MOTD

Nodeka is still under relatively active development. Below is a list of the entire known changelog in it's original form when quoted, barring any typos or in rare cases, the shifting of lines to fit MediaWiki formatting. Any commentary will not be in the code block.

MOTDs by year, in reverse order:

2020

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There are currently no updates or MOTDs posted for 2020.

2019

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Total updates: 5

  Update 4/27/2019:

  - Reign of spirit is now trainable beyond 100%.

  Update 4/21/2019:

  - Summoning of the grey has been improved slightly such that the follower
    created by it has slightly improved stats.

  Update 4/7/2019:

  - The shielded aylakia run time decrement bug has been fixed.

  - The hyper-unique period has ended and a new double gold, exp, stones event
    has begun!

  Update 2/16/2019:

  - Hyper-unique period through the end of March. During this time all 
    donations reward 3x infuscated marbles.

  Update 1/5/2019:

  - Nodeka is moving on January 11th! As such, Nodeka may be down for a few
    days from Jan. 11th - Jan. 18th while we re-establish our IPs and DNS.

    For updates, check http://justingottschlich.com

    We likely will have the non-bound DNS IP address the day of the move, which
    you'll be able to connect to directly. Check the above website for details.

2018

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Total updates: 9

  Update 7/1/2018:

  - Natural attunement has additional benefits and has notable strength in
    training beyond 100%.

  Update 6/23/2018:

  - Super summer deal! 
  
    For two weeks only (6/23 - 7/7), all donations will receive 3x stones!
    
    In addition, any character who maxes out in donations for either June or
    July donations while the 3x stones is active, will receive an extra 1x
    on all stones (a total value of 4x stones!).

    Lastly, gem costs are at a reduced rate *and* one character will be selected
    at random each day during this event period and receive a random number of 
    additional gems up to 1,000!

  Update 5/11/2018:

  - Change in 2x damage: now it only applies to PCs and their NPC followers.
    That is, NPCs no longer do 2x damage.

  Update 4/16/2018:

  - Improved race: oji-oem - keepers of the word.

  Update 4/13/2018:

  - Rune-ring has been improved for beyond 100% training.

  Update 3/25/2018:

  - New feature: when a player has reached the maximum number of augments for
    the first tier, he/she will open up a new set of sun stone modifications that 
    were previously hidden. 
    
    Although these modifications are permanent, they are extremely costly! Each 
    modification has its own unique base cost, incremental cost, and maximum 
    number of improvements.

    These modifications can be accessed using the normal sun stone command:

            "stones sun" -> list the options for sun stones
      "stones sun, xxxx" -> use stones to improve one of the categories

    However, keep in mind, that until you reach the maximum number of augments 
    for the first tier, they will be hidden and unaccessible to you.

    Good luck!

  Update 3/24/2018:

  - New bifold wizard spell: wizard's violence

  Update 3/23/2018:

  - New event from 3/23 - 5/1: 
      - 3x gold on mobs, 3x platinum on donations

  - Conjure deity has been improved to include consideration of the user's 
    wisdom

  - Red robes of the mjol has notably reduced prevention time and a 
    significant boost in caster-based bonuses and increased randomization

  Update 1/11/2018:

  - New event from 1/11 - 3/10: 
  
      - 2x gold, exp, and infuscated marbles (on all donations)
      - Hyper unique items possible on drops and when using marbles
      - Hyper salvage drops

2017

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Total updates: 23

  Update 10/14/2017:

  - More scrounger gnomes have set up shop in the Aur-Vindi [[crafting
    guild]] for your salvaging convenience!

  Update 10/2/2017:

  - A variety of schematics have been added, allowing for crafting gemstones to 
    be converted. The Magnificent Osbert in Aur-Vindi
    possesses the necessary scrolls to get you started.

  Update 9/17/2017:

  - Ataghan of inheritance, staff of the gate, and Lorhus's claymore have 
    been increased in power, again! :) 

  Update 9/3/2017:

  - Ataghan of inheritance, staff of the gate, and Lorhus's claymore have 
    been increased in power, especially for training beyond 100%. 
    
    More to come ...

  Update 9/2/2017:

  - The duration of the anti-nim affect has been significantly reduced.

  - Highwayman's speed and hand of the thieves guild now have the potency to
    reduce the affects of anti-nim. Highwayman's speed is based on both the
    user's skill % and the user's affect and will actively reduce the 
    anti-nim duration even when the affect is not active. However, hand of the
    thieves guild only has the chance to reduce the impact of anti-nim when
    it is active.

  Update 9/1/2017:

  - Nim has been changed in a fundamental way. First, once nim is used on an 
    mob, successfully or not, the mob is made aware of the nimming attempt and
    no further nims are possible on that mob for a period of time (see the 
    mob's affects).

    Secondly, when nim is successfully executed on a mob, it draws from a 
    special nim pool, separate from the mob's gold pool. 
    
    This means players who are aiming to kill mobs can simulateneously run an 
    area that a nimmer is running. Additionally, a nimmer can nim and then 
    subsequently kill the mob for extra gold.

    This also means that nimmers who don't end up slaying mobs will likely need
    to rotate through more areas due to their inability to nim a given mob more
    than once (which Nijlo likes a lot, due to their special resistence to the 
    run-time affects all other classes are impacted by). :)

    Hooray! Happy Labor Day Weekend!

  Update 8/20/2017:

  - After receiving numerous requests, we've increased the extra infuscated marbles    
    during the 8/19-9/15 event from 2x to 4x!

    All donations made between 8/19-8/20 have been retroactively increased
    on the marbles they've received to be 4x instead of the original 2x.

  Update 8/7/2017:

  - Spiritual judgement now has powerful effects for beyond 100% training.
  - Undefiled benignity now has powerful effects for beyond 100% training.

  Update 7/15/2017:

  - The gold cap for nim has been raised fairly substantially. However, we will
    continue to adjust it as necessary (even if that means reducing it some).

  Update 6/11/2017:

  - Hum ofValkyries Bastion] [sic] has been changed, slightly.

  Update 5/5/2017:

  - The preventions for glacious stones have been broken into separate
    categories:
     
      - glacious stones - pool (when restoring health, endurance, etc.)
      - glacious stones - run time (when clearing run time)
      - glacious stones - daily prize (when clearing daily prize prev)

    This means you may now use all three together, while the pool prevention
    is the shortest and the daily prize is the longest.

  Update 4/30/2017:

  - You can now use five glacious stones to clear your run time affect. This 
    can be done, at most, once every five hours.

  - The run time algorithm has been changed. It now has the following values:

           Hour 1:  300% experience / gold (previously 200%)
        Hours 2-4:  150% experience / gold (previously 125%)
        Hours 5-8:  100% experience / gold (same)
       Hours 9-12:   50% experience / gold (previously 80%)
      Hours 13-16:   25% experience / gold (previously 50%)
      Hours 16-24:    5% experience / gold (previously 10%)

    See "help run time" for more details.

  Update 4/29/2017:

  - Trewan of the rising forest has been increased in its prevention time.
    This means when using this ability, the user will be unable to use it
    again for a longer period of time than before this change.

  - Ruan awareness and combat instinct now have 1/2 round lag when their
    affects are active as opposed to having 0 lag.

  - Cleric's heavenly smiting now usually will have lag associated with it.
    However, if the user's ability % is high enough, sometimes when it is used
    it will be lagless. The higher the user's ability %, the higher the
    chance for lagless execution.

  Update 4/18/2017:

  - The bot check system is no longer automatically active. In addition,
    the last pk system has been changed to encourage mass PK of botters.

    See "help run time" and "help bot check" for more details.

  Update 3/12/2017:

  - Due to numerous requests, we have begun hyper unique month! During this 
    time all unique items have increased chances of being more powerful than 
    usual (e.g., use of infuscated marbles on items can improve items to levels 
    not normally achievable).

    Hyper unique month will likely run until the end of March. Maybe longer?

    For more details see "help unique" and keep in mind that hyper uniques are 
    even more powerful than super uniques, but their complete details are 
    secret.

  Update 2/26/2017:

  - Fenrir has returned to Nodeka. He will be resuming his previous duties in 
    charge of mortal affairs.

    Details:

    As some of you may know, Fenrir left the immortal staff in 2014 but 
    continued to play Nodeka thereafter. Later, he (using his mortal) caused 
    some disturbance on Nodeka in 2015.
    
    Because of this and in spite of after years of outstanding service, his
    mortal was deleted and he was banned from the game.

    Over the last few months, starting with a dialogue with Nijlo, Fenrir has 
    been actively working on Nodeka and with Nijlo behind the scenes. During 
    this time his mortal was reinstated and he recently asked for his immortal
    to be reinstated.
    
    Whim and Nijlo spent several weeks discussing this and finally
    came to the conclusion that given Fenrir's superior track record prior to
    the incident in 2015 and his continued and sincere desire to assist Nodeka
    that we would allow his return upon two conditions. First, that regardless
    of any outcome he will remain professional at all times, which he has 
    promised. Second, that he send a formal apology to all of Nodeka for his
    prior behavior. He has fulfilled both terms and his apology is as follows:

    ------------------------------------------------------------------------

    To all Nodeka players,

    As many of you know I stepped down three years ago from my Immortal Position. 
    In the following year I continued to play my Mortal character towards the end 
    of this time I became frustrated and used my position to sabotage Nodeka 
    and undermine Nijlo.

    My actions were unprofessional, inexcusable and truly unbefitting of a
    member of the Nodeka staff, active or not.

    There is no apology I can offer that will do justice to make up for my actions, 
    I truly regret what transpired and can never make up for what I did.

    I would like to request of you to allow me to return and with the efforts of
    Nodeka staff attempt to rebuild some rapport with you the players, whom without 
    this game would not be around, and make Nodeka better.

    Fenrir

    ------------------------------------------------------------------------

    We are excited to have Fenrir return to Nodeka and are moving forward
    in a disciplined and measured fashion to ensure we do not have a repeat
    of the incident of 2015.

    What Fenrir has done by making a formal and public apology to the entire 
    game is no easy task. It takes an incredible amount of humility and 
    courage. We ask that you give him your support as he transitions back to 
    his former role.

  Update 2/5/2017:

  - Crash bug fixed.

  Update 2/4/2017:

  - Lay hands now has strong benefits for beyond 100% training. In addition,
    its base cost has been increased.

  - Updated abilities list to show training beyond 100% for Tholec's rising,
    singularity of fate and singularity of focus have benefits. Thanks Odinn.

  Update 1/22/2017:

  - Added code in attempt to fix these mysterious Nodeka stall events that
    currently require reboots.

  Update 1/15/2017:

  - Training beyond 100% now improves weave of balance uptime.

  Update 1/10/2017:

  - Platinum rewards for Invasion events have been strongly increased.

  Update 1/6/2017:

  - Extending hyper triple through 1/31 due to January lottery!

  Update 1/1/2017:

  - The last pk system has been changed in the following way. If a player PKs
    another player, the killer's name is removed from the victim's last pk list
    (assuming it is on it).

  - New super map will become active for characters who receive $250 or more in
    donations over an entire year. For more information, see "help super map."

2016

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2015

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2014

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2013

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2012

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2011

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2010

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2009

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2008

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2007

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2006

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2005

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2004

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2003

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Total updates: 191

 Update 12/22/2003:

 - The benefactor judgement and nojohr fate have been toned.

 - Heightened precision's prevention time has been reduced by four minutes,
   this should make it a good deal more powerful. I'm still tweaking changes
   so don't get too set on anything being concrete (I just don't want to 
   disappoint you if I have to improve or worsen it).

 Update 12/21/2003:

 - As promised, double donations will run again: January 1st - January 9th
  
   This has been done to accommodate those who missed the first double donations
   because they didn't have their PayPal accounts setup.

   Setup your PayPal accounts *now* so you don't miss it this time. PayPal
   accounts generally take a week to setup, so get them started TODAY.

 - "toggle" has been reorganized, it's better now. =)

 - hints                     -> auto-hints
 - auto (features)           -> auto-join
 - map (auto-mapping)        -> auto-map

 - new toggle                -> auto-sense

 - being spammed by astral travel is no longer considered spam as you can now
   toggle auto-sense off. Help rules has been updated.

 - followers created by sigil of the undead army have been improved

 - now three types of heightened abilities: basic, intermediate, advanced

 - heightened defiance now   - basic heightened form
 - heightened precision now  - intermediate heightened form
 - heightened instinct now   - advanced heightened form

 - slightly increased prevention times of heightened abilities due to the fact
   that they can all be used simultaneously now.

 - heightened instinct has been revamped
 - new tholec spell: tholec's rising

 Update 12/20/2003:

 - word of withdrawal and withdraw both now have 50 minute prevention times

 - storm complexity now has a slightly increased prevention time
 - nefarious combat infusion has been toned

 Update 12/20/2003:

 - fixed eq output when looking at inviso people
 - more more more newbie mini-quest updates

 Update 12/15/2003:

 - more newbie mini-quests, the place is getting frickin huge now
 - fixed bug where guides would join you to kill the guide aids
 - fixed some other minor bugs

 Update 12/15/2003:

 - corrected "q" and "r" of line pauses so that entering something like,
   "reply <message>" wouldn't refresh the screen pause.

 - changed the way eq looks on output
 - changed color settings from worn eq brace and missing eq brace, to
   worn eq border to missing eq border (I'd suggest they stay the same
   color unless you really want some crazy ugliness to show up. But, maybe
   that's what you actually want ...

 - Made a ton of changes to the newbie mini-quests to be much less repetitive,
   thanks for the feedback Cryaxx.

 - modified, updated, corrected several help files

 Update 12/13/2003:

 - Modified the way the mobs react to actions by players. It's now done in a
   manner that allows players to perform the action the mob is waiting for
   and then perform other actions afterwards while allowing the mob to still
   identify that the action it was waiting for was performed.

   In addition, the mobs are still smart enough to know that if you perform
   the action before they ask for it, it'll be disregarded.

 - Added four more newbie mini-quest mobs.
  
 - Nodeka lock for all players reduced to 5 minutes

 - internal code cleanup and more newbie mini-quests
 
 - more newbie mini-quest stuff

 Update 12/13/2003:

 - Finally! The page pause the way it should have always been!

 - more more more

 - more newbie quest area updates.

 - Huge, huge, huge, huge, huge, huge, huge update. Create a new character.

 - safe rooms can now be identified by room name
 - new command "disband"
 - and tons of other changes, including truly "reactionary" mobs

 Update 12/4/2003:

 - DOUBLE DONATIONS! December 4th - December 7th only.

   All donations made from December 4th - December 7th will be doubled.
   This includes stones. This offer is good only through Sunday, December 7th.

   The maximum number of stones given out per month has also been doubled
   for this double donation period. Which means if you donate $200 while the
   double donation period is active, you'll get: 

         40 sun stones
         100 glacious stones
         4 storm crystals
         14 infuscated marbles

 Update 11/17/2003:

 - new command: where - which is an alias of the exits command
 - exits command revamped - see help exits

 - new interesting rules for continental travel. Credit goes to Smo for the
   curiously brilliant idea. For more info, see help on: continental travel

 - fixed bug where if a player's follower was pked and Nodeka crashed, the 
   player would lose the follower's eq. This would only happen if the follower
   was pked (it would not happen if the player ordered the follower to give
   the follower's eq to the player or if the player and follower were in the
   same room at the time of the crash).

 - fixed crash bug

 - you can now use stones while under impairments (like while berserking or
   while stunned, thanks Orlijn). You were suppose to be able to before, this
   was a bug.

 Update 11/15/2003:

 - fixed crash bug

 - fixed oracular vision (thanks Legend)

 - made some other minor changes

 Update 11/15/2003:

 - glacious stones have been implemented

 Message from Nijlo:

 For all of you who were online last night (Friday, November 14th), I would 
 like to apologize to you for shutting down the Nodeka server. While the point
 I was making, was a valid point, I could have used a number of other methods 
 to get my point across without negatively affecting those people who are 
 supporters of Nodeka.

 Last night, two hours prior to shutting down the Nodeka server, I received 
 news from my father that my grandfather passed away. While I had thought I 
 was handling the situation well, it seems my subconscious mind was struggling
 a bit to come to terms with this. My grandfather (Herb Gottschlich) and I 
 were close, although we had some differences, I loved him very much.

 The only time I have ever shut down Nodeka (at least to my recollection) was
 last night. You can expect that will not happen again. I apologize again, my
 emotions got the better of me.

 Thank you again for your ongoing support of Nodeka. I really do appreciate 
 it.

 - Justin Gottschlich

 Update 11/13/2003:

 - mental tiaran has been improved (it's now much more friendly to use when
   having low con and it's minimum prevention time has been reduced from 9
   seconds to 4 seconds).

 Update 11/12/2003:

 - full color control on 'data' (see new 'data' color settings)

 - revised/finalized look for data command (type 'data')

 Update 11/11/2003:

 - mental tiaran is now a basic ranged attack prevention skill (yes, I am well
   aware that lightning of the array is a basic ranged attack prevention skill
   and that by having two abilities that prevent on the same type, ateoli will
   now have to choose which to use). Yes, I'm very aware of this and have made
   the decision to overlap the abilities preventions quite intentionally.

 - cleaned up output from lightning of the array
 - fixed crash bug in lightning of the array

 - nojohr fate and benefactor judgement have been toned, slightly

 - heightened instinct has been toned

 - prayer of the gods disfavor has been altered, slightly

 - hex of menthijan's prevention time has been increased

 - palladium of sanctity has been toned
 - palladium of sanctity is now a basic sanctity prevention ability
 - rain of healing sanctity is now an intermediate sanctity prevention ability

 - rite of sundering's prevention time has been increased

 - passage of the bleeding moment has been toned

 - blindsided machination has been redesigned - it behaves differently now,
   pay close attention (help blindsided machination has been updated)

 - forge of magical dampening's prevention time has been increased, a good deal
 - titan's fortitude's prevention time has been increased

 Update 11/10/2003:

 - fixed bug with data adding follower kills to its data (data adding kills 
   and deaths to its toll for clannies, is correct)

 - you can now use 'data' on others. However, this functionality is limited
   to only be able to use on others in your same room. If you could "data"
   anyone in the world, you'd be able to see if they were running or not (and
   that would somewhat invalid astral, etc.)

 - bhikshu monk now: Tloh-monk
 - new tloh-monk spell: directed guidance

 Update 11/8/2003:

 - who <base race name>, race now lists all players of that race type,
   including minor and major remorts

 - angels lose anti player killer racial
 - angels now have invulnerability to anti-casting/invoking magic racial
 - demons now have anti player killer racial

 Update 11/4/2003:

 - new race: faehr

 - blindsided machination's anti-recall affect has been reduced and blind-
   sided's incurred prevention time has been upped so that targets now have
   a chance to recall between blindsided attacks.

 - races can now have second based racial affects (gnomes are the first)
 - gnome race lineage improved (again, lowered mana/spi, added new racial)

 - new behavior regarding mob gold when the mob's area repops, see:
   help mob gold repop

 - frost giant race lineage has slightly more +dam now (on each tier)
 - black drake race lineage has been improved
 - gnome race lineage has been improved
 - jerof race lineage has been improved
 - pixie race lineage has been improved

 - new command 'data'

 Update 11/2/2003:

 - nojohr fate and the benefactor judgement now have longer prevention times

 - you can now convert experience into gold

 Update 10/29/2003:

 - fixed crash bug in nojohr fate

 - fixed crash bug

 - storm crystals now always save you from any loss when real dying (this 
   includes saving you from losing any experience, any equipment and any
   attributes - str, dex, etc.). 'Help stones' has been updated.

 - cleaned up login to be as user friendly as possible. I know what you're
   thinking, "gee Nijlo, that stupid color question is still there, if you're
   trying to make it user-friendly, why not get rid of that pain in our ass?"

   Well, yes, you're right. It is a pain to have to answer that stupid 
   question every time you login and it's a pain to have to enter in a stupid
   number every time you login, but both are necessary evils. As you know,
   color is activated as soon as you hit enter to the color question. If I
   omit the color question at first connection to Nodeka, the Nodeka 
   presentation I want to make I can either "force on players" or remove.
   If I force it on players and those players are creating NEW characters,
   they won't be able to read the output about how to create a new character
   nor will they be able to read the line that asks for them to type 'create'.

   The character options is similar, if I don't do character deletion in the 
   character options while the character is not directly in the Nodeka world,
   we get some weird bugs, all of which continue to present themselves each
   time I add more functionality to Nodeka.

   Anyways, I'm doing my best to continue to make Nodeka as fun and as usable
   as possible. As you can tell, I'm very concerned with making the 
   presentation of Nodeka as professional and as usable as possible. I'll
   continue to do this as Nodeka continues to evolve. =)

 Update 10/27/2003:

 - there is now an 'auction' channel (due to Nijlo finally breaking down and
   coding auction the weak way rather than the right way, because he didn't
   feel like rewriting 'toggle' just yet - but realizing that ingame item 
   sales occur very often (sorry for the three year delay, heh) )

 - cleaned up and made all global channels consistent in output format

 - ephemeral discord of speed has been redesigned

 Update 10/21/2003:

 - arctic colossus's attacks has been toned
 - angel and arch-angel now have the 'anti player killer' racial

 Update 10/21/2003:

 - new oracle of weird skill: seer's understanding
 - new oracle of weird skill: oracular vision

 Update 10/20/2003:

 - all sa'duroth classes now have: infernal curing

 - new blood sa'duroth spell: blood-magic

 Update 10/19/2003:

 - you can no longer delete your character while logged into Nodeka. Type
   delete to see the new instructions on deletion. Thanks Farva.

 - fixed some more output errors, thanks Legend.

 Update 10/18/2003:

 - I've fixed a line of sight bug that was allowing players to throw around
   multiple corners. In the process of fixing this bug, I've added new 
   functionality to existing skills/spells. Each ranged ability/attack now
   has a distinct and unique number of corners it can travel around. Use
   these abilities to determine their unique cornering (note: some abilities
   corner the same number as before).

 - new 'update' functionality shows minimal information upon login, but full
   update information when typing 'update' online. This has been done to 
   minimize players being spammed by the news and hitting enter 20 times in a
   row to login. =)

 Update 10/18/2003:

 - I have attempted to correct all skill and spell output so no extra (or 
   missing) return lines show up. For example:

   Bad:

     -----------------------------------------------------------------------
     You chant the words, 'slmlp.'
     Increased mastery in your ability of qolok!

     You lose your concentration.
     -----------------------------------------------------------------------
     Increased mastery in your ability of path of the righteous!You are 
     guided by the gods and driven by the light.
     -----------------------------------------------------------------------
     Increased mastery in your ability of dodge!

     The Temple Guardian lands [ 5 of 6 ] attacks on you: MUTILATING damage!!
     You land [ 9 of 9 ] attacks on the Temple Guardian: battering damage!
     -----------------------------------------------------------------------

  Good:

     -----------------------------------------------------------------------
     You chant the words, 'slmlp.'
     Increased mastery in your ability of qolok!
     Time bends to your will, wind-runner.
     -----------------------------------------------------------------------
     Increased mastery in your ability of path of the righteous!
     You are guided by the gods and driven by the light.
     -----------------------------------------------------------------------
     Increased mastery in your ability of dodge!
     The Temple Guardian lands [ 5 of 6 ] attacks on you: MUTILATING damage!!
     You land [ 9 of 9 ] attacks on the Temple Guardian: battering damage!
     -----------------------------------------------------------------------

 If you see any output problems that don't follow the well formed examples 
 below, please let Nijlo know (jgottschlich@runbox.com)

 - new lo-fent, lightseeker spell: path of the righteous

 Update 10/17/2003:

 - lo-fent of the light order changed to: lo-fent, lightseeker
 - new lo-fent lightseeker spell: quester's gallantry

 Update 10/16/2003:

 - adapt can now be used by mortals and minor remortals

 - moon nojohr is now: silvern nojohr

 - new silvern nojohr spell (yes, spell): champion's battle

 Update 10/12/2003:

 - Nijlo will be allowing a grace period of two weeks for players to request
   password changes to Nijlo. The password changes will only be accepted 
   online, will only be accepted by Nijlo directly and will only be accepted
   pending Nijlo is satified the password change is not an attempt to sidestep
   the rule prohibiting character selling.

   Password change requests that will generally be accepted:

     - "I share my password with five other people and need to stop access"
     - "My password is currently way too easy to guess"

   Password change requests that will NOT be accepted:

     - "I just bought this character and need to circumvent the rules."
     - "I just traded characters and want to stop the previous owner from 
        accessing my new character."

   Each password change request will be handled on a per case basis.

 Update 10/11/2003:

   Hugely important update - read everything very carefully

 - the rules have been updated: see 'help rules'

 - character selling/trading is now illegal. Any characters caught trying to
   sell characters or trade characters will be zapped.

 - you can no longer change your password. This has been introduced to prevent
   character sales. Would you buy a character from someone whom you know will
   always have your password? I wouldn't.

   Even if you do risk breaking the rules and buy a character from another 
   player which could get you zapped at any time after the character sale, you
   put yourself at additional risk: the person you are buying the character 
   from will always know your password. Think about that risk in addition to 
   all the others.

 - adaptation has been changed - you may now perform class crossovers (i.e. 
   changing from a poliir to a sorcerer) for an extremely large amount of sun stones
   and platinum (this has been introduced to adjust the previous need 
   for character trading/selling which is now illegal).

 - type 'update' or 'motd' to see the latest update

 - type 'help update', 'help news' or 'help motd' for all old updates

 - Nodeka may, at some point, allow character sales to be performed through 
   Nodeka itself (with a certain percent of the character sale profit going 
   back to Nodeka). However, at this time, that functionality is not being 
   allowed. 

   Character selling and trading in all forms, is now illegal. Anyone caught
   advertising for it on Nodeka or outside of Nodeka will be zapped.

 For the current updates, type: update

 News 10/10/2003:

 - important: Nijlo's new e-mail address is: jgottschlich@runbox.com
 - important: Whim's new e-mail address is: whim_of_nodeka@hotmail.com

 - As Nodeka continues to grow in users, so do its operation fees. This is a
   good thing for Nodeka, but not such a good thing for Nijlo.
    
   More money is spent on advertising, more money is spent on hardware, more 
   money is spent on bandwidth, more money is spent on development and so on.

   Please remember donations are what keep Nodeka free. Nodeka has a fully 
   dedicated T1 to it, so you don't lag at all. How many muds can tout that?
   Nodeka is also the only process running on the Nodeka box, to keep Nodeka
   running as fast as possible, again to keep you running as fast as possible.
    
   And that's what we'd like to continue to do - give more and more to our 
   players. But all of these goodies don't come for free.

   If Nodeka fails to continue to support itself, we may have to resort to 
   other means of making income. Has Nodeka ever had a player base wipe in the
   five years its been active? No. Well why do other muds do it every other
   year? I'll tell you why - its economically sound, it makes a lot of sense 
   fiscally. If the players get too tough, they have no more incentive to 
   donate to the game and therefore all profits go bye bye.

   Well I come from a mudding background, and I know what it's like to lose a 
   super character that was worked for, for over three years. And to lose that
   character because some jackass in charge thinks its a great way to line 
   their pockets is something I'm not about to resort to. How do you know I 
   won't? Look at my track record: five years and not one player base wipe.

   And I'm not about to change that, but Nodeka does need to support itself.
   And the worst thought of all, what if Nodeka were to go under? You can
   help prevent that.

   One way to help Nodeka keep its head above water is to continue to donate. 
   When you donate, you do more than just get tools to make your character 
   more powerful, you provide means to keep Nodeka running.

   Buying super characters may make you tough, but they won't help Nodeka 
   continue to operate. And if Nodeka stops operating, all the super Nodeka
   characters in the Gedaon aren't going to do you much good.

   Please continue to support Nodeka - donate,
   Nijlo

 News 10/2/2003:

 - follower's aura has been removed from the game (willed protectors no longer
   incur a follower's aura)

 - demonic affirmation is no longer a prevention ability.

 - all skills and spells which are used to receive followers have been changed
   to follow a single lifespan algorithm (hire and seduce are the exception to
   this rule). All followers of the above mentioned skills and spells now have 
   lifespans and follow the same *new* lifespan algorithm.

   The lifespan algorithm has been created to make followers, in general, last
   longer than they currently do, have their lifespans more dependent upon the 
   user's stats and have prevention times (when applicable) more closely 
   relative to their lifespans.

   Willed protector, demonic affirmation, persuade and tame are not prevention
   abilities - they only create followers that now have lifespans.

   These abilities (willed protector, demonic affirmation, persuade and tame)
   create followers with lifespans but are not prevention abilities. Meaning,
   when the lifespan wears out, another follower can always be created 
   immediately thereafter.

   See 'help lifespan' for more details.

 News 9/27/2003:

 - Mjol followers:

    - conjure elemental is now: follower feat, basic (no change)
    - conjure golem is now: follower feat, intermediate (no change)
    - conjure deity is now: follower feat, advanced
    - all mjol followers have lifespan (except persuade - at least for now)
    - all mjol followers lifespans are 1/3rd the prevention of their master

 News 9/25/2003:

 - when a follower's lifespan ends the follower death message is no longer 
   sent to the world. Now the death message is sent just to the room the
   follower was in at the time of the death message. This also means the 
   master may not see the death message if he/she is not in the room with
   the follower at the time of death (although the corpse will still be
   given to the master). 
   
   This change has been done for obvious reasons. If those reasons aren't
   obvious to you, ask other players.

   Aylakia prayers:

    - defying prayer is now: prayer feat, basic
    - prayer of the gods disfavor is now: prayer feat, intermediate

   Fallad prayers:

    - prayer of greater aegis is now: prayer feat, basic
    - white flames of prayer is now: prayer feat, intermediate

   Daja prayers:

    - the prayer of guardianship is now: prayer feat, basic
    - prayer of mental restoration is now: prayer feat, intermediate
    - the shielding prayer is now: prayer feat, advanced

   Sa'duroth passages:

    - passage of dark summoning is now: passage feat, basic
    - passage of the bleeding moment is now: passage feat, intermediate
    - lowered cast/invoke cost for passage of dark summoning 

 - support Bruce Campbell's latest movie and get a free $10 donation!

   See the help file: "bubba ho-tep"

 News 9/24/2003:

 - crash bug fixed

 - nojohrs now get redirect
 - thunderous strike no longer nullifies regeneration

 - slight tweak in ability gains beyond 50%, 75% and 90% (see 'help ability mastery'
   for more information).

 - all uber-followers (with super prevention times) now have lifespans. All
   lifespans of uber-followers are exactly 50% of the prevention time incurred
   by the ability to create them. All prevention times of uber-followers have
   been reduced to around 50 minutes. This means your uber-followers will have
   around 25 minute lifespans. This is a massive change and is meant as a way
   of controlling uber-followers power. This was #462's idea, so blame him.

   When the time out of the lifespan of an uber-follower is reached, the 
   follower will die automatically.

   It is your responsibility to monitor your follower's lifespan, as a lifespan
   timing out in battle may have disastrous effects.

 News 9/23/2003:

 - support Bruce Campbell's latest movie and get a free $10 donation!

   See the help file: "bubba ho-tep"
       
 - link to the Bubba Ho-tep trailer: http://bubbahotep.com/

   And a totally unbiased, extremely professional review:
   
     http://portlandmercury.com/current/film2.html

 News 9/22/2003:

 - clouded spirit-shift prevention reduced from maximum of 7 minutes to a
   maximum of 20 seconds (this should be interesting)

 - the ability mastery system has been revamped, see 'help ability mastery'.

   This new system will greatly increase newbies ability to become proficient
   in abilities and help bigger remorts improve in long prevention time 
   abilities more quickly.

