Hello there and welcome to the February 12th edition of the weekly update. Let’s get into some of the things going on this week.
In the interest of keeping everyone informed of what is going on, I wanted to give an update on the unexpected downtime last week. After some investigating it appears there was a problem with something on our network where the servers are housed. It does not appear to be anything major, but our Ops team is going to be watching things closely, to be sure. We hope the downtime did not cause too many issues for anyone.
Now on to the good stuff.
This week we are going to focus on something coming in February, The Colosseum.
This is pretty much what it sounds like. The Colosseum is a dungeon of sorts with repeatable content. The premise is very simple. Players will enter the Colusseum and fight their way through increasingly difficult stages.
Players of any level will be able to participate, but The Colusseum is geared towards fellowships. In order to go through, you must be part of a fellowship. When players enter, they will be in a staging area which will be used by everyone. This is a great place to get your fellowships together, or to find a group to tag along with. Once in a fellowship, one person will need to purchase a ticket at a reasonable cost from a nearby NPC. That person will then give the ticket to the starter NPC who will lock the fellowship and let them know they can enter The Colosseum.
In the interest of full disclosure I will say the initial download time upon entering is a bit longer than most places. The drop is not hot so players are safe upon entrance and should only have to go through this download once. Once you hand in your ticket, your fellowship will have 1 hour to finish the Arena from the time that they start. After this time is up they will all be teleported out of the arena and will be able to speak to the NPC to get their reward. The rewards will depend on how far the fellowship has made it in The Colosseum. If you die in the arena you will be able to re-enter through the first door and then go through all the doors that you have passed through, they will remain open and the creatures will remain dead in previous stages as long as you are within the 1 hour time limit allotted to your fellowship. If this time is up and you still have a corpse in one of the rooms, the normal corpse timer applies. This means that you may need to get some help to run back through for recoveries. Or you may want to prepare ahead of time so that corpse loss will not be an issue.
There will be 5 branches of The Colosseum so 5 fellowships full of players may do The Colosseum every hour. Once a fellowship is inside a branch of The Colosseum, that branch is locked from letting other players in. In the coming months we have plans to further update The Colosseum with things such as Boss fights, which can be unlocked by completing various stages in The Colosseum.
There will be an Authentication downtime on Tuesday February 13th from 7am EST - 12pm EST. During this time, players will not be able to log in to the game.
Last but not least, the February event, Rekindling the Light is still tentatively scheduled for Tuesday, February 20th.
That's about it for this week. Everyone have a great day and see you all in Dereth!
__________________
Andy "Frelorn" Cataldo
AC Community Relations
Turbine, Inc
Hi there and welcome to the February 26th edition of the weekly update. We hope every one had a great weekend. So let’s get into what is going in the week in the world of Asheron’s Call!
It appears that everyone has been enjoying our new little Colosseum and the February event in general. It has been an interesting week of people planning out different strategies, getting groups together and overall having fun. We love to see people just having fun, enjoying the content that everyone on the team works so hard to get out. While some folks have made it very close, as far as we know, nobody has been able to complete the Colosseum. Only time will tell if any group will be able to complete this new challenge.
We will be making some tweaks, changes and improvements to the Colosseum in the coming months to not only improve things as a whole, but to also add more things for players to do. In order to consolidate things a little please feel free to use this thread to give us feedback on what you think could use some improvement in the Colosseum.
This week the team is working on getting things together for the March event. The quest designs have been written and the team is now focusing on getting the new content implemented internally for the beginnings of testing. Some of the ideas that are going in for March look really exciting and we will have more information on those things as we get closer to the March event.
There were some billing issues over the weekend which caused some people to have some issues or delays accessing the billing pages. These issues should now be resolved and everyone should be able to access our billing site without issue. We apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused people.
That’s about it for this one. Everyone have a great week and see you all in Dereth!
__________________
Andy "Frelorn" Cataldo
AC Community Relations
Turbine, Inc
Hi there and welcome to the first March edition of the weekly update. Let’s get right in to what is going on this week in the world of Asheron’s Call.
