ANNOUNCEMENT: GM Wyrom reviews how GemStone handles the major pay events through the year with many details of interest. He also announces in this post that they are planning to make needed changes to events immediately, and not delay. Here’s the link to the entire announcement:
Text of Discord Post follows:
GM Wyrom
Pay Events in GemStone IV
on 22 Sep 2026 at 3:58PM
from the Official GemStoneIV Discord
on #general-announcements channel
It’s been awhile since we announced the schedule handling for our events, but as time goes on and we see more returning and new players, I thought it would be a good time to add this to an announcement instead of it being buried in a channel by GameMasters that might not be here anymore. Maybe some of this wasn’t always clear, so that is another point of this announcement.
Our paid event schedule typically is even months for all major events.
February: Duskruin
April: Rumor Woods
August: Duskruin
October: Ebon Gate.
We have minor events, such as Rings of Lumnis, that we will run either alongside another event or during June/December. We also have the Inquisitor event we are debuting and will be using that June/December time to pilot the event while it gets off the ground.
Our events run roughly 21 days, but the breakdown of the event might have gotten lost over time. The first week of the event is considered our early access point. This is when we’re getting everything up and running. Our events typically start at 9pm ET on Friday. You may have read comments by me or the event leads where we try to stagger the opening with various parts because we need to monitor everything. There isn’t that many of us, so it just helps us stay on top of everything and not get too spread thin, especially when problems arise.
During the early access, we try to put in any story content in here. We intend folks to explore, window shop, and get into the swing of the event during this time. We would like to make sure this is when announcements for the event are housed. Again, there isn’t a whole lot of us, and we want to make sure event content is contained to the event period. This way game projects aren’t coming to a halt before our events. Come the second Friday at 9pm ET, the event should now be in full swing. The only exception is Ebon Gate where we tend to have some content throughout that is RP-focused.
During our paid event cycles, the game still goes on. The only changes you may see are we try to move merchanting, storytelling, and world events into the event grounds when possible. You may see major releases be postponed because we don’t want to cause interruptions. An example being releasing PSM updates during a Duskruin. It would cause issues if combat stopped working the way you expect it to work in the arena midway into the event.
One change we are going to make is during that first week of the event, if we find major issues, QoL updates needed, price updates, or have to make a change that impacts the event itself, we are going to push those in from now on. Since we are highlighting week 1 as an early adopter week, it may come with changes and fixes that impact how the event runs. We’ve been pausing these, but a lot of times we are preventing good changes from happening for the sake of change.
Direct Discord Link (Right click, copy link, and paste into Discord App if you don’t want to use the Discord web interface.)
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