Hey there!

It has certainly been a bit of time, hasn’t it? I’ve had a couple of people inquire as to what’s going on with the state of the game and all that, so in order to help keep people in the loop we’re starting a development blog. It’s linked in at the top menubar here for easy clicking.

Right now there’s only a small “teaser” snippet up there, but we’ll be adding more as things solidify and come together so check back often if you’re interested. We’ll be talking about things like professions, classes, questing, how various mechanics are going to come into play, etc. We are not opening a forum on the dev blog section of the site, though you can leave comments on individual threads. As always, we are certainly open to feedback as well, even if we don’t choose to act on it.

Since this has been another popular question: there is no current ETA on anything like open alpha, but as soon as we have one I’ll let you guys know.

Thanks!

-CM

Hey all,

Undoubtedly everyone has noticed or heard mention of the fact that the staff has been extremely silent and reclusive over the past week or so. While it may have appeared that way on the surface, it was anything but quiet among the staffers. Throughout the past several days we have been internally discussing at great length a number of very important things pertaining to the game’s health, both present and future. This culminated in a five hour long meeting last night on our Teamspeak channel in which we finalized the plans moving forward. I am writing this post to help explain the process and end result of that in as forthright a manner as I can.

As a bit of history, this game was put together by a group of gaming and roleplaying enthusiasts as a hobby. We had a vision to create an environment that allowed other enthusiasts to get together to partake in an unfolding story, both as actors and as authors. The goal was to create a world in which players would be able to take charge and take initiative to further the world story, eventually taking all but the most powerful or random abilities away from staff members and orchestrating their own events and plots.

Unfortunately, we do not believe that this is the direction that the game has progressed. This is due to a number of reasons, the extent of which could be discussed at great length. Suffice it to say that it is a combination of some poor design decisions, some interesting ideas that didn’t quite pan out for whatever reason, and expectations not being met in the way we anticipated. As an example, many of the devices were modeled on “golden era” MUDing, perhaps 10 years ago or so. A pantheon of 6 (7) deities is sufficient for 100 active and engaged players, but not for 50 and down.

As well, not enough attention has been given to things that progress the story, intrigue, and roleplay. Rather, we have ended up devoting nearly all resources towards furthering MMO style gameplay – skill grinding, money and item farming, etc. This is in part to match some player expectations, but ultimately has come to change the entire direction and focus of the game from its original intent. Some of this is a factor of a changing demographic, some of it is a matter of individual preference, and some is just a matter of making mistakes and learning from them.

Lastly, there has been a growing problem related to disrespect and harassment of staff members. While we do not anticipate that everyone will be enamored with every decision made and we understand that sometimes things do not move as quickly as one might hope, there is absolutely no excuse for some of the behavior that we have been subjected to either directly or indirectly. Derogatory emails, harassment on non-game related venues such as Facebook, flat out face-to-face disrespect, and other choice examples top this list. It extends even beyond direct actions, however, to people willfully breaking rules because they know that due to limited staff availability that it is unlikely that they will be caught. Cross charactering, AFK scripting, and exploitation of bugs are all things that should never had to have been dealt with but did.

What does this all mean, then?

Much of the internal talks over the past week have been about what to do to resolve these issues and continue forward. At the heart of the matter is that this is supposed to be fun for everyone involved and due to the issues enumerated above has stopped to be so for staff. That essentially leaves us with two options – salvage, or walk away.

It was unanimously agreed that the changes required to solve outstanding issues were not something that could be made without dramatically changing the existing game in ways that were not compatible with an ongoing game. However, the prospect of simply turning our backs on everything that we, including numerous players, have worked so hard on over the past two years is not pleasant either. We wanted to find a compromise somewhere that would allow us to refocus back on the desired path but without throwing everything away.

As such, the future of Isles of Aedin is as follows. Maintenance and development on the existing game will cease and development will begin on a spiritual sequel. The same overall world and lore will apply except where changes are done to refine it based on existing problems or things that did not work out or weren’t well received, though it will be at some timeframe largely in the future of Aedin. The existing game and boards will remain completely operational and open to anyone. This sequel will of course begin in an alpha stage. Once enough progress has been made, we will certainly open this up to anyone that is interested in playtesting.