 - kick endurance cost reduced
 - kick time prevention greatly reduced

 - mental blast maximum time prevention greatly reduced

 - trip has been improved (still not a prevention though)

 - newbie starting health raised to 100

 - slight level change on aylakia's ability set

 News 9/18/2003:

 - it seems some players did not understand the last post I made about the bot
   check so I'm adding a new one to hopefully clarify some things. The bot 
   check system, for all intents and purposes, has been relaxed as of the most
   recent changes. When you fail the bot check questions, you are drained once
   and the bot check ends.

   Before the latest change to the bot check system, if you failed a bot check
   question set (i.e. got 9 questions wrong) you'd be drained stats and then 
   the bot check system would CONTINUE to bot check you. With the new layout,
   if you fail the bot check question set, you are drained and the bot check
   stops.

   The "speed" bot check that happened during the 5 minute uptime of the last
   reboot was an accident. That's my normal "testing" mode. When this "test"
   mode is active, bot check questions have a 10 second delay between them.
   This is NOT the change to the bot check system. This was an accident and
   has been reversed.

   The time between bot check questions has not changed, it is still 60 
   seconds.

   Lastly, any players adversely affected by the bot check when it was in 
   super speed mode will be (and have been) restored +1 billion exp and 500
   platinum for the inconvenience INCLUDING any statistics and gold they lost. 
   Tyrant and Alucard are the only remaining players who have not been 
   restored due to their inability to keep an active connection to Nodeka.

   Conclusion: the bot check system is MORE relaxed now than ever.

 - concentration of killing revamped

 - the bot check system has been changed: failure to respond to the bot check
   system will result in a drain of stats at which point the bot check will 
   stop (no more cyclic bot checks). 

   The bot check will start up again at a later time when the player is active
   in battle or (coming soon) casting a spell, using a skill or ordering a 
   follower (and perhaps other circumstances where players should be present
   in order for certain commands to be processed).

   This change addresses all concerns regarding players losing connection to
   the internet due to ISP failures and worrying about bot checks draining 
   them continually or simple player negligence.

 - new minor remort footpad skill: thieves' sidestep
 - new skill for most 2nd remort joufu classes: blurred movement
 - new skill for Eaststar Khehusod: eaststar crossing
 - new skill for Nameless Ones: thieves' directional sidestep

 News 9/17/2003:

 - crash bug fixed

 - blindsided machination has a new "feature" which is bound to make battling
   a footpad a more than just a recall fest.

 News 9/15/2003:

 - the 'target' command now is usable on targets (potentially) twice as far
   away. This was done because some of the ranged attacks go much further
   than the 'target' ability does. However, this may have some side-effects.
   For example, it is now possible to target someone that you cannot hit
   with throw or telekinetic projection from where you are currently standing.
   This might lead this change to be less useful, but we're hoping not. Let us
   know your thoughts after you've used it a bit (whim@nodeka.com).

 - blindsided machination has been given a face lift - it's a totally 
   different (and more fitting) skill now.

 - light order, continuous heal has been toned down.
 - light order, restoration has been improved.

 - cloak takes over the role of prowl (in that it does something instead of 
   doing nothing). Cloak use to have an affect on critical and stratagem of the cloak,
   but that was changed awhile back. Cloak was effectively doing
   nothing and with the recent changes to prowl, footpads can only stay 
   hidden for a certain duration before they *must* become visible again.
   Due to this, prowl has been removed and cloak has taken over prowl's
   functionality, just as a mortal class ability. =)

 - prowl has been removed from Nodeka

 News 9/14/2003:

 - new 1st remort footpad skill: malignant injury

 News 9/11/2003:

 - Nodeka remembers September 11th, 2001

 News 9/8/2003:

 - bot checks no longer happen during player fights (this includes citadel 
   battles)

 - fixed color bug where if you had a colorless prompt, color turned off and
   logged in, your screen color would remain black (only happened on telnet as
   far as I can tell)

 News 9/7/2003:

 - new command: "repeat bot check", see "help repeat bot check"

 - competing while ambushing no longer works
 - continuning to blindside and decay touch while unconscious no longer happens
 - lots of other minor bug fixes

 News 8/30/2003:

 ************* NODEKA NOW HAS OVER 400 TOTAL SKILLS AND SPELLS *************

 - new 2nd remort joufu skill: strike of the quiet art
 - new 2nd remort ruanbaere skill: mystical fading

 - joufu of the Awaikage becomes Mahoutsukai Joufu

 - new mahoutsukai joufu skill: soundless strike
 - new mahoutsukai joufu skill: soundless strike: grei
 - new mahoutsukai joufu skill: soundless strike: naj'k

 - Ruanbaere-of-war becomes Mordant Ruanbaere (with alignment restrictions)

 - new mordant ruanbaere spell: orphic disbanding
 - new mordant ruanbaere spell: orphic disbanding: grei
 - new mordant ruanbaere spell: orphic disbanding: naj'k

 News 8/29/2003:

 - fixed prevention name redundancies

 - time walking has been improved a good deal - if it's too powerful now, it
   may be toned somewhere between its current power level and its last power
   level

 - Nodeka pulses are slightly faster now (old: 250 ms, new: 200 ms) - this has
   been changed primarily for the affects of time walking to be seen more 
   clearly (i.e. time walkers jumping up in pulse groupings). If this doesn't
   make sense to you, don't worry about it. =)

 News 8/26/2003:

 - reserved anger has been revamped and boy is it mean now
 - decaying touch prevention time increased
 - new design channel functionality

 News 8/25/2003:

 - fixed display races command (thanks Kismet)

 News 8/24/2003:

 - new jakaen skill: immunity: lightning
 - new jakaen skill: immunity: fire
 - new jakaen skill: immunity: frost
 - new jakaen skill: immunity: impairment

 - fixed problem with practice due to capitals in ability names

 - petrify is now a prevention ability - see help petrify

 - new infinity guardian spell: guardian's quickness
 - new infinity guardian spell: guardian's unwavering eye
 - new infinity guardian spell: infinity ray

 News 8/24/2003:

 - valkyries agility is now valkyrie's agility
 - aylakia of the shield is now shielded aylakia

 - new shielded aylakia skill: shield's binding
 - new shielded aylakia skill: shield's fusing
 - new shielded aylakia skill: shield's emplacement
 - new shielded aylakia skill: shield's greater emplacement

 News 8/23/2003:

 - new command: display locks / display preventions
 - new darkhand monk spell: black threshold

 News 8/20/2003:

 - skills and spells can now have apostrophes in their names. Places where
   apostrophes should go in skill and spell names will soon start appearing

 - spell name change: 'lectokkes vision' becomes: 'Lectokke's vision'

 - new stoic ruanbaere skill: titan's fortitude
 - new shisou skill: amassed reflex

 - updated 'affects' command - see 'help affects'

 - heiton of the greater trewan is now the only heiton that gets the spell,
   "enclosure of trewan"
 - enclosure of trewan's prevention time has been upped significantly
 - trewan of the rising forest is now a basic trewan prevention (updated help)
 - enclosure of trewan is now an intermediate trewan prevention (updated help)

 News 8/19/2003:

 - new dajain angel spell: lesser extolment
 - new radial daja spell: word of raising

 News 8/18/2003:

 - new radial daja spell: extol
 - new ataelos of method skill: battle learning
 - new cloud-ring khehusod spell: nefarious combat infusion

 News 8/17/2003:

 - prevention time for constricting hex has been upped a decent amount.

 - the hunt for bounty has been altered so players who kill bounty hunters
   receive a smaller portion of bounty than before. This has been done to help
   promote the uniqueness of tholecs of the hunt and re-establish their 
   playability to a certain degree. Previously, players killing a bounty 
   hunter would receive 1/2 what the bounty hunter received in loot. Now
   players kill bounty hunters receive 1/5th. This may be too harsh of a 
   cut back for players killing bounty hunters, but it may not. We'll see and
   tweak it further if needed.

 - hurricane kick now lags for a little over a round. This may change if 
   hurricane kick has been found to be too powerful (yes I know this means 
   vicious fist lags for nearly twice as long as hurricane kick and that might
   seem unfair to monks. Truth is - monks have far more power in their 
   prevention abilities and so I believe this change to be fair).

 - "who <class name>, class" now shows all remortal classes when supplying a
   base class name as the <class name> parameter

 - word of withdrawal is now castable and invokable

 News 8/13/2003:

 - haotien stance has been toned
 - guarding circle has been improved, slightly

 News 8/12/2003:

 - Important: the company which has been hosting Nodeka's server for the last
   couple years is going out of business. The Nodeka server will be relocated
   immediately to avoid any unforeseen downtime. Due to this however, you may
   be unable to connect to Nodeka for a day. However, due to this being a 
   fairly fast move, we cannot predict which day we'll be moving the Nodeka
   server.

   When the Nodeka server has been moved, the motd will be updated again. This
   will be done to inform you that no further downtime is expected.

   Thanks for your continual patience and support,
   Nijlo

   p.s. Thanks to some of the networking connections the Nodeka staff has
   established over the last couple years, the new network connection we
   are going to get is going to be *screaming* fast.

 - decaying touch has been toned, perhaps too much - if that is the case
   we'll work to find the correct median for it.

 News 8/11/2003:

 - monk of the stolid path becomes: stone-guard

 - new stone-guard spell: guarding circle

 - sunbind works again

 - players who are below level 50 and are not remorts are no longer penalized 
   when failing bot checks. Instead they are given warnings explaining what
   they did wrong, what would happen if they were penalized and how to get 
   more help. The current level implementation of this feature may change. For
   all of you who have been screaming, "bot checks hurt newbies", well, now it
   doesn't (although it does open up a potential hole for botting, for now, 
   that is an acceptable loss).

 News 8/10/2003:

 - successful bot check answers now reward gold as well as experience

 News 8/9/2003:

 - reimbursed players from bot check bug:

   Acie, Aedon, Airon, Akriloth, Alpha, Amaetheon, Anasazi, Azbleck, 
   Blitzkrieg, Bradnewmanxx, Browser, Chasui, Diamaunt, Demented, Dominic, 
   Evernite, Flamel, Fleshtear, Gannon, Hamfast, Iblis, Jigen, Khelin, Klatu,
   Lamar, Leanna, Leviticus, Mazus, Monoxide, Morelf, Mortimer, Ninevein, 
   Nomade, Nomag, Nosha, Phantomlord, Plink, Salve, Selberhad, Shahe, 
   Socrates, Sorn, Soulshadow, Spider, Starvic, Tekka, Tirana, Thoran, 
   Thugger, Varath, Zelda, Ziii

   It's probable that the bot check bug did not falter on some of the above 
   bot checks, however, we feel that reimbursing on the side of generosity is
   more appropriate than not to.

   If you were drained from failing a bot check and your name is not on the 
   above list, it's because we are 100% sure the bot check system did not fail
   inappropriately with you and you were in fact botting (i.e. we know Farxa
   was in fact botting and the bot check system was not failing in Farxa's 
   case).

   For those reimbursed players, your stats have been returned to you in the 
   form of sun stones (type 'stones' or see 'help stones'). We apologize for 
   the bug and delay of its fix (Nijlo was out of the state).

   In addition to the stats returned to you, each player above has been given
   5,000 platinum for the inconvenience caused by the bot check bug. You have
   our most sincere apologies.

 News 8/9/2003:

 - bug with double bot checks has been fixed
 - but with not resetting number of failures when performing a successful
   bot check has been fixed

 - bot system is now more complex - see 'help answer'

 - new command: clear
 - read 'help clear'

 News 7/30/2003:

 - new bot checking system created

 - botting no longer results in zapping/freezing, see help rules

 - all characters zapped for botting will be unzapped upon request to Nijlo
   (e-mail requests only: nijlo@nodeka.com) _____however_____ no passwords 
   will be recovered or changed. If you do not know the password to your bot 
   zapped character, do not ask for it from Nijlo (you may just end up getting
   zapped for asking). We are very serious about this as we have no way of 
   knowing who is who, giving out or changing passwords will be considered 
   unethical and will not be done under any circumstances.

   Do not expect any favors regarding this.

 - fixed prevention bug where remaining prevention time could not be seen

 News 7/29/2003:

 - corrected plural mob names in NaPali
 - new footpad skill: blindsided machination

 News 7/26/2003:

 - summoning of the grey now has a 370 minute prevention period
 - new grey-forest heiton skill: soothing touch

 - each time Nodeka starts Nodeka's internal calendar is now incremented by 
   300 phases.

   This has been done to prevent players from suffering unfairly due to new 
   feautures being added to Nodeka, maintenance issues needing to be addressed
   or even the unlikely Nodeka crash.

 - awakening of the guard has been toned

 - fallaj to fallad

 - daja and fallad no longer have gender restrictions on their classes. You
   may also notice that daja and fallad have significant differences between
   them that make them fall more into separate healing classes, one based more
   in healing, one based more in harming.

 - please let me know if you notice help files that refer to fallad and daja
   as being male or female only classes and I'll fix them (nijlo@nodeka.com)
   and reward you

 - witch/ataelos will lose gender class restrictions as well (when a rename 
   for witch becomes available)
 
 - ruanbaere/aylakia may or may not lose their gender restrictions

 - I'm a little disappointed in the aylakai class name, if you have 
   suggestions please let me know (nijlo@nodeka.com)

 - fixed endurance drains on throw/projection, thanks Pagan

 - fixed crash bug with continually acting affects that could get the user
   killed by the affects which would lead to Nodeka crashing. Currently, the
   only skill that would have caused the crash was decaying touch, however,
   as more skills/spells are created that work in the same vein as decaying
   touch, the likelihood of stumbling upon this crash bug becomes more and
   more likely.

   The fix changes the way affects are removed at PVPpk. Previously when you were
   pked on Nodeka, your temporary affects were removed at the time you were 
   killed. This solution is no longer possible. The only way to allow you to 
   get pked while iterating through your affects and not crash is to have the
   affects be removed after pk - which is how things are done now. You'll 
   notice some minor output changes on pk. Other than that, nothing should
   have changed.

 News 7/23/2003:

 - crash bug fixed - apologies for the downtime

 News 7/22/2003:

 - dajain angels get keepers vociferation

 - heiton lose: keepers vociferation
 - heiton lose: dignitary manifestation
 - heiton lose: soothing touch
 - heiton lose: entrance
 - heiton get skill: decaying touch (same skill # as entrance, so it'll be 
   whatever % entrance was)

 News 7/21/2003:

 - ecliptic pattern becomes: healing ecliptic pattern
 - new heiton spell: lunar vision
 - new heiton spell: rock formation of the druid

 - full affects on players/mobs can now be seen by everyone

 News 7/19/2003:

 - fixed negative range of natural attunement
 - new major remort heiton spell: ecliptic pattern

 News 7/17/2003:

 - to fix Plik's bug I had to rewrite the gold code. In the process, a couple
   compiler bugs were introduced (stupid compiler) - fixed now. Izod reported
   it first - Izod will be rewarded.

   If you discover any other gold related bugs (all of which should be 
   relatively minor at this point, please report them to nijlo at 
   nijlo@nodeka.com)

 - invoke cost of holy analgesic has been lowered
 - natural attunement bug fixed
 - natural attunement is no longer a prevention ability

 - Plik/Orlijn reported a bug to me a couple days ago about losing gold when
   giving gold to a follower, killing the follower and then quitting Nodeka
   with its corpse in his inventory.

   After much discussion on what the bug really was, I began looking into it.
   It turns out that Plik's original bug led to the discovery of a much bigger
   bug - one which would be very hard to duplicate, but if duplicated properly
   could duplicate gold. The actual ability to reproduce this bug was largely
   based on the users on (i.e. nearly 30-100 players individual actions). It 
   is because of this, the bug itself was incredibly hard to duplicate. In
   addition, the only way the reproduce the bug was to logout and log back in.
   Due to the ten minute wait period, even trying to reproduce it once would
   take at least 10 minutes.

   In order to fully abuse the bug, you had to give a certain amount of gold
   to something, which would set the gold template object's value. Then when
   a character logging in that had a gold item in its inventory was loading 
   its gold object, the object would be copied from the gold template object.
   The gold template object's value being whatever the amount you gave. For
   example:

     have friend logout with a corpse that contains a gold item in it
     give 999999999 gold, elf
     kill elf
     have friend login, gold item is loaded with value 999,999,999

   The only way to abuse the bug in a controllable way was to use the "give"
   command. It was actually the combination of two bugs that caused this gold
   dupe bug to exist: 1) loading gold from player files based directly off of
   the gold template item, 2) the gold template item's value member changing
   when the give command was used.

   The difficulty of reproducing the bug was that the template gold value
   could be changed (and would be changed) by anyone who used the give command
   with gold. Considering that on top of the fact that the bug only occurred 
   when gold was loaded at login made it very difficult to control.

   I feel fairly confident this bug was not being abused, but was rather 
   stumbled across indirectly first by Plik and then fully discovered by my
   integrated work thereafter (I'm fairly confident that Plik wasn't abusing 
   this bug, as the bug he reported had nothing to do with gaining gold - only
   losing gold - it wasn't until my "playing around" that the full bug 
   regarding gold duping was discovered).

   That being said, this is, without a doubt, the largest bug discovery in the
   history of Nodeka (larger than Rar's compose bug find). Both of the bugs
   used to create the gold dupe bug have been fixed. 

   Due to Plik's initial involvement regarding the indirect bug, which led 
   to my discovery of the gold dupe bug, I am rewarding him as if he had 
   reported the gold dupe bug itself.

   Plik's reward: +500,000 platinum, +300 stats

   Plik, thank you.

 News 7/15/2003:

 - new heiton remortal spell: winter storm of satio

 - holy analgesic has been improved, slightly

 - plane of safe housing prevents for a slightly longer period

 - more class renames (we're getting close to all unique class names, which
   is my goal)

 News 7/14/2003:

 - complete rewrite of how preventions interact with skills/spells. If you
   notice prevention problems relating to skills or spells, please let me
   know (nijlo@nodeka.com).

 - skills can now be prevented from being used based on the user's current
   affects - this is vital to some of the future work being done on skills
   and spells (especially when considering keeping mobs intelligent enough
   to not try to use abilities that cannot be activated due to the mob lacking
   the appropriate affect needed).

 - new heiton spell: natural attunement
 - new heiton spell: illuminated lightning

 - note: heitons are going through a complete class revamp. Once I feel the
   new structure of heitons is complete or complete enough, they will lose 
   nearly (or all) ability to control followers.

 News 7/12/2003:

 - holy analgesic and wounded abatement mana/spirit costs have been increased

 - bug with telnet and backspace characters not working correctly has been 
   fixed

 - holy analgesic has been toned slightly
 - wounded abatement's prevention time has been increased, slightly

 News 7/10/2003:

 - bug with incorrect visibility checks being done on most distance location
   abilities. This bug was reported by Yaga and was affecting the following 
   abilities:

   astral travel, visit, shadow gaze, transient alteration, 
   inosculated crossing, methodic shift

   The problem was each of the above abilities were performing two checks
   on the user's ability to see the target; the first check was being 
   performed when trying to initially locate the target in the world/area in
   order for the ability to properly process, the second check was being done 
   inside the code of the individual ability. This meant that targets cloaked
   or invisible were much more effectively cloaked or invisible.

   All other spells/skills that look for targets in the user's area or the 
   world were also checked for this bug, however they were not making the
   same mistake (i.e. summon, greater summon, clairvoyance - all working 
   correctly).

   Huge thanks to Yaga for taking the time to look into the behavior of astral
   travel closely enough to come up with empirical evidence that proved it 
   wasn't behaving correctly.

 - names can now have hyphens in them (i.e. Kor-el)

 - mobs delay in tracking has been randomized, mobs will now track anywhere
   from 0 milliseconds after being fled from to 2000 milliseconds from being
   fled from

 - fixed many bugs

 - mental blast, psychic shock and mental tempest are now mental attack prevention
   abilities

 - new orange-cloud sorcerer spell: quiet fog of Lectokke

 - new orange-cloud sorcerer skill: clouding cogitation

 - leoht of war, leoht of spirit, celestial ray and clouding cogitation now
   only add prevention affects if the attack hits. This has been done because
   it use to be possible to use the ability, have the target be in battle
   (which prevented the attack from going through) yet still prevent the 
   user from using the ability again. While the new layout obviously allows 
   the user to continue to spam the ability until it hits once, this is much 
   more acceptable than prevent the user from using the ability again, even 
   when the ability was unsuccessfully used (due to circumstances outside of 
   the user's control - that the target was in battle at the time the ability
   was used).

 News 7/7/2003:

 - sweet new feature inspired by a conversation with Leviticus regarding 
   skills and spells (also note that you can customize the colors using the 
   "color" command).

   use the 'skill' or 'spell' command to look through the list of skills and
   spells of the classes of Nodeka and see some new stuff

 - celestial ray now costs less endurance, can be used to attack targets and
   is a prevention skill

 - new warred lo-fent spell: leoht of spirit
 - new warred lo-fent spell: leoht of war

 - the crash that happened right before the last reboot was caused by one
   of the third party pieces of software we use to transfer files to the Nodeka machine.
   It corrupted one of the help files, so when I went to rebuild the
   help files prior to rebooting we crashed. Our apologies for the 
   inconvenience.

 - assassins keep nim for now, but this may change - I'm considering the 
   decision to remove nim from assassins very carefully
 - assassins gain disengage combat
 - new assassin skill: critically wound
 - new assassin skill: concentration of killing

 - new nomad of the watch spell: skyline interchange

 - new furied aylakia skills: furorem of one, furorem of two

 - fix in mobs not aggroing when trying to initiate combat with skills. This
   was caused by a crazy C++ standards rule that says (not that you really
   care) that the order of operations performed on function parameters is
   undefined. Therefore, the code I had:

     GetRandomAbility(*(++iter), *(++iter));

   was not equivalent to what I was trying to actually do:

     int32 actionType = *(++iter);
     int32 powerLevel = *(++iter);
     GetRandomAbility(actionType, powerLevel);

   what's neat is that I just learned about the standard's rule about any
   ordering of processing of instructions on parameters being undefined. So 
   when I tracked down the code, I knew immediately it was my fault. Heh, 
   cool.

   The undefined ordering of processing instructions on function parameters
   wasn't the only rule I was breaking - I was also breaking the rule that 
   says modifying the same object twice in a single lexical statement is 
   undefined.

   The really cool part about all of this, is it's just because I had read 
   another C++ book on the way back from India that I knew what the problem 
   was - the book specifically talked about this problem and how many people
   run into it because you'll often expect certain "incremental" operations
   to be performed on function parameters in the order they are supplied. Had 
   I not read that book, I definitely wouldn't have been able to identify the
   problem immediately, nor would I have thought it was a problem with my code.

   Moral of the story: stay in school

 - fury has been fixed so it will not miss if there is a valid target in the
   room. This has been done to accomodate that fury is now a prevention
   ability and can be used much less frequently.

 News 7/6/2003:

 - fixed peacekeepers auto-kill-everyone bug
 - fury is now a prevention skill

 - fixed crash bug (was caused by bad AI code)
 - redesigned/recoded artificial intelligence engine
 - fixed AI problems in areas
 - class name changes

 - new gate-crasher skill: gate-crash
 - new gate-crasher skill: encircling ambience

 - new zerkorian skill: ram door

 - reactivated AurVindi and new newbie area

 News 6/17/2003:

 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
 - New area south of Ruushi - newbie-lowbie area with *tons* of secrets!   -
 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------

 News 6/17/2003:

 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
 - New area south of Ruushi - newbie-lowbie area with *tons* of secrets!   -
 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------

 - you may now log out while preventions are active. When logging back in, 
   Nodeka will determine the time remaining on each prevention. Prevention
   affects countdown while logged off. This only works for preventions and
   most likely will *never* work for affects for some very very important
   reasons (ones which I don't care to discuss on the motd).

 News 6/16/2003:

 - bug in vanish and retreat if the user had skill % above 100% has been fixed
 - vanish now uses the user's agility, not the user's wisdom to consider the
   likelihood of success
 - vanish and retreat are now more likely to succeed

 - fix to withdraw and word of withdrawal bug, you can no longer sit in a
   room with all doors closed and increase withdraw/withdrawal to 100% -
   Iblis has been rewarded 50,000 platinum

 - new skill for nameless one, shadow archer and shadow rogue: disengage combat
 - new spell for mist warriors and shisou: unka

 News 6/15/2003:

 - all fighter type classes now have the new skill 'withdraw' 
 - all caster type classes now have the new spell 'word of withdrawal' 

 - withdraw and word of withdrawal have been created in an attempt to take the
   strategy used in Nodeka to a new level - see help files on each for further
   details

 - ambush now has 0 lag when used to initiate battle

 ************* NODEKA NOW HAS OVER 350 TOTAL SKILLS AND SPELLS *************

 - prowl is now a prevention skill
 - new shadow tracker spell: dimming of Yezlon

 - Nijlo will be traveling out of the country on business for the next two 
   weeks. In that time, updates will be very minimal, if at all. This would be
   a good time to start running those hard to run areas due to the number of
   keys needed for entrance. Hopefully (cross fingers) Nodeka will run for two
   weeks straight, without reboot or crash.

 News 6/12/2003:

 - new blade virago skill: calling the red blade
 - new blade virago skill: bringing of the staff

 News 6/10/2003:

 - new nojohr judge skill: nojohr fate
 - new nojohr judge skill: the benefactor judgement
 - fixed bug that prevented remorts under level 30 from being attacked

 News 6/9/2003:

 - mjol of enchantment is now "link mjol"
 - new link mjol skill: deft link of thatois

 - fixed problem with 'summon'

 - new mjol of summoning spell: summoning of intellect

 - instrumentation of riposte has been toned

 News 6/8/2003:

 - radius abilities (i.e. blackfrost cloudburst) now only do not target group
   members. Clan members and followers that are not grouped are now fair game.

 - new firebrand spell: silver inferno
 - new death-angel spell: third act of malice
 - first act of malice has been changed

 News 6/7/2003:

 - new death-angel spell: second act of malice
 - demonic affirmation is now a basic follower prevention ability
 - new death-angel spell: first act of malice

 News 6/6/2003:

 - new combatant of the barbaric order: reserved anger
 - instrumentation of riposte toned

 News 6/3/2003:

 - new deistic lo-fent spell: wings of ontonai

 - increased prevention time on wounded abatement, slightly

 - change to continuum of thunder durations

 - holy analgesic has been improved significantly, it's not as powerful
   as wounded abatement, but it's been increased in power a good deal

 - mana/spirit cost of holy analgesic has been increased

 - wounded abatement now heals 1% more of the target's max health

 - the healing affects of wounded abatement are now influenced by many new 
   factors which increase its potency a great deal
        
 - holy analgesic now heals like wounded abatement heals: a flat point amount
   (say, 205) + a percent of the target's health

 - was it my plan from the beginning to make healers use a combination of holy
   analgesic and wounded abatement? Gee, what do you think?

 - mjol seraphs are now of the lo-fent class - if I feel they are too 
   powerful being this class, I will change them again

 News 6/2/2003:

 - wounded abatement upperbound prevention time has been lowered to 14 
   seconds, lowerbound lowered to 8 seconds. This may be tweaked further if I
   feel it is too aggressive or too passive.

 - lay hands upperbound prevention time has been lowered to 24 seconds,
   lowerebound lowered to 14 seconds. This may be tweaked further if I feel it
   is too aggressive or too passive.

 - wounded abatement prevention time has been lowered. Upperbound is 30 
   seconds now, lowerbound is 12 seconds. This may be tweaked further if I
   feel it is too aggressive, too passive.

 News 6/1/2003:

 - wounded abatement is now a basic healing prevention

 - both wounded abatement and lay hands have been reduced in their prevention
   time

 - wounded abatement now heals more

 - mjol seraph's are now nojohr

 - conjure prevention times are now inline with other created followers (i.e.
   passage of dark summoning, prayer of greater aegis, etc.)

 - corrected prevention time in heightened precision and heightened defiance

 - new solar poliir spell: solar-flame

 - regen rates are now capped at 10%

 - another change to sunbind

 - slight improvement in healing done by sunbind, lay hands and wounded 
   abatement (any one may be toned if it's too high - especially wounded
   abatement because it isn't a prevention skill, or it may be turned into
   one)

 - new solar poliir skill: sunbind

 - darkhand monks are now alignment free

 - lay hands has been revamped:
     - it is now a basic healing prevention ability
     - it can be used in combat
     - it heals what it use to heal + 2% of target's max hp
     - it has 0 lag so you can perform another action immediately after 
       performing the heal
     - improved healing affects that use to affect the lag, now affect the
       prevention time (so they are still useful and used)

 News 5/31/2003:

 - archway of entrance is back in action (and the Nodeka source code is much
   better off now that it can handle all the complications that archway of
   entrance brings with it)

 - new shepherd of the way spell: archway of entrance

 News 5/29/2003:

 - monstrous fury has been changed so its affects are not lengthened with
   slaying creatures - the help file has been updated

 - fixed flee problems with mobs stalking too fast to ever escape due to new
   trailing battle lag (thanks Anasazi)

 - stoicism and focused sphere have been entirely rewritten/redesigned, see
   the new help files on each

 - because stoicism and focused sphere are now prevention abilities, these
   abilities have no lag and can be followed by the use of other skills in
   combat (this was not always possible before with focused sphere). The
   prevention time of stoicism and focused sphere is relatively low.

 - stoicism now makes the user much more difficult to hit

 - the affects of stoicism and focused sphere are now visible on your 
   "affects" list (type: affect)

 - fix to trailing battle lag change
 - followers are now clearly labeled as such

 News 5/28/2003:

 - change to trailing battle lag

 News 5/27/2003:

 - lightning of the array, mercurial spirit-lightning and crystalline wind
   have been given overhauls (both in output and damage)

 News 5/26/2003:

 - renamed 'sage of fire order' to 'substance magus'

 - new substance magus spell: crystalline wind

 - spirited-witch now has no alignment restrictions
 - new spirited-witch spell: mercurial spirit-lightning

 - bug fix in prayer of the gods disfavor (thanks Roderon)

 - the continuum of thunder changed to the oe continuum of thunder
 - the oe continuum of thunder has been altered, slightly

 - new bounty hunter skill: the oe continuum of thunder
 - new lightning strider skill: the tih continuum of thunder

 - fixed output problem in ice discharge and red firebeam

 - new anointed healer skill: bequeathal of sustenance

 - the following mjol abilities have been toned down:
 
    - mentalis vefr has been seriously toned down
    - broken vorpal dimension has been minorly toned down
    - page of competence turning prevention time has been increased, slightly

   I have contemplated how to tone down mjols very seriously for the last 
   two months - these changes hopefully will balance the class that has 
   largely been overpowered.

   These changes are not reactionary, they are well thought through decisions
   based on the extremely obvious problem of mjols being overpowered.

 News 5/25/2003:

 - red firebeam buffed up

 - inharmonic-helix tweaked, slightly

 - auto-resizing of titles/names on who happens now to prevent natural overrun
   on clients that have set line width to 80 characters (standard)

 - new lightning strider skill: the continuum of thunder

 - skills and spells prevented from being used now follow a single output
   method. This will help create a more consistent user experience.

 - new counterspiral mage skill: inharmonic-helix

 News 5/24/2003:

 - increased chain lightning prevention time a touch

 - red firebeam now benefits the user by granting solar regeneration and
   improved intellect after being used - see 'help red firebeam'

 - monstrous fury duration increased slightly when slaying creatures
 - chain lightning has less prevention time associated with it

 News 5/23/2003:

 - new sage of fire order spell: red firebeam

 - kick prevention time has been reduced, updated "help kick"

 - due to the changes to the ranged attacks becoming preventions skills two
   changes have been to them (ice discharge, chain lightning, lightning of the array
   and charge):

      a) the attacks no longer skip targets (removal of chance to try to hit)
      b) the maximum number of targets that can be hit by each ranged attack 
         has been increased

 - when killing bounty hunters with the hunt for bounty up, only half the 
   bounty is received. This has been done to help promote the use of the hunt
   for bounty, as using it places the bounty hunter under greater danger and 
   greater potential loss if the reward is equal on both sides. This change 
   was made to favor the bounty hunter.

