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April Fools!

As most of you had guessed, our big reveal about classes on April 1st was, indeed, a joke! To be honest, the retextured classes on each side of the game concept is something we had seriously considered in the past, and might be something we look into in the (far) future if there is enough support for it. That said, several of the classes in that list are thematically based on actual revamp concepts. Which ones, you ask? I might let this secret drag on a little longer yet...

Based on forum feedback and chatter, I can tell many people are impatient for the lycanthrope changes. We are working on our event to tie into the changes, involving the return of certain invaders from across the sea. But I am sorry to say that you'll have to be a little bit patient yet! There are several things happening at once that will tie-in with the release, beyond the scope of 'delete guild; acquire changes'. So for now, I'll leave you with the knowledge of what the two new races for lycanthropes will be: Wereboars and Werecrocs. These might seem a little bit unconventional to some who might've been hoping for other races (such as felines), but they certainly won't be the only additions we make to lycan races. In the future, we plan to add more races and leave them open for players to discover through a new system we plan to introduce: factions.

Factions are a new mechanic we will be introducing that will allow players to gain standing with a group of NPCs through questlines and events. This will confer certain bonuses and advantages depending on the faction and ask players to explore new avenues of roleplay. For example, each of the lycanthrope races will have a faction associated with them. Increasing your reputation with that faction will grant you access to their form, as well as the ability to obtain the class itself from them. Factions are Haern's baby, so I'll let him discuss the system in further detail when he chooses.

We have also been hard at work on improving our environment content. Most people will agree that this area of gameplay is the most lackluster part of Aetolia at present, and it is something we will be making continued efforts to improve. Factions are just one such outlet for this. We also released our new dialogue system for interacting with mobs this month, which has had a very positive result thus far. As a result, we have been slowly but surely updating areas to use this feature. The dialogue system also includes a beta of our new quest system, which we will reveal details on at a later date, as we are still cementing the specifics. We will be continuing to adopt these systems across our areas in April and the coming months, as well as adding in new quests while we're revisiting all this old content. March also saw the first tests of our new raid instances done, and we received a lot of valuable feedback from those involved. Veritas is polishing up the content for another test and will probably be asking for testers again in the coming weeks.

Thanks to some ingenuity and initiative taken by you, the players, we met our goal of dropping down to four Houses while only having to actually dissolve one of them! Aside from the headache of keeping tabs on point totals, most vampire players seemed to be enjoying some of the new changes coming along from Abhorash and the Dominion. With the total Houses down to the limit we wanted, you can all breathe a fairly large sigh of relief as that part of the process is done with. Of course we may leave the TOPHOUSES command in just so you can see how well you are doing compared to the others, though its likely to not have any relevance to future plans.

Speaking of the Dominion itself, we're still planning to churn out quite a bit of new content for it and the Consanguine in general in the coming weeks. Primarily is the introduction of long awaited House Credits! Along with Credits, the Dominion will see our first attempt at fully tying an organization to a City in a pretty obvious, and perhaps radical new way, that some of its members have already been made aware of. The full extent of this will be released in the near future.

A newbie Academy system is in the works for each city. Similar to the collegiums of Lusternia, these Academies are designed to provide a post-tour learning experience for newbies. At the Academy, newbies will reinforce what they have learnt in the tour, as well as learning about other mechanics such as general skills, specialized emoting/says, and features involving both their character and interaction with others. They will be able to go through these tasks at their own pace, leaving to do other things and coming back later if they choose. Completing tasks, however, will reward them essential and helpful supplies, such as curatives, tattoos, and class equipment.

And lastly, work on the Sentinel changes is nearing completion. We're expecting to have the class pushed to liaisons for balancing and testing within the next week or two, so look forward to previews of the skillsets soon!

Where is the island all the dwarves are deported to before subsequently being tortured?  Is it the one right below the pillars of Dusk?  Because that one looks a little too tropical and nice for them.

MS Paint doodle? Stand back guys, I got this. Might be slightly longer than twenty seconds. Writing letters with a mouse is hard.

Is it true that dwarves suffer -14 strength, -23 intelligence, and constant vomitting when they step on Albedos due to the fact that I hate them, and struggle not to wipe the race off the planet daily?