First, we would like to offer our congratulations to all of those people who have made it through the Colosseum. Those brave adventurers made it further than anyone else, and should be very proud of themselves and their friends. Nice work everyone!
We know that there have been some problems with the reward chest and the team has been trying to find a solution to the issue. Until we have found a solution, we ask that if you are looting the chest please make sure and take all of the items out of the chest before closing it. In trying to find a fix for the issues, we have found that this may help with some of the locking issues folks are having. In the meantime we are continuing to investigate the chests and I have asked that all of the people, who have completed the Colosseum but did not get to loot the chest, contact me via PM here on the forums. We are optimistic that a solution to this issue can and will be found.
This week the team is all about implementation of the March event content on our test servers internally. Working out the kinks and balance issues as well as just plain getting things to work the way they want them to. Just looking at everything going in for the month, I would say folks are in for a good time. From the looks of it there appears to be a little something for everyone, as well as a few new surprises which I have been sworn not to tell anyone about.
Last but not least I want to out a little heads up/advanced warning to all you movie makers out there. At some point this week I will be announcing all of the details to a little Make a Movie contest featuring AC. This is your chance to show off your crazy skills at making an Asheron’s Call movie. For now the only other tidbit I will give out is the theme, The Colosseum. Stay tuned for all the particulars later this week.
Well, that’s all for now. Everyone have a great week and see you all in Dereth!
__________________
Andy "Frelorn" Cataldo
AC Community Relations
Turbine, Inc
Hello there and welcome to the March 12th edition of the Weekly Update! Let’s get right in to what is going on this week.
So I know some of you are concerned over the key/chest issues with the Colosseum, and we have not forgotten about you. At some point in the next week or so, those people who have contacted us about the chest errors they got from using the reward key for completing the Colosseum will be contacted. The good news in all of this is that we are very optimistic that we have found a fix for the issues surrounding the chest, and the fixes needed should go live with the March event. In the meantime, we will continue to ask that if you are using the chest please make sure to use caution and to be courteous make sure you loot everything out of the chest before closing it for the next person to use.
We have made some other changes to the Colosseum. Here is a list of some of those changes that we have made for the March event.
• Replaced the second Carenzi fight with a Tukora Lugian fight
• The Swarm Demons have had their AL lowered from 2000 to 1200
• Balanced the Golem Crystal Lord so that it can be hit by Melee/Magic/Missile
• Rebalanced Golem Crystal Lord's resistances and AL, it should be less mage friendly
• The Regen rate on the Elite Guardians has been slightly reduced
• The Ninja fight has been increased by 2 Ninjas
• Ninjas now wield a number of elemental tachis instead of just frost
• Wisps no longer drop treasure
• Master Arbitrator returns your ticket if your fellowship already has access to a Colosseum Branch.
• Alarms in the Arenas now countdown in a more useful way. They inform players each minute for the last 5 minutes how much time they have left.
In recent weeks there have been many inquiries about when Crowley’s Producer’s statement will be released. If all goes well it should be soon. We are in the process of getting all of the final details worked out and making sure that all the t’s are crossed and the i’s are dotted. I want to get it published as bad as you all want to read it, trust me.
As most of you may have heard by now, we will be having a Developer’s chat this week with our friends over at Warcry. It will be on Thursday the 15th at 8pm EDT. You can head over to http://ac.warcry.com/#69404 for all of the details. Please join us if you can. It should be a fun evening.
We have had a small delay in releasing the details of the upcoming make a movie contest I had mentioned last week. Our legal team just wants to go over everything to make sure all of the bases are covered. We should have all the information on the upcoming contest very soon.
Last but not least, we will be paying the maintenance on all housing for the next couple of weeks in order to help out those people who are having issues getting the game to run while using Windows Vista. This is only a temporary thing and is not a substitution for a proper fix for those people having problems. We however do feel that people having problems should not be punished for upgrading their operating systems. We are hopeful we will be able to find a solution in the meantime. We appreciate everyone’s patience while we work though these issues.
That’s about it for this week. Everyone have a great day and see you all in Dereth!
