I'm fully back after the holidays, and have just about caught up with
all of my messages and the work that accumulated while I was semi-away.
That meant dealing with the quest abuse that happened on Christmas.

I've contacted all of the worst abusers, done my best to remove the gold
that they generated, and informed them that in lieu of shrubbing them
permanently, they're going to be disfavoured for 30 days instead. If you
haven't heard from me, then you're safe.

I've been asked to clarify exactly what people did wrong here. The
problem is that one person was able to use that quest to generate
millions of gold in less than an hour. Each and every quest and gold
distribution method in Imperian is intended to have some sort of a reset
timer or a cooldown on it.

For example: The rat quests have a limit to the number of rats that
appear in a room per hour. Most quests have quest items that reset once
every hour or so. Ironbeard gives bags of gold to a limited number of
people per hour.

Sometimes we make mistakes with the reset times and create quests that
can be done over and over again in a very small time frame, generating
lots of gold and experience. That's exactly what happened in this case.
You shouldn't have been able to ride the sled over and over again to get
gold. There should have been some sort of a timer to prevent you from
riding or getting gold again while riding.

The failure for that is on us, though. We made a mistake. However, it's
also on all of you to make sure that when you find an exploit like that,
you report it to us, and then -stop using it-. We're not going to ever
put infinite gold faucets like that in the game, so sitting there and
generating tons of gold over and over again is abusing a bug, pure and
simple.

Now that I've caught up with most of the administrative stuff, I'm going
to be putting the finishing touches on some classlead changes. Once
those are finished and loaded, I'm going to create an "Imperian in 2008"
thread on the forums, where I will detail what we are currently working
on and what we plan to continue working on for at least the next few
months of this new year.

Penned by my hand on the 24th of Letum, in the year 540 AD.