Gquest changes, keys, resistance changes, more.

Gquest Ranges and other Changes:

A few various changes in this reboot:

• The global quest ranges have been changed to the list below and it is now only possible to be in one group at a time:

         - Less than 25 wins.
         - 25 to 199 wins.
         - 200 wins or higher.

• Below level 200, you will no longer gain experience while you are in a global quest and it is not possible to use daily blessing instant levels or cards that grant free levels until you exit or finish the gquest.
• Using classchange will now reset your stats (free rebuild) even if you change to the same class. There is a new ‘norebuild’ option to use if you don’t want to do a rebuild.
• The cost of the ‘free rebuild’ wish has been reduced to 500qp. It doesn’t make sense to charge more for a rebuild than a full classchange with instinct/mastery rebuild.
• There is a new ‘race change’ option that works like subclass change for when you only want to change race and nothing else. You can use this every 7 days free of charge. This was added to simplify race changes and to make it easier because there are some bigger changes coming to races.
• If you use classchange to change race or subclass only the game will warn you that using subclass change or race change might be better and will also show if you currently have those options available free of charge.
• As as last resort, if you have to pay for a stat rebuild the old way, the cost is now 5% of trains not 20%.
• You can now use ‘group name’ as a quick way to see only the group name and the leader (Scars). While I was in there anyway, I also added ‘group summary’ which shows the top section of ‘groups’ but not the list of members.
• Using the new spamreduce silent option will now show the room and send room info via GMCP if the run is cancelled because of bad directions or an aggressive mob.
• Fixed the formatting of the gquest results notes and some of the oversized rankings.

Changes to Keys / More frequent reboots:

We are working on moving to a system where we reboot smaller changes in more often so that maintenance things and minor fixes don’t take forever held up by larger projects. We might not get there right away because there is a lot to work through but I would even like to see daily reboots eventually.

You will see quite a few changes related to this, the first is that keys can now be saved but will expire after 14 days of real time. Real time means that the items will be removed at the set time regardless of whether or not you are online. Clan keys still cannot be saved and any items marked NOSAVE will still not save.

Imms can override this default 14 days with another value for specific keys. Feel free to post to ideas if you have a strong case of your own why some specific keys should be nosave or more or less time. This change might be annoying now but you will be grateful for it as we start to reboot more often.

Also, now that all keys are timed items, it should not be possible to auction or donate them etc.

Upcoming changes for more frequent reboots:

Thinking ahead to what else we need to do to reboot more often, after the next reboot shops will save their gold, mobdeaths/area deaths etc will save and reset with the monthly rankings and global/clan channel histories will save. Saving all personal channel history (ftalk, spouse, group, etc) isn’t viable so it will not save, but most people capture chats to another window anyway.

We will need to remove NOSAVE from some goal items and give those items a fixed timer instead so that goal status isn’t resetting on people daily. Some other areas will have to change the way they repop or they will be able to be run more often than the builders intended.

Manor contents will *not* save. We have always said that they are not vaults and always warned never to leave anything on a manor floor you care about because the MUD can crash at any time. This hasn’t changed.

I am sure there will be other things to work through – if you have specific goals / items in mind or other features that will be an issue with rebooting daily please post them to ideas and include ‘reboot’ in the title so we can filter them all at once.

Changes to Resistances:

There are quite a few changes related to resistance and how it works. The biggest change is that the resist or vulnerability that goes with a race is now a fixed percentage and is not affected by the diminishing returns of regular resist points – so 10% race resist / vuln is 10% regardless of your other stats.

There are some other changes that go along with this:

• The effect of resistances and vulnerabilities overall has been reduced both their vulns and resists will have less effect. With so many other damage reductions on top of resists you might not even notice this. If you have very high resistance (1000+) and a high race resist or vuln you will notice more of a difference because that race value is having more of an affect.
• The ‘resists’ command has been modified to show the effective percentage of all your resists combined.
• The old ‘base’ resist of 100 is gone. This isn’t a nerf, it took that base 100 resists to even out to 0% so it only made things more complicated than they needed to be and I don’t remember why it was ever there.
• It’s a very crowded table, but ‘raceinfo resists all’ will now show resists for all races.
• The ‘resists’ lines in score and shown in ‘resists bars’ are now based on your overall resist %. The amount of resist it takes to get the bar full is now much higher so your bars will look shorter.
• Anything in the game that shows mob resists has been modified to show the percentage. If you notice any missing, please let me know.

For now I am just getting this code settled. The bigger rewrite to races is being reviewed on the test port and you are likely to see base resistances in many of the races change as these come live. Going through this exercise and looking more closely at the percentages has made it clear that a lot of the spells that give resists also need improving. I’d hoped to have some of the other race changes live this reboot but needed to get this resistance code and the race change option in first.