The Builder of the Year Award for 2009 goes to Diandra, in recognition for her endless work on improving our game.
Diandra is not your average type of Builder, in the sense that she didn't start her Imm career in 4D by building a zone. In fact her main zone, Killer Klowns, which she took over after the tragically deceased Alabastor, is still unfinished in the Buildport. I am confident that it will be completed one day, but Diandra is not only a perfectionist, she also gets constantly diverted by other tasks, which I keep piling on her.
Diandra is different from other Builders in another sense too; she is a constant and diligent worker. Too many builders slip into inactivity or oblivion after having completed a zone, with the main goal of getting an imm. But Diandra never stops working.

She's taken part in updating several of the older zones to our present standards, and she has also been a major part in RP events and global quests that needed extensive building support.
She has designed several quests, and is one of our best and dependable scriptors. In fact, when I screw up one of my own scripts, it's usually Diandra I turn to for help, and she usually fixes it.
She has been the main responsible for the perzonalised equipment for many years, and is probably the only one who has a full grip of all those items.
She runs our website, and when it got lost in the server crash, Diandra was the one that hunted down and retrieved most of the pages that we thought were lost for ever.
She wrote many of the helpfiles and maintains them.
And above all, she is the one who does most of the boring everyday work that I have come to hate myself. She corrects typos, fixes buggy scripts, hunts down bad resets - in short, most of her time on line is spent fixing mistakes made by other Builders. I don't know what I'd do without her.

Probably not many players realise how much work Diandra is doing for the Mud. This BOTY Award will hopefully make it a bit clearer.

A number of the old zones have been updated lately by me and Diandra to fit our current standards, (i.e. Listen/Smell/Taste/Feel descs, look Behind/Above/Under descs, undisplayed portals and containers, etc.)

The zones we have been working on are:
- The Robber Baron Castle
- The Viking Ship
- The Pirate Galley Ship
- Lostlands
- Fenizia

Several Quests has been added to these zones during the update.
In connection with the Fenizian Lore, I've also added one Quest each to The High Mountains and the Citadel of Thandar.
In addition there is a very large Quest involving most of the Future Dimension, 'The Quest for the Best of the Best'.

The Questcards have been updated as well, so the cards from 87 onwards are new.
We have now reached the magic number of 100 Questcards.
(The number of actual quests of course is a lot higher).

The serial murder mystery has been solved, due to the efforts of the players, in particular Lionheart’s CIIA deputies, where Erwin and Kitolani did most of the sleuthing work. MadMax was tracked down and brought to justice by Erwin, while Kitolani was the first to figure out the identity of the Poet, and collect incriminating evidence against her. The Poet turned out to be Joanie, our own Imm secretary, who apparently got fed up with irritating players, and having to do a lot of work for the Imms without getting any salary, or even thanks. Joanie of course is an android, so she shouldn’t need either salary or thanks, but apparently she got her wires crossed in the nodule that controls the Three Robotic Laws *), which made her turn sinister.

Those who want more info about the event can check the logs on the Roleplay Forum, http://4dimensions.org/forum/index/topic,93.0.html

Or get the full explanation on http://4dimensions.org/forum/index/topic,117.0.html

*) The Three Laws of Robotics 1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm. 2. A robot must obey orders given to it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law. 3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

Who is killing off all the Trainers of 4Dimensions?

By now already 12 people and a dog have died. The last victims were all the Clan Trainers, and still the corpses are piling up. Who is The Poet? And what could be the motive behind these heinous crimes? Who is angry enough to hire the notorious serial killer MadMax from USA to do their dirty work? A group of CIIA agents has been sent over from USA to help in the search for MadMax. Unfortunately Lionheart, the leader of the group, doesn’t seem to get along very well with the local police. In fact, both parties seem to regard each other with the utmost distaste. The CIIA agents regard the local cops as backwater bums, while the locals resent the intrusion on their territory. Hardly a climate for constructive cooperation, but young Agent Erwin plods along diligently is his investigations, helped by the ESP powers that his Martian origin gives him. But so far everything seems to get more confusing for every day, as more tracks and red herrings plop up. Is the Olde Yorke Mayor really involved in the killings, or is he just one of those shady Politicians, who abused his position and got caught with the fingers in the jam pot? Could the entire plot be a Jester joke that went bad? There is some rather incriminating evidence against the top Jester, Thotter, who for sure is an anarchist and anti-capitalist too. But he is also a known pacifist and vegetarian, so is it really likely that he’d go on a killing spree? Or could The Poet be a woman like Kitolani, a young female CIIA agent in Lionheart’s group, seems to think? An angry woman, who wants to strike back at the male chauvinist pigs that dominate the world in 4D as in most places? Women’s lib at its peak... And what about the Sicilian connection? Everybody knows that the Sicilians run the poker game in the Recall area. And nobody believes that the current Godfather is just an innocent used cars salesman, like he claims. But is he also the twisted brain that concocted this plot? From another angle, the Sicilians seem just as worried about the situation as everyone else. After all, a serial killer running rampant in the Realms is very bad for business, and above all the Sicilians are businessmen. If you want to catch up on what happened in the RP event so far, check the logs on the Forum: http://4dimensions.org/forum/index/topic,93.msg763.html#new

