Muratus del Mur

( i would suggest one of the judges to deal with this )

The situation is like this... over the years, the companies that built browser-based games invested insane amounts of money into advertising certain types of games. Also, development focused on fine-tuning those games for maximum addiction. Games are in general a money making factory, literally nobody ares about any other aspect other than the business aspect. I started and plan to continue MD totally disregarding the business aspect of it. Sadly, nowadays, players are used to think less and just fit within predefined gameplay patterns, they are all, regardless of their IQ level, unconsciously trained consumers that fit well planned behaviour patters. You don't even realize it..but nowadays it is "natural" for anyone to look for resources to build stuff, and attack other monsters for "near to lose" fights that you win anyhow, just to get a level up, that will make you do the same repetitive stuff just with an other zero added to the same stats. It is so natural that you can't even imagine it might be possible any other way...lol. Creativity in game play is basically extinct..or almost extinct ..you can still find it hidden in the variations..but core concepts are all the same everywhere. Just a single core concept if it changes, people need to start thinking more, and need to go outside their safety zone ..this is exciting but not relaxing. MD is BASED on entirely new concepts...so its target audience is increasingly low. There is no way i can change that, the world as we know it goes that direction entirely...not just games...everything tends to be trained to be a much easier to control consuming mechanism, with predictable people. Americans where at some point legendary for being the most predictable and controllable consumers in existance, but this happens now to everyone almost. examples: Place a contact phone in the upper right corner of a shop, and USA sales will increase by a clear percentage, because they where trained to like that. Make psychological prices like 1,99 and will sell better than 2.00 Use happy colors to mark things that cost real money Use more or less than 3 resource types in a RTS game, and you will lose important number of players, because they are all used to manage 3 resource types, believe it or not. Ask a player to be creative, and you will make his brain consume a lot more power, causing a better experience but more effort, and you will lose a significant number of less creative players..that is bad for economy but good for community. Money in game is best asked when you already won something single-player related, or when you lose something in multiplayer related gameplay. I could go on and on with examples....these things i know...they are however not applied in MD because md is my baby not my business. To survive, MD needs to disguise itself into a more friendly and relaxing casual game, where everything is clear and fun to do, at first. Initial addiction levels will increase, old time personality filters will vanish from sight (just from sight)..and MD will start to seem a lot more commercial to the first comers. Because of its current depth/size md can sacrifice a large ammount of the assets it has (locations, concepts, artworks, features) , to become friendlier ..but its current depth will ensure that it will still remain insanely deep and will respect certain concepts. Some marketing concepts will never be integrated, and this will deprive md of more than 50% of its potential growth. However we are not struggling here to grow, we are fighting to survive with minimum damage. You might wonder how i decide what concepts i change in favor of growth and what concepts i keep and why. Its complicated, yet simple :) The one thing i want to respect most is to give the chance to anyone regardless of age or financial possibilities to become part of this community with equal influence potential like anyone else. As long a 13y old can become king of a land without paying anything ever (for example), then md is in my view fine in keeping this balance between paying and non paying members. My target is and always was, to bring together people of various cultures, ages, talents and habbits, and to offer them a place where a well defined fragment of who they are (their player/character), can evolve and confront other real people... and through that it can learn, change and evolve. My benefit is very selfish,..i do it just for myself :P ..just so i can learn more about myself, same as you do. Learning about you helps me discover myself. I offer you something , you give me back pieces of who i am, thats my trade... I find joy in learning and experimenting with such things, my life has a purpose when i confront issues in md that require my skills to be solved. I learned to write and to draw, so i could be of more use in md development... i have fun doing this, same as you have playing it. This is something of far more value than any money or fame. That is why i fight to keep the playerbase of md as "honest" and clean as possible and not taint it with outside powers such as money. This doesn't mean i do not need money to survive, or that i do not enjoy it if i have it. I am actually hoping, and consider it one of the "business" targets of A25 changes, to make md profitable so i can focus my time just on it, because now i need to work for others to pay my bills, and this is a terrible waste of time, instead of finishing my second book and to make md better, i lose precious time fixing bugs and coding scripts for others..not fun...you agree with me i guess.