 - new color setting: who border

 - updated who output so more class name can be seen and the same length of 
   race name can be seen. I know some of you don't like borders, but there was
   no other way to keep the output length the same for races and increase the
   output length for classes without using a single character border. In the
   future I'll add another color to turn the border off.

 - broken vorpal dimension has been toned, slightly

 - the bad news: ice discharge, holy hammer, charge, chain lightning are now 
   basic ranged attack preventions

 - the good news: all of the above ranged attacks have 0 trailing lag now

 - lightning of the array changes from array prevention to basic ranged attack
   prevention

 - lightning of the array spell cost has dropped significantly

 - time bending now works not only on lag, but also on reducing lock time

 - onillin bend time more effectively now

 - bug fix in waters of enfeeblement (thanks Tonka)

 - new sea hag spell: waters of enfeeblement

 - attackers with the affect of the hunt for bounty can now only take loot 
   from players of equal or greater remort status than themselves. This should
   help resolve the leaning incentive of the hunters going after weaker
   targets (thanks Selberhad).

 - fixed all radius skills and spells so they always remove players/mobs in
   the room of the user last. These skills/spells include:

     quickblade, collapsed ellipse, north wind, broken vorpal dimension, 
     blackfrost cloudburst

 News 5/22/2003:

 - new viking of the fury spell: monstrous fury

 News 5/21/2003:

 - the hunt for bounty help file has been updated

 - when the hunt for bounty is up, if the bounty hunter is killed, a bounty is
   rewarded to the player that kills the bounty hunter

 - the duration of the hunt for bounty has been increased and prevention time
   decreased, slightly

 - new bounty hunter skill: the hunt for bounty

 - affects code now working in seconds again. This code has been highly
   optimized (so much that there's an improvement in system performance
   rather than a degradation) and the timing issues that the second based 
   affects code had are now fixed. Yes, I have huge plans for this. =)

 News 5/20/2003:

 - affects now work in seconds rather than minutes

 - battle affects no longer exist. Rather, they are second based affects
   which time out like normal affects (and can therefore be used across
   multiple battles)

 - singularity of fate's prevention has been altered
 - shifted cognition's prevention has been altered

 News 5/18/2003:

 - Nodeka now has 325 skills and spells

 - new arch-fallad skill: spiritual cleansing
 - new cleric of the order of light spell: light order, continuous healing

 - nim bug that was not auto-saving the user has been fixed

 News 5/16/2003:

 - fixed two bugs with eighth rule of the halo (thanks Diamaunt)

 - new sentinel of the halo skill: eighth rule of the halo

 - new ijiwaru joufu skill: watermark of binshou

 News 5/15/2003:

 - fix in flee/vanish code (thanks Gygar/Mazus)

 - new defensive-nojohr skill: parry of symmetry

 News 5/13/2003:

 - when quitting, keys are automatically dropped from the player. This code
   was added to prevent the auto-boot system from causing players to lose
   keys from uncontrollable disconnects from Nodeka.

 - new defensive-nojohr skill: unilateral front-sided parry

 News 5/10/2003:

 - the raider class is now: nojohr

 - new nojohr of voq skill: the nojohr one shield

 News 5/9/2003:

 - when using a shield all attacks are blocked, for all classes, this change
   is important for the direction that I plan to head with monks (and ... the
   whole shield thing allowing attacks was lame anyway)
 - monks have been boosted in class +hit and +dam to compensate for this

 - you will now see all mobs/players left and right weapons, even if they 
   possess no "physical" weapon. Instead, you will see their default handed attack
   (this will begin to play a characteristically important role)

 - darkhand monk alignment restriction change

 - new darkhand monk spell: strike of the black arts

 News 5/8/2003:

 - ataelos of the blade now: archimage of war

 - new archimage of war spell: quiet trident

 - new archimage of war spell: spatha of Vylryvn

 - most recent crashes have been fixed! These crash bugs were all being caused
   by the same problem, one which is too complex to explain (it would take me
   pages and pages to give you the background information to understand why
   it was happening). Nonetheless, it's been fixed! That resolves all 
   outstanding crash bugs - Nodeka should be running smoooooooother than ever!

 News 5/7/2003:

 - ataelos of drift now: ataelos
 - ataelos class has changed alignment restrictions

 - new ataelos spell: koloq
 - new ataelos spell: qolok

 News 5/6/2003:

 - witch of wonderment is now: arcane witch

 - the call to nahfiotos has been improved, greatly (see help file)

 - new frostbladed sorcerer spell: blue invocation

 - new arcane witch spell: wilting of the occult

 News 5/5/2003:

 - hand of the thieves guild has been improved

 - all heiton major remort heitons lose rite of virility, save ritual heitons
 - new grey-forest heiton spell: summoning of the grey

 - remort follower bug fixed for real this time (I hope)

 - new storm-valkyrie spell: Okaelis cloak
 - mystical monk changed to: monk of the mystic arts

 - new monk of the mystic arts spell: qekon-oku

 - remortal npcs are no longer tamable, persuadable, etc.

 News 5/4/2003:

 - properly fixed output error bug (thanks for all the output error bug 
   reports!)

 - new black hellion spell: the call to nahfiotos

 - second crash bug fixed, although this bug was output related (nothing to do
   with any code changes over the last several months)

 - crash bug in battle code fixed. Oddly enough, the retreat code that was
   causing it was not the problem, the problem was the battle code not handling
   a case it should have been. So in a bizarre way, the retreat code change
   bringing this crash bug to light was a good thing. Since the battle code
   would have inevitably crashed Nodeka, and most likely in much more curious cases
   than the obvious one it was found in with the changes to flee/retreat/
   vanish. Special thanks to Gygar who guessed on the cause of the bug and
   reported that to Whim and Nijlo, perfectly.

 News 5/3/2003:

 - retreat is now a stepping skill
 - vanish is now a stepping skill and only valid exits are attempted, similar 
   to the flee change on 5/2/2003.

 - retreat, vanish and flee now have no trailing lag beyond the lag incurred 
   by the retreating move. While these three forms of exiting battle may 
   require more time to perform, initially, the benefit of these exiting moves
   is now that once they are performed, the user can continue to try to escape
   from the opponent without lag.

 - the changes to flee, retreat and vanish have been made to increase strategy
   and create a fair balance of gameplay on both sides of the fight.

 News 5/2/2003:

 - fixed help file scrolling (when hitting characters other than R or Q, the
   help file will continue to scroll, rather than refresh)

 - flee is now a stepping command (there is one round of pause between 
   beginning a flee and the finalizing a flee).

 - flee is now much more successful (only valid exits are attempted and
   fleeing favors the fleer)

 - new fallen deacon spell: black magic of prolonging
 - new mist warrior spell: clouded spirit-shift
 - new aegol-defender spell: the hermetic shield

 News 5/1/2003:

 - wounded abatement has been removed
 - wounded abatement, divine has been removed

 - wounded abatement, immaculate has been renamed to: wounded abatement

 - fallads and dajaes had a deceptively long skill and spell list due to
   having four healing spells, two of which were never used. Removing those 
   two (wounded abatement and wounded abatement, divine) now shows a more
   accurate size of the usable skills and spells of fallads and dajaes.

 - new healing goddess spell: augmented divine healing
 - new daja of the order of light spell: light order, restoration
 - new goddess of battle spell: warring seraph

 News 4/30/2003:

 - correction to practice name overflow

 - new nameless one skill: blackening of the thieves guild
 - new highway bandit skill: hand of the thieves guild

 News 4/29/2003:

 - more website updates

 - wind wall is now a basic counterattack prevention (with lower uptime)

 - help file system is now fixed regarding multiple carriage returns in help
   files. In addition, the scrolling text system has incorporated this fix as
   well (i.e. "who" command pauses)

 - new help files (one big one - "help world")

 - coma characters in safe rooms are now auto-booted (if they can be)

 News 4/24/2003:

 - more updates to the website (check out the "classes" page)

 - default prompt for new players is now an actual prompt

 - fixed settable prompt help file

 News 4/24/2003:

 - help bug with 'q' and 'r' caused by compiler bug, workaround fix is in

 - "classes" is now "display classes"
 - "races" is now "display races"

 - help file system, rewritten
 - new command "display help"
 - new general help layout

 - new rules on adaptation (see 'help adaptation')

 - many website modifications

 News 4/20/2003:

 - the "classes" command has been improved, see "help classes". This is not
   to be confused with the "class" command.

 - class changes
 - new command: adaptation
 - changed remort command to work with class changes

 - right now, each of the five major remorts per class have exactly the same
   skills and spells and alignment range. That'll be changing. My next task is
   to start going through each base class and adding five new skills or spells
   to each of the five major remort classes of that specific base class. For 
   example, when I work on tholecs, I will add a skill or spell to each of 
   the following classes:

     tholec
     bounty hunter
     shadow tholec
     lightning-strider
     nomad of the watch

   The same idea will be applied to all 18 base classes.

   In addition, I'll be playing around with the alignment restrictions ... heh.
   It will take some time before each major remort class of the same base
   class has a different skill and spell set.

   For the most part, you can expect that major remort classes won't be losing
   any skills (they'll only be gaining skills). There will be some exceptions,
   for example the "assassin" class will most likely get an "assassinate" 
   skill and it will lose "nim". These are just my initial rantings and 
   thoughts, as I work more with this new concept, we'll have a more concrete
   idea of where we're going. Nonetheless, this'll be fun.

 News 4/18/2003:

 - website has been altered to be more maintainable
 - channel endurance drains have been reduced
 - channel endurance drains are lifted when you reach level 30

 News 4/17/2003:

 - holy light has been toned
 - output for deific amelioration has been corrected
 - new command: social

 News 4/16/2003:

 ************* NODEKA NOW HAS OVER 300 TOTAL SKILLS AND SPELLS *************

 - new lo-fent skill: deific amelioration
 - new lo-fent spell: spiritstone

 - new ruanbaere skill: rolling elbow
 - new ruanbaere skill: knee-smash
 - new 1st remort ruanbaere skill: spartan grapple

 News 4/15/2003:

 - there are no longer any holes in the IP checking system. Multi-playing
   is no longer possible through matching IP addresses. However, multi-playing
   through different networks is still possible and will result in character deletion 
   if caught.

 News 4/14/2003:

 - all clan hall portals have been removed, each clan will be reimbursed
   clan hall portal fees

 - continental lag has been reduced by nearly 2/3rds

 - pker flags have been reduced from 2 ticks to 1 tick

 News 4/10/2003:

 - quiver is now 'keiiken'

 News 4/8/2003:

 - fixed bug that prevented players from using skills/spells on mobs when 
   fighting a player and a mob. This bug was reported several times by several
   different players. The first report in my inbox was from Thystonius on 3/9.
   Therefore, Thystonius gets the reward. Nonetheless, thank you all for 
   reporting the bug, it's greatly appreciated. =)

 News 4/7/2003:

 - mentalis vefr has more prevention time (use to be 4 phases, now is 11)

 - new 2nd remort valkyrie skill: collapsed ellipse
 - new 2nd remort joufu skill: quickblade

 News 4/4/2003:

 - fix to obfuscous spirit-talon

 - new 2nd remort witch spell: witching frostband

 News 4/4/2003:

 - soul guardian is now an intermediate counterattack

 - new 2nd remort sa'duroth spell: obfuscous spirit-talon

 News 4/2/2003:

 - new 2nd remort tholec spell: north wind

 - north wind now behaves in the manner it should, it has not been toned
   down, but rather the "secret" aspect of the spell is working more correctly
   now

 - conjure elemental, conjure golem and conjure diety have been recoded. All
   of these spells are now follower preventions spells:
   
     conjure elemental - basic follower prevention
     conjure golem     - intermediate follower prevention
     conjure diety     - intermediate follower prevention

   in addition, the power of these followers have been vastly improved

 - new 2nd remort mjol spell: broken vorpal-dimension

 - fixed bug with super-followers (necros, fallads, dajaes) stats being
   higher than they should have been

 - 1st remort mjol's lose earthened veil (practices will not be reimbursed)
 - 1st remort mjol's get: speckled field

 - earthened veil and speckled field are now basic counterattack prevention 
   skills

 - entrapment's demon has been improved

 - blackfrost cloudburst prevention time has been reduced

 News 4/1/2003:

 - fixed rescue bug that was being abused to tag players with pk flags

 - new 2nd remort heiton spell: blackfrost cloudburst

 News 3/30/2003:

 - important: fixed ambush crash bug

   the fix was fairly challenging, however, thanks to the exception handling model
   (the thing I was ranting and raving about several weeks ago) the fix 
   to this bug is actually achievable. Without the exception handling model, 
   this fix would have been very very difficult, and it would have taken at 
   least a week or so to do. Really. Gosh exceptions are great!

 - fixed problem with ambushing mobs where using one full word of the mob's 
   name did not ambush the mob (now it will)

 - ambush can now kill its target

 - fixed pk flag bug with throw/telekinetic projection, where you could obtain
   a pk flag if you threw in a direction through players that were fighting. 
   You no longer get a pk flag when doing this (thanks Salvador).

 News 3/28/2003:

 - fixed bug where real death was still preventing player movement if the
   player had a pk flag (the pker restriction is now restricted to just
   pdeath).

   Terror, please return all Zhakar's eq to him, immediately. If you no longer
   have the eq, then we can work out how to round it back up. But if you give
   away the eq after this message has been read the repercussions will be
   severe. We will refer to log files to verify you haven't tried to avoid 
   returning Zhakar's eq, if need be.

 News 3/27/2003:

 - atemi ai now stuns, rather than cripples. Atemi ai now has no trailing lag
   and has the same prevention algorithm as alluring grace (the valkyries
   version of this spell)

 - dragon stance has been toned

 - all basic and mid prevention skill/spell costs have been reduced

 - new 1st remort ruanbaere skill: Ishtl's thrashing

 - new 2nd remort ruanbaere skill: acute might

 News 3/26/2003:

 - fixed bug with damage sliding scale, damage avoidance behaving incorrectly
   the problem was related to the opponent's inability to avoid a hit actually
   causing them to improve in their ability to dodge (signed bug)

 - more detail added to the damage sliding scale, for more information,
   see 'help damage sliding scale'

 News 3/23/2003:

 - important: see help 'damage sliding scale'

 - new footpad, 1st remort valkyrie and 1st remort joufu skill:

     one of four, pivot

 - new footpad, valkyrie and joufu skill: glancing pierce

 - footpads now get extra class +hit bonuses

 - the damage sliding scale has been tweaked, just a little bit

 - followers now no longer tag their masters with pk flags if they perform 
   aggressive actions. This fixes the bug where masters are tagged with
   pk flags after their have already died.

     You can now re-enable follower ai without any negative pk consequences

 - ok, from here on out when I use the word "follower" it'll mean I'm talking
   about an npc that follows a pc's orders (a slave, a charmie, etc.).

   When I'm referring to a pc following a pc, I'll use the term "groupie".

   Ok, I'm glad we cleared that up. =)

 News 3/22/2003:

 - Naj'k and Grei no longer exist

 - the following output has been reformatted, if you find any errors please
   e-mail Nijlo at: nijlo@nodeka.com

   hurricane kick, charge, holy hammer, ice discharge, chain lightning, 
   vicious fist, mental tempest, mental tiaran, critical attack, celestial ray,
   holy light, channeled anger, stun, temple touch, focused sphere, 
   beguile, magic arrow, fireball, static charge, elemental malediction, 
   ice blade, lightning, petrify

 - all impairment and multi-attack abilities (fireball, hurricane kick, etc)
   have been internal recoded for coding simplicity. No functionality has been
   changed

 - winged arc-bolt prevents for a shorter time and does slightly more damage

 News 3/21/2003:

 - I wanted to take a minute to send out an apology for anyone who was on
   last night and heard my global rant on Syveril. While I was only responding
   to his negative commentary towards my work on Nodeka, I was being 
   reactionary, ill-mannered and it was largely inappropriate.

   As the creator of Nodeka, I carry with me the heavy task of always being in
   the spotlight. Lord knows I don't do the best job with that task (I'm a 
   game designer, not a diplomat). But this is the role that comes with my 
   position and it's important that I strive to fulfill that role to the best 
   of my ability. One of the ways I can do that is apologizing when I make a 
   mistake, rather than pretending that it didn't happen.

   So for all of you Nodekians, you have my apologies for my comments last 
   night (including you Syveril). While I can't say it won't happen again, I 
   can say I will try harder to be the leader I should be.

   Nijlo




 - sorcerers lose firebolt

 - firebolt has been changed into: winged arc-bolt (basic mystical pattern ability)

 - mjols and ateoli retain winged arc-bolt, but the level in which
   they begin to use it has changed

 News 3/20/2003:

 - cyclone of the guild is now an intermediate storm generation
 - bolted lightning is now a basic storm generation

 - spectral windstorm is now an intermediate mystical pattern
 - unhallowed scathing is now a basic mystical pattern

 - cyclone of the guild has been improved, slightly

 - flaming arrow has been changed into "star of the green flame". Star of the
   green flame is a basic fire generation prevention spell. The three classes
   which previously had flaming arrow (sorc, ataelos and witch) still have
   star of the green flame, but it is available at a higher level than flaming
   arrow was available to them previously.

 - new ataelos skill: oblique pattern (intermediate mystical pattern)
 - new witch skill: oblique pattern (intermediate mystical pattern)
 - new 1st remort monk skill: oblique pattern (intermediate mystical pattern)
 - new 1st remort poliir skill: oblique pattern (intermediate mystical pattern)

 News 3/19/2003:

 - regarding the new name for preventions, while I kept the word "prevention"
   I added the word "lock". Lock was suggested and strongly promoted by two
   individuals: Yaga and Zanubis.

   Yaga and Zanubis split the 100,000 platinum reward: 50,000 a piece.

   Zagro, Doos and Blood also submitted lock, but it was sometime after my 
   discussions with Yaga and Zanubis about it. However, Zagro, Blood and Doos 
   still received 20,000 platinum for their push for the word.

   Thanks again for everyone who offered suggestions on renaming prevention.

 - new prevention skill: breeze of hand
 - new prevention spell: bolted lightning
 - new prevention spell: cyclone of the guild

 - classes that get breeze of hand:

   tholec 1st remort, heiton 1st remort

 - classes that get bolted lightning:

   tholec 2nd remort, heiton, sorcerer, fallad, daja

 - classes that get cyclone of the guild: heiton 2nd remort

 - heitons no longer get infravision (sa'duroths are next) =)

 - bug in regeneration skill fixed

 - the follow command output has been corrected

 - new command: preventions

 - skill/spell preventions are now placed in the prevention command. For
   more information see 'help prevention'.

 News 3/18/2003:

 - new sa'duroth skill: unhallowed scathing
 - new 1st remort sa'duroth skill: spectral windstorm
 - new 1st remort khehusod skill: unhallowed scathing

 News 3/17/2003:

 - new prevention skill: banded smiting initiative (basic combat initiative prevention 
   skill)

 - classes that get banded smiting initiative:

   nojohrs, ruanbaeres, valkyries, khehusods, lo-fents, poliirs

 - 1st remort valkyries now get ashi barai kick

 News 3/16/2003:

 - new prevention skill: striking fist (the fist version of kick)

 - classes that get striking fist:

   nojohrs, ruanbaeres, valkyries, tholecs, khehusods, joufus, poliirs,
   footpads, monks, ateoli

 - new monk skill: yikwon hand form
 - new joufu skill: yikwon hand form

 - kick is now a prevention skill (with increased endurance cost and no lag)

 - new joufu skill: ashi barai kick
 - new monk skill: ashi barai kick
 - new 1st remort tholec skill: ashi barai kick
 - new 1st remort nojohr skill: ashi barai kick
 - new 1st remort footpad skill: ashi barai kick

 News 3/15/2003:

 - redirect has been changed to follow the battle locking rules that
   flee, vanish, retreat and rescue follow.

 - follow has been altered - followers can now be grouped by the player
   leading a group, so long as the master of the follower is following
   the leader of the group. For example:

   Nijlo has Kiskr as his follower.
   Nijlo begins following Zed.
   Zed can now group Kiskr.

   If you notice any glaring mistakes in the new follow code (as more than
   just what I've mentioned here has changed), please let me know via e-mail:
   nijlo@nodeka.com

 - new 2nd remort ataelos skill: spanning fluctuation

 News 3/11/2003:

 - new 2nd remort heiton skill: the bending codex

 - citadel should now restore the citadel winner, even if the citadel winner 
   is killed in the same round as the loser (i.e. by a the loser's follower)

 - decreased prevention time of step of phasing

 - endurance cost of movement has been changed. You can now move until
   you are at negative endurance, regardless of what the negative endurance
   amount you end up at (-1, -10, etc).

 News 3/9/2003:

 - new 2nd remort poliir skill: uprooting maneuver
 - added poliir skill: redirect

 - new 2nd remort sorcerer spell: step of phasing
 - correction in step of phasing's behavior

 - movement code has been redesigned

 - thanks to the testers: Gygar, Jaiven, Epix, Manifesto, Selberhad and Yaga

 - fixes to flee:
   - you will no longer see repetitive output when bashed, stunned, etc.
   - you will no longer suffer over two seconds of lag for failed flee attempts
     (in some cases, people were suffering up to twelve seconds of lag for
     failed flee attempts - ouch! I only stumbled across this just recently,
     and since I didn't see any bug reports regarding it, it's been around for
     awhile outside of my knowledge. Thankfully, it's fixed now)
   - successful flees now have one second of lag

 - fixes to vanish:
   - you will no longer be able to vanish through obstacles
   - successful vanishes now have one second of lag
   - you will no longer suffer over two seconds of lag for failed vanish
     attempts (the cause and fix of this is the same as for flee)

 - fixes to charge:
   - you will no longer be able to charge through obstacles
   - charge now lags constant time, charging across the continent with little
     lag is now possible again (as it was never intended to be broken)
   - output is given only when charge is complete
   - when charge fails on exits, useful information is given in each case
   - charge is a thing of beauty (I'm somewhat proud of how elegant this skill
     is now)
   - charge no longer drags group members or players/slaves following the
     charger

 - fixes to ambush:
   - ambush has been prevented from ever laying in the killing blow. This is 
     very important to the stability of Nodeka. If ambush is allowed to 
     kill mobs, mobs may be deleted from memory before Nodeka has a chance to
     finish the command the mob was performing before being ambushed. This can 
     cause very evil things to happen and thus killing mobs with ambush has 
     been prevented.
   - output for ambush now happens in the middle of moving output. There's 
     really no way around this at present.
   - ambush now works on targets that have unseen movement

 - what's been modified:
   - mob movement
   - player movement
   - groupie following movement
   - immortal commands: at, goto
   - all "visit" type spells
   - flee, retreat, vanish
   - charge

 - help file written for radiant awakening and awakening of the guard

 News 3/3/2003:

 - new 2nd remort mjol spell: page of competence turning

 News 3/2/2003:

 - new 2nd remort valkyrie skill: defying prayer

 News 3/1/2003:

 - the citadel code is now hack-free. This new code fixes; numerous
   potential RK bugs, a number of potential crash bugs, and opens Nodeka up 
   to more elaborate skills and spells that won't be limited by the old 
   incorrect citadel code.

 - many things about the citadel have changed, here are some of the major ones:

   - only the challenger of challenges is prevented from performing subsequent 
     challenges

   - player/mob flags are no longer stripped when joining the citadel (yes,
     this means friends can aid someone to help turn the tables in a 
     competition)

   - challengers of battles can no longer quit to avoid citadel punishment 
     when not joining

   - the following skills and spells no longer have dangerous or unwanted 
     side-effects when used in the citadel:

       fury, charge, ice discharge, chain lightning (witch/ataelos), rite of sundering
    and any other multi-target skill/spell

   - clan citadel output has been improved. I plan on improving it further, 
     but at this point, how I should proceed is still unclear. So rather than
     moving forward in haste, I will pause and re-evaluate the problem and 
     potential solutions before implementing anything further

 - many more citadel features will be expanded upon in the future

 News 2/27/2003:

 - atemi ai trailing lag reduced, but not removed

 - sensual sedation is now beguile

 - new 2nd remort valkyrie skill: alluring grace

 News 2/25/2003:

 - changed atemi ai again so it now has trailing lag. Without the trailing
   lag monks could keep their targets crippled for an extremely long period
   of time (this does prevent the strategy I hope for in preventions). Still
   though, the point of atemi ai is to give monks an edge and allow them to
   use combinational affects of stances. My current change allows that. I've
   now added trailing lag to atemi and decreased the prevention time again.

   Now monks will be able to use atemi ai to cripple a target without any
   front-ended lag, but won't be able to then turn to temple touch to keep
   a target crippled for over 9 rounds of combat. If this approach correctly
   solves the problem in the manner I see fit, I may then reduce the prevention
   time on atemi ai again. Until I know this solution is right, I'll leave
   the prevention time a bit higher than I would have it if this was a known
   working solution.

 - fixed bug with casting/invoking invalid spells

 - increased the prevention time for atemi ai and made the duration
   based on the user's dexterity

 News 2/24/2003:

 - prayer of the gods disfavor has been made more deadly:

     - it is automatically 100% anti-recall
     - the valkyrie's agility now affects the prevention time. Having beyond
       perfect agility can still affect it in positive ways        
     - the use of the skill is hidden to all but the user, therefore a 
       valkyrie may be making the gods disfavor you and you would have no idea
       it was happening until you tried to recall (or checked or affect flags)

 News 2/23/2003:

 - introduced base exception handling model - general commands are now
   throwing exceptions consistently when error states arise. This is
   beneficial because as I start to migrate into more bizarre skills like
   charge, I can handle the error states/cases as I see fit, rather than
   just one general way - spitting out the failed info to the user, over
   and over.

   The implications and magnitude of this change are simply unexplainable.
   Most likely, this change will be the primary force shaping the future of 
   Nodeka. Yes, it's that big.

 - fleeing, retreat, vanish, etc. now will try to break impairment like all
   other abilities. It was a bug in the code that was discovered and fixed
   while I was implementing the exception handling model.

 - followers and mobs understand prevention skills now. They should not 
   repeatedly try skills or spells which they have the prevention up on. 
   So cool.

 - a special thanks to the testing team: Lanfear, Aalynor, Mazus, Swarm, 
   Wyshmere and Dazz (and Whim).

 News 2/20/2003:

 - changes to all prevention skills/spells to work more correctly. Using 
   offensive prevention skills/spells when you already have the prevention 
   affect up of the skill/spell, should no longer give you a pk flag.

   If you notice any prevention skills allowing you to use the prevention 
   skill continually, ignoring the fact that you have the prevention affect
   up, please let Nijlo know via e-mail (nijlo@nodeka.com). You will be
   heavily rewarded.

 - slight changes to battle code (this was my original change to the pfight
   code, but I backed it out because I thought it was too preventative. It's
   possible that it still may be too restrictive - I guess we'll see).

 News 2/19/2003:

 - new 2nd remort ataelos skill: resolute mind of the array

 - significant decrease in methodic shift lag time

 News 2/18/2003:

 - ranged abilities recoded:

   chain lighting, lightning of the array, holy hammer, ice discharge,
   throw, telekinetic projection, celestial ray, charge

   The recoding was done due to certain "hacks" being done in the code to make
   things work. All ranged attacks now use normal and correct system flow and
   because of it behave more correctly and are much less likely to break due
   to further enhancements in other areas of the source (for example, charge
   was never intended to break through obstacles - if that behavior is desired
   I will code it, I don't however, want it to work naturally due to a side-
   effect of poor design).

 - charge has been drastically changed regarding its output. If you want
   to minimize the output you see for charge, tog map and turn brief on.

   Thanks to the testers who did an excellent job running through all ranged
   attacks and the numerous possibilities they allow.

 News 2/17/2003:

 - fix to battle lock abuse where players were attacking another player and 
   then starting battle with a mob to lock the player in battle that they 
   just started battle with.

   The fix is: players that do not have pk flags are allowed to flee pfights 
   where the player they are fighting is in a real kill battle. Players with 
   pk flags, are not. Therefore, if you have a pk flag and attempt the above
   situation, the player you fighting can potentially RK you.

   An interesting twist ...

   This also makes player killers potential RK targets in other ways.

 - new 2nd remort ataelos spell: lightning of the array

 News 2/16/2003:

 - Note to players with followers, please pass this information on to other
   players who may not be aware of this (or who don't read the motd):

   Followers don't know anything about preventions yet. Because of this, 
   followers can't determine which skills/spells can't be used based on which
   prevention type they are currently affected by. This even includes a single
   skill/spell that is being used over and over again.

   The more intelligent the follower is the more he or she will try to use 
   powerful skills/spells. This may result in smart followers trying the same 
   high powered prevention skill/spell over and over again.
 
   This is not a bug.

   It will take Nijlo months to change Nodeka so mobs are smart enough to not
   use skills and spells of the same prevention group over and over. Please be
   patient as there is only one Nijlo trying to do everything.

   For the time being, if you want your follower to perform specific actions
   in battle, use the "order" command (and turn follower AI off).

   Thanks for your patience,
   The Nodeka Staff

 - fixed crash bug

 - new 2nd remort sa'duroth spell: sigil of the undead army

 - follower skills/spells changed to use more robust code:

      persuade, the prayer of guardianship, prayer of the greater aegis,
      passage of dark summoning, dignitary manifestation, demonic affirmation,
      willed protector, conjure elemental, conjure deity, conjure golem,
      tame, hire, seduce, entrance

   The bug this new code resolves is when playerB is following playerA and 
   playerB creates a follower, which never becomes playerB's follower due to
   playerA speedwalking (and the follower never "following" playerB). 
   
   This new code should prevent the above bug from ever happening - please
   inform Nijlo if you see it continuing to happen (or see any other bizarre
   behavior in your follower skills/spells due to the above change) via 
   e-mail only.

 - corrected mana/spirit drain on prayer of guardianship, prayer of greater
   aegis and passage of dark summoning

 - to reduce spam, orders given to followers are no longer visible to other
   players in the same room

 News 2/14/2003:

 - healing in pfights is no longer cut in half. Abilities affected:

   lay hands, meditative healing, holy analgesic, wounded abatement,
   wounded abatement, divine, wounded abatement, immaculate, soothing touch

 News 2/13/2003:

 - recall now lags one second, per attempt (successful or not)

 - new 2nd remort valkyrie skill: prayer of the gods disfavor

 - new 1st remort sa'duroth spell: followers gaze of return

 News 2/12/2003:

 - new player fight battle rules

 - new 2nd remort footpad skill: bandit tactic of enmeshing

 - fixed error with palm

 - shadow gaze is now a gaze prevention spell of sa'duroths

 News 2/10/2003:

 - changed safe room code so mobs in safe rooms can use skills and spells
   against their victims so long as their victims are fighting them

 - increased plane of safe housing prevention duration

 - new 2nd remort sa'duroth spell: sigil of banishment

 News 2/9/2003:

 - new 2nd remort ruanbaere spell: forge of magical dampening

 - another vital bug fix (this time for building)

 - bug fix on plane of safe housing thanks to Callers

 - new 2nd remort sorcerer spell: plane of safe housing

 - follower bug fixed regarding lingering following affects until the
   leader has quit Nodeka

 News 2/6/2003:

 - crash bug that's been hiding from me for over a month now has finally
   revealed itself to me (thanks Crayon) and has been fixed! This was the only
   known unfixed crash bug (and I lost sleep over it several times).

