I noticed the server was hung, which happens occasionally. So I restarted it. Which appears to have resulted in several accounts and characters getting blown away for no reason. Not only that, it appears the emails are still out in the ether so people are reporting that they cannot sign up again because their email is in use, even though they no longer exist! Argh! I'm very sorry. None of this was intentional in anyway. I have been very busy lately training a replacement for my job. I will work to see what data I can recover. If you have lost a character or an account, please use the contact form to tell me. If you lost an account please tell me the user name and email. Once again, many apologies. There must be some evil gnomes that were responsible somewhere that very much need punting into a furnace. --Tim

Work is underway on guild testing, character deletion, emails, and a larger world map offering strange and new places to explore, plunder, deforest, or build the cutest of barbarian cottages.

To address the extreme powers currently held by many Wizards, Spell Book size was increased to 12. Thanks to many suggestions from Crawly, spells also received updates reducing not only the damage and number of instants per skill, but overall Critical strike chances since the latter was explosively high.

To prevent the drudgery of unfair power-leveling exploitation, the experience reward for Quests is now level-adjusted, so that only quests within about 4 levels of your current level provide full experience, diminishing gradually until 10 below your current level where it's obvious that the tasks of butchery, seduction, miscellaneous organ removal, and strange package delivery involved are so mind-numbingly simple as to provide no experience whatsoever.

Caveat: spell changes do mean that existing combat records and spell books have expired.

Want more control in battle? Build a Spell Book by selecting exactly which 12 or more spells your character will use in combat. Now you can mix and match, to build the right deck for your character, and change it as he/she levels up to fit with new spells and strengths. Spell books have been engineered to clear automatically at global spell changes, and automatically invalidate themselves when 10 levels or more out of date so that your customized character won't be easy duel fodder if you go on vacation. They're also private, naturally, known only to the caster. Other, less scrupulous characters can only speculate about your spell book's contents by having its fury unleashed on them.

Want more damage or healing in combat? Now you have it! Skill points beyond your level now apply not only to increased Critical strike chances, but also additional damage or healing. A number of smaller combat fixes were also implemented. Dodges are now described seperately from normal spell failures. Spells will no longer be reported as succeeding before failing. A bug allowing characters to use spells above their level was fixed and an error inflating armor resistances by percent dodge chance was fixed. Armor resistances were increased to compensate for added per-hit variation to account for those times when your character hits well-armored places versus weakly-armored places.

A recent Diva tribunal has concluded that Divas are not commanding the stage presence they deserve, so a special ritual of attunement has resulted in increased Enchantment spell power for all Divas.  Meanwhile, a chaotic energy shift discovered by the Wizards at Largen's Mystical Bookshelf appears also to have taken place, which has resolved some of the inbalance of Arcane and Fire energies in an Elemental Magic shift towards Frost.  Word on the street is that Gangsters are chillin' out at the news.

Are you more into Posing and Fashion than Lightning? Then you're probably an Extreme Glam or Trendsetter Model. Characters who have focused primarily on one or two combat skills will now automatically display a Specialization to describe their particular style of death-dealing. Specializations are updated at level-up for characters starting at level 10.

Say cheese! Tired of not having proof of those grand, dirty smack-downs you've been laying out? You can now include choicely delicious duels in blog posts simply by clicking a checkbox to attach the last duel you saw. It's fast, easy, and, most of all, 100% sanitary now to share the charred remains of your best Six Ton Handbag Executions with everyone you know for smiles all around.

Work on guilds, rankings, and tournaments continues.

Two small combat fixes were pushed out. Research into Kids' Chewable Vitamins showed that the spell was protecting successfully, however Protection Spells in general, which not only protect against new spells but have a chance each round of cleansing residual spells, were actually cleansing themselves off as well. Imagine protection so strong it protects against itself!

The other fix was Mana Burn Spells, like the recently added Psychic Perestroika which, instead of reducing mana and life on the target, were doing exactly the opposite. Wizards, thou are redeemed, and do know that the Gnome temp worker spell scroll copyists responsible for the errors are currently strapped in a dungeon somewhere undergoing rather stringent and unpleasant performance reviews by their Custard Nightmare superiors.

As promised, spells have been rebuilt to reel in upper level spell damage, as well as Fire which recently got a little bit out of hand during a Mad Tequila Bonfire party.

Work continues on rankings, tournaments, and guilds. To new arrivals, welcome! We're glad to have you, and we hope you get a good chance to settle in and roast a few of your neighbors. All's well that burns well, and if that doesn't work, add a dash of boils or a good beating!

Tired of long click commutes? Relax! Character sub-pages are now only one click away thanks to handy new submenus.

The Giant's share of recent development work has been focused on upcoming Rankings and Tournaments which will allow your character to compete with others within his/her level bracket (1-9, 10-19, 20-29, etc) to see who is the both the fairest, and the deadliest of them all.

In minor news, after many strong political motions, the Troll Bum Governmental Efficiency and Apathy Awareness Oversight Committee has finally succeded in its lobbies for improved skill-up rates relative to Experience. This means your characters should have more room to focus on General Skills and not have to obsess over combat so much to stay competitive.

A slight Spell reconfiguration was done, adjusting damage mostly for higher-end Wizard and Diva spells, as well as a slight reduction to the effect of Mail Armor given the undeniable advantages upper-level characters capable of wearing it are showing in combat.

The new year brings surprises and cheer from strange sources. If only such legislation were transferrable to other, more solid realms...

Gold and improved rewards are a continued theme for the new year, as a yearly audit by local Wattadefooka Goblin Greed Consultants revealed that our lower level quests were far too stingy in their cash outlays. This has been addressed with increased rewards. The consultants also pointed out a bevy of quests with seemingly mismatched reward loot. A team of Looting experts was sent in to improve quest rewards by Skill applicability for many quests. In some cases, strangeness could not help but be preserved.

Thank you for all the bug reports! The questing Level Up and Dueling bugs appear to have been fixed, and hopefully life is back to normal...

Unfortunately, there was a hiccup with character creation which was fixed with a server restart. Those of you who found it difficult to make characters or login should be fine now. Those of you who made several characters unsuccessfully in a long, frustrating process-- it should now be fixed, and you've been given extra WTF Embryos for the trouble. Sorry about that. If you still are having problems, please use the Contact page and include as many gory details (such as pasted error message entrails) as possible. There are still a few pages that may be having problems, but I'm on it.

Our Gnome forensics team has also discovered an issue with duels sometimes misreporting Health Points and Mana Points. Meaning people who should be dead continue to fight or cast spells with no mana. Don't lose heart! The end outcome is actually the fair one, the problem is that it's overdeducting the health/mana displayed in the browser, such that people appear to have 0HP or 0MP before they actually do. This corruption will be uprooted and justice will previal, even if our developers have to summon Bluto the Meat Maker to do it.

Get Nasty!   Now a character's Duel page will show you a selection of similarly-leveled fodder to pick trouble with.   For added street cred, the WTF and realm (such as Spoof) home pages now display a list of the most recent blog posts and duels so you can easily see what's been going down in Wattadefooka and whether you were in on the action.

The Shopping mavens realized that there just weren't enough cool items available to purchase, so several for each Skill were added, giving you more options for twinking out your character. Several minor bugs were fixed as well, and work on duel records and better ways to find other characters continues.