Asheron's Call, Update Notes

Update Notes – June 2002 – Castling

By Ellen Ripley, June 14, 2002

Elysa Strathelar knew she was dreaming. She struggled against the invisible tendrils that held her, and that felt real enough. Panic and anger surged within her as she fought, twisting and snarling. . . but it was obviously a dream. A figure stood just outside of the corner of her eye, enough so that she knew he was there, could not see him directly. He seemed to flicker, there, not there, there, not there.

And she was floating, hovering above her bed. She could not turn her head, which was bound like the rest of her body, but she was several paces from her vaulted stone ceiling, and she could see the torch flames on the wall lapping up the warm night air as soft breezes blew in through the open tower windows.

In a back corner of her mind, behind the rage and fear as she fought against her unseen tormentor, she wondered what the dream meant. Yet another example of the icy rage she felt toward Martine? Her continued attempts to deal with the shock of almost losing her son? Her previous resentment towards Asheron, as she had had to cope with these problems alone? All of these, perhaps.

Any comfort brought to the people by the victories against the Bronze Statues and their new weapons was shattered by the assault on their Queen and the destruction of her castle by the insane Martine. Just barely escaping the destruction with her and her son’s lives, Queen Elysa begins taking steps, with the aid of Asheron, to truly make Dereth her people’s homeland. The last Empyrean has been of great assistance of late to the people of Dereth and has some wondering if he can indeed be trusted as the Queen has always maintained. Martine’s rage at having the Queen snatched from his grasp has not been satiated by the mere destruction of her castle, and he continues to formulate plans, breathing hate for Asheron.

Still reeling from this attack, the people were dealt another blow when mages were jolted awake in the dark of night, clutching their heads in pain. Throughout the ley lines of magical force deep in the planet, a vast fluctuation was felt. Reports trickled in that the magical Essences, those forces that aided the people in learning higher magics, were destroyed, and the rings where they stood smashed. To their dismay, the recovered mages discovered that their magics were not as powerful as they had once been. They were able, though, to take some solace in the fact that this fluctuation caused their magics to last much longer than they had previously.

Realizing what a blow this was to the Isparians, Asheron shared knowledge on how to create magical foci with the Arcanum. These bulky packs contained the essence of the magical schools known to the Isparians. With these in hand, along with Prismatic Tapers and Scarabs, Isparians could cast their spells without the other components they had used since their arrival on Dereth. Asheron also shared a means to record scrolls so that all those skilled in the various schools could understand them, not just lore scholars. Scriveners quickly set up shop in the various towns selling scrolls for purchase.

Amidst these events, the exploration of Dereth continues. Rumors return of an ancient Empyrean construct unlike any seen before, containing artifacts of an unknown purpose. Parties have begun gathering to find this construct and pull what secrets they can from it.

New Functionality and Content

  • 150 Cottages and 50 Villas have been added to the game.
  • There is now a separate panel for negative magical enchantments (the original enchantment panel now lists only positive magical enchantments). Both panels are in the far right upper corner.
  • @allegiance info is a new monarch-only command. Typing @allegiance info <charactername> (for a character in that monarch’s allegiance) will display the following: the full name and title of the character, the full name and title of the character’s patron, and the full name and title of each of the character’s vassals. This command can only be used once every 30 seconds.
  • The number of allegiance broadcasts the allegiance speaker can make per day has been raised from 3 to 10. In addition, monarchs may now assign speaker status to someone even if they are not currently online.
  • The leader of a Fellowship now shows up as a triangle dot on radar.
  • You can now use the @filter command to filter out recall messages. See @help filter for more details.

