Asherons Call: Letter to the Players

November 11th, 2002[/b]

[B]Skill Sell-back

As previously announced, we are introducing a method by which players can "sell-back" or untrain skills, as well as a method to specialize skills after creation. We had two main goals for this change: first, to allow characters to change decisions that they may have made before they understood the full consequences of those decisions; and second, to allow characters to deal more flexibly with the changing world of Dereth.

In order to sell-back or specialize a skill post-creation, characters will need to complete a quest. I won''t go into the details of the quest, but here is the important information you should know about how this system will work:

Each step of a skill change--that is, increasing a skill from trained to specialized, decreasing a skill from specialized or trained, or decreasing a skill from trained to untrained--requires the completion of this quest. You can still increase a skill from untrained to trained the old-fashioned way by pressing the green triangle; this does not require a quest.

This quest is restricted to characters level 25 and higher.

You will not be limited in the total number of times you can do this quest, but you can only complete the quest once every three weeks. This is a change from our original concept, but we felt that being able to complete the quest twice during each monthly event was too liberal. We may decrease this wait time in the future.

You will be able to untrain the free skills (Run, Jump, Loyalty, and Magic Defense), but you will not be refunded the skill credits for those skills nor will the skills actually become untrained. You will be refunded all the experience you invested into those skills, however.

You will be able to untrain your racial skills, but you will not be refunded the skill credits for those skills nor will the skills actually become untrained. You will be refunded all the experience you invested into those skills, however.

You will not be able to specialize in any of the Tinkering skills.

You will not be able to spend more than 50 credits in specialized skills. These 50 credits include both the credits invested to train and to specialize the skill. This limits players to the same sets of skills that are possible at character creation. We may lift this restriction in the future.

You will not be able to alter a skill in such a way as to cause you to no longer meet a wield requirement for some item that you are currently wielding. You will be asked to remove that item, and then you can attempt to alter your skill again. (Note that you don''t have to do the quest again, however.)

[B]For new characters: Any skill points unused in creation will now carry over with you when you first enter the world, instead of being lost forever as they were previously.

Treasure and Corpse Changes[/b]

In our ongoing effort to improve the performance of our servers, we are making several changes to the treasure system, in particular as it operates with monster corpses.

Currently when a monster dies, its corpse lies there for 90 seconds and then decays, leaving behind any loot that hasn''t yet been claimed. This loot remains on the ground until it is either picked up by a player, or cleaned up by the housekeeping system. Unfortunately, as long as the loot sits on the ground it eats server resources, resources related to keeping track of each item and telling all the players in the area about it. In addition, a large number of items on the ground contribute to client lag, both by increasing the amount of messaging between server and client, and by straining the graphics capabilities of the client.

So in order to reduce these performance hits, we are changing the behavior of monster corpses slightly. In November, monster corpses will remain on the ground for five minutes--a much longer period than they currently do--but when they decay, any unclaimed loot that remains on the corpse will also decay. This will reduce the number of items on the ground and thus reduce the load on the game servers. Note that this change does not affect player corpses in any way. Also note that this does not change the period of time in which a monster corpse is "protected" (i.e., the period of time in which only the monster''s killer--or the killer''s fellowship, if the killer is sharing kill loot rights--can access it).

In the future, we will also be re-evaluating our treasure tables to reduce the amount of absolutely useless junk that creatures drop. This change, however, is not part of the November update.

[B]Life Magic Tweaks[/b]

Last month, we discussed some possible tweaks to Life Magic to address the continuing difficulties faced by some life mages. Unfortunately, at this time we are satisfied with neither the design nor the gameplay effects of those changes. We want to take more time to study the problem and consider your feedback so that we can make the best decisions we can about what tweaks are necessary. For this reason, there are no changes being made to Life Magic in the November update. We will keep you posted on our progress with these changes in the future.

These are the issues we wanted to communicate to you as soon as possible. Thanks for reading, and if you have any questions, please post them at http://www.accmty.com/idealbb.