To those who play or are thinking about playing Alter Aeon, the following information concerns all of those who are interested in the game and its future.
To the administrators of Alter Aeon: this information is not meant to be an attack on the game or a condemnation of the staff, but should be used as a resource to mollify possible detractors of your game and understand their grievances.
Note: I will do my very best to keep the discussion totally factual, except in paragraphs labeled "My Opinion", which will contain my thoughts on the matter. You do not have to agree with my opinions, but the facts are undeniable and should not be ignored.
The following topics will be discussed:

1. Computer tracking in mush-Z, and its future

2. Current grievances that players feel are unheeded by the administration

3. Dentin's Response to feedback and negativity

Computer Tracking in Mush-Z

If I were to setup a poll asking how many viewers use Mush-z as their primary means of playing Alter Aeon, I suspect that the percentage would be above 90%. If you do, open the AlterAeon.xml plugin, and search for the following text:
  ESend("lecho _mushz " .. GetVariable("version") .. " " ..
This is around line 21028 in my copy of the xml. I have not updated to the latest beta so it might be a few lines off in the latest version. But anyway, you will see that it makes reference to something called an iuid. The iuid is generated when you first create a character on Alter Aeon and identifies your computer to the server. If you log on a different character or use a different IP address, therefore, the server will still know it is you thanks to this IUID.

My Opinion: This in itself is not a problem, as multiplaying is against the rules. However, Mush-Z users received no information about the IUID when it was added sometime in 2013. The fact that the mush-Z developers made an effort to hide that information constitutes spyware.

How to get rid of it: Luckily for you, there is no reason that you need to be spied on like this. You can counter the espionage by simply removing that entire line of text from your xml.
 
A number of security-minded users have known about the IUID in the past, but it was only recently brought to the public's attention when an innocent player was booted and frozen from the game without warning because he was suspected to be another player who had been recently banned. As you can see by the following log, Dentin assumed that just because someone had compromised the validity of the iuid, it was the same player, when all this innocent person wanted to do was to avoid unsolicited tracking.

N.B.: Dentin continues to  not admit outright that freezing Riddle was a mistake; he is instead placing much of the blame on Riddle for countering the spyware.

My Opinion: Dentin mentions that it would have been better had Riddle not sent out anything.  I was afraid that omitting the information would have changed the way Alter Aeon responded to the client, since the message identifies the character as a Mush-Z user in addition to identifying their computer. Riddle simply copied my changed code.

The Future of Mush-Z

A number of Mush-Z's most reliable developers, including Slej and Dernan, will no longer work on it because of the change in game atmosphere. In Dentin's words, they "all did a pretty good job with the code and made it better than when they started". Their loss will mean a significant slowdown in new developments for Mush-Z. Dentin controls the git server where the code is stored as well as the updater that allows you to get soundpack updates. In the past, he has also asked  Weyoun, the chief developer, if Draak and Shadowfax may be allowed to work on coding Mush-Z. Weyoun has always refused the assistance.

My opinion: Now that Weyoun has stepped down, Draak and Shadowfax will probably be granted access to the git server. Along with Kurek, they may continue releasing updates to Mush-Z. However, all three of them have a solid reputation for sloppy  coding. Also, with two of the three coders firmly affiliated with Dentin and many of the more savvy users leaving, it will be much easier to slip other hidden bits of code, such as the afformentioned computer identifier, into future Mush-Z updates. Once you have secured your Mush-Z,  be  wary of future updates as they may compromise your efforts.

Dentin and change

As Alter Aeon continues to evolve, so does Dentin. Sweeping mechanical changes to Alter Aeon have always been met with mixed responses, but in the majority of cases, players realize that they can continue to play and enjoy the game after a while. Unfortunately, Dentin's changes within the last twelve months have been received with excessive disgruntlement by many. A majority of these changes have hit high-level players extremely hard. When various high-level players complain over an extended period of time, Dentin does not respond, brushes them off, or reminds them that his knowledge of the various systems in the game far exceeds theirs.

My Opinion: In addition to the above, proponents of the changes seem to do their best to suppress   those who complain through heckling, or drown them out with praise to counter it. It is, of course, much more difficult to control those people. Some of Dentin's more sinical opponents posit that he is making changes to satisfy those who make him the most money, but he is quick to point out that Alter Aeon will always be playable for free, that he has banned players who have spent thousands of US dollars on the game, and that he makes fifty times more money working at Google than he ever has on Alter Aeon. I do not doubt any of this, but it is undeniable that he is currently far more invested in his employment at Google than his administration of Alter Aeon.

Community Opinion: What they are complaining about]

What exactly are the complaints that people feel go ignored when voicing? The following discussion will be a bit more technical and number-based than the rest of the post, and the chosen numbers are merely approximations to ease calculations.

