Wow. Lots of work went into this. Lots of new stuff, lots of requested features. Here's the breakdown:

FACTIONS:
* Eliminated councilor scandals (shifts to neutral) from happening during Frenzy.
* Made it so that only one councilor at a time have a scandal.
* Eliminated penalties for attacking and killing a token holder.
* Added Soldier Shields to the game. Explained more below.

GUILDS:
* Added colored halos around players in the minimap. Guildmates (yellow), guild enemies (red), and guild allies (green) are shown.
* Increased the time before you can rejoin a guild after leaving to 4 hours (was 3 hours). Increased the time before you can rejoin the same guild to 72 hours.
* Added in financial penalty for withdrawl from a mutual guild war. A guild must have at least 50k shillings prepaid rent in order to declare an enemy. If two guilds mutually declare each other as an enemy, then they are at war. If one guild undeclares the other as enemy, they lose 50k from rent. The winner gest 60% of the positive amount lost by the losing guild. So, if a guild had 30k prepaid rent and undeclared from a mutual war, the guild would be at 20k owed and the winner would get 18k added to their rent.
* Added a 1 Meridian day (2 hour) delay when undeclaring a guild as an enemy that has mutually declared your guild as an enemy. The financial penalties mentioned above happen when the enemy is first undeclared. During this delay, the war continues as before. After this delay, the war ends and the guild is removed as an enemy. Only one guild may be undeclared an enemy at any one time.

SPELLS:
* Added quest to get Jala necklace.
* Morphed players now show up as red dots on the minimap. They also do not show friend/foe colors.
* Morphed players are now prevented from casting Illusionary Form.
* Casting Morph will remove an Illusionary Form.
* Players are now prevented from casting Evil Twin on themselves.
* Prevented Shadowform from affecting someone in the form of a stone troll.
* Increased the duration of Night Vision significantly.
* Lowered the effectiveness of Glow.
* Altered mana and vigor costs for various attack spells. In general, spells cast less mana now than before.
* Increased damage of Vampiric Drain.
* Removed Sword of the Hunt restrictions for the Hunt spell.
* The casters maximum health points are now used to offset the high-level penalty of creating high level spells into potions.
* Made non-illusionary fire and lightning wall elements add a little light to the room they are cast in.

NEWBIES:
* Added in newbie Honor string. Any player with the string "This soul is new to the lands of Meridian 59." is from a new account. This string disappears when the player rerolls twice, gains over 30 health, or is over 2 Meridian years old.
* Added quick help to the screen of newbies logging into the game. Gives basic commands to help the newbie.

COMBAT:
* Fixed it so that a player that forgets defensive skills can't use them in combat.
* Also changed parry to not work when a player cannot attack.
* Fixed bug with gauntlets causing additional damage to the wearer in certain circumstances.
* Reduced the rate at which player karma changes for killing monsters of the opposite Karma that move Karma towards neutral.
* Improved mana regeneration rate in general. Fixed a bad equation that gave Duke faction a greater than normal bonus to mana regeneration.
* Made it so that certain monsters will not affect the karma of a player that kills that monster. Event monsters, Xeochicatl, and Evil Twins are now neutral.
* Increased Xeochicatl mobility. They are more dangerous now.
* Added living statue monsters.

STATS AND IMPROVES:
* Raised player's stat cap to 70. This means a player can gain enhancements to stats over the natural 50 stat points you can start with.
* Increased the chance for spells with no target to improve.
* Made the cumulative improve bonus to spellcasting increase faster.
* Changed all god's gifts to give +5 to main stat and +2 to secondary.

GENERAL:
* Eliminated the ability to use a name like "a/an (monster name)".
* Added Event Signs to the game. These are DM placable signs to give a visual reminder of events. Using the admin window, you can customize time/date information on the sign.
* Changed rentable rooms to no longer try to dispose loose items if a player is in the room.
* Made Martyr's Battleground a semi-permanent enchantment in the first level of the Marion Crypt.
* Altered various merchants around the mainland. Some will now buy items where they would not before. Prices on some merchants have changed.
* Made it so that shattering a Riija swords gives the victim 3 random components (only 1 component is shattered). Each component is labelled with the quester of the original sword.
* Made wedding rings unshatterable and unswappable.
* Added a new zone... :)

Okay, so what are soldier shields?

These shields must be worn and cannot be gotten rid of in any of the usual ways. They provide some shield defense (while not requiring the block skill). Each shield gives a bonus to 2 specific stats, determined by faction. Each shield also gives a faction-specific bonus to the character. Users with the shields can attack other faction members with these shields without penalty (murderer, revenant, etc). Users gain rank by killing faction enemies, lose rank by dying to faction enemies or taking log penalties.

You gotta be a faction member to become a soldier. The quest for the items can be requested from your liege, but they will only sign up a limited number of soldiers per day. However, the total number of soldiers is unlimited.

Only faction soldiers can claim flagpoles or pick up flags now, but may not pick up tokens anymore. Also, active faction soldiers with high enough rank will not have to do loyalty quests for their liege.

Losing your faction will, obviously, make you lose your status as a soldier. Attacking an allied faction soldier, reguardless of outlaw or muderer status, will also revoke your status as a soldier.

These are intended to replace the stat-enhancement aspects of the old hunter/necro scenario. That scenario is being reworked into something more interesting story-wise.

As always, email bugs to bugs@neardeathstudios.com. In addition, you can gmail vital bugs to me and Help.

Have fun!

Source: Psychochild - Info@NearDeathStudios.com