With the excitement of the update and all the new things to do, I don't want to forget the amount of time and effort that was put into such creation. I know too well that tiresome frustrations and long hours that come with Toolset work. Sometimes it feels like you're trying to use parts from a 50's Tube TV to create the best looking makeshift new age flat screen possible.

Let's all not forget to extend a big thank you to those involved with the new update, taking a large chunk of time from their personal lives to knock out the biggest project the Server has ever seen.

Thank you Calan for finding the most creative and unique ways of utilizing that extremely old toolset to appeal towards the new-age desires and interests of the Players. Thank you for all your efforts put into deep and difficult scripting, as frustrating as scripting can be. Thank you for taking time from your family and work to complete this project for the Players. Thank you for always being a good Host and keeping this a world that many of us just can't step away from... because you continue to throw addiction at our face with your creations. But in all seriousness, no one has put as much effort, time, frustration, emotion, hard work, and even love into this server as you. You are our boomstick.

Thank you Yendys for putting forth all your free time to work with Chris in creating this. Pitching in your unqiue ideas and personal flare into all the less glamorous parts like book creation and finger jamming things. Thank you for continuing to self sacrifice your time to appease the Players as our Head DM. Thank you for pushing through your Teddy Bear like Rage to knock out testing and cover all corners of a very large area of possibility. Sometimes the most frustrating part of these projects are the errors you come across, when you want nothing more than to see that code you just worked on for the past 8 hours simply work right off the bat.

Thank you BF for putting forward a good amount of what time you could to finger jam a lot of the less glamorous things also. Sometimes the most tedious parts are the most important, as the time consumption it caused alone allowed for Chris to alleviate himself onto other things like Weather Creation; I'm sure. Thank you for helping Calan/Yendys and doing all you could.

Thank you Reebober for also helping with anything and everything you could. Thank you for taking some time from your family, also, to work on such a large project. Also, on the topic of family, thanks for kicking [censored] so that Chris can have extra time to work on the update. You really did play a larger roll than most people might understand.

Thank you ShalynArater, even though you weren't able to help much with the actual creation of the Project, you jumped at the chance to help testing. Testing is not always the most fun, in fact it's usually very frustrating, but you put a large amount of your free time to help them cover what ground they needed to cover; and with testing such a large update, it's like trying to cover all of Texas with debugging errors and checking possibilities, and you helped speed that process up.

I don't believe I missed anyone, but to wrap it up regardless, thank you to everyone that took part in the update.

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The Criminal - Sliver Vortec - Expelled
The Brain - Skylar Dune - Seventh Year
The Athlete - Lance Silverston - Seventh Year
The Basket Case - Drathil Vortec - Seventh Year

"Everybody prefers to see a nut - they're more fascinating." - Penn Jillette

I feel like I have to mention some of the hidden/not obvious things that BF did to help out. I'm not exaggerating when I say that the spells probably wouldn't have gotten out of the planning stage for a lot longer, if ever, had they not been helping out. Incantations, spell descriptions, spell skill assignments, and spell book locations are all things that they did either virtually entirely by themselves(with a few minor tweaks by me and calan as we finished things up), or contributed at least 50% to. All little things, but when you have to do them individually for hundreds of spells it adds up! I feel like just saying "oh yeah BF helped out" doesn't really cover it, because on the spells at least they were invaluable.

I'm not meaning to downplay what Calan and Ree did though. All that potions and project design work, on top of scripting the core systems and writing most of the library text...spells are nice, but it takes a lot more than that to make a curriculum. I just feel that their contributions are probably a lot more obvious and easier to see, just making sure that recognition makes it's way everywhere it's due!

And all the thanks to Melissa too, of course. Testing is certainly tedious, especially when everything is all bugged up, so thank you for helping out with that when BF and I were fed up and wanted to throw our cauldrons in the lake.

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Karen Bonoa - Ravenclaw Alumni
Madeline Ingleman - 2nd Year Hufflepuff
Niven McLaren - 1st Year Slytherin
Sam McKinnon - 6th Year Ravenclaw

Jabari Nwosu * Joshua Tannerman * Lenora Hollings * Lillian Stewart * Maria Bonoa

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Thank you, Matt. And Yendys. I've actually been wanting to write this post, but to be completely honest, I've been too exhausted. I also have just felt like anything I say just wouldn't be enough given how much was done by everyone involved.

