Hey all,

After fighting for a while with my new host, it looks like we finally got the DNS squared away. You can now visit this page by going to www.islesofaedin.com.

You can also get to the game via game.islesofaedin.com, port 40001.

Thanks guys.

Just a few quick fixes for things I forgot or unintentionally broke.

– Fixed queuing issue.

– NPCs should no longer drop broken items.

– Fixed issue (again) with items dropping off NPCs not being worth at least 1 mark.

– Changed coin payout calculation that resulted in a rather large dip in average payout around the low 20s. Fixed error that could cause NPCs flagged as having 1 crown to not have any.

Thanks for the patience, guys.

Evening folks. Before we get down to the patch notes, I wanted to thank everyone again for continuing to support us. We understand that this is a grassroots game, but with everyone’s support we hope to continue making it bigger, better, and above all more fun and enjoyable for everyone. (Yes, I know how cheesy that was.)

From the staff side of things, we are having a blast. The Elbanes / Baelros scenario and all the intrigue therein have been really fun to plan, execute, and watch. A big thanks to everyone who has taken time out to get into it – hopefully we can continue to have a few more surprises and twists thrown in.

And now, your patches.

Server Changes

– Server now adds 1/4 of a second of delay to all commands. This should be basically unnoticeable except to stop insanely fast commands, such as what we staff have dubbed “telewalking.”

– As a result of this change, at least for now the “>” prompt has been disabled.

Turn Undead

– Turn Undead now tells you about the favor cost of using it.

– Turn Undead will no longer let you even try if your favor levels prohibits you from possibly succeeding.

– Turn Undead’s “holy incineration” effect will no longer leave a corpse’s corpse.

Emotes

– Added tons more emotes based on the forum thread.

– You can now emote at things in your inventory.

Inventory

– Items readied no longer count against your 20 limit “floating” inventory limit.

– The “inventory” command now breaks out containers and clothing into their sections instead of into “Misc”

Defenses

– Defenses used against monsters dramatically lower level than you will no longer earn uses.

Spells

– Aggressive storms will no longer have effect in peaced areas.

Item Names

– I believe I should have resolved all the instances of names getting wacky, such as “broken damaged”, etc. This applies to new items only, existing items that are wacky will probably be more wacky after this patch. Please see a staff member to rename them if it’s something you do not wish to sell.

Technical / Boring

– Fixed the sending window size issue that could cause some longer descriptions to get fragmented on clients, in particular room descriptions and help lists.

Misc

– Changed the word “second” to “sec.” when unreadying weapons for uniformity.

– Changing languages and assisting will no longer unhide you.

– Whispering is now possible in combat. Originally it made no sense, but it was prohibiting such critical messages as “AFK, my house is on fire.” and the like.

– Fixed error when using the “go” command and not specifying where you want to go.

Sorry about the late update, folks. Yesterday was a bit of a stressful day with some car troubles among other things and I just didn’t get the time to finish off the things I had wanted to for this patch.

However! Now that we’re moving along, I wanted to thank everyone who has shown up to play the game. We the staff are thrilled beyond words that all our hard work is being enjoyed (we hope!) by people, and we hope we can all continue to work together to have a lot of fun. We had a lot of fun running the opening set of events, and though it was a bit of a learning experience I think overall it went pretty well. Much of the stuff in this patch is based on player feedback with a couple of new additions, so even though we may not be responding to every post, we are certainly reading and taking notes on your feedback.

Anyway, read on! And as always, feedback is always appreciated.

Tracking

– Tracking has been added as a skill. There are two modes to use it in. The first is with the “search tracks” command, which searches your current room for all tracks. The other is by toggling the “track” command. For example, let’s say I wanted to find city waste engineers. I would do a “track engineer”. Now every time I move I automatically search the room at a quickened pace for tracks from the engineers. If I want to stop, I simply “track off”. This gets faster / more reliable with levels, as well as letting you find older tracks and more accurate tracks.

NPCs

– NPC magic resist now scales with level. This means that someone using spells at level 20 against a level 50 monster will have significantly reduced chance to penetrate spell resistance. On equal levels, the resistance is normal. This should help prevent mages from severely overhunting areas with monsters with poor or no ranged attacks.

