In related news, Crimbo Town has inexplicably vanished from the Big Mountains.

January 03
The new data center is doing some sort of equipment reboot tonight (Wednesday morning at 1:00 MST) that they say will result in about ten minutes of downtime. Just a heads up.

The January item-of-the-month is now available in Mr. Store.

January 14
A new feature has been added to chat -- custom right-click menus! You can enable it from your account menu. This feature is experimental, and may not work for everyone. See the documentation for more information.

January 25
The in-disguise portion of Itznotyerzitz Mine has been changed into a fun mining mini-game. Also, the L33t Tr4pz0r quest has been altered a bit.

January 31
The February Item of the Month is available in Mr. Store. On time!

Additionally, there have been some changes to elemental damage in combat. The separate types of elemental damage that you do are now enumerated during combat, in stunning color.

Additionally additionally, there is a new element of damage in the Kingdom -- sleaze damage.

February 03
We're testing some stuff after rollover tonight, so it'll run a little bit long. Probably no more than 30 minutes.

February 08
In your campground (and your top menu) you'll now notice a Quest Log. This currently underutilized new feature provides a way for you to keep track of what quests you're currently on, and there's a section of it where you can keep some notes. This is also where your accomplishments are displayed, now.

Also, there's some new stuff going on at the hippy camp. Take a clover!

February 08
Over the next few hoursdays, we're going to be converting a number of existing items into off-hand items. Check out this post in the forums for a list of affected items, and exactly what the change will entail.

February 12
Okay, so, we've made some changes to the way elemental resistance works. Instead of just being a "you have it or you don't" situation, it now stacks up. Equipment and effects can give you varying levels of protection, and your character sheet tells you how protected you are against each element.

In other news, all dropped and crafted equipment is now enchanted. Like some evening.

February 13
The long-awaited leaflet revamp has gone live! If you were in the middle of or had finished the old leaflet, you've been reset -- happy Valentine's Day, I guess. Thanks go to Riff for the awesome new rewrite.

Also, Happy Valentine's Day! There are some new goodies in the Gift Shop in Market Square to mark the occasion.

February 15
Rollover will be long tonight (2/16) so we can perform a little bit of maintenance.

Edit: Maintenance successful. Yay!

February 27
There is a new store in Market Square. Go check it out!

March 02
In the Account menu, you now have the ability to change the e-mail address associated with an account. The way it works is a little janky, but it's a necessary evil, what with the security and the scamming and the nice LADY.

Edit: March's item-of-the-month is available.

March 05
A bunch of new skills are now available from your friendly neighborhood Guild Trainer. All classes now have skills up to level 14, except Turtle Tamers, who only got a level 13 skill, and Accordion Thieves, who got their skills all the way to 15.

March 13
A new NPC (that's non-player character, for all of you non-dorks) has been added to each of the class guilds. The Car/Shore quest has been changed such that this NPC assigns it to you, rather than the Council.

This is all he does right now, but there'll be more in the fullness of time. Also, I was just kidding. No non-dorks play this game.

March 14
When you open gift packages, they'll now open most recent first, instead of first-in first-out like they used to.

Also, the messages associated with gift packages should now correctly update with the inside note once the package is opened.

Also also, why didn't anybody tell me that feature had stopped working?

March 14
Turtle Tamers have skills to level 15, now. More notable, however, are the many, many changes we've made to Turtle Tamers and their skills. Several skills have been changed; some removed, some added. Check out this forum post if you want to know exactly what's up.

March 19
The clan rank and permission system has been revamped. You can read about the changes in this forum post.

March 30
Mr. Skullhead has updated the documentation on scammers slightly. Check it out here and here, funk soul brother.

March 31
April's Item of the Month is now available in Mr. Store.

April 11
The Spooky Forest has been updated a bit. It has been made more interactive and streamlined, like a... uh... choose your own sports car?

April 15
We've added a leaderboard in the Hall of Records for Noblesse Oblige's Hardcore Ascension Contest. Because it's cool. The leaderboard will go away when the contest ends. Not that I really needed to specify that.

April 21
A dodgy little man has set up a new booth in the Casino. I wonder what he's doing there...

April 28
The first KWE fights are occuring tomorrow! Check John Wilke's Booth for fight times.

April 30
The May Item of the Month is now available.

