September Letter to the Player

From the AC Insider - September Letter to the Players

Welcome to the September 2003 Letter to the Players. There are three main topics I’d like to address, so let’s get right to it!

Event News

For the last several months, we’ve been sending out information on upcoming events in three separate documents: the Letter to the Players, the Teaser, and the Dev Notes. Starting this month, you’ll also be seeing a return of the Rollout Article. Here’s how these four break down:

The Letter to the Players, which you’re reading now, will be used for hot-button topics that we want to inform you of prior to patch day.
The Teaser won’t change—it will still be a story progressing and teasing the ongoing plot. In addition, you’ll continue to see pictures of upcoming content.
In the Rollout Article, you’ll see features that we used to discuss in the Letter to the Players and the Dev Notes. Any item in the Dev Notes that deserves more in-depth explanation, but not necessarily advance notice, will go in here. This is also the new home of the story snippet that used to be at the beginning of the Dev Notes.
Other than moving the story paragraph to the Rollout Article, the Dev Notes won’t change. This will still be a point-by-point list of updates to the game.

In addition to these four documents, we’ll still be doing the Developer Diaries, plus other articles when we have special topics to discuss.

Dupe Bans and the Hall of Shame

As was announced, our initial sweep through the dupe logs turned up a number of names. We banned these players and shamed their characters publicly. Since then, we have continued our search through the logs, and have banned several additional players.

Some of these players contacted us and explained themselves. They stated that the duplication was unintentional, and described exactly what had happened. We compared their stories to our logs…and the stories matched. These players have since been unbanned and we would like to apologize to them. Their information will help us weed out future mistakes. However, in light of this incident, we are instituting two new policies:

If you experience a bug or server hiccup and accidentally duplicate items, please hand them to a Town Crier immediately. Then send an email to accmty@microsoft.com reporting what happened. Please include your account name. This will allow us to track down any remaining dupe bugs and assist us in distinguishing intentional duplication from accidental duplication.
We will no longer be listing account or character names on the Hall of Shame. Bans can be appealed—everyone makes mistakes sometimes. Dragging players’ names through the mud may be effective, but we feel it’s unnecessarily cruel. Therefore, the Hall of Shame will be updated with the number of accounts banned on each server, but not the specific names.

The first bullet point above will also be added to the character select screen in the September event, to ensure that players do not miss it.

Keep Your Heads Down

We couldn’t let a whole Letter go by without mentioning game content, could we? Well, here’s some advice, from me to you...

The last time you log out before the September event, make sure you log out somewhere safe. I recommend towns, mansions, housing settlements or residential quarters. Those digging noises are back... and they’re getting louder…

See you in Dereth!

- Ibn