 - Round two of optimizing affects - we should be running extremely fast
   now as far as affects are concerned (thanks testers)

 - improved power of three points of complexity

 News 2/4/2003:

 - redesigned/recoded the pc/npc affects, thorough testing thanks to Jagas,
   Rar, Yaga, Tezrik and Ziii

 News 2/1/2003:

 - bug with trewan and mobs/followers has been fixed

 - new 2nd remort heiton spell: enclosure of trewan

 - bug with needing to order words alphabetically to manipulate them
   has been fixed. For example this:

       drop insight yellow robe

   Use to not work because the words "insight", "yellow" and "robe" weren't
   ordered alphabetically. Now the above command will work (as it should)

 News 1/31/2003:

 - fixed bug in entrapment

 - improvement to trewan of the rising forest

 News 1/30/2003:

 - new 2nd remort heiton spell: trewan of the rising forest

 News 1/27/2003:

 - new 2nd remort heiton skill: hastened codex

 - rite of virility and rite of sundering have been changed

 News 1/26/2003:

 - new remort tholec skill: surrounding sense

 - onillin and jerof races have been changed

 - new 2nd remort joufu spell: ryou spirit of hananoki

 News 1/25/2003:

 - new 2nd tholec remort spell: sweeping insight

 News 1/24/2003:

 - new tholec remort spell: hawks acumen

 - scouting sense has been lowered in endurance cost

 - multi-directional hunt has been fixed for joufus and tholecs. The 
   direction you now see first, is the direction you should move towards.
   For example: east-south, means move east first, even though the target
   is east and south, if you move south first, you may not be able to walk
   there from where you are.

 - scouting sense now automatically is at 100% skill, so it can be useful
   for even those players without super high con and int. However, int and
   con now affect the duration, and therefore con and int at a very low
   amount will give scouting sense an extremely low duration.

 News 1/23/2003:

 ************* NODEKA NOW HAS OVER 250 TOTAL SKILLS AND SPELLS *************

 - new 2nd remort tholec skill: scouting sense

 - new remort ruanbaere skill: fervent war cry

 - all prevention skills/spells no longer drain mana/spirit/endurance if you
   are prevented from using them (if any still drain when its prevention is
   up, please notify Nijlo via e-mail)

 News 1/22/2003:

 - new remort fallad spell: guided canon of mending

 News 1/21/2003:

 - fix to riposte victim and other output
 - increased cost for low level damaging spells (fireball, lightning, etc)

 - increased power of rain of healing sanctity

 - new remort daja spell: rain of healing sanctity

 News 1/20/2003:

 - new 2nd remort daja spell: palladium of sanctity

 News 1/19/2003:

 - new 2nd remort fallad skill: canon of the second hammer
 - new 2nd remort fallad spell: creed of the first hammer

 - remort fallads now have holy hammer

 News 1/18/2003:

 - new 2nd remort khehusod skill: storm complexity

 - all damaging skills/spells can now be used to start battle and will
   be followed with a full round of attacks. Some skills/spells that are
   not damaging follow with a round of attacks (i.e. petrify) but some do
   not (i.e. circle of bane). These were done intentionally based on the
   skill or spell's power.

 - new 2nd remort fallad spell: creed of the gods volition

 News 1/14/2003:

 - throw crash bug has been fixed, our apologies for the short downtime.

 - massive internal code modifications (slight detour from skills/spells, 
   sorry!)

 - new 2nd remort khehusod spell: three points of complexity

 News 1/14/2003:

 - ranged attacks can no longer be riposted

 - new remort lo-fent skill: barrier behest

 - new 2nd remort lo-fent skill: behest of the angel

 - resistances and vulnerabilities are now calculated by highest amount 
   possible. What this means is, the resistance or vulnerability that yields
   the highest amount is the rest/vuln that is used. For example, since Thoe's
   now have physical invulnerability, if invulnerability hits, its resistance
   will supercede physical resistance. Therefore, if multiple vulns/resists
   hit in a single attack, only one is still used, but the one that yields the
   highest absolute number is the one that's used. Keep in mind, this also
   means the most damaging vulnerability is always the one that's used if it
   is successfully rolled.

 - fix to 100% item loading in lowbie areas (thanks for all the bug reports)

 - thoes now have physical invulnerability (reduce any attack to one point 
   of damage) as a low percent racial

 - other race changes (+spe to thoes, drow lineage loses all speed, but gains
   other stats - these gains/losses were not meant to be equivalent)

 News 1/13/2003:

 - shortened the prevention time on healing radiance
 - greatly shortened the prevention time on radiance of atonement

 - new 2nd remort lo-fent skill: virile behest of restoration

 News 1/12/2003:

 - instrumentation of medicine usage and prevention time algorithm has been
   changed so it's more usable.

 - new remort nojohr skill: instrumentation of medicine

 - shields are counterattacks
 - riposte is a counterattack

 - when you see shields briefed and output as "counterattacks" it is not a bug
   (thanks for all the bug report e-mails, I should have mentioned this change
    before putting in the new system and expecting all of you to understand
    and not think it was a bug)

 - new 2nd remort nojohr skill: instrumentation of riposte

 News 1/11/2003:

 - new 2nd remort nojohr skill: taktikos of ranged warfare

 News 1/10/2003:

 - fixes to several output messages for skills (thanks Ziii)

 - minor toning to dreynen curse

 News 1/10/2003:

 - new remort nojohr skill: clashing taktikos

 - new 2nd remort witch spell: dreynen curse

 - passage of the bleeding moment has been made slightly more powerful

 - reduced prevention time for constricting hex

 - the character Terror has been unzapped. His character has undergone a 
   substantial downgrade and has been zapped for several months. We feel
   Terror has been made to serve a valid punishment term and is now being
   *mostly* reinstated. This message is primarily being made to inform the
   players (you) that you may see Terror around again. This has been done by
   the Nodeka staff and you do not need to report this to Nijlo.

   If Terror shows any form of misconduct to the Nodeka staff again, he will
   be punished again, accordingly.

 - new remort witch skill: constricting hex

 News 1/9/2003:

 - new 2nd remort witch spell: curse of spellbound death

 - followers can no longer use the command [gain]. It was causing some followers
   [pools] (hp, mana, spi, end) to become negative.
 - corpses of a player and his or her followers no longer show up in the
   same room as [ 2 ] corpse of follower.

 News 1/8/2003:

 - new 2nd remort monk spell: atemi ai
 - new 2nd remort joufu skill: flowering spirit

 News 1/6/2003:

 - hex of menthijan now caps at 90%
 - petrify offers greater power for those with *extremely* high wisdom

 News 1/4/2003:

 - the bug with not being able to get items from your own corpse has been
   resolved. The problem was a hack was being used in the code. The code is
   no longer using the hack.

   Please note that followers' corpses no longer have the follower's name in
   the corpse name. Followers' corpses only consist of the master's name and
   the word 'corpse'. This was done to prevent further hacks in the Nodeka
   source. In order to get items from a followers corpse, simply use your 
   name (i.e. get all, nijlo).

 - massive optimizations made in the Nodeka source. The following
   information relates to Nodeka before and after the optimizations:

                            Before                After
                            ---------------       ---------------
   Nodeka startup time:     53 seconds            35 seconds
   Ruushi repop time:       1070 ms               130 ms
   Citadel repop time:      310 ms                50 ms

   You may also see speed improvements in actions relating to items.

 - lag problems with the server have been resolved. We apologize for this
   interruption. The lag was not caused by Nodeka itself, but by another 3rd
   party piece of software running on the server. That piece of software has
   been removed.

2002

[Show/hide]

Total updates: 109

 News 12/29/2002:

 - major tree change - special thanks to the testers: Akylius, Alpha, 
   Amaetheon, Murdoc, Pesmerga, Sabre, Salvador and Ulrik

 - commas are now in gold strings

 - aulora's gift changed to aulora's gambit
 - new nojohr remort skill: gambit of the warring shield

 News 12/27/2002:

 - fixed bug with multiple worded world searches. The initial fix allows
   players to find players and mobs with the same name (i.e. doing cast 
   'visit' 100.mage will now go to the 100th mage, not the pc Mage (PC)). But now
   it gets more complex. In order to prevent invis affects from screwing with
   players trying to find players with mob names, I've changed the way the 
   world searches work.

   Before explaining the fix I made, consider this scenario:

     - a pc that has 90% invis named Mage
     - an aggressive mob with 0% invis named Mage

   Obviously it'll be a real pain to prevent all mob names from being used by
   players. In addition, mobs may be created after a player already exists 
   with the same name. The Nodeka staff can't possibly monitor those cases 
   easily. So the above scenario could happen very easily with a number of 
   different names.

   Now consider someone doing a cast 'visit' 1.mage, not seeing the player 
   named Mage because of Mage's invis affect, visiting the aggressive mob
   named Mage and then rdying because of it. Seems highly unfair. And that
   kind of "protection" isn't going to work on Nodeka. So I came up with this
   solution.

   Doing a player find, always finds the player in the count, but will fail
   if the player attempting to locate the other player can't see him or her.

   For example:
   
   1. Ziii casts 'visit' 1.Mage.
   2. The player Mage is logged on, but is highly invis to Ziii.
   3. The search finds the player Mage as 1.Mage.
     a) Ziii succeeds his check on seeing Mage and Ziii succeeds with his visit
     b) Ziii fails his invis check, and the search ends.

   The important part above is that the search ends if Ziii fails to see Mage.
   The search doesn't continue on to mobs at this point. That's because Nodeka 
   knows Ziii meant Mage the player by his "1.Mage" search term. This then 
   means Ziii will either visit Mage the player, or fail. He will *not* visit 
   Mage the aggressive mob (unless, of course, Mage the player logs out).

   Hope that all makes sense. I know my explanation was rather weak and too 
   short-winded, but I have tons of work to do and I can't spend all my time
   explaining how things work. Sorry. =)

 - profiling code has been put in place to monitor Nodeka real time activity.
   Once this profiling information is gathered, we'll have a better idea
   where Nodeka lag is coming from. For example, doing test runs we know that
   ticks only delay Nodeka 300 milliseconds, which is less than 1/3 of a 
   second. However, results may differ under live running conditions. As of
   today, we know the citadel lags Nodeka for 250 milliseconds every time it
   repops and Ruushi lags Nodeka for an entire second every time it repops.
   Once we have gathered the results of all major lags areas, code 
   optimizations can be made to address each problem, individually.

 - follower initialization and deinitialization has been modified for
   optimization and simplicity.

 - certain world wide commands can now handle multiple keywords. 
   For example:
   
     cast 'astral travel' 100.devil blue

   will now work. This new functionality required an incredible amount
   of optimization to not bring Nodeka to its knees when doing multiple word,
   big number searches. Boy was that fun! We're currently limiting the
   multiple words to two words, so you can't cause Nodeka to come to a full
   stop when you do your world mob find action. When the Nodeka server is more
   capable, we'll allow more worded searches (it's as simple as incrementing
   an integer). For now, be happy with two. As far as I know, Nodeka is the
   only mud that allows multiple worded world-wide mob searches. And if you
   knew the optimizations required to make this thing work, you'd understand
   why most muds don't / can't allow it.
   
   Of course, some yahoo will now e-mail me with a mud that does multiple
   worded world wide searches, just to prove me wrong. What he or she will
   leave out is the mud only has 100 total mobs and never has more than 10
   players online. Try allowing that functionality with over 50,000 mobs and 
   see if the results are the same. =) That's one helluva fast frickin
   algorithm to make that work ... I just want you players to appreciate the
   coolness of the coding side of things (it's too much fun for you not to
   experience it!).

 - fixes to help files
 - invis followers can always be seen by their masters now

 News 12/14/2002:

 - new 2nd remort fallad skill: prayer of greater aegis
 - new 2nd remort daja skill: the prayer of guardianship

 - the Nodeka server has been upgraded (now has 1.5 gigs of RAM). This is
   first of at least two upgrades. The next will be the cpu or the entire
   machine.

 - due to the Nodeka machine upgrade, you should notice most everything 
   working faster. Even things that don't immediately make sense, like
   receiving your score output faster. This would seem like it's entirely
   related to bandwidth, but it's not. The output for score is first stored
   in a memory buffer on Nodeka before it is transmitted. It's because all
   mobs/rooms/pcs can be stored in RAM now simultaneously that accessing and
   storing information in Nodeka is much faster. The reason why the previous
   example of score output scrolling faster happens is because Nodeka no
   longer uses virtual memory (i.e. hard drive memory) to store data pertinent
   to Nodeka. RAM is faster than disk access and because of it, score output
   is faster. This logic can be applied to numerous areas where improvements 
   in speed don't seem to be caused by increased RAM.

 News 12/13/2002:

 - Nodeka will be going down for maintenance for approximately one hour
   today around 12:00 p.m. - 4:00 p.m. (Mountain time, GMT -07:00:00)

 News 12/11/2002:

 - more questing AI functionality added

 News 12/10/2002:

 - more AI added for questing

 News 12/9/2002:

 - help buy the most powerful machine in existence for Nodeka! Nijlo's going
   to be upgrading the Nodeka server within the next month to help assist in
   the amount of quests Nodeka can handle. Show your support in this process
   and donate today!

 News 12/8/2002:

 - new mob AI stuff
 - mobs can now give quests (right now there's only one quest mob, but the
   quest system will allow any mob to give any number of quests). Please note
   that we are logging all quest experience that is handed out. If you
   come across a bug with the quest mob (i.e. a mob that will allow you to
   quest for infinite amount of experience) please report the bug immediately.
   As we are logging all successful quest completions, quest abuse will be 
   highly visible. Please report any quest bugs you find so we do not have to
   enforce Nodeka's bug abuse rule.
 - the bug that prevented players from logging out of Nodeka due to 
   unconscious mobs stalking forever has been fixed

 News 11/24/2002:

 - the newbie channel can again be used by all new players. However, it
   still requires endurance to use. I made this decision based on the wise
   counsel of Rar.

 - minor immortal code changes for purging the donation room

 - unconscious <2% targets no longer do shield damage (yes, this may not 
   be a realistic implementation, but this is Nodeka not Street Fighter -
   double KO's are bad.)

 - pc/npc death is done slightly different now to counter for the growing 
   power of sustained life

 - ateoli lose trip and get bash (there will be no practice reimbs)

 News 11/15/2002:

 - startup crash bug has been fixed (our apologies for the couple hours of 
   downtime)

 News 11/12/2002:

 - new Nodeka theme: Crossroad to a thousand journeys.
 - the newbie hint system has been revamped, turn hints on to take a peek
   (i.e. toggle hints)

 News 11/9/2002:

 - heightened instinct now requires 8 phases to use again

 Nodeka theme contest winners below. All players, with the exception
 of the winner will receive 20,000 platinum.

 Winning Nodeka theme (submitted by Rar):

     Crossroad to a thousand journeys.

 Other finalist themes:

 Bringing imagination to life. (Kinshin)
 Deceit? Intrigue? Betrayal? Yeah, we got that. (Khaled)
 The dream that never wakes. (Leviticus)
 Of arms and incantations. (Liege)
 Struggle. Build. Thrive. Dominate. (Maggoty)
 Adversity builds strength. (Maggoty)
 Forge your own destiny, leave the dying to someone else. (Jub'ae)
 Bold adventure. Limitless potential. Unsurpassed excellence. (Jagas)
 Be spellbound. (Nomade)
 Of mjols, witches, ateoli and warriors. (Nomade)
 The edge of innovation, the heart of imagination. (Tezrik)
 Limitless horizons, endless adventure. (Tezrik)
 Wield friendships. Wear hope. Bear skill. (Feline)
 Building character, stone by stone. (Calypso)
 Outwit. Outhunt. Outsurvive. (Booya)

 In perfect night... in flawed daylight...
 A noble villian... a murderous hero...
 The choice is yours, which will you be?? (Ebonfyre)

 Humorous themes:

 Rar, Rar and Rar. (Aalynor)
 I'm gay, are you? (Flashstar)
 The one place to find hot women. (Flashstar)
 Don't trust Tsilloa. (Hate)
 Unlike real life, your equiptment matters more than your attitude. (Jaiven)
 Unlike real life, being naked sucks. (Jaiven)
 Real life sucks, this isn't much better. (Jaiven)
 Everquest is better. (Jaiven)
 Fireball, it's what to cast. (Klatu)
 Death, destruction, and a little bit of dismemberment. (Salvador)
 Where Darwinism is a lifestyle, not a theory. (Sentry)
 Dueling Spoons at ten paces. (Sentry)
 Where the men are men and the women are too. (Wyshmere)
 The good, the bad and that fucking Terror guy. (Wyshmere)
 Where you throw spoons at dragons and attempt to beat up statues. (Xeddiex)
  
 Adventure, excitement ... a Jedi craves not these things. 
 Good thing you're not a Jedi. (Ziii)

 News 11/2/2002:

 - infinite loop in passage of the bleeding moment has been fixed
 - long lag spells after a citadel finishes has been partially resolved. 
   You'll still experience some lag, but much less than before
 - followers not killed in a citadel are now transported to their master's
   home (not killed)
 - recall bug where followers would recall to their area, not their master's
   homes has been fixed

 News 10/31/2002:

 - races, classes and character generation output has been corrected
 - fixed throw crash bug
 - fixed bug that allowed antei of formation to be used without
   prevention (thanks Jagas)

 News 10/30/2002:

 - new joufu skill: whispering wind antei
 - new major remort joufu skill: antei of formation

 News 10/29/2002:

 - fixed problems with mental blast and psychic shock
 - minor output corrections
 - prompt all and allcolor now contains the lag identifier
 - new prompt setting (lag) in 'help settable prompt'

 News 10/28/2002:

 - fixed output bug with impairment attacks
 - three new races (nine including remorts)

 News 10/27/2002:

 - Attacks now do a variety of damage - see help resistances
 - A bazillion other changes that we don't feel like detailing through

 News 10/20/2002:

 - Minor bug in character generation fixed (thanks Doos).

 - Theme contest winners will be announced no earlier than next Sunday
   (October 27th).

 News 10/19/2002:

 - Remort crash bug has been fixed. It was caused by Nijlo changing the
   name of the "albino drow" to "drow of the blue blood". The source code
   was weak and was unable to handle the extended length name. Now the source
   code is strong!

 News 10/18/2002:

 - All races are now on a single experience table. Experience tables only
   exist per remort tier now (i.e. one table for all non-remort races, one 
   table for all minor remort races, one table for all major remort races).
   Race improvements will be happening throughout the course of the following
   week. If race changes are made to your race, but do not seem to be 
   affecting you at the moment, log out and log back in.

 News 10/15/2002:

 - Two bugs fixed, one regarding leading mobs out of areas and one regarding 
   seeing hidden exits when exits were being locked/unlocked.

 News 10/13/2002:

 - Nodeka is currently running a "best theme" contest. Right now, Nodeka's
   theme is "Stronger. Faster. Better." Well, we don't like that theme any
   more! We're looking for something more fantasy based, something more
   contextually based. So now's your chance to help come up with a new
   Nodeka theme! Not only will the winning theme be used for Nodeka, if your
   theme is ranked in the top five best themes, you'll receive the following 
   reward:

    1st place - 50,000 platinum
    2nd place - 30,000 platinum
    3rd place - 20,000 platinum
    4th place - 10,000 platinum
    5th place - 5,000 platinum

   Please send all theme suggestions to Nijlo at nijlo@nodeka.com. Be sure
   to send theme suggestions no later than midnight Friday, 10/18/2002 
   (mountain standard time).

 News 9/25/2002:

 - thunderous strike has been toned, slightly

 News 9/22/2002:

 - tracking system change, you can no longer "quit out" while a mob is
   stalking you - this means for certain areas, just by entering them
   you may be forced to wait several minutes before being able to quit
   (waiting for the mob's stalking period to end). However, the purpose of
   this change is to prevent aggro-luring abuse.

 - new method-ataelos spell, staff of the gate

 News 9/19/2002:

 - fixed crash bug with the shielding prayer

 News 9/11/2002:

 - non-remorts can no longer use their remort status to hide in non-remort 
   areas when flagged as a player killer
 - fix to item manipulation commands and the use of 'all' and additional
   characters causing dangerous side-effects

 News 9/3/2002:

 - critical attack now does 1/2 its previous damage but has no front-ended lag
 - cloak is currently unused (but don't worry, I'll find a use for it)
 - stratagem of the cloak success is based entirely off of stratagem's
   skill percent now

 News 9/2/2002:

 - new diva skill, the shielding prayer

 News 8/20/2002:

 - change in shifted cognition, prevention lasts a good deal longer than
   the affects now
 - change to lightning, until I figure out what to do with it, the lag is
   increased to two rounds

 News 8/19/2002:

 - heroines charge and savage assault now work more off of skill % than
   before (thanks Brooke)
 - invisibility and hidden now cap before 100% (prowl caps at a higher % than
   invisibility due to footpads greater need for it)

 - nojohrs no longer have dodge
 - valkyries and poliirs no longer have enhanced damage

 - send all complaints to Whim, send all praises to Nijlo ... heheh

 News 8/18/2002:

 - resonances can be used in battle now

 - hakanai shouten has been renamed to 'antei of hakanai shouten'
 - akisunerais now get antei of hakanai shouten as well as kage-kyoukans
 - new kage-kyoukan spell, antei of the clouded mind
 - help files on both new spells are in (apologies about the month delay in
   getting a help file for hakanai shouten)

 News 8/17/2002:

 - new witch skill, spiritual resonance drain
 - new remort sorcerer spell, shifted cognition
 - new sorcerer and witch skill, magical resonance drain
 - all created followers (dignitary manifestion, willed protector, etc.) now
   have pools (hp, end, spi, mana) that closer match their master's.

 News 8/16/2002:

 - new method-ataelos spell, temporal gate of bending (this spell may in fact
   be too powerful. We will be monitoring its use and may have to tone it 
   down if it is found to be too powerful - please keep this in mind)

 News 8/15/2002:

 - new remort ruanbaere skill, trial of aggression
 - new man-of-war skill, trial of amplified vigor

 News 8/14/2002:

 - new ritual heiton spell, rite of virility
 - new remort heiton spell, rite of sundering
 - new remort lo-fent skill, radiance of atonement
 - new white dragoon skill, healing radiance

 News 8/12/2002:

 - new dark creator spell, passage of dark summoning

 - fixed off by one error that would occur in any "attack" affect. Thanks
   Brooke. Now when you have an attack affect (by race or spell/skill) when
   it says "100%" that means 100%, not 99%. =)

 - please see 'help follower' if you play a character that controls NPCs,
   there is new information in the 'follower' help file that will make your 
   life a bit easier. You may also want to revisit 'help order'.

 News 8/11/2002:

 - new dark creator spell, passage of the bleeding moment
 - new chaos lord skill, ephemeral discord of speed
 - new remort valkyrie skill, song of striking
 - new demigoddess skill, the ruining song
 - tholecs have ambush again (thanks Littlesmoke)
 - fixed major bug with throw/projection being used on targets through doors
 - fixed weird bug with seeing followers when entering rooms

 News 8/5/2002:
 
 - followers now take full damage in battle (not half)
 - players can no longer entrance/persuade/tame followers of size bigger
   than their current pool values (i.e. no getting huge charmies after
   you just got pked, you'll have to regen first now)

 News 8/4/2002:

 - new khehusod remort spell, discorded corporeal sinew
 - ice blade can now take shield damage
 - modified layout for "class" / "skills" / "spells" command
 - internal modifications

 News 8/1/2002:

 - fixed prayer of mental restoration, it can be used in battle now
 - changed output for clans (hope you like it, freaks)

 News 7/30/2002:

 - Rearchitecture of affects, invisible, mostly to players, but it was a huge
   change which has a number of positive affects on Nodeka including increased
   performance, improved design (flexibility and robustness) and massively
   decreased memory requirements to run Nodeka.

   p.s. Thanks to the testers - who found several bugs with the new affects
        code (bastards).

 - a ton of new socials, send complaints/errors to Whim.

 - new remort daja skill, prayer of mental restoration.

 News 7/22/2002:

 - fix to witch's hexed scepter

 News 7/21/2002:

 - monks have better class dice now (more damage for monks, they didn't do
   enough before).

 - new oracle spell, hexed scepter. This spell may be too powerful, so please
   note it may be subject to change within the immediate future. That being
   said, this spell is one that I've been excited about doing for some time 
   now (simply because it finishes one of my original ideas of witches).

 News 7/20/2002:

 - the "item loss" issue having to do with item limits for rooms and players 
   preventing items from going to players and then getting destroyed, has 
   been rolled back out of the system - item losses will no longer happen, 
   but players caught openly abusing and exceeding the *room* max item limit 
   will be dealt with very severely. For those of you who are unaware how this
   could be done but are worried about breaking a rule - don't be. It's a
   complicated task exceeding the room max item limit, in most cases you have
   to intentionally be trying to exceed the room item limit.

 - an alteration to the endurance drain for channel use has been put into
   place - only those below level 50 will suffer endurance losses for channel
   usages.

 - new witch remort spell, hex of menthijan

 - super bug of the universe dealing with over 1000 items in a single room
   bringing Nodeka to its knees, has been fixed (finally).

 - new sorcerer skill, shifted accuratus

 News 7/18/2002:

 - Endurance charges have been added to many channels, however, many global
   channels which require actual leveling haven't had endurance drains added
   to them (yet). Of course this change has been made due to our most recent
   spammer attacks. =) We apologize, but in order to protect you and ourselves
   from spammers we currently have no other choice. Site-banning someone who's
   using an alternate IP address to spam on seems pointless (as they can just
   find another IP address and continue the cycle endlessly).

 News 7/17/2002:

 - Charge can no longer be used while in combat (to leave combat).

 News 7/9/2002:

 - More socials, if you run into mistakes in the socials, please e-mail Whim
   (not Nijlo, Nijlo's too busy being lazy to fix social mistakes).

 - p.s. Ileana is now really Ileana and not sometimes Ileanna.

 - Bishops, mjols, ateoli, witches, heitons, sorcerers, sa'duroths and
   dajaes now have: telekinetic projection.

   Ileana is now selling spoons.

 News 7/8/2002:

 - Throw has been changed to do more damage - see "help throw". This is our
   first attempt to make throw more useful, however we may adjust throw up or
   down within the next several days to balance it as needed.

 - Bug fix with ranged attacks being used "right here". Thanks to all of you
   who turned this in (there were several of you).

 - Winning a citadel with throw now behaves correctly.

 News 7/4/2002:

 - Ice blade lags one round again, but costs a great deal more to cast
   and invoke. Thanks for the logical argument Mage (PC), as always, that kind
   of reasonable conversation is appreciated (and as you can see, it gets
   responded to).

 - Fireball and ice blade are now invokable as well as castable.

 - Shield of lectokke and ruah kyf have been changed to charge the user more 
   mana to resist damage.

 - Shield of lectokke no longer falls when mana reaches 0, therefore when a
   sorcerer regenerates, shield of lectokke becomes active again. Ruah kyf
   didn't fall before at 0 spirit, so no change has been made it its existing
   behavior in that regard.

 News 6/30/2002:

 - Chain lightning now greis properly.

 News 6/29/2002:

 - Flee succeeds much more now.
 - Slight change to white flames of prayer

 - Mentalis vefr has been slightly toned down

 - Lag on alleviate has been removed (at least most of it)
 - New diva and arch-fallad skill, white flames of prayer

 - New poliir spell, awakening of the guard
 - New remort poliir spell, radiant awakening

 News 6/22/2002:

 - Weekly clan battles now happen on MONDAY (see below)!

 - New mjol remort spell, mentalis vefr
 - New mjol spell, weave of balance

 News 6/17/2002:

 - New clans output

 - Singularity of fate has been changed, thanks ... uhhh, Terror? Crazy,
   we know.

 News 6/16/2002:

 - New thunderer skill, aulora's gift

 News 6/15/2002:

 - New tholec skill, heightened precision
 - New remort tholec skill, heightened defiance
 - New strider skill, heightened instinct

 - New remort footpad skill, singularity of fate

 News 6/9/2002:

 - New kenpo skill, annulment stance

 News 6/8/2002:

 - change to the command 'affects'. See 'help affects'.

 News 6/7/2002:

 - New shadow rogue skill, singularity of focus
 - New monk (and all remorts) skill, mantis stance
 - New gesko/kenpo skill, dragon stance
 - New kenpo skill, hao'tien stance

 - Bug fix to godly mediation - thanks Ziii. Also slight modification in
   its functionality.

 !Important! New City!

 - Situated in the harsh lands of Mhaldryn, the city of Aur-Vindi has broken
   its two-hundred year exile and is now open for you to explore.

   Aur-Vindi is a fully functional city designed for remorts, equipped with
   [[its own safe rooms, citadel watchtower, trainer, identifier, race and]]
   guild masters and more. The city boasts a number of shops with a very
   large selection of remort equipment (some much rarer than others), as
   well as rotating inventories (the merchandise for sale will constantly
   change). Keep in mind that the populace of Aur-Vindi does not tolerate
   violence.

   Aur-Vindi is designed for remorts - mortals enter at their own risk.

 News 5/30/2002:

 - You can now recall your followers. You can also order your followers to
   recall themselves or have group members recall your followers (so long
   as your followers are grouped).

 News 5/29/2002:

 - Change to track

 - Tame/entrance/persuade have been changed. Details coming soon, but
   please try out the new system today!

 - Lag on tick bug has been fixed.

 - New command: clanset - see 'help clanset'

 News 5/28/2002:

 - New man-of-war spell: ancestor song

 News 5/27/2002:

 - A potential fix for the lag on ticks has been coded. We're not sure if
   this fix will work or not, because we still aren't 100% sure of the cause
   of this behavior.

 - Mobs regenerating massive amounts of health on a tick prior to being 
   knocked unconscious will no longer occur.

 News 5/22/2002:

 - Starting this coming week (the day after Memorial Day) we will have a clan battle.
   The winning clan will receive some kind of prize. We will continue
   to have these battles every Tuesday at 6 p.m. Mountain Time (-07:00:00).

 News 5/16/2002:

 - New 2nd remort khehusod spell - hold alignment

 - New area in the southern part of Ruushi - the towers of Lkkt'vao. This
   area is the first of its kind, a racial area. Lowbie/newbie area.
   Thanks Arwyn for building another winner!!!

 News 5/15/2002:

 - change to stratagem of the cloak, the basic premise is still the same,
   except now stratagem happens immediately before critical. No more extra
   round of your footpad being visible to the world. You still must 
   successfully be cloaked in order for stratagem to succeed.

 - willed protector levels are now equivalent to that of their master.

 - corrections with the lower end scale of using target and throw. Target and
   throw should now work correctly for newbies and veterns, alike.

 - throw is now fully complete as to what I originally had in mind when first
   developing it:

   - throw can be used in a direction
   - throw can be used to hit a target

 - see 'help throw'
 - see 'help target' - right now targetting only works for throw, but I 
   envision it working for a couple of the other ranged attacks.

 News 5/13/2002:
 
 - Due to numerous requests the donation cap per month for stones has been
   raised. See 'help stones' for more details. The change is effectively 
   immediately (i.e. this month).

 - For a quick list of the stone system see 'help stone system'

 - If you are a graphics artist or are looking for a way to make some 
   platinum, we're looking for a new Nodeka banner for our Nodeka advertising.
   The banner size should be 468x60, please submit all banners to Nijlo at
   nijlo@nodeka.com. Rewards will be given for any banners we plan on using.
   All work in the banner must be original or free (no stolen art).

 News 5/11/2002:

 - new ruanbaere skill, savage assault

 News 5/6/2002:

 - Fix to real kill bug found by a group of players doing the most crazy
   kind of battle I've ever seen in my life (why the hell were they casting
   offensive spells on each other while running? Isn't that a little 
   dangerous). Crazy.

 - Fix to battle awareness / min sali tra bug.

 News 5/2/2002:

 - Neat little "sell , <mob>" bug that sold all your inventory has been fixed.
   Thanks Doos.

