Alter Aeon Recent Changes and Additions

Recent code and server updates can be found in this changelog.  Only the
last 20 changes are listed.  For a complete list, click here.

For new area additions and area updates, click here.

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---- Aug 07, 16 [2207]
Fix minor bug in email erase.

---- Aug 06, 16 [2206]
Fix bug in skeletal lich causing normal skeletal mages to do no damage.
Limit upper end damage of ground strike when using very slow, heavy weapons.

Split/increase personal exp thwacking on thief stealing skills, remove
personal gold thwacking to increase the amount of gold available via steal.

Massive internal rework of the mudmail system.  There's almost certainly
stuff that's now broken, or that won't work right - we'll probably have
to do multiple boots to get everything back into a properly working state.

---- Aug 03, 16 [2205]
Minor one notch increase in cleric spellcasting charisma requirements.
Three spells affected by one point each.

Players can now only have one instance of any given area open at a time,
and it has to time out before you can open a new copy of that area.  In
general very few people will be affected other than those who are used to
resetting instances repeatedly to rerun them.  It may also cause problems
for groups trying to merge, or players joining a group running an area
they've recently been in.

Eventually we'll be adding an 'instance abandon' command to allow controlled
destruct of instances, but in the short term you'll have to deal with it
as best you can.

---- Jul 31, 16 [2202]
Add initial support for accounts on channel allow and channel admin.

---- Jul 30, 16 [2200]
Absorb is now limited by max mana.
Various work on the mudmail infrastructure.
Improve show/brag email.
Fix bug in clan elder 'boot' command.
Fix mapper bug showing streams across half the mainland.

From Draak:
Whips and flails are now parryable, but not shield blockable.
Blast, splat, and spit are not parryable.
Add foragable eggs.
Add static blast and chill touch to newbie mage starting spells.
Miscellaneous cleanup to warrior 'stomp' skill strings.
Static blast now has a short term duration affect that makes the target
more vulnerable to electricity.  This can be canceled by the ground spell.

---- Jul 25, 16 [2198]
Make Durham's guiding spirit plane aware.
Prevent scribe while fighting.
Back off some of the idle detectors a bit.
Raise damage output and price of constructed grenades.
Make enchant more likely to work on most normal equipment.
Bug fixes to crystal coat weight changes.
Make it possible to pick up gold at max carried item count.
Minor improvements to cast level warnings on the 'advice' command.
Hopefully improve autolevel area exp.

Change the way exp is handled for a bunch of skills, including more consistent
thwacking for command spamming and using one function in a bunch of different
places instead of having custom exp code everywhere. We're basically going to
have to rebalance anything touched by this, so let us know which things are
grossly out of whack so we can take a look.

From Draak:
Add 'stormy', 'blizzard', 'windstorm', and other keywords for control weather.
A few minor sound updates.
Make it easier to catch big fish.
Add an easter easter egg.
Add "temp", "weather", and "wind" to prompts.
Add help page for skinning, updates to other help pages.

---- Jul 15, 16 [2195]
Dramatically slow down the long term response of the alignment offsets.
Lower group join timeouts.
Lower resurrect cooldown.
Add more label tags to forms on the web site.
Make align equipment more resistant to idling.

---- Jul 10, 16 [2192]
Add a 'lag' command for displaying recent server lag.
Attempt to add html labels to the main credit card form on the website.
Make 'mend bones' more mana efficient.
Now that the money market floor and ceiling are stable, disallow player
offers.  Sorry, all you arbitrageurs.

Updates to change mob load probability thwacking into a more ordinary exp
thwack instead.  Note that there will be a startup transient for some mobs,
where they will have lower than usual experience until the control system
figures out what's going on.  This should only happen for things that had
low load probability to begin with, which isn't very common.

---- Jul 09, 16 [2189]
Raise cleric charisma spell requirements one more notch.  Almost done.
You can now do things like 'quest sloe todo' and 'quest sloe done'.

From Shadowfax:
Add 'gisco's giblet grenade' necromancer spell.
Modify the corpse strings of plural mobs to better represent their plurality.
Make priest tasks award a bit more favor.
Add some monster lore sends for air mob types.
Add slight chance of faster recovery for a floating weapon
after being disarmed.
Prevent 'protector' from working with characters whom you are
currently fighting.
'Mass confusion' will now respect mob allies.
Prohibit metal constructs from being created from metal terrain in clan areas.
Fix weirdness with dual-key doors not properly breaking keys.

---- Jul 02, 16 [2185]
Fix minor weirdness with infravision and night descriptions.
Fix minor display issue with money market ceiling/floor.

---- Jun 20, 16 [2182]
Even more stats collection for looking at exp in autolevel areas.

From Shadowfax:
There a small chance of gaining favor when sacrificing non-system objects.
Mobs are no longer shocked and horrified by their own death.
Air creatures can be healed by breath-only damage.
Add descriptors for breath/air weapon attacks.

---- Jun 15, 16 [2180]
Allow 'touch <object> ground'.
Make 'advice' come before 'advance' in the main parser.
Drastically change leap attack experience.  We may need to revert this.
You can no longer recall boats across planes or from other worlds.

From Draak:
Fix minor bug in mushroom gathering.

---- Jun 11, 16 [2178]
Add idle warnings when sending tells to idle people.
You must now use the 'ungroup' command to remove people from groups.
Slow down the rate of change on the long term alignment offset.
Make strings on mana shield a bit more obvious.
Cast-only spells can no longer be tapped onto other players.
Make setting alignment goal require -f at low levels.
Make storage locker timeout a bit more deterministic.
Fix bugs in autolevel and group area experience calculations.