Miscellaneous Improvements and Changes

  • All vendors now accept all trade notes.
  • Pyreals now stack to a maximum of 10,000. In July we will introduce three additional trade notes into the game.
  • Mansions now have 100 hooks in them, all of them usable.
  • Neutral Balm’s burden has been reduced from 135 to 65 and is now available in more vendor locations.
  • The Select Self key now works to have a targeted action actually work on oneself. For example, a player can use a healing kit and then the Select Self key to heal oneself.
  • You now have a number of UI panels and character options that you can bind to a keyboard map.
  • A new mana stone, the Superb Mana Stone, can be found at some mage vendors. In addition, many more mage vendors now carry High and Great Mana Stones.
  • All Bronze trophy items are now givable and droppable again.
  • New characters who start with a magic school will start with the correct focus, 5 Lead Scarabs, and 25 Prismatic Tapers. New characters who start with additional magic schools will receive additional foci, but not additional scarabs or tapers.
  • The time it takes to read and learn a spell from a scroll has been reduced to roughly one second.
  • When a character attempts to use a mana stone to drain mana from an item, there will now be a confirmation check even if the item does not contain any mana.
  • Isparian Bows, Crossbows, and Atlatls are now unenchantable.
  • The Isparian Modifying Tool is now unbreakable. The stones, however, will break each time you put them in an Isparian weapon.
  • The Arcane Lore difficulty on Gorgets with Nuhmudira’s Boon has been altered. The new difficulty levels are Red (High) = 180, Blue (Mid) = 150, and Green (Low) = 120.
  • Isparian Daggers now have the correct damage range. Perfect Isparian Daggers have a maximum damage of 8, Superb 7, Good 6, and Quality 5.
  • You now get 3 Wood, Copper, or Obsidian Keys when you successfully carve Wood, Copper, or Obsidian Hearts.
  • We made a few changes to the Tenkkardun Foundry to reduce the viability of combat macroing in that location.
  • Last month we introduced a bug which prevented users from playing if they were using a machine running Win95a. This should be fixed now.
  • We believe we have fixed the bug where, occasionally, a character logging into the world would find that their items had lost all mana. This was a difficult bug to reproduce, and we would appreciate any reports if players experience this bug in the future.
  • There was a bug with the Fellowship panel last month that kept it from updating properly. This should be fixed now.
  • The bug where a character quits a fellowship and the character keeps attempting to assess a person in the fellowship has been fixed.
  • We fixed a bug where the cursor appeared as an hourglass on the Fellowship panel before a player actually created the fellowship.
  • There were a few bugs with the XP-sharing code for certain fellowships involving players over level 50. These have been fixed.
  • There was a bug where you could exploit a vendor by selling healing kits with less than full uses, then buying them back cheaply at full uses. This has been fixed.
  • For Creature Mastery scrolls, you will need to ID and read the description to determine if it’s a Self or Other scroll. Self and Other do not appear in the title of the scroll. This will be fixed in July.

Minor Details

  • The Invoker now displays the correct inscription.
  • The portal to the Arcanum Research Facility now has a level restriction prohibiting those characters under level 20.
  • Ciandra decided to reverse her impromptu sex-change operation, and now looks like a woman.
  • When using a mana stone on yourself, you will receive a message letting you know when all your items are full.
  • All non-used hooks now become visible whenever a house is abandoned.
  • Players can no longer open the doors to the inside of the statues from the outside, unless they use the correct key.
  • Statue Portal dungeons are now no-recall, no-tie, and no-summon.
  • The Isparian Dagger model has been changed.
  • The experience point total for a few statue creatures has been reduced.

Miscellaneous Changes

  • We’re always happy when we can implement new allegiance and fellowship improvements. We hope the @allegiance info tool and the increased uses of the allegiance broadcasts help monarchs manage their allegiances more productively. We’re also pleased with the new triangle radar shape for fellowship leaders. After being frustrated for a long time by the inability of a large group to easily follow a leader on the landscape, we hit upon this simple yet effective solution. We hope you enjoy it.
  • We fixed a number of longstanding and irritating bugs this month. Two of the biggest were the “vendors not buying back their own trade notes” and “characters logging back into the world and occasionally discovering that all their items had lost all their mana” problems. Our solution to the vendor issue was to make all vendors able to purchase all trade notes, regardless of what trade notes they sell. As we mentioned in the Dev Notes, the “items losing mana” issue was extremely difficult to track down and reproduce, so please report any instances if you see it happen again.
  • Money, money, money. After analyzing the current state of the pyreal economy and factoring in new changes such as the updated magic system, we decided to increase the stack size of the pyreal to 10,000. We think this change will help improve the liquidity of the pyreal, especially at such a time when the pyreal may have its greatest value.
  • Superb Mana Stones. One change we wanted to make sure to introduce whenever we implemented the new, extended buff times was a new, high-mana mana stone. The Superb Mana Stone has a reservoir of 2,000 mana, and can be found at many mage shops throughout Dereth.

Hot Topics

  • @filter recall command. While we knew that some players would eventually learn to ignore the spammy text messages from the numerous recall options available today, we wanted to give players stronger relief from the incessant barrage should they desire. (As one of our grandfathers always says, “Back in my day, we didn’t have all this newfangled `recallin” all over the dang place. We had to walk back to Serac Vault, in the snow, uphill. Both ways!”)
  • Bronze weapons. We apologize for not telling people in advance about the sudden change to the Bronze trophies making them no-give. This had been planned as a one-month-only change, and we are glad to change them back to their natural state this month.
  • Hollow Weapons/Racial Weapons. For July, we will be making some minor tweaks to unarmed weapons, staves, and hollows (including some of the racial weapons). While the racial weapons still will not have the effectiveness of their non-racial counterparts, or of the current Triple-Strike Dagger, they will receive some bonuses. It remains true that the four non-racial weapons, sword, axe, mace, and spear, should be considered the “better” class of weapons in the game. However, we do recognize that the current state of non-dagger racials needs some improvement, and we hope to implement that in July.
  • Fast-casting exploits. We’re working hard to get a fix for this in either July or August.