Some Tweaks in Multiplaying and High Level Characters

[kiri]

It has become necessary, in the opinion of Slart and myself, to make some changes to the code and the policy of BR in order to ensure our community, our ethics of fairness, and our belief in protecting the balance of the game:

In the next coming weeks, there will be some changes to the way the code works as to multiplaying. By this, I mean when you have more than one character on at the same time. As you know, it is not illegal to have 2 characters on at the same time. This will not change.

However, it has come to our attention that the game balance is simply not tipped fairly. Many people, over the last couple of years, have pointed out how simple it is to level a character from level 1 to 51 in a matter of hours using a high level alt as a mana battery and a spell machine. While we have built into the mud the use of support group members (such as a druid to a group of tanks/fighters), the usage of this technique while multiplaying does nothing to add to our community atmosphere. In fact, it creates resentment from players who don't do this as a "cheap" method of levelling. What's more, it eats away from the pool of players who could be grouping together because it keeps people solo'ing with their multi alts out of the pure accessibility of the method.

So this is the deal. In the upcoming weeks, we will be implementing a coded system that will prevent any person to multiplay with their characters which are more than 10 levels apart. We hope you understand our reasons for this and will try to be supportive to the new changes. If it doesn't work, we of course will not keep the code in place. But for now. we hope those of you who were unhappy with the system such that it was will be pleased with the changes!

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Next, I plan to start enforcing our long-standing policy of asking players who have sat at high levels for very, very long periods of time to please try to level. If necessary, I might have to set deadlines. We have many, many reasons to ask you to do this, but amongst them are these:

- it imbalances the mud to have a character as strong as a low-level hero able to enchant, get eq and other things for players without any rules applicable to them.

- Most of these players are simply batteries, spell bots and enchant/eq machines for their OWN characters, creating an endless stream of heroing alts without much work on the part of the player.

There are many more reasons, but those are just two.

It's been a long time since I have enforced any policy that negatively effects some people, but I will do it as fairly and consistently as I possibly can. Be sure that I will listen to your concerns if you are affected by either of these policy and code updates/changes. Please address any concerns to me, and not Slart, as I am handling that end of things.