[Hades_Kane]

Snowtroll, I appreciate the shout-out!

This is "Diablos" from End of Time, the lead developer and game designer for the project.

To be more specific on our plans with regards to the storyline and some other things brought up, we are indeed planning out a playable storyline that the intention is to span the entire MUD. In fact, almost all of the areas that are built and the entire way the world is designed is largely done so with the story in mind, allowing for ease of exploration and direction from area to area when called for. There are pieces of the story already implemented, most notably in the Sector 7 hometown choice. What we are currently working toward is having is all three hometowns having a completely separate "starting" quest, and as those progress, the stories and directions from all three will inevitably "meet" at the same place. From this point, the quest will follow the same general outline from that point. It is also important to note that built into this all is both a hero and villain path, so that players may freely choose in these quests how they want to go about them. It is important to note that full implementation of the storyline is considered a concrete goal, but a long-term goal. Also on the agenda for a long-term goal is making sure that all "citizens" in the games are unique mobs with a unique description and dialogue options. Your actions throughout the story will also influence the way these mobs will react or interact with you as well.

A significant mid point in the quest was originally planned as class promotion. It was going to be a point in the quest where the player was out-gunned and discovered that the people they are facing and losing to had discovered an ancient secret to power, and the main quest would take a break for the player to also seek this out, and that power would basically be upgrading their class. In the interest of moving things forward and not upholding progress until we can get the storyline fully implemented, it was decided that we would pull class promotion out of the general story and have it exist as a stand alone quest, perhaps later tying it back into the story when we get that far.

It is important to note that the storyline will exist as a separate thing from the general RP from the players. It's purpose is to have a structured and purposeful series of quests and interactions for PCs to help make area exploration and leveling more fun, and to provide an alternative method of gaining exp, as rewards for quest completion will include things such as experience points, skills, skill points, money, and possibly even new merits. We also have code in place that can allow our scripts to run checks and execute commands on entire groups, skipping those in a group that don't meet the requirements, and so the ability for people to group up for these quests as long as they are at the same spot is something planned to be built into them. The goal overall is attempt at creating as much of a console RPG like storyline to play through as possible, while not sacrificing the integrity of the game as a multi-player experience.

The promotion classes are all fully implemented, we are just currently finishing up the final 3 quests in order to fully open the system, and this could be as quick as a week from now, hopefully no more than two. After we finish these last three, I have about an afternoon's worth of work on finishing up some other stuff in a handful of more areas to have them ready, and then we will be raising the level cap from 50 to 65. At our current pace, it probably won't be but a few months until we are raising the level cap to 80.

As far as "beta" or anything else like that, for all intents and purposes, we are an open game. Listing on the sites such as this one and TMC was a big step toward that (we listed at the beginning of the month, and already rank 35 here and rank 14 on TMC), and really all we are waiting on to be "officially" open is the aforementioned stuff needed to raise the level cap. We are also laying the groundwork for the opening RP story/events, with the climax event of the first part of the opening event planned as our big "officially open" party.

We are a RP Encouraged game, and will never require roleplay. Exceptions to this are that non-consenual PK requires a "valid" roleplay based reason to kill another player, and the three major governments are also setup to admit people into their ranks and promote based on roleplay. Otherwise, people are free to play, chat, level up and everything all without ever touching RP or an in-character channel.

And so to clarify, the game is maybe a couple of weeks from having the level cap raised from 50 to 65, the 2nd tier of classes (the first promotion) is 100% complete (which goes from level 50-80). We are still in the "planning" stage for the final tier (80-100), but the overall method of progression we are looking at will be the release of content in stages. We've had up to level 50 open for a long time, and are about to open to 65. When we are ready, the content will open to 80. Once the final tier of classes are complete and the area content begins to stack up as well, we will probably be opening the final 20 levels of classes either in 5 or 10 level increments, but admittedly, we are a ways off from this.

You can connect to End of Time via host: eotmud.com and ports 23 or 4000