– Guards should no longer become hostile if you cast a spell at yourself with a harmful effect.

– Guards should no longer “freeze up” if their primary target dies or leaves the room.

– Guards should no longer become hostile if you are defending yourself against an NPC, even if you started the fight out of its vision.

Urgons

– Urgons can now eat NPC corpses to recover health and fatigue.

Magic Changes

– Fixed issue with a spell modifiers being able to take the effect down to 0, especially noticeable on hastes / slows.

– Magical Armor spells now impart a base flat block in addition to their percentage based armor. This is designed to make them more useful at lower levels / damages.

First Aid

– First Aid has been made noticeably better in terms of HP restored at lower levels.

Uses

– Levels 1-5 will now grant x3 uses on skills.

– Levels 6-10 will now grant x2 uses on skills.

– While hasted you will no longer gain uses.

Misc

– Advancing now has a base 1 second delay.

– Throwing spent runestones will cause them to shatter now.

– Stuns should now properly stop monsters from following you / blocking you.

– Fixed hashing issue with creating new logins.

– Fixed issue with items in containers ignoring durability when determining price.

– Lowered spawn rate of NPCs inside of Travers

– Fixed issue with disguise causing tattoos / markings to incorrectly readjust themselves.

– Fixed issue with casting mods and Druid Natural armor spells

– Fixed issue with doors closing extremely rapidly in certain circumstances (hopefully!)

– Lots of various typos, etc fixes. Thanks for submitting them guys.

– EDIT: Forgot this one, maybe a few more. Everything dropped off an NPC is now worth at least 1 mark regardless of depreciation.

– EDIT2: Getting reminded of these as people remind me. Base claw ftg cost reduced to 4 from 5.

It has come to my attention that there is a sporadic issue when making new accounts. This is unfortunately a missed problem when we moved servers and the architecture changed, which causes hashing algorithms to change behaviors slightly in certain circumstances.

If all of that meant nothing to you, it will be fixed in the next patch. If you are having problems creating an account, please try remaking the account with a new password. If you don’t get the “Account Created Successfully” message, that means it did not go through.

Sorry for any inconveniences. Thanks for bearing with us!

Well, today is the big day. Beta launch. I can hardly believe it. I don’t even really know what to say except a big thank you to everyone who has stuck with us through nightly server crashes, power losses, more ERRORs than I can possible count. This absolutely would not have been possible without you all.

So truly, a massive thank you from all of us to you.

Now with the mushy emotional stuff out of the way, let’s go to some beta! First, some technical details. As of the time of this posting, DNS changes for islesofaedin.com have no propagated yet. As such, you will need to connect on the specific IP address (same as the website, 204.93.178.222) on the traditional 40001 port. Once the DNS change does occur, you can simply connect to islesofaedin.com on port 40001. Everyone will need to create a new account here. You may use the same name and password as your previous account if you wish – we are simply trying to prune out some old information and start with a fresh slate.

I will be in game tonight dealing with alpha rewards. If you believe you qualify, please create an assist in game and I will help you. If you are not around today, please email me at daniel.l.doyle@gmail.com and I will get back to you. To clarify, only people who made significant contributions in alpha either with suggestions, testing, writing contributions, or time dedication will qualify.

With Beta comes full RP. Alphachat is gone and Betachat (say) is in. We expect everyone to be in character at all times. If you need to get ahold of someone from staff, you can use the in game assist command, send an email, or poke us on AIM if we’re around. There may still be ERRORs lurking around – if you stumble across this, any of the above mentioned channels (as well as the standard bugreport and typo commands) are appropriate for dealing with them.

Also with beta comes anti scripting measures. While scripting is tolerated, inattentive scripting or as some call it AFK scripting is absolutely not. Those found AFK scripting will have a 3 strike system. The first is a 3 day account suspension from the game. The second is a skill reset. The third is an account ban. We’re really serious here, folks. A full Terms of Service will be posted on the board shortly once we have finalized it and will detail all this and more. I really wish I didn’t have to do any of this because I want to believe that everyone will play nice and fair, but I’m unfortunately not that naive.

