Re: Leafcull Colisseum Broken - 2/20/07 (by Django)

Here's the issue with the bell vanishing.

The 5th arena branch does not portal players out when their hour is up like the other arenas do. So, when your time runs out your bells simply vanish and it seems that it has broken. However it's that the time for the event ran out. However, it seems, due to this the event got out of wack and was starting to end before it should have. I went thround every sever and placed this event in a state that should not allow arena branch 5 to be entered.

You will still have access to arenas 1-4 and should not have issues with disapearing bells again. If you do please let us know.

The issue that Kid ran into is a different issue and is easy for an envoy to fix, the disapearing bell issue on the other hand can not be fixed by envoys.

Re: Colosseum Inquiry - 2/21/07 (by Django)

Septa Scarabae: "Our fellowship made it into the 15th arena. I died here. I portalled back and began running, but our time ran out while doing so. I was portalled out in the 11th arena. Everyone in my fellowship recieved 200+ million experience and the title: Fearless. I recieved 47 million experience and no title. Is this because I wasn't in the 15th arena when I was running back and portalled? Or is it because I'm level 137?"

A little bit of both actually.

The Pxp base for the Colosseum is a little over your level. So you'd make a bit less xp than they would.

Also, the doors stamp you as you use them and overwrite other stamps of the same type.

So, seeing you were running back through and you hit door 11 when you finished you had the stamp for door 11.

You should have a title, but this title should be different than the rest of your fellowship.

If you do not have a title after checking through again let me know and I'll check it out.

Re: Colosseum Inquiry - 2/21/07 (by Django)

Quote: Originally Posted by Septa Scarabae
Would it be possible to only have a stamp overwritten if it is of a lower tier? That seems like it would solve that problem. Or is it working as intended?

What title should I have? Pit Fighter?

Edit: It's kind of ironic that my corpse would have been one of the first unrecoverable ones, too. I had death items, though.

Yes, the title is pit fighter.

We could make it so that they would not overwite, however, it would make the colosseum have around 5x as many items as it does now. Right now the doors use "relative portal tech" this allows us to portal you a certian distance from where you are. The doors are all placed in the same location and all the arenas are in the same relative location to eachother. So when you hit one it portals you the distance needed ot enter the next arena.

To have it not overwite the flags the doors would need to act like NPCs instead of like portals. So now all the Doors become NPCs that have to check your quest flags before portaling you, but that's the minor part. NPCs can't use relative portal tech at this time, so they would each need to portal have a portal sending spell made for them. This would be 18*5 seperate spells, so 90 new spells adn 90 new doors that all need to be created and tested instead of 1 spell and 18 doors.

Seeing how this turns out we may look into a way to make the flags not overwrite.

February Known Issues - 2/21/07 (by Frelorn)

Colosseum
Some generators in the Colosseum break. In the event that you have waited more than a minute and nothing new has spawned contact customer support to correct the broken generator.

It may be possible for you to load into a Colosseum that has no bells. In this event please contact customer support. You will most likely need to leave the Colosseum, abandon your fellowship, and restart the Colosseum. You will lose your ticket cost.

Do not hand a second ticket to the Master Arbitrator after you have already paid for your fellowship. If you hand him a second ticket he will tell you that you have already paid but will not hand back your ticket, this will costs you your entrance fee, however, it will not have any negative effect on your current Colosseum run.

Players are reporting issues when using the Rare Skeleton Key on the Colosseum chest. Please use these keys carefully as they cannot be replaced by our customer service staff if there is a problem.

Craft Buffing Pets
Golem Construction Materials List note incorrectly lists which dungeons to find the stones in.

The note states:
Mines of Despair: Stone of Rez'arel
Colier Mines: Stone of Alb'arel
Arwic Mines: Empyrean Sun Stone

It should be:
Mines of Despair: Empyrean Sun Stone
Colier Mines: Stone of Rez'arel
Arwic Mines: Stone of Alb'arel
__________________
Andy "Frelorn" Cataldo
AC Community Relations
Turbine, Inc

Re: question about rare key - 2/22/07 (by Frelorn)

As of right now there is no way for an Envoy to tell if you actually had a key or not. There are limited logs, but they take some time to access and can be vague at best.

We are looking in to ways we can prevent this from happening in the future, but for now all we can do is offer some advice. We know that most everyone knows how to pull from a chest, but sometimes folks can be a little impatient. All we ask is that you use some extra caution when pulling from this particular chest.

1. Make sure nobody else had pulled from the chest for at least 5 minutes.
2. Try to make sure nobody else tries to use the chest while you are using your key.
3. Make sure not to click the chest too many times, causing it to close as soon as you have opened it.

