Game Updates

[Quanqued]

Merry Christmas!

It's that time of year when crazy Christian people celebrate the birth of
their lord. Not that this has much to do with CthulhuMUD, but we felt that it
would be a good opportunity to provide our players with some sort of present
(like we needed the excuse of a holiday to give you people something for
free).

So, what sort of gift do you guys get? I'm glad you asked, since I'm going
to tell you. After some downtime this Saturday afternoon (December 22), the
MUD will come back up with some enhancements to the codebase, as well as a few
new quests, area updates, and subrace enhancements.

Codebase Enhancements
The codebase enhancements are tested but may not be completely balanced, so
expect some more tweaking to be done as time goes on to make sure that
everyone gets an equal share of the goodies. In addition, they may cause some
instability. So, there will also be a backup and restores to previous pfiles
will be allowed, provided that the MUD caused the issue and not some temporary
lapse of judgement on your part.

Quests
The lich spell will now be removed from the MUD. This means that you'll need
to complete a quest instead to get these abilities. The were quests have all
been updated and spruced up, and new were-types have been added to expand on
the ones we already have.

Area Updates
Because the quests required going to various locations and rooms, lots of
areas needed updates. I'll do my best to merge the two different sets of area
files, but that's going to be a really difficult task. So, if you have shops
and other things that get eaten because of it, let an Imm know and we'll work
to get it sorted out as soon as possible.

Subrace Enhancements
It may have been part of the April fool's joke, but we went ahead and did
it. All of the subraces are getting a pretty major overhaul. New commands were
added for them, and some commands were taken away to be replaced by different
things. We tried to balance it, but you may see us tweaking it as time goes
on. So don't expect them to be the same the next time you log in. What we
ended up with was the following set of subraces: liches, weres, and vampires.
Yes, I said vampires. All of these subraces will have a new ability or two,
and in the case of the vampire subrace, a lot of it has been left in, but some
of it has been removed. So, we'll see how that works. You'll need to explore
and figure out how it all works on your own, since the help files won't be
updated just yet. There's also a whole new 'lineage' system for subraces. It
should make playing the game at least a little more interesting. You'll figure
that out as time goes on as well.

Important Notes
With all of these changes, we'd normally do a pwipe, but that usually makes
people angry. So, instead, we're going to do 'corrective surgery' to your
pfiles. When you next log in after the code update, it will check for a
special flag. If you do not have that flag, your existing subrace will be
removed and the flag will be added. Those who are over their lifespan will get
a nice benefit of being dragged back to approximately half your lifespan. This
gives you ample opportunity to find the quests and partake of them before
experiencing that old age feeling again. If you didn't have a subrace, you'll
still get to partake of that aging bit, but only if you're older than your
lifespan. So, consider it an added bonus.

Special Event
Also, starting that day, we'll begin with a 2x XP event. This means that
every time you gain XP it is now 2 times more valuable. It also means that
death is 2 times more painful as well. Each day up until new years eve we will
increase the multiplier by 2.1. So on Sunday it will be a 2.2x event,
Christmas eve a 2.3X, and so on. On new years eve, we'll set it to 4, and give
you a few hours over the course of the evening to enjoy it. Then we'll put it
all back to normal and you can be on your merry ways. We'll also likely have
an event or two planned for this duration as well, if time allows.

That should about cover all the basics. If you have any questions, please
don't hesitate to ask. Not all the Imms know everything, but someone will
eventually answer your questions.

--The Immortal Staff

[Quanqued]

Folks,

It was brought to my attention that we had an abundance of spam messages on the forums. I went through with a hatchet and pruned (hopefully) all of them with prejudice. If I accidentally deleted a legitimate post, I apologize and ask that you repost it or (better) use the in-game message boards.