 - Quickness now plays a slightly bigger role in battles.

 - Lightning strike now gives less quickness.

 News 5/1/2002:

 - All racial restrictions on all items in Nodeka have been removed. This
   was done for several reasons, most were concerns of game balance.

 News 4/28/2002:

 - Oracles now have chain lightning.

 News 4/26/2002:

 - Fixed the spam of "Not in a safe room." when throwing an object through a 
   safe room. 

 - khehusods now have |throw - Bukaal is stocking thin axes.
 - Raiders now have [throw] - Norruk is stocking light hammers.
 - ruanbaeres now have [throw] - Norruk is stocking light hammers.
 - Aegols and Jakaen now have celestial ray.
 - Monks now have throw - Khaleth is stocking shurikens.
 - Valkyries now have throw - Akthar is stocking thrusting spears.
 - tholecs now have throw - Akthar is stocking thrusting spears.

 News 4/25/2002:

 - Cosmetic output error for seeming changes in handedness have been fixed.

 News 4/24/2002:

 - Footpads now have throw - Alyshe is stocking throwing daggers.
 - joufus now have throw - Khaleth is stocking shurikens.
 - Help files for battle awareness and insanity are now available.
 - The crash bug in the socket code has been fixed.
 - Men-of-war now have battle awareness.

 News 4/22/2002:

 - Two potential crash bugs have been fixed, one which was clearly a crash bug
   and locally tested to prove this. The second crash bug I believe is the 
   correct fix, however I cannot verify it locally - it can only be verified
   on the live Nodeka server. Therefore keep on your toes, it's possible I
   have made a mistake and this bug fix, in fact, does not fix the crash bug.

   As always, thanks for your patience.

 News 4/21/2002:

 - Alignment bug in healing spelling has been fixed. The bug was related to
   the healer's alignment not improving if he/she/it had max experience.
   Thanks to everyone who turned this bug in.

 - Insanity has been reworked. Thanks Mel.

 News 4/20/2002:

 - Celestial ray is now a distance attack ... super-distance.

 - Field aid now lags two rounds.

 - Flee has been modified to succeed much more.

 - Petrify has been rewritten, entirely. It is now greiable and has a new help
   file to explain the stats which are considered when using it.

 !Important!

 - The major impairment skills in the game have been redesigned. These skills
   and spells are the following:

   Stun, Channeled Anger, Sensual Sedation, Temple Touch and Petrify

   The basic format of these skills and spells are now in favor of shortening
   recovery time after the skill or spell has been used, rather than the
   previous format which increased the impairment time. For example the new
   layout for the skill stun is as follows:

   Impairment ability   | Pre-lag | Impairment duration (rounds) | Post-lag
   ------------------     -------   ----------------------------   --------
   Stun (0-149 dex)       1         2                              4
   Stun (150-299 dex)     1         2                              3
   Stun (300+ dex)        1         2                              2

   As you can see, as the dexterity of the user increases, the lag associated
   after the skill has been used decreases drastically. However, you will also
   note that impairment duration is constant, not dynamic as it had previously
   been.

   Impairment skills can still miss however, and therefore naj'k and grei are
   still important to their use. Even though the skill stun now has a maximum
   impairment duration of 2 rounds, it does not mean the impairment will be
   2 rounds each time stun is used. Rather, it means stun can impair anywhere 
   from 0 - 2 rounds. The same is true for the other impairment abilities as well.

   It should be noted: this change is very similar to the old system in terms
   impairment to lag ratio. I would be lying if I said it was the "same",
   it is not "that" different. The major difference is that instead of having
   a huge amount of impairment duration and a huge amount of following lag,
   the impairmment abilities will now have breaks between the impairments.
   These breaks will allow the opponents of impairmers to fight back, which
   they have been unable to do previously.

   If you have complaints with this new system, do not e-mail me (Nijlo).
   Please e-mail Myx (myx@nodeka.com) or Whim (whim@nodeka.com) with your
   complaint. The Nodeka staff appreciates your compliance.

 News 4/17/2002:

 - New kage-kyoukan spell: hakanai shouten

 - New configurable colors:

   Map: Me
   Map: Mob
   Map: Player

 News 4/17/2002:

 - New dark creator spell: shadow gaze

 - The command "challenge" has been reactivated.

 - I believe I have fixed the problems with challenge, although I can't be 
   100% sure. I know that I've fixed at least *one* problem with the citadel,
   but there may be others. Please note any bizarre behavior with the citadel
   when challenging others and e-mail me (Nijlo) immediately. Thanks so much!

 - Crash bug fixed.

 News 4/16/2002:

 - Unique items now have greater potential for power (albeit rare, heheh).

 News 4/14/2002:

 - A real kill bug has been fixed which related to a player being real killed 
   when killed by another player who was already engaged in another battle.
   This bug while reported in ice blade is in fact much broader in scope. 
   Thanks goes to Feline, Drayke, Melkor and Whim.

 - The clan hall entrance problems have been resolved.

 News 4/13/2002:

 - Real kill bug fixed in ice discharge and holy hammer (it did not exist in
   charge nor mental tiaran). Thanks Ziii and Orin.

 - New [arch-fallad] [spell]: holy hammer. Please note, this spell may undergo
   some slight changes in the next couple days.

 - In memory of Josh Rollins

 "I don't have exact full details as to what happened, but sometime between
 the night of April 9th and the morning of April 10th, Josh Rollins, 
 otherwise known as Cytic, was in an automobile accident that took his life. 
 Many of you knew Josh personally, more of you knew Cytic from the game. I 
 myself only knew Josh from Nodeka, but that was all I needed to know. He was
 a great guy, and I am proud to say he was my friend. Oh behalf of myself and
 Clan Har'luth, I would like to send our deepest condolences to his family 
 and friends. And from our hearts, God speed brother. We'll miss you.

 On a personal note, this is the first time I have lost a friend like this, 
 so I'm very much at a loss for words. Something like this really makes you 
 wonder what tomorrow will bring. Hold on to what you have, make sure those 
 who mean something to you truly know it, because you honestly never know if 
 you'll get another chance.

 Rest in peace Josh. I'll miss you, bro.

 -Tezrik / Andy"

 News 4/7/2002:

 - !Important!

 - The battle code has been changed again. The new system will mark any battle
   ending in player death as a player kill if at least one player or follower
   is attacking the player when he/she/it is killed. This is slightly different
   than the previous battle system which held any attack on a player as a
   player battle until the battle ended, even if no players or followers were
   attacking the player when the player was killed. This system is still
   likely to be altered further to help prevent players from abusing the
   system and getting player kills where mob kills should take place. However,
   the good news is that since a player must be attacking another player when
   the player dies for it to be marked as a player kill, abusing this system
   for eq runs will only work on the first tank death (the following group
   would most likely not have time to cheat the system and would most likely
   suffer real death). This satisfies both sides of the fairness scale (at
   least partially).

   Lastly, I would like to thank the *reasonable* arguments I received 
   requesting a change to the battle system. Those arguments coming from
   the unnamed website were not rational, but rather emotional tirades and
   did nearly the opposite of encouraging me to change the battle system. Had
   it not been for the "rational" voices of a few very unbiased unopinionated
   players, the battle system would not have changed. I greatly appreciate
   those of you (you know who you are) for taking the time to e-mail me in a
   calm and logical fashion.

   Your friendly neighborhood Nijlo-man

 News 4/6/2002:

 - New lowbie to midbie area that has over 1,000 creatures to pummel!
   Located somewhere on the continent of Tarsis - hail Arwyn for his great
   work on this one!

 - Super-memory leak of the universe has been fixed.

 News 4/2/2002:

 - Mob artificial intelligence bug fixed - rescue.
 - lo-fents can now use lay hands only outside of battle.

 News 3/28/2002:

 - Shields worn in battle now still use base class damage and +damage.
 - Rescue can no longer be used on non-players and non-followers.

 News 3/19/2002:

 - Fix to ice discharge, thanks Mel.
 - Help stones has been updated for infuscated marbles.

 - You can now get 3 infuscated marbles per month. Help 'stones' has been
   revised to correctly outline the new infuscated marble layout.

 - Infuscated marbles are now fully implemented.

 - Critical citadel follower bug fixed. Thanks to Dade, Namlehse and Melkor.

 - Ticks/phases no longer "skip".

 - Quiver crash bug fixed - good job Saron (3,000 platinum reward).

 - The Nodeka battle engine has been completely redesigned and recoded from
   ground up. What we now have is an ultra-light, smart and well contained
   battle engine that's ready to handle some serious complexities and handle
   them flawlessly. The new battle engine fixes a numerous number of bugs as
   well as correcting "poorly formed" battle behavior. Special thanks goes to
   all the testers involved in this project.

 - There will be new help files explaining the new battle engine in the next
   couple of days, keep your eye on "help battle". Some of the more important
   aspects:

     - Kills are determined by "last hit". The last hit that takes a player 
       to death determines whether that death is a player kill or a mob kill.
       This functionality has been carefully thought through and will not
       change (this fixes a huge number of "cheats" players were abusing with
       followers and groupies).

     - Kills are handled at "last hit", not "end of round". This means things
       such as the citadel ending improperly because both players die at the
       end of a round are fixed.

     - Battles re-evaluate themselves immediately. You'll no longer see
       breaks in battles when fighting groups of enemies. Also, auto-join has
       been updated to reflect this behavior.

     - Rescue and redirect have been reworked and recoded to work exactly as
       they work now. Rescue will only redirect incoming attacks from a victim
       to the rescuer, it will *not* remove the victim from the battle.

     - A huge amount of code has been reworked and rewritten. Before you
       assume something's broken, ask. Many of the testers know what the
       correct behavior is and why it's correct.

 News 3/14/2002:

 - ateoli now have parry.

 - Correction in mob, thanks Namlehse. Correction in beg command, 
   thanks Cerberus.

 News 3/12/2002:

 - New spell: slow

 - Changes to stoicism, shorter lag, increased endurance cost.

 - IP blocking code preventing players from logging in which didn't have
   a user logged in from their IP address has been fixed. This bug was
   caused by your clients keep sockets active that were supposedly already
   disposed. The work around for this on Nodeka is to only prevent users
   from logging in if their characters are already logged into the world,
   rather than the old way which prevented characters from logging in even
   if another socket was active which didn't have a player connected inside
   Nodeka.

 - A long standing bug with tell has been fixed (tell NIJLO blah, now works).
   The *all* capitals problem has been a bug for awhile.

 - Something major has changed. It's up to you to identify what it is.

 - Correction to created followers (i.e. conjure astral), thanks Aimless!

 - Flee has been rewritten. Now all of the "leaving battle" forms follow the
   same algorithmic patterns. See help flee for more details.

 News 3/11/2002:

 - Fix to vanish. Thanks Drakmorden.

 - One of the most elusive bugs in the history of Nodeka has been fixed. This
   bug had to do with lagging group members, other than the leader of the 
   group, in much greater form than should have been taking place. This bug 
   was caused by a coding misunderstanding by calling the CorrectLag() method
   after lag was applied, rather than calling it before lag was applied. The
   Nodeka staff sincerely apologizes for this erroneous behavior. The intent
   of lag code change was to prevent things such as people casting heal in a
   group and then having that group's leader move one space in a non-lagged 
   zone to clear the healer's lag. This *use* to be done commonly prior to the
   lag code change. However, with the new lag change, group members were 
   lagged incorrectly. As you will soon see - casting up while traveling will
   now be possible again, however the lag will continue over a duration of 
   moves as the spell lag is diminshed with each "extra" time between steps.
   This was the original intent of the change in the lag code, and the lag 
   code now produces this expected behavior.

   To summarize, the lag code works now as intended. Lag in continental movement
   along with spell/skill lag are merged together to work under a
   single lagged period - the intended timing and delay mechanism.

 - Output for holy light corrected. Thanks Beowulf.

 News 3/9/2002:
 - Critical area fix
 - Fix to idle character booting code

 - Stones should reset properly when month rolls (rather than retaining old
   values as it did previously). This should be a bit more clear now. Thanks
   Onys.
 - Architecture change for main branch of affects now (even bigger than last
   time).
 - ateoli ataghan's have been improved.

 News 3/5/2002:

 - Architecture of affects code heavily altered
 - Ambush fix (thanks Flea)
 - Non-abusable train/enhance bug fixed (trust us, anyone who stumbled across
   this bug wouldn't exactly be *happy* with -260,000 practices ... hehe)
 - New spell: celtic resilience

 With the heitonic circle increasing in size and intellectual prowess, a new
 power was formed, deep within the inner circle. A power that alone was no
 great wonder, nor inflicted no intolerable damage. Yet, this power was of
 the simple sort. The sort when carried by intellectually guided hands could
 foil even the darkest mage's plans...

 News 2/27/2002:

 - Retreat has been altered to succeed more.
 - Vanish has been rewritten and has some new capabilities.

 News 2/21/2002:

 - String correction to sacrifice attempts in a donation room (thanks Drak).
 - Retreat has been rewritten, it can now fail. See 'help retreat' for info.

 News 2/10/2002:

 - Bug fix in the multiple IP code.
 - Crash bug in the multiple IP code fixed.
 - New clan code, mostly just design fixes, interface changes. Nothing 
   directly related to players.

 News 2/6/2002:

 - Mighty mighty Nijlo destroyed the five million crash bugs he introduced
   with the last build (we're still trying to figure out why he's so mighty, 
   since if he wouldn't have created the crash bugs in the first place, they
   wouldn't need to be fixed ... o_O).

 - The spit social has been fixed. Thanks to all 300 of you for turning the
   typos in. =)

 News 2/4/2002:

 - Celestial ray bug fixed - thanks Asguard.

 News 1/31/2002:

 - Lag when failing trip, stun, temple touch, sensual sedation,  
   channeled anger has been made consistent!
 - Lag when failing bash was already consistent.

 - The following impairment skills algorithms have been modified to what we
   consider more appropriate: stun, temple touch, bash, sensual sedation,
   focused sphere, channeled anger. The rest of the impairment skills will
   follow (we just haven't had time to get to all of them yet).

 - Stun and temple touch are now fully naj'ked.

 - Temple touch is now a weapon of destruction.

 - Nijlo is a super-hero, his name: PATHETIC-PUN-MAN!!

 News 1/30/2002:

 - the first verse of the riddle has been solved and closed

 - a new riddle will replace the old solved riddle soon

 News 1/26/2002:

 - new secret stuff

 - A note to all players - Drakmorden nor any other player assisted me in
   the revision of the lo-fent class. I would also like to say that blaming
   other players for any change that happens on Nodeka is ridiculous, as no
   change to the game structure is done without my consent (as I'm the only
   one who touches the Nodeka code, so I must personally approve of them). 
   The changes I make to Nodeka are the changes *I* feel should be put into 
   the game, not what anyone else feels should be put into the game.

   If you would like to have a target of someone blame for anything and 
   everything being done on Nodeka that you dislike - blame me.

   Your friendly world leader and tyrrant and destroyer of all that's good 
   and holy,

   Nijlo

   p.s. SEND HELP

 News 1/23/2002:

 - the "it" gender can now be any gender restricted class, such as; ataelos,
   ″witch, ruanbaere, valkyrie, fallad and daja.
 - plenty of new ″immortal code
 - ″lay hands now only works in battle and has increased lag
 - soothing touch now has increased lag

 ##############################################################
                       NEW CITY - ILLURIEN
 ##############################################################

 News 1/21/2002:

 - String corrections
 - New immortal stuff =)

 News 1/15/2002:

 - Fixed door code, thanks Whim.
 - Multiple IP address logins are now prevented.

 News 1/9/2002:

 - Prompt crash bug fixed. Bye bye. Thanks Myx.

 News 1/6/2002:

 - Compose fixes, creating new nodes doesn't add the extra word it use to.
   For example, "new message blah" would create message "message blah" rather
   than creating message "blah". This has been fixed.
 - Annoying $$ # characters are gone.

 News 1/5/2002:

 - Parry, dodge and evasion have ... altered, something different. See help.
 - Minor fix to skill/spell code (thanks Mordru).
 - Minor fix to retreat (thanks Tyrrany - and nice spelling)

 News 1/3/2002:

 ##############################################################
     The darker side of Nodeka comes to life - be prepared
 ##############################################################

 - Parry, dodge and evasion have been reworked and redone.

 - The skill code has been rewritten - this should have no affect on players
   This was done to clean up some of the more "ugly" code in the source. The
   work that went into this was pretty large, but it makes Nodeka even better
   and was a necessary effort.

 News 1/1/2002:

 - Spam-guard for newbie channel implemented. We apologize if this solution
   inhibits any other newbies, but it is clearly the most effective solution
   without inhibiting all Nodeka players overall. And thus, when you reach
   level 30 you can use a channel other than newbie.

 - Happy happy happy!!!

2001

[Show/hide]

Total updates: 70

  News 12/30/01:

  - HOLY CRAP, MOTHER OF ALL MEMORY LEAKS FOUND!!! (and fixed)
  - rewrite of all the door code, joyous.
  - so many bugs fixed, I won't even bother trying to list them all.

   News - over the past two months:

  - Please read 'HELP BUG' or 'HELP BUG REPORT'

  - Fix to summon and greater summon output - thanks Velkyn
  - Fix to output in "quit" - thanks Montecarlo.
  - Fix to focused sphere - thanks Xxx/Drakmorden.
  - Fix to stoicism.
  - Fix to mental blast and psychic shock output - thanks Exar, you rock!!
  - Player killing help file has been corrected to follow the modified rules
    of Nodeka - thanks Kakaroth!
  - Spear plant "liche lord" bug acknowledged - thanks Telstra!!
  - Stoicism output error fixed - thanks Exar (sheeez, you go)!!
  - Ice blade help file fixed - thanks Zorro!
  - Another minor help file fix, removal of "wield" in general help file.
    Nice work Exar!
  - Yet another fix, to the help file "wind wall" - Exar, you are amazing!
  - Throw will now at least have some success on level 100 characters.

  News 10/10/01:

  - Crash bug in FindExactWorldPlayer() method has been fixed. This bug was
    introduced with the new source code that was pushed last night. So far
    this is the only crash bug we've found in the released source (knock on 
    wood). We appreciate your continued patience

  - Nodeka's string system has been rewritten (3 days work nonstop).

  - Crash bug fixed regarding immortal setting and removing. Nice catch Azrag!

  - Reply in prompt problem resolved, thanks Rar!

  News 9/30/01:

  - Another major change to all offensive spells. Offensive spells and skills
    now include +damage to their damage, with the exception of a couple of
    spells/skills.

  - Greater fireball completely wiped out, but instead of removing it, it's
    been renamed, reconfigured and redesigned into: ice blade. It's a
    completely new spell derived from an older spell which was essentially not
    very useful (however your spell percentage of greater fireball will roll
    over into ice blade). Ice blade is more cost intense and is frost based,
    rather than fire based.
  
    In addition, non-remort sorcerers don't get it. Sorry, it's too powerful 
    for you non-remort folks. Don't worry though, the changes spells took 
    today, you'll have more than enough power with the arsenal you have 
    already (trust me).

  - Upon a suggestion of what I was asking previously, I received an e-mail
    which brought something important to light. This e-mail will require some
    background. The basic story is as follows. When I was first creating 
    Nodeka, I had to put boundaries on certain skills, but more importantly 
    spells from doing too much damage. This was done because other classes
    didn't have skills which could counter the spells damage, nor did enough
    equipment exist to support fighter classes. Believe it or not, casters 
    dominated Nodeka. To fix this, I put damage caps on a good majority of 
    spells, this solved the problem perfectly, or so I thought. In effect, 
    what I had done was prevent those spells from ever doing the full amount 
    of damage their counterparts could do without a damage cap (something I 
    missed when initially making my first observation). This ends up leading 
    to completely disproportionate damage structures of spells/skills. The 
    spells which I had thought would do the most damage, end up doing the 
    least. And the skills/spells which I had never intended on doing much 
    damage, ended up doing the most (i.e. holy light).

    In conclusion, all spells which had damage caps on them have been removed!
    In case you're curious if you or your spells were affected, here is a list
    of all the spells which had damage caps removed:

    magic arrow
    flaming arrow
    firebolt
    elemental malediction
    fireball
    lightning
    greater fireball

  - More changes to the who command's visuals. The basic idea here is that 
    I wasn't happy with the way the output was because it created to much 
    overhead with empty space (empty lines of output). Specifically, this was
    caused by the "who" headers. The way I wanted to do this was to have the
    color scheme figure out what each player's preference of foreground color
    was for the race, class, clan and then create the appropriate background
    color based on that initial discovery. Well, it was too much work for 
    something I wasn't sure I even wanted initially. Now, however, I realized
    that's the way I wanted it, and implemented that "color finding" 
    functionality. What happens now with the "who" command is Nodeka will look
    at your colors and then put up the appropriate background color based on
    the foreground color selections you have set for your character. Keep in
    mind, some of these foreground/background color combinations won't work.
    It's the players responsibility to choose a foreground color that will work
    with a background color. Don't send me a bug saying "when I set my who race
    color to white, I can't read the who race headers." Or even better, "when 
    I set who race color to black, I don't see a background color for race".
    These aren't bugs, for as much as I would like it to be, Nodeka isn't 
    psychic and can't read your mind on how you want it to perform. Sorry. =)
    For those of you who are laughing right now, don't laugh too hard. You'd
    be quite surprised by some of the bugs that get reported.

  - Changes to follower names when competing (finally).

  - A HUGE ROUND OF APPLAUSE FOR WHIM!!! Whim went through every mob in the
    game and added the new name to make followers new names work!! If you see
    him on-line give him some praise! Thanks Whim!!!

  News 9/30/01:

  - More "who" functionality, see 'help who'

  - Cloud giant help file changed/fixed, thanks Ravon!

  - Major randomization bug fixed. Three people to thank for this fix,
    Zorro for first identifying it, Rar for e-mailing Nijlo about the
    possibility of its existence, and finally Myx for pulling what is being
    an unbelievable feat of analysis and correctness of the source of the
    problem. In short, Myx was able to identify not only that the bug was
    occurring, but exactly *how* it was occurring without ever seeing any of
    the source code. Myx, how the heck did you do that???

    This bug was causing unique items at startup (and only at startup) to load
    exactly the same each time. This bug did not continue with subsequent area
    repopulations. Nijlo has run over ten rigorous tests to verify the fix put
    in place for this bug fixes it completely. We apologize for any 
    inconvenience.

  - Revamped "who" command, following options are now IN!!!

      who blac, race
      who raid, class
      who har'l, clan
      who nijlo, name

  News 9/26/01:

  - Minor bug in the string code fixed.
  - Myx is a super-hero.
  - Made some minor improvements to display skill.
  - Made display spells more maintainable and fixed the page problems with it.

  News 9/25/01:

  - The help file for "list" has been updated. See "help list" for more
    information.

  - Bug in "display skill" has been fixed, thanks Knight! While I was working
    on fixing this bug, I decided I would work on implementing a piece of code
    which would make both my (Nijlo) and yours (all players) lives easier.
    After several hours of analysis and design, I have built a system which
    makes player controlling output very easy to implement. Player controlled
    output is output where the player can pause at his or her set page length
    (see 'help page setting') for certain types of output.

  - The command "list" now allows for player controlled output (list output
    will now pause at your page setting).

  - The crash bug that has caused the last several crashes (and has been in
    the code base for only about 2 months) has been fixed. The curious part
    about this crash bug is it could only be accomplished through telnet and
    it was caused by the implementation of more robust code in the player
    input buffer arena which then propegated this new "better" code to areas
    of the code which were still very stupid (read as: Nodeka 1.0). The
    current fix is a solution that will eventually be removed when all the
    strings in Nodeka use stl strings, rather than char pointers or arrays.
    Until that time, the current fix will correct any potential crash bugs of
    this type because the fix is placed in a location which prevents input
    from being oversized. Oversized input was being blocked by most clients,
    but because of the way telnet sends data (one character at a time, even
    before you hit the return key), it was able to skip past our initial
    size check. The new size check is located after the strings are complete
    and verifies the size isn't too big for the other "bad" code to work with
    it. Keep in mind, both size checks (the initial and the new check that was
    just added) are totally necessary.

    Moral of the story: debuggers are no susbstitute for the human brain.

  News 9/24/01:

  - New undead racial (and will be a skill for at least one class):

      Sustained Life (see 'help sustain life')

  - Drolls are now stronger and have more +damage.
  - Pixie racial lineage:
      are stronger vs. stun.
      have more quickness
      have more agility
      have ... been redesigned.

  News 9/21/01:

  - Fix to recuperation string (if only Nijlo could spell). Thanks Virion!
    These strings have been external to the Nodeka source now, so they are 
    easier to change on the fly (no reboot required).

  News 9/19/01:

  - Fix to help citadel, thanks Exar.
  - Fix to help answer, thanks Liege.
  - Minor change to Ruushi mobs, thanks Exar!
  - Recuperation messages have been modified.
  - Some more string/file reading improvements.

  - Help 'reminder' has been modified to be more useful, thanks Gilgamesh.

  News 9/18/01:

  - Retreat lag reduced, thanks Harbinger!
  - More minor modifications to the Citadel.
  - Player kill output has been revised (simplified and standardized).
  - Some low level string and file reading code has been modified.

  News 9/16/01:

  - Slight modification to ascension of the templar help file. Thanks Exar.

  - I rewrote the mob number code, because it was evil, and managed to break
    something. Harbinger was the first to bring this to my attention, thanks
    Harbinger! The mob number bug has been fixed.

  - Output for Celestial Ray, when Naj'ked, has been fixed. Thanks Beowulf!
  - Spit social has been fixed -- thanks K'jin!
  - Change to the mental tempest help file -- thanks Mustafa.
  - Rage now lags for the same duration as it lasts.
  - Minor bug fix with glance, thanks Exar.
  - Minor bug with skill/spell order of checks on alignment, ability drain
    and target attackable as been fixed. Thanks Hate.

  News 9/13/01:

  - Citadel bug fix, crazy!

  - Social bug of all socials ending up being "yawn" has been fixed. Thanks
    Harbinger.

  - Minor destructor bug for CSystemCommand (the new command hashing code) has
    been fixed.

  News 9/12/01:

  - Modified some of the output code for future maintenance.
  - Modified a couple hundred lines of code for more correct C++
    grammar.
  - Redesigned the command hashing (skills, spells, socials as well) which
    ended up being a couple thousands lines of code changes, reductions. I
    made a great deal of logic changes as well, hopefully no bugs made it into
    the new code (unfortunately I'm guessing if nothing else, at least minor
    bugs slipped through. It's difficult changing a couple thousand lines of
    code without making at least some mistakes. Especially when you are making
    all those changes in the course of two days). In addition to changing the 
    design of the command hashing, I also have attempted to make the command
    hashing safer (char*s to stl strings). Making this change, however, 
    required a pretty massive amount of other changes to make everything else
    work. Nonetheless, I had a blast, I hope it all works =)
  - Made at least another thousand or so line changes to the code, ran diffs 
    on all changes for single pass verification of code. Made stronger code 
    with more preventive measures in place to protect memory and increase 
    object safety. What does this mean to players? Maintainable code, which 
    means Nodeka continues to have a future (rather than eventually building a
    code base that becomes unworkable preventing any new features).

  - After a long debate, mental tiaran can no longer be used to attack players
    or creatures already in battle. Alternative solutions or changes to balance
    mental tiaran may be implemented in the future. However, for now this 
    change will stand, there will be no discussion about its removal for the 
    time being.

  News 9/6/01:

  - Battle stance and defensive stance now lag only one round. Thanks Brooke.

  News 9/5/01:

  - More soft citadel code fixes/cleanups.

  - Major bug fix with a door code problem, all hail Azrag!!!!
  - Speaking of Azrag, Soth has promoted Azrag to Assistant Head Builder!!

  - Minor output bug fixed, thanks Gehenna.

  - Hurricane kick, vicious fist and quiver all no longer execute a full round
    of damage. Special thanks to Gades and Myx!

  News 8/30/01:

  - The citadel has been fixed. Thanks to Sisco, he was the first person to
    send an e-mail to Nijlo.

  - Minor change to the affect output, thanks Beowulf.

  - The entire affect layout has been altered, affects now drop under the
    same similar string. Some minor changes will still be made, however the
    basic layout is decided on. Thanks to Beowulf and Kakaroth.

  - Rescue now lags if successful and if not successful. Thanks Drakmorden.

  - Redirect now lags for a longer duration of time if successful. Thanks
    Drakmorden.

  - Psychic shock, mental blast and holy light no longer can be used at the
    beginning of battle to reap an attack and a full round of attacks. These
    skills now work like all other damaging skills and spells when used at the
    beginning of battle. Thanks Drakmorden.

  - A good portion of the Citadel code has been rewritten. Whew! This was
    mostly to clean up bad code. Still a number of other Citadel changes
    coming (I hear ya Myx, I hear ya).

  News 8/20/01:

  - Minor output error on ice discharge. Thanks Beowulf.

  - New skills: climb and swim. Special thanks to Mel for discussion regarding
    these two. For more information see 'help climb' and 'help swim'.

  - Three new races from the dark, warped matter we call: the Mind of Soth.

  - A minor change to the bash output string. Thanks to Disease.
  - A logical change of beggar's gold from whatever to 0 was suggested and
    implemented. Thanks to David Miner.
  - Ambush has been changed. If the ambusher is in lag while ambushing and the
    target of the ambush arrives, no ambush will be made. Specifically:

      - Nijlo ambushes Myxlplyk
      - Nijlo casts 'bless'
      - Myxlplyk enters the room Nijlo is in while Nijlo is still in bless lag
      - Nijlo does not ambush Myxlplyk

    Special thanks to Blitzkrieg.

  - Earthened skin has been recoded. See the earthened skin help file for more
    details.

  News 8/15/01:

  - Lightning is now both castable and invokable (reflecting the help file).
    Nice catch Auberon!

  - Mental tiaran now displays output to players in the room of a player who
    is being mental blasted. Special thanks to Abram.

  News 8/12/01:

  - A change of output for flow of nobility has been made. Thanks for the 
    insight Tyranny (and Myx).

  News 8/10/01:

  - New character item max bug fixed -- thanks Skater.
  - Typo in Newbie training area fixed and names modified due to missing
    keyword in long name -- thanks Strega.

  - Miscalculation of mob statistics found (finally). Racial affects were
    being applied twice, which was causing some extremely weak mobs to become
    nearly double or triple in power. This bug was two-fold:

      - Error found in applying racial stat bonuses twice
      - Maximum statistic was always doubling. Therefore is a mob had a max
        staticistic of 100 constitution, the mob's constitution would always
        be 200.

    Both of these errors have been fixed. Special thanks to Gibran.

  - Newbie training mobs have been toned down, special thanks to Joe Alias!

  News 8/10/01:

  - Industrial strength C++ code optimizations in place, turned on and 
    debuggable. The basic jist, Nodeka runs *really* fast now.

  News 8/9/01:

  - Typo in winged attack found by the player Holiday. In addition, Holiday
    helped come up with the replacement string for winged attack, thanks!!

  - Field aid can be used when the player is less than 75% full of health,
    rather than 50% full of health. Thanks Soth.

  News 8/7/01:

  - Reign of resistance has been toned down

  - Follower bug *may* be fixed. This relates to followers dying and those
    followers not being removed from the master's control. This bug prevented
    master's from getting new followers. Thanks Auberon.

  - Lag now properly placed when casting spells which create followers and
    a follower is already in existence. Also output for these spells have been
    corrected. Thanks Losati.

  News 8/6/01:

  - Khenpo to Kenpo, thanks Jesus.

