Back to the Basics -- April Fool's!!

[TripleAught]

What an exciting time! Avlis has been a wonderfully successful world and has grown into such a strong community over the past decade.

I've been reading through some of the older forums, and one of the things that has really struck me is the sense of commraderie and companionship that was (and still is) so evident in the early days of developing the servers. This, combined with a fortuitous find of an ancient copy of the original Mikona module has given me a grand idea for a new direction to take Avlis in.

Codename: Project Gnomish Underpants

Over the next couple of months, while the DM team is busy running the Drotid War plot, I'm going to be heads down with MadKat and the Dev team porting our systems into the Mikona module and making sure everything works.

The goal is that when the war plot is concluded (and I'm not putting any specific timeline on this, the DM team will have as much time as they need to do it right) we will re-boot the franchise.

I think that this gives us a couple of opportunities:
1. We have a huge world already built. This gives us an opportunity to tweak things and roll-out new areas and servers -- and gives us a chance to do more "exploring the wilderness" style plots as new parts of the world are discovered.
2. Density of Players. The huge world has been a boon, so much to do, so much to see, so much to kill. But there is also something to be said for putting people into a smaller space and watching the interactions that bubble up from that proximity.
3. Brand New Characters. This is probably the hardest part of the plan, but after some serious thought I think that after the first year it will be overall beneficial. I'm also talking with the staff about a massive Character Re-Mort project to help make that transition smoother. Details on that will be forthcoming.

From a world perspective, I want to address a few things about continuity.
1. The timeline would not change. The servers would still be on an IG timeline for right after the Drotid War. Just because you can't walk to all the servers you could before, they would still exist in the world timeline and continue flowing, when we added new servers, we would make a community update about what happened in the intervening time.
2. Old characters would be the stuff of legends. From the re-mort idea above, I'd love to get a lot of our current characters turned into NPCs that would fill spots in current quests, maybe merchants, or even just flavor NPCs.

From a community perspective, there are probably a couple of questions too.
1. The biggest likely being: "But I have invested so much in my character, it's not fair to lose it." I am sympathetic to this concern. The sole purpose of Avlis is to have a space in which we can have fun. I'm working closely with Spool32 to try and do as much as we can as a team to help players 'wrap-up' their characters before this change. Where we can run individual (small) plots to help you retire or make a more permanent end, we will do that.
2. The role of the Team: With a smaller server, the DM team's ability to cover it will feel significantly increased. There aren't any plans to change the DM roles at this time. However, what we will need are more people in other team roles such as Builders, Scripters, and especially QA. If you've been thinking about those roles, drop us a line at staff@avlis.org.

And of course, the final question that you may have: Is this for real?!?!
To which I can only answer with a simple Yes.

TripleAught
World Leader

[Ulu Elexin]

Yay for Mikona! I always knew that was the best server!~

Yay TA!

[bidocks]

Ummm... I really hope this is just an April Fool's joke....

[Dreamangel]

Is this when we'll be rolling out the Fighter AMS analogue code?

[Xaila]

[solitude_peace2]

That's a great idea. So we still get to have "legacy" PCs that can inherit one cool item from the remorted ones?

[Kandi_Nulein]

Ummm... I really hope this is just an April Fool's joke....

The clue was in the codename: Gnomish Under Pants!

[p0m]

Ummm... I really hope this is just an April Fool's joke....

The clue was in the codename: Gnomish Under Pants!

Nah, that's just the safe word for "Deider is coming back."

[TripleAught]

Ummm... I really hope this is just an April Fool's joke....

The clue was in the codename: Gnomish Under Pants!

Nah, that's just the safe word for "Deider is coming back."

What about you. Get your p0mmy butt back IG.

[Gorgon]

Bring your old IRC stats too! We need more old quotes from folks to laugh at.

[tindertwiggy]

The early days of the Mikona mod were a lot of fun. We could adventure in the slums! Half-Orc barbarians were brutal. If you went to the wrong corner a were-rat might spawn, and that would ruin your day. One day the Priests went crazy and had a war in the Temple district (faction bug) that culminated in an epic showdown in the temple of Maleki. Vian was the only one to make it out I think.

Then we got real actual sewers to play in. And get this, one of the guys in the sewers dropped a +1 greatsword. Now we'd seen +1 longswords, and maybe even a+1 axe or two, but a greatsword? Nope. Our greatsword-specced pc pretty much shat himself. And then there were abandoned dwarven quarters put in BELOW the sewers. You could actually go down deeper. That was the first announced dm event which I remember!

And one day, we logged on to find two areas of road outside the city gates! You could honest to god set foot OUTSIDE the city walls. Everyone just kind of looked at all the green.

And forget standing around outside in the rain looking at each other and waiting for someone to talk. We did that in the Inn, damnit. Mikona Gates Inn was the only Inn to stand in! And we stood in it by the gods. YOU KIDS GET OFF MY LAWN!

[Zerub]

Vian was the only one to make it out I think.

Wow! I can't imagine him making it out alive with his wimpy character and junky gear!

Scott