Weekly Update 1/8/07 - January 8, 2006 (by Frelorn)

Hello there and welcome to the January 8th edition of the weekly update!

I know it has been a couple of weeks since the last update was posted, so I am going to try and cram as much information as I can in to this weeks update.

During the last week I have been busy trying to catch up on all the things I missed over the Holiday vacation. One thing we did discuss on my return was gathering more feedback from players here on the forums and in-game. A fine example of this feedback in action is the thread on returning the Caul to its previous XP yield. Just so we are clear, for the time being we are just talking about the creatures in the area known as Caulcano. Creatures outside of this area were not touched when the XP amounts were lowered.

The January event Bridging the Vast Divide is tentatively scheduled to go live on Tuesday January 16th. As always the date can change if there are any unforeseen issues. We will of course give as much notice as possible if that were to be the case.

In the past, players have stated that they would like schedules of our story-related live-ops. To this end, we wanted to let you know that we do have a story live-op in the works for our January update. We will be posting a schedule of the live-ops in conjunction with the Letter to the Players. We hope that you will be attend, and look forward to seeing you in Dereth!

As some of you may have noticed, we have fixed the errors on the launcher that became evident to those using IE7. The actual issue was that some different coding had to be done when everyone was using IE6 in order to make things look right. This code was actually throwing me off a bit because; for the most part it did look correct. After several posts on the issue I made some quick changes to the old page, which as far as I can tell has fixed the problems people were having. We are still going to have a new page made at some point in the future.

A reminder that on January 19th our beloved Producer, Crowley will be attending a special dinner in the beautiful Pacific Northwest! The will be fun and prizes, as well as the chance to meet and hang with the man behind the scenes of Asheron’s Call. If you are going to be in the Bellevue Washington area and you would like to attend make sure to RSVP john@dilley.com. Having had the opportunity to attend one of these dinners myself, I can say they are really a lot of fun. Make sure you go if you have the chance.

Based on some recent feedback and wanting to keep things going in the right direction as we go forward. We would like to take the opportunity once again to solicit some feedback from you, the players about the last story arc involving Grael. What about the Arc did you like? What about the Arc did you not like? Please keep all responses constructive in nature. Just telling us you did not like it, is not what we are looking for. We want to know exactly what aspects of the event you did like as well what you may not have liked. The more information we can gather, the better. We want to make sure that moving ahead we make the events as strong as we can. Your feedback is an important part of that process.

Some of you have already noticed but, AC along with a few other games has been featured in this month’s Massive Magazine. That goes along with another back cover advertisement. Make sure to check it out if you get the chance.

Well 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
 

Weekly Update 1/15/07 - January 15, 2006 (by Frelorn)

Hello there and welcome to the January 15th edition of the weekly update!


As most of you know by now, Tuesday January 16th is patch day. So remember that all worlds will be down from 8am EST – 3pm EST for the update.

Crowley, who has been on vacation, sort of, will be attending an Asheron’s Call dinner for all those located in the beautiful Pacific Northwest on the 19th of this month. If you can go, make sure you harass him as much as possible.

During the last week, we have been having a lot of discussions about storylines and what we want to happen in the coming months. The feedback we have gotten from last week’s update has been great to read. We would like to thank everyone who has taken the time to give us that feedback. Our goal is as always to provide our players with the best content and stories that we possibly can. Getting the feedback we have so far is going to be a good way for us to make sure we deliver on that goal. So, thanks again for the great feedback.

With the January event being all set to go this week, the team has shifted gears to getting things done for the February event. This means getting things documented, implemented on our internal servers and getting into balancing things. I know it’s still early, but from what I have seen so far, February is already looking like it is going to be a fun month.

At this point there is not much else going on right now, so I will take this opportunity to answer a couple of questions that are looking at us from the front page of the forums.

Is it possible to change my characters to another server?
At this time it is not possible. Not too long ago we had a very serious internal discussion about being able to do this as a service to our customers. After some research we found that without a lot of back end work on the game code and how information is stored of the server, this process would be very difficult to do on a large scale. Hopefully with some of the changes we would like to make over the coming year, this will become a possibility, but as of right now, this is something we just cannot do.

New sounds?
We would love to add some new sounds to the game. Right now the team has other priorities as far as what is getting done, but I would not rule out some new sounds at some point. As far as the weather stuff that came along with this question, we can certainly inquire about putting it back in with a toggle of some sort. Though I know that Severlin already has a ton on his plate right now, but what’s one more thing?

Rares
As someone in the thread on this topic already said, they are called Rares for a reason. The higher tier rares were never meant to be found by everyone, while the lower tiers were meant to be a bit more common. With that in mind we have been discussing the system as a whole and the possibility of turning up some of the rates on the different tiers of rares. When we have more information about what, if any changes we are going make to the system, we will make sure to let everyone know.

Well that’s about it for now. Everyone have a great week and see you in Dereth!

Oh yea, one more thing before we forget…

GO PATS!!! (Sorry had to do it.)
__________________
Andy "Frelorn" Cataldo
AC Community Relations
Turbine, Inc