As part of our initiatives to increase playability for new players, we have prepared changes that will go into effect after the next maintenance cycle. This will not go into effect until that point, so please do not act on any of this in-game at this time.
- Dwarves will no longer be a selectable option for new players. After repeated analysis, it looks as though new players have a lot of difficulty with the dwarven role and the focus requirement for all dwarven characters. In order to assist new players in learning how to properly play dwarven roles, we will also be removing dwarves as a selectable option for all players, essentially retconning the role from the game through attrition. This will ensure that new players will understand how to play dwarves by the time there are no dwarves left in the game, attacking the problem from both ends at once. Dwarven NPCs will slowly be phased out and replaced with an object (the generic string will be "A rough circle is here, grunts and gibberish emanating from its interior", please e-mail Seidhr directly with any of your suggested alterations).
- City-elves will be able to ride mounts. New players often find that it is difficult to play city-elves due to their limitations to mostly being inside a city (and their subsequent disadvantages for travel in the myriad of clans they are allowed to play in). However, they will be restricted to only riding mounts that have the following keywords: skinny, sharp, neck, ear, prostitute.
- Half-giant keywords will be standardized so as to reduce space for sdescs. Many players new and old alike have had issues with the length of the word "half-giant". Some have suggested reducing this to "giant." We have decided to go farther than this so as to allow our 3+ karma (or 3+ karma equivalent) players the opportunity to flesh out their half-giant sdescs with greater use of adjectives. After the maintenance boot, all half-giants will be renamed to "big".
- Half-breed racial options extended for new players. Half-elves are unique in their mental makeup, but one of the interests of staff here is to challenge new players and stoke the creative spark into a creative flame that will light up the rest of the playerbase. The new options will be half-gith, half-mantis, half-big, and half-dwarf. For 8+ karma players (or 8+ karma equivalent players), we will offer an additional role option that can be unlocked, the half-half, a mixture of halfling and half-elf.
Thanks to all that have assisted in this long-term project.