Balance November Update

[petros]

Greetings Denizens of Genesis!

I've heard from many of you that you would like regular updates
about what's going on in the wizard world. In an effort to
engage the player population, I'm going to be publishing a
monthly update on what is going on in the realm of balance,
and specifically the things that I'm involved in.

Sunlight
--------
As you may have noticed from the common board posts, one
of the big projects this past month has been to implement
sunlight across all domains. This has actually been a project
that has been talked about for quite some time, and was
finally put together. As expected, it had its ups and downs
and some unexpected effects. Over the last couple of weeks,
we have dealt with issues that players have found and
discovered and corrected it so that it behaves the way that
we want it to.

Item Improvements
-----------------
Over the last month, we've also been working on the
foundations of item modifications. One of the immediate
benefits of this will be the alteration of the algorithm
to whether items will glow (save) or not. We are in
the testing phases of this change, and you should
hopefully see an update on this by the next monthly
update. Future updates will involve some exciting ideas
for gameplay as suggested by Gorboth in his otherworldly
post "Carrot and Stick".

Magic and Academics
-------------------
The magic system has been redesigned and new rules
established. The foundations are all complete and there
are now two guilds in full development using this new
system. One of the guilds is the upcoming Academics
of Elemental Arts, which will be a sort of magical
Cadet guild for young players. It should go into beta
by Christmas, and I'll be posting something for beta
applications sometime in the next few weeks. If you'd
like to contribute to a new guild not only through
testing, but also in giving feedback on how to make
it better for younger players, I invite you to apply
when it's ready.

Until next month.

Petros