Planned updates

Windmills

The reduction in workers provided by windmills and watermills will be significantly reduced. At present a windmill reduces the number of workers required by 40. In future a windmill will reduce the number of workers required by 10 for a farm and 25 for a plantation. Effects on other buildings will vary. This change is being introduced because the current impact of windmills is significantly out of balance with their costs. Windmills are way too powerful which is rendering other downtime options worthless.

This change will be implemented for the downtime following event 3 2010.

Known World correspondents

We are going to overhaul the downtime letter system. At present players can write letters to anyone in the Known World and while this flexibility helps to create a sense of depth to the game world, it has become increasingly difficult for the plot team to read and respond to letters written to any of millions of potential NPCs. These problems have been compounded by the fact that increasing numbers of players have been writing letters in recent times, for some events we have had upwards of 150 letters to respond to. The ever increasing time that this has required has inevitably been at the cost of plot that we can write to run at events. Consequently we are going to reduce the scope of the downtime letter system. This will significantly reduce the workload involved in administering the system but it will also allow us to improve the focus of the system, developing more consistent and well rounded characters for players to write to and influence.

The new system will allow a character who visits a Known World port to deliver a letter to one of a short list of correspondents available in that port. For instance, if your vessel visits Terino then one of the correspondents available will be Duke Lauricello of the colonial office. Any character or ship that visits that port will be able to deliver the letter to the Duke's office. It will no longer be possible to deliver a letter to the Duke's office unless your ship visits Terino and it will not be possible to deliver a letter to a correspondent unless the character's name appears on the list of available correspondents. We will produce a list of known correspondents and make it available through the website as soon as possible.

The plot team will read every letter that is delivered to one of our Known World correspondents and anything you write will have an appropriate IC effect. However the standard response of most Known World correspondents will be to write back to characters they know in the New World which will usually be characters who have status. This means that while all letters will be read, most replies will be sent to characters with status.

It will no longer be possible to write letters to family members and minor characters from your personal background. Obviously you can roleplay that you have a correspondence with a character like this but we will not create replies for you. We appreciate that many players really enjoy the letters created in this way and that they have led to some memorable moments, but unfortunately the time required to create dozens and dozens of letters from minor family members every event is enormous, as we have to study backgrounds intently to try to get the characterisation right. After some heart-searching, we believe that the overall game will be better for players if we devote this time to producing plot that we can run at the events themselves, which you can then interact with in the field.

If you do feel that your background would give you the ability to write to some one, but you don't appear to have this option, then you can email the plot team to ask them to review your character and background. Under most circumstances we will not create correspondents simply to reflect a character's background, however we may choose to do so if it links in with existing or potential plot.

We intend to introduce the new system as soon as possible, hopefully for the next downtime period, if time scales allow. In the meantime we will attempt to produce responses for all letters delivered in previous downtimes as normal, but please bear in mind that with literally hundreds of letters submitted it is inevitable that some will not receive replies.