Future updates

From Arelith Wiki

Contents 1 Future Updates and Plans 1.1 Split of server 1.2 Automatic timed reset system 1.3 Forums: server status 1.4 Character appearance modifications 1.5 Citizenship system 1.6 Bard Song 1.7 Craftable enchantment basins 1.8 Shops 1.9 Books 1.10 Spell changes 2 Rejected 2.1 NWN 2 and D&D 4th edition 2.2 CEP and other Hakpaks 2.3 Character remakes 2.4 Mark of Destiny (MoD) 2.5 NPC hirelings or mercenaries 2.6 -disguise changes 2.7 Change of name with -disguise or remove all the names above PCs heads 2.8 More guild houses outside settlements 2.9 Storage chests for everyone 2.10 Containers (bags and boxes) 2.11 Weapons 2.12 Invisible or open helmets, bands, flowers, tiaras, etc. 2.13 More Gods 2.14 Horses 2.15 Messenger 2.16 True Seeing 2.17 Races and classes 2.17.1 Vampires 2.17.2 Custom classes 2.17.3 Druids and DR 2.17.4 Shadowdancer and hide in plain sight 2.18 Crafting 2.18.1 Crafting experiences 2.18.2 Craftable heal potions 2.18.3 Melting down weapons and armour 2.18.4 Dividing crafting categories 2.18.5 Changes to prices of products

[edit] Future Updates and Plans

You can learn more about them on forums. This article includes answers to those most frequently asked about.

The updates will come when they will come. There is no fixed schedule. Arelith has great team of developers making fantastic work in improving the enjoyment of server for everyone.

Just keep in mind that this is not their job and that they don't get paid for doing all this. They are doing it for fun, when they have the inspiration and when they wish to script and build areas. Please, try to appreciate the great amount of work that they are all putting into this. Provide them on forums with inspiration and not demands.

"The To-Do List (TM) is only ever available to the people working on Arelith, and most of the time is not actually written down anywhere. If something gets added to the To-Do List (TM), it means it will be done When It's Done (TM)." Fire Boar

[edit] Split of server

Splits were done already, currently, there are three servers: Surface, Cordor and Underdark. Future splits could come, but that is unlikely to be any time soon.

Quote by Mithreas before the splitting ot three servers:

"There are a lot of technical reasons why adding a third server to the mix would be time consuming to implement. I'm not going to say we'll never do it, but suggesting it isn't going to alter the likelihood one whit." Mithreas

[edit] Automatic timed reset system

Such system is down on developers' list. It is not desired to have an automatically timed reset occurring at given time "no matter what".

"Because if you're in the middle of a dangerous area with a party, a reset can mean death. I have considered a voting system where players can vote yes or no for a reset after the server has been up for a certain number of hours, but haven't got around to doing anything about it." Mithreas

[edit] Forums: server status

"I have Grand Plans (tm) for the level of information displayed. But they require module changes, and I'm to busy to make them right now." Mithreas

The scripters have developed a testing page for server information. A -playerlist command has been added to the game console too, which shows the name and current server of characters.

[edit] Character appearance modifications

An area to change a character's appearance has been realized already. A DM is required to bring players to the area and will supervise the changes.

[edit] Citizenship system

Citizenship system is not fully implemented yet and many changes tied to it are expected in future. See main article about citizenship system for details.

[edit] Bard Song

"Lyrics are probably going to be introduced to Arelith at some point (as soon as Jj figures out a few nifty ideas for 'em). At least, that was the status last I heard." UGrabMyDrumstick

[edit] Craftable enchantment basins

Craftable enchantment basins have already been added to the crafting matrix.

[edit] Shops

It is planned to give shop signs many of the functions that quarter signs have. For example renaming.

"Yes yes, we'll do it just as soon as we migrate the shop conversation to Z-dialog." Mithreas

"I have a plan to let people set per-item prices in shops." Mithreas

[edit] Books

There are plans from developers to add a "Printing press" in future. This should allow easy reproduction of books and even possibility to make player-created books spawn around server in book-containers.

"Yup! This is very much the intent. For now, if you catch me IG I can take books from your inventory and manually add them to the matrix." Mithreas

By now, a printing press has been realized which allows players to multiply books. There is no In Game way to add books to the matrix.

[edit] Spell changes

Several changes to spells are already implemented.

Future changes are on the list, but not expected to be done in near future.

