As 2016 comes to an end and we welcome in 2017, we in the PlaneShift Development team would like to thank everyone who has had a part in making PlaneShift what it has been this year.

First, this means you, the players. We are thankful that you all still like PlaneShift enough to play, as without you logging in there would be no point in making this game. We are also thankful for all the effort many of you take in reporting bugs to us, no matter how small, it has really helped over the years.

We would like to give special thanks to the players who have taken the effort and put aside the time to make content for PlaneShift this year, be they bosses or NPCs, quests, and more recently art. Every little bit that is contributed to PlaneShift makes this game that little bit greater, we all appreciate it.

A big thanks also goes out to all the Game Masters who put in as much time as they can to run events and the In-Game world.

And finailly, a big thanks to our server hosters http://www.teamix.de/ for freely donating server capacity to run PlaneShift on.

And to end with.... HAPPY NEW YEAR!!!

So for a while I've wanted to try and open up the back end of quest writing so that people can really see what goes on, because there really is very little offical documentation regarding the whole process. The end goal would be to have enough information avaible that people could write a fully quest and submit it to me and it would just ... work.

To this end, I'm making available the 5 current tutorial quests, and a manual (of sorts) I've written which details base quest set up and what sort of functions we have available.

The files are vailable here

If you have an interest in the quest systen them please take a look at these, any questions you have please ask here and I'll explain.

So, I'm developing a show room/armoury/forge location like thingy up in the BD fortress, much like my banquette hall, which I hope will bring a little more life to the place. As part of it I've added 6 NPCs who you can think of as being like bosses, but bosses who were defeated. And after their defeat were stuffed and moved to the fortress.

And now, this is where everyone reading this comes in.


What I hope will happen now is that anyone interested will look over the 6 creatures, pick one or more that you like the look of and make something up. You can then post below, or PM/e-mail me, with the following

• Number(s) of the creature
• A suggested name (1-2-3 words with - or ' is possible)
• A description (Not too long ~50-100 words max, to nicely describe the creature)
• History / background (a few hundred words to start with, if you get picked we can expand it if there is room to later)

Keep in mind that initially a player will only get to name 1 of the 6 creatures, even if you enter all 6. This is to allow more people to get involved. When you submit your answers submit them in the order you would like to name the creatures. If you REALLY want to name the Gorweal then put 5 first, then your other choices in the order you'd like. However, if I don't get enough good suggestsions its entirely possible that one player could end up being picked for 1 or more creature.

The most important things to consider when creating something is ICness, creativity, and originality but they also have to be suitable. Try and read over some of the history and see if you can work in your chosen creature(s) into the current settings/history some how.

I would like to have these out in the next update (later this year) so there is a time limit on this;

ALL SUBMISSIONS MUST BE GOTTEN TO ME BY NOVEMBER 30th.

In December once all the submissions have been made we will work on deciding which was the best for each NPC and we will announce it here, and immediatly add the details into the game in the form of a book which will be added to the bookstands for everyone to be able to read.

Thanks.

If you have any questions just ask, and good luck!

Venalan.

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How many suggestions have there been.

1 - 3
2 - 3
3 - 3
4 - 2
5 - 2
6 - 3

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Example

So many of you would have seen some of the bosses we have in game at the moment. Examples of their current descriptions are below as examples.

• Marangma is unusually large for a weaver arangma. She has a large purple body displaying vivid yellow and red markings on the carapace, which look like a deformed glyph. Her four hairy legs are spread around her, folded as if she was ready to jump at any time at her prey. She stares at her victims with her multiple cold black eyes, her mouth jaws dripping of remaining web tows.
• This tremendous maulberlord looks particularly tall and healthy. He seems a perfect representative of his species, displaying a large body, voluminous muscles showing up through his thick dirty white fur, massive clawed arms and a mouthful of razor-sharp teeth. If you take some time to observe him at a safe distance, you will notice that the tip of his left claw has been cut off. Furthermore, his legs are striped with scars, some dried blood taint the fur around his mouth and an arrow is obviously planted in his right shoulder. (This is One-Claw)

So it's been mentioned that selling items by mistake is still occurring, ideally we would add in client/server support to reduce the chances of losing something to an NPC like this. But as we are unsure when we will next make a new client I made some adjustments to the UI windows to make Merchant and Storage more obviously different.



Thoughts?

EVENT IN A FEW HOURS!!!!!!

Some rather odd things have been popping up by Harnquist!!

Have you seen them?

Have you any idea what they are?