__________________
Andy "Frelorn" Cataldo
AC Community Relations
Turbine, Inc _________________ Anna Elyse Lv 275
Jilly'Anna Lv 275
Wandering Anna' Stranger Lv 250+
Ingame Wife to My Love Wandering Stranger <3
~ DoJ Co-Monarch
Hello there and welcome to this weeks update on what is happening in the world of Asheron?s Call.
This week the team is busy working on things for the April event. We are at the point in development where things are being placed on the test servers and the team begins to tweak, adjust and balance out all of the new content they are working on.
We had a busy day on Friday, with lots of game industry press in the building for various reasons. We spent a good part of the day with some of these folks talking about gaming in general and what the future has in store for us. Our friends over at Warcry have posted about the visit today, which you can read about here. We even got a bit of a mention from the folks over at the LotRO Vault. It was great to meet the people behind some of the bigger sites and publications and to talk about what is in store for AC in the future. It was a fun day and I think we will be seeing some benefits from meeting with these folks in the future.
There has been a rather large amount of great suggestions for the game coming in to us lately, either through the forums here or via email. We wanted to take this opportunity to say thank you for all of the wonderful ideas and suggestions. I am not sure what has spawned all of these great ideas as of late, but please by all means keep them coming. While the team here works very hard to get the best content and features out that they can, the only way we know what the players want is the continued communication that we have with you all. You cannot imagine how helpful you all have been, and continue to be as we move forward with the game. From the very bottom of our hearts we just wanted to say thank you. Thank you for the ideas, thank you for supporting us, and thank you for being here and sharing in the joy we all get from working on and playing this game.
That?s about it for now. Everyone have a great week.
__________________
Andy "Frelorn" Cataldo
AC Community Relations
Turbine, Inc _________________ Anna Elyse Lv 275
Jilly'Anna Lv 275
Wandering Anna' Stranger Lv 250+
Ingame Wife to My Love Wandering Stranger <3
~ DoJ Co-Monarch
Hello there and welcome to the Weekly update. I apologize for the delay on this weeks update, things have been very hectic around the office these last couple of weeks and we are all doing what we can to help each other out.
So let’s get down to business, shall we?
This week the team has been discussing a few different things. One of the things that came up in our most recent meeting was PK issues. Despite what some may say, we are in fact reading your posts on what you think could be done to improve our PvP game. Some of the items in particular that have been brought up are healing/chugging in PK, as well as the negative/positive effects of “harming” people. This discussion was in large part brought up as a direct result of discussions going on here in the forums. I would expect to hear more about this going forward. In particular we will be asking some more questions about these very issues.
We had some issues this week on Darktide and Morningthaw with players getting stuck or frozen. The team is investigating this and we are optimistic that we will be able to get to the bottom of what was/is causing this to occur.
In the coming months you may notice a change to how we release the patch notes, Letter to the Players, Dev notes. As we grow as a company we want to start having more processes and ways of doing things that are inline with all of our other titles. This will just make it easier for everyone involved as we continue to help each other out. At first these changes will be subtle, and not noticed by most, but in the end we all feel it will better help us communicate what is going in the game each month. Once we have everything ironed out and have a uniform system in place, I will give you all of the details on what these changes will be and how they will affect everyone who reads these notes that come out every month. Please do not worry though, the fiction will still come out every month as well as all of the information you would get from the LttP and the Dev Notes. These will just come in a somewhat different format.
The list of folks who will be getting replacement Colosseum keys has been given to the person who will be replacing them. If you are one of these people, please be aware that at some point a member of our staff will be attempting to contact you in-game in the near future.
Last but not least, a reminder that Tuesday April 17th is our scheduled day for the April event, Strange Sightings. If the day needs to change for any reason, we will let you all know. Also, this upcoming Monday the 16th is a holiday for us, so the team will not be in the office that day. This of course means that the weekly update will come at some point on Tuesday the 17th.
That’s about it for now. Everyone have a great week!
__________________
Andy "Frelorn" Cataldo
AC Community Relations
Turbine, Inc _________________ Anna Elyse Lv 275
Jilly'Anna Lv 275
Wandering Anna' Stranger Lv 250+
Ingame Wife to My Love Wandering Stranger <3
~ DoJ Co-Monarch
Hello there and welcome to the late edition of the weekly update.
