Iron Realms has been running general, automated events on a weekly and monthly basis since the beginning of 2010. You have seen events like Login Lessons, Ticket Tuesday, 21 Login Days, and Double XP Thursday. These are easy for us to set up as they can be automated, unlike normal RP events. They can be coded once and reused every couple months so the amount of work is a onetime investment. Continue reading
In Imperian lately, we’ve been working hard to make sure that players have a reason to log in and have fun. Along with the rest of the IRE games, we’ve been offering lessons, credits, and vials during the past few months to encourage people to log in every day.
One new thing that we’ve been trying in Imperian is the creation of various “theme days”, where we basically hold a series of events that revolve around one theme. The first we held several months ago was a whimsical Frog Day, with games, events, and prizes that revolved around giant frogs.
On February the 13th at Midnight, GMT time, Tears of Polaris opened its doors to allow anyone to come in and take a look at the newly redesigned novice introductions and explore a tiny bit of the world as well as take a look at some of the archetypes in the game. Over 300 people decided to take a look in the twenty-four hour period; from the blazingly fast Whitney to the multiple run through people like Saran and Kirraxus, just to name a few, and we learned a lot, fixed a lot, and are reinvigorated a lot from all the responses, comments, and suggestions we received!
Five years after the last new class (Bard) was introduced to Achaea, we wanted to create some exciting new content for our players. We felt that combat balance was at a state where we could take a step back from our in-depth classlead evaluation and focus on a new class. The idea for Blademaster had been tossed around in the Garden of the Gods for a few years, but serious planning and development really began in August 2009.
We knew swords were going to be the basis of our new class before we began design. The main skill, Two Arts, is heavily referenced in Achaea’s history and was an obvious choice for a foundation. Our biggest question was how to make Blademaster live up to its legendary reputation without being overpowered. The design went through several iterations, with early designs resembling a reskinning of current classes. In the end we tried to make Blademaster as unique as possible without overcomplicating things – we didn’t want to be forced to create a new combat system just for this class. We are proud to say that, out of 54 total abilities across the new skills of Two Arts and Striking, only 5 are shared with other classes. The third skill, Shindo, is referenced in the games history (though not by name) as being very similar to the existing skill of Kaido. We decided to preserve this trait, splicing old favourites with 15 new abilities.
