What exactly is the state of the magic/druid/bard system?
My interest is mostly with the bard system. The (main) website says bards supposed to be able to cast magic using melodies/notes (that's why I became a bard in the first place, my poor misinformed newb self... not that I don't like rping one anyway ).
When is this supposed to come into effect? Is there a projected timeline?
The concept for bard magic is currently being worked on. The original concept is outdated since our devs implemented so many new possibilities. 6/20 steps are done with the major steps upcoming. Vital informations are still missing.
Bard magic won't come before priest magic or the newbie island, that's for sure. But I quite like the stuff and I look forward to play my first chaotic dance song!
By the way, the informations about the bard magic concept given on the homepage are 100% correct, one of the very few cases that the development section contains correct informations.
There where once a few staffweek reports..but I guess the ones lost "interrest" becaus of the lack of respons or because it couldcreate tensions between people, when it was mentioned that the staff talked about a player and so on.
The ones who wanted to care for for the staff reports just stopped writing them. I liked them as well. The reasons are RL issues and maybe no motivation to write them. I don't know.
The internal work of the staff mainly focuses currently on introducing a transporting system for huge amounts of items. On the development of the Joomla based new homepage. Furthermore in the organisation of a new place for the server.
Beside this not much happens.
We have a good amount of demotivated and fully inactive persons in the staff. Something that has to change but since there hardly is anyone to fill up the open positions in the staff... well. Everything goes rather slowly.
The concept for bard magic made quite some progress. Only minor issues are incomplete. However, a concept is just the first step and scripting new magic systems has absolutely no priority. Referring to a dev, it is not hard to script magic, but it is much work and not very challenging thus, not motivating. An apprentice scripter could do it, but as far as I recall, there was no serious attempt of anyone to become a new scripter for Illarion recently.