Valentine's Day Server Updates

I had planned to open a bunch of things for Valentine's day, but I only managed to get about half of them done, largely due to laziness and akrasia. It's still a decent chunk of work though:

- There's a new slot machine based on a 'travelling merchant' theme. The first two slot machine wheels pick a random cargo and destination, the next few wheels pick your path through various terrain (or have you get robbed by thieves), and when you arrive at the destination you sell your cargo. If there's a local event and your cargo is badly needed, you make a premium on your cargo, for example if you're hauling food into a famine zone, or supplying weapons to a kingdom at war.

- There's a new level 14 area on the island of Kordan, the Haunted Hills. This is the first complete, full size area that I've personally built entirely myself in at least a decade, possibly more. I ended up making quite a few code changes for this - silly little things to make the area work the way I wanted it to, but important (at least to me.) This area taught me that I underestimate the creativity of my builders, and I overestimate the ability of the code. Several things that should have been easy to do and that I've seen other builders do were best handled as code updates; even though my awesome builders have managed to get similar effects, they had to use incredibly shitty workarounds to do it.

I'm now convinced that if I were to build full time, building areas would rapidly become easier and more powerful for all the builders. It may be worthwhile for me to simply build a zone every month or two to improve the building system. If only I had multiple copies of myself.

- There's also a new level 24 area on the island of Archais, the tinker gnome colony. This is a massive rebuild and rework of an ancient 15 room mini-area built by Aleph at the dawn of time; the rebuilt version is at least five times the size, and uses a lot of the snazzy new building features that weren't available in 1996.

- The planar research guild has opened their main offices in the city of Gad's Landing on the island of Archais. The guild gives out copies of a bunch of quests which were used in the 17th anniversary event of 2012. The players seemed to really like the anniversary quests, and with the opening of the planar knot observation platform, it makes sense that similar sorts of things would be available.

- I added a new level 31 mage spell, 'group teleport'. The whole point is so that people can teleport with their group, to die en-masse instead of solo. Now that we have obscure spells, I can safely add this and put it somewhere out of the way where new players won't kill themselves using it.

- As mentioned above, the 17th anniversary zone is now an official area. The observation platform is instanced and accessible to players of any level - the dangerous parts are cordoned off with a very powerful ward spell. My intent was that it would be a place to visit and/or sightsee, similar to the Lincoln monument. High level groups can break the wards and let loose the elementals in the rest of the area. It takes a group with a minimum of 5k mana and an obscure high level spell to do this, so I'm hoping that new players who wander into it will be safe.

- We also opened the 18th anniversary zone in the Ash Mountains. Ward breaking is needed to enter the main fortress, but honestly any group able to make it to the main fortress in one piece is probably capable of bringing down the wards. This and the 17th anniversary zones were primarily intended to be high level group experience.

There probably won't be any more area or event updates like this from me for a while. I'm pretty burned out now, having done christmas/new years, the anniversary, and now a gob of stuff for valentines day; I'm also really behind on work I had scheduled that is important, so I'll probably be spending some time on infrastructure for a while.