a25 is a total concept adjustment, md will change 50% after it, but still respecting some core concepts and using most of its current assets. Don't worry, you will absolutely love it i am sure. I designed it in a very smart and unique way, yet a way that is easy to assimilate by players already trained to play games a certain way. Md wil not be easier but will be a lot more playable and relaxing than it is now. For hardcore amateurs, deeper stages will remain intact...concepts will remain intact, just disimulated in a much more commercial form, so that nowadays players can cope with them. I estimate less than a year till md will die, unless i finish a25...yup. You wouldnt believe it how easy a community based game could die..once you drop under a certain player number, it becomes an unstoppable chain reaction. Money will prevent me from keeping it online anymore, and its structure that was build based on active players does not support single player mode(!!!), so a new start is nearly impossible. Thats why i am so agitated to get a25 done, because it is the most important thing i could do to ensure md does not die suddenly. ..not to mention i have a strong feeling this is the last major change i will do in md myself, so it has to come out right, or it won't matter at all. ... today i visited my martial arts teacher...and i realized we know eachother for 18 years..much of how i ruled md was influenced by his teachings (non-verbal/physical ones). I realized his school became a lot more commercial, for the same reason..people are more and more used to comfort and are less available to get out of their comfort zone to learn new things. So he made it more easy for them to assimilate, less painful and less scary...but for old timers, he keeps private training sessions. This is something i will not do...i guess my learning stops here. I will not split md in old timers and newcommers ...even if i wanted to do that initially. There won't be any private quests for old players from this 'era'...MD is enough splitt as it is. Even if it will be much more easy and commercial in the first part, the deeper parts of the gameplay will remain hardcore as they are now, for everyone. By hardocore i mean , ..it will still be the sort of gameplay that crosses the border of virtual and comes into your life and changes it. MD will not turn into a casual game, it will just pretend to be one, so that more will give it a chance. Deep inside i still believe we are not all brainwashed consumers and that somewhere there, there are still people of real value.

done, sent my gifts :D

thanks, i would want these also as research docs to place in the labyrinth, don't worry they are also public and also in the research section..people will forget about these posts, but in-game they will remain forever

yeah i must agree fang has no clue about illusions, he is using them just for one of their side effects apparently.

(tags not changed yet might be slightly different because i made the initial settings from the db so they might be +1 & +1 each or +2, idk, anyway they will adjust to what Ary said when you save.

there is no way i will read two pages of suggestions, no offence Feel free to open a discussion on the forum and bounce ideas with others to see how they can be improved or implemented. Right now illusions are far far away in the line. Best people to discuss about them are those that are testing/using them..like fang and dst. alternatively you could summarize those ideas in a couple of lines and let me extrapolate them myself. also on the forum..not private Thank you

oh my.....i totally forgot obviously why did nobody remember me of this ? :( :( right now i am busy with somethign else, if you would be so kind to email me the books list again i will have them done in a day or too. Get used to remember me , i forget things Thanks

by official he means he didnt code the tool but is using a publicly available thing. NOT to be confused with md official admin tools. (otherwise i would have exploded)

i am also not certain if this should be feature or not..... i'll observe this discussion for now. Tag value will be determined by how much time you spent keeping it active, and there will also be other ways to increase its score...so question is..should someone that had such a tag, hard enough to get, be granted a chance to turn it into a role or not...at least thats how i see it for now

Interface works perfectly, please actually check next time before reporting a bug

this is a good lesson to me to focus more on separating content edited by one or the other.... as a rule, people with scene editing access should not change things others place,,it is very annoying... but i forgot to state such a rule...and i am not doing it yet, because i want to see how things will go like it is now..this will influence the type of tools i will continue or not continue to make. As for you dst, stop trying to shift the blame. I am equally mad both on you and dd. And dd, even if i forgot the ghosts there, don't make assumptions. It happens i forgot them at pillar 19 when i requested 20 to be found...think.

i am unable to keep up with this topic. For now i will focus on replying to the people i named, and when i will be able get some more time i will continue , if i need, to assign more parts of md to other people to document. Thank you.

