Fighting you get better at, a friends list, and a switch for the classic years

The longest day yet: an overnight run through the list, a morning making every test in the game pass, and an evening of the systems the original grew in its later years.

The fight teaches now. Every swing used to be one roll of level and stats, so a warrior who had fought all year hit exactly as often as one who had just bought the same sword, and a wizard in plate was as hard to hit as the tank beside them. There are weapon skills, Defense and Dodge now, and they climb as you use them — proved by a warrior, a sword, three rats and ninety seconds. Practice moves how hard you hit as well as how often, a little. Nobody starts at nothing: a new character has held a sword before. And creatures can finally be bad at fighting, so a rat in a cellar and a guard captain are no longer equally well trained.

Double attack and dual wield, the EverQuest way. The numbers come from the original rather than from anybody's memory of it.

Fighters get disciplines. A caster has eight spell gems; the classes that fight had a kick, a bash and a taunt. Now there are fifteen disciplines by the original's names — Defensive, Evasive, Mighty Strike, Thunderkick, Voiddance, Holyforge and the rest.

A raid is paid for what it kills. Eighteen people would bring something down and seventeen got nothing, because nobody had ever asked the raid. A raid splits experience by level now, like a group, and every member of a group is told their share. The group is told when somebody levels, too.

The commands a group cannot do without. /assist, /split, /makeleader and /random were all missing, and /assist was the most typed command the original had: without it, six people looking at a camp of four pick four different things. /yell and /con are in too — a yell stays in the zone and says where you are, because somebody about to die has no hands free to read out coordinates.

A friends list. /friend a name and you are told when they come on, wherever you are. Ignoring somebody now works across zones as well; walking into the next zone used to be a way round it.

Things that were written and never switched on. Lava had never burned anybody — the code that makes it hurt had never once been called. Being rested had been filling up while people were away and speeding up their first hour back, and nothing ever said so; now it does. A door can carry a trap, so there is finally a reason to wait for the rogue instead of letting the warrior try the handle. And a stun no longer breaks on the first blow.

Your progress is harder to lose. A save the server could not write used to be tried once and then forgotten. It is kept and tried again now, and written to disk so that even a server that dies does not lose it. A server that goes down tells you why and takes you back to your character list instead of leaving you standing in an empty world.

The service stopped taking requests without limit, so a password cannot be guessed as fast as the network allows — and the first two tries at the limit were wrong in instructive ways, counting a whole zone as one person and then counting every zone line as a login, before it settled on the right thing.

A switch for the classic years. Much of the evening went on the systems the original added late, each behind its own rule so a world can choose: alternate advancement, so the last level is no longer a wall; augments, and when they are off the socket is not shown at all; mounts; mercenaries for the player online when nobody else is; achievements and titles; private copies of any zone for guild halls, houses and instanced dungeons; and a guild bank and a house chest. A world set to classic turns them all off in one go.

Tinkering, the tenth tradeskill, and the gnomes' own: anybody can buy the toolbox, but only a gnome can use it.

Every test in the game passes, and the build checks itself. Overnight, suite after suite turned out to be failing because the world was reset in September — nineteen failures about missing shopkeepers on a world with no shops, forty-five about quest design that had nothing to do with quest design. Each now says what it is waiting for instead of failing. The whole headless run takes under three minutes, and the automatic build is green.