In case you hadn’t noticed yet, Tuesday was patch day. This of course means that our focus is on how things go with the event now that it is live. One of our main concerns was/is the performance issues that plagued most of the servers over the past couple of weeks. We put in what we hoped would be fix for these issues in the April update. It appears that this fix did not resolve the issues, so we are now in the process of going through the logs again to see what else could be causing the problems. During this process we may need to take the worlds down for a short time to install some special monitoring on the servers to help us find the cause of these issues as fast as possible. We will of course give everyone as much notice as possible if we do need to bring down any servers.
This week the team is focused on getting the design specs done for the May event. During this time, they are getting all of the details down on paper as far as what they want to do with the content.
The response to the arrival of the Producer’s letter has gotten a good response so far and folks seem generally happy to see what Crowley had to say about the state of AC right now, and going forward. As we closer to implementing some of the things that were mentioned in the letter, we will of course be discussing it more here on the forums.
As of right now that is about it. We are focused on trying to discover the cause of the server issues we have been having over the past several weeks. Once we have more information or a fix, we will let you know.
__________________
Andy "Frelorn" Cataldo
AC Community Relations
Turbine, Inc _________________ Anna Elyse Lv 275
Jilly'Anna Lv 275
Wandering Anna' Stranger Lv 250+
Ingame Wife to My Love Wandering Stranger <3
~ DoJ Co-Monarch
Hello there and welcome to this edition of the weekly update!
This week the team is busy getting the things they have designed implemented on to the test servers and making the paper versions of their quest ideas come to life. This is also the time when our QA staff begins the process of testing the new quests and giving feedback to the Devs.
We are continuing to investigate the problems that have been occurring on some of the worlds, which have been causing players to get timed out of the game or “stuck” in a state where they cannot log in to the game. On one of the more recent incidents we were able to get some rally good specific data, and the team is going through this data in hopes of finding out what may be causing these continuing issues. We are working very hard to find a solution to this problem, and will continue to do so until we have fixed whatever may be causing it. We would also like to take this chance to apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused players. We are taking this issue very, very seriously.
Finally, I was reading through the forums today and some interesting questions were brought up in a post by KronikJames. So, I am going to do my best to answer those questions here.
1. when ever we have an idea and post it here it would be nice to know if the idea is brought up in some Turbine meeting and what was said and if it is placed on the possible list or at least the good idea list.
With the entire team reading the forums, a good number of the things we discuss are based off of player ideas. While we may not always give direct credit to those folks, we always like to see the ideas that players come up with. We try to discuss these ideas as much as we can and we will continue to do so going forward.
2. when you guys/gals have a meeting it would be cool if we could watch and listen to it. just to see what a meeting is like for you. it would be like a Day in the Life of Frelorn or Django or whoever...
While in theory this may sound like a good idea, there are way too many things discussed in meeting that cannot be seen or heard by the public for many reasons, including us not wanting to give out company secrets. While I suppose we could change the meeting structure for something like this, doing that would kind of defeat the purpose. So in short, this is probably not going to happen.
3. how about a contest where the winner gets to come out and hang out at Turbine for the day at Turbine's Expense. it would be a behind the scenes look at Turbine from a players point of view.
I know in the old days of Turbine there were instances where something like this would happen. I can certainly inquire about doing something like this again as a contest reward of some sort. Getting it past our legal team could be the tricky part, but it does not hurt to ask.
4. how about double xp offers to get players to return. this would be where you send out an email to a bunch of players who are not subscribed and you tell them for the this weekend their acct is reactivated for free for and they get double xp for it as well. this might help people play agian and maybe reactivate. just a thought.
This one is easy. We have no plans for another double XP weekend anytime soon. We are however looking into getting some kind of welcome back type promotion together for former players. When I have more details about this I will post the information.
That’s about it for this week. Everyone have a great day and see you all in Dereth!
__________________
Andy "Frelorn" Cataldo
AC Community Relations
Turbine, Inc _________________ Anna Elyse Lv 275
Jilly'Anna Lv 275
Wandering Anna' Stranger Lv 250+
Ingame Wife to My Love Wandering Stranger <3
~ DoJ Co-Monarch
Hi there and welcome to this week’s edition of the weekly update.
