[Davood]

A little tidbit from the troll under the bridge (me!)

The development of this server comes with a long history... this isn't a new development that was just started, it has been in the works on and off for years, but only recently has had enough active developers (3) to bring it to a state that could be called beta and have the (man?)power to organize, and respond to user feedback.

1. There are literally 1000s of changes, mostly minor, subtle tweaks, such as weapon model updates, to differentiate certain items (there are a ridiculous number of models available, even to titanium users).

2. Capitalization of global models for npcs to spruce up areas asthetically, quest/npc trimming to remove the non-classic-ish content, and addition of a an excellent welcome zone with all the bells and whistles to help you understand what the MDB experience is all about without breaking the game immersion or lore.

3. heavy balancing analysis through the use of offline databases and spreadsheets and clearly defined point systems. - this means items, quest progression, npc difficulty, and overall vision are all being calculated and analysed with objective analysis rather than "timmy wants more orcs, lets make some of them size 255!!!!111111 YEY". there are discussions, and analysis, in order to determine how exactly we might tweak some npcs or add /remove npcs in order to properly flesh otu the world, maybe there is a need for size 255 orcs, but if there is, it will make sense. It won't just be a random thing because a developer has discovered that he can do it so he did it.

4. npc strength has been reduced accross the board, but certain npcs are actually stronger, or not as weak. and some abilities have been changed to reflect the target size of the active player base - all of which is variable, so we can increase the difficulty if raids of 20 people are banding together!

5. the rules table is being optimized to use the servers resources better for pathing and z adjustment - in the next week I believe we will notice the improvements.

6. there is a surprise for those hardy adventurers of any level who play long enough.....

Some re-envisoning is planned, in order to enable defunct, or poorly "visioned" vanilla/kunark/velious zones to be valuable and conducive to exploratory adventuring.

Specific details I will leave out as that would ruin the fun.

some additional info:
1. you can have one bot, but you cant create bots - it will be quested only, and that is something that is coming
2. you can have 3 connections per ip maximum
3. mq2 users who warp will get two warnings then banned for a set period of time(? not sure, maybe this can be clarified - we may be a little lax during beta)
4. hotzones will rotate on a weekly basis
5. xp rates are continually being adjusted from player feedback
6. PLEASE use the ingame mail feature to report bugs to soe.eq.mdb.maze this way we will definately see your feedback
7. there will be a set of rewards based on contributions during beta, and what you have accromplished with your toons during beta (levels, items discovered etc). so that when we char wipe, you will have some rewards in your shared bank upon logging into the production run of 1.0 MDB