max Moves Bonus

Most of these are fairly self explanatory. The only ones that probably need further explanation are:

• Solo Exp Rate / Group Exp Rate – based on group members in the room sharing in the exp at time of mob death. You can be in a group and still earn solo exp if you are solo at the time.
• Hp / Mana / Moves – does not add to permanent HP and has nothing to do with increases when you gain a level. It is a calculated bonus based on your base HP / mana / moves. This bonus can also take you over the normal hard-max for hp, mana and moves.
• The regen modifiers have no impact either way in negative regen rooms.

We are working through assigning these to the various races but, in the meantime, I have assigned some temporary values to some of the lesser used races so that you can experiment with them: dark-elf, dwarf, elf, giant and halfling. Remember that as of the last reboot you can no change race free of charge every 7 days using raceinfo.

Please do note the temporary part, these values will almost definitely change as we work through the full list of races. They are set based on feedback from a group of players so hopefully make sense overall but some of the values added just to make sure we have at least one plus and minus in every category. Resists have also changed for these races to be more impactful, stat costs have not.

There is a new race editor where these values can all be changed without a reboot so we can experiment with them and see what works without having to wait for reboots.

Other changes related to Races:

• There is a new section in ‘raceinfo’ to show each of these bonuses.
• The syntax ‘stats hp’ will show your HP / Mana / Moves total – useful when your race has a bonus or penalty on one of these.
• The ‘lastkills exp’ command includes an extra column for race exp if your race has an EXP modifier.
• Raceinfo will now show % signs next to resists when there is a value.

Other Changes:

• Fixed a bug in ‘lastkills’ – it now shows the correct total EXP when double was on.
• New options in the note editor to help with creating ‘blindmode’ content:

        .snr    : Shows the note with color codes *and* line numbers.
        .snh    : Shows the note in blindmode 0 then blindmode 1.
  	  

• Donation double will no longer run when the MUD is flagged as rebooting.
• Nothing you can directly see but put in some tools to help imms workthrough the keys / nosave items list.

  For a general upate on the keys/nosave items – there is a list of almost 1000 items that imms are working through and most keys that that are NOSAVE are getting that flag removed so that they inherit the normal timer. Quite a lot of NOSAVE items that are not keys are tied to goals and these are getting a 5 day timer instead. I don’t know if this area has been done yet, but a good example is all the goal items in Hotel Orlando for example are NOSAVE but will be changed to the 5 day timer. Each item is a separate decision but these are what we are going with unless there are special circumstances.

• The ‘disband’ command is enabled again.
• There is some work-in-progress in changing the way the MUD reboots. If we do end up having to reboot to fix a couple of things from this reboot the ice-age message will be different than usual and might not make sense until the whole thing is finished in the next planned reboot.

That’s it for this reboot, as I said last time expect generally more frequent reboots with fewer overall changes in each one (although this was a lot, the race code has been ongoing for quite a while).

A few various changes in this reboot:

• The global quest ranges have been changed to the list below and it is now only possible to be in one group at a time:

         - Less than 25 wins.
         - 25 to 199 wins.
         - 200 wins or higher.

• Below level 200, you will no longer gain experience while you are in a global quest and it is not possible to use daily blessing instant levels or cards that grant free levels until you exit or finish the gquest.
• Using classchange will now reset your stats (free rebuild) even if you change to the same class. There is a new ‘norebuild’ option to use if you don’t want to do a rebuild.
• The cost of the ‘free rebuild’ wish has been reduced to 500qp. It doesn’t make sense to charge more for a rebuild than a full classchange with instinct/mastery rebuild.
• There is a new ‘race change’ option that works like subclass change for when you only want to change race and nothing else. You can use this every 7 days free of charge. This was added to simplify race changes and to make it easier because there are some bigger changes coming to races.
• If you use classchange to change race or subclass only the game will warn you that using subclass change or race change might be better and will also show if you currently have those options available free of charge.
• As as last resort, if you have to pay for a stat rebuild the old way, the cost is now 5% of trains not 20%.
• You can now use ‘group name’ as a quick way to see only the group name and the leader (Scars). While I was in there anyway, I also added ‘group summary’ which shows the top section of ‘groups’ but not the list of members.
• Using the new spamreduce silent option will now show the room and send room info via GMCP if the run is cancelled because of bad directions or an aggressive mob.
• Fixed the formatting of the gquest results notes and some of the oversized rankings.

Changes to Keys / More frequent reboots:

We are working on moving to a system where we reboot smaller changes in more often so that maintenance things and minor fixes don’t take forever held up by larger projects. We might not get there right away because there is a lot to work through but I would even like to see daily reboots eventually.

You will see quite a few changes related to this, the first is that keys can now be saved but will expire after 14 days of real time. Real time means that the items will be removed at the set time regardless of whether or not you are online. Clan keys still cannot be saved and any items marked NOSAVE will still not save.

Imms can override this default 14 days with another value for specific keys. Feel free to post to ideas if you have a strong case of your own why some specific keys should be nosave or more or less time. This change might be annoying now but you will be grateful for it as we start to reboot more often.

Also, now that all keys are timed items, it should not be possible to auction or donate them etc.

Upcoming changes for more frequent reboots:

Thinking ahead to what else we need to do to reboot more often, after the next reboot shops will save their gold, mobdeaths/area deaths etc will save and reset with the monthly rankings and global/clan channel histories will save. Saving all personal channel history (ftalk, spouse, group, etc) isn’t viable so it will not save, but most people capture chats to another window anyway.

We will need to remove NOSAVE from some goal items and give those items a fixed timer instead so that goal status isn’t resetting on people daily. Some other areas will have to change the way they repop or they will be able to be run more often than the builders intended.

Manor contents will *not* save. We have always said that they are not vaults and always warned never to leave anything on a manor floor you care about because the MUD can crash at any time. This hasn’t changed.

I am sure there will be other things to work through – if you have specific goals / items in mind or other features that will be an issue with rebooting daily please post them to ideas and include ‘reboot’ in the title so we can filter them all at once.

Changes to Resistances:

There are quite a few changes related to resistance and how it works. The biggest change is that the resist or vulnerability that goes with a race is now a fixed percentage and is not affected by the diminishing returns of regular resist points – so 10% race resist / vuln is 10% regardless of your other stats.

There are some other changes that go along with this:

• The effect of resistances and vulnerabilities overall has been reduced both their vulns and resists will have less effect. With so many other damage reductions on top of resists you might not even notice this. If you have very high resistance (1000+) and a high race resist or vuln you will notice more of a difference because that race value is having more of an affect.
• The ‘resists’ command has been modified to show the effective percentage of all your resists combined.
• The old ‘base’ resist of 100 is gone. This isn’t a nerf, it took that base 100 resists to even out to 0% so it only made things more complicated than they needed to be and I don’t remember why it was ever there.
• It’s a very crowded table, but ‘raceinfo resists all’ will now show resists for all races.
• The ‘resists’ lines in score and shown in ‘resists bars’ are now based on your overall resist %. The amount of resist it takes to get the bar full is now much higher so your bars will look shorter.
• Anything in the game that shows mob resists has been modified to show the percentage. If you notice any missing, please let me know.

For now I am just getting this code settled. The bigger rewrite to races is being reviewed on the test port and you are likely to see base resistances in many of the races change as these come live. Going through this exercise and looking more closely at the percentages has made it clear that a lot of the spells that give resists also need improving. I’d hoped to have some of the other race changes live this reboot but needed to get this resistance code and the race change option in first.

Note: You can only enter this area if you have less than 25,000 powerups total.

Innocent souls have been ensnared within this mystical realm by mischievous faeries. Trapped within the bodies of birds, their untapped potentials are being held captive by the faeries’ capricious whims. Once destined for world-changing fates, they now navigate the lush treetops and winding waterways of the swamp. They yearn to fulfill their thwarted destinies, but their aspirations are forever hindered by the faeries’ playful interference.

Level range         : 200-201
Area Author         : Robbo & Guinnes

New Goal in Sanctity of Eternal Damnation:

In the icy, volcanic mountains of Gelidus, lies a trapdoor to a place of pain and endless suffering. The air reeks of rotting flesh and the halls echo with the moans of the undead. The ground is littered with bones and skulls of those who dared to enter unprepared.

This place is known as the Sanctity of Eternal Damnation. Every violent, grotesque form of torture is inflicted on hapless creatures. The actions are done in a ritualistic manner, as though the actions are a form of worship.

The perpetrators of these acts are empowered by the Demi-God of Pain. Very few adventurers have laid eyes on it and lived. The survivors claim the evil being must be immortal and invincible, with powers beyond comprehension. It seems that the Sanctity of Eternal Damnation is a place of pure evil and darkness. It is said that the only way to defeat the Demi-God of Pain is to find the ancient artifact that is hidden somewhere in the sanctity. But beware, for those who enter the Sanctity of Eternal Damnation do so at their own peril. Are you brave enough to take on this challenge?

Level Range         : 100 to 201
Goal Difficulty     : Easy
Goal Recommended at : 200
Goal Converter      : Kelaire & Scars
Area Author         : Taath & Bremen

There are some new color codes that support blindmode. Anything between @A and @E will not be shown to users with blindmode on. Anything between @F and @H will only be shown to users with blindmode on.

These new codes will allow us to have different descriptions in extra descriptions, helpfiles, identify descriptions, notes and other areas of the game. It will also allow us to start to work through in-game commands to have different layouts when blindmode is on without having to have two sets of code for each command.

Some details on these codes:

1. Multiple commands had to be modified to not allow these color codes. Anywhere a player can set something that is later seen by someone else, so:

   from, email, www, mstatus, title, afkmsg, battlecry, enter msg,
   exitmsg, leavemsg, visitmsg (imms), graffiti, groupname, pet names,
   afkmsg, vote booth fields, clanadmin settings, channel usage
   (including channel emotes, *think, *say, whisper, etc).
   

2. A few areas such as descriptions, notes and clanadmin editmotd do allow these codes to be used so that you can put @A and @E around any ASCII art etc in your content. In these cases, it should be impossible to enter @A without a closing @E and the same with @F and @H.

A good example of how these are useful in the code game too is to check the ‘clients’ command with blindmode 0 then blindmode 1 – there is no actual difference in code for these two versions, only markup using these 4 new codes.

Note-autoformatting and new note read options:

These are a group of changes around finally dealing with longer lines in notes and formatting notes for those who still want it.

• There is no longer a line size limit when entering notes. Or, more accurately, it is the size of the max input the game will allow in a single line (just over 1000 characters). I don’t recommend you enter notes this way, it will be really annoying when you hit max.
• The game will automatically format notes that contain lines over 79 characters as you read them. You can turn off the auto-format permanently with a new config command: noteformat [on/off]
• Because note formatting will not always be useful, any note that has no lines over 80 characters will not be touched at all. This means that when writing notes you still have full control over your note layout if you don’t go over the previous limits.
• While reading notes, you can use the commands to turn on/off note read options for the current note only:

  note read f        : Format the current note.
  note read nof      : Don't format the current note - some notes will look
                       strange auto-formatted, use this to read them plain.
  
  note read #        : show line numbers in front of notes.
  note read no#      : dont line numbers in front of notes.
  
  note read prefix   : show | prefix on current note.
  note read noprefix : don't show | prefix on current note.
  

  Each of these options has alternatives like ‘format/noformat’,’lines/nolines’, ‘pre/nopre’ etc. I will put a full list of them at the bottom of ‘help notes’.

• When a you read a note and it is formatted automatically, you will see a line like this:

  Note auto-formatted…use ‘note ran’ to read unformatted.

  ‘Note ran’ is a shortcut for ‘note read again noformat’. If you don’t want to see these messages at all, you can use ‘config noteftag [on|off]‘ to turn these notifications off. There is no separate command for this one and it only shows in ‘config all’.

• Added a couple of commands that existed only in the description editor to the note editor:

      .ra  : Same as replace but replaces all occurrences.
  
      .size: Shows size of the note.
  

  That’s it for this round of changes – hopefully this will make reading and managing notes easier for everyone.

