Chaos Storm #1042 has swept the Lok'Groton island chain. Please post any changes you have observed and wish to share with others in the comments. If you don't want to read possible spoilers, please do not read any further!
Delta Tao's "What's New" for v1042:
11/15/2017 v1042
But now the days grow short
I’m in the autumn of the year
And now I think of my life as vintage wine
From fine old kegs
From the brim to the dregs
And it poured sweet and clear
It was a very good year.
— Ervin Drake (1919–2015)
* No significant changes this version.
* No crashes in 1,693 days, and counting. (A record!)
* Today marks the 1042nd week of the game’s existence, more or less. This means that Clan Lord has been up and running, almost continuously, for just over 20 years. Happy anniversary to us!
However... as you will have noticed, the Account Portal has been out of order for some months now. Unfortunately, we’ve concluded that, for reasons of time and resources, we are unable to revive it. This means it’s basically impossible to sign up new players, or for existing ones to modify their accounts, add new character slots, transfer characters, etc.
Moreover, we have to recognize the writing on the wall for our current Mac and Windows client apps. Both are technologically out-of-date by decades, not just years. We’ve nursed them along as much as we could, but without drastic rewrites they’re not likely to survive more than, say, 12–18 months.
Even if we had the time, skill, and resources to rewrite the clients (not to mention our associated internal world-building tools), we’re still stuck with game assets — primarily artwork and sounds — that, although they may have been acceptable or even ambitious back in the late 1990’s, are nowadays woefully inadequate. They would all have to be redone, from scratch, to look and work reasonably decently on modern hardware.
Finally, even the least observant of players will have noticed that the pace of world enhancements has lately slowed to a trickle. Many of the volunteer GMs and their helpers and the artists and contributors who had put so much time and effort into the Clan Lord world over these last 20 years or so, are now inactive. Without their enthusiastic participation, the game world stagnates.
We have enormous gratitude to all our dedicated players and wonderful collaborators. We’re interested in your thoughts; we’ve started a discussion on the Sentinel, where together we can work out the future of Clan Lord.
A chat tonight with Pengy