the owner of Istaria, has stated that his team is working to rectify these issues as quickly as possible. Istaria suffers from a number of performance issues affecting both the client and the servers. These performance problems are often, and sometimes incorrectly categorized by players as lag. According to David Bowman, former Creative Director of Artifact and President of Tulga Games, "The client combat systems were slow and jerky... while there were many reasons to like the game, most players couldn't get to them past these problems." After several years of stagnation, Istaria no longer had land available for new players to purchase. However, a recent "Plot Reclamation" project has made available many areas which had previously been owned by players who are no longer subscribed. David Bowman: "There was not sufficient enjoyable content for the players, with some promised content systems not making it into the launch." Subscription Istaria has Free Access and Paid Access / Paid Subscriptions. Free Access is a Free-to-play account. Paid Access is a single payment, while Paid Subscription renews automatically each month. Free Access provides a single character slot for any race and is limited to level 15 per adventure and crafting school. With the Property Holder Access / Subscription account, it is possible to have a plot or lair and up to 7 characters. A special feature in the account management allows Basic or Property Holder Access subscriptions to create more characters, to acquire several plots of land or lairs and to log in with multiple characters at the same time in the game from one account. Servers (Shards) With the start of Horizons there were three European and eight North American servers, or shards. Because of the many problems at the beginning of Horizons, many players sought other alternatives and as well, some servers saw little use by very few players. In October 2004, the three European Shards (Wind, Ice and Earth) were merged into Unity, the five standard shards (Life, Shadow, Bounty, Twilight and Energy) to Chaos and the three RPG servers (Spirit, Dawn and Expanse) were merged into Order. With the takeover by Virtrium, the Unity shard was shut down at the end of 2007. In April 2008, players on the Unity server got the opportunity to move their characters to Order or Chaos free of charge. References External links Istaria Reference 2003 video games Massively multiplayer online role-playing games