  ]]> https://www.aardwolf.com/blog/2024/01/21/new-blind-accessibility-features-premonition-instinct-others/ Sun, 21 Jan 2024 18:47:40 +0000 https://www.aardwolf.com/blog/?p=1120 The main reason for the reboot this time was for the previous note but there’s a few other things ready:
  • We have removed the instinct in the Oracle skill Premonition. The skill will now act as if you had full instinct by default. Any trains or gold spent on instinct in this skill have been automatically refunded to instinct trains/gold.
  • The ‘time’ command now shows if the current time is considered daytime, evening or night time. The exact start and end time of each varies by the season.
  • The amount of HP restored by consume has been reduced. Additionally, vampires will take 10% more damage when fighting outside during the daytime. This applies to both mobs and players.
  • There is a new ‘spamreduce silentrun’ option that will suppress room names while running. It isn’t perfect because some ‘runto’ paths are actually more than one run so you will see rooms between each one but this should cut down on a lot of spam for players using screen readers who don’t want to see every room name. That ‘multiple runs’ is why I didn’t add any kind of “You have arrived” message after each run either.
  • Cleaned up several rankings where mob kills or total powerups had outgrown the column width.
  • There is a new option to add a ‘VI room description’ to rooms. When a player has ‘blindmode’ set to 1 or 2, if a room has a VI description it will be displayed instead of the main description. A good example is the description I put at the entrance to Deathtrap Dungeon which will display instead of the large ASCII art. We will require this to be set on all rooms in the main game that have ASCII art in them. Please post rooms you are aware of to typos, but read the board first to see if it is there already.

    For manors and clans with ASCII art it is optional – if you do choose to set these descriptions, cost will be the same as a regular description.

  Newbie Superhero Areas

  To allow us to create one or two areas specifically for new superheros, we have added the ability to max a “max powerups” on an area.

  The first area of this type is the a new area by Robbo and Guinness called “An Auspicious Star’s Zenith” that you can only enter if you have less than 25,000 powerups total. This area isn’t here yet, so more to come on that.

  Some things to know about this new field:

      - Any areas with this value set are automatically noexplore.
      - All mobs in these areas are excluded from global quests.
      - You can only get a quest or campaign in these areas if you can access
        them.
      - We will not add goals in these areas, or if we do we will make sure they
        do not count towards any rankings.
      - Using 'Areas maxpups' will show areas with this set (nothing live yet)
  

  Other minor fixes and changes

  • Dtrack skill / skill reset will now correctly reset number of skill/ spell uses.
  • Echocommands will now echo what you entered before any special “this room only” commands are checked – this makes it consistent with the part of the helpfile that says it echos what you typed regardless of whether or not it is a valid command (Popa).
  • The syntax ‘allspells [primary class] subclass’ now works with all classes not just your primary.
  • I have set inertial barrier to explicitly use instinct in ‘protection evil’ and accelerate to use ‘haste’ – this should solve the problem where Psi can benefit in instinct in these abilities but doesn’t have them without other remort classes.

  That’s all for this time, have fun with the dragons!

  ]]> https://www.aardwolf.com/blog/2024/01/21/season-of-dragons/ Sun, 21 Jan 2024 18:40:50 +0000 https://www.aardwolf.com/blog/?p=1117 For years, trade routes through the Great Eastern Desert have had a ban placed on them due to the dangers that lurk within the sands. Now, with the elevated power of Andolor’s chosen, they have been opened once more. Whispers of shimmering white walls have caught the ears of the auspicious, but also the danger of dragons lurking beneath the
  surface of the Dunes in Gold.

  Moreso, there are whispers of another dragon that has awakened somewhere within the icy tundra to the far north, but seasoned travelers dismiss these rumours as hearsay.

  ]]> https://www.aardwolf.com/blog/2023/12/17/new-area-quests-goals-public-manor-rooms-other-changes/ Sun, 17 Dec 2023 20:19:00 +0000 https://www.aardwolf.com/blog/?p=1063 New Goal in Anthrox:

  Many of the troll heroes that populate the world of Aardwolf originate as the best and the brightest of the thriving city of Anthrox. Anthrox is found settled in amidst the Greenwart Swamp in the southeast corner of the main continent, Mesolar.

  Despite its uncivilized appearance, Anthox enjoys a flourishing society with a leadership hierarchy that promotes honor and respect among its people. That said, they find most visitors to be unwelcomed guests and even its returning citizens are considered adversaries among the local population.

  If you consider venturing into this troll-dominated region, be mindful of lack of diplomacy and distaste for outsiders.

  Also don’t forget to shower, if you return.

  Axa has instructed Borteg to complete the invasion of Anthrox. Perhaps you could investigate this?

  Level Range         : 80 to 110
  Goal Difficulty     : Difficult
  Goal Recommended at : Level 110
  Goal Min Level      : Level 100
  Goal Max Level      : Level 150
  Goal Converter      : Kelaire & Scars
  Area Author         : Maerchyng
  

  New Goal in Dortmund:

  Nestled in the countryside lies a small town known as Dortmund. For years they have been known for their export, ermine fur. However, lately the caravans have completely stopped and no word has been sent as to why. You remember seeing a poster in market square from some mayor, Darkon Stills you think his name was, saying that Dortmund needed some adventurers to look into a problem with a cave or something. Maybe no one took the job and they are having too many problems to continue shipments of ermine. Ermine is pretty valuable, maybe you should wander over there and see if they still need help. If it works out you could possibly make a small fortune.

  Level Range         : 5 to 25
  Goal Difficulty     : Easy
  Goal Recommended at : 20
  Goal Converter      : Zolstead
  Area Author         : Calabus
  

  Manor expansions and public rooms:

  Several changes to manors in this update:

  • It is now possible to make manor rooms public. To make a room public you must be the owner and it will cost 1,000,000 gold in land registry fees. The syntax is simply ‘home public’ or ‘home private’. Using ‘home public’ will give a warning and require a confirm option. You can make some rooms public and still keep the rest private.

    When a room is public, anyone can enter the room but they cannot use area exits other than to Aylor. They *can* take or sacrifice items on the floor so we recommend you move important items to other rooms before making any public. Using ‘look’ will also show a new flag [Public] when a room is public.

  • To go with this change, it is possible to increase the number of rooms in your manor beyond 5, but every 5 rooms is an additional 10tp cost. So:

               Rooms  1 -  5   : 10tp
               Rooms  6 - 10   : 20tp
               Rooms 11 - 15   : 30tp
               Rooms 16 - 20   : 40tp
               Rooms 21 - 25   : 50tp
               ...
    

    This is deliberately expensive and we don’t expect it to be used much, but it’s better than a hard no for anyone who *really* wants a bigger manor.

  • It is now also possible to change the sector type of your porch as long as it is not to a sector that causes other players problems such as quicksand.
  • You can now see maps in your manors and into Public flagged rooms. If you don’t want this you can have the NOMAP flag set on your rooms (help MU-ROOMS). If you want the map of your manor but don’t like the way the area exits clutter up the map, you can also request a ‘nomap’flag be set on the exits (help MU-EXITS). There might be a lot of these over the next few days so please be patient if the upgrade takes a while.

  Other code changes this reboot:

  • Tidied up eqsearch so that it will not suggest both shields and off-hand weapons if you can’t wear both. What it shows will depend on what you are wearing at the time.
  • The chances of bloot loading in a room is now modified by how many object resets are in the room – more resets means less chance per item.
  • Increased the base damage on the Harmer spell Void Sermon a little.
  • The code around superhero and whether it is better to let it restore stats (almost always) or force norestore can get quite complex at times and wasn’t always giving the best advice. I have changed the code to take into account the free rebuild you get when restoring the previous stats. I think this might actually mean that the norestore option will almost never be seen now unless you really screwed up a rebuild in the past.
  • There are several options to ‘spells’ such as movement, dodge, resist, etc that didn’t work with ‘allspells’ – they do now. Using ‘help spells’ shows a list of them.
  • Dtrack now tracks critical hits and shows the critical hit percentage.
  • Dtrack now tracks critical spells if you are a class that has the possibility or have cast critical spells via an Oracle prophecy.
  • Dtrack now also tracks both your dodges and combined dodges of enemies you are fighting. You can see the table of dodges using ‘dtrack dodges’. Not sure who useful the second one is but I needed it to test some changes of my own so figured I’d make it available.

    Keep in mind with dodges, most dodges block a lot of hits so whichever dodge is checked first will have the highest number. It is usually your class specific dodge checked first then dodge itself next.

  ]]> https://www.aardwolf.com/blog/2023/12/17/oracle-class-additions-5-new-abilities/ Sun, 17 Dec 2023 19:58:24 +0000 https://www.aardwolf.com/blog/?p=1034 There are several new abilities for the Oracle subclass in this reboot. Full details are below:

  New Passive Ability – Foresight:

  With their heightened intuition and divinatory powers, the Oracle can anticipate and better respond to the actions of their enemies. Foresight allows the Oracle to predict how an opponent will move in combat which gives them the ability to better dodge incoming attacks and better place their own attacks which reduces the opponent’s ability to evade the Oracle’s attacks.

  Foresight will also lead to an improved ability to land critical hits, and, allows the Oracle to predict how an enemy will respond to their spells leading to critical hits with magic in addition to physical attacks.

  Learning instinct in Foresight will further increase these benefits and also assists with prophecies (see ‘help prophecy’)

  Foresight is a passive ability and always active.

  New Passive Ability – Prophecy:

  The Oracle’s preternatural ability to communicate with their deity allows them to share some of their Foresight with others by issuing prophecies to their companions. These predictions will provide a minor boon to the Oracle’s group while they are active. Because the prophecies are bound to the foresight of the Oracle, training instinct in Foresight will also increase the clarity of these prophecies.

  To issue a prophecy use ‘cast prophecy [type]’. The types available are listed below. If you give no type the spell will use the prophecy from the last time you cast the spell. This spell does not add an affect to the group members when cast – just being in the group with an Oracle that has this effect is enough, so it works more like totems than “group spells”.

  The available prophecies are:

     prophecy of intuition  : provides a bonus to landing physical criticals.
     prophecy of cognition  : provides a small ability to land spell criticals.
     prophecy of evasion    : slightly reduces damage taken.
  

  Multiple prophecies of the same type in a group do not stack but three different Oracles can each share a different prophecy to provide a group with the full benefit.

  Note that the idea behind prophecy is that you are sharing your Foresight with your group so you do not get the benefit of it yourself – you can still get the benefit of another Oracle in the group with the same prophecy type as you.

  New Oracle ability – Premonition:

  Premonition gives the Oracle a chance to receive a vision of their next quest and the option to request another. The vision only lasts a short while before it becomes reality and the quest is locked in. When the Oracle requests a second quest, it will always be in a different area than the quest shown in their vision. Only one vision can be received after which a quest must be either completed or failed.

  Gaining instinct in Premonition will increase the chances of receiving a premonition with each quest with the ability reaching 100% at max instinct.

  Premonition will also occasionally show a vision of a campaign and allow the Oracle to re-roll a single target using ‘campaign reroll [target#]’ – when you get premonition on a campaign it will show the list of targets and their numbers – you can see that again using ‘cp check numbers’.

  New Oracle ability – Divination:

  Oracles are able to foretell what type of damage is most likely to hurt an opponent. This ability is automatic and works like ‘peek’ – if the target has any vulnerabilities it will report the strongest. If a target has multiple vulnerabilities at the same level, it will report the first one found.

  You can temporarily turn off divination messages using ‘spamreduce divination’

  New Oracle ability – Eye of Vigilance:

  Oracles have the ability to leave an eye of vigilance in certain rooms. The eye will alert its owner whenever a mob or a player their level or lower enters the room, and, when an area resets. The eyes can only be detected by other Oracles the level of the eye or higher.

  The duration is based on the wisdom of the Oracle and the eye cannot be replaced until 10 minutes have passed.

  Casting eye of vigilance with no arguments will show either the current location of the eye or add a new one if it is allowed in the current room.

  Oracles can give basic commands to an eye already in the game using the new ‘eye’ command:

     eye dismiss  : Remove a current eye of vigilance from the game.
     eye close    : Turn off eye of vigilance output.
     eye open     : Turn on eye of vigilance output.
     eye status   : Shows where your eye of vigilance is.
  

  Eye of Vigilance cannot be cast in lasertag, a private room that you do not own or rooms that are any of ‘nomob’, ‘safe’, clanroom, combat maze or Aylor.

  You can see people sneaking through the room if you would normally be able to see them in the room (detect hidden) and you can see stealth players moving through the room if you have Eye of Warning on. You should also see someone enter or leave the room via a portal or transport spells (allspells movement all shows a list although not all of those actually move the character) and some other commands that move a character around such as quitting/entering the game, home, leaving for wars, etc. Mob transfers are not shown because they typically don’t echo anything to the room.