As soon as we have any more information on this, we will be sure to post it. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause.
__________________
Andy "Frelorn" Cataldo
AC Community Relations
Turbine, Inc

Re: Devs Plz read you just destroyed balance on Darktide - 2/22/07 (by Django)

Thanks for the feedback, I've seen a fairly well defined split of people for and against the ring.

We took PvP into account when making these rings and came to the conclusion that, as has been stated here, most serious PvP players already have all their major wards, getting this ring simply gives them an opertunity to diversify slightly.

As a fairly standard player on a "carebear" world I have all my wards on my set, including imbued rings, and I also manage to have all the other majors I find useful as a mage who does not use heavy melee defense.

I'm looking forward to see how many of these rings get into the hands of players.

I'm quite impressed at what I've seen of the Colosseum on DT. Players fighting over control of the entrance and, from what I've heard, the most accomplished Colosseum run out of any server.

Re: Devs Plz read you just destroyed balance on Darktide - 2/22/07 (by Django)

Quote: Originally Posted by ACBoy24
make the ring have a value of 20k and make it only attuned.

the player wielding it needs to have the probability of having it stripped, even if the one hwo picks it upa fterwards can't use it.

Or players who have finished the Colosseum can work out a way to trade it to other players by letting them kill them and loot the ring. Think battle pants, except intentional.

However, there may be the ability to make it so that the rings in the chest are not active yet, the players may have to get an item to craft it with. When they craft it it gives it the spells, makes it neither attuned nor bonded, and makes it wieldable only by the crafter. I'm not 100% that this will work correctly, but I'll bring it up.

This way you could strip someone's ring but you would not be able to use it yourself. Any opinions on this? Negative because you don't want your hard earned/rare paid item taken away form you and TCed by some other PK? Positive because you'd like some threat of your opponent/yourself losing it to give it risk in using? Other?

Re: Is the new Burun dagger bugged? - 2/25/07 (by Django)

In the event that the dagger is attuned then this is a bug.

Please hold onto the dagger, it should revert to a non-attuned state when the fix goes in.

Re: you did it again, Turbine?! 2/26/07 (by Lupus Argenteus)

Paloma: "Once again, if you complete something new, you can't show your friends???

I can't redo the Inert Mucor dungeon until my timer is up. This is something that Turbine does FREQUENTLY when a quest comes out and come on....WHY?!? Put the timer on the REWARD not the dungeon.

This is the fourth one you've done like this. And you fixed the other three... WHY keep doing it?

I can lead Search for Lunnum til my face turns green and not get the xp, even when my timer is up, but I can't lead my followers through the Ley Lines.

LOVELY"

This is actually a design bug - somewhere along the line, I got mixed up on which quest flag I should be gating people on as I wrote the specification for this quest, so it worked "as designed" but not as I intended, if that makes any sense. The dungeon itself was implemented with the idea that players could be in it while their timer was not up.

The current intention is to change it.

Re: you did it again, Turbine?! 2/26/07 (by Lupus Argenteus)

Quote: Originally Posted by Keury
I don't know exactly how the barrier works. I was told it's on a 24 hour timer. If that's the case, then I think that any time someone puts their muccor in the ley line that it should extend that period by 24 hours or even 4 hours... If it's triggered by killing something in the Ritual Chamber, then I'd like to know what it was so we know not to kill that until we're to a point that we're not likely to lose the entire group.

Unfortunately, generator limitations prevented implementation of a timer extension such as you described. That's part of the reason we want people to have access to the ley line cavern - we want people to be able to reopen that mana barrier whenever they need to.

Weekly Update 2/26/07 (by Frelorn)

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

Re: Weekly Update 2/26/07 (by Django)

Re: Weekly Update 2/26/07 (by Django)

Quote:
Originally Posted by silvurhawke
"1. Crystal Golem makes an atrificial block on how far non-melee characters can solo/small group the Colosseum"

Your'e worried than non-melees might not be effective enough in the colosseum?????????????????????????????????

The idea is, if you want to do the Colosseum in a small group and gather the lower titles or because you're lower levels you should not be blocked because a monster is only killable by one class that you may not have with you.

Quote:
Originally Posted by Gengis
The tweaks you mention Django would dumb it down and take the challenge away, as well as puch it too far to the Mage Candy side of the world.