  - mjol class modification

  - Conjure golem has been moved to 1st remort
  - Conjure deity has been moved to 2nd remort
  - Conjure elemental has been improved

  - Conjure golem and deity will be improved soon

  - Race modifications:

  - 1st remort gnome has 4 natural resist
  - 2nd remort gnome has 8 natural resist (thanks Soth)

  News 8/5/01:

  - Race modifications:

  - 1st remort dwarf is now: Mountain Dwarf
  - 2nd remort dwarf is now: Whitebeard
  - 2nd remort half-elf is now: Elven Psionist
  - 2nd remort drow (Matron) is now: Dark Elf

  - The below race information is in relation to new racial bonuses or racial
    modifiers the race previously did not receive. Use the 'race' command to
    see the full list of racial bonuses the below races have.

  - Demon statistic modifiers:         - Daimonikos statistic modifiers:
       +5 strength                          +6 strength
       +2 dexterity                         +3 dexterity
       +2 agility                           +2 agility
       +3 constitution                      +4 constitution

  - Angel statistic modifiers:         - Arch-Angel statistic modifiers:
       +2 agility                           +5 agility
       +2 speed                             +4 speed
       +3 willpower                         +4 willpower
       +3 to hit                            +8 to hit

  - Mountain Dwarf stat modifiers:     - Whitebeard statistic modifiers:
       +3 strength                          +5 strength
       +5 constitution                      +10 constitution
       +3 willpower                         +4 willpower
       +101 health                          +237 health
       +112 endurance                       +281 endurance

  - Elder Half-Elf stat modifiers:     - Elven Psionist statistic modifiers:
       +3 agility                           +3 agility
       +2 dexterity                         +2 dexterity
       +3 intellect                         +11 intellect
       +3 willpower                         +3 willpower
       +2 speed                             +2 speed
       36% psychic shock                    91% psychic shock

  - Minoi statistic modifiers:         - Svirfneblin statistic modifiers:
       +8 intellect                         +12 intellect
       +5 wisdom                            +7 wisdom
       +5 willpower                         +8 willpower
       +130 mana                            +246 mana
       +201 spirit                          +412 spirit

  - Stoor statistic modifiers:         - Thain statistic modifiers:
       +5 agility                           +8 agility
       +7 dexterity                         +9 dexterity
       +4 speed                             +6 speed
       +272 endurance                       +611 endurance

  - Albino Drow statistic modifiers:   - Veldruk statistic modifiers:
       +4 agility                           +6 agility
       +2 dexterity                         +8 dexterity
       +4 speed                             +6 speed
       +1 intellect                         +4 intellect
       +1 willpower                         +3 willpower

                                       - Dark Elf statistic modifiers:
                                            +5 agility
                                            +4 dexterity
                                            +8 speed
                                            +6 intellect
                                            +1 willpower
                                            +4 damage

  - Troglodyte statistic modifiers:    - Droll statistic modifiers:
       +9 strength                          +15 strength
       +8 constitution                      +14 constitution
       +3 damage                            +6 damage

  - Sylph statistic modifiers:         - Sprite statistic modifiers:
       +3 agility                           +4 agility
       +4 dexterity                         +4 dexterity
       +3 intellect                         +3 intellect
       +2 wisdom                            +2 wisdom
       +7 speed                             +12 speed

  - Undead statistic modifiers:
       +91 health

  - Liche statistic modifiers:         - Liche Lord statistic modifiers:
       +3 intellect                         +5 intellect
       +3 wisdom                            +6 wisdom
       +5 willpower                         +6 willpower
       +288 health                          +623 health

  - Wind Titan statistic modifiers:    - Storm Wielder statistic modifiers:
       +10 strength                         +21 strength

       +2 dexterity                         +4 dexterity
       +4 constitution                      +2 constitution
       +6 damage                            +9 damage

  - Titan of Ice statistic modifiers:  - Arctic Colossus statistic modifiers:
       +6 strength                          +11 strength
       +2 intellect                         +2 intellect
       +2 wisdom                            +2 wisdom
       +6 willpower                         +10 willpower
       +3 constitution                      +3 constitution
       +3 hit                               +7 hit

  - Fire Drakontos stat modifiers:     - Crimson Draco statistic modifiers:
       +6 strength                          +9 strength
       +5 intellect                         +5 intellect
       +4 wisdom                            +6 wisdom
       +4 willpower                         +5 willpower
       +4 constitution                      +5 constitution

  - Ice Drakontos stat modifiers:      - Frost Dragon statistic modifiers:
       +7 strength                          +13 strength
       +5 intellect                         +6 intellect
       +5 wisdom                            +7 wisdom
       +7 constitution                      +11 constitution

  - Greater Weretiger stat modifiers:  - Weretiger Khan statistic modifiers:
       +4 strength                          +7 strength
       +5 agility                           +7 agility
       +5 dexterity                         +8 dexterity
       +3 hit                               +8 hit

  - Onyx Protector stat modifiers:     - Obsidian Guardian[[]] stat modifiers:
       +4 strength                          +7 strength
       +3 dexterity                         +6 dexterity
       +3 willpower                         +4 willpower
       +7 speed                             +10 speed

  - Dark Drakontos stat modifiers:     - Shadow Derkesthai stat modifiers:
       +5 agility                           +8 agility
       +4 dexterity                         +6 dexterity
       +5 intellect                         +7 intellect
       +5 wisdom                            +6 wisdom
       +4 willpower                         +4 willpower

  - Dayenar statistic modifiers:       - Koj'ehr statistic modifiers:
       +8 willpower                          +13 willpower
       +2 constitution                       +3 constitution
       +6 speed                              +9 speed

  News 8/3/01:

  - Invigorate has been made more powerful
  - Petrify has been corrected for out of bounds statistics

  - New socials: sneeze, mitee, punee, nijlo (change). Thanks Trinity!!

  - Bug fix: followers can no longer use any means of communication. This
             includes global channels, private channels and public channels.

  - Bug fix: using ice discharge 'west' now shows it traveling 'west'. Thanks
             to Soth, Zhakar and Axel for all turning this bug in.

  - Bug fix: unique items changing names with subsequent identifies has been
             fixed.

  - Bug fix: unique items losing their "identified" flag when logging back in
             has been fixed.

  - Elf lineage change (addition):

        -> Grey Elf   -> Silver Elf
    Elf
        -> Green Elf  -> Elven Guard

  - Contradiction of the rabbit has been toned down
  - Way of the panther has been toned down
  - Way of the bear +strength has been lowered
  - Way of the bear colossal smiting percent has been increased
  - Godly mediation duration has been greatly reduced
  - Godly mediation output has been corrected
  - Concentrated attack has been toned down
  - Vtshinnes frenzy no longer adds +hit
  - Vtshinnes frenzy now adds to current health as well as max health
  - Convergence of balance has been slightly modified
  - Nefarious shift has been toned down
  - Divinity has been toned down
  - Inviolable Asylum has been toned down
  - Heroes Crusade has been improved
  - Soul guardian output has been corrected

  - The 300 statistic cap has been removed for skills/spells/equipment.
    Statistics still cannot be trained/enhanced beyond 300, however [[racial
    affects]], item affects, skill and spell affects can raise statistics
    beyond 300. No absolute maximum exists.

  News 7/24/01:

  - The crash bug, which appeared twice this weekend, has been fixed. Special
    thanks to Myxlplyk who gave outstanding insight into the bug's location
    which also happened to be 100% accurate. Had Myxlplyk not supplied Nijlo
    with the amount of detail into the bug, it would have taken a considerable
    amount of time longer to fix. Thanks Myx!

  News 7/16/01:

  - Many changes/additions. The message of the day will be updated soon.

  News 7/9/01:

  - Please continue to support Nodeka through donations. Special thanks to
    all the donators who showed their support last week. We greatly appreciate
    your contributions for the new Nodeka development machine!

  News 7/2/01:

  - Fix: Valkyries agility now increases agility less but for a longer 
    duration of time.

  News 6/27/01:

  - Fix: Mana and spirit regeneration rates -- thanks newbie channel
  - New: Equipment can now raise attributes above 100

  ----------------------------------------------------
  - New:                                             -
  -                                                  -
  -           Unique items ... everywhere.           -
  -                                                  -
  -                                                  -
  ----------------------------------------------------

  - Special thanks to the following testers:

    Rar, Monoxide, Mel, Raolin, Soulcage, Morkai, Gideon and Myxlplyk!

  News 6/16/01:

  - Fix: Container full message typo fixed, thanks Nijlo.
  - Fix: Improper auto-completion for spells fixed.
  - Fix: Left wrist wear typo, thanks Beowulf.

  News 6/12/01:

  - Fix: Auto-join bug fixed.

  - Fix: Architecture rewrite for output strings (save often, there may be a
    bug hidden in the new code somewhere). This rearchitecture was a pretty
    one to make. Nodeka is looking really nice after this design change.

  - Minor bug with Naj'k/Grei -- thanks Exar!!!

  - Other minor modifications with tree code and tree objects

  - Special thanks to the following testers:

    Veldrin, Exar, Morbid, Haran and Eowyn!

  News 6/6/01:

  - Fix: Minor bug with ... well we can't tell you, but it's fixed.

  - New: Skill -- Art of imbalance

  - Fix: The crash bug that has been causing the crashes over the course of
    the last three days (and long before that as well) has finally been fixed.
    The details of the bug itself are complicated, so we won't waste your time
    getting into that. The important thing here is to give our utmost thanks
    to Whim for bringing what he thought might be the cause of our crashes to
    our attention. Thanks Whim, we're extremely grateful for your help!!

  - Fix: Yet another elusive Nodeka 1.0 crash bug coming into light in 2.0 has
    been fixed. How this bug was overlooked until now is beyond us, all we know
    is that it has been in the source code for months. Our only guess is that
    the stability and correctness of the 2.0 code has forced this bug into 
    showing its head. Regardless, this crash bug has been the cause of a major
    rash of crash bugs recently which will come to an end now. This is not to
    suggest Nodeka won't crash in the future, merely, we've nailed two major
    crash bugs in the last two days which means things are going to be at least
    more stable than previously. Nonetheless, you should always save often.
    Thanks for your patience while we correct many of the lingering Nodeka 1.0
    bugs.

  - Fix: Staff related bugs fixed.

  News 6/5/01:

  - Fix: SUPER-DUPER CRASH BUG FIXED!! This one has been around since 1.0 and
    we were ready when it revealed its ugly head this time!

  - New: You can control the color of your joins now! Note, you can only 
    control your join strings -- not the strings of joins for others. The
    added control is in your "color" command.

  - Fix: Minor cosmetic fix to Naj'k/Grei
  - Fix: Minor logical fix to Naj'k/Grei


  - Change: Naj'k and Grei have been drastically altered. Before the final
    touches are added we're going to give you some time to get accustom to
    the new layout (to help you figure out how it all works). This new system
    should be more intuitive and somewhat easier to understand than the
    system worked before. The Naj'k and Grei system will continue to remain
    extremely challenging to master, although now staying within an aura
    should be relatively painless ... at least in most cases.

  - Change: Cow udders have been removed from Nodeka. All NaPali items load
    less frequently now. Cypress staves load less frequently.

  News 6/4/01:

  - Fix: Lag for the petrify spell has been fixed. Thanks Legend!!
  - Change: The skill throw can no longer be used by any class.

  News 5/31/01:

  - Fix: Secret, evil, deceptive, and really mean memory leak/crash bug has 
    been found and fixed. Hail Winter for finding this very well tucked away
    bug!!! Thanks Winter!

  News 5/30/01:

  - Fix: When trying to give to a mob/player who's inventory is full a message
    indicating their inventory is full is now displayed. Also, colors have
    have been added to any type of give, even single gives. This is done 
    specifically to deter from fake item selling. Those who choose to have
    their color off give up their right to determine fake sellers from real
    sellers. Thanks Renard!

  News 5/29/01:

  - Fix: Another crash bug with tree this time -- boy and we thought it was
    stable. Heh...

  - Fix: Crash bug fixed with new follower code (Nijlo forgot to add one line
    of code -- whoops!). Did we mention that the follower code is being 
    rewritten? Well, now you know. And as G.I. ... nevermind.

  - Fix: You can no longer sacrifice in the donation room, thanks Tedo!!!

  - Fix: Commands; look, inventory, examine have been highly optimized.
    For example, Nodeka can now handle literally thousands of items in a room
    and not skip a beat when command "look" invoked. The same applies for
    inventory and examine.

  - Fix: More optimizations for get, drop, give, etc. Specifically, the
    donation room can now handle thousands of items within it and execute a
    get without any processor performance issues.

  - Fix: More tree internal optimizations which make things run even faster.
    This affects everything, from slaying mobs to wearing equipment. As many
    of you already know, most of the 2.0 foundation is tree based and making
    even the slightest optimization of the tree code affects Nodeka on a 
    global level.

  News 5/28/01:

  - Fix: You can no longer use socials when silenced -- thanks Tedo!!!

  - New: Immortal features and internal maintenance.

  - Fix: Mobs who use the skill regenerate will automatically "stand" when
    unlagged.

  - Fix: AI mobs who were ending up "resting" bug has been fixed.

  - Change: More internal cleaning.

  - Change: Slight changes to many strings.

  - Fix: Immortal fixes/changes.

  News 5/26/01:

  - Fix 2: Lightning spell lag has been corrected, for real this time. Thanks
    Gades.

  News 5/25/01:

  - Fix: Lightning spell lag has been corrected.

  - Fix: Logging in from non-safe rooms will automatically transfer you to
    your home. If your home is not safe, Nodeka will transfer you to the 
    default safe room.

  - Fix: Crash bug in the tree system fixed.

  - Fix: Output bug related to citadel count fixed.

  - Fix: Crash bug due to Nijlo having a mental lapse. Once Nijlo got his
    brain back he was able to easily correct the bug. Problem was related to
    a minor change in the "wear" code. 
 
    Be careful there may be some other crash bugs around.

  - Fix: Citadel bug has been fixed, the citadel will not break nearly as often
    as it had in the past. However, there is still one citadel bug remaining.
    We are beginning our work to fix the second bug now.

  - Fix: Both the winner and loser of a player fight in the Citadel now see
    number of players remaining on their exit.

  - Improvement: Tree code has been optimized, this will speed everything up.
    The implications are too far to list, mostly this was done now to ensure
    future growth can be sustained without any performance loss.

  - Fix: Wear bug related to eq locations fixed (boy was this a pain). Wear
    now handles things like:

      wear xxx, left wie
      wear xxx, right wrist
      wear xxx, l ear

    The command 'remove' still needs work.

  News 5/23/01:

  - New area: The Bhalin Deeps -- hail Soth!!!!!

  - Fix: Crash bug related to invalid naming (it's complicated)
  - Fix: The give command has been fixed to correctly handle nim-flagged PCs

  - Change: Pay attention to this one

  Lag is now cumulative. Be prepared, things are going to get interesting.

  - Fix: Lag is no longer removed by movement. Special thanks to Cookie for 
  pointing out a bug related to movement removing all lag. He's received a
  10,000 platinum bonus for finding and turning in this bug.

  News 5/21/01:

  - Change: Shielded mob gold has been decreased.

  - Siteban: The player controlling Khaled has been site-banned. Please 
    remember to always follow the rules and show the Nodeka staff the respect
    they deserve. The character Khaled will remain unzapped, however the 
    player controlling the character previously no longer has access to 
    Nodeka. The Har'luth clan has been given the right to do whatever they
    choose with the character.

    It should also be noted that the clan Har'luth has rarely broken rules in
    the past. The majority of rule breaking, bug abusing, was from the player
    behind Khaled.

 Lastly, the point that needs to be driven home is: no matter how important
    you think you are, if you mistreat the Nodeka staff and you break the rules
    you will be dealt with severely. No matter who you are.

  - Change: Svirfneblin magical regeneration has been increased. Thanks Atim!!
  - Change: Spam kill rule has been REMOVED.

  News 5/18/01:

  - Fix: Greater summon can now only summon players.

  News 5/16/01:

  - Fix: Bug with strings has been fixed (i.e. using sun stones works again)

  - Change: A good deal of performance improvements have been made, in general
    this means Nodeka will run more smoothly. Many more to performance 
    improvements to come, of course.

  - Fix: Significant item fixes (mostly cosmetic, i.e. naming)
  - Fix: Track help file.

  News 5/14/01:

  - Fix: Color bug fixed.
  - Change: Help get, put and give have been updated.

  - Fix: Crash bug has been located and fixed.

  - New: Naj'k/Grei design has been altered greatly -- work is not finished yet.
  - Fix: Failed output for skills, fury, frenzy, and hammer. Thanks Black!

  News 5/11/01:

  - New: Check out the new badass website at: nodeka.com! Thanks Mirinda!!

  - Change: E-mail addresses have been updated.
  - New: Social moon.
  - Change: The hammer skill output has been altered. Thanks Exar!!!
  - Fix: Help file fixes. Help e-mail is right now.
  - Fix: New socials have been fixed.

  News 5/10/01:

  - Fix: Opening/closing doors now outputs correctly -- thanks Theophrastus!!

  News 5/9/01:


  - Change: Berserk/Insanity lag reduced. Excellent points Hreow! Thank you!

  - New: Socials - headbutt, stare, spit, wiggle. Please e-mail Trinity with
    problems in socials. See 'display social' for the full social list.

    Please e-mail Trinity with new social ideas (or post them in compose).
    Trinity's e-mail is in 'display staff'.

  News 5/7/01:

  - Fix: Several fixes to help files. Thanks Sashi!!

  News 5/5/01:

  - Change: Storm Haven [sic], Xuvgra Output [sic], Ancient Barrows, and Braggi's Proving Ground have new mob AI. Be careful.

  News 5/4/01:

  - Fix: Critical crash bug has been fixed. Thanks Myx

  - Also, we forgot to mention the two excellent testers who helped us test
    the race change functionality. Special thanks to:

    Eldomir and Drakmorden!!!

  News 5/3/01:

  - New: command 'alteration', see 'help alteration' for more details.
  - New: Race changes can now be purchased. See 'help race change'.

  News 5/1/01:

  - Fix: Major fix on active socket connections being blocked at 64, this 
    problem has been fixed (we sincerely apologize for not recognizing this
    bug sooner). The new socket connection maximum is 1024, meaning 1024
    players will be able to connect before login attempts will be turned away.
    Special thanks to all the testers for bringing this to our attention.

  - New: command "map" can be used interchangably with "peripheral". Both
    commands trigger the same action.

  - An evolutionary step forward: auto-peripheral now works everywhere and it's
    lag-free!!! (world travel still lags slightly)

    Exits will not be included in auto-peripheral (as of now at least) due to
    the extra amount of processor usage it'll require. It should be noted that
    it took a great deal of optimization to get peripheral to run fast enough
    everyone could use it at all times! In addition, it took a good deal of
    testing, and we have the following individuals to thank:
 
    Izod, Mel, Myx, Nix, Rar, Veldrin, Yadvashem

    Thanks testers!!! In addition, a special thanks to all the donators who
    allow Nodeka to stay abreast with the fastest hardware both CPU and this
    beautiful dedicated T-1 we have, without the support all of you give to
    Nodeka none of this would be possible! Thank you so much!!

  - See 'help map' or 'help peripheral' to understand how it works.
 
  - Typing: "toggle peri" or "toggle map" will toggle auto-mapping on and off.

  News 4/30/01:

  - Fix: Crash bug related to stratagem (and soul egression) fixed.
  - Change: Modifiers such as "hovering above the ground" as well as all
    others no longer appear (there's a reason for this).
  - Fix: stratagem draining endurance when manually entering the skill name
    has been fixed (it only drains when it's being used now).
  - Major internal speed optimizations.

  News 4/26/01:

  - New: Remort footpad skill, stratagem of the cloak
  - Fix: Nim gold amount fixed for minor and major remorts (thanks Flea).

  News 4/23/01:

  - Change: heitons now receive dignitary manifestation at level 30 and keepers
    at level 49 (this applies for all heiton remorts as well).

  - Change: Dignitary manifestation has been serious altered.

  - Change: Meditative healing costs less, lags less, and heals less. Output
    for this spell has also been touched up.

  News 4/22/01:

  - Fix: Follower equipment loss bug when your inventory is full and the 
    follower is killed (corpse would not be transferred back to you). This
    did not occur with followers who didn't leave corpses. Major bug, major
    reward to the player that found it.

  - Fix: Conceal ANSI attribute yanked due to some UNIX boxes misinterpretting
    its behavior.

  - Magically class based mobs (i.e. sorcerers, mjols, but not joufus) are
    no longer valid followers. This applies for all ways of ways of getting 
    them. However, this does not include followers which are created (i.e.
    conjure diety).

  - Gold string has been altered. You will most likely want to change your
    splitting trigger to the following:

      ^You get a pile of %0 gold %1

    We realize this change forces you all to change your splitting actions.
    However, it should also be noted that this change will reduce the amount
    of spam you get by one line for each corpse you loot. If you kill on the
    average of 100 mobs per hour, you will receive 100 less lines of spam each
    hour. We believe this is more beneficial then the change required to alter
    your splitting action. It should also be noted that you can change the
    color of the gold string via:

      color coins gol, <color name>

    or a more concrete example:

      color coins gol, lig red

  - Many other internal changes to make Nodeka faster and your transfers
    faster. Special thanks to the testers:

 Tezrik (lead), Rar, Kerlyn, Mel, Sashi, Jesus, Kakistos, Vagrant, and Myx

  News 4/21/01:

  - Built in help for storm crystals is now active through the command:
  
      stone storm

    Please refer to it if you have any further questions regarding how storm
    crystals work.

  - Fix: Crash bug that has been haunting us for the last couple days is now
    fixed! Yay!! Had to do with character names exceeding a certain amount and
    then offsetting an index into another string. Anyways, fixed now!

  News 4/20/01:

  - Visit, transient alteration, inosculated crossing and methodic shift no 
    longer work when attempted in battle, period.

  - Minor help file fix (thanks Eramis)!

  News 4/19/01:

  - Fix: Finally!! That annoying display problem with the experience line
    of your scoresheet in *some* clients has been fixed. Let me also say, this
    bug was ENTIRELY the fault of the client. This is why most of you probably
    have no idea what the fix really is, while others have been dying for it.
    Two words: ampersand. Ok, that's not two words, but those clients which
    were failing to display it properly were failing because they were 
    displaying the ampersand with TWO characters, not one!!!

    Want to test your client?

 The following two lines are identical, except the first line has an 
    addition sign and the second line has an ampersand. If the words fixes 
    and client stick together, on the second line your client is affected by,
 the bug known as "the ampersand zone":

      + Nodeka even fixes client problems
      & Nodeka even fixes client problems

    For Jaba users who want to see a really cool trick: highlight the
    ampersand on the second line. Whooa, cool eh? =)

  - Fix: Rescue strings fixed (thanks Mitee Mel!)

  - There was a log file problem which was just noticed on the last crash.
    We've been unable to determine the reason of the last crash due to 
    corrupted logging information. This has been fixed, we'll be ready for
    for the crash when it rears its ugly head. This is a different bug then
    the one early with the old code. We're not sure where this bug lives yet.
    Apologies for the inconvenience. We'll get her. Grrrrrrr!!!

  - The crash bug of this morning has been fixed. We are currently calling
    this bug: "Justin wrote bad bad code again" bug. We hope he seeks 
    professional help soon as Nodeka cannot continue to undergo this type of
    mistreatment (in truth, the code which broke Nodeka most recently was 
    extremely old code -- we're talking at least eight months old -- we all 
    know that the *new* and *improved* Justin doesn't code any bugs. Ha ha ha.

  - Rescue is being worked on (not finished yet, but strings are changed)

  - Safety: Added internal code to make certain functionality more safe. We
    realize this is vague, it's suppose to be. =)

  News 4/18/01:

  - Fix: Internal modifications, be more cautious for a crash than normal.
    Although the new code has been tested thoroughly, it still may have a 
    crasher in it somewhere. Save often.

  - Fix: Internal performance optimizations (both space and time complexity
    improvements).

  - Fix: Minor discrepancy with description string in player files. Nothing 
    major. This fix won't change your description in any way.

  - Fix: Holy analgesic will now let the caster/invoker know when the target
    of the spell is fully healed (as is the case with wounded abatement).
    Thanks Allegra!!

  - Fix: Modification to circle of bane to better fulfill its purpose. Circle
    of bane will now, more effectively, make the target which has been baned
    less accurate in battle.

  - New: Storm crystals are now fully functional. Storm crystals can save up
    to; experience loss, stat loss and item/eq loss. In the event that the
    storm crystal saves you from nothing, the storm crystal is not taken from
    you. For each affect the storm crystal saves you from, a message will be
    displayed stating such, for example:

    Your storm crystal protects you from stat loss.
    Your storm crystal protects you from experience loss.
    Your storm crystal protects you from item loss.

    Please remember storm crystals can save you from all three affects or
    any combination thereof. This means the storm crystal may save you from
    stat loss but you may still lose experience and items. All combinations
    are possible, for more information see 'help stone'.

  - Fix: Ignore string held in player files was incorrect, it is now saving
    properly. You may need to manually clear your ignore string.

  - Fix: Another well hidden shield crash bug has been fixed.

  - Fix: Potential problems with the new help file structure have been 
    resolved in all locations (we hope) that may have caused corruption.

  - Fix: More internal code cleanup for better overall performance. Again, 
    this type of work will continue for several months until Nijlo is 
    satisfied with the state of the code.

  News 4/16/01:
  - Fix: Race/Class help in character generation now works again. Special
    thanks to Veldrin.
  - Fix: Alignment change in fallad and daja classes for healing spells
    is now changing alignment to a more reasonable amount. Special thanks to
    Atim.

  - Fix: Finally!! We've tracked down and fixed the infamous ambush crash bug
    that was eluding us. The way it was done was by ambushing a target and 
    then shadowing *anything*. The character would then stop shadowing and if
    the ambush target walked into the room, Nodeka would crash. Somewhat 
    complex, but fixed now! Hooray!!

  - New: Kneecap biting racial for dwarves and hobbits!! Beware the uncanny
    power of those under four feet!!
  - Slight cleanup of the helpfile system. It's a little bit easier for us to
    add help information now, but this modification is far from being 
    finished. Nijlo will work on this in more detail at a later time, for the
    time being the current change will suffice.
  - Fix: Description bug (where only the first word was being accepted in the
    in each line) has been fixed. You can enter a description for your 
    character now in the login screen (under option 3). We apologize for any
    inconvenience this may have presented.

  News 4/15/01:
  - New: Soul egression decreases alignment, slightly.
  - New: All fallad/daja healing spells now improve alignment, slightly.
  - Change: Flee now lags for 1 second with each use, and will fail more often
  - A large number of internal optimizations have been made to help Nodeka run
    faster and with more stability. This type of work will continue for 
    several months.

  News 4/12/01:
  - New: level 78 remort ruanbaere skill, frenzy
  - New: the undead race and its remorts now have physical resistance
  - New: level 25 ruanbaere skill, vehemence

  News 4/10/01:
  - Whocitadel command is usable again.
  - Quiver will no longer do insane damage for 300 dexterity players. It still
    has the *chance* of doing insane damage, but it won't happen every time
    as it did previously for characters with 300 dexterity.

  News 4/9/01:
  - Maximum items carried is now 30 until the character reaches level 30 at 
    which time it begins increasing by 1 per level (as before).
  - Newbie training mobs are now easier to kill.
  - Tracking bug, regarding name hiding, fixed.
  - Gargoyle's fury +hit/+dam lowered, duration raised
  - Insanity altered a lot, it's better now. It can actually increase the
    user's ability to hit, but it can also decrease their chances as well.
    I'll get a more detailed help file out when I have time. Also it only
    drains 3 endurance per hit now, rather than 4.

  !!! Pay attention to this one !!!
  - The role of agility/quickness has been severely altered. Just what that 
    means will be revealed soon enough. Mob fights will be different. Player
    fights will be extremely different.

  - Bellow bug fixed, thanks Soth/Fayte.
  - Whocitadel command has been temporarily disabled.
  - Fixed: casting/invoking on a player with an apostrophe in their name
    (thanks Allegra)

  News 4/7/01:

  - Major internal cleanup (save often, some of the changes may cause a crash)
  - Soul guardian no longer regenerates health!
  - Summon/Greater Summon can no longer summon people in battle.
  - Naj'k/Grei string bug fixed
  - Over 30,000 lines of code modified to integrate new command object since
    the work began last Sunday. Too many things modified/fixed to list.

    Overal goal: make Nodeka more stable

    Special thanks to testers: Eldomir, Myx, Veldrin and Mystic

  4/1/01:
  - Fix: Palm bug fixed, output cleaned up. Thanks Junior.
  - Fix: Input stack fixed, internal re-architecture.
  - Fix: Stones roll-over bug fixed.

  3/31/01:

  - Crash: 99.9% sure charge crash bug is now fixed.
    Hreow and Myx -- you guys rock!

  - Item manipulation: bug fixed regarding not being able to look at items 
    correctly.
  - Charge available to ruanbaeres again. Save often, there may still be a
    crash bug in it.
  - "Track" command overhauled -- cool output.
  - Several other internal cleanups/fixes.

  - New: See "help donation", "help stone"

  - New: Command "gems" changed to "stone"
  - New: Sun stone code is complete, try: "stone sun," or "stone sun"
  - New: Glacious, Infuscated and Storm stones should be active soon!

  - Crash: New character generation crash bug fixed *correctly* now.

  3/30/01:
  - Crash: New character generation crash bug fixed

  - Train: Less than 100 stats back to original train/enhance prices
  - Train: Interal code corrections

  - New: Command "donations"
  - New: Command "gems"

  - New Commands will be explained when they are fully functional in the next
    day or so. This is sort of a preview of what you will be able to access.
    A good majority of the "gems" code is finished, it should be finalized
    by 4/1 or 4/2. There is no help on either of these commands yet, it will
    go in as soon as the functionality is finished.

  3/29/01:
  - Train: Primary stat exp needed back up
    We're still not done with these changes, so try not to freak out too much.
  - Score sheet fix: Aura bug finally fixed

  3/28/01:

  - Train change:

      8 Primary stats:

          Experience needed, way down
          Platinum cost, way up

      Pools:

          Experience needed, up

  - Enhance change:

      8 Primary stats:

          Platinum cost, up

  - Infinite Nijlo: buy/sell infinite loop bugs fixed

  - Buy syntax: buy <item keywords> , <mob>
                buy, <mob> (buys "all")
    Notice the comma (type "buy" to see the syntax)

  - Sell syntax: sell <item keywords> , <mob>
    Notice the comma (type "sell" to see the syntax)

  3/27/01:

  - Crash fixes: two time to live crash bugs have been fixed

  3/26/01:


  - List syntax: list <item keywords> , <mob>
                 list, <mob> (lists "all")
    Notice the comma (type "list" to see the syntax)

  - Buy/Sell should be finished tomorrow. Apologies for the delay.

  - Note: List Commands, List Spells, List Skills, List Races,
          List Classes, List Staff are now:

          Display Commands, Display Spells, Display Skills, Display Races,
          Display Classes, Display Staff.

  - All player files of 1.0 converted to new XML format of 2.0.

  - Two very important immortal commands fixed (thanks Myx)

  - Followers can now be attacked in safe rooms.

  - Masters can see their followers equipment missing locations

  - Nodeka 1.0 crash bug related to tracking has been fixed

  - Please remember you can change your "page length" setting in toggle
    which will allow you to scroll through more than 21 lines at a time.
    21 lines is the default screen size for old-school terminals, thus we
    need to maintain compatibility with that older technology. However,
    most of you can probably see nearly 50 lines of text on one screen,
    so please look into the "toggle page" option.

  3/25/01:

  Nodeka 2.0 is released.

