We're perfectly aware that a lot of you would like some base mechanics and various inconsistencies changed. For a good while, we've held off on performing any major, game-altering changes because once you start pulling levers in game balancing, it's butterfly effect extreme. That will change soon, in the coming months.
Some core game elements will change; for the better, of course. Concerns of casters, warriors and nature people alike will be visited. Your SD experience is sure to improve. There will, however, undoubtedly be inbalance in several aspects of the game, and to lessen the impact of that, we are halting active development on the production server until each change has been thoroughly tested and fine-tuned, and all of the changes as a whole have been considered. We'll still be fixing bugs and releasing new areas, though.
That brings me to the point of this note. We need a handful of people who will want to extensively test and evaluate the new features and changes as they become available. You'll be testing the development version of SD on a separate server using a clone of your existing character or pre-generated characters. You'll be expected to spend a decent amount of time testing and providing feedback (i.e. if reading down to this point is tiring you, you need not apply), and you won't get any rewards, bonuses or prizes of any kind. You will, however, get to see new (and yes, probably broken) features first, and get a chance to directly influence the development of the game ---- no, we won't make Rampage's stun last 15 seconds :-)).
If you're interested, send an email to beta :at: sdmud :dot: com with the name of your character in the subject. Later, when we have the first features ready for testing, we'll contact you.
PS: There won't be any pwipes or anything like that, don't worry.