  ]]> https://www.aardwolf.com/blog/2023/11/11/shaman-guardian-update/ Sun, 12 Nov 2023 01:34:36 +0000 http://www.aardwolf.com/blog/?p=966 Ranger and Guardian Changes:
  • Gaias Focus changes:
    • Can now be cast even if Gaias Revenge is already up.
    • Removed damage types air and water, added energy. Full list of damage types is now Earth, Electric, Energy and Cold.
    • Like Elemental Focus, this Will now remember the last damage type it was used with.
      – Gaias focus now casts when using in-game ‘spellup’.
  • Gaias Revenge changes:
    • Damage types use the same damage types as Gaias Focus.
    • Base damage has been increased.
    • Effect of instinct has also been increased.
  • Totem Force and Totem Guidance no longer set a recovery so they can both be cast at the same time.
  • For Shamans, Eruption has been replaced with Gaias Fury. This spell will use whatever damage type your Gaias Focus is set to. Any amount practiced or instinct that you had in Eruption has been moved to Gaias Fury.
  • The base damage of both Eruption and Gaias Fury has been increased and so has the effect of instinct. They still don’t do as much damage as the top tier casts spells but Ranger total damage per round is in good shape now relative to other classes, especially with a Bear Totem up for Shamans.
  • The delay on shoot when affected by Volley has been reduced which means you will get more shots in on average before the Volley expires.
  • Changed the rounding of exp on Owl Totem so it round up in the same way that combat empathy and other exp bonuses do.
  • Guardians can now wear a shield with both weapons. It might not seem like much but this is actually a fairly large buff when you add up the stats from the shield, access to shield block and damage reduction from wearing a shield while still having full melee.

  Other Changes

  • Almost all normal attack skills can now be used with dtrack. The Paladin ‘Charge’ skill can now also be used with dtrack – in this case ’rounds’ doesn’t make much sense but damage per use may be useful. By ‘normal’ attack skills I mean the standard kind of skills where you use them against the mob you are fighting and they do some damage. There are still a few ‘special’ skill this does not work with.
  • The base (not instinct) version of Humility was incorrectly nerfed a little last reboot and the full-instinct version was too high because of the rounding in the calculation to add instinct. It was only a few percent exp overall but noticeable for anyone tracking exp. It is back to normal now. If you already have 200 instinct you won’t notice much difference because the total bonus is around the same.
  • The check to use whichever mastery is for elementalist spells was not working for Air Skewer – now fixed.
  • The Knight skill ‘Charge’ now has instinct that increases damage – more instinct means more damage.
  ]]> https://www.aardwolf.com/blog/2023/09/09/subclass-paradise-lost-goal/ Sat, 09 Sep 2023 17:51:25 +0000 http://www.aardwolf.com/blog/?p=959 Another reboot with lots of updates, most of these are related to subclass changes and, in most cases, these are buffs:

  Subclass Changes:

  • The effectiveness of Enhanced Damage on melee attacks has been increased fairly significantly for warriors and a smaller amount for thieves, rangers and paladins. The increase is based on Strength (Dex for thieves) so you will notice more of an increase at higher levels. This increase does not apply to backstab damage.
  • For warriors, the chance of landing third, fourth, fifth and sixth attacks has also been increased. This increase is also based on stats – whatever is the appropriate stat for that skill, usually dex.
  • There is a new Harmer spell called ‘Void Sermon’ that is essentially the same as ‘Voice of God’ but does negative damage and costs a little less mana. This does also have instinct.
  • Made a couple of changes to the Humility (Priest) spell:
    • The duration of Humility (Priest) has been extended and uptime will be much higher for everyone, it will now reach 100% uptime at a combined wis+luck of 600 whereas it previously needed 600 in both.
    • Humility now has instinct which will make the spell more effective as instinct is increased.
  • Curse of Sloth can now be cured at healers by using ‘heal sloth’. Unlike other spells, it will not let you waste the gold if you’re not affected by Sloth.
  • Power Projection now has a much shorter recovery time but is also slightly less effective. At around 150 int the recovery is low enough that the spell will be up 100% of the time unless you die. The recovery continues to get shorter so that you can re-cast it sooner if you die and at 600 int there is no recovery at all. Overall this is a buff but it does make the ‘burst’ damage a little less, however…
  • Power Projection now also has Instinct – more instinct increases your chances of additional casts.
  • Quite a few Elementalist changes so they get their own section. The short version of this list of changes is that, all combined, they make it so that Air Skewer, Earthen Hammer and Ice Daggers are equivalent alternatives to Immolate but with different elemental damage types.
    • Elemental Focus now has instinct. More instinct = more damage bonus for those damage types. The instinct increase in damage only applies to spells not melee damage but it is a fairly significant damage incresae overall.
    • The 3 higher level elementalist spells (Air Skewer, Earthen Hammer and Ice Daggers) now all have the same calculation as immolate and have been moved up a little in levels. These three spells will also now use instinct in Immolate so that you don’t have to buy instinct in all 4 spells. If you have instinct in either of these three spells we recommend that you classchange to free it up so that you can use it on something else. It is no longer possible to buy new instinct in those three skills/spells.
    • Showskill will inform you when a skill or spell shares instinct with another ability and will show the correct amount of instinct based on that shared skill.
    • When elemental focus is up, any damage done in Water, Air, Earth or Fire damage types will use whichever mastery of these 4 you have the highest amount in.

  Other non-subclass changes:

  • Added ‘MUDslinger’ to the list of clients recognized in the ‘clients’ command.
  • Made some changes to dtrack to help with some testing I am doing of my own:
    • Columns are wider to allow for commas in the format.
    • There is a new ‘damage per round’ melee average on the first line.
    • If you assign a skill using ‘dtrack skill’ it will save over reboot.
    • Expanded the output of the dtrack skill section because ‘hits’ isn’t too useful without come context around how many casts that is. This section now shows how many times you cast the spell, number of hits per cast and how many casts. Currently only works for spells, skills need to be updated individually so that is to follow.
  • Each hour, time last on in the roster will update for players online. This solves an issue with ‘last on’ appearing to be days ago if someone stays online for a long time. Roster used on imms (wolf clan) no longer shows date last on at all.
  • When ‘Sense Life’ was written we didn’t have epics with extended repop times. When the repop time is more than an hour, the output will now change to something like this (Nuanse):

        You sense that life will return to this area in roughly 1 day,
        23 hours and 12 minutes.
    

  New Goal: Paradise Lost:
  The King of Hell, Lucifer, has been acting strangely lately. He rarely
  talks, he only appears in public for short periods of time, and there is
  an odd stiffness to his motions. There are even whispers that he has been
  replaced by an impostor. If you’re determined to get to the bottom of this
  mystery, perhaps you should pay him a visit in his private chambers.
  Remember to bring a plaza pass!

  Level Range         : 50 to 70
  Goal Difficulty     : Easy
  Goal Recommended at : Level 70
  Goal Converter      : Alison
  Area Author         : Vladia
  

  ]]> https://www.aardwolf.com/blog/2023/07/15/areas-july-15th-2023/ Sat, 15 Jul 2023 17:33:40 +0000 http://www.aardwolf.com/blog/?p=955 We have quite a few other changes in today’s update, details below:

  New Area and Goal: Svrogan’s Logging Camp:

  After years at sea, with now tatterred sails and dwindling
  stores, the call from atop the main mast comes as a shock:
  "Land ahoy!". Captain Svrogan and his crew have been in search
  for the fabled Ironwood Isles. It is said the Ironwood trees
  produce the hardest wood known to man. Many have called it a
  fool's errand, and that it was but a fabled land. Svrogan
  however, knew that if he could find these Ironwood isles he
  could be a rich man indeed.
  
  In the distance, a faint glimmer akin to mirage in a desert 
  heat caught his eye. Encircled in a thick fog, only the faintest
  of treetops emerged high above. Just then, a ray of sunlight
  caught just right, and sent a cascade of brilliant light that
  pierced the fog ever so briefly. 
  
  At long last the journey for the lost Ironwood Isles is about
  to pay off! Svrogan knew that the journey was just beginning
  though, as now he would have to make shore and setup his
  logging camp before any profits would be seen. 
  
  Will you answer the call and help Svrogan and his lumberjacks
  establish camp on the island of the lost Ironwood forests?
  
  Level Range         : 80 to 110
  Goal Difficulty     : Medium?
  Goal Recommended at : Level  100
  Goal Converter      : Myrddin
  Area Author         : Myrddin 

  New Goal in the Dark Temple of Zyian:

  Among the villagers in Abend, whispers and rumors have said that people
  have gone missing when they are around the well. There are also rumors
  about a group of robed and hooded people entering and leaving the well. A
  few brave and adventurous people have gone into the well, and none have
  returned.
  
  Will you be the person to investigate what is happening and end their
  nefarious intent, or will you just walk by?
  
  Level Range          : 130 to 150
  Goal Difficulty      : Medium
  Goal Recommended at  : Level 140
  Goal Min Level       : Level 100
  Area Author          : Rundvelt
  Goal Converter       : Teleron
  

  Other game changes:

  • As I think most of you know (annnounce note 1437) there is a group of players and imms looking at changes to improve balance and PVP in the game. Part of this process will involve some experimental changes to try something and see how it goes.

    One of those changes is to speed up PVP at Superhero. As of this note, all PVP damage at level 200+ is doubled. Maybe it should be 50% or some other number or maybe we decide this is too broad of a change and remove it completely so let’s try it and see what we learn.

  • Aard has been without a web client for a while. I have been working on a modified version of MudPortal and getting it working for Aard. It has been out there for a while unannounced but it is now ready and available at:

    https://play.aardwolf.com

    Note that this is only meant to be a very basic quick way to try Aard, the Aardwolf Mushclient is still the recommended client. Also, although it is a web client this does report the *real* I/P address to the game so please don’t try to use it to multiplay.

  • The max number of people you can ignore has been raised from 10 to 20.
  • Scribed scrolls / brewed options will now have descriptions and keywords that look like this:

      +-----------------------------------------------------------------+
      | Keywords   : scroll 3xincompletehealing incompletehealing       |
      |            : 1xrefresh refresh                                  |
      | Name       : a scroll of 3*incomplete healing, refresh          |
      +-----------------------------------------------------------------+
    

    Note the difference between 3x in keywords and 3* in the description. One is better for reading the other is easier to manage items. (Yajan/Myth)

  • Fixed a couple things with the ‘clients’ command. Mudlet never counted correctly because of the way they change the client ID with each version and also added “Mudrammer” and the new web client.
  • ‘Runto healer’ now works in Aylor to take you to the healer. (Kelaire)
  • Wolf Spirits gives higher bonuses during three moons but this was only working if the spell was cast while outside. I removed the outside part of the requirement and also removed the lower duration under three moons.
  • Social usage by mobs and players is now tracked separately.
  • Fixed the player name not apppearing correctly in ‘yell’ when they have a pretitle set. (Talia)
  • The message when you gain a powerup will now show powerups this remort in the message. (Losteix)
  • When you use ‘:’ to emote no a channel, if the next character is ) or (it will use that instead so you can still do the basic smile/frown symbols on channels. (Guinness)
  • Fixed the ‘(Null)’ message to room whenever anyone wears/removes Aard sleeping bag.
  • There is a new policy for restrings – you don’t need every character to be a different xterm color, but this will allow a little more at least – short desc limit 40 characters as displayed / 100 characters including color codes, long desc limit has not changed as long desc generally should not have many (any?) color codes anyway. (Vilgan)
  ]]> https://www.aardwolf.com/blog/2023/07/15/classchange-rewrite-instinct-mastery-rebuilds/ Sat, 15 Jul 2023 17:21:57 +0000 http://www.aardwolf.com/blog/?p=950 Classchange rewrite and instinct / mastery rebuilds:

  A lot of work and discussion is taking place behind the scenes to improve balance between the subclasses.

  As part of the changes that are coming, we want to make it much easier to change primary class, masteries and instinct to be able to try out the changes as they are done. Because of this, there are some big changes to classchange:

  • You can now class change free of charge every 7 days. There is no decreasing cost, wait 7 days or pay the cost to change earlier.
  • The cost to classchange if you don’t want to wait is 1000qp. It does not reduce with time.
  • A class change will automatically rebuild mastery and instinct too. If you don’t want to rebuild these, you must use the NOINSTINCT and/or NOMASTERY options.
  • If you prefer to use the old commands to reset only mastery or only instinct, they work the same as before but there is a maximum cost of 500qp / 1000 trains which is significantly lower in most cases. These commands will go away eventually, except perhapt the ‘single skill’ version of instinct rebuild.
  • The ‘noskills’ option has been removed – classchange will no longer reset skills but will try to return practices for the skills you are losing based on what it would have cost you to practice them at current stats. If this paragraph makes no sense to you that is ok, NOSKILLS was overly complicated which is why it has been removed.
  • If you try to classchange to the same class, the game will warn you but allow it – this is for when you only want to rebuild mastery or instinct with the free classchange. When you use this option there is no automatic rebuild of stats.
  • Retier will also automatically reset mastery and instinct. If you don’t want this to happen, add the NOMASTERY and/or NOINSTINCT options when entering the retier command.
  • You can also use this command to change only subclass or race only. Details are in the helpfile.
  • Rebuild works the same as before but I added warnings to check classchange status first in case you are about to pay for a rebuild that would be free with classchange.