  - Get syntax: get <item keywords> , <container>
    Notice the comma (type "get" to see the syntax)

  - Put syntax: put <item keywords> , <container>
    Notice the comma (type "put" to see the syntax)

  - Give syntax: give <item keywords> , <player/mob>
    Again, the comma (type "give" to see the syntax)

  - Wear syntax: wear <item keywords> , <specific or general locations>
    Notice the comma (type "wear" to see the syntax)
    Enter the command 'LIST EQUIPMENT' for locations

  - Remove syntax: remove <item keywords> , <specific or general locations>
    (type "remove" to see the syntax)
    Remove is a *bit* buggy, I think specific locations don't work yet,
    we'll get that worked out though

  - Color syntax: color <color setting> , <color name>
    Notice the comma. Also, you'll see some new color settings, many more
    to come.
    (type "color garbage" to see the syntax, I'll fix this)

  - !!!!! Important: Sacrifice corpses !!!!!!

  - Due to a change regarding [[]]item ordering, all items placed in rooms are
    now grouped in a queue formation. What this means to you:

    Freshest corpses at the bottom

    Therefore please change your looters to the following:

    "get all, corpse; sac corpse"

    Or:

    "get all.gold, corpse; sac corpse"

  March 25th, 2001. A date that will forever be special to me.
  
  The day Nodeka 2.0 was released.

  As I don't want to prevent you from getting into Nodeka 2.0, I'm going to
  clutter up the message of the day AFTER it's released. This message is to
  give you a heads up on things you're going to want to make sure you pay
  attention to. So, here's the quick list:

  - Get syntax: get <item keywords> , <container>
    Notice the comma (type "get" to see the syntax)

  - Put syntax: put <item keywords> , <container>
    Notice the comma (type "put" to see the syntax)

  - Give syntax: give <item keywords> , <player/mob>
    Again, the comma (type "give" to see the syntax)

  - Wear syntax: wear <item keywords> , <specific or general locations>
    Notice the comma (type "wear" to see the syntax)
    Enter the command 'LIST EQUIPMENT' for locations

  - Remove syntax: remove <item keywords> , <specific or general locations>
    (type "remove" to see the syntax)
    Remove is a *bit* buggy, I think specific locations don't work yet,
    we'll get that worked out though


  - Other item commands which have been seriously revamped:
    Drop, Sacrifice, Donate, Inventory, Equipment (same syntax though)

  - Color syntax: color <color setting> , <color name>
    Notice the comma. Also, you'll see some new color settings, many more
    to come.
    (type "color garbage" to see the syntax, I'll fix this)

  - Output syntax is the same, but the command should "feel" more
    comfortable. However the NAMES are a bit different. Just type
    what you see and it'll switch the output on and off.

  - !!!!! Important: Sacrifice corpses !!!!!!

  - Due to a change regarding item ordering, all items placed in rooms are
    now grouped in a queue formation. What this means to you:

    Freshest corpses at the bottom

    There was no way getting around this, but we will have a very VERY sweet
    addition coming soon that it sure to please the lot of you. Until that
    solution is implemented please make sure you sacrifice corpses.

    You'll need to do this so you can continue getting gold from other mobs
    that you kill in the same room. Thus if you kill 5 mobs in a room and
    you do "get all, corpse" each time one dies, you'll only get the gold
    from the first mob you killed. Therefore please change your looters to the
    following:

    "get all, corpse; sac corpse"

    Or:

    "get all.gold, corpse; sac corpse"

    We apologize for any inconveniences this may present, but we GUARANTEE you
    the solution we have for this is going to make all of extremely happy!
    Until that solution is made available, we humbly request you follow the
    above example.

  - You'll see all sorts of subtle changes, some of them may annoy you, some
    of them may entice you. Whatever the case, please keep in mind all of the
    changes were made with a greater plan in mind. This is the beginning of
    that change.

  - Several months ago, when I first stumble across the creation of the tree
    object I mentioned that one day, everything would be based off of its 
    form. That day is here. As of now, almost every object is derived in one
    way or another from the tree object. It has opened up the doorway for many
    many things to come.

  - Much of what has been done in the past several months has been making 
    internal changes to support the direction we have wanted to take Nodeka.
    With this in mind you may be disappointed, you may have expected to see
    more concrete results. I personally guarantee you that once 2.0 stabilizes
    these ideas will go in at a pace unlike anything we've seen before. Not
    only will these changes go in FAST, they will be nearly bug free. I can
    guarantee this because the new layout prevents me from most of the typical
    coding mistakes. You don't have to take my word for it, I expect that many
    of you will have hoped for me; but I will give you what it is you're 
    looking for. The hard part of the road has been traveled, now we're ready
    lay down the future in whatever way we so choose.

    Nodeka 2.0 has opened up a number of opportunities that I had not only 
    never considered implementing, I had never even *thought* of implementing.

    The road that we have just finished traveling has been long and hard, but
    we now not only have the ambition of creating a master piece, we have the
    underlying technology to make it happen.

    You can expect a more detailed explanation of the future later today, but
    before I sign off I want to thank EVERYONE from the beta testing team:

    Rar - 
     
      Lead Tester, you gave direction to the group (including me) throughout
      the entire testing period.

      You kept us focused, on target and took a good majority of the stress
      on your shoulders. You kept the testing team closely organized and kept
      me up-to-date on all the major show stoppers. In addition, you spent 
      countless hours helping me and arguing with me about bugs.

      The burden of all the bugs was on your shoulders the entire time. It's
      nice to know, because if things turn out poorly I can just blame you. 

      Seriously though, it couldn't have been possible without you. You played
      the most vital role of all us and we cannot thank you enough for it.

    Blitzkrieg - 

      If your communication skills were as fine tuned as your
      persistence you'd grow up to be president. Thankfully I'll
      hold you captive on Nodeka for years to come and we'll have
      100% access to your talents. Fantastic testing Blitz.

    Drakmorden - 
      

      Your experience in Nodeka is astonishing for the amount of time you've
      been here. I still remember when you first showed up and were still a
      newbie to mudding in general: boy have you made strides. And even though
      our personal history hasn't been the "best", I'd be a fool if I didn't 
      recognize the talent you bring to the table. Excellent work Drak.

    Eldomir - 
 
      Easily the "newest" Nodeka player of the testing group. I think you've
      only been here for ... a couple months? In that time you've shown us 
      just how quick to learn and eager to find ways of improvement. It has 
      been a pleasure learning all we from you in the past month, and much 
      more to come in the future I'm sure. =)

    Izod - 
 
      Playing a much more crucial role than you could possibly know, you and 
      Rar pushed the upper limits of compose. Your testing and bug finding is 
      what will make the future possible (in addition you covered races and
      classes and just about anything else you could get your grubby footpad
      hands on).

      But I gotta ask, did you really need to create a 500 message board???
      Heh, rockin work Izod.

    Kakistos - 
 
       All your European punks are the same to us Americans: cocky as all 
       hell, outspoken, totally over-confident ... so basically, you fit right
       in. In addition, you're extremely driven. Your attention for detail 
       and ability to communicate that clearly and concisely is a tribute to 
       everyone.

    Khaled - 
 
       What can I say, you went through every class and skill in the game. And
       then some. It's been argued that you have a greater understanding of
       Nodeka than anyone, and I think your work only further agrees to that.

    Legend - 
 
       You came on late, but did just what was needed. Thanks Legend for being 
       there when we needed you and allowing us to probe into your expertise.

    Loki - 
 
       You're a crazy one Loki. In the last couple days the amount of bugs 
       you found surpassed everyone (partially because I was coding them on
       purpose to make you feel better and partially because you're just 
    badass). Difficult to understand at times, I half the time want to
       hug you or kill you. Still haven't decided which would be more 
       rewarding...

    Myxlplyk - 

       You were a real pain in the ass. Did I say "were"?

    Oenryth - 
 
       Kick ass job on all aspects, even though I left a major part of your 
       area till the end, you covered a huge spectrum of aspects in addition 
       to your own and were eager to try anything and everything thrown at 
       you. Great work in the early, middle and especially the late stages of
       testing. Phenomenal.

    Soth - 
 
       Our work has only begun. You and I have gone over all the aspects of 
       what building is and what it should be. And we're going to make those 
    ideas come to life. Thanks for being so patient Sother, we're going to
       be driving your ideas home now.

    Veldrin - 
 
       Charismatic, diplomatic and just generally a mastermind. Not only did 
       you keep Khaled and I from tearing each other apart at times, you
       covered a huge number of aspects in getting 2.0 out the door. And 
       finally, yes, you also managed to destroy Nodeka more times than 
    anyone else.
    
       Yes, I'm still pissed off.

    Yadvashem - 
 
       You is da man. Unparalleled level of understanding, patience and 
       vision. You've been a mentor to me as well as a truly  unbiased 
    visionary. I can't count the number of times you and I have gone over
       aspects of Nodeka to improve what we have now are further express our
       original environment. In testing, you showed your prowess for being
       able to understand the deep complications and not let those distract 
       you.

  More to come about 2.0 later ...

  Now buckle up folks, ground-shattering technology awaits...

2000

[Show/hide]

Total updates: 116

 News 12/02/00:
 - Fix for "Experience" line in scoresheet to work with faulty clients.
 - Login character options screen strings externalized.
 - Login character password change strings externalized.
 - Login character description change strings externalized.
 - Final acceptance step of character creation cleaned up.
 - Strings for deletion of character through character options externalized.
 - We're going out on a limb here and allowing players to do something which
   seems to follow along lines of allowing more player creativity and control: 

   Apostrophes are now allowed in names.

   There are some restrictions: your name can't begin or end with an 
   apostrophe. You are limited to having a single apostrophe in your name.
   Thus:

   Valid Name:      M'nliir
   Valid Name:      Mnl'iir
   Valid Name:      Mnlii'r

   Invalid name:    'Mnliir    (begins with apostrophe)
   Invalid name:    M'nl'iir   (contains more than one apostrophe)
   Invalid name:    Mnliir'    (ends in an apostrophe)

   Keep in mind that permanent name changes cost 500 platinum. If you wish 
   to change your name to take advantage of the new feature make sure you 
   have the 500 platinum available BEFORE requesting a name change.

 - Important: rules have been updated, see 'help rules'

 - Colors have been updated: black is now a valid color, as well as [[background 
   colors]]. See 'help color' for more details.
 - Note: background colors start with 'b', for example: blig red.
   You'll probably only want to do this for the border color of the score 
   sheet.
 - Who and Score are now customizable. Set your own color preferences with the
   color command.
 - Help files for all of the color settings coming soon! For now, just play
   with the color setting and see what they do (most of them are obvious).

 - Note: the mind-boggling new feature is NOT implemented yet! The above 
   changes were brought about by beginning to implement the new feature and 
   running across each item as the implementation begin. We appreciate your 
   patience while we continue to implement it.

 News 11/28/00:
 - Some more internal engine changes/fixes. Mostly for stabilization.
 - Code cleanup.
 - Nijlo locate crash bug, Nijlo verify crash bug, Nijlo smash crash bug into 
   millions of tiny pieces because crash bug make Nijlo very very angry.
   Crash bug die.
 - Another crash bug has been fixed. This being the second crash bug that's
   been found in the new code, we felt it was appropriate to take a minute
   and explain what's been going on behind the scenes which has been causing 
   these events. When the score sheet was changed what most of you were
   probably not aware of is that a huge amount of code had been added. This
   new code is fairly new ground in terms of what it can offer, however with
   new designs come new issues. These issues, unfortunately were not all 
   caught before the new code was released. We apologize for not catching all
   the possible errors beforehand, however the code was heavily tested and
   through our passes no errors were found. You, the players, have been great
   quality assurance testers for pointing out all the mistakes that exist and
   we are thankful for your efforts and patience through all of this. The good
   news is that once this code is 100% stable it will be reused over and over.
   The new code that's been causing the crashes is very low level, therefore
   it's already touching a huge portion of Nodeka. It will continue to be
   used even more thoroughly but the low level portion which has been causing
   crashes will not change. This means you will begin to see more and more
   features implemented with almost 100% stability. The downside of achieving
   that level of stability is that the low level design needed to be rehashed
   and in doing so, we've missed two crash bugs. The most recent crash bug was
   very easy to rectify once located and we believe it may be the last of the
   crash bugs with the new design. Again, please accept our apology for any
   inconvenience this may have been to you while we've located and fixed these
   bugs.

   We appreciate your ongoing support,
   The Nodeka Staff

 News 11/27/00:
 - Help for every score field has been finished (boy was that fun).
 - Bug with gender appearing incorrectly on score has been fixed.
 - Slight problem with score misprinting commas for negative values greater 
   than 100 million has been fixed.

 News 11/26/00:
 - Toggling reminders will turn on/off recuperation strings. You will still
   regenerate faster, but you'll be able to dismiss those annoying strings.
 - New internal object code written
 - Score sheet redesigned
 - XML parser optimization finalized, it really hauls ass now!
 - New string code written to help enhance user interfaces and will allow
   more code to be written without Nijlo screwing it up (this was coded to
   ensure Nijlo can't code string memory leaks =)
 - Expect something mind-boggling soon!

 News 11/16/00:
 - Learning curve has new meaning: it now affects experience gained. For quite
   awhile now we've been probing possible solutions to make pure 
   caster/invoker classes easier to level. Through an indepth conversation
   with Cixelsyd (you rock Cix) we were able to take an initial idea he had
   and propegate its affects throughout Nodeka. Learning curve now affects
   experience gained in a logrithmic way, this means differences in learning
   curve at high values have little difference between them, whereas 
   differences in learning curve at low values have large differences between
   them. For example:

     Player A has 50 learn curve (approx: 100 int, 100 wis)
     Player B has 60 learn curve (approx: 120 int, 120 wis)

     Difference in learn curve experience bonus: minor

     Player A has 10 learn curve (approx: 10 int, 10 wis)
     Player B has 20 learn curve (approx: 30 int, 30 wis)

     Difference in learn curve experience bonus: major

   This change of course has other purposes than just making the leveling
   of pure caster/invoker easier. We have been trying to find new and creative
   ways of making intellect and wisdom more important to all types of players
   (we're still searching for a constitution end-all). This feature adds a
   subtle but nice incentive to increase intellect and wisdom for all
   players. 

   Also note the experienced gained string has been changed and we realize
   many of you will have to rewrite your 'get all corpse;sac corpse;save'
   triggers. We apologize for any inconvenience.

   Note: all experience gains now factor learning curve, this includes nimming
         experience bonuses and healing experience bonuses. Future 
         implementations of experience gains will include learning curve
         bonuses as well.

 - Nimming experience has been decreased slightly. Nijlo has
   has been analyzing footpads for quite some time and has reached this
   conclusion based on several case-studies. Keep in mind the amount of gold (tier 1)
   nimmed was up for alteration but was shot down by Nijlo as to keep 
   footpads as great money-runners. However, this addition will create an
   environment where footpads will need to do more than nim.
 - Help on learning curve, intellect and wisdom have been changed slightly.
 - Inventory bug allowing inventory to reach negative numbers has been fixed.
 - Monks Hand Roll has been raised.
 - Real death can drain up to 500 million experience now, rather than the old
   cap of 100 million

 News 11/15/00:
 - Cls Dice/Cls Roll are now: Hand Dice/Hand Roll.

 - Hand Dice/Hand Roll have new meaning in battle. See 'help hand dice' and
   'help hand roll' for detailed help files. The jist [sic] of the change is that
   hand dice and hand roll now compute not only +damage but +hit as well.
   The most obvious advantage of this change is giving extra hitting accuracy
   to joufus and monks, however monks are targetted [sic] more directly. This is
   because monks have a much higher Hand Roll and much lower Hand Dice than
   joufus. Because of monks higher hand roll and lower hand dice their added
   hitting accuracy will be consistently higher than joufus (although joufus
   will feel a nice benefit from this). This improvement, while still 
   affecting joufus, was directed towards monks with the above idea in mind. 

The other, not so obvious, change this brings about is granting mobs more
+hit (since most mobs are weaponless). This additional hitting power 
   should affect most mobs in an insignificant way.

   In addition, we realize every class is affected by this change, but monks
   and joufus are the only classes who can fight with no weapons (or with 
   shields) and actually fare well. 

   P.S. Yes, this will make monks one of the best raw hitting classes in all 
        of Nodeka. And that was our intent. To quote Master Monk Haran 
        directly: "they practice fighting with one weapon all of their 
                   lives. You're damn right they're going to be accurate with
                   that one weapon." (maybe there was a little adlib)

 - 'Score' has been altered slightly to adhere to the above change.
 - Door bug fixed (thanks Theophrastus)

 News 11/12/00:
 - Minor bug with open/close commands fixed (thanks Mordeath)
 - Focused sphere now works in any condition.
 - Focused sphere no longer reduces +hit of incoming attacks.
 - Focused sphere has reduced lag and can be re-vitalized even if the affect
   has not fallen (this will not double the affects, but rather it allows
   the user to keep the sphere up at all times).
 - Practices can be enhanced (this has been in for awhile now, but we failed
   to mention it in the message of the day )
 - Character statistic roll code cleanup (another use of CGenericPair)

 News 11/12/00:
 - The commands 'open' and 'close' have been revamped. This change will make
   opening and closing a doors much easier and much more intuitive. It will
   allow multiple doors of the same name to be opened/closed by repeating
   the open/close command. For example:

     open door (opens first door in directional checks)
     open door (opens second door in directional checks)

   This change also includes logical directional checks (as identified above)\
   which will open exits in the same order each time based on the direction
   ordering (i.e. checking order: north, east, south, west, up, down). Some
   other small touches have been added to make the user interface better.

 News 11/6/00:
 - Problems with peripheral has been fixed. These problems specifically
   relate to showing exits where hidden doors were.
 - Peripheral code entirely rewritten for speed optimizations and clarity
   improvements. This was a 40-50 hour effort, the good news is peripheral is
   flying fast and very readable. Some new toys are going to be coming out
   for peripheral and hunting. These new features (which aren't fully 
   identified yet) are possible because of the clarity improvements. In basic
   terms, the code's easier to read so it's easier to enhance.
 - Hunt/shi-ku/shadow now require an exact name for finding
   a target. If you were going to hunt Fayte, you'd type: hunt fayte. You
   would be unsuccessful in hunting Fayte if you typed: hunt fay. Keep in
   mind this alteration was done to help you hunt more successfully. By
   forcing an exact name to be searched for, you can remove other 'catches'.
   An example of this is as follows:

    Player: Legend
    Player: Legendary

    Previous hunt action: hunt legend
    Will find both Legend and Legendary -- depending on who's closer.

    New hunt action: hunt legend
    Will find Legend only.

 - Some code tweaks to improve stability and speed. Also general code
   cleanups for increased clarity. Mostly this was done to help decrease the
   time spent creating new features -- this will be an ongoing effort.
 - New dark creator skill: cubic dissonance

 News 11/1/00:
 - The door problem has been fixed, however Har'luth and Avarus clan halls
   have undergone some door losses which could not be inherently fixed.
   Please e-mail Myxlplyk the door(s) which were lost and they'll be fixed
   immediately. All other doors which were corrupted have been fixed. We
   sincerely apologize for any inconvenience.

 News 10/30/00:
 - Enhance bug fixed -- nice catch Fayte
 - Cool battle round bug fixed (thanks Yadvashem)
 - Mental Tiaran fixed
 - Color: new message in 'compose' on how to add color to your messages

 News 10/29/00:
 - The meta command is gone
 - Three new commands: train, enhance, and convert. See help on each.

 News 10/23/00:
 - New 2nd remort ataelos skill: mental tiaran (watch out, this one's deadly)
 - Mobs will now track you down much more effectively and require no tracks
   to do so. We realize and accept the implications this has upon vanish.

 News 10/20/00:
 - Crash bug with affects and critical fixed (thanks Cutie)

 News 10/18/00:
 - Ignoring someone now ignores their socials as well
 - Inviolable asylum now shows a message when the affect falls
 - After great consideration, multiple shield hits have been re-inserted
   This change will allow more than one shield to hit per attack. Therefore,
   if you have 3 shields up, you can return 3 shield hits to any single
   attack. Feel free to post your argument within 'compose' and it will be
   considered. The main reason for this change was the inhibition that was
   being applied for races with shields and classes with shields. Keep in
   mind that shields do relatively low damage and usually shield spells
   are only given to classes which have no non-offensive healing method.

 - Finally, I've implemented a new idea which works with what most of you
   know as the "compose" system. I won't go into detail about it's
   implementation but I'd like to give just a brief explanation of what it is
   and why it's good. I'll be taking this conversation to 'compose'. If you'd
   like to hear more about what this addition gains us, look for the message
   entitiled: [ Hooking ]

   For those of you who might have been wondering what's been going on for
   the last week, you'll want to read my Hooking message.

 News 10/10/00:
 - Visit, transient alteration, methodic shift and inosculated crossing
   no longer work on creatures who are beyond your remort tier. Non-remorts
   cannot visit 1st remorts, 1st remorts cannot visit 2nd remorts.
 - Summon and Greater Summon work in the same manner as visit-type spells.
 - Failing to summon someone in your area will no longer display an 
   identifiable message different than normal failing which was leading 
   people to make logical conclusions on whether or not a player was in their
   area.

 News 10/10/00:
 - Hunt, shi-ku and shadow have all been altered. They will now work in any
   area and continue to stay active until the user stops using them or the
   user runs too low on endurance. These skills will also drain endurance 
   with every step that is made and each "look" that is done (as looking also
   shows the target's location). Lag has been added to hunt/shi-ku/shadow
   when the target is located, however no lag is appended while the target
   is not located. There is no lag penalty for stopping hunt/shi-ku/shadow.
   See help on each for more details.

 News 10/7/00:
 - tholecs no longer have ambush (stripped from remorts as well)
 - Vtshinne's no longer prevents ambush as tholecs no longer have it
 - tholecs now get hunt at non-remort
 - New skill: Acutus Videre
 - New skill: Grete Sja
 - New skill: Shi-Ku
 - New skill: Rokkan
 - New skill: Shadow
 - New skill: Takushiki
 - tholec remorts get: acutus videre, and grete sja
 - joufu remorts get: shi-ku and rokkan
 - Footpad remorts get: shadow and takushiki
 - Necromancer remorts get: shadow
 - The above batch of skills are all "hunt" related but vary greatly in 
   implementation. However, we're not going to tell you "how" they differ. =)
   But don't be fooled -- they are not replicas of each other.

 News 10/7/00:
 - New Online Resource Library (ORL) will be explained when
   it's integration is finished. This is just another example of Nodeka's
   tree system (which you use 'compose' with).
 - Door opening/closing is now back to one letter (open n.door).
 - All door issues are now resolved

 News 10/4/00:
 - Tree (Compose) Issue:
   
   Nodekians:

   Recently a change was made to the XML parser for optimization. This change
   needed to be made and seemed quite stable, showing no outstanding flaws. 
   It was fully tested and verified before implemented. Unfortunately, 
   while the optimization was mostly correct, there was one line of code 
   that was incorrect, which was overlooked. This line of code has 
   corrupted the entire tree (compose) structure at almost every location.

   Nijlo has repaired the code and has verified the corruption will no longer
   happen. However, the data which has been affected cannot be reversed.

   Therefore, Myxlplyk and Zed have taken it upon themselves to piece the 
   information back together by hand. Because of their efforts, we will soon 
   have 'compose' back on-line. Please note that some of the messages may 
   have been lost due to this corruption. I would like to take a moment and
   thank Zed and Myx for their outstanding efforts in repairing the tree 
   structure.

   We sincerely apologize for any inconvenience,
   Nodeka Staff

 - Hunt has been optimized (over 1000 times faster)
 - Peripheral has been optimized (over 1000 times faster)
 - Due to the optimization to Hunt, all lag has been removed
   (this was Nijlo's intent from the beginning)

 - P.S. We know what you're thinking, the last optimization took out
   the entire tree structure why are we doing more? 

   In answer to that question, these optimizations are required of Nodeka
   to satisfy Nijlo's plans for the future. Peripheral and hunt needed to be
   optimized in order for his future skill/spell development to continue. As 
   of now, hunt and peripheral use less than 0.1% of the processor cycles. 
   Previously they were using up to 97%.

   However, we guarantee these optimizations will not have the disasterous [sic]
   affects the XML parser optimization had. We can boldly guarantee this 
   because there's only one tree ...

... and Nijlo already completely obliterated that sucker! =)

 News 10/2/00:
 - Hunt now works PERFECTLY!!!! It needed some multiple fixes.

 News 9/30/00:
 - Vanish works while under conditions again, but will fail more often
 - Charge/Ice discharge work with Naj'k and Grei now (these may be toned down)
 - Hurricane kick/Vicious fist have increased accuracy
 - Bug: Cloak % staying up for 100 phases is now fixed
 - Please read the critical message left by Myx in 'compose'

 News 9/23/00:
 - Gargoyle 2nd remort colossal attack fixed
 - Vanish will no longer succeed under impairment (unless broken)
 - Charge and ice discharge lag HEAVILY reduced
 - Ambush/quit bug dealing with breaking anti-ambush/Nodeka-lock is fixed
 - Tree is now nearly 100 times faster (optimized)

 News 9/20/00:
 - Inviolable asylum now shows up correctly on the 'affects' list
 - Minor bug with charge fixed
 - The command 'class' now lists skills/spells of that class
 - Output on track altered slightly (it'll makes more sense this way)
 - New spell: ICE BLAST (2nd remort Sorcerer)

 News 9/19/00:

 - Fury and hammer don't give pk flags improperly anymore
 - New skill: CHARGE (2nd remort barb, level 100)
 - Hammer is going to be altered soon ...
 - Fury is now a remort barb skill
 - Defenders discipline has been given to ruanbaeres

 News 9/17/00:
 - Change to compose for ease of use.

 News 9/14/00:
 - Vanish allowing entry into clan halls and other rooms which should be
   inaccessible has been fixed.
 - Flee/retreat/vanish now access each direction with an equal chance
   of success.
 - Astral travel now works as intended with non-remorts, 1st remorts and
   2nd remorts.

 News 9/9/00:
 - The main "help" has been updated, type 'help' to see changes
 - Astral travel, clairavoyance and sixth sense have been altered.
   Remortal type now factors into the equation. Non-remorts cannot astral
   1st or 2nd remorts. 1st remorts cannot astral 2nd remorts. This applies
   for all three spells/skills above.
 - Peripheral has changed, see 'help peripheral' (thanks Bargle)
 - Petrify has been changed again. The latest change will do three things:
     1) Easier targets will be much more easy to paralyze
     2) Similar targets will reflect balanced success and failure
     3) Difficult targets will be much more more difficult to paralyze
 - New clan hall features, see 'help clan hall'

 News 9/2/00:
 - All affects names now match skill/spell names. Some players were
   having a hard time seeing what affects were up because of the naming.
 - Important: See 'help riddles' and 'help answer' if you haven't already
 - Important: The infamous Citadel crash bug has been SMASHED!

 News 9/1/00:
 - Critical attacks can now receive partial shield damage. This decision
   was reached to provide a compromise between criticals being too powerful
   and criticals becoming the "end-all" skill. Please keep in mind this
   decision was made to maintain a slight advantage for critical attacks
   while disallowing it from becoming all powerful.
 - Citadels rewards improved! See 'help citadel'
 - New Gaa'el racial: detect invisibility!
 - Wings of the dragon altered. Duration now lengthened, also the fly
   affect percent has been increased but the wing attack percent has been
   decreased.

 News 8/30/00:
 - Petrify has been toned down, it will miss more often now
 - Petrify now has extra lag associated with it
 - HP/mana/spirit/end metas are now individually calculated, rather than being 
   calculated as a sum. This will decrease EVERYONE'S meta cost (guaranteed)
 - A ton of code optimizations/cleanups
 - Some resource strings have been altered/improved
 - Petrify has even more lag, but mana and spirit cost dropped severely
 - Witches now have fireball
 - Visible toggle fixed in toggle list and output string

 News 8/29/00:
 - The 'visible' toggle is now in.
 - Holy light fixed (it now Naj'ks correctly)
 - Elemental Malediction hits much more often
 - Sensual sedation slightly more difficult to break
 - Some minor resource fixes

 News 8/23/00:
 Message of the day will no longer be in. Messages of the day will be stored
 in the message board for message of the day. This'll be implemented soon.

 News 8/21/00:
 - Tree enhancements, bug fixes, no color login now works

 News 8/20/00:
 - 'Compose' is now in, and may be accessible for players this boot

 News 8/6/00:
 - Nodeka experienced a crash bug today after putting in some of the
   more powerful code that's been written. To help clarify the situation, I thought
   I'd take a moment to explain.

   Software almost always has bugs. If you manage to code a program that has
   no bugs you are either Albert Einstein or you're writing a 2 line
   program. What I (yes, it's me Nijlo) have been working on recently is to
   help insure Nodeka's growth stays steady for the next decade and is based
   off of three fundamental ideas:

    i.  Spend more time designing it, and the code will naturally be better.
        This hardly needs an explanation, but I'll delve a little. In the
        past, I would write code profusely, which would seem to show that
        I was doing a lot (and in some sense, I was). The side-affect,
        however, of doing this "mass-production" of code is that maintanence [sic]
        and bug checking becomes a nightmare. Not to mention that most
        design improvements become unattainable if not impossible.

        It's fairly obvious that I've undergone several growing pains while
        building Nodeka, from redesigning things 3, 4, 5 times to failing to
        solve the description bug even after 15 attempts. These experiences
        have been painful, but very needed for me to understand how to design
        the system I envision today.

   ii.  Reuse, reuse, reuse. Build objects which can be applied everywhere.
        Instead of trying to build things which are issue specific, and 
        require a complete rewrite to accomplish the same thing with a 
        slightly different face, create things which will work with 
        everything, but may require a slight tweak for each individual case.
        This slight tweak will save hours of development time, and days of
        bug checking. Most importantly, and easily the most difficult to
        design and code: build abstractly (definitely harder than it sounds).
        Build boxes that come in every shape and size, that will carry
        anything ... and then reuse the hell out 'um (optimize later).

   iii. Quality over quantity. One of the best examples of this is the rave
        of MP3 software out there. Many boast to do a number of things, and
        turn out to crash more than they run. In the end, the software that's
        the most stable will win (Linux's race with Windows is a great
        example. Some don't know this, but Linux servers now take 29% of the
        server boxes out there). Considering that Linux isn't backed by a
        software giant as Windows is, this is truly a feat which leaves me in
        awe by Linus' (the creator of Linux) initial attempts. And not to get
        "too" side-tracked, but Linus is working on doing it again with a
        shot at completely revolutionizing laptops. The company, he and a
        number of the top brains in the world work for, are building low
        powered laptops. These laptops (supposedly arriving in the fourth
        quarter of the year) may turn the mobile PC industry on its head. As
        I'm an avid supporter of inovation [sic], feel free to by Transmeta's web
        page (www.transmeta.com) or just go to this URL to read up on them:

        http://www.transmeta.com/press/011900-1.html

  Now, back to my explanation of the crash tonight and the my direction with
  Nodeka. The crash tonight was, as most of you guessed, caused by the new 
  code which I had just implemented. What most of you may not have guessed,
  is that my new code actually "found" the bug which then crashed Nodeka.
  The crash bug was within code that was causing a memory leak for over a
  year. Once I was pointed in the right direction, it was only a matter of
  minutes before the damage was repaired. Very cool ...

  So, some of you may be thinking, "how does his new code 'find' bugs"? I'll
  spare you from asking: it doesn't. What it does do is secure and release
  memory much more frequently (and much more properly) than most of the other
  "older" code. It is because of this "packing" memory that memory leaks are
  found much more quickly (of course, I won't tell you "how" to pack memory,
  trade secret ... ya know?). 

  Anyhow, the reason you're hearing about this now, and not a year ago, is
  because I'm a much more disciplined coder than I was when I first ventured
  into the depths of Nodeka. I'm by no means a master, and doubt I ever will
  be, but I can assure you Nodeka will continue to thrive and implement the
  "coolest" but most stable things you can think of.

