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From the woman who brought you the 5/15 Rule...

It's been my goal for the past year to work on implementing things that make it literally easier to play, that relies more on good faith with our players instead of from the premise that players are going to cheat and we must anticipate them and stop them before they cheat. In real life I don't like a lot of red tape, and it occurred to me about a year ago that if I don't like it, we don't need to have it here in overabundance.

With that in mind, since January of this year I've been working on a new LAN system. Basically, when released it will let you pretty much automatically "plug and play". It will be up to you to register for a LAN within the game, and your responsibility to maintain it. There will be no up-front Immortal interaction, no one to mail for permission, etc. You will literally be able to play characters on your LAN without waiting to be cleared first by an Immortal. The flip side to this is that if you don't register your LAN, or we catch you cheating on a LAN, we'll shut you down. Any characters on a LAN at level 4 or over will need to be registered; statting characters will not need to be registered for a LAN (though obviously, the multiplay rule will still apply and we will be keeping a rather sharp eye for that). This process has been extremely difficult for me to write and debug, but I think I've got it stable enough now. It is in BETA. When it actually goes into effect I will do a formal release note complete with instructions for use. Until then, our existing LAN rule applies.

With the help of the Chosen players I have also been revamping the Darkfriend/Fade/Dreadlord system. After some very comprehensive discussion with the Chosen and then some additional notes from the Staff level, the new system is almost ready to be released. It will be a lot clearer as to what is expected of hopeful Darkfriends, and the clues to make it come to fruition will be more intuitive and less dependent upon immortal auditing overall. The goal is to make it not necessarily faster; it's to be more playable and less restrictive on players having to rely solely on other players to gain the favor of the Great Lord.

Normally I would not say "this is coming" unless I was 90%+ certain that I can get it delivered. I am not going to put a hard date on the releases, and they may come together or separately, but July is the target release month.

More as I get closer to the big reveal!

Vivienne