We are fully aware of the “political” ramifications of this move and that there will most likely be a non-trivial percentage of people that walk away perhaps never to return and it pains us greatly to have that be the reality. However, when left with the decision of abandoning our creation and attempting to return it to its former fun, there was really only one decision to make. We would certainly love to see everyone in Aedin’s future, however, and we will be rolling the current game’s events, including anyone’s character that wants to be part of it, into the lore and backstory of the future. For anyone interested, we will have more details on this set of transition events available in the near future if you are so inclined to write your character into the pages of history.

Please be sure that this was not an easy choice, as evidenced by the sheer amount of time spent debating back and forth about what to do. If anything, our sheer love and devotion to the game, the lore, and its success is what drives this forward in a new direction instead of floundering and dying an unceremonious death of mediocrity. We have appreciated every ounce of creativity and all the time people have put into this game, truly.

Thanks as always, guys. Here’s hoping to meeting again on the other side.

-IoA Staff

Hey guys,

Just a quick note to say that the website will be undergoing maintenance this evening. I’m not sure how long this might take, but I am guessing no more than 30 minutes. As a result, you might not be able to access some or all of it while the upgrade is taking place. Thanks!

-CM

Good evening everyone! Here is the latest and greatest installment of the things that are kicking around on the drawing board or that we feel would be useful to have a bit of exposure to player ideas. As usual, please note that most of these ideas are still in the experimental stage or just random scribbles and sticky notes.

Rage / Berserkers

Ah, rage. Probably one of if not the first class specific ability added into the game ages and ages ago. Life was simpler then. Abilities were nice and vanilla. Bugs ran rampant and the server crashed almost nightly. Good times. All that was an elaborate way of saying “Rage was oversimplified when initially added due to the desire to get things done quickly so we could move on.” However, now that all the core has been laid out we can take a bit more time and go back and add all the things we originally wanted to do but didn’t either due to complexity or time constraints.

Right now the biggest problem facing Rage for everyone is that is is a binary state. You’re either in rage with huge bonuses or out or rage without them. While I do not have any hard numbers at the moment, the goal I believe here is to change Rage to be a scaling benefit based on your overall health. For example, you might automatically go into rage at 90% health. At 90% health you gain… oh, let’s say +15% AR and -15% evade. You keep fighting and get down to 50% health. Now maybe you have +40% AR and -60% evade. Maybe at 60% health you pick up the first haste, that sort of thing.

Now wait a minute, this sounds like a straight up nerf? Well, it actually finally justifies adding a bunch more things to Rage that we originally envisioned but didn’t do because it was already incredibly powerful. For starts, I’ve always loved the idea of the ol’ “so enraged the berserked ignores pain” facet of many games, so we could give them some degree of natural armor as their rage grows. Maybe things to help them maintain rage, like getting a deathblow reinvigorates them a little bit with bloodlust. This also ties into the next category…

Battle Techniques

Long long ago, Battle Techniques used to be War Cries and Berserkers were limited to level 10 in it while Warriors could train it to 50. When the entire idea behind it was changed, the Berserker level cap wasn’t. Based on some of the successful stories I’ve heard, it sounds like the following changes might be fun for everyone.

We could move counter / riposte out into the standard command space so that any melee character can do it. Replace these with better / different versions in BT. Also add a shield based version.

Improve the taunt so that it scales faster and providers a weaker but AoE version.

Remove or increase the berserker cap to let them get defend, maybe throw in some berserker specific ones as well (ideas?)

And of course, actually implement the rest of the line. I think it stops right now at 25 or 30 just because we left it there while trying out the new underlying mechanisms of it, but the rest of the abilities are still plotted. This would also be a good time to get a feeling for things people feel are lacking in the classes that could be addressed.

Foraging

As the precursor to the crafting system, it makes sense to get a foraging system in place first. The term “foraging” is pretty loosely defined and we’d like to gather feedback from you all on things you’d like to see. While we obviously can’t implement anything and everything, it will greatly help us figure out what’s important and will be fun for everyone.