"Honestly, I've wanted to give spells a thorough revamp for some time, but there's always more important things. This sort of subject needs extensive dev team discussion, and we've always got more interesting things to talk about." Mithreas

[edit] Rejected

Issues mentioned in this category have been discussed extensively in past. Many good arguments were listed both on their behalf and against them, yet the final decision belongs to Developers and DMs of Arelith server. It is very unlikely that these decisions will change in near future.

"I want you to remember that you're one of the kids on the playground, not the people who make the playground. Your job is how you interact on the playground, not where to put the merry-go-round" Jjjerm

[edit] NWN 2 and D&D 4th edition

There are currently no intentions to move Arelith forward to NWN 2 or D&D 4th edition.

Between other reasons, NWN 2 requires extensive additional downloads and enormous amount of work for a persistent world(PW) to be moved to it from NWN 1. Neither is currently considered worthy the advantages gained by moving from NWN 1 to NWN 2.

NWN 1 is based on D&D 3rd edition. In following editions (3.5 and 4) there were many changes in mechanics and settings, yet those are not reflected on Arelith. Such would require great efforts and some of those changes may not be achievable without hackpack.

Arelith setting is frozen in time on end of canon D&D 3rd edition. All the events from D&D 4th edition (year 1372 DR and afterwards) DID NOT happen as far as Arelith's setting is concerned.

[edit] CEP and other Hakpaks

Arelith is not using and not planning to use CEP or any other Hack packs that would have to be downloaded separately. For more information see separate article about hakpaks.

[edit] Character remakes

DM Watchtower: "I can say with a fair level of confidence that "In exchange for X, we'll give you Y levels" suggestions won't be implemented."

More is in separate article about character remakes on Arelith.

[edit] Mark of Destiny (MoD)

Not counting Resurrections against the MoD counter was suggested before.

Mithreas:

"Not happening.

For one thing, it would encourage corpse location metagaming; for another, it would encourage people to request 'courtesy raises' for ooc reasons. And I'd rather not have to increase the time I spend on log searches."

[edit] NPC hirelings or mercenaries

"I have code for this, but it encourages soloing rather than party play and is bad for perf, so we won't put it in.." Mithreas

[edit] -disguise changes

Mithreas about proposals for changing -disguise mechanics:

"... a significant proportion of which seem to be written by players frustrated that they can't do anything back to sneaky types who have turned up disguised and wronged them in some way.

Guess what, folks, that's EXACTLY what it's intended to do. No, really. Yes, this means that unobservant characters are going to have real problems identifying the 'real' person behind some situations. Great. That means that people can be villains and not automatically lose out. But it's not risk-free; while your character may not be able to identify them, there are plenty of spot monkeys around who will be able to. So from the villain's point of view, they're still taking a risk doing what they're doing - exactly as they should be.

Now, having said all that, it's certainly possible that there have been abuses of the system. If this is the case, then you should handle it like any other abuse issue - collect evidence and send it over to a DM with a concise description of what happened and what was wrong with it. If we get a number of documented cases of abuse with a common theme, I'll then be in a good position to address it. But all this forum venting is not helpful.

As a final note, I'm not interested in discussing this further. Send the DM team evidence of any abuses, and we'll handle it from there."

[edit] Change of name with -disguise or remove all the names above PCs heads

Mithreas: "It's possible but it screws up all sorts of things, some in the base Bioware engine where I can't change them. Which is why being disguised doesn't change your name."

Character name changes don't strip you off your deposited gold or housing. This was made possible by Fire Boar and the Linux Switch.

[edit] More guild houses outside settlements

Mithreas:

"... the basic points are:

• Diverse settlements are good
• Guild RP works best when you have interaction both within and between groups, and having groups located in isolated places makes interaction between groups much harder.

Cordor always has RP - lots of groups based there to feed off each other.

Wharftown and Bendir have a fair bit of RP - both are in highly trafficked routes and so a resident guild gets interaction with outsiders as they pass.

Myon, Brog, Guldorand, Light Keep and Soulhaven have much less RP (Myon the most of all because of the sheer number of Elven PCs). Why? Because unless you're a member of the faction running the place, you have little reason to go there - and in turn, the residents will get bored of waiting for people to show up.

As neat as it seems to have a 'castle' to yourself, manning a castle gets very boring when you don't see anyone else."

[edit] Storage chests for everyone

"Storage is expensive on server performance, so it's deliberately hard to get at. Be nice to the server, keep your inventory to a minimum *nod*" Mithreas

[edit] Containers (bags and boxes)

Containers that can be carried in characters' inventory are not available on Arelith. There are no intentions to reintroduce them. Two of the main reasons for this are:

• Unmentioned exploit
• Lag created by excessive amount of containers and items in inventories of characters.

