Game Notices

The following are notifications, recent changes and pending future plans and ideas.

Notifications

Sep 22, 2021: We will be providing IRC project cloaks to any player with one or more characters over level 50. These cloaks will be of the format:

@idlerpg/player/irc_account_name/primary_nick

Do note that we are only providing these cloaks for players of the primary game.

If you are interested in such a cloak please read this page for more information.

Jun 02, 2021: In honor of the move to Libera IdleRPG is being restarted. The restart is scheduled for 00:00:01 UTC on Saturday, June 5th. The existing player's database from freenode has been preserved and at some point in the near future I will be restoring that game on Libera as well in channel #idlerpg-legacy. An announcement will be made here as well as broadcast online.

Oct 27, 2018: Game migrated to new host. dwfreed and simple now have shell access access to the server removing myself as a single point of failure.

Feb 12, 2017: The game and discussion channels are now set to only permit users that are authenticated to services to join. This is to prevent various problematic network behaviors. Please see http://libera.chat/kb/answer/registration for more information on nick registration and authenticating to services.

Jul 23, 2014: Due to a series of events, all bad, there was a catastrophic loss of the server that the game runs on. The most recent viable backups date from 00:09 AM, June 1st, 2014 and the system has been restored from that date. _ALL_ game progress since that date is lost; including any characters created since that date.

Feb 22nd, 2014: Freenode is undergoing yet another DDoS from butt-hurt little brats. Problems with the game will be resolved when the attacks are over.

June 8th, 2013: Freenode is still undergoing network issues which may or may not be part of a DDoS attack. This is causing the bot to misbehave due to a programming issue I don't see off-hand. Splits should be handled properly but it's just not working. I need to schedule time to isolate and correct this once and for all. NOTE: due to this combination of factors people have to log in again as the bot lost state during the most recent restart. I am deeply sorry for any inconvenience that this may have caused anyone.

Freenode suffered another DDoS attack against its infrastructure on May 11th which caused the bot to lose track of who was logged in so it was not able to log people back in across the resulting netsplits. The game state state and channel +v state was also greatly out of sync. The easiest way to resolve this was to stop the bot, clear the channel users and then restart the bot. Players will be forced to log back in to the game manually.

Changes

Jan 4, 2018: Game pronouns are now genderless. Thanks to isha for the patch.

Jan 4, 2018: Quest penalties now only affect members of the quest and will not impact non-questors. Thanks to kenyon for the patch.

July 7th, 2013: Merged quest re-load on start patch from the NG version to prevent loss of quest across a bot restart.

July 7th, 2013: Merged signal handlers from NG version to permit sane command-line kill and re-read config file functionality.

May 19th, 2013: Added an @reboot crontab to start the bot at system reboot.

May 13th, 2013: Bot will force a services RELEASE prior to attempting to identify to services to ensure that the bot nick is free from services enforcement. This should help during times of network instability.

May 12th, 2013: Player database cleanup has been run and all characters unused for the past 120 days have been removed. Previous database has been preserved and individual characters can be restored if necessary. Note: I will only keep the old database around for a month or so, after that point purged characters will _not_ be restored.

Date Unknown: For those of you that use the Gnome Desktop Environment there is an extension available to display character statistics from your favorite IdleRPG server. Please see https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/643/idlerpg/ for more information.

Future Plans / Todo

At some point the codebase from the -ng instance will need to be merged into the main codebase. As the featureset between the -ng and main instances varies and merging users from the -ng instance to the main instance is not fair to those playing the main instance I will quite likely restart the entire game. Yes, this means resetting all users to level 1. I will preserve the rankings and make this data available on this website in the form of a Hall Of Fame or similar. Details are still being considered and there will be an opportunity for community discussion before this takes place. Details of the differences in the game features will be detailed here as well.