If you are wondering what they are please join us in a GM led event to help Harnquist solve the puzzle of this "Unfortunate Fungal Infection" tonight at 19:00 GMT. (in 3.5 hours, sorry for the short notice).

Good luck to all who join.

Hi all,

The server is currently down for an update of the operating system running on the server. It should take no more than an hour or two.

Sorry for any disruption this might cause to your enjoyment of PlaneShift.

Hi everyone,

So I wanted to let you all know about a quest helper system I'm in the middle of making. The quest chains we have now function well, and we have tried to make it as easy as possible to pass along the main chains without having to search for the next quest blindly. This was done by adding dialogue at the end of quests suggesting which NPC to see next. If some of these dialogues are not clear please let us know so we can fix them, we get some comments about this which we improve but without being told what could be better we can't make it better.

However, recently a comment was made by a player that it may actually be finding starter quests that could be hard for a new player to do and therefore put them off PlaneShift. A few weeks earlier I had started planning a system where players could be pointed towards open quests to help them find new quests. So I've done two things. The first is I've added a book on the noticeboard in the tutorial which tells players who the NPCs are that start the main chains for all the factions/associations which should help get new players started. This is similar to the welcome letter players are given but is much more succinct and direct and is about as easy as possible to get them started. This I hope should make it easier to get stuck into PlaneShift and then hopefully a few more players might stick around.

The second is my idea to make barkeeps a central point of gossip (and quests) in a city. Once the system is complete you will be able to go to Alleia, Belcor, Jarda or Brado (I'm also thinking about making someone equivalent do this at the fortress) and ask them to tell you about gossip and they will respond with dialogue designed to point you towards an open quest.

Now, this dialogue WILL NOT be the holy grail of quest info. I want it to be useful, but also as IC as I can make it. It will point you to most but NOT ALL quests. For example, Way quests will not be pointed to, thieve/baddie/sewer quests will not be pointed to, quests outside of cities will not be pointed to, and not every quests in a city will be pointed to. The idea I have for this system is that it is designed to help new players get into PlaneShift, and it will also benefit infrequent players by helping them find quests quickly when they do play by giving them help finding possible quests. It is not designed to help players find every possible quest from every possible NPC, so there will still be plenty of times when help from other players or just asking NPCs will reveal quests.

I hope you all think this idea will prove as useful and will improve playability as much as I do.

Hi all,

So, for the longest of times faction points have been almost completely useless in PS (beyond basically just being a count of how many quests you've done). Some factions maxed at about 40 some use to be able to reach 3000+ just due to the number of quests that award specific faction points. A few updates ago we started changing this by adding a hard limit to 200 or -200 for all factions. Which was a nice start as it at least allowed us have a fixed scale. But then we got stuck deciding a way to use the current faction system such that it would be balanced with quest progression and still an accurate representation of a character In Character (IC), and also not break each time we added new quests or made other adjustments.

We have now decided to actually change the way many factions should be looked at from an IC point of view, and this also means how they are awarded in quests. For the Magic Circles and Crafting Associations, factions will no longer be a representation of how much members of a Way or Association like you or not, but will be an indication of your IC rank in a specific Way or Association. For example, a faction level for Azure Order of 200 will mean that you are a Full Master and have gained the highest IC rank (you will automatically get the faction level associated with a rank no matter what your faction was before, if it was 155 or 195 both would move up to 200), whereas a level of 0 will mean you have not entered that Way at all. Equivalent ranks should slowly be created and added to all the Associations.

When you are in-between IC ranks you will still technically be able to gain faction, but you will never be able to exceed the next level associated with a rank. So assume Full adept gave you 100 faction, and the first master's rank gave you 120. If you did 50 other quests after gaining 100 faction which all awarded faction for that Way your faction would max at 115. It would only reach 120 once you completed the first master rank quest for that Way. For other factions like Guard or Nolthrir, factions will still be used as an IC indication of how much a race or group like you. It will take more time to make the necessary adjustments to these as they are inherently much more dynamic and will be much harder to balance and will take substantially more time to finish.

So then what do these changes mean?

Well, for those of you who have spent any time with Ferryd you may have heard him address you by your IC Red Way rank. It will make setting up AI systems like this easier for the other way masters, and for other member of a Circle. It should also make it easier to set up other NPC AI behaviours such as using faction points to decide how and when an NPC will or will not attack you. It also opens up the possibility of having quests accessible only if your faction reaches a certain point. Right now it is not really feasible due to how much work is still needed with factions.