Greetings and Salutations,

I am writing to provide you all with an update on how things are shaping up in
this strange new world. Naturally, such drastic changes spark a large variety
of emotions, positive and negative; please just keep in mind that BatMUD has
always been a game that goes through evolutionary stages, and thus new
abilities are gained and old ones lost. With that said, let's take a look at
some of the changes that have occured in the last month:

- A couple of new areas have appeared.
- Many guilds have established representatives on each continent in order to
make training easier. This will not happen for all guilds, but by the end of
the next couple of weeks, most should be done.
- Minerals/animals have been fixed, so that they show up on the proper
terrains.
- 65-70% of the extant player cities have been anchored onto the new maps.
- Player city portals have been upgraded slightly, with some more upgrades
planned for the near future.
- Almost all events have been updated to take place properly in the new world
(no more magic eater lurking in old BatCity). In addition, some events will
now take place randomly amongst the major cities/continents.
- Rangers have obtained new travelling abilities to allow them to cross the
map more readily.
- EP costs for terrains are finally not restricted to integer values. This is
best seen by travelling on roads, which have a terrain cost of ~0.2ep/square
now.
- Bugs in the ress spells have been fixed; there are also plans to make the
spell more 'healing friendly' (i.e. you can visit your resser briefly, then
return to your original continent).
- Travelling the ferries has been made significantly cheaper, and commands
introduced to make it easier to travel to your destination.
- Many areas have been fixed to report their overworld locations correctly
(note that you can use some nav spells such as 'go' inside of an area where
you couldn't before). There are still many areas that are problematic, but
~95% should work correctly, and we'll get to the others as quickly as we can.
- Travel is much more mount-friendly.
- Back stories and artistic representations of the continents are appearing on
Bat's website.
- Newbie posts have become fully operational again (please let newbies know
that they can even travel between continents with these devices!).


Some upcoming projects that I will go ahead and mention:
- The return of an old, old area and a new "island"
- More guild trainers.
- Inns shall begin appearing very soon, much as was suggested by a recent news
post.
- New stables.
- Improved player city interaction (long term).
- Ship tuning, NPC ships, fixing related merchant quests
- We have a nice new weather server, with some potentially fun effects. As we
get more settled on the new maps, you may see these showing up more
dramatically.


I would like to take this moment to thank all of the wizzes who have been
helping to make this new world a bit more manageable, and all the mortals who
have sent in constructive ideas. This new world has opened up a lot of
possibilities, and it will take some time to turn those ideas into reality.

And,
Thank you all for playing,
Melemkor