i gave the rewards to everyone. i think dst ruined the challenge in the first place, then dd ruined it more by trying to fix it. At least if dst managed to move mass the ghost, the others should have tried to pass it the way i intended it to, would have been more fun than just getting rid of that clickie. next time i will try to make such quests more secure, to prevent you from ruining your fun, and mine. topic can be closed

of course. you may deny the citizenship after you win, i won't mind also a question, "Justin Case" is an alt or?

summon by tag works just fine. Only thing it had in addition was the search for tags in brackets..that is fine...even if such tags won't be promoted anymore. I don't want it to work on tags that are available but not active, so no change needed in this script. problem is with adremovetag script I will be blocking access to that one till i decide if its still needed or not in the way it is now.

umm dst..you passed february by using a bug..wasn't part of the plan..so what dd did was just normal. I thought at first he removed february's ghost for no reason, but i totally forgot about that bug. Point is..if you are telling a story, tell the full story.

so: dst had 20 obelisks first Shadowseeker had 20 cartography first (not 20 obelisks however) Ary Endleg is the first one with 12 This challenge was a very useful way for me to test if something is wrong with the obelisks, if someone could somehow 'beat the system', and to see how hard it is to find them all....not that hard...not that fair either. Credits are part of md, i didn't think about them when starting this, but its good to know skill points could in extreme situations be altered like this...this is a very useful information. I have doubts about ways of access the last obelisk, but still, it was done. I shall discuss rewards with each one, in-game.

its not lack of respect , its reaction to your lack of appreciation ;) Sorry for the rude replies, i have nothing against the work you did so far related to the tags. don't generalise my rudeness. current brackets tags will need changes to work with ..lets call it "my system" ..so i am willing to do those changes. the rest is sent by email. here won't be any trouble for you to migrate to the new system.

its impossible that the old items are affected ANYHOW by the new system. The new system uses the same tags as before, it just hooks into it and collects tags to display for later use, thats all. In fact i will rename it to Tag memory, not multiple tags. if you have errors on the current items related to tags, just post as normal bug report and notify me , i will fix them dont worry

type is something i will use to track how you got that tag, for now its not use other ways than type 2, i will probably give tags i manually edit a type 1, automated collected tags from your current tag will be type 2, type 3 will be tags given by somethign scripted but stored directly to the tags list not given as active tags. For now you should consider tag type as an admin flag, not to be used yet to influence gameplay. [removed some rude content] Please understand i can not trace plans done ages ago to the letter..its simply not the way i work. I gave you the initial plan for multiple tags, you could have alter it as you wish, or do it as such, anyway nothing happend (in general with a25) so i started to do it...but i am doing as i have it in mind now, thats slightly different ...also because i dont remember many things also because i might have better ideas. Thank you for reminding me anyway.

I can confirm that back then i used to spend hours...days...even weeks..to adjust design and create all the stuff you see around here. Sadly i can't remember what is there, i lost the sources too, i know it had a meaning, i don't know anymore what..same as i forgot lots of other things...but i know there are words in there. I was hoping nobody will ever ask me that hahhaha Erolin is same like fenths .. its not taken from anywhere else..if you find the word in an other place is pure coincidence OR that person made the name up in a similar manner i did, so you could investigate any other source and probably find same roots of the word. This is one of the most exciting research topics i read in years about md history, but due to personal reasons.

Someone please confirm if the duplicates have vanished or not. I will reset all tags if not..there was a problem with the update script. As a concept ..this new way is in mely opinion not just much better but also fundamentally different than what i initially had in mind. i believe that "god given tags" should not be different from any other tag. That way all tags will share same potential importance and their actual value will be given by their score not by who granted it

actually my plan is to create items that give tags on use, or to create locations that will analyze your stats and give you a tag based on that..such as how much gold you have old your wood cutting skills, and then give you a trader tag or woodcutter tag...things like that. What you describe is more for the kings, and i can give the king items that can grant specific tags and they can give them to various people. I will however stay away from giving individual plaeyrs ability to give fixed tags FOR NOW, because i want to focus on the more automated stuff. If chew wants to do these things himself, i will provide sample code if needed, but i will let him decide who gets what... my focus remains on tools and features that give tags and less on the community aspect of this.