Five on Friday - May 12, 2006

1. When you add vet rewards, will you add some for vets that haven’t been playing since the beginning?
Darkscribe: Yes! We are adding a new reward for one year players, to go along with the existing one. We should be able to announce all the new vet rewards next month.

2. I really liked the Treasures for Tokuno event. Is there a chance that it, or something like it, will be brought back in the future?
Darkscribe: Absolutely. We really liked that event as well. It needs some tweaks here and there, but overall it got a great response. We’d like to do something similar this year.

3. What would it take that you consider removing the timer on the polymorph spell. If not then why?
MrTact: The only reason I would be reluctant to do this would be that I hate “toggle” spells, although the recent introduction of the buff/debuff gump makes them somewhat less annoying. We will look into doing this in a future publish.

4. Have you been listening to our feedback on Proficiencies? I haven’t seen you comment on them recently.
MrTact: Proficiencies slipped out of this publish, both because we bit off more than we could chew with pub 40, and because of the level of player reaction to the announcement of the feature. I haven’t been talking about them because there was more than enough controversy over what was left *in* pub 40! As we come to the close of that publish, we’re going to start talking more about proficiencies.

It’s clear to us that we need to take our time and make sure they are done right. Accordingly, we are actually slipping them out of pub 41, as well – we have some time-dependent features in that publish, proficiencies are a big change, and we don’t want to push them out half-baked just to make a deadline on another feature. We’ll be working on them, and they should be available on TC for players to experiment with, but the earliest you would see them in production is pub 42.

5. I really enjoyed the "Inu" story that was printed on BNN. Who wrote it, and do you plan on writing more fiction like that?
Inu the Crone: I commissioned this relatively unknown writer who goes by the name Draconi to write the first chapter of my story. So many of you have come to me asking me about bits and pieces of the story. By bits and pieces, I literally mean one word at a time. And you wonder I prefer the company of scorpions and sand to you people? Bah.

In any case, I do think I will have this Draconi fellow write more of my story in the future.