  I tried to keep the highlights in the note as simple as possible – there are quite a few options to the classchange command now. Full details are updated in ‘help classchange’.

  Hopefully these changes will make it easier to try new classes as we start to get into the individual subclass/class changes which you will start to see coming through in the next update.

  ]]> https://www.aardwolf.com/blog/2023/05/03/fractals-weave-update/ Wed, 03 May 2023 19:11:36 +0000 http://www.aardwolf.com/blog/?p=946 Some large updates to Fractals of the Weave were added today: --- Major Updates --- - A new minigame themed after the Unseelie Court. - A new minigame themed after a battle with corrupted Vorel. - A new minigame themed after caravan defense from desert raiders. - The above games feature 59 new explorable rooms for players. - Fractals of the Weave will now automatically repop every 60 hours. There is no announcement for the respawn, as players can arrange based on elapsed time. --- QoL Improvements --- - After each of the three minigames above, player health and mana is restored. - After you hand your thread in to the rewards mob at the end of the run, player health and mana is restored. --- Bug Fixes --- - A minor logic issue in the rewards code caused players to be transferred to the spire before rolling the additional loot table if they got lucky (random occurence). This has been fixed. - An invisible bug where shards tried to purge themselves as many times as there are players in the room has been fixed. --- Misc Changes --- - Fractals of the Weave and punching bag mobs can no longer be spawned until an hour between respective events has lapsed. - Credits have been updated. Thank you to those who helped me test these changes! --- Take Note --- - IMM-spawned Fractals events will be much more scarce and only occur on special occasions or odd weekends. - IMM-spawned Fractals events will not count towards the hour- long timers listed under Misc Changes. - Punching bag events and Fractals have seperate timers. You can still run a Highway Man/Martini Master/Knitting Needles/ clan mob directly after Fractals, provided there isn't already a cooldown timer in place. - Fractals will not automatically respawn upon posting this note, but there will be a global echo to announce when the repops do begin. This is due to observation on the new mechanics in a live environment. ]]> https://www.aardwolf.com/blog/2023/05/03/androgyne/ Wed, 03 May 2023 19:08:55 +0000 http://www.aardwolf.com/blog/?p=940 Androgyne/Non-Binary Gender, other changes:
  • The main reason for this reboot was to clean up a lot of things with gender. Mostly the messages like “They is dead!” and a lot of the socials. I think some of the clan info messages might still be off until we review them but, other than those, if you see any messages or socials where the wording just doesn’t fit with the gender, please post them on typos. Many thanks to everyone who helped go through all the socials on the test port – it was a lot of work and a few very dedicated people got it done quickly.
  • The ‘neutral’ gender that was known as ‘genderless’ for about 5 minutes is now called ‘Androgyne’. There is a ‘help androgyne’ which explains more about why. If anyone used tpspend to genderless and really doesn’t like this new name please contact me and I will return the trivia points so you can change back.

  
  HELP ANDROGYNE:
  Androgyne is the Aardwolf neutral (none-binary) gender. In-game actions 
  and commands will use they/them/their pronouns for characters with this 
  gender.
  
  After adding a non-binary / neutral gender into Aardwolf, we had some fairly
  long conversations about what to call it. Neutral was too easily confused
  with Neutral alignment. We had 'genderless' for a while and it just seemed
  too bland. The Wikipedia description for 'Androgyne' fits exactly what we
  want to accomodate and also has a "kind of RPG" feel to it:
  
  "An androgyne is a person who does not fit cleanly into the typical
   gender roles of his or her society. Androgynes may identify as beyond
   gender, between genders, moving across genders, entirely genderless, or 
   any combination or all of these. Androgyne identities include pangender,
   bigender, ambigender, nongendered, agender, gender fluid, or intergender.
   Androgyny can be either physical or psychological; it does not depend on
   birth sex and is not limited to intersex people."
  
  "An androgyne may or may not look androgynous. Someone who looks 
   androgynous may or may not be an androgyne. A "psychological androgyne" 
   is one term for a person who has an androgynous gender identity, but 
   doesn't necessarily look androgynous."
   
  

  This is a very complex and rapidly changing real-world situation while we are a fantasy based RPG. I do sincerely hope that these recent changes help make Aardwolf more inclusive, but we also need to move on and focus on the core game now. We will fix messages and code that just sounds “wrong” with the new gender, but no other changes for now.

  ---

  Some other changes in this reboot:

  • It is no longer possible to train stats with a cost higher than 1 while you have unallocated tier stats or wish stat.
  • There is a new command ‘areaquests’ that will show the most popular areas for quest targets. Like mobdeaths, this is on a delay and updates every 15 minutes or so. Not exactly Aardwolf’s biggest need but I wrote it to troubleshoot a bug report so figured I would make it available to everyone.
  • The ‘quest obj’ stat max amounts have been raised slightly, they are now as listed below:

         Levels 1-29    : 1 stat
         Levels 30-59   : 2 stats
         Levels 60-89   : 3 stats
         Levels 90-119  : 4 stats
         Levels 120-149 : 5 stats
         Levels 150+    : 6 stats
    

  • One of the gquest ranges has moved from 200-201 to 201-201 which means it will pick up some additional areas.
  • There is a new ‘spamreduce consider’ option – when this is turned on you will no longer see when other people consider mobs in the room.
  ]]> https://www.aardwolf.com/blog/2020/08/15/ranger-shaman/ Sat, 15 Aug 2020 17:39:41 +0000 http://www.aardwolf.com/blog/?p=927 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.
  ]]> https://www.aardwolf.com/blog/2019/07/07/goals-thief/ Sun, 07 Jul 2019 19:34:57 +0000 http://www.aardwolf.com/blog/?p=923 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.

  ---

  New Area and Goal – Tilule Rehabilitation Clinic:

  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

  ---

  New Area and Goal – Shadow’s End:

  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.

  ---

  New Area and Goal – Old Vanir:

  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.

  ---

  Other Game changes this reboot:

  • 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)>
  ]]> https://www.aardwolf.com/blog/2019/02/16/ranged-attack-skill-goal/ Sat, 16 Feb 2019 21:56:33 +0000 http://www.aardwolf.com/blog/?p=918 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.
  ]]> https://www.aardwolf.com/blog/2018/09/23/superhero-stats/ Sun, 23 Sep 2018 14:53:42 +0000 http://www.aardwolf.com/blog/?p=915 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.
  

  ---

  
  Other changes in this update:
  • 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.

  ---

  Minor changes and fixes:

  • 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.
  ]]> https://www.aardwolf.com/blog/2018/09/02/goals-clan-merge/ Mon, 03 Sep 2018 00:54:25 +0000 http://www.aardwolf.com/blog/?p=911 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

  ---

  Game changes this reboot:

  • 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.
  ]]> https://www.aardwolf.com/blog/2018/09/02/mud-update-march-31st-2018/ Mon, 03 Sep 2018 00:47:51 +0000 http://www.aardwolf.com/blog/?p=908 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.
  ]]> https://www.aardwolf.com/blog/2018/02/11/accessibility-bonus-equipment-improvements/ Sun, 11 Feb 2018 20:32:01 +0000 http://www.aardwolf.com/blog/?p=905 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.

  ]]> https://www.aardwolf.com/blog/2018/01/14/game-load-equipment-bonuses/ Sun, 14 Jan 2018 23:57:25 +0000 http://www.aardwolf.com/blog/?p=902 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.

  ---

  Other changes in this reboot

  • 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.
  ]]> https://www.aardwolf.com/blog/2017/11/17/winds-fate-epic-area/ Sat, 18 Nov 2017 00:01:18 +0000 http://www.aardwolf.com/blog/?p=898 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

  ---

  New Goal in Realm of the Zodiac

  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

  ---

  Code changes this reboot

  • 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.
  ]]> https://www.aardwolf.com/blog/2017/04/09/priest-martyr-merge-channel/ Mon, 10 Apr 2017 01:33:51 +0000 http://www.aardwolf.com/blog/?p=892 Priest / Martyr Subclass Merge:

  The Martyr and Priest classes have been merged with the subclass skills of the two combined into Priest. If you were a Martyr before this reboot then you should have received a note explaining the change. If you were a Priest before the reboot then you gained:

  Humility, Sacrifice life, Heavenly Smiting, Serenity

  Be sure to read the helps on these and if you just got these skills for the first time you will need to practice them. If you were a Martyr then any percent practiced in these should have carried over.

  ---

  Holy Preference / Unholy Preference – New Priest / Harmer Ability:

  There is a new Priest ability called ‘Holy Preference‘. More information is in the helpfile but the short version is that this a passive ability that causes Protection from Good to be ignored on the target, unless the target is also a Priest (and some mobs can be priests).

  There is a new corresponding Harmer ability called ‘Unholy Preference‘ that causes Protection from Evil to be ignored on the target. Again, more details in the helpfile but this does *not* stack with Desecration. I realize that for max-stat Harmers this does nothing at all as you can have Desecration up 100% of the time, but it will help at other levels and stat ranges.

  ---

  Channel Changes:

  There is a new feature to allow you to turn off a channel for a set number of minutes rather than permanently. This only works on regular channels, not channels tied to a specific feature such as auction. As an example, to turn off gossip for 10 minutes use:

   gossip *off 10

  If the channel is already off then you are basically setting a timer to turn it back on in 10 minutes. The timeout shows in the ‘channels’ command and if you manually turn on the channel in the meantime then any timeout on the channel will be cancelled.

  Gossip channel is relatively quiet these days and with this new feature in place to turn off the occasional temporary “explosion” on the channel, we would like to encourage more discussion on gossip rather than sidebar channels. Between that and clearing up a couple of channels we just no longer need, the following channels have been removed:

  Debate, Mxit, Sports, quote, Gsocial, Nobletalk, Advice and Gametalk

  Obviously we’re not going to tell people to move conversations to channels that don’t exist so this can be considered a loosening of the the channel rules in terms of where conversations take place. It does *not* change any of the rules about excessive trolling and spamming.

  These channels have also been removed from ‘gamestat 12’ and from colorset options.

  ---

  Other Changes in this Reboot:

  • The amount by which align impacts Paladin damage has been increased. This means that extreme align Paladins will do more damage with spells (approx 25%) then before the change. Paladins closer to neutral will do slightly less damage than before. I have seen suggestions to remove this alignment bonus / penalty completely but would rather keep it and make it more worthwhile.
  • The Blazing Fury spell has been added to the list of spells that cannot be used on clan items (staves, scrolls, etc). This was an earlier oversight as the other higher level paladin attack spells were already on the list. No impact to existing items in the game.
  • The ‘Desecration’ and ‘Party Sanctuary’ spells can now be cast while in combat.
  • Made ‘Curse of Sloth’ duration more based on stats and greatly reduced the recovery timer (Kane). Made the same changes to the ‘Flank’ skill.
  • When using Hammerswing, the hammer will start to slow down after the first 3 opponents in the room and do less damage to subsequent targets Overall damage over time (number of rounds) does still increase regardless of number of opponents.
  • The ‘Sacrifice Life’ spell will now show the actual amount healed. (Daresia)
  • The base percentage on Precision (soldier skill to ignore dodges) has been increased, particularly in PVP.
  • The ‘pkoff’ setting will now be set by default for new users. This is the one that prevents you from attacking another player via area attacks etc. (StarsOcar / Arcidayne)
  • Someone who is hardcore should now be able to attack OPK players but with the usual level checks in place. Someone who is OPK should be able to attack hardcore without level checks in place same as everyone else. (XiQuan)
  • When you Superhero you will now get a full restore. Not a big deal but with sometimes large amounts of HP being restored from saved stats this will allow a new superhero to enjoy their own double without having to spend 5 minutes healing. (DjVoltron / Soleila)
  ]]> https://www.aardwolf.com/blog/2017/02/12/avenger-inquisitor-merge/ Sun, 12 Feb 2017 21:12:34 +0000 http://www.aardwolf.com/blog/?p=884 Avenger / Inquisitor Merge:
  The Inquisitor and Avenger classes have been merged with all of the subclass skills of the two combined onto Avenger. If you were an Inquisitor before this reboot then you should have received a note explaining the change. If you were an Avenger before the reboot then you gained:

  Flay, Lash, Interrogate and Tortured Visions

  Be sure to read the helps on these and if you just got these skills for the first time you will need to practice them. If you were an inquisitor then any percent practiced in these should have carried over but you will need to practice Righteous Anger.