One thing that all the players agree on is the excellence of the newbie experience. From the very beginning, newbies are taught how to play the game through carefully designed, class-specific tutorials. Well-written and multifaceted quest chains guide newbies through the newbie islands, pointing them to powerful equipment and keeping them engaged in the various interlinked stories of the islands. Character strengthening comes easily and without fuss, with quest completion and consistent experience for mob kills easily railroading them to their next level with a minimum of grinding or extra efort. The new Fairyland areas are a great example of this, as they patched up a significant stall point at level 23 that Dentin identified as a stumbling block for newbies.
But unfortunately, this experience comes to an unexpected halt for most people, when the feeling of constant progress begins to ebb to almost nothing. Around the end of 2016, Dentin removed the high limit on experience costs for levels, which was originally capped at 1.8 billion. For the sake of example, imagine that you get 270000 xp per mob kill and 330000 xp for performing various skills or spells to kill it, which are both fairly realistic numbers. For each mob killed, you therefore gain 600000 exp, and in order to get a level costing 1.8 billion exp, you must kill 3000 mobs. In an efficient group, one can run about 600000 exp per minute, which means that even if you were to group for all your exp, it would take 1.8 billion divided by 600000 divided by 60 hours= 50 hours of killing to run this experience. Daily gifts and other automatic xp rewards only change this number by a small amount.
After the change, level cost limits no longer cap at 1.8 billion and rise very steeply. For example, leveling your third class from 33 to 34 costs 3.1 billion, from 34 to 35 is another 4.3 billion, from 35 to 36 costs 6 billion, and to reach level 37, the maximum available, is 8.2 billion. Together, this adds up to 21.6 billion experience as compared to 7.2 billion (1.8 billion times 4) under the old system. Dentin did help the problem marginally by increasing experience caps to 500000, but it is not nearly enough, as doubling the xp caps does not help matters when level costs are already quadrupled or more.
As an even starker calculation, to get your fourth class from 36 to 37 alone costs a whopping 43 billion experience. Imagine that you are gaining 1.2 million experience per minute. It will still take you 597 hours to gain that one level, or almost 10 months of running for two hours per day, seven days per week. Player morale was devastated when they saw those high level costs and never recovered. Dentin has confirmed several times that he will not be doing anything to alleviate the level costs, because he does not want to use code workarounds, and his vision for the game's future is much farther than what any of the players could ever imagine.
A related problem is experience consistency. Thanks to complex game balance systems that lower experience on frequently-killed monsters, and unreliable information about what areas have been hit the hardest by these systems, players have  complained that they have difficulties finding places to efficiently gain experience in groups at the higher end. With the exponential increase in level costs, this concern is a legitimate one. Though Dentin has lowered the effects of his game balance systems, players still complain, although a bit less, about it. It pales in comparison to the discontent about level costs. After all, consistent experience is not going to reduce the ten-month estimate to run 43 billion experience by much.

Don't Complain too loudly

Dentin also began to crack down on "toxic behavior and negativity" on Alter Aeon. His post on the Case Law Board is copied below:

My Opinion: It is important to keep a positive game atmosphere, and banning Teros from the game was overall a good decision, as his net contribution to the game and community was not positive. However, the end of the post, where Dentin mentions rule 5.11, is far more concerning. He admits that the new legislation  is a blanket rule that allows him to ban players who "actively make the game worse ... in the eyes of the admin". In short, Dentin can now use this rule to ban anyone he wants. That in itself is not bad, but the following information, where he takes advantage of the rule, is.

Soon after writing this post and penning the new rule, Dentin  banned another player, Ignotus, from the game. The post explaining the ban is below:

My opinion: This post does not mention when or how Ignotus was banned. He was asleep and idle on the game when the ban occurred, and got no warning by Dentin. Most of the reasons Dentin wrote to justify the ban, when examined carefully, are suspect:

• "Only logs in to chat"/"literally hasn't gained a level in a month": Many other players log in just to chat, and have not gained a level in far longer than a month

• "Constantly negative about the game"/"spreads discontent": Ignotus's negativity about the game was only on tells and private channels with other discontent players who only logged into chat and hadn't leveled in a month or more. Had he expressed his discontent or negativity on public channels, it might  be a legitimate reason.

• "Communicates with Teros via out of band channels": I am not sure why Dentin included this, but he means that Ignotus communicates with the banned player Teros on other media besides Alter Aeon. This should not be a reason to ban a player. If that is grounds to ban people, Anyone with an Alter Aeon character who replies to Lord Lundin's forum posts on Audiogames.net  risks being banned for that reason as well. Dentin, in his post about banning Teros, stated that anyone who wants to communicate with Teros must do it off the game.

• "explicitly stated that once his 'Chatmud' is done he and all the other players he can find will leave AA and go there": Ignotus claims that he never said anything like this anywhere. He did give status updates about Chat Mud on private channels, and many people sent him tells asking him to finish working on it, but he never said anywhere that he would convince people to leave Alter Aeon for it.

This leaves fighting with builders and having his moderator flag removed. That he had the moderator flag removed is simply another punishment, not a reason for this one. Details are unclear concerning whether he fought with builders or not, but Dentin never gave him a chance to explain himself, instead deciding to do it without warning when he was asleep. Similarly, Riddle was kicked off the game because he had circumvented the spyware without a warning. In short, Dentin used this new rule to justify banning people without warning, without giving them a chance to defend themselves.

My final Opinion

As a person who has loyally played Alter Aeon for six plus years, it pains me to see these changes and their cumulative effects. Other users do not condone the changes as well, and have stopped logging into the game in protest. And this is why. It is unethical to add hidden tracking code to users who thought they were simply getting a handy soundpack. It is unfair to ban people without letting them defend themselves, or banning them early without a notification. It is unwise to spurn so many players so cavalierly by ignoring what they have to say and doing nothing against those who heckle and shout them down when they give feedback.
    I care deeply about the game, and even though I was banned from it (I am the player Teros), the hours I spent playing the game were very enjoyable ones overall. I consider it a disservice to game admins and any current or potential players if this information is not publicized, and I hope that it will result in change that betters the game.  If this information concerns you, post below. Get the attention of the administration so they realize that these grievances are real and universal. Tell fellow Alter Aeon players on social media to post their concerns here or on the Alter Aeon boards.