Lowering the AL on the Swarm Demons and reducing the regeneration of the certain unnamed monster will help melees/archers as much or more than mages. The only mage assisting tweak we're looking into is making the Crystal Lord killable so those who decide to solo the Coloseum to see how far they can get, or work at it in a small group, or maybe can't recruit a melee are able to advance in the Colosseum. We'll keep the Crystal Lord so that mages do low damage to him, but they and archer will be able to at least land attacks. This way melees will be best for killing him quickly.

Re: Weekly Update 2/26/07 (by Django)

Quote:
Originally Posted by silvurhawke
Well there are plenty of blocks for non-mage groups. PLENTY! The mage should also have some sort of racial weapon (sans Viamontans). Changing this for a group of low level Viamontan mages is beyond ridiculous. I really don't think you guys understand your own game sometimes?

Outside the Crystal Lord there is no creature in the Colosseum that can not be killed by a specific attack type (if there is another one let me know). As mentioned, the Crystal Lord will be very hard for a mage to kill (Have you tried killing a Crystal Golem with a mage?) but you will at least be able to land spells.

Re: Weekly Update 2/26/07 (by Django)

Quote:
Originally Posted by silvurhawke
"(Have you tried killing a Crystal Golem with a mage?) "
(much like the Crystal Golem itself)

Crystal Golem is a seperate creature from the Crystal Lord, the Crystal Golem is a melee killable creature from well back in the day, I made a sword character just to fight them because they dropped the most majors. Mages only hit Crystal Golems for around 10 or so per war magic spell. In the case of the Crystal Lord Archers and Mages can't even land attacks it. I was using that as a reference point to how hard the Crystal Lord should be for the mages once they are allowed to be able to hit it with spells. They'll land attacks on it but they'll do very little damage instead of just not being allowed to land attacks. This will not effect how hard melee/missile characters can hit the Crystal Lords for, they'll be top dog on this no matter what.

Also, you asked about fighting a room of VoD Virindi without magic. In our in house play throughs of the Colosseum I played an Archer so I've faught them without magic, I did fairly decent damage (was using the new Composite Bow), not the best damage of anyone in the group, but with Imperils/Vulns (I used a runed bow to land Imperils when I needed them myself) and a full group you should be able to clear that room without needing a War Mage. The main point is to not need a specific class at all (no creature is 100% invulnerable to a certain attack type though some are good for melee and some are good for mage), but to have it set up so that a good mix of templates and attack types will make the Colosseum run more efficient/quicker.

Re: Weekly Update 2/26/07 (by Django)

silvurhawke, I can understand your concern but we're working with you, not against you. We're making one minor change that will make the Crystal Lord hittable by Mages/Archers. However, a mage will be able to kill a Crystal Lord about as well as a melee could kill a hand full of VoD Virinidi without Imping/Vulning them, a mage would still definately do better with their racial weapon if they have one. The point isn't to make mages the best against them, it's to make it so it's not an artificial block (artificial block meaning that it blocks players from continuing by a means other than difficulty, in this case is impossible to hit).

We're also looking at lowering the armor level on Swarm Demons and another couple creatures. This is definately melee/archer love and should make them more useful.

Most of the tweaks we're looking at for the Colosseum will be making melees/archers better than they are now.

I think the leading concern is that the Colosseum may become too easy, we're going to be very cautious about this and try to change the actual balance as little as possible.

Re: Weekly Update 2/26/07 (by Django)

Quote:
Originally Posted by Gustaive
Django ... any thought for making a base xp reward for lower levels?

I saw your other post and we talked about it a bit. At this point we don't have a definate decision on the matter but we agree with your point that players in the 60-110, or so, range are not being rewarded as much for their work.

Re: Weekly Update 2/26/07 (by Django)

Quote:
Originally Posted by KronikJames
just curious do you read all the topics or just certain ones?

Well, it depends. Seeing my habbits from before I worked at Turbine my normal day consisted of 1. Go to work 2. Come home and play AC or another game 3. read the forums 4. sleep. So, I read most of them at home then I catch up on new posts off and on durring the work day. I'd say I read most of them in this forum, several of them in the PK forum and almost anything that's in feedback. It's actually important from a certain stand point, I need to keep in touch with how the players are receiving things and what bugs they may point out about them.

About vitae, we don't have any plans with vitae and the Colosseum at this point. Not saying we won't, just as this point we don't.

Re: Why was the illuminated scroll removed? - 2/26/07 (by Django)

Someguy1: "I just did the deep guruk dungeon on Bur for the first time since Bur opened and I found that the illuminated scroll was gone from the Falatacot boss. I still need the other seeker title so I wasn't too happy about that. Why was it removed? I opened the corpse first so they weren't looted before I got to it.