May 14
There have been some changes made to the way booze works. First-generation mixed drinks (base booze + base fruit) have had their quality improved quite a bit, such that it is no longer possible to end up with a net loss of adventures from cocktailcrafting two things.

Also, Ode to Booze has been changed. Instead of giving a flat bonus of one adventure per booze item, it now gives a bonus of 1-4, scaling with the quality of the item.

May 18
The observatory, having completed its upgrades, is now again open to the general public.

There is also a leaderboard for most time spent stargazing.

May 23
Just a friendly reminder -- due to the strangeness with KWE wager payouts, Xenophobe is going to perform the wager payouts manually this time. Doing so will be slower, and you may not receive your winnings until some time after rollover. Rest assured, however, that you WILL receive your winnings correctly this week. You will receive a notification in chat when your winnings have arrived.

May 24
The Disco Bandit skill Crossbow Fever has been changed. Instead of giving a flat to-hit bonus, it now gives +1 damage per player level when using a crossbow.

This should make it just a weensy bit less useless.

May 25
The level 15 skill for Disco Bandits has been rolled out. Please visit the Department of Shadowy Arts and Crafts for details. And de heads.

May 30
It's Tuesday! There's a new smithing recipe. Also a new shield.

May 31
The June Item of the Month is now available in Mr. Store.

Additionally, custom avatar forms are again available in Mr. Store. The guidelines have changed, so be sure and read them before you trade for one.

Additionally additionally, there is a new item in the Demon Market.

June 02
We regret to inform any burgeoning astronomy fans in the Kingdom that the LAAAAME Observatory has been destroyed by a direct hit from a comet that ricocheted after colliding with Grimace. A large section of Grimace itself has fallen to the Desert Beach; it is recommended that adventurers not attempt to lick it.

June 05
At some point tonight, probably around 6:30 Arizona time, the guys at the data center are going to be replacing the server that went down on Friday. The forums will go down for a little while (they're guessing 15 minutes or so) and no non-cached images will load during that time.

June 06
It's Tuesday! There's a happenin's a'transpirin' on the Mysterious Island.

June 12
The construction on the Right Side of the Tracks is complete. It looks like the penguins have built themselves a Raffle House.

June 13
It's Tuesday! There's that new item in the Grimoire. But wait! There's more!

The level 15 crafting skills for Seal Clubbers, Saucerors, and Pastamancers have been rolled out. The Saucecrafting rollout required us to make some changes to existing items and effects, so it might seem like you're missing stuff, but you're not... Also, some cooking recipes (notably chow meins) don't work the way they used to. There's a forum post with details.

June 14
There has been a minor change to the way the skills page works -- now, instead of removing a skill from your list if you can't cast it, the skill is grayed out. (This apparently only works in Firefox.) Skills which can only be used a certain number of times per day (Pastamastery, Smile of Mr. A, etc) also gray out if you can no longer cast them. There is an option on the skills page to revert back to the old behavior.

Additionally, Transcendental Noodlecraft and The Way of Sauce now allow you to summon 5 noodles or reagents per day, if you have the Pastamastery or Advanced Saucecrafting skills. (This is the way it was originally intended to be, but we forgot to change the limits.)

Additionally additionally, the Cerebral items from the astral mushroom zones now form an outfit, the Encephalic Ensemble.

June 20
It's Tuesday, and we've got two for Tuesday today.

All outfits now have an additional effect of some sort when worn. See if you can figure out all of them!

A number of new shopkeeper images were added to mall stores. You can now switch your shopkeeper name and picture without selling your entire store, for 1,000 Meat. Additionally, if you have a custom avatar, you can choose that to be your shopkeeper picture as well.

June 22
It's random interface upgrade time! A new feature called "Quick Skills" was added. You can enable it in your account menu. Quick Skills allows you to use your skills and buffs and MP restorers in a small form on the top part of the screen, allowing you to quickly replenish your MP and effects without having to go to the skills page. This feature uses some pretty fancy Javascript, and it may not work in all browsers. (Internet Explorer and Firefox work fine; other browsers may choke.)

The MP restorers form may, in the future, be expanded to allow you to use any multiusable item, if enough people think it's a good idea. Look for it some time in the future.

June 27
It's Tuesday! (At least, for us, it still is.) The Moxious Maneuver button has disappeared, and is now a choice in your Use Skills menu in combat. Additionally, Moxious Maneuver is now affected by -MP cost items.