This week we are continuing to investigate the rather frustrating issues that have been affecting some of the servers. As it stands right now we have still not been able to locate the cause of these problems. We are going to continue to investigate the issues until they are resolved. We appreciate your patience while we continue to troubleshoot the problems. We are still hopeful that we can get these issues resolved.
The team is working on getting all of the kinks and bugs out of the content for the May event. This is also the time when the balance is worked out for the quests and we begin looking at what will hopefully be the final version of things for the update.
Right now we have tentatively schedule patch day to be Tuesday, May 22nd, with the event being named Prodigal Sons. If there are any changes to the schedule, we will of course let everyone know as soon as possible.
The updates to the web tools I mentioned last week are going as planned and we should be able to use the new tools sometime next week. When that happens I will begin the massive project of cleaning up and archiving the main website. While this is occurring, you may notice some strange behavior from some pages on the website. We will be trying to keep the errors that appear to a minimum amount, but with this much information stored on the site, we are sure to have some strange things showing up or disappearing on us.
I know that the last couple of updates have been a little bit lighter in information than some folks would like however, right now our focus is on getting the new content completed and getting the server issues fixed. Once things return to some semblance of normality, we will then return to the more detail packed goodness that everyone likes to see.
That’s about it for now. Everyone have a great week, and see you all in Dereth!
__________________
Andy "Frelorn" Cataldo
AC Community Relations
Turbine, Inc _________________ Anna Elyse Lv 275
Jilly'Anna Lv 275
Wandering Anna' Stranger Lv 250+
Ingame Wife to My Love Wandering Stranger <3
~ DoJ Co-Monarch
Hello there and welcome to this edition of the Weekly update.
This week the team is continuing to work on getting the server problems resolved. Severlin has been putting in some crazy hours trying to look through all of the data we have gathered thus far. We have made some progress in getting to the bottom of these issues, but we have not found a resolution yet. We will continue to investigate and pour through data until we get the matter resolved.
Next week is that time again, Patch time! This is a reminder that the May event, Prodigal Sons is scheduled to go live on Tuesday May 22nd. On that day the worlds will be down from 8am EDT – 3pm EDT. If for some reason that date changes, we will give you as much notice as possible. Please note that due to many circumstances including the ongoing server issues, this month’s content may appear a bit lighter than normal. Anything we were unable to complete for this month should however make it in for June, along with what was already on the schedule for that month. There is still going to be plenty for everyone to do this month, but we would have liked to be able to get more done. Time was just not on our side this month.
The issue of death macros and continued use of the /die command continues to come up here and with customer service, so I want to be clear on a few things. The use of any macros which cause you die intentionally over and over again is a Code of Conduct violation. As well as the intentional dropping of multiple corpses in an effort to either glitch the game in some way or to cause others lag. Despite the claims by some, even those people who no longer drop corpses still cause a performance hit to the servers when they continually use the /die command. If you are found to be abusing this function in any way shape or form you can and will be subject to disciplinary action from our customer service team. To that end, the team is investigating the idea of putting a timer on the use of the /die command.
Some of you may have noticed some odd things with the website and forums today. This is a result of the now completed upgrade to the web tools we use for the main website. If you notice something on the site that is now missing or not working as it was before, please drop me a pm with the info and I will get it fixed as soon as I can. In the meantime I am going to archiving and cleaning up some of the older stuff on the main site. As much as we all love the rich history of the game, there are many articles and pages that are simply out of date and they need to be updated or just removed. That is going to be my main focus over the next few weeks.
So that the folks contributing are aware we have been keeping a close watch on the New Augment suggestion thread. There are some really good ideas there so far. Now without making any promises, the discussion has come up about adding some new Augments in to the mix. If and when we do go forward with these, I would like to see us pull from the ideas we have seen here so far. Good work folks, keep it up!
That’s about it for now. Everyone have a great day, and see you all in Dereth!