From Shadowfax:
A door's name is now shown when unlocked, instead of just *click*.
Knowledge of butchering adds a small bonus of success to the harvest
bone and corpsecutter skills.
Tweak revocation strings to make them a bit more visual.
Add poison damage to imps conjured via bloodmist by a foulblooded necromancer.
Add show/brag option for title.

From Draak:
Various MSP and dclient audio updates.
Various gather mushroom updates and improvements.
Fix bug allowing animal lore to be used on non-animals.

---- May 31, 16 [2176]
Prevent reforge on items with spells on them.

From Shadowfax:
Make legendary enchant dependent on artificer.

From Draak:
Various MSP sound updates.
Add a new kind of fish for fishing.
String fix for noxious cloud.
Add movement loss when tripping mobs.
Various monster lore/consider improvements.
Add 'gather mushrooms'.
Add movement damage to stomp.

---- May 30, 16 [2175]
Make minion hitpoints more random.
Minor fixes to look command.
Compactify the mage lightning spellgroup a bit.
Get boats mostly working on planes other than prime material.
Reduce mana on soulbind to keep items from autodenting on relog.

From Shadowfax:
'Continual light' now adds a light flag to an object instead of glow.
'Faerie fire' can add a glow flag to an object.
'Fly' can be cast on an object to make it float.
When cast on an object, 'invisibility' is no longer permanent.
Some bystander mobs will now attack or flee when they see a death.
Add cleric 'illumination' enchant.
Add mage 'levitation' obscure enchant.
Add mage 'concealment' obscure enchant.

---- May 29, 16 [2171]
Increase default alias limit from 120 to 150.
Allow the '.' character to match any other character in the grep filter.
Fix quest gold bug that was added yesterday.
Add new 'varset' socket filter.
Add new 'compact' socket filter.
Add new 'cut' socket filter.
Add hard floor and ceiling GPC rates to money market.

From Shadowfax:
Give shield location priority over shield block in brag/show.
Fix strings when charging spirit totems and casting thorn armor.
Add help page for brag/show keywords.  All of them!

---- May 28, 16 [2170]
Prevent system mobs from being fame.
Don't allow player corpses to be sold in shops.
Thunder seeds now works through magic resistance.
Add kxwt_emote support for mush-z.  Users of old mush-z versions will not
be able to see emotes until they update.
Make dodge, parry, and shield block a little easier to improve.
Reduce the per-hit mana cost of mana shield.
Packet mode dclient paste buffer is now bigger and should overflow less.
Add skill exp to soulshatter.
Change the freak system for soulsteal to make high freaks more likely and
low freaks less likely.
Add three minute cooldown on the target of a resurrect to prevent
multi-resurrect death griefing.
Change the way that resurrect hp are calculated.
Attempt to improve the follow lag in groups problem.

Make the warrior taunt/intimidate/roar skillsets no longer dependent
on user charisma.  This is to help handle tanks and players who may
intentionally have low charisma.

Improve warrior skills feint, bash, knockback, ground strike, cleave,
jab, and whirlwind.

Dodge practice cost lowered from 8 to 4 practices, and players will be
able to dodge a bit better without knowing the skill.  The dodge high
end/maximum is unchanged.  This should help improve survivability at
low and mid levels for non-minion classes.

The pfile cleaner will now be more aggressive about deleting old pfiles.
Specifically, level 1 characters not hooked to an account are deleted
after six months of inactivity, level 1 with an account in 12 months,
level 12 with an account in 18 months, and level 24 with an account
after 24 months.  Level 25 and above characters are exempt from the
cleaner.  As before, characters with more than three total levels per
primary level are also exempt, so a level 20 character with 60 total
levels will never be deleted.

---- May 18, 16 [2168]
Even more kxwt updates.
Closing an object now sends something more than just 'Ok.'
Harvest bone is dependent on the size of the creature/corpse.  It should
be possible to harvest spellstaff sized bone from smaller creatures now.
Fix crash bug in fishing.

---- May 15, 16 [2166]
Make the 'areas' command do basic keyword search, and limit area level
range to exactly the specified level.  Also hook up 'help area name'.
Make an 'advice' command that maps directly to 'check'.
Fix missing lag/move cost on certain types of gather/forage.
Fix negative practice bug in enchanting.
Allow improvement in greater mage elementals.
Put obscure spells later in the spell parser order.
Skeletal mages can now be cast with a specific element type.
Make lower level suncatchers less likely to shatter on carve.

---- May 14, 16 [2164]
Raise creation costs of lightcatchers.
Green demon familiar now gives movement, not movement regen.
Red imp demon familiar now gives movement regen, not movement.
Demon familiar level is now more dependent on soulstone than casting level.
Raise cleric charisma spell requirements one minor notch.
Force mush-z into hard returns mode on startup.
Minor kxwt cleanups.
Add 'credit buy nosac'.
Turn off default single item identify when looking in containers.

The level 37 necromancer is officially out!  Included spells and skills:
Add level 8 obscure spell 'strawman'.
Add level 16 obscure necromancer skill 'harvest bone'.
Add level 21 obscure necromancer spell 'spectral ward'.
Add level 24 necromancer spell 'skeletal knight'.
Add level 26 necromancer skill 'summon demon teeth'.
Add level 28 necromancer spell 'skeletal lich'.
Add level 30 necromancer skill 'blood bottling'.
Add level 37 necromancer spell 'field of the grasping dead'.
Add level 37 necromancer spell 'mend bones'.