For those of you who saw a ghost wandering around the wasteland earlier saying creepy stuff, this was a preliminary test for the upcoming patrolling guards feature that will be part of the new combat system. Expect to see more random wandering things as work on that system continues. The aim is to make guards basically like NPC players with their own AI.

Duel system testing will begin soon on Dev, once it begins warfare and hunting will be disabled. For the first stage all players will be made level 80 and we will be testing the basic (pre-skill training) abilities of each of the 4 classes. Levels will be backed up before this change so hold on to your items as you'll be going back down to your old level once testing is complete.

This -should- happen in the next week but as I've run in to 4-5 unforseen problems already it is very possible it could be delayed slightly.

In regards to some of the comments on the blog below. Yes, online now is kind of useless at present that is why I'm remaking it on Dev right now with filters and all sorts of fancy things. This change was required due to the way the new dueling system is going to work.

It would not let you challenge people to duels who had not changed pages in the past 10 minutes as they were not considered to be online even if they were sitting waiting for the duel request. This was one of the first issues I noticed with the system so had to be fixed.

I'm still hopeful that the system will be up for testing on Dev early next week, even though this unforeseen problem has delayed development a bit. There may be some resets / forced level changes coming up on Dev once it is live as we will need to test it at various level brackets.

So in preperation for a lot of real time systems, dueling and such we are changing what it means to be 'Online Now'. To what I consider to be a more realistic representation of who is actually online at this very moment.

The current system only considers somebody online if they changed pages within the last 10 minutes. With more and more javascript based systems being added it is quite possible to be active without changing pages now. Sitting watching Side Chat would be a perfect example.

The new system which is going live today will change this. You'll still be able to see when players last changed pages in the color of their name, but they will not be considered offline until they close the browser window or log out.

This will mean that the Online Now number will increase but everybody on that list has a browser window on their computer currently open and logged in to Legacy.

So I've been doing a lot of work recently over on Dev. As with my previous post random fighting while in the hive will be disabled. You will however be able to challenge online players to duels in the hive, and if they accept fight them that way 1 vs 1 in real time. You'll also be able to duel people in your own gang if you wish.

This may later lead to things like combat ratings (much like chess ratings) where you can duel other people to increase it... as the new combat system requires skill. This also means the first thing I'm making is the duel system, the idea being we can test all the abilities and combat mechanics in a 1 vs 1 enviroment before I start working on Hunting and Warfare and get everything balanced / decide if we like it or not.

Warfare and regular combat will go down on Dev when the Duel System goes live, this should happen some time in the next week. I urge any Avatars not currently signed up to the development server to do so if they wish to have a say in the future of Legacy!