__________________
Andy "Frelorn" Cataldo
AC Community Relations
Turbine, Inc _________________ Anna Elyse Lv 275
Jilly'Anna Lv 275
Wandering Anna' Stranger Lv 250+
Ingame Wife to My Love Wandering Stranger <3
~ DoJ Co-Monarch
Hello there and welcome to the 5/29 edition of the weekly update!
This week the team is working on things for the June update. This includes putting the finishing touches on any documents pertaining to the June event, as well as getting things implemented on our internal servers. This is also the time when the team starts getting things rolling for July event.
Right now we do not really have anything to update you on regarding the server issues. We are still trying to track down the exact cause of the issues. As always, if we get any more information we will pass it along. I can say at this point Severlin, and those helping him out, are ready to pull their hair out. They are spending nearly all of their available time trying to track down the cause.
Some people have asked if it possible for us to schedule and post a series of live events for those folks who want a guarantee of getting to try out one of our new Live event reward weapons. As of right now, mostly due to short notice, we cannot put up an official schedule for these events. The team is doing as many of these events as they can, and will continue to do so going forward. These events are being run during all times of the day and night across all servers, so please be patient. We are doing our very best trying to make sure that everyone who wants to get access to these weapons can do so. I will investigate the possibility of getting some events scheduled for next month, but please keep in mind that depending on how busy things get, we may be limited to only a few scheduled events.
You all may have noticed the change to the news page on the launcher. Thanks to our very nice Web Dev team and a little guidance from me, we are seeing the first of what we hope are many changes and improvements to the user experience. This was just the first small step. In the coming months we are planning on more changes to the launcher and its functionality.
That is about it for this week. Everyone have a great week and see you all in Dereth!
__________________
Andy "Frelorn" Cataldo
AC Community Relations
Turbine, Inc _________________ Anna Elyse Lv 275
Jilly'Anna Lv 275
Wandering Anna' Stranger Lv 250+
Ingame Wife to My Love Wandering Stranger <3
~ DoJ Co-Monarch
Hello there and welcome to this week’s edition of the Asheron’s Call update! Let’s see what is going on this week in Dereth.
First and foremost we have moved the date for the July event back one week. The July event is now on the schedule for July 24th. This move gives us more time to get things done.
We have been continuing to monitor the reports of players getting booted. We have identified a few instances where this could occur for players not using third party applications and we are investigating ways we can stop this from happening. For those people still getting booted while using third party applications we suggest you check with the plug-in authors for updated versions of some of the more popular plug-ins. We know that some of them have already made some updates in order to help improve performance.
In the meantime we will continue to monitor things and make improvements where they are needed. We are happy to say that since we made the initial fix, we have not seen any more server crashes.
Since it has been a while I figured now would be a good time to answer some questions that we have seen over the past few weeks.
Can we please get unspec aug gems?
We do not have any plans for these right now, but it is certainly something we can discuss as a team. If we have any updates or progress we will let everyone know.
Would Turbine ever consider an old school server?
The idea of doing something like this has been discussed several times, both internally and here on the forums. At this time it is not something that we can really do. We would basically have to re-write the old version of the game in order to be compatible with our new billing system and the newer version of the service platform we are running on now. That in itself is no small task. There is then the added hardware costs and any bug fixes which would need to be made. This would take time away from content for the current version of the game, and in my opinion, that is not a good thing to do.
When are you going to stop paying everyone’s rent?
As of right now we are looking at stopping this around the time of the August event, which we have not yet set a date for. As we get a bit closer to this time I will make sure to notify everyone with as much notice as possible. I guess this could be considered that first notification.
Will Hilts ever get upgraded?
Ahh, the days of running around like a madman looking for Idols that could possibly drop that all elusive Idol Gem…. Memories
Anyway, as of right now we don’t have any plans for an update, but to be honest this was the first time I recall seeing someone ask about this in quite some time. It is definitely something that we can check out. Who knows? At this point we have learned that almost anything is possible.
Well that’s about it for now. Everyone have a great day and see you all in Dereth!