A few of these things are rather core and needed for the overlying crafting system, though implementation details haven’t been fully hashed out yet. Things like mining (metal, stone, gem), gathering herbs, chopping wood, and skinning animals (pelts, leather, bone) would be examples of core things that supply base components for crafting. Would it make sense to require specialized gear? Active commands to do it vs just walking into a room and seeing “You see a piece of ore on the ground.” Skill based?

As well, there could be plenty of non core things. Farming and fishing come to mind as the prime examples of these. Other suggestions certainly welcome.

Thanks guys!

-CM

Not exactly an early morning / afternoon patch, but I’m not going to be around much tomorrow on account of father’s day so here goes nothing! This was intended to go out last week but I just couldn’t bring myself to leave one feature unfinished. Hopefully everything is working up to snuff now, though I have no doubt we’ll need to polish / refine some things as we go. Read on!

Shops

– Shop list now breaks out armor into “Heavy” and “Light” categories. Light armor is pure caster friendly. Also fixed bug with shop examine not properly listing whether or not something would interfere with casting.

– Added ability to filter shop list by Consumable, Writer, Writeable, Instrument, and Lockpick.

– Added ability for shops to only service based on class / religion / race criteria. IE it is now possible to have a shop of Aederon that only sells to followers of Aederon.

– Fixed issue with shops that have hours that span midnight being perpetually closed.

– Fixed issue with improper faction based cost scaling in some shop actions.

– Fixed issue with shops not counting coins when selling containers.

Chase System

– The “chase” command has been added to this game. This is effectively an aggressive follow. While chasing someone, when they move you have a chance to automatically move with them (as long as you are capable). Each time you successfully chase, their chance to escape rises. You cannot chase while grouped, though this might be reevaluated at some point in the future.

– 31+ in tracking provides a bonus to chasing (only to maintaining chase, not escaping).

Customization System

A customization system has been added for weapon attacks and spells / psionics. Feel like you can do a better job than the staff or just want to personalize your own stuff? Now you can! Please note that all customizations require staff approval (though this is automated in game, no emailing and whatnot). The help file for this will go into a lot more detail on the specifics, but here’s a high level view.

For basic melee attacks, you can put whatever you want before the “at target” bit. “Code Monkey feints to the left and makes a stab with his rapier” would be a good example.

For spells, you can rewrite any of the animations (up to 4 per spell). These are the start animation, the resolve animation, the pulse animation (if pulsing) and the end animation (if pulsing). For these you fill in the entirety of the animation.

Factions

– Faction shifts will only occur in rooms where that faction is relevant. For example, murdering an Urda citizen NPC outside of Urda will have no effect, but doing it in the city will cause a shift.

Zacotl / Flying

– We went back to the drawing board on this race to examine where we wanted it to fit mechanically. The goal was the “aerial superiority” race, so a number of changes have been made to help in that regard.

– Zacotl now “swoop” in combat while flying. What this means is that as long as the Zacotl is at a higher elevation than the target they will swoop down and attack the target, effectively ignoring vertical range restrictions. Normal tact range restrictions apply. Swooping costs additional fatigue.

– Zacotl base fatigue pool increased by 10. This change has been made retroactively.

– Zacotl can now adjust their elevation by 40 at a time instead of 20.

– Zacotl fatigue cost for adjusting flying height reduced.

– Base delay for flight lowered from 5 to 3.

NPC Spawn Thresholding

– Support has been added for the idea of “threshold” NPC spawns. What this means is that certain NPCs can be flagged to only start spawning when a group of a certain size is in the area. These could be elite NPCs to provide more challenge / reward for groups or just simply different ones. As with most new things, it will take a bit of time for the rest of staff to begin integrating this into the world.

EDIT: Disguise

– Forgot about this one. Two new disguise abilities have been added.

– At level 35 “disguise titles” is gained. Using this will hide all your titles when someone looks at you.

– At level 40 “disguise faction [faction]” is gained. Using this causes things to react to your faction score with that faction as if it were neutral, regardless of what the actual score may be. Only one faction may be disguised at a time.

Misc

– Support added for some new spell / psi archetypes. More on this later.

– Standing now takes 2 fatigue and has a small delay attached to it.

– Looking in containers now gives you the itemized list that the “inventory” command does.