You might notice that the boards have changed, too. When we moved we decided to try out a new look mostly for fun – feedback welcome as always. Unfortunately due to the way we were able to get a copy of the saved data, everything from the past 5 days or so has been lost. This includes new accounts or new posts / threads. Our apologies, but given the circumstances it was the we could do. If you feel you had a particularly important thread, please copy / paste it from the old boards.

With all that out of the way…

Welcome to Aedin.

Just a quick note for people – the game is back up temporarily at 98.223.182.198, port 40001. Within the next day or so it will be moving over to DNS at simply “islesofaedin.com”, port 40001. Thanks for the patience. Moving is always 100x harder than I remember it. /grumbles

Every time I do these things, I can’t remember the syntax I use for representing the date. Every time I think about looking at previous posts, but then I already have the editor up and have started typing and… yeah.

Ahem.

Sweet mother of Thaessilgan, this is our last week of Alpha! I can hardly believe it. Today in game a couple of the older fogies and I were sitting around being nostalgic and truly, it is remarkable how far the game has come since we first opened it up to people just about a year ago. I’ll have a big long speechy post right when we get closer, so for now, let’s get to some patch notes.

EDIT: I forgot to mention some other important news. We are going to be moving the site AND game within the next week over to dedicated hosting, so it’s possible at some point that it will disappear for a while while I move things. It is guaranteed that starting tomorrow afternoon-ish EST (Monday) that the game will be down, as I am moving. It likely won’t be back until Tuesday evening as a result. My apologies for the downtime – hopefully distance makes the heart grow fonder?

Shops

– Added the ability for some shops to be able to unlock locked boxes, chests, etc. The syntax is “shop unlock <item keyword>”, as you probably guessed.

– Changed the way Tradestores manage their inventory. Tradestores will now rotate their inventory to only have a maximum of 100 items at a time. Tradestores will no longer keep in their inventory bags, chests, etc from NPCs. Tradestores will now empty out containers sold to them, adding each item into their inventory rather than leaving it in the container.

Races

– Slightly reduced Varanus body armor and slightly raised Galirrim body armor. This impacts new rollups only since we’re so close to a wipe I didn’t want to bother writing an upgrade script.

– Touch of Morana has been added for Galirrim. This basically amounts to a curse that requires them to take a special type of cure every so often to avoid certain feral actions. A cure will grant you some period of time before the effects begin again – how long depends on how strong the Galirrim is and how powerful the cure is. As the Galirrim gains higher power with their natural abilities, it requires more to keep them in check. At the worst point, Galirrim will begin to attack randomly or move randomly as their baser instincts begin to take over. More information such as the reason behind it, etc will be posted shortly.

Languages

– All classes except Psions have their own class language now.

– Zacotl may now choose an additional racial language at rollup to better represent their scattered culture.

Lockpicking

– Changed the difficulty calculation slightly.

– Lockpicking now works on doors.

Spells / Psi

– Level 50 spells will not be so harsh on their racial modifiers now, as there is no way to outlevel them.

– Many of the 25+ templar buff and debuff spells have been significantly increased in power.

– Fixed issue where you could have multiple instances of the same storm running. You can have multiple storms, just not the same one.

– Fixed issue with Humans and Silvarin having lower than intended Psi mods.

EDIT2: Alcohol

(How the hell did I forget about this? I’ve been promising it for months before Beta!)

- Alcohol has been introduced to the lands of Aedin! Drink and be merry! Drink too much, though, and you’ll probably get sick. Drink even more than that and you just might die from alcohol poisoning. There’s still a small bit I wasn’t able to get quite working with regards to speech slurring, but everything else is there.

- Higher CON scores results is less effect per sip.

-Vorngar have a racial resistance to the effects of alcohol.

- Different drinks have different alcoholic ratings. A mug of “Dragon’s Breath” might flatten you after a couple of sips, while a fancy mix drink probably will take a couple before you feel it.

Guards

– Guards now actually act like guards. They will respond to aggressive events, but are smart enough to realize that you attacking a clearly aggressive monster isn’t a criminal act. They also have very good memories, so simply running away and coming back won’t help you much if the same guard finds you again.

Instruments

– Added instruments and activated the Instruments skill. You can use them via the “play” command, such as “play a soft song on flute”.