Also, more elemental tests have been added to the Daily Dungeon (including new sleaze tests.) These may not show up for a day or two, due to the Daily Dungeon's randomness, but you'll know 'em when you see 'em.

June 30
July's Item of the Month is now in Mr. Store.

July 04
It's Tuesday, and what a Tuesday it is! The next stage of Riff's Guild Quest project has been rolled out, along with some changes to the zone it involves.

Enjoy!

July 11
Is it Tuesday again already? Doc Galaktik needs some help.

Also, some PvP changes have been rolled out. Each fight is now best of 7 rounds, instead of best of 5, and a bunch of new minigames have been added.

Also also, check your account menu for some optional inventory interface enhancements.

Also also also, a couple of new star items can be made now.

July 18
Tuesday's coming. Did-- err, Tuesday's here.

The Knob Goblins have discovered a new section inside of their glorious Knob. Beware the inhabitants therein, for brute force may not be enough to keep you alive...

The Grimoire also has a new item.

July 19
Thanks to your generous support, we have been able to purchase and install three new webservers. www6, www7, and www8 are online and working. The fight against lag continues!

July 25
The reward scheme for the Giant Garbage quest has been made a little more interesting. We also added a bunch of new cooking recipes. Some interesting, some not so interesting -- it all depends on your threshold for finding things interesting, I guess.

Also, all class skills level 4 and under have had their training costs reduced, and the trainer is unlocked after you complete the first Guild challenge. We'll fill in some sort of reward for the third one soon.

July 31
August's Item of the Month is now available in Mr. Store.

August 01
A bunch of new crafting recipes have been added, as well as a couple of new drops from monsters on the Island. Item drops. Not, like, eyedrops. There are already too many eyedrops in the game.

August 08
We've done a minor revamp of the Accordion Thief skills. Some underpowered, unpopular and underutilized ones were made better, and a few of them were reordered and/or had their MP costs changed.

August 15
There was a glitch in the Raffle House yesterday that caused the prizes to not get handed out. Though tickets from yesterday may have vanished from your inventory, we still have records of the purchases, and the tickets will be applied to today's raffle. Also, twice as many prizes will be awarded today.

Sorry. To make it up to you, we've added a whole bunch of new Meatsmithing recipes, changed some old ones, and made some improvements to the way the Comma Chameleon (August's Item-of-the-Month) works. See this thread for details on the Chameleon changes.

August 22
It's Clover Lover Tuesday! A bunch of new clover adventures have been added to various zones, and the letter from King Ralph XI that you get after you ascend now gives you a clover.

August 29
All monsters can now get both critical hits and fumbles in combat. This change is accompanied by special critical and fumble messages unique to each monster. Yay, more dumb jokes!

Also, the Icy Peak is now finally a real zone. Several new monsters and encounters have been added, making it significantly less boring than it used to be. Yay, more content!

August 31
September's Mr. Store item is now available. Hoorah!

September 05
Gnorman the Supertinker, that sly old dog, has learned some sly new tricks.

Also, by popular request, the Auto Attack option in the Account menu has been expanded to allow you to automatically attack with any combat skill or spell, not just your weapon. Xenophobe is back in town with an interface-improving vengeance!

September 12
The old, boring "You hit for X damage" messages in monster fights have been augmented with more specific messages based on your weapon and the monster you're fighting.

September 19
8 New Zones!

So, yeah. We dropped a significant amount of new content in tonight. Finding it will be at least 1% of the fun! Please note that we'll probably be tweaking and/or rebalancing the new content over the next couple of weeks as we watch people play with it, so please feel free to constructively criticise in the forums.

As always with new content, though, please refrain from posting spoilers in chat or the forums for at least a couple of days. Secrets abound in the new areas, and you wouldn't want to ruin them for people, now, would you? Even if you would, we don't want you to, so please don't.

September 22
Due to a stupid error on the part of Xenophobe, we accidentally had the long rollover tonight (when it was supposed to be the rollover after this one.) The good news is that it took less than an hour -- much shorter than originally calculated. Long rollovers such as these will continue, starting next week, on Saturday night, Arizona time. (8:30 PM, -7 GMT)

September 25
At long last, familiar kills have been separated from familiar experience! Familiar kills, which (currently) only increment after defeating monsters, do not get reset after ascension. Familiar experience, which can be gained from fights and the arena, operates like normal. For the benefit of those who have high kill counts, familiar kills have been set equal to experience, so those of you holding out to ascend because of a high kill count familiar may do so.

