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Complete Noob's
Guide to Asherah
HP Limits on Towns

This is a really controversial topic. At this time, there are HP limits around certain towns. WAY back in 2003 when we started the game, there weren't. There was a simple reason for this - the game was incredibly difficult by comparison. It took significantly longer for people to do things and go places. Contrary to logic, this was NOT a bad thing, because it allowed people to get to know each other, and become familiar with and fond of the environment - essential parts of any successful role playing game.

It was not uncommon for people to spend a whole two weeks in the first city, before going on to other towns. Skills were much more difficult - and most good players concentrated a lot of effort in the first weeks on those beginning skills. Fishing, which now takes about an hour, took about eight hours. It could take a year to a year and a half for people reach Wudan and Aethras. To modern sensibilities that might seem boring, but when you log on each day and in the course of the day can play with or interact with several hundred people it's pretty neat.

But the newer generation was more impatient and demanded more shortcuts. From 2005 and 2006, people complained it took too long to level skills - we responded by increasing the speed at which levels accumulate or by setting the beginning skills higher. Monsters were too difficult. Distances were too long. With airships, of course, travel time was cut in half, and the flyer was impervious to any dmg from the monsters below.

But eventually, there is a limit. If we removed all the monsters and all the barriers, you could walk from Arthos to Keld in a whopping three minutes. Four more minutes and you can be in Rhine. Obviously that's not very gamelike.

So if it's best for only high level players to go to high level towns, there have to be some artificial limits. One way we could do it is to put monsters into more narrow or precarious paths to increase the risk to the traveller. But constantly being killed by monsters seems to have something of a demoralizing effect on players, although, in all honesty, we think it might toughen 'em up a little to have a little more adversity along the way.

But the game came equipped with HP barriers and eventually (probably around 2009) we chose to use them. Their levels were arbitrarily pre-set at 50, 150, 250 and 350. We CAN change those and will if it seems necessary. However, at this point we use them as they were sold to us.

So here are the towns that have restrictions.
  • Arthos, 50
  • Rhine, 150
  • Lyr, 350
  • Cairnwood, 350
  • Galendyr, 350
  • Goland, 350
  • Wudan, 350
  • Thrashorn, which is the ingress to The Tundra, Tower of Zot and Aethras, 350
We know it's offensive to some people to stroll along merrily and suddenly come up against a barrier that means they have to go back and work some more to raise their HP. And we apologize. If you can come up with a better answer, by all means, make a suggestion and we will strongly consider it.