New feature announcement in region server 1.3

Dear friends,

the new region server 1.3 will soon be released together with a meter update. Several awesome new features will be available, all are optional and none of them will affect the performance. Here is a rough list:

• sim owners can freely adjust the strength of all three attack types: ranged, melee and device (the latter denotes automated attacks from traps, animals etc, i.e. anything which works without an attacking person). These attack types are recognised automatically by the meter (this is not a new feature, it has always been so). Now for each of them a global factor can be applied
  
  
• attacks can now be globally randomised. Sim owners can determine if they want to overlay e.g. 20% of an attack with a random value (anything between 0% and 100% is fine). I'm very curious on feedback on this feature and on what is your preferred value for the randomisation. It is expected, that randomisation will help eliminating disadvantages for people with high ping time and slow computers ... but that must be experimentally verified first
  
  
• the time of unconsciousness can be adjusted and is not fixed to 15 min anymore
  
  
• an experimental traffic counter is included. Sim owners can decide if they want to display this traffic counter on the list of ML-sims. It is region based (not parcel based) and gives for several reasons slightly different but similar results than the LL traffic counter. I am thinking of adding up the traffic for clusters, so that expanding RP area does not anymore appear as a loss of traffic
  
  
• sim owners can now create their own characters! This is useful when you want to have various races/genders that go beyond the predefined ones. All such characters can be freely customised, as explained in the following
  
  
• you can customise name and token (the symbol tied to a character) for each character, of course UTF-8-safe
  
  
• you can customise health regeneration rate for each character
  
  
• you can customise stamina regeneration rate for each character
  
  
• you can customise defence strength for each character, and how much this will be affected by defence experience points
  
  
• you can customise soundsets for each character!
  
  
• alternatively you can use templates and modify them according to your needs. There will be built-in templated (i.e. default configuration), and I want to ship the region server with a couple of templates (on notecards) for popular roleplay environments
  

So, the discussion is open, tell me please whatever comes to your mind. There are a few more features that will probably come, but I'm not sure if I will include it in the next release already, among them configurable extended healing abilities and some 'special attacks'.

Comments are welcome!

Have a nice day,
Tala