I too want to make sure that it's known how much BF and Reebober put into this. And Yendys was there every possible second she could be, making sure that the spells were all entered into the database, and then for testing too- it was massive work.

Ree pretty much did -all- the book work, which is no small task in itself. All the potions and projects would also have been impossible without her, because on this level it's absolutely a two-person job to get those done. She manned the ingredients while I manned the recipes, because it has to be done simultaneously. Any of the actual area work was also done by Ree. A small paragraph simply doesn't do the work justice.

I only interacted with BF through Yendys for the first half of the project but it was still completely clear how much BF was doing. There is no shortage of spells in this game, and categorizing them all and coming up with a skill and proper rolls for each of them not only requires constant creativity which is hard for anyone to pull off, but it also requires deep consideration for how things are going to interact and affect each other. BF went through a lot of tedium that's mind-numbing pulling up nearly every single resref, tag, and name letter-for-letter so that we had a proper reference. And then when testing came around, while the cauldron may have been punted into the lake, BF didn't give up and busted through a good half of the full curriculum years 1-7 to make sure it was ready.

Melissa blew my mind. She asked if she could help so I threw a book full of stuff to test at her. I woke up the next morning to see how things were going, and there's Melissa in the potions lab with six cauldrons blasting through complex potions simultaneously. It really blew my mind. Now it's important to know that for a lot of this, we couldn't skip parts to test a potion that had previously failed because of a bug. In many cases, even in complex potions, we had to start at the beginning each and every time. So Yendys at one point asked Melissa to make "a few" of the upper-year base potions so we could debug a problem. When Yendys checked back, Melissa had made -19- of them. So thank you Melissa for your help, The Healing Arts wouldn't be the same without you.

But that's true for everyone. When we started this project we were all like "Yeah I think we can just do a crunch time, and bust this $*&! out in a week." Two months later, we were all still running 12-16 hour days, and no one gave up. There is absolutely no way we'd have this done without everyone who contributed.

Speaking of which... there are more who need to be mentioned.

One of the biggest components of this project was the logistics. Getting together which thing goes where, what's best for game play, what spells are potions, which are projects, and which are actual spells. Getting lore together and collecting the massive amounts of data to put it into a coherent package. That started years ago, and more than one person was involved when I simply couldn't be.

This update relied heavily on information compiled by prior efforts. It was that information being compiled and prepared that really allowed us to dare to believe it could be done in a week to begin with (LOL), because that's a massive amount of the work.

So for that, I would like to thank Necro and Drogo in particular for the work you did there to prepare the information we needed to get this thing started in the first place. Others have done a lot of work on prior attempts as well that unfortunately simply never panned out, but their efforts were efforts and time nonetheless. JBMT and Zane come to mind in particular, but there were quite a few very effort-filled attempts at pulling together a starting point for this beast for a long time. And of course thank you to Necro for your prior work on the castle, and to Drogo for your compilation of information about the Libaray Adventures, which are going to be alive again very soon. After I RP for a little while.

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-Calan

Liss Crest, Slytherin
Kalara Crest, Hufflepuff
Elizabeth Finley, The Moon

I'm really glad to have been able to be a part of this project, and my strongest appreciation goes out to all of you who were a part of the update team as well - and for me especially to Calan and Yendys, for putting up with my sometimes lengthy squawking and moaning about various things in the update. 50 points to your house of choice. (Not for real, don't kill me.) For the most part, we finally have a complete Hogwarts experience. I can only hope it goes a long way to resurrecting interest in the server and making it into a friendlier environment again.

Welcome to the new WOHP!

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Corinne Beckett - Inherited flower shop and eventually relocated to Diagon Alley.
Michael Draufy - Went to America to study native magical creatures. Still visits Anastasia.
Jade Celine - Married Peran and became a magical archaeologist.
Ana Celine - Took her revenge and vanished into the night.
Space Dog - Some say it still roams the halls of Hogwarts in search of petting.

Awww, shucks!!

Great job on the update, folks! This kind of hard work is neither accidental nor easy. You all rock!

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You go your way
I'll go your way too