With Kerasota not playing EQ any more, and with no desire to continue maintenance on his part, he and I had chatted for a while about the future of lucy. Initially his suggestion was that Allakhazam and I acquire Lucy, and then hire Rale (the original developer of the itemcollector). We pondered it. We drank some beer, and we pondered it. In Chicago, Allakhazam, myself and Kerasota sat down and hammered out some details. (We managed to get pretty much all of the eqlive dev team drunk at the same time, which I consider a decent bonus). The net result is that we bought Lucy from Kerasota, and have hired Rale to maintain the itemcollector, among other things.

What does this mean to you? Nothing really aside from a change in url, although to a base user Lucy will appear to lose a couple features. I removed the forums, since they can be duplicated in email or on the main site. As well, the advanced search is moving to supporter-access only.

We've installed Lucy on a brand new dell 1750, 2 processor, sitting up against a few DS3s. She's going to be well cared for. Maintenance is continuing, and bugs are being fixed, introduced and fixed again. Lucy is now being updated to handle the new melee effects, as well as some effects which have been missed or displayed incorrectly. The itemcollector currently works on live servers, and development copies work on test server.

This was not cheap for us. First off we paid Kerasota for Lucy. He didn't give it to us. Plus, Lucy uses a considerable amount of bandwidth, and processing power, and to keep the collectors up to snuff we now have paid staff on the project. However we'd like to avoid the traditional way of recouping costs on a web site -- ads.

What can You do?
Support Lucy. Buy an Allakhazam premium membership. We like to think that they stand on their own for our sites, with the removal of all ads, additional info, and the best EQ based searches anywhere. You get additional options on the forums; you get more characters, and you get the character upgrader -- something many people have sworn by. Additionally, you get an integration of allakahazam.com meta information about EQ items or spells on the Lucy display. Oh and you get the original Lucy advanced search, with the addition that the itemcollector will also update your Allakhazam character profiles if you choose. And you also get to keep Lucy running.

The cost is $3.33/month. Less if you buy in bulk such as a year at a time.

Why not donations?
Think of premium memberships as supporting Lucy, and Allakhazam.com as a whole. Premium membership allows us to reward those who do support us with more expensive features, and searches. Yes it's a fixed amount, but we feel that the best way to reward people who really want us to keep going is to quantify that by the use of additional features. Of course if you felt the urge to support us a whole lot, you could always up your entire guild with the gift thingie.

But I don't want to pay?
You don't have to. All information is available and searchable (name wise) for free, and always will be. This information (well the items at least) are community collected, and will always be community accessible. You will not benefit from the integration of data and you might not see some cool features we launch down the road if you're not a supporter. Just hope pray and cross your fingers (I know I am) that enough people do support us that we can afford to continue to provide Lucy ad-free.

Welcome to lucy.allakhazam.com. As always, I can be reached personally at illia@allakhazam.com, or if your question is more general I encourage posting to the forums.

Enjoy. We've been working hard on this, and sorry for rambling so long.