Hey guys,

I’ve had a couple of people pinging me about my seeming lack of presence over the past week or so, and so I wanted to throw something up to let everyone know I’m not dead. And yes, there is a patch brewing. It was originally supposed to go out last weekend but due to some time constraints and one major feature not being polished off enough I decided to suck it up and wait until this upcoming Friday or Saturday to stay in line with my not patching on a work night schedule. The good news – gives me some more time to work on things. The bad news, obviously, is waiting until this weekend.

Work is / has been getting a bit hectic as well, so I apologize in advance if I’ve been hard to get ahold of. Don’t doubt for a moment though, as plans are still going forward to advance the game as usual. I just might be more grumpy / sleepy than usual.

Thanks as always for the continued support, and tremendous thanks for the voting. I still can’t believe we’re #5 as of the time of this posting for the second month in a row! While we cannot offer rewards for voting, it is definitely a symbiotic relationship where staff is encouraged to see the game doing well and appreciates the support you guys are giving.

-CM

Ah, the joys of not patching minutes before I need to go to bed and then staying up hours later anyway just to make sure everything is stable. A Code Monkey could get used to this sort of life.

Snarkiness aside, let’s take a look at what we have here.

Factions

– The bits for faction systems have been turned on, effectively enabling it full scale. Keep in mind that it will take a bit of time for the world builders to begin fully incorporating it into everything, this is just talking about the mechanical aspects of it.

– Attacking or being caught stealing from an NPC will lower your faction with any friendly factions that NPC is associated with. How much is determined by the actual NPC. As an example, killing Urda townies is less offensive to the faction than killing their guards. It will raise your faction with any opposing factions by a similar amount.

– Shops, trainers, and healers will adjust their prices based on your standing with their faction. How much depends on the shop. Some might even flat out refuse to provide services if your score is poorer than what they allow.

– NPCs that are normally aggressive for which you have a very high faction score might not normally be aggressive towards you. NPCs that are normally not aggressive for which you have a very low faction score can become aggressive towards you without provocation.

Player Commands / Titles

– Several new titles have been added to the game.

– New commands have been added for players equipped with certain titles. This will be noted to players on a 1 on 1 basis. At present this is only for Justicars and Councilmembers, but it is extensible to anyone and anything as we move forward.

– Added “upkeep” command to list all spells / psionic manifestations you are currently maintaining and on who.

– The “diagnose” command now provides information about mana levels.

Shops / Items / New Players

– Shop repairing will now require a “confirm” at the end. Without the confirm it will just tell you how long it would be if you did confirm it.

– Shop repairing low level gear will happen instantly now instead of with a delay.

– Added shop resize command. Any store that is capable of repairing is also capable of resizing. The command is simple “shop resize [item]” and it will be resized to your size.

– Shop examine will now give an item’s long description if it has one.

– Containers can now be transparent.

– Containers will now report how many items they can carry.

– Looking at an item will now give information similar to the shop examine command such as armor protection, damage capacity, etc.

AI Enhancements

– Several NPCs across the lands have gotten some unique twists to what they can do. I won’t ruin the fun by explaining it all here, but I will note that right now they are all “boss” type NPCs. This is a somewhat medium-ish experiment to verify that everything works okay. Provided it does, we’ll be adding more and more as we go.

Classes

– Psionic AP damage scaling has been changed to not take effect against NPCs as a stopgap until we finish redoing a number of their abilities.

– A number of the psionic abilities have been touched up. There is still more to do on this, however.

Account Preferences

– You can now toggle whether or not you see people enter / leave the world in your account preferences.

Misc

– Fixed typo in use lockout message.

– Shop contact is now colored on the server side.

– Shop heal will now fix wounds as well as health.

– Anything ending with a double quote (“) will no longer auto generate a period.

– Fixed issue with some containers having infinite carry.

What an ominous title, eh? Fortunately, nothing too ominous to report on. At least I don’t think so. Let’s find out!

Before that, though, I’m sure a couple of you are wondering where the heck your hard earned patch is. It’s all ready to go, but I have found that patching on “work nights” has been adding unnecessary stress due to staying up to monitor things for stability, performance, etc. As such, I’m trying to move the standard patch day / time to sometime over the weekend where it’s less of a strain making sure everything is alright. That all being said, you should be expecting to see your patchy goodness this weekend!