  ---

  Holy Reprisal – New Avenger Ability:
  There is a new Avenger ability called ‘Holy Reprisal’. This is an automatic passive skill like weapon skills or fast healing which means that you don’t have to cast it as a spellup. You do still have to practice it for it to start working.

  This skill will give you a damage bonus against any player or mob that initiates combat directly against you. This skill is not like revenge – when the fight stops the list of attackers is cleared. The main point of this skill was to give a damage bonus against aggressive mobs, the PK benefit is just a bonus.

  In terms of activating this skill, it does not trigger if the attacker has revenge against you or when the Safeguard skill is used to rescue someone. If someone attacks a group member present in the room at the time of the attack then you do get Holy Reprisal against them too. When a group member is attacked rather than the Avenger directly the reprisal is not as powerful, but still enough to punish them for attacking your group.
  

  ---

  Other Changes:

  • The ‘Tortured Visions’ ability now has no lag when casting but has a small recovery on failure of one round of combat. This means that you can try (and retry) the spell without it affecting other combat abilities but can’t just spam it with zero lag. The base amount of intelligence it removed has also been increased slightly.
  • The ‘info other’ channel has been removed as it was no longer needed. The double exp messages previously in there are now part of info global. The only other thing it was used for is remort / retier info which is now under classchange. The ‘levels’ info might have been more logical for that but I wanted it to be possible to get the info on ‘major’ levels such as remort and retier without having to keep on all the other level info spam.
  • Added a few new builder lua prog commands on the test port over the last couple of weeks so check them out if you’re a builder.
  ]]> https://www.aardwolf.com/blog/2017/01/28/classchange-costs-info-channel-redo-epic-deaths/ Sun, 29 Jan 2017 02:47:35 +0000 http://www.aardwolf.com/blog/?p=874 Aardwolf Server Move:
  Aardwolf moved to a new server tonight – the domains should update shortly but the new I/P address is 23.111.136.202. The domain ‘aardwolf.net’ can be used to reach the server immediately as DNS on that was updated weeks ago.

  Other than a general technology refresh this server will allow us to experiment with ‘instances’ and some other ideas we haven’t been able to touch because of memory constraints on our previous server.

  ---

  Aardwolf Update – January 28th 2017:

  Quite a few unrelated but important changes this reboot. The list is below:

  • There is now a ‘who wanted’ option.
  • The speed at which the Navigator “Timeshifting” spell reduces lag is now based on stats and is generally lower than before but now has 100% uptime. At max stats it is very close to what it was before so this is a minor buff overall. Navigator is clearly not one of the classes most in need of attention – this was a fairly quick fix to help depend on recoveries less, nothing more than that.
  • The ‘parry’ skill has been modified so that proficiency in your own weapon is far more important than the attacker’s weapon. This means that it is now possible (but still more difficult) to parry attacks with weapons you don’t know.
  • When dying in an epic area your chances of losing a stat have been greatly reduced. We have not removed the chance completely but it’s about 10% of what it was before the change
  • The starting cost of a class change is now 5,000qp and it will decrease 100qp per day over 50 days until you reach and eventual cost of zero. The previous 2,000qp minimum has been removed.
  • The way daily prayer reset tokens work has been changed so that they no longer reset your original timer. For example, the means that you can use a token with 3 hours left on your timer and the timer will still be 3 hours. Note that when you use a token it now does the new daily blessing immediately rather than simply resetting the timer – this was the only way the new timer could work.

    This also opens the potential for being eligible to receive a new DB while you already have effects from the previous one (you use a token close to original expire time). If this happens the game should warn you and require a ‘confirm’ option to overwrite the previous blessing.

  • Ambush will now completely ignore the HARDCORE flag – this means that you can only ambush a person in a room if you would be able to attack them normally in that same room. OPK and all other flags (should) work as before.
  • The OPK flag now shows in ‘whois’.
  • The ‘keyring data’ option now shows the actual color codes to make it consistent with invdata. If you want to see the actual colors, use ‘keyring data ansi’. Made this same change to the ‘vault data’ command.
  • There is now a 3 second period after a successful backstab during which you can’t flee. This closes a loophole with quickstab being able to backstab (no lag), flee, and repeat for each mob in the room with no delay. I did not add the delay to ‘retreat’ as retreat already has a skill delay. So now we have a ‘no flee’ recovery maybe it should be set for a while when you initiate pk on someone, or maybe not, just a thought…

  ---

  Info Channel Rewrite / New Filters:
  The way that the ‘info’ channel works has been redone. If you type ‘info’ now you will see a matrix of settings for on/off on each type of message but also for being able to make each type of message include friends or clan members only.

  
  
  
  If you set both options then friends _and_ clan members will show, not only people who are both. If you are not in a clan at all you’ll only see the ‘friends’ column. The previous ‘clanonly’ filter is no longer used – if you had that set then your levels, deaths and powerup info channels have been set to clanonly.

    To change options, Use the syntax:
  
         info [channel] [friends] to toggle on friends only.
         info [channel] [clanonly] to toggle clan only options.
  
    You can also abbreviate these 'fr' and 'cl'.
  

  When you view history for info you now view each type separately. You do see everything, not just what was filtered and shown to you. The syntax is:

  info -h [channel]

  The ‘channel’ value is any of those shown when you type ‘info’ with no arguments.

  Messages that previously went to info and couldn’t be filtered such as marriage, season changes and double exp are on a new ‘info global’ setting so there is probably some clean up to do between this and ‘info other’. The ‘notes’ info channel is also global as that is based on whether you are subscribed to the board not who posted it.

  ---

  Bugs Fixed in this Reboot:

  • When PK was changed to not create a corpse that was for convenience only and rot-death items were still supposed to have had the timer set.
    This also introduced a bug with clan keys and raid items not being removed in a PK death, including a suicide. I (hopefully) fixed this in a way that does not cause rot-death items to be removed in previous scenarios that didn’t produce a corpse such as morgue rooms, but needs testing. Sorry it took a while to fix this pretty serious bug, was super buy over the holidays and it was a fairly complex fix.
  • Fixed the 7 digit note numbers on personal – will correctly loop at 999,999 in future. Not going to fix the exiting note numbers so it will be ‘untidy’ for a little while until those personal notes expire.
  • Fixed a bug with the default ‘elemental focus’ type not being used correctly.
  • The ‘pkstats’ command was giving incorrect message for non-clanned or NOPK clanned players with OPK flag. Now fixed.
  • Fixed a bug with items carried and weight carried when a player dies to a mob with items on the keyring.
  • There was a bug in campaign rewards with practices not counting in your total for rebuild. For someone who does a lot of campaigns, this could result in negative practices showing in rebuild stats.
  ]]> https://www.aardwolf.com/blog/2016/10/24/opk-open-pk/ Mon, 24 Oct 2016 16:12:33 +0000 http://www.aardwolf.com/blog/?p=869 Open PK (OPK) feature added to Aardwolf:

  There is a new feature called ‘OPK’ which is an abbreviation of ‘open PK’.

  A player can flag ‘OPK’ at any time but, once set, cannot be removed for at least 3 days or until you remort. When the flag is manually removed, there is a 24 hour timer before it can be added again. The most important things to know about the flag are:

  • You can be PKed by other OPK players in any room in the game that is not a ‘safe’ room or similar.
  • There are no clan restrictions on using this. The game considers you a regular PK player regardless of clan. This means that any other ‘PK’ player (not just other OPK players)s can attack you in a PK room. Only other OPK players can attack you in a non-pk room. Other than this, who you can and can’t attack follows regular PK rules including level checks, not being able to kill people in same clan, etc.
  • While you are ‘OPK’ flagged, you will receive a 10% exp bonus for all kills, enhanced campaign rewards similar to hardcore and will receive, on average, 2 extra qp per quest. We will probably end up tweaking the numbers for both hardcore and OPK but right now these are decent bonuses for the added potential of interruption to your playing but intentionally less then hardcore bonuses.

  A few other housekeeping items related to Open PK:

  • You cannot be hardcore and OPK at the same time.
  • OPK (and Hardcore) players will no longer show their location in ‘where’ unless they are either in warfare, in a clan room, or you have revenge on them. Oracles and Ninjas can see full location.
  • Hardcore players, Hardcore kills, OPK Players, OPK kills and regular PK kills now show in gamestat 5. Pinning down exactly what is considered a “OPK kill” vs a regular PK can be tricky. A kill is considered ‘OPK’ if the two players wouldn’t have normally been able to kill each other without the flag but it doesn’t check every single scenario – mostly if the players in a non-pk room or are in a PK room but one / both of them are not clanned. There are probably other scenarios where it technically isn’t an OPK kill (such as revenge), but this is close enough to get a feel for activity level of the new feature.

  Other PK related changes:

  • To prevent ‘griefing’ on corpse retrievals and genally make PK less of a pain, you will no longer have a corpse to collect after being PKed. Equipment will be kept on you as if it were a warfare or combat maze kill. You do still get transported to your morgue with hp/mana/moves at 10. The grace period on OPK kills has also been increased to 10 minutes.
  • Using ‘who pk’ will now also include OPK and hardcore players.
  • Hardcore mode now has a bonus qp for each quest completed at an average of 3qp per quest.

  ---

  Keyrings and other changes unrelated to OPK:

  • Made a couple of changes to the way keyrings work. When you die, a container will be created called, for example, Razor’s Keyring. Whatever items were on your keyring at the time of death will be in this container. Whenever this container is returned to you, the items will be quietly transferred back onto your keyring. Rot-death keys will *not* be purged on keyring so this transfers over the bag ‘loophole’ which I don’t have much appetite for fixing after all these years.
  • If someone else loots your corpse then your keyring will sit in their inventory as a normal container until they return it to you, at which point the items will transfer to keyring again.
  • Changed the way ‘Elemental Ward’ works – it will remember the last damage type you chose and automatically use that same damage type if you cast the spell with no arguments. This makes it more useful with the ‘spellup’ command.
  • The Air Focus, Fire Focus, Earth Focus and Water Focus spells have been removed and replaced with the single spell ‘Elemental Focus’. When you cast it you now have to specify which damage type you want to focus on. As with Elemental Ward, it will remember the last damage type you used and default to that if cast with no arguments. Also to clarify, this effect does increase melee damage too, not just spells, so with the recent increase it is fairly significant.
  • Any percent practiced you had in air focus is now elemental focus. The game will estimate practices spent on the other 3 and add some practices for them at login.
  • Allspells will no longer show spells that have been removed.
  • Invsort by weight should now correctly display the weight of aard bags and other containers that have items in them and a weight multiplier.
  • Setwanted will now show the player name that set the flag in the info message.
  ]]> https://www.aardwolf.com/blog/2016/09/25/subclass-skill-updates/ Sun, 25 Sep 2016 22:38:08 +0000 http://www.aardwolf.com/blog/?p=866 In addition to the stats saving across each remort, a number of other changes were added to the game today:
  • When you superhero loud, you will now be given 200 additional trains.
  • Channel history size for global channels such as gossip, auction, etc is now 200 lines, was previously 100.
  • There is now an ‘invsort weight’ option that will show inventory sorted in descending order of weight. Works on a container, for example, ‘invsort weight bag’. Also works with ‘vault sort’ and ‘keyring sort’.
  • When viewing inventory, keyring will now always show even if it has no items on it. Always showing it is best way to inform / remind people that the feature exists at all.
  • The change mentioned to Hammerswing last reboot is now in – no change at all to Hammerswing when solo. When using Hammerswing in a group, you will only hit targets you are directly in combat with, which means that either you are targeting them or they are targeting you.
  • Elemental Ward has changed a little – you have to specify one elemental damage type (air, earth, fire or water) when you cast it, but the protection for that one type has doubled. There is no output to the room when you cast this – others will not know what type of ward you have used.
  • Elemental Ward and the Elemental Focus focus spells can now be cast at the same time and no longer have a recovery time. They can also both be cast during combat.

  I’m going to improve the syntax on these so elemental ward remembers the last type you gave is so it will work better from ‘spellup’ then do the same with the focus spells. Don’t want this to hold up the reboot though so it will be in next reboot.