__________________
Andy "Frelorn" Cataldo
AC Community Relations
Turbine, Inc _________________ Anna Elyse Lv 275
Jilly'Anna Lv 275
Wandering Anna' Stranger Lv 250+
Ingame Wife to My Love Wandering Stranger <3
~ DoJ Co-Monarch
Hello there and welcome to this week’s edition of the Asheron’s Call update!
First and foremost I want to start off talking about the reasoning behind the changes that were made to The Master and the robe, since that seems to be the main discussion going on post patch.
When that section of the Colosseum was first introduced in June, it was found that it was entirely too easy for players to get to the master. It was originally intended to work as it does now, meaning you would need to finish the Colosseum before you would gain access to The Master. Once we found that there was an issue with how the quest was working, the decision was made that it needed to be fixed. A side effect of this issue was that players were able to acquire the rewards much easier than we had intended. We did not feel however that this was an issue that warranted additional downtime to fix, as we try to keep the amount of downtime to a minimal amount.
Over the course of the rest of the month, players found that this was a rather easy way to level mules and alternate characters, which was not our intention. This task as a whole was/is supposed to difficult. When the fix was put in, I somehow missed it on the list of changes that were made going in for the July event. That of course makes it appear as if we were trying to deceive players, which we were not. That was a simple mistake made in gathering the information, and I apologize for that.
The thinking behind the changes made to the robe were pretty straight forward. We felt that it was not fair to those who would have to work hard to get to the master once he was working as we intended, if we allowed all those people who had done the quest when it was not right to keep the reward, which was not comparable to the amount of work they had to do to acquire the robe. The point is that the risk vs reward factor was way off base with how the whole thing worked in the June event. That robe is considered by many to be one of the best items in the game. To be able to get something like that with almost no effort and make an huge amount of xp once you have already done it was not something that we wanted. So the change was made.
Should people have had more warning this change was coming? Absolutely. Do we feel this change was necessary? Definitely. Will we try to not have this happen again in the future? Yes.
Again we apologize for not giving you the proper warning that this change was coming, but in the grand scheme of things we feel it was needed.
We put in what we hope is the final adjustment to address the few remaining players who were still getting booted for CoC violations. As far as we can see this latest adjustment has pretty much resolved the issue. If anyone is still getting booted, we suggest making sure all of your third party applications are up to date and that you are not running any questionable programs. We will of course continue to monitor the situation to be sure, but as of right now it appears we can finally move on to other things.
A couple of questions about Live ops have come up so I Just wanted to let everyone know that as of right now we have not scheduled anything yet, but Geneva has submitted a couple of ideas for us to look over. Once they have the official ok, then it will be up to Geneva to get things going. Keep an eye on the Live events forum for any announcements or scheduled events.
That is about it for now. Everyone have a great week and see you all in Dereth!
__________________
Andy "Frelorn" Cataldo
AC Community Relations
Turbine, Inc _________________ Anna Elyse Lv 275
Jilly'Anna Lv 275
Wandering Anna' Stranger Lv 250+
Ingame Wife to My Love Wandering Stranger <3
~ DoJ Co-Monarch
Hello everyone and welcome to this weeks edition of the Asheron’s Call update!
It was an interesting weekend we just had, as everyone knows by now. All the evidence we have at this point says that we had what is classified as Network issues. We still have one of our Operations managers out on site, doing some more work to the servers and the network hardware located out there. As a result of this past weekend, we are going to be returning to our regularly scheduled weekly maintenance window. We want to be very clear that we are going to do everything within our power to make sure that something like this does not happen again. As of right now it looks like the maintenance window will be on Tuesdays, but nothing is set in stone yet. Once we know more, we will post the scheduled downtimes in the launcher and here on the forums.
We also wanted to take this opportunity to once again thank everyone for their patience during the weekend downtime. We know that many of our players only get the chance to play during the weekends, and this downtime made it impossible to do so. Our Operations team spent the entire weekend getting things back up and running and in fact, most of them worked well over 24 hours straight until the issue was resolved. Our Friend Ramen also spent a great deal of her time here making sure everyone knew what was going on, and trying to keep everyone as calm as possible. She did a great job, though some people made some less than appropriate comments towards her. I have since moved the thread and I will be going over each post at some point and taking the proper action towards those people. We know that everyone was upset, but there is a line that does not need to be crossed, and that type of behavior will not be tolerated here.