There are Storage Chests available.

[edit] Weapons

There are things that are hard coded by NWN and can not be changed. Some examples includes:

• Which weapons are usable with Weapon Finesse feat.
• Possibility for weapon master to take unarmed fight as their weapon of choice

[edit] Invisible or open helmets, bands, flowers, tiaras, etc.

Those all are easy possible with haks, which are not an option for Arelith.

"There's nothing we can do in this area, sorry." Mithreas

"I have no interest in scripting a helmet-replacement system - there's many many more things I'd want to do first. If you don't like them, don't use them." Mithreas

"With cloaks it's different, when you go into toolset even in basic NWN there's cloak that wouldn't appear, that's because first versions of NWN didn't had visible cloaks, those were added later." Wendigo

[edit] More Gods

"I refuse to add more deities until I've rewritten the deity system to be more efficient. Sorry." Mithreas

[edit] Horses

"Sadly they cause massive lag spikes for most players, and have a number of exploitable bugs. There are no plans to include them." Mithreas

[edit] Messenger

Ideas for speedy messenger to deliver items, written messages, or responses back to sender were suggested several times before.

"This has been brought up, there aren't any plans to bring 'sendbacks' into the Speedy's." DragoneyeIIVX

Mithreas: "It's not implemented. Maybe it will be some day but that will take Work."

[edit] True Seeing

This has been brought up many, many times in the past, and any suggestions to alter the spell further than it already has have been rejected by the dev team.

"This particular subject has been discussed a great many times in a great many different PW communities. There are strong arguments on all sides for changing it in a number of different ways and keeping it as is. My personal take is that Arelith seems to run fine with things as they are right now, so I see no reason to change it - your mileage may vary but I promise you that if we change it, half a dozen people will pop up to suggest that it's changed back." Mithreas

[edit] Races and classes

[edit] Vampires

Vampires would be doable but it would be difficult. This idea for new subrace has been already proposed several times and decided against.

Since this is an unsupported race, roleplaying a vampire is not possible on Arelith.

DM Anne of Arelith:

"Yes, Vampires are a total no no.

Sharp teeth can be a Teifling or a RDD... However if you see any Vlad's running about, saying.. "good evening" and with Vampire in their description.. Please report it to us.. We have a wooden stake wiget just for them *nod nods*"

[edit] Custom classes

Custom classes are not possible without Haks. Instead, Arelith developers implements many modifications to existing classes that can players take with their characters to make them specialized in some areas. Examples of this are Totem Druids, warlocks or improved Spell Focuses.

[edit] Druids and DR

Totem druids don't have any way to pass the damage reductions in animal form.

"This is deliberate. Every class has strengths and weaknesses. For totem druids, they have a lot of strengths, but DR is a significant weakness." Mithreas

[edit] Shadowdancer and hide in plain sight

On Arelith, Shadow Dancer class has feat Hide In Plain Sight disabled. There is no intention of reintroducing this feat. There is no intention to introduce anything simulating this ability by allowing some invisibility uses per day, or Shadow Jump (teleport like ability). This all has been denied.

Shadow jump: "Yep, too easily abusable. Imagine if you could go anywhere! People would start shadow jumping into quarters, up cliffs, potentially cutting out huge segments of travel and wreaking all sorts of havok. Udos, par example. Those big gates that cordon off each noble house? With Shadow Jump, they'd be no problem, then it would just be a case of waiting in stealth until someone comes along and opens the front door. Getting out? Absolutely no problem at all." Fire Boar

Mithreas: "Use potion of invis if you want to vanish. SD is very nicely balanced right now. If you disagree, you're Doing It Wrong. Honestly, I should know, I play one."

[edit] Crafting

[edit] Crafting experiences

Crafters are earning their experience through RPRating. Additional experiences from crafting items were considered several times and denied. To the contrary, usage of enchantment basin for creation of item can be draining and cost you Experiences.

[edit] Craftable heal potions

Heal-potions won't be implemented as craftables any time soon, due to balance and other issues.

[edit] Melting down weapons and armour

Mithreas: "It came up some years ago." ... "it's way more effort than it's worth."

[edit] Dividing crafting categories

Mithreas: "This is very hard to do, because the menus are automatically generated from the config file of item types. Changing it would be a PITA."

[edit] Changes to prices of products

Mithreas: "I have a plan to let people set per-item prices in shops. That's the generic solution to this sort of problem (e.g. positive essences should be valued differently on the surface and UD)."