Was this for storyline reasons or something? Now that Asheron and Torgluuk are found the seeker titles were removed? Or is it just a bug?"

It's not a bug, Vici is correct in his assumption. The note was the device to inform the key characters about Asheron. Now that they note has been sent and intercepted by the players then delivered to the key characters, it's been removed from circulation.

Re: Bosh Bosh Tokens - 2/26/07 (by Django)

Quote:
Originally Posted by Xarkath
Same timer, I tried to pick up both.

And how long is that timer?

To pick up the advanced token you have to have scored a critical on Bosh Bosh, to pick up the lesser token you just have to be there.

A player should be able to obtain and use both the tokens within the weeks time that the NPC restricts them to for repeating.

Quote:
Originally Posted by Xarkath
Is a fellow supposed to decide which 5 people deserve the title and more XP? Most will just decide to kill again to get more greater tokens so why even bother with the lesser?

No, but those who get the greater token will be able to pick up the lesser within a reasonable amount of time, so they can assist those who didn't get the greater in getting their greater tokens and be able to pick up the lesser and receive a reward for helping.

Weekly Update 3/5/07 (by Frelorn)

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

Re: Cow and Chicken Colosseum (Warning) - 2/6/07 (by Django)

The boss fights, such as these and the other future ones, are not like the normal colosseum.

You can drop corpses.
The creatures are worth experience to kill.
Arenas may be recallable as they have unlimited access.
Fights may be insanely hard, expect to die

Re: Dev Team - 3/6/07 (by Django)

Exploding Arrows in my post did not mean AoE, that's an entire other can of worms. As of right now you might notice that all of our AoE spells orriginate from the caster, at this time we don't have a way to make a spell/skill effect originate from a target creature or location.

About exploding arrows in my first post, here's a praticle example. When you hit a creature a particle effect is emitted, one may think that it's the weapon that causes this to happen, however the particle effect of being hit is actually part of the creature that it knows to set off when it's hit. So for a creature to look like it's been hit by an exploding arrow it would need to have a particle effect that it knows to set off only when hit by a certain type of arrow or bow. It's not all that trivial.

Re: Locked out of Upper Catacombs  - 3/12/07 (by Lupus Argentus)

Weekly Update 3/12/07 - 3/12/07 (by Frelorn)

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
 

Re: Vista capable soon or Not ! ? !  - 3/15/07 (by Karch)

Another workaround is available:

Instead of changing permissions in the Properties Tab, right-click the AC icon and click "Run as Administrator". This enables different rights in the Vista backend than changing permissions, and has been successful with DDO and LOTRO on Vista.

Currently, Turbine does not officially support Vista and no ETA is available, but we are working on a supported fix. To help us in this, please inform us of what you have done to get AC working in Vista, and what you have done that did not help. The more information we have available, the better.
 

Re: request for titles - 3/16/07 (by Django)

I put in a suggestion a few weeks back asking for a feature to be able to delete unwanted titles.

There are a few reasons for this.

In one case players like An Adventurer may not want any other titles.

Another case is when you have a large number of titles that you're not using and you'd like to cut back to only the ones that you like, this way you can view your choises more easily.

We don't have an eta, or even a desicion on if we'll be doing this but it's been braught up.
 

Weekly Update 3/19/07 - 3/19/07 (by Frelorn)

Hey there. I hope everyone had a good weekend. We apologize for the Monthly fiction being late, but the weather was really treacherous here for a while and we felt it was better to be safe than have someone get hurt trying to drive home later than needed. The fiction has been completed and you can now read it here.

Please remember that Tuesday March 20th all worlds will be down for the March event, Ancient Enemies. As of right now the scheduled downtime will be from 8am EDT – 3pm EDT. We are also having an Authentication downtime on Wednesday March 21st from 7am EDT – 1pm EDT. During this time players will not be able to log in to the game, but those already in the game should not be affected.

We would like to take this opportunity to thank everyone who participated in last weeks Developer’s chat. It was lots of fun to take part in, and we are looking forward to having another one soon. A special thanks to the folks over at Warcry, who made the chat possible for us. You can find the chat here.

We have compiled the list of people who sent me a PM about the Colosseum eating a key on them after they completed it. For those of you who sent me a PM, thank you and please keep an eye on your PM In boxes for information regarding what happened and what will be done.

Finally, I know it’s a little late, but our friend Aerbax has once again decided to offer us some holiday greetings.

That’s about all for now. Everyone have a great week.
__________________
Andy "Frelorn" Cataldo
AC Community Relations
Turbine, Inc
 

Happy St. Patrick's Day - 3/19/07 (link)

 

(click to enlarge)