Now then, let’s take a look at some upcoming things or ideas that are brewing.

Improved Customization

A marvel idea was pitched to me earlier this week. One of the problems that every game has, including visual games, is that everything is ultimately hard coded. When you swing your sword, there are only so many animations to be picked from. When mage A casts a spell, it looks just like mage B. Ultimately, this is sort of boring and uninspired. It can also heavily lead to metagaming since the players tend to learn what description means what.

Instead, what about a system that allowed players the ability to essentially arbitrarily customize their spell and attack animations? The system could them either pick a random custom animation sort of like how the current attack system picks an animation for you or provide some sort of mechanism to let you choose your own. Or both! This would obviously require some sort of staff approval system to prevent someone from making their uber spell of pwnage look like a heal spell, but otherwise we think it holds a lot of promise.

New Race

Not a whole lot of details to spill on this yet, but it is essentially confirmed that we will be adding one more race to fill the desired “evil brute” race slot. When this occurs, it’s likely going to have to be backfilled into the existing lore to avoid some sort of ugly shim situation where a new race magically appears. As this is a Beta, we are hoping that nobody takes too much offense to this as we believe it’s the best scenario moving forward. We’re hoping to have the initial details on this new race publicly available shortly.

Group / Epic Hunting

While the plugin system is going to do some special things with NPC AI in the next patch (!), one of the common complaints I have heard is that hunting areas often do not scale well with large numbers of people in a group simply because of what we’ll call the “zerg effect.” This is a different situation than a bunch of people who happen to be independently in the same area, but rather specifically where you have a bunch of people grouped together.

As such, we have begun looking into ways to make hunting areas a bit more dynamic and responsive to the type of players in them. Taking the Vollogs as an example due to the recent fun in Urda with them, we might see the same spawn layout that we do today while folks are in there hunting either solo or duo. However, once people show up as a group of 3 or if the area determines that a given player / duo is appropriately powerful enough, it might start sending Alpha Vollogs or a King Vollog or something out.

I would stress that the goal here is not to favor group hunting but rather to enhance the ability of the game to respond to current situations and make it more challenging and engaging for players rather than “zerg”ing their way through things.

Player Empowerment / Faction Stuff

Some aspects of the next patch are going to begin putting more specific control into the hands of players. Elected city people will have access to things like sending out town criers, Justicars will have the ability to exile and pardon people from Urda, and a couple other things. These are obviously hugely experimental and will rely strongly on player maturity, but we are hoping to provide a level of player driven control not seen in many games. Fancy titles and positions are nice and all, but having the power to make things happen is what really brings it to life. I just want to mention this now because I feel that we are somewhat at an important crossroads with this decision and I want to make sure that we are all able to keep moving forward having fun and being mature.

Future Large Coding Projects

With the next patch, much of the faction bits will be flipped on and, barring something catastrophic, we can begin to evaluate our next major coding project – player enabled foraging and crafting. This of course means that we will continue to enhance various other areas and fix bugs, but the “big task” will be crafting focused. We have talked about this for a long time and it is a great time now to take the opportunity to have folks chime in on what sorts of things they would like to see, whether from systems in other games they felt worked well (or failed miserably, good to learn from mistakes too!), or just from their own creative juices.

Presently we have a number of ideas considered on the drawing board so I will mention some of the basics here. Firstly, we intend to make crafting heavily reliant on materials. Simply put, this means to make a sword you need to find metal to forge it from. Some metals might be purchasable, some might be findable / mineable, and some might only be available through scenarios. We hope to start an in game player driven economy in this way.

Secondly, as with everything else it will be a skill driven thing. It’s undecided whether the skills will be somehow racially or class bound, but the general consensus is to limit the amount of crafting available to any one given character somehow to encourage diversity and player interdependence / interaction. One idea might be a concept of “subclassing” where you pick up a subclass such as “Smith” that unlocks armor and weapon forging, or “Woodworker” that unlocks bow, staff, etc making. Thoughts and suggestions welcome, of course.

