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Ahh, yes. Beta. When those of us who liked the concept of diplomacy felt like we really had input into the development of something different in an MMO. Alas, there was never any time to conceptualize and implement an actual Diplomat class, but the basics of the system were heavily tested and modified based on those suggestions.

The one thing that didn't completely transfer from the end of beta to the 'Gold' release was how developed Civic Diplomacy had become. What it ended up being was only about 3/4 of what was already being tested. The levers were in, but the system to allow competing 'factions' to effectively compete with each other to affect the levers was the icing on the cake. Levers could affect only those from certain regions, or specific harvesters, etc.

With the player base right now what it is, this isn't the biggest thing to re-implement and all the information about it was most likely lost when Microsoft took over anyway. But wishful thinking it is!

It must be 2 months now since we discovered your work and rushed back to Vanguard. What an enormous task this is. Even in that short time the progress has been very evident.
We were enthousiastic crafters, but will wait patiently for whatever is on offer beyond IOD.

However we discovered that Diplo can be started in the various Home Towns, but only in your own Home Town, and I have been working my way through these. Incredible!! Most seem to be in place with considerable quest lines available. Some of these towns, like Hathor, are like building sites littered with npc stock waiting to be built in. Yet here the Diplo threads are working well. I am not sure if the line from Shimmerlake is complete yet. But there is enough so that an IOD start is not essential for those who want Diplo.

Except at Mekalia, where the Diplo starter, Nenetcria Noxy the Menagerie Mgr, is in place but not yet scripted. So the Gnome still has to do the IOD start for Diplo.

Not urgent, but do you have any idea yet when the diplo at Mekalia might be in place?

Mekalia and Hathor Zhi are the two starter towns that we can't set up yet. I'm not sure why Hathor Zhi is like this, but for some reason all of the data collected from live is missing. We can set up the quests with information available online and from our own collections, but for most of them the quest text, turn in text, and completion text is missing. For this, we leave aside so we can continue filling out where we do have the information. Hathor Zhi will most likely need an entire storyline rewrite.

Mekalia is a different story. In Live, SOE decided (we believe) to make it a raid zone. So they cleared out all the NPCs and removed the starter quests from it. At this point in time, they forced everyone to start in Khal if you were any kind of Qalian race. And for this reason, we didn't have any of the starter quests up until you get outside of Mekalia. It will also need a rewrite, but it's in an even worse state than Hathor Zhi. One of our content designers, Moldew, worked really hard recreating all the NPCs and placing them where they should be. I've set up the starter quests, except, again, all we have is objective and no story.

We don't know when these will be set up. As I said we're trying to get through the content we have available and then will come back around for this stuff. There's no way I can guess, but I can easily say that it will take years.

Many thanks. Only one race then that has no choice but to start diplo at IOD. Hathos has enough to do the job for diplo to then be acceptable elsewhere.
Difficult for an enthousiast with little real computer knowledge to realise what ajob you have taken on. Thanks for the clearly explained info.

Actually diplomacy in Hathor Zhi is done through getting your horse. I had no problem with quest text when I worked on it but I think Jakkal said the Adventure quests were missing text. Qur'xa on the other hand is missing a lot of the quest text now and I think both Diplo and Adventure can't be done.

Not sure if you've looked at Hathor Zhi recently Jakkal. Might be quest text available for adventure quests in the raw text tab that you can copy from which wasn't there perhaps when you checked it last. I can't remember if I pulled a lot of text from those tabs or not when I did Diplo because everything ended up working out. But maybe there was a problem with Adventure quests.

Qur'xa is missing quest text because I think it was closed off at the time (if I heard this right) similarly to Mekalia. Might not have been able to collect anything there so the quests were very basic ones that were manually typed in from external sites and are definitely missing a lot of text. Correct me if I'm wrong on that of course. You can get there though through the portal that I fixed up though. A pretty neat place.

Qur'xa is Lomshir, not Hathor Zhi.

I have checked the raw text tab for the HZ quests, but most of it is still missing. I'm not sure what's going on with it because we'll have the quest text for the subsequent quests but not the turn-in or completion. And some are missing the quest text too.