NPCS

– Changed the way item sell prices for NPCs are calculated. Items dropped off NPCs are generally considered in non perfect condition and will have their prices automatically scaled to be in line with what they are capable of dropping coinwise.

Assist

– Added “assist” mechanism for people with questions. The usage is “assist <description of what you need help with>”. If you’re from DG, it works exactly the same. Use “assist cancel” to remove an assist request. The assist is linked to your account and persists no matter what character you are on, as well as automatically readding itself when you log back on.

Rogues

– Rogues now specialize their character at rollup, choosing which skills to have as primary (50), secondary (30), and tertiary (10). The skills in question are Bows / Throwing, Blades / Thrusts, Disguise, Tracking, Picklock, Pickpocket, and Dual Wield. Rogues get 3 primary, 2 secondary, and 2 tertiary.

Misc

– Fixed bug when following someone who enters a room with a lower elevation than you not properly disbanding you.

– Fixed bug with Psion’s Dominate ability working on pets.

– Fixed bug with STR increases not increasing carry capacity.

– Shinkick should only target lets now, if applicable.

– Fixed error with duplicate numbers showing up in the attribute picker on rollup.

– Fixed issue that could cause the container chance for areas to not be utilized correctly.

– Capped rogue critical strike damage to 1/2 the target’s max HP. This should only really have a bearing when executing them against Fae and getting a perfect roll.

– Added a small server delay to all move commands. Basically, no instant walking anymore.

Hello Everyone,

As you can see, there is now a pretty little events list on the sidebar of the website that will display upcoming events. There is now also a Calendar page amongst the headers which will display a large calendar with event links that can be hovered over for more information. If you need more information than the day of the event (as the list shows), then go to the calendar page to see more info such as time, location, and host. Enjoy!

-V

I almost decided to post this without my usual wit and charm at the top, but I figured it just wouldn’t be the same. So without further ado, I will simply leave you with the wisdom I gained today – canoeing 9 miles is very exhausting, and sun screen is your friend.

Read on!

New Commands

– There is now a “typo” command in addition to the “bugreport” command. I know in the past that bugreport has fallen by the wayside, but we are revitalizing it. Please start using these. Both commands will record your room when using it as well, so you can reference that if it helps.

Defenses

– Defense cooldown calculation in PvP has been changed slightly to help players with high defensive skills have more of a result from their skills. High defensive skills will now have a lower natural cooldown in PvP, helping to make them active more often. You can still be overwhelmed, of course, but this should hopefully help make them more worthwhile. Note this is PvP only, PvE remains the same.

Tattoos et al

– Added a unique marking system to players. You can get customized scars, tattoos, tribal markings, pretty much whatever you want. These are available via events such as festivals, peddles, or if there is a particular RP reason / event to warrant it.

Stores

– Shop list will now break out its listing into explicitly titled categories. For example, all “Blades” weapons will be clearly marked as such.

Martial Arts

– Changed the combo system in Martial Arts to use generic tiers instead of hard coded combinations. Performing any Tier 1 move will allow you to perform any Tier 2 move, etc.

– Leg sweep no longer works on flying targets.

Grouping

– When leading a group, if you follow someone else your group will be merged into theirs (even if they are the only person in the group, ie not grouped).

– When the group leader dies, the group will disband.

– When you are the leader, you can now “disband <player>” to remove a specific person from the group.

Casting Mods

– Went back through and made casting mods more diverse. What this amounts to is that most races got worse at spellcasting, though in a respective fashion. The one exception to this is the Varanus, whose ranking in the spellcasting system has fallen significantly in an effort to help better balance and define them.

Misc

– Fixed bug where called shots were not properly using reduced AR.

– Reduced Acid Spit damage

–  Fixed bug with Urgons magically growing legs. Existing Urgons that have legs should see this after the next time they die.

– Fixed “disguise hair” to include styles now. For example, you now must do something like “disguise hair style wavy color brown” to get “wavy brown” as your disguised hair.

– Fixed issue with trying to fly into a room with a lower ceiling.

– Fixed Resurrection spells

– Fixed issue when attempting to fly over a room’s ceiling