Hey guys,

We’re back up but experiencing some hardware difficulties. Everything should be stable but we will be taking things down at approximately 1pm EST to perform a hardware maintenance to resolve the issues. Thanks for everyone’s patience and understanding, and sorry for the inconvenience.

On the plus side, if you’re anything like me this gives you no excuse not to call your mother or dash out for some last minute flowers for your wife or something.

EDIT: Maintenance has been completed successfully and so far everything looks good! Thanks guys!

-CM

Before we get on to the notes, I wanted to just take a moment to both welcome all the new faces we have been seeing around here and thank everyone for the dedicated voting that has kept us at #3 on TMS. I never believed that just a scant 8 or so months after opening up to the public in beta that we would have this kind of turnout, so our thanks go out to each of you. We might be the new kids on the block and still have lots to do, but I believe we can continue to grow and succeed as a community.

Alright, all that emotional kumbaya stuff aside, let’s get down to some notes. Much of what was done in this patch was laying the groundwork for a lot of new things to come. While some things might not seem evident on the surface while playing the game, you will begin to notice more and more things built upon them. I’ll try to give some examples for each one.

Factions

– The barebones faction system has been introduced. Currently there is 1 implemented faction, the City of Urda, though this will begin to (hopefully) rather rapidly. Much like the random loot system, this is a trial run to make sure the basics work out first before we really dig into it. For now, here are some of the highlights.

NPCs in a faction will react to your ranking with them. People with extremely high rankings might have the guards turn a blind eye (or deliberately treat them differently), or naturally aggressive NPCs might not be aggressive. People with very low rankings might experience the opposite, where normally non aggressive NPCs become hostile without provocation. NPCs will also respect members of their own faction, so no more guards killing citizens.

The current iteration is just to make sure some basics are still working. Provided this is the case, this weekend I’ll be patching in some more to expand upon it.

“Plugin” System

– I’ll spare every the “bored to tears” in depth technical explanation of this and mention some of the highlights. Essentially what this is going to allow us to do is write very specific actions into the game. For example, giving Justicars a unique “exile” command that interacts with with the faction system, or giving players with ranks ability to send out messengers, stuff like that. It will also allow us to begin to write in unique NPC AI, so expect to see some NPCs pick up some new tricks in the future.

This is unfortunately one of those “tons and tons and tons of code and planning involved, very little to show for it” types of things, so just bear with us and see what it brings in the future.

Random Loot System

– Random loot system has been expanded to work with Weapons, Armor, and Clothing. This is still somewhat a trial system, so please let us know if you find something that appears completely messed up so we can fix it.

Drug System

– Fixed issue with retaking a specific drug not correctly putting you back under its effect when it had previously worn off.

– Increased the rate at which addictive withdrawal clears.

– Changed duration on Galatean Sand to 10 minutes.

– Changed slow effect on Galatean Sand to 1 second

– Changed effect on Galatean Sand to have it where you can hear fragments of conversations from nearby rooms. Withdrawal will cause you to miss bits of conversation from the room you are in.

– Purified Essence will now grant Nightvision to Duskwen.

Races

– Duskwen demonblood ability duration extended to 5 minutes from 2 minutes.

– Duskwen demonblood ability now grants Nightvision as well.

Turn Undead

– Cost has been more normalized and generally lowered for Turn Undead.

– System has been changed from random effects to called effects. Now instead of “turn ghost” you will have to “turn ghost [effect]“.

– Clerics / Templars can also now turn non-undead with a specific “realign” effect, allowing them to target creatures under the effect with their undead-only spells. This is designed to hopefully make clerics less of a heal / buff bot in a group setting and better capable of solo hunting.

Classes

– Clerics and Templars can now gain WIL from training their magic lines. This change has been retro-rolled.

– Monks can now gain STR from training MA. This change has been retro-rolled.

– EDIT: Psionic armor piercing damage now scales based on your distance to the target. Standing 10 tacts away will result in significantly reduced damage, whereas standing next to them will have the same effect that it did prior. And everywhere in between.

Misc

– Throwing dice will now show you the result.

– Fixed bug where some debuff spells would not take effect on NPCs.

– Reduced maximum penalty for non-mastered spells getting increased cast time. After talking with some players, it was too punitive. The effect and duration penalties remain the same.