Dezember Rollout

[Ziv]

Dereth had weathered the dark tide. Tumult had turned again to peace.

The Ongoing Saga
As festival season continues, the crafters and collectors of Dereth are hard at work producing new trinkets and masks. While new dangers are found in the Direlands, most of Dereth begins to breathe easily once more after the long struggle against the Olthoi.

Now we look forward, at some of the changes happening in this month's event.

Explorer Society Quests
The Dereth Exploration Society has made some changes! They have not only changed the rewards that they give, but also when those rewards are given. They're also clearer as to which reward you'll get for any given stamped letter. Check with an agent in one of the nine Nexus towns to find out the details.

Pouches, Backpacks and Sacks
All player-carryable containers now have 24 pack slots, just like backpacks. We made this change so that the "smaller" containers, such as sacks and belt pouches, would be more useful. This does not increase the amount of equipment that players can carry—8 sacks are the same as 8 backpacks—but it does allow for more options in organizing your inventory.

The Marketplace
Due to the means by which distance from other players is calculated, it was possible to gain fellowship XP while your fellowship was in a dungeon and you were standing in the Marketplace. To prevent this behavior, we have changed the location of the Marketplace in the world.

We intend to fix the code that allows fellowship XP to be shared between players who are not in the same dungeon. For now, though, the Marketplace move is a short-term fix for the location in which this behavior happened most frequently.

If you were in the Marketplace when you logged off prior to the December event, you should find yourself at your Lifestone when you log back in. You'll see the message, "The currents of portal space cannot return you from whence you came. Your previous location forbids login." A quick @marketplace and you'll be right back at your trading post!

Avoiding Stamina Loss
In the April 2002 event, "Betrayal," the Endurance attribute was given new functionality. If you had Melee Defense trained, you would have a chance to avoid losing any stamina when you successfully evaded a melee attack. The same was true for Missile Defense with missile attacks. This chance increased as your base Endurance increased.

We recently discovered a small bug in this system—it was possible to avoid losing stamina even if you did not have the proper Defense skill trained. This bug has been fixed in the December event.

Crafter Stamping
There are a number of quest items that, when created, are stamped with the name of their creator. These include Nuhmudira's Gorgets, the Imbued Simulacra Helm and Shield, and the Focusing Stone, among many, many others.

Previously, the description of the finished item included the phrase, "Created by" and then the name of the creator. This character name controlled whether or not a character could activate the magical enchantments of that item—the creator (or a character with the same name as the creator, if the creator had been deleted) could activate the magic, but no other characters could.

Starting with this event, items that use a crafter name in this way to restrict activation now say so explicitly. Instead of "Created by Ibn", for instance, my Focusing Stone reads, "This item can only be activated by Ibn." In addition, the check for whether or not a character can activate the item now depends on the character's unique ID number, not just on the character's name. This means that you can no longer craft your Elari with one character, delete him, make a new character with the same name, and activate the Elari with your new character. These changes affect all pre-existing items as well as newly created items.

Incidentally, it is important to note that we did not make this change just to prevent the behavior described above. Rather, we are working on long-term plans for some exciting new functionality and we need to standardize how character names are used.

@Deaths
We recently discovered that the @deaths command was working rather inefficiently. Even though your client knew how often a character had died, and displayed this information on the Character Information screen, each use of @deaths required it to contact the server. As there was really no need to have this information in two different places, the @deaths command was removed.

Ding-Dong!
There are a handful of house-hookable items that you might reasonably expect to make noise. Previously these items were silent, but as of this month, some of them may prove quite noisy! Remember, before you use an item on a hook you may need to type @house hooks off. And if you already have these items hooked, they may need to be rehooked.