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Announce post #3051: 2019 End of Year
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1/9/2020 at 16:49
Tiur, the Gnosis
Everyone
2019 End of Year
A new format this year, of course. I'll append the huge post to the forum thread for this announce!
Of course, we're also teasing some 2020 things...
-T
Penned by my hand on Quensday, the 17th of Khepary, in the year 485 MA.
Tiur, the Gnosis
Everyone
2019 End of Year
A new format this year, of course. I'll append the huge post to the forum thread for this announce!
Of course, we're also teasing some 2020 things...
-T
Penned by my hand on Quensday, the 17th of Khepary, in the year 485 MA.
0
Comments
2019 has been a busy year! I’ll break it down below by month.
January saw a developer goal being met with the release of a revamp of the Zealot class. With this both tethers have an equal number of unique classes, with no class a copy of another. This also saw a change in how we notify people of events, with the usage of the internal EVENTs command and some pretty heavy handed hinting elsewhere. All this hinting was surrounding the failing of Spirit natives within Prime, new hosts would be needed. Events 247 has the details, but thusly was born a new symbiotic relationship with the Duamvi, Sapience mortals paired with Spirit beings.
Milestones are a new favorite of ours, released in February, these allow us to give everyone personal quests every day/week/month. We can connect them to events, old prizes, even promotions. Now everyone has something to do every day, and it adds up to legitimate rewards! It also provides a unified system for tasks, killing the question of what you have to do this month to get something shiny.
With all that newness, March was devoted to bugs. And bugs were smashed! We also said goodbye to the mighty Tecton, who was an IRE hero for quite some time. Bug smashing in his honor felt right.Of course, that was just us boring admin types. On Sapience itself, the War with Chaos reached its peak, seeing the Plane of Chaos remade and claimed by Chakrasul and Omei, and the previous lords vanquished.
April is a favorite of Tiur’s, leading to the temporary release of a class that copied NPC attacks, as well as the ability to waste gems by grinding them to dust. One of these was even useful! We also held our Year 480 celebration, with contests varying from combat to crafting, and major prizes were given out; prizes larger than ever before!
The Celebration wasn’t over! Because Delve was so rude as to not make it a Celebration of the Stars, Lord Sorrelion Sammonward the Fifth brought his after party barge and the party was resurrected. New games of all sorts were had, from wrestling matches to the Jox Dance. Hooray May!
June was quite tumultuous,with changes to the Bounty system, the making of the Dominion into a Guild, and even more story beats being put into the Events system. That last bit was particularly important, as Spinesreach was again attacked by the agents of Shadow, leading to an overabundance of the element in Sapience in stopping the attack from consuming all. The Ascendril took part to rebalance the elements after, leaving both Mage classes fundamentally altered. But with that, the Ascendril and Sciomancers finally received their promised revamp! With completely new skills and focuses, they each have a different focus in both lore and utility. And with Enchantment now a Mercantile skill, we now allow a person to have two! Of course, Earth didn’t see its rebalance, I wonder what that means?
Not to be defeated, July also came with major changes. Namely, the first of our new Agriculture skills, Farming! Now commodities are produced through the efforts of players and refined in cities, giving everyone a hand in the economy. Farms themselves are a fun management sim, with an IRE first as the cherry on top, graphics. Farms came with a pixel graphic set and upgrades to both Mudlet and Nexus to support it. On a smaller note, Guild Envoys became official, allowing small numbers of players to switch cities and represent their Guilds.
In August small changes were made to how experience is gained in player versus player combat, encouraging group work and lowering penalties for raiding. We also released a slew of new artifacts to help in Farming. Another large change that was long overdue was the introduction of a self-set pronoun system. Regardless of chosen gender, Aetolia will call you whichever pronoun you prefer.
September brought a new skill type, Hobbies! Hobbies are much smaller skills, learned by doing, that just provide flavor for your roleplaying. This month also began an adjustment of older areas, moving quests to the more modern system. And just because our coders could, line of sight PvE was introduced, allowing hunting via ranged attacks.
October involved a lot of spiders and a temporary new dungeon. In protection of our more arachnophobic players who spent the month creeped out, we can leave it at that. NPCs also received another upgrade, giving them endurance, willpower, and mana. Mana focused attacks now work in PvE!
For November, the spiders were finally put to rest. Multiple farms can now be owned by a single player, and Provisioning grew a little to reflect. We also were featured on the Titans of Text podcast!
Lastly, December brought upgrades to pathfinding and teasers of Mining to come. Ironbeard visited our players and a new version of Orrery was added to spice it up (as the beginning of a look at improving our automated PvP sources to be more varied and interesting). Raim has finally been healed, and we saw our first Holy War in 50 years between Chakrasul and Bamathis… neither side seems content to just sit idly of late!
Aetolia: 2020?
Looking back, 2019 was a feature filled year with major storyline advancements and systems released. Of course, that doesn’t mean we get to rest on our laurels! 2020 has many things planned to keep the ever-growing and improving world of Aetolia going.
Only a third of the Agriculture skills have been released, so you can expect we’re working on those other two! Our hope is that 2020 will bring about an entirely player-based commodity system. Mining is already nearing completion, and ???ing will follow (after a short break to let the whip marks heal).
You can also expect the larger story of Aetolia to continue progressing as it ever does. Prepare for a continuation of our huge world events, as well as a few small ones tying up other loose lore threads. It’ll be hard to top flinging players at the face of Golgotha, but we’ll try!
We’re also scheduling an update to Major Foci to make them more fun, new dungeons, bashing zones, and a tradeskill/talent! There’s also a nice push for more Slice o’ Aetolian Life RP, where the world ending isn’t the focus… look for holidays to mean a lot more!
Our Pools keeps growing in experience and number, and I couldn’t be prouder to work with such an amazing team. 2020 is looking amazing for Aetolia, and I hope you’re as excited as I am!
-Adam
I had it all nice and fixed, and then... well, excuses. I was overly excited to send it out and didn't check that.
I'll see myself out.
I was wondering if all of these items are still on the docket. Can you provide any insight?
1) Huge world events
2) Small events to tie up loose threads
3) Update major foci
4) New dungeons
5) new bashing areas
6) new tradeskill or talent
7) holidays meaning something
Some of these items are very exciting to look forward to, and I am sure others could agree that seeing them this year would be awesome! That said, we're already chugging along into Q3.
1) We're in a weird spot, our storyboard has plans, but not definites. I don't want to make a promise here because we reallocated resources a bit.
2) We've been doing all sorts of small things! I was planning one just this morning, even.
3) I will ask Raz! He had a neat idea, but he's been in the Mines for so long he might be lost.
4) We have one or two in the works, but I'll see about reprioritizing, if players really really want these.
5) There's talk on this! Maybe the next class of Celani have a job waiting
6) If I had a good ylemnics joke, I'd put it here. But there's another being worked on!
7) ...this may have fallen off the list and we all forgot about it. Whoops! Thank you for the reminder!
I don't know about anyone else, but this year has both felt incredibly short and incredibly long. In my mind, it's still January in terms of expectations, but dang if every single week hasn't felt like an entire month.