It’s been some time since we last ran a global RP Event, but we are planning a pretty big one now. It will start on Friday April 25th and I scheduled to run for about 10 days, meaning that everyone should have a fair chance to participate in at least parts of it, since both weekends and weekdays are involved.

I cannot tell you much about the plot before the Event starts, except by publishing this initial warning that we’ve just received from CIIA in USA:

“Thanks to our advanced scanning equipment, our agents have succeeded in intercepting a number of messages, between a notorious professional hitman, known to the Police only as MadMax, and someone calling themselves 'The Poet'. The intercepted communication shows that 'The Poet' has contracted Madmax to carry out an unspecified number of murders. MadMax is already the main suspect in a number of serial killings in USA and other countries, but has so far never been apprehended. Apparently he sells his services to the highest bidder, but he also appears to take a personal pleasure in the killings. Although he uses different disguises and different weapons, there is one thing consistent in all the murders he is suspected of: The victim's left pinky finger is always cut off. (It is not clear whether he does this as a kind of signature, or whether he actually collects the fingers as souvenirs). As for The Poet, apparently he/she is residing in the 4 Dimensions, but the CIIA hasn't been able to secure any information about name, address or even gender. We have not yet any information about when MadMax is planning to leave USA, but since the deal seems to have already been closed, it will probably be within a week or two. You had better take all possible measures to warn the public and to stop these planned killings. Signed, Joe Goodbody, Foreign Affairs Director of CIIA (Central Intergalactic Intelligence Agency)"

What we expect from the players is of course to figure out who it is in 4D that could be angry or desperate enough to hire a hitman from USA for their dirty work. You can do this both by using your deductive skills, and by Roleplaying out the investigation, interview various suspects etc..

More specifically the task is this:

A: Find and neutralize MadMax.

B. Identify The Poet, and figure out the motive for the crimes.

There will be the usual rewards; Award Points and Tokens. You’ll get Award points for good RP Sessions, which should be logged, cleaned up from spam and posted on the Roleplayer Board in the Forum. There will also be a pretty substantial Token reward for the first player to figure out who The Poet is, and what the motive is for the killings. When you think that you know, you should send a note to Molly, but don’t be too hasty about it. Each player - (including alts) – only gets 2 guesses, so if you should change your mind later, you might have already wasted your chances.

More info about this Event later, on the Forum and in Game.

The good news are that Diandra has done an enormous job, and managed to retrieve a lot of the content of our lost webpage.

Hopefully we'll get a new page set up soon after Christmas, so that we'll be able to restore its content.

Some of it, like the player Background stories, has been harder to find backups of, but if we cannot find the files in any of our own computers, hopefully the players themselves will have copies of their own stories and will re-submit them.

There are several purposes with playtesting the arena:
- To find out if the area, scripts and code work as intended
- To prevent possible ways of cheating in future fights
- To check if the Gladiator chars have suitable stats or if they need to be tweaked
- To check if the different classes are balanced against each other

To prevent potential 'cheating', we need the following safety measures to work:
- Gladiators should not be able to leave the arena
- Other players should not be able to enter the Arena
- Gladiator equipment, potions etc. should be confined to the Arena

We’ll soon be starting playtesting of our new Gladiator Arena, a feature that will give all players a unique chance of testing their PK skills by fighting others on equal footing, regardless of your own level, tier and equipment. The Gladiators will all be tier 4, level 50, and have the normal stats, skills and spells for their Class. More detailed info about the Gladiators in a later post.

The first step before testing is however to set up a list of who runs which Gladiator.
We want as many of them as possible in action, to get a thorough test.

We are getting very close to the point where we can start playtesting our new feature, the Gladiator Arena. I am really looking forward to this myself, since among other things it will be a chance of testing out the balance between our classes in a totally controlled environment. It will also be a real test of who is the best PKiller in the game, since the Gladiators will all be the same tier and level.

The Individual Zoneflag Contest is still a lot more open than the Clan contest, and theoretically any active player has a fair chance of winning it, especially since several of the players in the lead are no longer active. So far no player has more than 50 flags registered on their certificate, but I expect this to change soon, because you can start collecting the flags for the individual contest immediately, even though it will be finished at the same time as the Clan Contest.