It is that time of year again, and we hope everyone has been enjoying the various Logosmas activities all across Achaea!

When it came time to write this post, I made a cup of tea and settled in as winter swirled in blues and greys outside the office window to dig through my notepad tabs, wikipages, and announce posts to put together a list of what we've achieved. Turns out there's been quite a lot this year! Some ups, some downs, but mostly a lot of fun.

So! Some of the highlights of 2022 for us were the release of Boldarihm - a big expansion for Dwarven lore; the return of the Lupine Hunting Grounds reworked to honour the Hunt and the fallen Lord Lupus; the release of Aster Keep and the Knights Guild including Chivalry's repurpose to reward those who would walk that difficult path; and of course, the Fayad and the fae pronoun set.

Other notable moments included Eleusis fully embracing Lady Gaia, the expansion of renown, all of the God-themed Fair, the return of the Tournament of Names, and the ever-hype Championship Games which was truly a nailbiting affair.

From the backend side of things the coders have been working hard all year on various updates, problems, and projects. Alongside classleads and class updates, we've done a big overhaul to the voyage system which makes things much cleaner for us to work within, and more foolproof for you all to enjoy. Changes to the queue system and command rate limiting plus the revamp of our curing system meant that the CTF in November saw no complaints of game lag, which is a first in Achaea's 25+ year history. And we just finished the City Ministry rework!

To return briefly to the subject of the Champs games, Makarios and I were not happy with the experience we presented to the competitors, there were some obvious problems and we will be resolving these ahead of the next.

Every advent of the Championship games or any competition is always an iterative process, and we do feel like we are getting closer, but boy oh boy did the Worldgames day challenge us in new ways. We do want to apologise to those for whom this was an unhappy experience, and while we do not think that faced with the same problems now we'd do anything differently in the moment, we are always striving to do better, and will be making updates to systems to prevent similar problems in the future. On a happier note, we think we have Championship Twins and the XP event in a great place, and the Group Riddles were everything we had hoped for, really challenging game knowledge and offering accessibility in ways that the Quiz (ye olde wiki race) could not.


Now, I know most people read this and want to know what's coming up next year. And I also know that you know that I'm not going to spoil the surprises we have in store. BUT! I can say that (world-shattering events not-withstanding) we may well have Adryn's games again next September, classleads will return as they do every year (whenever Mak is ready for them), and I'm certain we'll see some Gods out and about around the land. Makarios and I also feel that 2022 has been a bit light on conflict, so you should expect some exciting developments in that area of gameplay.

If we don't see you at the QnA tonight, we look forward to seeing you all in the new Year!

Penned by My hand on the 18th of Ero, in the year 906 AF.