Hi Imperianites,
As is obvious to all of you, few people play Imperian these days, and that doesn't look likely to change. It's just a function of what a niche format MUDs are in the world of games, especially in 2023.
We're going to take Imperian, and Starmourn, into what we're calling Legacy Mode as a compromise between shutting the games down and losing too much money on them every month.
In Legacy Mode, the game eventually won't have any real support other than keeping the server up, and purchases (credits, arti packages, etc) will be disabled.
Skuf will be sticking around for at least a month to help with the transition, so we're not turning off admin support today or anything, and likely there will be some admin work for awhile as we figure out what the best changes to make are to make this happen.
What does this mean for you as a player of Imperian?
That as of now, the retirement values of your characters are forever frozen and retiring into Imperian is disabled.
However, you can also retire to Achaea, Aetolia, or Lusternia with the full 100% of your retirement value. But, you don't have to decide now or anytime soon. You can choose to create a character in either of those games and use your retirement credits there whenever you want. HELP RETIREMENT will tell you more about retirement.
Purchases are turned off as of this announcement, and the credit market is disabled.
Quite a few other changes will be forthcoming as well, such as Imperian becoming a completely open PK environment, and others, that will largely be a result of trying to set up an environment that is usable without necessarily needing admin support.
One immediate question some people have is probably how we're going to deal with players being abusive a-holes to each other. The answer is that it's going to be a combination of encouraging you to use ignore on irritating players to a kind of "f*** around and find out" mentality, where if you make us spend our attention on you through egregiously bad behavior, it's not going to go well for you.
This is probably a disappointing announcement for some of you, for which I'm sorry, though as I mentioned this is in lieu of shutting Imperian down. To be honest, I had written the posts announcing that we'd be shutting down Imperian and Starmourn in about 5 weeks, but couldn't pull the trigger on them. I really dislike the idea of shutting down virtual worlds while there's any hope of keeping them alive, even if not exactly thriving. It'll cost us a few thousand dollars a year, but it's worth it to keep the world alive.
If you choose to stay on Imperian, I hope you enjoy the new Legacy mode changes, and if you choose to retire and move to the other non-Legacy games, I trust you'll find a friendly welcome there!
Best,
Matt Mihaly
Founder/CEO Iron Realms Entertainment
Penned by my hand on the 3rd of Aequitas, in the year 314 AM.