  • The ‘Precision’ skill no longer has a cooldown. The effect of precision is already stat based so having a cooldown also based on stats makes less sense now than it must have whenever I wrote the skill.
  • When you are in character creation mode after tiering, you will no longer be asked your MUD experience level.
  • There was an older bug where you could wear an item with a skill bonus before you have the skill then remove it after you gained the skill and would end up with a negative bonus. Good example was the Rudolph Nose (+6 to toxic cloud) worn before level 175 then removed after level 175. Should be fixed now.
  • Fixed a bug with quest appraise showing incorrect stats for bag at level 201 as a tier.
  • Fixed a bug with new tierpins not showing in owned.
  ]]> https://www.aardwolf.com/blog/2016/09/25/stats-saves-remort/ Sun, 25 Sep 2016 22:26:21 +0000 http://www.aardwolf.com/blog/?p=862 Major change to save stats across every remort:
  • The way stats are stored across remorts and tiers has changed. Whenever you remort, *all* of your current stats will be saved. When you reach level 201 on your next remort, those stats will be restored. If you do not have a free rebuild at the time you superhero, you will be given one. This is not a +1, if you already have one then you don’t get another.
  • The goal of this change is to allow someone to do some powerups at level 201, maybe experience a superhero group run or two, and not have those trains or stats be wasted. It will break up the grind rather than having to immediately remort as soon as you hit level 201, or have time spent at SH wasted. It also gives the option to save base stats rather than hp, mana or moves across tiers. If you have saved stats, the ‘stats saved’ command can be used to display them.

  The next few paragraphs get really into the details and get quite complex. If you don’t understand all this, the basics are that stats are saved across remorts and, when you reach level 201, whichever is higher of your current *total* stats vs your saved *total* stats is restored. It’s hard to mess up unless you remort at level 201, put all your trains into hp/mana/moves then leave yourself with no stats when you reach level 201 next time around – don’t do that!

  • To get into some more of the details, your trains on hand and practices on hand are also restored so there is no way to “double spend” your trains by rebuilding at level 200. The only exception to this is that any trains on hand at the time you superhero that are instinct eligible (previously unspent / not from a rebuild) will get added to the restored trains on hand.
  • Because trains on hand are stored across remorts, the ‘auto instinct deposit at remort / tier’ is no longer necessary and has been removed. If you try to remort with rebuild trains on hand (cannot be saved) then the game will advise you to spend them on stats instead.
  • There is a ‘norestore’ option to superhero that also requires the ‘confirm’ option to be added. Taking the norestore option will mean that your previous stats will NOT be restored and will be overwritten by your current stats when you remort. This is irreversible, there will be no manual pfile edits because someone did not pay attention. The main purpose for this existing at all is if your current stats are close to the stored stats and, for whatever reason, you prefer the current stats.
  • When you superhero, if the total cost of your current stat (in trains) is higher than the total cost of your stored stats, the game will warn you that you might want to consider taking the norestore option to keep your current stats, then will require the ‘confirm’ option either way. This is based on current training costs including wishstats / tierstats.
  • Because I had to calculate these anyway I figured might as well make them visible in a command, so the ‘train totals’ command will show the total train cost from your base stats to your current stats based on current training costs. If you have saved stats, it also shows the same for your saved stats. This is useful to help you decide which set of stats to keep.
  • If you are a tier with previously saved hp/mana/moves or on a t9 redo, those stats will restore the next time you reach SH and from that point on you will be under this new system.
  ]]> https://www.aardwolf.com/blog/2016/09/11/game-update-sept-11th-2016/ Sun, 11 Sep 2016 21:41:20 +0000 http://www.aardwolf.com/blog/?p=859 Game updates made on 11th September 2016:
  • Double experience from someone doing superhero loud is now 15 minutes rather than 10 minutes.
  • There is no longer a minimum level 15 requirement to join a clan. The original reason for this many years ago was to stop “casual alts” from stacking up the numbers but level 15 is just a matter or minutes for anyone who knows the game well and the rule keeps out longer term characters chose to stay low level for whatever reason.
  • Two changes to quest timers – when you fail a quest because you run out of time, you can immediately quest again. As Tyebald mentioned, you’ve already waited more than 30 minutes now that quest durations are longer. If you “fail” a quest because you accidentally quit / get disconnected then it will be considered a regular 15 minute quest fail rather than adding a full 30 minutes.
  • When you use a staff, you will only hit targets that are directly in combat with you (you are hitting them or they are hitting you), or valid targets not fighting anyone. The lag on staffs is back to the normal one combat round.
    The reason lag was increased on staffs originally was massive damage being done in large groups with everyone using staffs and, in large groups, getting hundreds of spells cast per round. This change fixes that without the penalty for solo users and smaller groups that the increased lag created. Advance Warning: This same change is going to be made to Hammerswing once it is tested out live.
  • Fixed a bunch of typos previously reported. Not going to list every one but if you posted something that never got addressed it was missed.
  • Fixed a bug in ‘quit check’ causing color bleed on some nosave magic items.
  • Help search and showing helps that don’t display a header will now show tags when ‘help tags’ are on.
  • Wimpy is no longer reset when you remort / retier if you didn’t actually have a wimpy value set.
  • The skills Poultice, Lay Hands and Treat Wounds will now show the amount healed if you don’t have ‘nohealamt’ config option on. (Redryn) Lay hands also now has a message when you are already fully healed.
  ]]> https://www.aardwolf.com/blog/2016/01/17/titans-genies/ Sun, 17 Jan 2016 22:03:39 +0000 http://www.aardwolf.com/blog/?p=852 Having a reboot where we add a new epic area is pretty rare. This reboot, we’re adding two!

  ---

  A Genie’s Last Wish – high level epic area and goal:

  The beautiful genie is in need of someone to free her from her entrapment. Many years ago she was taken prisoner by a heinous genie general and everyone who has ever loved her has died trying to save her. Left unchecked, the general’s armies will continue to grow. If he becomes too powerful, he will attempt to usurp control of the entire genie kingdom. If this were to happen, the future of the genies would be a very dark one indeed. A strong warrior is needed to abolish this evil general.

  Are you capable enough to help?

  Level Range           : 200 to 201
  Goal Difficulty       : Very Difficult
  Goal Recommended at   : Level 200
  Goal Min Level        : Level 200
  Goal by               : Wire and Nikkei
  Area Author           : Wire, Nikkei and Trollemite
  

  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.
  (minimum size of group needed: 10, no maximum)

  ---

  Titan’s Keep – High level epic area and goal

  Faced with the growing threat of an impending demonic invasion through the rift in the Crystal Mountain, an unlikely old power has emerged once more: The Titans. An ancient race whose powers once rivaled the gods, they had disappeared without a trace during the Old Wars.

  For reasons unknown they have now returned in force, establishing a Massive Keep at the peak of the Crystal Mountain. Rumor has it that they are amassing an army to march against the source of demons itself, and seal the threat forever.

  Word from the underworld has it that skilled mercenaries are sought at the Keep, though there do not seem to be any reasons why the Titans would hire an ordinary adventurer. Vague promises of untold riches and raw power are whispered in the night like a siren’s call, and some of the bravest have already begun their journey to seek its source.

  Are you bold enough to venture into the domain of the Titans?

  Level range         : 201
  Goal Difficulty     : Extremely difficult (Mini-epic)
  Goal recommended at : 201 Maxxed
  Goal Converter      : Redryn / Koala
  Area Author         : Redryn / Koala

  Note: There is a limit on the number of players that can attempt the goal at any one time, based on tiers.

  ]]> https://www.aardwolf.com/blog/2016/01/09/keyrings-feature-afterglow-area-quest/ Sat, 09 Jan 2016 19:04:54 +0000 http://www.aardwolf.com/blog/?p=846 Keyring Feature:

  There is a new ‘keyring’ feature. This feature is intended only for convenience and organizing inventory. It will not allow you to save with keys or carry more items. Keys on your keyring are still considered inventory and will still go into your corpse if you die.

  There is no gold or trivia point cost for the keyring as we are just making it a standard game feature. The command itself is very similar to vaults:

       keyring list       : show items in your keyring.
       keyring get        : Retrieve an item from your keyring.
       keyring put [item] : Place a specific item on your keyring.
       keyring put all    : Put all available keys on your keyring.
  

  Using ‘keyring put all’ will put all eligible items on your keyring but will not give a message for the rest. The more specific syntax to add [item] or all.[item] will give a message.

  Whenever you use a command such as ‘unlock’ that looks for a key, your keyring will also be checked.

  You can also use the same ‘keyring filter’ and ‘keyring sort’ options as those now available for vaults. Invmon has new tags 11 and 12 for items being placed onto / removed from keyring.

  Getting into the details, in most cases the keys are considered “carried” but it depends on the action. Mobs looking for items carried will see them and you can use them as if they were in inventory. In other cases, they are more like worn items in that you can’t drop, donate, sacrfice, them etc without first removing from the keyring and items on your keyring cannot be seen with ‘peek’.

  As this new feature settles in you may find some items that are used to unlock doors but are not actually keys won’t go on the keyring and need to be flagged. Post them to the bugs board as they come up. Mobprogs should be fine but if you encounter any issues where a previously working goal is suddenly not working because the mob can’t find your key, post that too. In the meantime a workaround would be just removing it from the keyring.

  ---

  Afterglow Area and Goal:

  Although the powers of Master Mages Fahlyk and Fahlen were released in Dusk Valley, the brothers were not completely destroyed. After regaining their powers they both conjured a devastating blow. The amount of energy was so great nearly everything in the Valley was destroyed and a bright aura was left in the sky. The Great War had finally ended but neither side had won. The remaining residents of Dusk Valley were forced to settle elsewhere. The brother’s mutual hatred had not lessened though and over time they both passed away.

  Nearly one thousand years after the destruction of Dusk Valley, time seemed to heal the devastation wrought during the Brothers’ war. Trees grew tall and strong, streams filled the crevices in the land, grass covered the valley floor and fauna cautiously populated the region once more.

  Upon hearing of the rebirth of the Valley, the Relyks returned to the area to start anew. Although many centuries had passed the aura covering the valley remained. The region became known as Afterglow. The Relyks in the area have built a large mansion to honor their master. Those who have contributed to the community are scribed into a great book. Are you honorable enough to contribute to Afterglow?

  Welcome to Afterglow, adventurer.

  Level Range         : 200-201
  Goal Difficulty     : Medium
  Goal Recommended at : Level 200
  Goal Converter      : Shaelynne
  Area Author         : Shaelynne

  ---

  Other changes in this reboot:

  • Domain flagged some epic quest items to be level 211 and here only earlier this week but not everyone got their items updated. That should be fixed after this reboot and all items in the list Domain posted in mudinfo note #1661 will now be level 211 and hero only. The level is so that all tiers can wear rank equipment and the hero only flag is to prevent it being worn at much lower levels now that the base level is lower.
  • Your run prefix will now be skipped if you are already at Aylor recall.
  • The bypass bug should hopefully be fixed now. If you have bypass at 100% and the stats to cover the areas you have listed but still get a target in one of your bypassed areas, please post to bug board.

  A few cleanup items from the last couple of bigger additions to the game:

  • You can now use an item’s unique id when retrieiving items from your vault. For example ‘vault get 1693141671’.
  • You can now sort inventory in a vault using ‘vault sort [option]’. Options are the same as those available in ‘help invsort’.
  • You can now ‘vault filter [filter option]’ using the same options as seen in ‘help invfilter’.
  • The ‘invdetails’ command used by clients for plugins will now show

    enchants using this format:

    {enchant}Solidify,stat,hit roll,1,Lasher,T
    {enchant}Illuminate,stat,luck,3,Lasher,E

    Data is: spell, type (resist or stat), stat name, amount, who cast,
    (e)nchanter can remove, (t)ponly or (n)ot applicable.

  ]]> https://www.aardwolf.com/blog/2015/12/19/disenchant-radiance-woods-updates/ Sun, 20 Dec 2015 03:01:52 +0000 http://www.aardwolf.com/blog/?p=840 Disenchant Feature:
  Items that have solidify, illuminate or resonate cast on them after this reboot will have the stats the came from each enchant stored on the item.

  Using this data, there is a new ‘disenchant’ feature that allows you to remove a specific enchant on an item to try again. The first time each spell is removed from an item, it can be done by an enchanter free of charge. Any removal after that costs 3 trivia points. If the first disenchant is done by someone other than an enchanter the command will warn you but still allow it with the confirm option. The identify spell / command shows the enchants and, for each one, shows whether it can be removed with TP only or free of charge by an enchanter.

  The syntax for this command is ‘disenchant [item] [spell]’. Using this command will show an abbreviated identify screen and the bottom section will show the cost. Repeating the command with ‘confirm’ will do the actual disenchant. I strongly recommend that you use the first command to make absolutely sure you are disenchanting the right item at the right cost rather than using ‘confirm’ to begin.

  The disenchant command does include the toggling of flags necessary to try again. For example, removing solidify will remove the solidified flag and also put invis back on the item. Removing illuminate will remove the illuminate flag and remove glow so the spell can be cast again.

