Hey guys,

Quite a few changes ready for today. Please take your time and read through them!

Staking and the Duel Arena
I've decided to do an experiment with staking. We'll be limiting all stakes to 1M as maximum bet. Depending on the outcome of the experiment, we'll keep it this way, or limit stakes to maximum 10M per fight. If everything backfires, we'll just go back to how it used to be. I know that this may be frustrating for some players, but let me try to explain why I'm doing this.
In my opinion, gambling (=staking) is just frustrating gameplay. People are betting money until they lose it, that's the nature of gambling. Imho that just doesn't belong into games. Moreover, it also brings so much toxicity to the game. Players are often being upset about their losses and yell at each other, effectively creating a toxic environment for others. I've seen this too many times in global chats and would like to put an end to it. The game isn't about gambling, it's about training and leveling your character. Having an adventure, talking to friends and killing monsters. It's definitely NOT about gambling.

Highscores
It's been a while since I've last updated these. There's now ranks on player pages. So you'll always know your rank in a certain skill. Moreover, you can now also go back and forth 10 pages at once. You can also jump to a specific page by entering the page number in the highscores link.
Following link will jump to page 101: https://emps-world.net/hiscores.php#skill,Overall,100
Why does 100 jump to page 101? Because computers start counting at 0 and that leaves an offset of 1 to natural numbers. 

Slayer pets
We're getting more pets, yay! Just like hatchling dragons, certain slayer monsters have received pet drops:

• Abyssal demon
• Basilisk
• Cockatrice
• Kurask

Their drop chance is 1 in 1000.

Following things have been updated:

• Fighter torso scaling up to level 70 is just too much. It now caps at level 60 with a +6 strength bonus.
• Morrigan javelin special attack adjusted. Before the update, the bleeding effect was 80% of the total hit. The bleeding effect now is 120% of the total hit. To cope with this change, the special attack hit now deals 60%. Simply said, 40% of the initial hit has been converted into bleeding damage.
• Morrigan axe special attack costs changed from 25% to 30%. Their maxhit has been lowered by 5% and accuracy buffed by 5%. You could just deal too much damage in a too short amount of time.
• Dark bow special attack adjusted. The special attack's max hit was reduced by 20%. However, if you now use dragon arrows with the bow, it'll boost your hit by flat 8 damage. This lowers the maximum hit of the bow from 52/52 to 48/48. It just shouldn't be possible imo to 1 shot somebody completely. To cope with this nerf, I've increased the special attack's accuracy by 20%. This will make the bow more powerful in fights with good armours and high defence levels.
• Void equipment, defenders and fighter torso are now turned into more cash if lost in the wilderness. A full void knight set turns into 800k,  fighter torso into 240k and dragon defender into 180k cash.
• Further improvements to water and lava planes.
• Ferocious rings now have an Ancient Caves teleport option that place you directly near Shenven.
• Shenven now wears a Slayer master cape.
• Slayer experiences for bosses has been multiplied by 4. Such tasks should really be worth your time, because they are difficult and can take a while.
• Buggy slayer tasks have been fixed. You'll no longer encounter tasks that cannot be completed. Also, Chaeldar and Hundig now correctly can reset your task once for free.
• Slayer experience gains for bosses has been increased.

Please don't be too upset about the staking changes. It's an experiment for now and if it fails, I'll definitely revert it back how it used to be. I just want to do do something against the gambling problem and its resulting toxicity in emps.

All the best,
Thomy