We are still in the discussion stage of what we might do as a thank you to everyone who was patient with us during the downtime. Once we have determined what we want to do, we will post an announcement about it.
The Penny Arcade Expo (PAX) was a big hit this past weekend, along with the Asheron’s Call player gathering. Having the chance to talk face to face with so many players is one of the things I really enjoy doing. We had a chance to just sit down and talk AC. Also, special thanks to Gouru for once again putting everything together, and getting us all in one place. Everyone in attendance at the dinner received one of the new Asheron’s Call T-shirts we had made especially for PAX this year, and they seemed to really like them. We also gave out more autographed copies of the game, and even had a guest appearance by one of the old Devs, Orion, who was kind enough to do the Drudge dance for the crowd in the Cheesecake Factory. Orion is always a hit at parties with that dance. ;p
This week the team is busy getting things ready for the September event, putting the finishing touches on the writing, and in some cases, testing on the newer content. As always they are hard at work making sure they deliver the most exciting content that they can to the players, and we are all looking forward to the next few months of content.
The Live Events schedule has been updated with some changes to reflect some of the missed events due to the downtime. The updated schedule is as follows:
Harvestgain- August 23, Thursday, 8pm EDT
Leafcull- August 24, Friday, 8pm EDT
Thistledown- August 27, Monday, 8pm EDT
Morningthaw- August 27, Monday, 9:30pm EDT
Verdantine- August 28, Tuesday, 8pm EDT
Wintersebb- August 29, Wednesday, 8pm EDT
Solclaim- August 29, Wednesday, 9:30pm EDT
Darktide- August 30, Thursday, 8pm EDT
Frostfell- August 31, Friday, 8pm EDT
That is about it for this week. As we stated above, when we have any new information, we will post the updates here on the forums. Thanks again everyone, and have a great week. See you all in Dereth! _________________ Anna Elyse Lv 275
Jilly'Anna Lv 275
Wandering Anna' Stranger Lv 250+
Ingame Wife to My Love Wandering Stranger <3
~ DoJ Co-Monarch
We are going to be keeping this edition short and sweet because, we have a lot of work to do still and there is not much extra time floating around right now.
The September event Dark Materials is scheduled to go live on Tuesday, September 18th. This of course means that all worlds will be down on that day from 8am EDT – 3pm EDT. If for some reason that date changes, we will let everyone know. We will be getting the Teaser screenshots out to the fansites as soon as possible, probably on Friday, along with the Release Notes and Fiction.
The forum upgrades that I mention in past updates will be coming in the next 2 weeks. The 2 most notable changes will be the addition of a new forum front-page (see attachment) and the introduction of the Infraction system to these forums. I will have more information on the Infraction system once we get closer to launching it. The system will make it much easier to moderate the forums, as well as making the explanations much easier for why infraction may have been handed out.
Please remember that when the September event goes live, we will no longer be paying maintenance on housing for players. Please make sure you have taken all the necessary steps to make sure that you can once again begin paying your own rents.
The team is busy putting the finishing touches on the September event, while at the same time, work has already begun on the October event. Do not forget that with October comes Festival Season! That time of year when all the fun and in some cases spookiness comes out. We always have fun this time of year, and this upcoming season should be no exception.
That’s about it for now. If we have any updates or important additions, I will update this thread. As always, have a great day and see you all in Dereth!
Attached Images
File Type: http://forums.ac.turbinegames.com/attachment.php?attachmentid=8&d=1189628251
__________________
Andy "Frelorn" Cataldo
AC Community Relations
Turbine, Inc
A shadowy flight into the dangerous world of a man who does not exist! _________________ Anna Elyse Lv 275
Jilly'Anna Lv 275
Wandering Anna' Stranger Lv 250+
Ingame Wife to My Love Wandering Stranger <3
~ DoJ Co-Monarch
You cannot post new topics in this forum You cannot reply to topics in this forum You cannot edit your posts in this forum You cannot delete your posts in this forum You cannot vote in polls in this forum