  If the items added by an enchant have since been removed (failed enchant armor etc) then disenchant is not possible and the stored enchant data will be removed.

  

  There was some controversy around this command on the test port. Some feel it will make max enchants too easy and kill motivation to run epics once everyone has max gear, others think it’s still too expensive.

  We can always experiment with settings and prices as necessary. Having this code in place also lets us tweak enchants without worrying about “breaking” existing equipment. If I improve solidify next week then solidify only can be removed and recast.

  Unfortunate that on this specific change existing items WILL get left behind but it’s been many years since a change was made where you couldn’t just upgrade. Continue using what you have which will work exactly the same as it did yesterday, or get new gear to min/max every last stat. Not to imply there’s anything wrong with that btw, I play that way too, it’s just not going to be “free” this time. All kinds of possibilities open up with the code behind this, looking forward to building on it.

  ---

  Radiance Woods Area:
  During low tide, the dense trees of Blake Forest give way to a relatively unknown place called Radiance Woods. The magic once sealing off the woods from outsiders has been lifted. The wood nymphs and faeries that live here are welcoming. The timing, however, is not a coincidence: the shadows have corrupted the woods and they are desperate to save their home.

  Years ago, life in the woods was vastly different. The village thrived and families loved to visit the forest. Travelers from near and far came to view the manor and participate in annual festivities that took place as spring turned into summer. It has been just over a century since a stranger found their way into the woods. Over time, fact turned into fiction, and the faeries and wood nymphs of Radiance Woods became nothing more than a fable to enjoy before bedtime.

  As more shadow faeries take up residence, the corruption spreads and diseases those within. Radiant faeries are falling sick and turning towards the shadows. The trees are beginning to perish, animals are acting bizarre, and the protection spell that keeps out the darkness is succumbing to the corruption. In an effort to reclaim their home, the nymphs have removed the magic isolating the woods to outsiders and have sent word they need assistance. Queen Aevintyri can not save the woods without help from an outsider.

  Will you be the one to stop the shadows? If you consider yourself intelligent, brave, and loyal, seek out the lovely witch, Luama.

  Level Range         : 200-201
  Goal Difficulty     : Medium
  Goal Recommended at : Level 200
  Goal Converter      : Shaelynne
  Area Author         : Shaelynne

  ---

  Game changes this reboot:

  • Radiance Woods is new area by Shaelynne for level 201. It does also have a goal. You can get a feel for the story and goal using ‘help radiance’. Definitely recommend you turn on room descriptions for this one. As a reminder, ‘brief 0’ to always seem room descs or ‘brief 1’ to only see room descriptions in a room you haven’t already explored.
  • Increased the base chance of Illuminate, Solidify and Resonate to add any stat at all. With 100 luck for example it was previous only around 10%, it’s now 35% and scales higher with luck. Doesn’t ever reach 100% though, that’s where Enchanter’s Focus comes in. Note that this has nothing to do with how many stats are added, only the chance to get any stats at all.
  • I have multiplied the costs and prizes on the Aardwolf lottery by 10. This means that a ticket costs 10,000 gold and the minimum jackpot is 40,000,000 gold. If all tickets get sold (rarely happens), the jackpot would be 400 million. This does not affect rollover counts but the new jackpot does apply to the next draw so any tickets already on hand are included.
  • Using ‘who from’, ‘who www’ and ‘who afkmsg’ will no longer include players who do not have that field set. (Fantomex) was last note I read on this, feel like it has been posted before, sorry if I should have given credit to someone else.
  • The Level field in rankings has been increased to 6 characters. This should include rankings commands, metarank and ‘toprank’. Let me know of any places missed.
  ]]> https://www.aardwolf.com/blog/2015/10/21/vaults-tpenchant/ Wed, 21 Oct 2015 21:14:54 +0000 http://www.aardwolf.com/blog/?p=837 Equipment Vaults:

  There is a new permant inventory storage option called ‘vaults’. Items in your vault are not considered part of inventory but do save over reboots. This means there is no risk of loss at death, accidentally dropping them on the floor or losing them because a friend holding items for you stopped playing or got themselves deleted. Items in a vault cannot be located by other players but will still show in your own ‘owned’ list if they are owned.

  Vaults do *not* allow you save anything you wouldn’t normally be able to save and do not get around item timers – something with a timer still has a timer even in a vault. Something you can’t save with should still show in ‘quit check’ as in your vault.

  You can put containers in the vault but they will take up as many slots as items in the container. Items that already have the ‘kflag’ do not take up vault space so once you have a vault we recommend putting those in there right away for safekeeping.

  The vaults are intended for longer term storage of collectibles and items you don’t use often and don’t want to keep tracking in inventory. For day to day use or characters just starting out on Aardwolf, you are probably better off with the first couple of ‘pockets’ wishes.

  You need to be in a bank room to use a vault. It costs 20 trivia points to open your vault with 20 storage items included. You can upgrade your vault up to 50 slots at a cost of 1 trivia point per slot. After that the costs increases to 2 trivia points and increases by 1 trivia point every 50 slots.

  The main options with the vault command are:

     vault buy          : Create a new player vault.
  
     vault upgrade [amt]: Without confirm option will check costs
                          for [amt] slot upgrades or 1 item by default.
  
     vault put [items]  : Puts items into the vault. [Items] allows usual
                          object syntax such as 'vault put all.sword', etc
  
     vault get [items]  : Gets items from the vault. Allows all usual
                          'get' syntax.
   
     vault list         : Shows items in vault in inventory format.
  

  For those using ‘invmon’ there are also new invmon tags 9 and 10 for adding / removing items from the vault.

  ---

  Tpenchant / Other changes in this reboot:

  • There is a new tpenchant option for trivia auras. It costs a single trivia point and will add either a random stat or 1hr/dr. An aura can be tpenchanted up to 10 times max and identify will show how many times an aura has been enchanted so far.
  • If you solidify a weapon before tpenchanting you effectively lose the benefit of solidify because the tpenchant max is still the same. If you wait until your weapon is maxxed then solidify it and get a poor enchant, that isn’t good either after putting so many TP into the weapon.
  • I have changed this so that a weapon with the solidified flag will allow +4 hr / dr more than usual on tpenchant. The +4 number feels like the right amount to make up for a bad enchant while still leaving some value from a full +6 solidify or possibly higher with Arcane Source.
  • Other player’s stats no longer show in ‘whois’ and ‘swho 12’ has been replaced with campaigns won which means that ‘swho 13’ (formerly campaigns) has been removed. Duel info also no longer shows total stats. Total stats are considered a private stat now so if there is a way to see this remaining please post on bugs, thanks.
  • Using ‘gq info [num]’ would not work if you were actually in a gquest as it would always default to the one you’re in. Now fixed.
  • General and Epics board were incorrectly sharing the same flag so you could not unsubscribe one without the other. ‘Unsubscribe epics’ should work fine now. If you already set it you’ll need to set it again and check that your general board setting is what you wanted.
  ]]> https://www.aardwolf.com/blog/2015/10/12/saves-equipment-upgrade/ Mon, 12 Oct 2015 21:32:16 +0000 http://www.aardwolf.com/blog/?p=829 Equipment upgrade for “Saves” Stat:

  TL,DR: If you have equipment with saves, use ‘savesupgrade [item]’ to replace the saves with random stats or resists. See below for a way to try again if you don’t like the stats.

  Focusing on fully removing saves from the game. Saves have now been replaced with new effects on all new objects in live. Items that are not enchanted or unique (clan items) will pick up the stats from their new base item.

  Items that are unique, which includes anything that has been enchanted and all clan items, will not pick up the stats. For those items, there is a new command called ‘savesupgrade’ that will randomly assign the object points that were taken up in saves to other stats.

  The roll is weighted towards stats and damroll but it’s possible to roll any stats including resists. To use it, simply type ‘savesupgrade [item]’. The saves will be removed and the stats assigned. If an item has negative saves they will just be removed, no negatives added to anything else. This roll can allow an item to go slightly over max in a specific stat type – 1 ‘builder point’ over max in any single category (hr, dr, stats, hmv). On items over max already you can’t roll that stat. If an item is over max on all stats then you’re just going to get resists.

  The max is not perfect – it’s based on a combination of level and existing enchant flags. Some items will probably go a little over max, some will stop a little short of their theoretical max. Without specific tracking for what stats came from where we can only estimate.

  The interesting part (for me at least) is that the item will remember exactly which stats were added from savesupgrade and there is a trivia point based ‘savesupgrade reverse’. Don’t like the stats you rolled? For a trivia point you can ‘savesupgrade [item] reverse’ to undo the whole thing and try again. This is using completely new item code that has a lot of potential for enchants. Prior to these changes, any stats added to items were just merged in with everything else and no real record of what came from where.

  Note that reversal can only be done if the stats are still on the item. If they have since been wiped (by a failed enchant for example), the reversal cannot be done. If stats have been ADDED that’s ok, only the amount added by savesupgrade will be removed.

  Higher level players, don’t blow off stats if you’re already at 600. I’m planning to make stats over 600 start to count for something with diminishing returns. This isn’t the same as increasing the cap which I am not planning to do, but to make those ‘overmax’ stats have _some_ impact. For the math inclined, something like square root (so 16 counts as 4, 36 counts as 6, etc) but not quite that extreme.

  ---

  Other Changes in this reboot:

  • Spells that previously added saves now add something else, mostly resistances in place of saves. This includes:

    Indestructible Aura, Holy Aura (Paladin primary gets bonus con), Energy Containment, 
    Ego Whip. On prot good / evil I just removed the minor saves, the flag is the 
    main point of those spells anyway.

  • Options such as ‘allspells saves’ etc have been removed and ‘saves’ has also been removed from the ‘score’ and ‘attr’ comands/
  • There is now a new board called ‘EPICS’ for both announcements and discussion of epic areas. Until we make the necessary changes, auto-posted notes will still go to the existing board. Please use this board rather than general to announce upcoming epic areas runs. I’ve also added something about this board to ‘MOTD’.
  • There is a new ‘info epicdeaths’ option which filters deaths to mobs (only mobs) in areas flagged as ‘epic’ which so far is Inferno, Icefall and Oradrins. We don’t have a lot of death spam from Terra so I didn’t add it there. This defaults to off so you will need to turn it on if you want to see Icefall death spam!
  • The ‘spamreduce wflags’ option was not working for a third party in the room. I don’t think many people saw these as they weapon special flag messages are already covered by ‘battlespam’, but this if fixed now.
  • Fixed a bug with the new ‘*’ in score sometimes showing even if you could still train more stats.
  • When a navigator requests a quest or a campaign there is now a message showing how many areas can by bypassed. This is how many that will actually by used, not necessarily the amount you have set. If your bypass skill is at 100% and you get a target in the areas included in that count you should get a separate message telling you there were no targets found out of the bypassed areas. If you get neither of these it is a bug.

    If you get a campaign target in your bypass list without getting this new message, please post your exact stats, copy of bypass output and the list of targets selected to the bugs board.

  • There is now a timeout if you sit at MOTD or clan MOTD for more than 10 minutes.
  • People in the ‘lizardman’ race can no use envenom on an item that already has another weapon flag.
  • Increased the ‘Since Added’ colum on gamestat 5. Apparently we’re going to need that soon.
  ]]> https://www.aardwolf.com/blog/2015/08/23/imagis-nation-area-code/ Sun, 23 Aug 2015 16:34:52 +0000 http://www.aardwolf.com/blog/?p=824 New Area and Goal – Imagi’s Nation:

  The Imagi family has been an Andolor residence for decades, never creating a stir or drawing any attention to themselves. This is about to change. They are a loving family, consisting of the Father, Firgovi, the mother, Tolsirle, two children and a family dog, Seeko.

  Firgovi, jobless and looking for a hobby, decided to start practicing some dark magics. Although his family did not approve, he would have friends over on the weekends to practice his magic in the basement, while the rest of the family sleeps. He practiced one magic most often, sleep control.

  Now, fully trained in the magics he practiced, he offers something some people have been searching for during their entire life: freedom from a phobia. During the process, he magically puts you to rest on his bed, and you enter a deep sleep like never before. Unlike any other dream you have had, you are able to control this one.

  Feeling brave? Ready to conquer the fear you’ve had your entire lifetime? Head over to Imagi’s Nation. It will be a trip you’ll never forget. Tell Firgovi you want ‘the works’ for a complete dream-diving experience!

