Experience points (XP) have now been retroactively awarded to all current players at a rate of 2 XP per month that their oldest player object has existed. These XP belong to the player pool. This means that once the tools have been coded, players will be able to transfer these between alts. Additional XP for OOCly helping out on the game have not yet been awarded, but we hope to get to that soon.
Furthermore, the cron job has been started that will award the weekly allotment of XP for the character pool. This allotment will happen each Sunday and will only be awarded to those who have connected within the last 7 days counting from the time that the cron runs on Sunday. This allotment will be 1 XP per week except for every 4th week when it will be 2 XP.
Your current XP totals can be seen on your sheet (+cdb/view me/sheet). The first number represents the total current XP and the numbers in the parenthesis represent the character pool and the player pool.
It is now possible to use +cdb/view to view the data stored in the Counter attributes. This data records who played a specific character before and between which dates that they played it. This should make it easier for those interested in previously played characters to find out how much they were in play and when they were last in play.
Logs can now be submitted via a web interface, which can be accessed from the main logs page. To submit logs, you need a login for the site (the same login can be used to contribute to the player wiki), and to get one of those you need to request one from Nymeria (you need to give a login name, password and the email you want to be registered with).
Logs submitted by players will not appear on the page until they have been checked over by Nymeria or Balerion, and to keep this flowing smoothly it is very important that the instructions on the logs page are followed closely.
We have added a new little system to the game, called Tips. Tips is essentially a database of notices about commands, resources and other useful things on or related to the game. Each hour, a random notice is broadcast to anyone who hasn’t turned off the system. The idea is that it will help players (especially new players) learn of these commands and resources since digging through all the helpfiles is perhaps less than fun.
See +HELP +TIPS for the helpfile, which explains how to turn tips on and off, and if you’d like to suggest any tips to be added, use ‘ex #2936/TIPS*’ to see what the existing tips are.
The search code has been tweaked to allow tier as one of the fields that can be searched. However, tier search will only return NPCs, not PCs. This is in line with our policy of not displaying the tier of a PC in the +cdb output. If any unexpected results are produced, let us know.
A new type of characters will be added: Cameo characters. These will be fully CGed characters, primarily of tier V, that prospective players (inexperienced and experienced alike) can use to sample the game with. We hope that this will provide a way of testing the game for players who don’t want to invest the time and effort in CGing a character before they know if they’ll like it.
In order to build up a small selection of Cameo characters, we will need some help, both with concept suggestions and CGing. If you are interested, let us know. Keep in mind that these concepts should be for characters that can interact with the majority of the playerbase (that is, with noble characters) and they should ideally be characters that are in King’s Landing more or less permanently so that players can easily slip in and out of these roles. The idea is that players should stay in these roles for a very limited time period, perhaps a month or two at most.
A new set of commands have been added, to allow players to vote for the NPCs they most want to see in play. Please make sure to make use of this and to point the command out to players looking for suggestions. For more details, see +HELP CDB WANTED.
We have decided to go ahead and allow alts with certain restrictions. Specifically, alts will be available to current players of Dornish hostages or to players of other characters who wish to play a Dornish hostage. Players will only be allowed one character with a tier higher than IV (to see if any such slots are currently available, see +cdb/quota) and to qualify for a Dornish hostage you need to either have 1 year of prior MU*ing experience or 3 months of regular activity here on Blood of Dragons. You also need to have read all the published books.
Players may start requesting these characters right off, though actually processing the requests may take us a little while since we need add in some more alt-checks in various place. Finally, we will note that the policy we have decided on is that alt information will be publicly available via +finger.
Since we have found that the unset tier (represented by the ?) is a source of complications and confusion, from now on all characters that we do not have a preconceived notion about will be set as IVs or Vs (primarily in the case of some personal NPCs and some others that we have intended as Vs). The relevant files have been updated to reflect this. If we have managed to miss any, please let us know.
I have reduced the multiplier determining how easy it is to successfully pick up a rumor, from 4 times how widespread the rumor is to 2 times. After looking at the results, it currently seems like everyone eventually picks up every single rumor on their own, and that seems to mean it’s a bit too easy. We’ll see how the new multiplier works. Any feedback, please feel free to direct it my way. :)
+Rumors/view now takes the “all” argument, which should allow a person to get all rumors they have access to in one go rather than having to view them one by one.
Also updated, the rumors will indicate when a rumor is a targetted one by indicating whether it is of a positive or negative character, and whom it concerns.
An elementary bug crept into +rumors awhile back. Reports were initially spotty enough that I thought people were just not having luck finding rumors, or no one was inserting rumors, but it became clear that it was a broader issue. I’ve since corrected the bug. If there are any other bugs (for example, being unable to properly investigate or quash a rumor), please report it via +jobs. Note that success is not guaranteed whenever you try such activities—there are roles involved—but if you seem to just consistently not manage, there may really be an issue. Feel free to try and investigate and quash the present test rumors. I will try to remember to reset everyone’s influence at the end of this month, so you can use points with abandon.
On top of this, I’ve at least temporarily increased the odds of hearing a particular rumor. This should matter most for those rumors which are strong but a person has very little in the way of the arena-relevant skill (for example, Politics for the Court arena) to pick it up. It will have less effect on weak rumors, which would be difficult even for someone with the relevant skills to pick up on it. Let me know if it seems to help any with more regularly hearing rumors.
The +joust system has now been completed and can be read about in +help +joust. It is likely that the system will undergo some tweaking as it sees more testing, and the gain and loss of Renown has not yet been added in, but the basic functionality of jousting someone else is now functioning.
The +rumors system has been at the same stage of completion for some time now (see +help rumors), but we haven’t announced this as we had hoped to get the Renown in there. That will take a bit longer, so we would like to announce it now anyhow. Basically, it will work as it should for untargetted rumors and targetted rumors using Influence rather than Renown.
A new Type, ‘Extra’, has been added to the CDB. This will be used for NPCs added specifically to be used by any player who needs them for a scene. They are intended primarily as background characters; septons, guardsmen, merchants, etc. We have already had quite a few suggestions (but more are welcome) for such characters in the thread we created for this purpose on the board and we will start adding these as soon as we can.
A Roleplay channel has been added. Its described as follows:
Channel for roleplay-related discussions. If you are looking for roleplay you are encouraged to use this channel to ask if anyone is around but you may of course also use Public. However such questions are more easily lost in the spam on Public.
Do consider adding yourself. We will be starting to auto-add newly approved players to this channel. To join, use @chan/join Roleplay