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[dentin]

This morning, the game turned on the new druid class, adding a bunch of new spells and skills into the game.  If you haven't heard of it before, Alter Aeon is a text heavy RPG, with swords and magic, dungeons and dragons.

This new character class adds a number of new abilities:

- control of the weather, to make storms and call lightning

- rune carving and runic enchantments

- magically controlling and growing plants

- animal lore and handling

- summon wind and dust storms to hinder your enemies

- use minions summoned from the earth to assist you in battle

- brew tinctures and salves

- new item crafting skills using carving and runes

The game is multiclass, so you can use these spells and skills with other class skillsets to create custom combinations, some of which are really powerful.

The address is:

Alter Aeon MUD
http://www.alteraeon.com

[dentin]

I'm one of the guys who worked on the new class.  I suppose the only difference between me and 90% of the other threads in this sub-forum is that I'll publicly say I'm associated with the game, instead of astroturfing it like all the other companies.  I did read the forum rules and tried to put my post in a place where it made sense and wouldn't be a problem.  If I was mistaken, please let me know.

As for the game itself, if you like muds, that's awesome - I figured there would be some overlap between people who like muds and people who like DF, but it's not like a mud will let you do the kinds of things you can do in DF.  I only really hoped that a few people like yourself would notice and maybe take a look in your spare time.

[dentin]

No problem.  Forum spam sucks a lot, and I've had to do pretty exotic things to keep up with it on the forums I run.  Sorry again if I was out of line.

[debvon]

Alter Aeon is one of the most blind friendly multiplayer games on the web. Nearly all of our players are blind or visually impaired, and our dedicated staff is constantly on the lookout for trouble spots.

Fascinating. How did that end up happening? By visually impaired do you mean people who wear glasses, or are most of you players *actually* blind/near blind?

[dentin]

Actually blind.  They range from impaired vision (some of them), to completely, stone blind (most of them.)  The computer reads the game to them and they type in commands in response; with the more advanced clients and soundpacks, various events are converted into easily identifiable sounds to get critical information across quicker.  In the time it takes for a reader to speak a few sentences, your character can be very dead.

It happened pretty much by accident.  A few people started asking for spam filters and spam reduction around 10-15 years ago to make it easier on readers, and a lot of those changes got added to the main server.  Minor improvements can really add up if you make a decade's worth of them.

[debvon]

So if I'm reading this correctly, eventually you'll want to put levels into ALL of the classes? Mainly for the stats? I'm leveling a mage, so eventually I want warrior levels for health?

[dentin]

Something like that.  The leveling system is set up so that if you always level cheapest, you'll end up with your classes staggered about five levels apart.  For example:

30 25 20 15 10 5

You do get stats and practices from leveling the other classes, but you don't have to spend those stats getting anything from that class.  A lot of the time, people use the practices from their lower classes to pad out their top one or two.  In a way, it's a form of 'skill unlocking' system:  you generally pick the class order you want based on the skill trees that are available.  You can go with nearly pure caster (Mage necro cleric druid thief warrior), which would put your warrior class 25 or more levels below your primary, or the reverse for the highest hitpoint fighter combination.  Most people pick and choose though - for example, one of my favorite combinations is warrior cleric, with levels in the other classes depending on how I feel at the time.

The reason this works is because we designed it from the ground up to work this way.  The game never had a concept of 'single class' characters so having multiple classes doesn't cause balance issues.  The levels give you the skillsets, and the skillsets determine what kind of character you really are.

[debvon]

I've been playing for about a week and the game is really entertaining. I love the way you can allocate your practices into whatever skill build you want, and set a chain of commands to a key press, like.. press f5 after a battle to do a victory cry, suck juice out of a corpse, and then sacrifice it to the gods. If you're a manly sorcerer you can even set an alias to cast 20 fireballs (you'll just keep casting fireball until you, it, or everything dies).

The other thread is here http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=49642.msg1035299#msg1035299 but this thread is fresh, unlike the corpses I often encounter in game.