Having come and gone a week back (as mentioned on our forums), a happy birthday seems to have escaped the front page. So here it is.  

A Land Far Away is proud to announce the first anniversary of our NWN2 servers!

ALFA began in 1999, several weeks after the Neverwinter Nights game was announced, as a dream to recreate the Forgotten Realms in Pen and Paper style, using Bioware’s NWN computer game. It has been almost ten years since that first vision was conceived and the ALFA community is still going strong.

One year ago our first NWN2 server went live and we have since added a second NWN2 server with several more near completion and still others in various stages of development. Now we are celebrating the beginning of our second year on the NWN2 platform.

Our NWN2 Live Servers:
The Silver Marches
Baldur's Gate

Servers in development:
Moonshae Islands
Western Heartlands
Cormanthor
Skullport

All in all, a big happy birthday to ALFA.  Thank you to all who made the past year such an amazing one, and may the year to come be one of more great surprises!

I'm happy to report that over the past few months our numbers have increased quite a bit.

As of this writing, we are over 400 active members strong, and the traffic both on the website and the servers themselves keep increasing day by day.

A week ago, an email was sent out to all former members to inform them that we're still around and doing quite well. Welcome back to everybody who decided to re-apply / re-join our community!

Traffic on the servers is increasing as well. Lately it is not uncommon to see 10+ people on either server at any one time. Additional servers are being built, and will hopefully be ready to take the load off once we're starting to see 20+ players per server.

ALFA is stronger than it has been in quite a while,- kudos to everybody chipping in to make it that way!

Please patch NWN2 to the new 1.22.1588 version.

ALFA is now in transitioned to the new patch, and with it, added the requirement for both expansion packs (Mask of the Betrayer, and Storms of Zehir). 

"ALFA 003: The Silver Marches" is up with the latest patch.

"ALFA 010: Baldur's Gate" is also up with the latest patch.

There are updates to most of ALFA's haks available on the main ALFA Worldgate server, see the Downloads section for information on how to update.  It does not matter which you patch first; the game (via the NWN2 autopatcher), or the haks (via Worldgate).  I do not recommend running both patch processes at the same time, though.

Remember to remove any overrides or special UI files before patching NWN2.

The 1.22 patch includes optimization for keyboard-walking via WASD keys, as well as many spell fixes.  Swashbuckler is now an available character class for character creation or multiclassing.  New feats are also available, though the Fey and Fiendish Heritage traits require Extraordinary PC approval to take (send a bio for the PC to your server's Head Dungeon Master (HDM) for approval.

ALSO: with adoption of the 1.22 patch, ALFA will require the Storms of Zehir expansion pack.  If you have not already purchased a copy of SoZ, please do so soon in order to continue to be able to play , DM and/or build on ALFA's servers.

Other additions to the 1.22 / SoZ haks:  Two new tilesets for builders to work with, DM client inventory management tools, boardable ships, equipable offhand items, and more.  

Congratuations to Ayergo and his build team on making it to the end of a long road to Live status, and expanding our Persistent World to include a second Live Server.  A ship now provides passage between the docks of Rivermoot in the Silver Marches, to the docks of Baldur's Gate. 

For those who have not played on a multiserver Persistent World before, your character file will move from one region to another as you switch servers.  You may only keep one Live PC at a time though, even across both servers.

The BG PWC is now up a part of the Live Worldgate configuration.  Update and check out the new territory!

 On the 20th of February, the year 2009, the Open Application server is put to rest. After many years of great service, the Open Application Server finally crawls into its final resting place, in the realms of the DM FTP. Since its first conception, back in 2004, the OAS has seen through countless of new faces. Maybe in the future some future Admissions Team and future Player Admin may seek to revive the OAS - to give it a good beating down and lay it out as the Welcome Mat for new members. But until then, it is going to be stored away.

*fires off a 21-gun salute as the OAS coffin is slowly carried away*

Over the next few days I will go about updating our documents to remove all reference of the Open Application Server. Thank you for all those legions of DMs and builders who have worked away over the years to make the Open Application Server the success it was. Thrasy, idoru, Ranger de Wood and HEEGZ are a few of the names that leap to my mind, but I know for sure that there are so many more who have spent hours and hours on the OAS that I apologies for not been able to list them all.

As of today, for the first time in more than 4 years, the Written Applications are the sole entry into ALFA. The Admissions Team and myself are constantly working on ways of making this system more and more straight forward and user friendly for applicants. Should you have any suggestions to further these improvements, please do not hesitate to contact myself, or any other Admissions Team member.