Ancient Anguish - Development

Development

New code is continually added to the game by a team of volunteer "wizards", or coders. Players can elect to become a wizard upon meeting three requirements: 1.) achieving a minimum of 1 million experience points; 2.) completing a number of the quests available; and 3.) earning a number of exploration points (sometimes called "Gaius Points", after the sage who provides hints to guide players to find them). Players may elect to solve more quests and fewer exploration points, or more exploration points and fewer quests.

Exploration points are generally completed thorough exploration, prodding, touching, and otherwise investigating a given area or room, or completion of a mini-quest. The hints provided by the Gaius character are generally vague, and no direct statistic is available to players.

New wizards go through an educational process where they learn about coding enhancements for the game, develop an idea for a new area, and proceed to build it. The system was designed to provide guidance both to experienced programmers and those with no experience. These new areas go through a process of validation to ensure they meet the thematic, quality, and balance/playability requirements of the game, and are then opened to all players.

In late 2005, player levels were expanded from 19 to 50.

The game's move to the Michigan server brought several changes: during the move, the old site was available in "Anarchy Mode", a traditional experience when the game moved from one server to another, with all rules on player killing, multiplaying, wizard-mortal interference, and other guidelines of Law suspended. Since all player files had already been backed up prior to the move, none of this had any long-term effect on players and allowed them to "blow off steam". It proved popular enough that the Senate is considering providing regular Anarchy events on an alternate port of the new server. In addition, the move prompted a change from 25-hour mandatory reboots to 49-hour reboots, which were tested in late April and then made permanent. (These reboots, common in MUDs to recover memory leaks and to clear 'trash' items which accumulate, restore the world to a default state, leaving characters to regain equipment from scratch. All skills, stats, and gold are retained.)

In May 2006, a new continent named Infidian was opened after several years' wait, nearly doubling the available landmass space on the map for areas and alleviating overcrowding of older areas on the main continent of Anguish (from which the game gets its name). Several areas have already been placed on its map, and more will be 'discovered' in the near future. Infidian is reputed to be the historical homeland of the humans who came to Anguish, where the rest of the races already lived, and is nearly pacifistic. At present, Infidian has few explorable areas, although many more areas are in development.