  Now, I'm going to share with you a small piece of information, just a tease
  of what's coming. The explanation above of the future and past wasn't 
  induced by the crash that took place and some funky new code that I've 
  developed overnight. In fact, it's taken me four weeks to develop the new 
  secret system I'm going to share with you, and boy-oh-boy has it been a 
  testament of faith ("Let's just do it the easy way" and such and such).

  Finally!

  What we have built is an integrated UNIX-expanding on-line access hierarchy
  supporting group/individuals, group-ownership/individual-ownership, smart
  searching and a bunch of other buzz words to wet your appetite.
 
  We're calling it: tree (it's a tree-based system)
 
  It is with the exception of Nodeka's AI and peripheral systems, the most 
  complex "thing" I've written. That being said, it is by far, the most robust
  system I have yet had the pleasure to design.

  Now you may be wondering why this is important to you, here's just a couple
  things tree can do for you:

   - Message Boards (topic grouping: flames, ideas, Mel's troll hut, etc.).
     Most other muds/on-line games have multiple boards for multiple dialogs.
     While we'll be giving all the clans their own message board, we'll have
     one major board broken into topics so you don't have to go wander off
     into the Abyss to find the next one. We'll also be placing them 
     conveniently around the globe to make your access to them easier.

   - Mortal building. That's right, we'll be able to do it. We'll have
     a mortal building area just so you can take a stab at building your own
     mobs, the way you think they should be. And if we use your ideas, of 
     course the platinum will be flowing your way. What about items and 
     areas? Well, maybe ... often times items are more difficult to create 
     accurately, and areas take a good deal of time to produce. We're
     considering it though.

   - Corpse-saving. Never again will you have to worry about a crash stealing
     your corpse. Nodeka's tree system will automatically cover that for you.
     So in the unlikely event of a crash, you won't be searching for the
     oxygen mask, tucking your head between your knees and kissing your ass
     goodbye.

   - On-line bug fixing. The truth is many things still require a reboot,
     but we're doing our damnedest to find new and creative ways to make your
     stay at Nodeka as smooth as Cindy Crawf ... well, smooth.

   - Massive time improvements for building areas, items, mobs, and whatever
     else you can think of. Anything that can be built through tree, will
     be. And it'll be done faassssst.

   - Did I mention the possibility (and yes, this is still hypothetical) of
     building skills and spells through tree? We'll keep you updated. Even
     if this isn't fully possible, the development of skills and spells will
     continue, hopefully at a rapid pace (like the old days, but without the
     bugs).

   - Quests. This is, I'm sure a big one for the lot of you. We've been 
     holding off on quests because we didn't want to give you the generic, 
     "go kill an ant and bring back its corpse" type of quest. We're talking
     about level by level, chapter by chapter quests that will leave you in 
     a blubbering foam of sweat begging for more abuse.

  So now that I've hopefully gotten your attention, we still have some major 
  pieces to get wrapped up before we can start pushing the above ideas in. So
  please don't get "too" excited. Right now, it looks like anywhere from 2 
  weeks to a month before a template for the builder can be done generically 
  and work for everything (as it should). Hopefully you're coming away with 
  a good sense of what to expect in the future and a reinforced belief that 
  Nodeka has been, and will continue to stay under development until it 
  eventually rules the civilized world (or at least a good portion of your 
  neighborhood).

     Mad Scientist signing out,
     Nijlo-man

 News 8/6/00:
 - Nodeka's been getting a serious tune-up. We're almost to the turning
   point where you, the players, will be able to start seeing the power we've
   been building. Hold tight, things are gonna start moving fasssssst!

 News 8/4/00:
 - Our apologies for the recent downtime. There was a power outage a few days
   ago which corrupted some of Nodeka's resource files. This prevented anyone
   from being able to put Nodeka back on-line, but Nijlo. Again, we apologize
   for the inconvenience.
   - The Nodeka Staff

 News 8/1/00:
 - More additions to new functionality
 - Minor bug fixes with new functionality, restructure of
   access rights/priviledges system [sic] (immortal only (for now))
 - Soon, the mystery of all this functionality will be revealed

 Cheaters 7/31/00:
 - Shie and Noah have been zapped for multi-playing
 - Kazzet has been zapped for botting
 - Enigmapotpie and all of his alts have been banned
 - Bhaal, Pestilence and Helm have been zapped for multi-play
 - Seven more players zapped for cheating

 News 7/31/00:
 - Massive internal re-architecture, Nodeka is smarter, and much
   more versitile [sic]. Three more pieces must be complete before the internal restructure
   is finished. Three weeks of non-stop coding is now almost done

 Cheaters 7/12/00:
 - Shie and Noah have been zapped for multi-playing
 - Kazzet has been zapped for botting
 - Enigmapotpie and all of his alts have been banned
 - Bhaal, Pestilence and Helm have been zapped for multi-play

 News 7/16/00:
 - Necromancers followers are now MUCH more powerful

 News 7/14/00:
 - Cool new system architecture

 News 7/12/00:
 - Stepping skill/spell pair association crash bug fixed
 - Stepping skills/spells modified. More solid structure base now and they
   have a more visible look to them
 - Stepping skills work more properly when under affect (baned, stunned, etc)
 - Extra string added to celestial ray
 - Alleviate now lags an extra round

 News 7/10/00:
 - Soul egression now mimics soul guardian, preventing stat peaks above maximum
 - Celestial ray damage string fixed
 - Lightning damage strings fixed
 - Mob typo fixed (thanks Nix)
 - Shield crash bug fixed
 - Evasion strings now included on shield damage
 - Grouped shield damage now shows average damage, for consistency
 - Attack damage strings fixed (some genders were incorrect)

 News 7/8/00:
 - Updated Rules: See 'help rules', ignorance of rule changes will not be accepted
 - Updated Rules: See 'help bot'
 - Shield strings fixed (thanks Soth)

 News 7/7/00:
 - Feature: shield damage now seen more correctly! Rockin!!!
 - Critical attack cannot take shield damage (just like other naj'k/grei attacks)
 - Hurricane kick cannot take shield damage (just like other naj'k/grei attacks)
 - Vicious fist cannot take shield damage (just like other naj'k/grei attacks)
 - Illusionary Displacement improved
 - Planar Sage class +hit now fixed (thanks Zhakar)
 - Major Fix: one shield hit per attack (my apologies for letting this bug slip by)

 News 6/25/00:
 - Fix for return line failures

 News 6/22/00:
 - More than 30 bug fixes

 News 6/13/00:
 - Another 100 strings externalized (yay!)
 - Anti-recall affect now in (but not used ... yet)

 News 6/12/00:
 - 'nodeka staff' converted to 'list staff' (nod social now works again)
 - 'commands' converted to 'list commands'
 - 'socials' converted to 'list socials'
 - Logging modification

 News 6/11/00:
 - Help on building is in, see 'help building'
 - New planar sage spell: mist of lectokke
 - New remort sa'duroth spell: arhkarret's form

 News 6/3/00:
 - Player fight damage is now cut in half (for player fights only)
 - Regeneration rates are now coded properly (regen % is while sleeping)
 - All healing skills/spells now heal half on player fighting targets
   (with the exception of compelled rejuv, now it'll be worthwhile to use)
 - Mana and spirit regen are increased by 52 points per tick
 - Two special cases with 1/2 pfight damage fixed (working properly now)

 News 6/1/00:
 - Critical is now more accurate
 - Partial hits are now in, meaning you can hit with less than full damage.
   This allows for more accuracy for landing a blow in battle, but it may
   mean you hit for less than full damage. Instead of an "all or nothing"
   type of combat, you can get those imperfect hits to still land.

 News 5/31/00:
 - Phases are now only seen when on the world map
 - Channeled anger and sensual sedation's duration now based off of willpower
   (as it was suppose to be, thanks Soth)
 - The 'race' command now shows each race's lineage
 - The continent Tarsis has been added to the world map!

 News 5/29/00:
 - More social fixes
 - New skill: Prowl (Shadow Rogues only)
 - Prowl fixed
 - New area: Stormhaven!
 - Stepping skills/spells template improved (easier to code them now,
   and less chance for error)
 - Soth has a new title! (wizlist)
 - Prowl skill modified, strings modified as well

 News 5/27/00:
 - Loss of concentration is no longer seen by others
 - New socials in: ponder and twitch! (hail Luminata)
 - Some other socials slightly modified
 - New spell: Sight of Divestment! (remort heitons)
 - New skill: Hunters Vigilance (remort tholecs)
 - Elf remort racials fixed!

 News 5/25/00:
 - The Scobie-Noyola Fund raising is over.  You will no longer
 - receive double platinum for donations.  Thanks to all who
 - contributed to the cause.

 News 5/24/00:
 - New Spell: Bestow Vision (remort witches/daja)

 News 5/23/00:
 - New Skill: Lectokke's Vision (remort sorcerers)
 - Hobbits "cloak" now is extremely powerful in concealing their existance
 - "list skills", "list spells" are now two worded commands (for easier use)
 - A few strings now display more correctly
 - Invisibility, Blended, Cloaked and Unseen flags are now displayed

 The Scobie-Noyola Fund has raised over $1900 dollars so far!!
 (see 'help fund raising')
 
 Thanks to: Soma, Blitzkrieg, Auberon, Yevroth, Avalanche, Monster, Zhakar,
 Ishmael, Jato, Utxsudo, Arkenon, Jagas, an anonymous donation,
 Drayke, Shandara, Cixelsyd, Shierkahn, Drakmorden and Grit, 
 and another anonymous!

 News 5/22/00:
 -Multiple bug fixes
 -Crash bug fixed! (thanks to Myx for reminding Nijlo to fix this)

 The Scobie-Noyola Fund has raised over $1900 dollars so far!!

 (see 'help fund raising')
 
 Thanks to: Soma, Blitzkrieg, Auberon, Yevroth, Avalanche, Monster, Zhakar,
 Ishmael, Jato, Utxsudo, Arkenon, Jagas, an anonymous donation,
 Drayke, Shandara, Cixelsyd, Shierkahn, Drakmorden and Grit!

 News 5/18/00:
 - Trolls/Trogs/Drolls have been improved, thank Soth and Nijlo.

 The Scobie-Noyola Fund has raised over $1300 dollars after two days!!
 (see 'help fund raising')
 
 Thanks to: Soma, Blitzkrieg, Auberon, Yevroth, Avalanche, Monster, Zhakar,
 Ishmael, Jato, Utxsudo, Arkenon, Jagas, and an anonymous donation.

 News 5/16/00:
 - Hail Soth! The new area Stormhaven is in!!!! Special thanks to Myx
   for checking every room for typos, Zed for checking every item and mob,
   and Soth for doing all the work!

 *************************
 - See 'help fund raising'
 *************************

 News 5/14/00:
 - Stoicism help reads more correctly.
 - Multiple string errors fixed.
 - Silent Malevolence made more powerful.
 - Stormhaven item fix (thanks Nijlo)

 News 5/11/00:
 - Player description bug fixed.

 News 5/6/00:
 - Stoicism toned down (sorry folks, it was doing some things I didn't realize)
 - Soth's new area is in (thank Soth for building, Zed for clean up,
   and Nijlo for figuring out why it broke Nodeka, so it can actually go in).
 - Crash bug fixed -- another crash bug fix when builders go bad...hehe.

 News 5/1/00:
 - Invisibility bug fixed (mobs will show up correctly now)
 - 2.mob will work now if a player with a similar name is on (thanks Khaled)
 - Methodic Shift to [ataelos]] Remorts

 News 4/19/00:
 - Yulek non-damaging hits fixed! (hail Akari for the help)
 - Rescue bug fixed (rescue now leaves lag on the rescued target)

 News 4/17/00:
 - Alleviate modified
 - Learning curve now helps in combat? (see 'help learn curve')
 - Humans race modification
 - Newbie school mobs altered, slightly
 - Lots of other internal code clean-ups/modifications
 - Toggling channel info now blocks clan changes and citadel information

 News 4/15/00:
 - Link dead bug fixed (thanks Jesus)

 News 4/9/00:
 - Crash bug fixed (still shocked that we crashed)
 - Sell issues fixed
 - Some follower issues resolved (thanks Nix)

 News 4/8/00:
 - Groups of mobs now appear in group order properly. Previously, for
   example, you might see 2 ladies in a room and a female soldier. It was 
   possible that when you typed 'k lady' three times you might attack them
   in a number possibilities. These would be:

   Attacking a lady, attacking a female soldier, attacking a lady
   Attacking a lady, attacking a lady, attacking a female soldier
   Attacking a female soldier, attacking a lady, attacking a lady

   This 'bug' can no longer happen. The *only* way that the above will happen
   now is as follows:

   Attacking a lady, attacking a lady, attacking a female soldier

   This is the correct behavior. My apologies for overlooking this for so 
   long.

 - Player items and room items follow a similar ideology as the above
 - Fury fixed (thanks Legend)
 - Strength and Dexterity tables *slightly* toned down (very slight tone
   down for 100+). Remember, this means more powerful mobs will be down-graded
   as well. This change was not put in to reduce player power, and the gold
   algorithm was *slightly* increased. The only reason this was put in was to
   reduce the gap between small and large players (very slightly at that)
 - The barter/buy command now takes this syntax: buy <item #> <mob>
 - SELL IS NOW IN - it'll undergo changes, but it's in
 - Peripheral now gives more information (expect more)
 - Mobs that are trying to lure you out of a safe room are less spammy now
 - Corpses now align in the frestest first in the room (for killed mobs only)
 - Sell bug fixed

 News 4/7/00:
 - Battles shouldn't end improperly anymore
 - Stoicism is more powerful than before!
 - Outcast now auto-sets home to Ruushi
 - If you have fly, you will now always succeed on terrain movement, but
   that doesn't mean you will always get a lowered endurance drain
 - Hammer and fury should work properly now
 - Lag has been removed from commands: scan and peripheral
 - Stoicism will now show up in Citadel battles
 - Bug with tracking mobs showing up in your prompt is now fixed
 - Bug with "You don't have enough endurance" fixed
 - Stoicism completely revamped! See 'help stoicism'
 - The Citadel now deals with 300 levels, see 'help citadel'
 - Important: Real Death now has a chance of reducing a stat PERMANENTLY!
   See 'help real death' for more information

Note: To all you mass-suiciders to Raash/massive guard and Abyss mobs -- 
you've had this coming for a long time. Be thankful I was kind enough to give
you advanced notice that this was implemented instead of letting you find out 
the hard way.

- N

 News 4/1/00:
 - Cogline's Giest Mist items and mobs in (Artificial Intelligence!)
 - Sea Hag to Oracle (thanks Legend, I like this one more)
 - ruanbaeres [sic] now have fury, it took awhile for me to decide to allow this
 - Bishops have regalement, they lose invig and greater invig
 - Bishops lose cure light/serious/cure critical|critical]] (those spells sucked anyway)
 - Bishops gain holy analgesic (and this spell is badass)
 - Peripheral now usable in battle!
 - Room mob default colors changed (if you don't like it, change it)
 - Command say modified (just color/cosmetic)
 - THE BEST EQUIPMENT MONEY CAN BUY -- DONATOR ONLY EQ NOW AVAILABLE!!!

 News 3/31/00:
 - More mob/item fixes -- Zed's the man!
 - Minor changes to mental blast and psychic shock
 - Astral Travel is more powerful than ever...
 - khehusod skill reordering (minor change)

 News 3/30/00:
 - Gaa'els double willpower fixed (thanks Fizzle)
 - Mob/Item fixes -- hail Zed!
 - More social fixes (thanks Lum and Myx)
 - Witches' major remort: SEA HAG! (Muhahahah, thanks Pandora)

 News 3/27/00:
 - Alleviate bug fixed (thanks Ziii)
 - Major Character Generation bug fixed
 - Nodeka lock is now ignored when deleting a character
 - Major race alteration - please see command 'race' and read
   Nijlo's indepth reasoning behind the alteration: 'help nijlo's race change'

 News 3/26/00:
 - Nodeka Lock doesn't re-apply on reconnections (thanks Potem)
 - Luminata and Myx have modified/added new socials! Comments to Lum
 - Character generation now shows racials!! =)
 - Another cool crash bug SMASHED!
 - 200+ internal strings externalized!
 - Alleviate altered again (usable on self, but lagged)
 - Major race alteration - please see command 'race' and read
   Nijlo's indepth reasoning behind the alteration: 'help nijlo's race change'
 - Commands - Identify/understand and Extrinsic Elucidation slightly altered.
   Nijlo will be heavily modifying its interface for easier understanding
 - Command - Affect more organized (will undergo more changes)

 News 3/21/00:
 - Alleviate altered
 - Blue, Red and Black Drakes altered (and their lineage)
 - Humans now have racials
 - Gnomes and their lineage altered
 - Frost Giants and their lineage altered
 - Angel/Arch-Angels and Demons/Daimonikos altered
 - Forced connections are in (astral travellers, you'll dig this)
 - Note: All donations are handled by CHAOS now (see 'help donation')
 - Race strings fixed (thanks Khaled)

 News 3/18/00:
 - Races are now creatable while Nodeka is running (finally)
 - Many racial changes: if your racials changed, it was intended
 - So many changes, I could write a book about it...

 News 3/8/00:
 - Some social fixes (including 'nod')
 - Many more socials added (hail Luminata and Soth!)
 - Peripheral design restructure -- super fast, super clean!
 - Cosmetic race changes including proper names (i.e. An angel, A human)
 - Please e-mail Luminata with social errors

 News 3/6/00:
 - Collision with illusionary displacement and ill fixed
 - Crash bug with event logging fixed
 - Overloaded input buffering fixed (truncated lines now work properly)
 - Holy light lag time reduced (damage/hit unmodified)
 - Lord Braggi item fixes (thanks Myx)

 News 3/5/00:
 - Crash bug with over 50 of the same mob in a room fixed
 - Many more socials in! (hail Luminata and Myx)
 - Tracking now lags slightly

 News 3/1/00:
 - Another 20 or so socials add (thanks Luminata and Myx!!!)

 News 2/29/00:
 - More socials added (hail Luminata), more will come soon

 News 2/25/00:
 - Crash bug fixed with invalid items on mobs
 - Socials revamped (please bare with us while we convert them)
 - Holy light toned down and made more willpower dependent

 News 2/23/00:
 - Items in container crash fixed

 News 2/21/00:
 - Socket problem is NOW fixed
 - Items in containers STAY in containers upon quitting.
 - Channeled Anger string fixed (thanks again Atlas)

 News 2/20/00:
 - Bug with clan halls fixed
 - Rhall mobs updated, hail Soth!
 - Visit and astral travel fixed (thanks Ryv)
 - Socket connections problems should be solved -- if you have trouble
   logging in, please tell an immortal
 - Phase string fixed (thanks anonymous)
 - Continent mapping is now seamless ('?' won't show between continents)
 - Stepping skills now stop properly if the user drops to 0 hp
 - Insane skill string fix (thanks Atlas)
 - White Dragoons now have celestial ray (thanks Iron)

 News 2/18/00:
 - Inside and outside area types now settable per area
 - Mapping/Peripheral functionality improved 
   (fixed bleeds, overlapped terrain now blends)

 News 2/17/00:
 - Feature added to output contol: Brief My Attacks
 - Feature added to output contol: Brief Enemy Attacks
 - Help on output control simplified

 News 2/15/00:
 - Many color incompatibilities between clients fixed
 - Exit colors are now player settable (see "color")
 - Color layout heavily modified
 - Output layout heavily modified

 News 2/14/00:
 - Character Generation heavily modified (ugly parts cleaned up)
 - Gender Generation now allows becoming an "it"
 - Handedness more greatly explained in char gen
 - Stats generation informs player of max and mins
 - Stats generation briefly explains stats now
 - Gender generation and password generation cleaned up
 - Classes no longer require *ANY* stat requirements: any race can be any class
   (we realize the implications of this, so you don't need to inform us)
 - Alleviate fixed: it now behaves as it should
 - Petrify is lagging somewhat properly (it will step eventually)
 - lo-fent's Holy light beefed up majorly
 - lo-fent's Holy light is now Naj'ked
 - ateoli no longer have globe of fluctuation

 News 2/10/00:
 - Soth's NEW area is in! All hail Soth!
 - Who bug fixed (logging in chars no longer included)
 - Race problems with Khan-lith and Iron Claw items fixed (hail Akari)
 - Self-deletion string error fixed
 - Sweet stepping bug fixed (thanks Black, great find!)
 - Who invisible miscalculations now fixed (thanks Wrath)
 - Aggros finally up to Nijlo's standards

 News 2/8/00:
 - Anti-where tactics work on peripheral and scan, this includes
   footpad skills, black drakes and so on. This also works with invis
 - Invis bug with scan and look fixed (thanks Akari)
 - A bunch of new races added (these may be playable in the future)
 - Yet another memory leak found and fixed
 - Soth's new area coming soon!

 News 2/6/00:
 - Crash bug fixed with replies in prompt

 News 2/3/00:
 - Temple touch now startable under a condition
 - Sensual sedation now startable under a condition
 - Channeled anger now startable under a condition
 - Stun now startable under a condition

 News 2/2/00:
 - Temple touch now steps (success rate improved)
 - Sensual sedation now steps (success rate improved)
 - Channeled anger now steps (success rate improved)

 News 2/1/00:
 - Critical memory leak fixed
 - Stun now sequential stepping (lag is still the same)
 - Stun will now hit more often (success rate improved)
 - Auto-join no longer works for player fights
 - Critical attack slightly altered

 News 1/30/00:
 - Vanish and retreat now lag properly (thanks Soma)
 - New Footpad skill: Cloak
 - Critical Attack modified again (some really cool stuff going on now)
 - Dropped sockets throughout the code fixed
 - AFK freeze after dropping link fixed (only took 2 minutes, 37 seconds)
 - Thieves to Footpads, Rogues to Shadow Rogues
 - Critical attack restructured: added time delay and enhanced power
   ('help critical' rewritten)

 News 1/29/00:
 - Strings externalized
 - PC descriptions fixed (thanks Akari)
 - Sixth sense fixed
 - Inventory corpses string fix (yes yes, it took awhile)
 - New high lo-fent skill: Celestial Ray
  (this is the start of yet another new breed of skills/spells)

 News 1/28/00:
 - Command input blocking fixed
 - A couple more memory leaks isolated and fixed
 - Fireball evade string fixed (thanks Atlas)

 News 1/26/00:
 - Bug fixed related to losing ability to input commands
 - Mobs/items can now be added or modified while running
 - Aggro bug fixed (buffering finalized)
 - Two memory leaks found and fixed
 - Crash bug fixed
 - Command buffering fixed

 News 1/25/00:
 - Tracks now stay longer
 - Sensual Sedation and focused sphere now show Naj'k (thanks Sheep)
 - Hunt bug fixed (thanks Dwiggs)
 - Where has been removely [sic] completely -- let's see how this turns out
   (We do realize this present a problem of Anti-Where people, but not to
   worry we have a solution)
 - Buffer leak fixed
 - Modified command buffering

 News 1/24/00:
 - Whocitadel now only shows players (not locations)
 - Contradiction of the rabbit +quickness toned down slightly
 - New skill for hunters/striders: hunt (remort only)
 - Where now lags for two seconds (no more "spam where")
 - Memory leak fixed (one more down!)

 News 1/23/00:
 - Bug with willed protector has been fixed (thanks Dwiggs)
 - daja equipment now works (my apologies for the delay)
 - Agility bonus on quickness has been toned down, e-mail Nijlo with comments

 News 1/21/00:
 - daja class for fallad-like females only. This class will undergo many
   changes, please be patient while Nijlo restructures them
 - Automatic conversion for female fallads to female daja (you won't need 
   to recreate your character from scratch, or ask for a class change)
 - daja statistic variation from Bishop is complete
 - Remorts, minor and major, for dajaes are named
 - Knight class and remorts all renamed and will undergo multiple changes
   that will make knights more appealing (not necessarily more powerful)
 - Riposte has been removed completely (practices automatically reimbursed)
 - New Raider skill: Field Aid (thanks Potem)
 - New item type: bandage
 - Randomized repop on some "seller" mobs inventory (each mob is unique)
   This means sellers can now "restock" items for selling purposes without 
   being slain
 - Time functionality revamped -- Nodeka will flow more steadily now
 - Sockets optimized using sleep-splitting for maximum response time
   (this means you should be able to communicate with Nodeka even faster)
 - New shop somewhere in Ruushi
 - Remorting now requires at least a $20 donation (if you don't like it, 
   don't remort)

 News 1/20/00:
 - This is now nodeka.com. Most of you can just use nodeka.com, but in some
   areas you may still be forced to use the IP 207.238.190.4 (for another day)
 - www.nodeka.com is now accessible on the web!
 - A big THANK YOU to Akira for his great work on the web page redesign!

 News 1/19/00:
 - New T1 is up, ALL PROGRESS WILL BE SAVED (while we wait to get Nodeka.com back)

 News 1/17/00:
 - Item loading has been fixed (thanks Myx)

 News 1/16/00:
 - Insanity modified again (much better now from the last degrade, but uses more end)
 - Time command heavily modified

 News 1/13/00:
 - Nodeka now runs on multiple platforms (still some major bugs)
 - Nim bug fixed (thanks Soma)
 - Lightning typo fixed (thanks Ith)

 News 1/9/00:
 - Mystic Wand of Fleetness has been fixed (thanks Legend)
 - Witches completely revamped
 - New witch spell: Cathianas Guidance (help 'cathianas guidance')
 - New witch spell: Ruah Kyf (help 'ruah kyf')
 - Revamped spell: cat of summoning to mystic wand of... (help 'mystic wand')
 - Improved race: Svirfneblin
 - Berserk and Insanity fixed (thanks Gavial)
 - Bishops now have sixth sense

 News 1/8/00:
 - Incorrect behavior for missed affect fixed (thanks Myx)
 - Fixed problems with bash and channeled anger (thanks Dwiggs!)
 - Bash and channeled anger now use Naj'k
 - khehusods [sic] now have: mental tempest
 - Help on Naj'k and Grei has been changed
 - Followers can no longer be attacked in safe rooms
 - Ordering followers to attack newbies will no longer work
 - Newbie "no-pk" range is now at level 30
 - PCs within a Grei/Naj'k sphere are now seen

 News 1/7/00:
 - Some new damage strings
 - Naj'k has been made a little less complex
 - Critical now uses Naj'k
 - Grei has been made more visible, and somewhat less complex
 - Some spell costs mana/spirit) have been slightly altered
 - Bishop protectors, and sa'duroth zombies have been improved

 News 1/5/00q: [sic]
 - Fixed output problem with Grei and Naj'k
 - Fixed vicious fist string (thanks Jaxon)

 News 1/3/00:
 - The mysteries of Grei and Naj'k have been implemented (thanks Demonlord and Overman)
 - Soothing touch bug fixed (thanks Yaga)
 - Raider remort name changes (thanks Ishmael)

1999

[Show/hide]

Total updates: 18

 News 12/24/99:
 - New area: Kobolds! (hail Forge and his great work!)
 - Newbie school can no longer be entered by remorts
 - New drow remort: Veldruk
 - heitons skills/spells layout modified again
 - Soothing touch can now heal the user as well as followers (help 'sooth')
 - New spell: inosculated crossing (help 'ino cross')
 - Notice: Followers now enter ANYWHERE you can (clan halls, guilds, ect.)
 - 'help news' has been added to review old news you may have missed

 News 12/23/99:
 - Massive speed optimizations (you should immediately notice an improvement)

 News 12/22/99:
 - Nim bug fixed (thanks Soma)

 News 12/20/99:
 - Syntax fixed for retreat and palm (thanks Pin)
 - [[[heitons]] new spell: song of the trees (see 'help song of')

 News 12/19/99:
 - Recall typo fixed
 - Minor bug fix with shield damage/hits (thanks Gambit)

 News 12/18/99:
 - Scan bug fixed (thanks Synn)
 - Hit roll algo has been modified
 - Hit roll on critical attack has been fixed for mob battles
 - Lag on lightning has been shortened
 - Hammer lag on non-action has been fixed (thanks Orson)

 News 12/15/99:
 - Stun like skills are now back to full damage, but retain the lag/battle
   initiative change

 News 12/13/99:
 - Join string for auto-join removed for reduced spam/lag
 - Scan strings externalized/modified
 - Alignment aggros have been completely removed (this may be temporary)
 - heitons skills/spells have been revamped
 - heiton spell: keepers vociferation
 - New e-mail!! (hopefully this'll last): nijlo@crosswinds.net
 - Inventory/items carried bug fixed (thanks Atlas, Jagas, Scarlock)
 - Many fixes to "Increased Mastery..." at incorrect locations

 News 12/13/99:
 - Concentrated attack has been modified (see 'help concentra')
 - Defenders discipline has been modified (see 'help defenders')
 - Focused sphere lag modified (still less than the skill duration)
 - Group follow bug fixed (thanks Zorachus, Sheep, Dwiggs)
 - Identify/understand now costs 10,000 (to keep the spell desired)
 - New Area: The Asylum is in, great job Forge!!!

 News 12/10/99:
 - Fairy, Sylph -> Sylph, Sprite
 - 'P' aliases to 'peripheral' not 'password' (fixed yesterday)
 - Race command will work for partial names anywhere (i.e., race r dra)
 - Undead, Zombie, Liche -> Undead, [[Liche], Liche Lord (thanks Asmo)

 - Fire Derk/Ice Derk racials are now finished
 - Tracks work properly with movement again
 - Lag bug fixed with world map movement
 - Chivalrous Valor now gives greater bonuses on willpower
 - Typo with Ascension of the Templar fixed (thanks Atlas)

 News 12/8/99:
 - Map group/follow bug has been fixed
 - Gedaon is now complete...world movement will lag one second
   per move, however all areas are much closer in distance, so your travel
   time will actually be shortened by a great deal.  Peripheral now lags for
   one second as well, instead of three.  The outside world is completely
   visible through peripheral, see 'help peripheral'

 Time for a little exploration...

 - TRUE LINE OF SIGHT THROUGHOUT THE WORLD MAP!!!
 - Peripheral can now be used EVERYWHERE!! (only 1 second of lag)

 News 12/5/99:
 - Sight renamed to: 'peripheral vision', see help on 'peripheral'

 - HOLY COW!!  TRUE LINE OF SIGHT IS IN!!!!
   See 'help sight' for more information.
   Only these areas have been approved as non-mazes for use with 'sight':
   Ruushi, G'kir, Citadel, Sun Cult, and Vl'lak (more will be added)

 News 12/4/99:
 - Ruushi now has multiple exits to the Continental Highway
 - Enhanced error checking code added, broken mobs/items fixed
 - Internal restructure to streamline PC/NPC stats. A BIG thank you
   to; Dwiggs, Gavial, Godz, Jagas, Moltave, Ramiel, Soma, and Trill for 
   helping test all of the changes.  Great work folks!!

 News 12/3/99:
 - Internal optimizations (command parser is much faster now)
 - Two memory leaks isolated and fixed
 - Sixth sense should now work properly (thanks Gambit)

 News 12/2/99:
 - Modification to the lag algorithm for nim
 - Gargoyles and their remorts have increased in power
 - Gargoyles Fury now is more powerful (twice as much +dam)

 News 12/1/99:
 - Login prevention fixed (it's complicated, don't bother with the details)
 - Check out: http://clubs.yahoo.com/clubs/nodekamud and leave a post!

 News 11/?/99:
 - Gold will repop on area repops (to balance out nim)
 - Major memory leak fixed (yay!)
 - Daemon to Daimonikos
 - Archaic Angel to Ancient Angel (Arch Angel racials now visible)
 - New! Nijlo's e-mail: nijlo@yifan.net
 - The ':' command now aliases to emote (see 'help :')
 - Minor bug/string fixes (thanks Ryv!)

The game launched in 1999.