  Level Range         : 140 to 160
  Goal Difficulty     : Easy
  Goal Recommended at : Level 150
  Goal Converter      : Rhuli
  Area Author         : Rhuli

  ---

  Game changes this reboot:

  • There is a new area in the level 140 to 160 range called Imagi’s Nation. This area is by Rhuli and does also have a goal. For more information, see ‘help imagis’.
  • Using ‘gquest progress’ will now show all global quests unless you are in one in which case use ‘gquest progress all’ to see all of them.
  • Made the ‘You have joined’ gquest message match the color that goes with the gquest type.
  • The definition of ‘supernewbie’ used in ‘who sn’ is tier 0 no remorts only. Was never meant to have included characters on later remorts or tiers just passing through that level range.
  • There is a new item flag called ‘nogive’ which means you cannot give an item to others. This also implies you can’t drop it, sell it, auction it, etc. If you die while carrying a nogive item, it will remain with you rather than going to the corpse. Any method found to transfer a nogive item to another player is considered a bug.
  • Adding the ‘inv’ argument to a destroy command will allow it to target an item in your inventory that you cannot drop. New instances of the Abyss sword will work with this (they are no longer nosac), old items will disappear in time anyway but if you really want one removed an imm can do it via ‘oset timer’. Destroy now also requires a ‘confirm’ option to be used.
  • When a status is maxxed you will now see a character next to it in score. Maxxed can mean different things – a “*” means that stat is fully trained and as high as it can go with spell / equip boosts. A ‘+’ means it is has max spell / equip boosts but is not fully trained.
  • When you have noexp on, the ‘You receive 10 experience’ type messages now read ‘You don’t receive 10 experience’. You can turn off ‘You have set your character not to receive experience’ messages using ‘spamreduce noexp’. I didn’t make spamreduce noexp hide the “don’t receive 10 experience” messages too – if you want those gone use ‘spamreduce noexp2’. If you turn both of these off and don’t display prompts then it’s on you to remember you have noexp on.
  • When using ‘brew’, Oracles will have a slightly higher chance of success and when using ‘scribe’, Enchanters will have a higher chance of success.
  • Objects repopping have always been random within +/- 2 levels of their base level. I changed that to +/- 3 levels.
  • There is now a limit of 100 global quest kills per level. After you reach the limit, you can still join and win global quests if you have not hit the limit but will not be rewarded for the individual kills. The counter is reset when you gain a level, remort or retier and does not apply to level 200+. The tracking of kills starts from this reboot so past activity does not count. Using ‘gq check’ will show your kills remaining and it is shown after each gquest kill.
  ]]> https://www.aardwolf.com/blog/2015/07/25/global-quest-rewrite-multiple-tracks/ Sun, 26 Jul 2015 02:07:23 +0000 http://www.aardwolf.com/blog/?p=812 Global Quest Rewrite:

  There are now multiple gquest cycles – the existing set of gquests that anyone can join, a cycle only for people who have won 10 gquests or less and a cycle for tier 0 only.

  It is quite possible (and likely) for gquests to overlap and, at any given point in time, there may be more than one gquest running you are eligible to join. You can only be in one global quest at a time but there is no problem with leaving one global quest for another. Keep in mind you cannot rejoin a global quest you have already quit.

  The biggest single change with this is in syntax – commands like ‘gq info’ will require you to give the global quest number if there is more than one gquest running. The ‘gq join’ option tries to be a little smarter in that if there is only one gquest running you are able to join it will join that one, otherwise it tells you there is more than one global quest running that you are able to join.

  
  
  Other Global Quest Changes:
  • The global quest announcements will show which type of gquest is being declared.
  • Each global quest group has a separate color. Standard gquests are in green, t0 only in magenta and < 10 wins in cyan.
  • The ‘gquest ranges’ command will now show all 3 cycles. Added some spacing lines in there just to make it a little more readable.
  • Using ‘gq history’ now shows the gquest number of that global quest. You can use the syntax ‘gquest history [number]’ to see the full history of that global quest.
  • All the places you would expect such as gquest info and the final gquest note should show which gquest type a particular quest was. I removed the ‘started by’ line as they are all auto-generated now.
  • ‘Gquest list’ will show the gquests currently running, which cycle they belong to and how many people are in the global quest.
  • Gq info will only show the global quests you can join based on these new rules. I also removed the ‘use gquest info to see the targets’ line when a gquest first starts.

  The ‘Global’ Channel:

  The global quest channel has changed so much it gets it’s own list of changes:

  • The ‘global’ channel is now a regular channel which means you can use socials, emotes, etc like any other channel.
  • Each global quest has its own “thread” and its own history much like clan channels.
  • You can see history of the channel for a gquest you are in using ‘global -h’. Once a global quest is over, you can see its channel history using ‘global -h [gquest number]’.
  • You can now ‘colorset global [color]’ to set the channel of the main body of the global quest channel.

  Fixed up / cleaned up some things in existing gquest code:

  • It should be impossible for the same mob to be in more than one global quest at the same time.
  • If you kill a mob in a global quest while the global quest is in preparation phase you will trigger the faster repop. This is new, in the old version a fast repop wouldn’t trigger until the gquest actually started. Things like hunt and summon will still work until the gquest actually starts, otherwise this would be a super-easy way to find the targets before the gquest begins.
  ]]> https://www.aardwolf.com/blog/2015/07/25/dusk-valley-vistells-t3-hardcore/ Sun, 26 Jul 2015 01:33:32 +0000 http://www.aardwolf.com/blog/?p=803 New Area and Goal – Dust Valley:

  Early in its history, the Eldar race mistrusted outside races and sought the privacy of its own kind. A small group of Eldars had searched for quite some time and had happened upon Dusk Valley where they organized a town. The town featured the hallmarks of ancient Eldar architecture in its streets, buildings, and ornamentation. Central to the community itself was the Great Totem, a focal point of the great and secret powers of the Eldars.

  Over time as the Eldars prospered, the community grew. Eventually, the community produced two powerful young mages, twins named Fahlyk and Fahlen. The twins studied magick intensively as they aged, each competing with one another as he achieved new heights of power and magickal understanding. Eventually both became Master Mages, made their individual marks on the Great Totem, and focused their considerable intellects upon the community that had reared them.

  Fahlyk praised the community for its accomplishments and the quality of its people. He encouraged mingling and oversaw the establishment of Giant ambassadorships within the council of Eldars. Fahlen turned his eye elsewhere. He discovered that his magick granted him tremendous dominance over weaker minds. His heart grew dark and twisted. As Fahlen’s power multiplied exponentially he added Eldar thralls to his service. He despised what he could not pervert and sought to taint the Eldar alliances with the Giants.

  Fahlyk grew increasingly worried as he saw his brother’s corrupting influence spread over the civilization. He began integrating the Giants, over whom Fahlen’s influence was weak. A new race, the Relyks, came into being as this alliance bore fruit. Seeing his twin brother undermining his plans enraged Fahlen and spurred him to action. Fahlen’s thralls set to fortifying their master’s position, setting up a great tower very near the ancient Great Totem that contained so much magical energy. Fahlyk grew terrified at losing access to the magical source that he had studied for so much of his career. Abandoning his efforts at peace and harmony, he gathered his allies to him and declared open war on his brother.

  Both brothers share similar influence over the town. Open war reigns throughout the land. The brothers struggle for control of the Great Totem knowing that its gain will bring instant dominion over the land. The community suffers as this Great War rages on.

  Welcome to Dusk Valley, adventurer.

  Level Range         : 100 to 120
  Goal Difficulty     : Medium
  Goal Recommended at : Level 110
  Goal Converter      : Trepid
  Area Author         : Trepid

  ---

  Game changes this reboot:

  • Moved some more config items into ‘spamreduce’ where it makes sense. As before, if you had these set before the reboot they should have copied over. The new spamreduce options are:

       showdesc  : Hide description in whois. Replaces 'autodesc'.
       echodeaths: Hide death cries in adjacent rooms. Replaces 'echodeaths'.
       peek      : Do not automatically use peek skill. Replaces 'nopeek'.

  • Removed the ‘quietsell’ command completely as it doesn’t really help selling items one at a time and no longer makes sense with the new ‘sell all’ that combines items.
  • Where an old command maps to just a single spamreduce option (all of them except nospam), I have made entering that command just call spamreduce with the right option rather than giving an error message.
  • There is a new command called ‘vistells’. When you have this on any player can send you a tell even if they can’t see you. This will need to be turned on for existing characters but will be the default for completely new characters. (Jethro). Sending a tell to a non-existant char is a pretty expensive operation in the MUD and I can see this getting scripted to build online lists so there is now a slight lag on a failed tell because the character does not exist.
  • When you are fighting and get a mob immune to your damage type, the messages should now respect your ‘damage’ setting. So instead of seeing 4 lines of ‘X is unaffected by your bash!’ you will see instead:

         [4] a shadow is unaffected by your bash!
    

    Results get a little weird if you have two weapons, the mob is only immune to one of them and you have a damage output type set that is one line from the whole round. Not going to try to fix that. Several people have suggested this over the years but watching the last Icefall group was a good reminder to finally get this done.

  • (Hardcore) mode can now be set at T3+ rather than T5+
  • You can now request a campaign from any questor (Iceman). Considered making a whole separate upgrade flag for this but decided to just roll it in with questors.
  • Recall moves cost is now capped at 5000. The ‘half of moves’ cost dates back to very old age when 1000 moves was a lot and 5000 is still a pretty significant cost.
  • Necrotic Touch will now only cost 50 moves when used against a mob. Still costs 200 when used against a player.
  ]]> https://www.aardwolf.com/blog/2015/06/12/spamreduce/ Fri, 12 Jun 2015 22:04:45 +0000 http://www.aardwolf.com/blog/?p=799 Spamreduce command:
  There is a new command called ‘spamreduce’. I have moved some of the existing config options into this command. Settings you already had should have copied over. Type ‘spamreduce’ to see what the options are. These replace existing commands:

       spamreduce dodges          : hides dodge messages.
       spamreduce wflags          : hides weapon flags such as flaming, vorpal.
       spamreduce areaspells      : hides earthquake and similar area messages.
       spamreduce hunger          : hides hunger and thirst messages.

  The 4 items above replace the ‘nospam’ command. If you had nospam on you have all 4 of these already set. Other options:

       spamreduce mobstatus       : replaces 'nostatus' command.
       spamreduce combat          : replaces 'battlespam' command.
       spamreduce spellups        : replaces 'nospellup' command.
       spamreduce spellchants     : replaces 'quietspell' command.
       spamreduce groupcombat     : replaces 'groupspam' command.

  There are several new options with this command which are the main reason we changed it:

       spamreduce all             : turns on ALL options.
       spamreduce none            : turns off ALL options.
       spamreduce save            : Stores a copy of current settings.
       spamreduce restore         : Restores the saved settings.
       spamreduce                 : Shows both current and saved settings.
  

  The main idea is that you can ‘spamreduce all’, do an epic run or whatever other activity you want max spam reduction for, then when you are done use ‘spamreduce restore’ to set your options back. See ‘help spamreduce’ for detailed info on what each option does.

  A new spamreduction option command ‘spamreduce nocries‘ will toggle whether or not you see other player’s battle cries. Mostly useful to cut down on spam in large group epic runs.

  A new spam reduction group ‘spamreduce groupexp‘ will remove the messages you see when a group member gains experience.

  Plenty of other suggestions for spamreduce such as party heal messages etc, this is just a starting point to get the command in the game.

  ---

  Other changes in the Jun 11th Update:

  A few other changes that made it into the game this time around:

  • When a player dies to multiple attackers you will now see different messges depending on how many people are attacking and whether they are mobs, players or a combination of both. For example:

         Razor has been killed by an owl and 4 other mobs.
         Razor has been killed by Lasher, Failbait and 3 mobs.
         Razor has been killed by an owl, Lasher and 3 other mobs. 
    	(The owl got the kill in this case).

  • The impact of the ‘saves’ stat on many skills and spells has been removed from the game completely. This will make many spells easier to land against both players and mobs unless there is a sufficiently big enough different in stats (int/wis, lesser degree con/luck) that saves already made no difference. I’m not going to immediately increase the impact of resists to counter this as I feel that many spells are too hard to land anyway so let’s see how this goes for a while.
  • The max skills / spells you can add using ‘forgetskill’ has been increased from 30 to 60.
  • The bug with players still showing in ‘who gquest’ after a GQ is over should now be resolved.
  • Using “Gq check” when not in a global quest will show how many gquests you can still take part in for your current level. This was missed in the
    recent redo of gquest.
  • When a mob uses enrage, the amount of resistance penalty it gets has been reduced. This means you will do less damage against a mob that is using enrage. Damage when a player uses enrage against a mob has not been changed.
  ]]>