As a prelude to a longer "fix armour" post, I made a tool to help people start familiarising themselves with some of these engine concepts that have traditionally been more abstract — AV, DV, and the combat formula. Play around with it. What looks "balanced" to you? If you had control of these settings in your realm, what would you set them to?

Hit Chance Curves (left chart) — the X axis is monster AV, the Y axis is how often that monster hits you. Each coloured line is a general armour tier, and the dashed lines show the stock game for comparison, so you can see immediately how the curves shift when you change a setting.

Defense Landscape / Monster Impact (right chart) — two views you can switch between:

• Monster Impact puts every monster in the stock database on the chart as a dot, spread by EXP across the X axis and AV up the Y. Each dot is coloured by how often that monster hits you at your selected DV — green if you tank it, red if it hammers you. The radio buttons below the chart switch armour tiers, the Player DV slider sets a specific DV, and hovering a dot names the monster and its basic stats. A minimap of the formula heatmap shows where your DV sits on the curve.

• Formula Heatmap shows the raw combat formula as a colour field — player DV across, monster AV up. The coloured vertical lines mark where each armour tier sits. This is where you can see the knee of the quadratic: the sharp transition where defence suddenly becomes very effective. Move the sliders to see what each part of the formula does to the outcome.

More detail on the proposed tweaks and the thinking behind them soon.

• Regen changes, to help with the clutter in popular areas.

Keep in mind this ties into the +15 stat increase players voted for.

Shop pages were showing the same price for every item on the shelf — a General Store where the torch, the lantern and the wooden ladder all cost 120. That is fixed, and shops now show a lot more about how they actually work.

• Every item shows its own price now — the item’s own value times that shop’s markup. In the General Store that is torch Free, lantern 4, crowbar 6, wooden ladder 30, waterskin 50, instead of 120 straight down the list.

• It affected 100 stocked shops on each realm — 3,608 price tags in all. Gang storefronts were always right: they are the one kind of shop that genuinely stores its own asking price, and reading every other shop the same way is what caused it.

• Items the game gives away now say Free rather than 0.

Each slot now shows how it restocks, like 4% · +1 · every 252 min:

• 4% — the chance of a restock each time that slot tries. It is a chance per attempt, not a rate per hour, and not a quantity.

• +1 — how many are added when an attempt succeeds. If that is less than the maximum, a sold-out slot needs several successes to fill.

• every 252 min — how often it tries. Fixed, not a maximum.

• A slot reading never has its chance set to zero. It will not come back, no matter how long you wait.

Those three multiply out to very different waits, and the same item is not the same everywhere. Scroll of zeal sits in Very Powerful Spells on all three realms at the same 2,500 gold — but on HellaMUD it refills in about an hour, and on MajorMUD it averages four and a half days, because MajorMUD rolls 4% every 252 minutes where HellaMUD rolls 99% every 63. On OmniMUD it is about four hours.

All of it is read live from each realm. Spot something that looks wrong? Say so on the gossip channel.