Heed the call and save on AC!
(email distributed 7/6/06)

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Weekly Update  - 7/10/06 (by Frelorn)

Hello there everyone. I hope everyone had a great weekend. I would like to start this update off with a heart felt thank you. Due to scheduling conflicts and a very serious family issue, I have not been here as much as would have like over the last few weeks. Hopefully all of that is behind us, and things can get back to normal… Well as normal as things can be around here.

I am not going to try and sugar coat things at this point. It would be an insult to everyone’s intelligence for me to do that. The big issue right now is the current state of the Authentication servers. As I write this update the team is still investigating the issues. Now I know alot of people are sitting back saying, “It’s been a week! Why hasn’t this been fixed yet?” Since I am not well versed in the world of operations, all I can tell you is what has been told to me. What I know is that everyone that is able to help with this, is working on it. Looking at every possible reason this might be happening, from hardware to code to everything in-between. No one here is taking this lightly, and everyone is working as hard as they can to get this solved as quickly as we can. Other projects are getting pushed off so that we can solve this before going forward with anything else.

We all greatly appreciate all of your understanding with us through this difficult time. We know this is not something that is easy to get past, when players want to get in and play, they expect to be able to do that whenever they want to. We know this and I will say it again. We are doing everything in our power to get this issue fixed.

Now we know some players have already begun asking for some form of compensation. At this point we have brought it up, but we will not seriously discuss it until we have the issues resolved.

Other than the big subject of the week, the team has been working hard to get the July event done. The testing is in its final phases and so far everything is going well. Since I am a week or so behind, I am going to do my best to get the monthly teaser images as soon as I can this week. I just have to find the time while trying to catch up on everything that I have missed. They have also completed writing the content for August and have begun implementation and testing of that content.

That is about it for now. Right now all of our focus is on getting the login issues resolved as soon as we can, so that everyone can back to playing AC and enjoying the content the team rolls out each month.

Have a great day, and see you all in Dereth!
__________________
Andy "Frelorn" Cataldo
AC Community Relations
Turbine, Inc

Re: Changes made to Authentication, Please read. 7/11/06   - 7/12/06 (by Frelorn)

So I wanted to take this time to give you an update as to where we stand. Our continued testing and the downtime today has helped us locate what we think to be the problem. That is the good news. The bad news is that the issue is with some code that is very deeply imbedded in the billing/authentication system. What that means is while we know what the problem is; we are going to have to be very careful working on a fix. If something were to go wrong with any fix we try to implement, it could break the billing and authentication system even more than it already is. And we don't want that.

So we have the first attempt at a fix getting ready to be sent over to our QA department. While this is good, due to the sensitivity of the issue, it will take some time to test. This means as much as we would like it, the fix will more than likely not be in place today, but we are very optimistic that we will have a fix in place by the end of the week.

We greatly appreciate all of the help we have gotten from the players and everyone else who has been helping us get to the bottom of this issue. When we have more information, I will post it and hopefully have some more good news.
__________________
Andy "Frelorn" Cataldo
AC Community Relations
Turbine, Inc

Weekly Update  - 7/17/06 (by Frelorn)

Hello there everyone. I hope you all had a great weekend.

Let’s get right into things for this week. I have some good news and some bad news. We are going to start with the bad news, which in a way is related to the good news. The bad news is that we are going to have to delay the launch of the July event for one week. The new date set for the July event is July 25th. As we continued to test some new content we found that we just needed more time to balance things out and get some needed fixes into the game. We gave ourselves a heavy workload this month, and we want to make sure that things are done right. This also means that the July Letter to the Players will not be coming out until this Friday, July 21st.

This brings us to the good news which is related to the heavy workload that I already mentioned. You may recall in a past LttP’s that we mentioned one of our In-Concept items was additional high level outdoor hunting. By this time many of you have completed the Raising Grael’s Island quest. Well in July, this island will be come open to players. This new landmass is aimed at players level 150+ and is going to contain some new spawn dynamics we have been working on. Unlike Vissidal Island, players will no longer want to “Cherry Pick” certain creatures from a spawn to get better loot or the special drop. In the case of this new island, players will be encouraged to kill the entire spawn they are hunting in order to get that special creature with the item to spawn.

This new spawn dynamic is also something we are looking in to adding to some of the regular landscape spawns throughout Dereth. If we decide to add this dynamic to regular spawns, you may find yourself suddenly involved in a mini-boss type fight when you least expect it. We feel this could definitely spice things up a bit for those players who enjoy outdoor hunting and a few surprises.

We have also deployed a fix for those players having authentication issues. We are hopeful this will resolve these issue and we will be able to move on with improving Asheron’s Call. We will be continually monitoring things to see just what the results of these changes are. We once again thank all of you for your understanding while we worked through these issues. It is appreciated, and we will discuss more of that appreciation in a future update.

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  - 7/24/06 (by Frelorn)

Hello everyone. I hope that you all had a great weekend. Things were a little soggy here, but overall it was a good weekend.

Let’s get in to what is going on this week.

First off we have some news about forum upgrades. On Thursday July 27th we will be bringing down the forums at 10am EST so we can upgrade to the latest version of vBulletin, which for those who don’t know is the software that runs these forums. This will allow us to add more features to the forums and to have much more freedom over what features we can use here. As part of this upgrade we are also going to be changing these forums over to a system where you will need to be a subscriber to post. We are working on a way for non-subscribers to be able to post in a separate forum also, but for the time being you will need to have an active game account in order to post. Everyone will still be able to read everything that is posted on the forums.

After the upcoming forum downtime on Thursday when everyone tries to view the forums, they will be prompted to enter a username and password from an active game account that they want to associate with their forum account. That’s it. After that you will be able to go to the forums and post as normal, but we will now be able to track information easier. Also bear in mind that this means your forum account is linked to your game account in every way. If you break the Code of Conduct in the game and get banned, it could also affect your forum account, and vice- versa. We feel this new system will be better for everyone involved.

A reminder that tomorrow, Tuesday July 25th is the day we push out the July event Toward Ancient Shores. All worlds will be down from 8am EST – 3pm EST. During that time players will not be able to log in to the game. We would also like to remind players that during the event that there will be several un-announced Live Events taking place in locations all over Dereth. That means that all players should be mindful of where they log out certain characters on their accounts. You never know what you might log in to.

And just so the issue is not ignored, we are still in discussions about possible compensation for players due to the recent authentication issues. When we have more information on this we will let you know.

That’s about it for now. Everyone have a great day. See you all in Dereth!
__________________
Andy "Frelorn" Cataldo
AC Community Relations
Turbine, Inc