September 26
The oft-overlooked fortune cookie has been the recipient of a reimagining. They're now food, and available at the Demon Market. The fortunes inside have been changed to context-sensitive hints about quests and whatnot.

Also, I apologize for using the word "reimagining" in the above paragraph. It won't happen again.

September 30
Just like those awful boots you might have worn in the 60s, October's Item of the Month is a go-go.

Additionally; late, but not forgotten, a new hilarious item is summonable.

October 03
Starting tomorrow, the way the hermit doles out clovers has been ner... uh... enhanced. You'll see.

Also, there's a new mini-questy-type thing in the Manor somewhere.

October 05
Happy 2nd anniversary, Mr. Store! The Cymbal-Playing Monkey and Attention-Deficit Demon have been retired, and two new, functionally identical familiars have taken their place. They're cute, cuddly, and need good homes.

October 08
Tomorrow's rollover (starting Monday, 8:30 PM, Arizona Time (-7 GMT)) will be a long rollover, taking as many as two or three hours (though hopefully less.) We are performing some maintenance on the database servers that should (hopefully) reduce lag (and reduce parenthetical statements. (We hope it helps.))

October 09
We're back up, after performing the configuration changes to the database server. Everything seems to be working just fine, but I wanted to give you a heads up -- in the extremely unlikely event that something goes horribly wrong after we let people back on to the servers, we might have to roll back to last night's backup.

October 10
Minor update today -- some new pies are in the air.

Speaking of pie, there are also some new shirts available in the Store of Loathing -- they'll protect your torso from any pie that might try to slide out of your mouth and get you all messy.

October 17
Clan furniture has gotten a serious facelift. The old gym stuff and the rest of the furniture are now in a Clan Rumpus Room, and there are tons of new furniture options available. Tons, I tell you.

October 24
A new clan feature, clan advertisements, has been released. Clan leaders can now take out an advertisement, which will be displayed alongside the clan's furniture in an all-new clan search page! The new search page allows you to search clans by member count and furniture, and also shows the top 10 clans, as favored by the Council of Loathing. (The Council of Loathing likes clans who spend a lot on advertising, come to find out.)

October 26
The Flea Market has undergone some minor changes. The fee to list an item has been reduced from 100 Meat to 10, and the Market now takes a 1% cut of the final selling price of an item that sells. Hopefullly this will lower the barrier for entry for new players a little bit.

In unrelated and not-nearly-as-exciting news, 6 new trophies were added.

October 31
November's Item of the Month is now available in Mr. Store. Due to the real-life and in-game holiday traffic jam, there's no official Tuesday update. Sorry -- we'll try to make it up to you next week.

November 07
There are some new leaderboards in the "Familiars" section of the Hall of Records. They enumerate the fastest ascensions using specific familiars.

November 07
It's Tuesday, and we're only a week late for Halloween! We've added a bunch of new encounters and items to Spookyraven Manor. Enjoy!

November 14
A few new shirt drops have been added, for those players aware of their torsos. Plantman knows where the plants will grow.

Also, the Crackpot Mystic now has a "make as many as possible" option for the items he crafts. There should no longer be anything to whine about regarding the Crackpot Mystic.

November 17
There's a new system for transferring clan leadership when a leader gets deleted from inactivity or doesn't log on for a long, long time. Check this forum post for details.

November 21
It's Clantastic Tuesday! The way clan buffs work has been changed, and a few new types of buff have been added. There have also been a bunch of visual and organizational improvements to the clan hall interface in general.

November 28
The Haunted Pantry, the Sleazy Back Alley, and the Outskirts of Cobb's Knob have all been renovated. Some streamlining, some new mini-quests, various and sundry improvements.

November 30
December's Item-of-the-Month is now available in Mr. Store.

Also, the first part of the Crimboween event has begun. Check your campsite to see if anything has spookily materialized there.

Also also, due to the scope (and gradually-unfolding nature) of the Crimboween stuff, we're going to take a break from our regular Tuesday updates for the rest of December.

December 24
Uncle Crimbo is back from his tropical vacation, and he brought presents!

Check your inventory for holiday goodness. It'll be buried in the giant and cumbersome Miscellaneous section.

December 31
Happy New Year! Our resolution this year is to deliver each and every one of 2007's Items-of-the-Month on time.