Hello there everyone. Welcome to this week’s update. Let’s get right into things.

Everything appears to have gone well with the March event. Since the event is still only a few days old we won’t pass the final judgment yet, but as things stand right now this has been a very smooth month. With that in mind, we will be asking for specific points of feedback in the coming weeks. On the PvP improvements as well as some of the other things we introduced this month. We have read a lot of good feedback already, and we hope you continue to let us know what you like and don’t like about the changes that were made.

The question keeps coming up about the shipping of ToD from the Turbine store. The latest information that we have is that the orders are being shipped from the manufacturer as I write this. Once the boxes get to the retailer, they should be shipped out quickly. We are hopeful that the boxes will be shipped out to people who ordered them this week.

This week the team is focused on getting all of the new things they have in store for April implemented on to our test server. Once there our QA team will begin testing everything along with the Devs. While doing this the Devs continue to tweak and change things as they come upon them and do more testing. This is a process that is repeated several times until the team feels that things are where they want them to be.

One last thing before we wrap this up. There has been a rumor around that a new suite of weapons will be showing up in Dereth soon. These weapons are rumored to fall between rares and quest weapons in damage, and have some really cool effects. The question is, where and how would one acquire these new weapons? As always with this world, you never know where things might show up. All we know for sure right now is that these new weapons have never before been seen in Dereth.

That's about it for this week. See you all in Dereth!
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Andy "Frelorn" Cataldo
AC Community Relations
Turbine, Inc

We have some exciting news for fans of Asheron’s Call: Throne of Destiny. Starting next week, CD keys will be available for purchase, along with the full version of the game for download at the time of purchase.

Next week we will release all of the details for where and how you can purchase the CD keys. Included in the information we will provide, will be the cost and a link to the purchase page.

All of us here are really excited to be able to offer Throne of Destiny to players in a way that will make it easy to purchase and play the game.
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Andy "Frelorn" Cataldo
AC Community Relations
Turbine, Inc

Hello there everyone. We hope you all had a pleasant weekend. Let’s get right into things, shall we?

This week the team is putting the final touches on the content for the April event. This means after doing a lot of testing they will be going back and making any final adjustments to the content, including difficulty and rewards. They will also take this time to discuss what changes they would like to make, and get the feedback from the rest of the team. We are also in the stage where we will begin to talk about the content for May. We will meet and begin discussing where the story is going next and start passing ideas around for the May event.

So let’s get on to answering a couple of questions.

Months ago you said there was going to more high level hunting areas, what happened to those plans?
Those plans have not really changed; they were just delayed a bit. Once we started working on things we found we were able to make some other changes to the game we felt were a better use of the team’s time. Things like the PvP changes and some of the User Interface changes we were able to make, not to mention the continuance of the story arc.

Will we ever see hub/subway recalls?
In my short time here I have learned to never, say never. That being said, the general feeling right now is that travel around Dereth is already pretty easy, so there is no need to make it even easier. A few years ago when it was still very difficult to get around this may have been a more viable things to do, but with the number of portals and recalls we already have, we don’t feel that another recall is needed right now.

Will the tiered allegiance officers EVER be put ingame? If not, can we at least have a couple of allegiance speakers back (along with the two officers we are now allowed)?
We are in the discussion stage right now for the allegiance improvements. They won’t be coming for the April event, but I would not be surprised to see improvements like this in the May event. No promises, since May is still a bit away, but I would not be surprised.

That’s about it for this week. As always, see you in Dereth!
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Andy "Frelorn" Cataldo
AC Community Relations
Turbine, Inc

Hello there everyone. I hope we all had a great weekend. Lets get right into our update for this week.

This week the team is going over the April event for the last few times and making sure everything is done and ready for players to tear into it. We have also begun the work on the May event as well. This is the time the team is writing up the details of each quest and going over things with the rest of the team to make sure what we want to do for the month is possible.

I would also like to take this time to give an update on the CD keys, since I know it will come up. Due to an unforeseen issue with the getting everything ready, we had a slight delay. So what does this mean? It means that the keys are still coming, but we want to make sure everything is working right before we release them. We are still very optimistic that the keys will be released for purchase this week, and I will do my best to keep you updated when we have more news.

Our intention was not to mislead or give you false information when we made the announcement last week. Unfortunately these things sometimes happen, and all we can do is learn from the mistakes that were made, and make sure not to make them again.

Finally, I hope that everyone had a chance to check out this years April Fools quest involving Ulgrim and some new pack friends. We wanted to make something silly that everyone could enjoy.

That is about it for this week. Everyone have a great day, and see you all in Dereth!
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Andy "Frelorn" Cataldo
AC Community Relations
Turbine, Inc
 

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

Let’s get right into this weeks update.

For some time now many of you have been asking us for more communication. I have seen many a post asking for something that has not been done in some time, a Dev chat.
Well you are in luck! Our friends at ACVault have generously offered to host a Developer’s Chat on Tuesday April 18th at 7pm EST. For all the information on this exciting event please click here

Another question that we have gotten this week already is: When is the April Event? Well due to some unforeseen issues, we had some things we needed to make sure were ok before we went ahead and announced the date and time for the Event. On Thursday April 13, 2006 the April Event Shining Runes and Shadowed Hands will go live. As with all of our events the worlds will be down from 9am EST – 3pm EST while we push the event to the live worlds.

As a Side note to the announcement above about the upcoming event, you can find the April Event page here. On that page you will find the April Letter to the Players and the event fiction for April. I think both are a really good read. You can use this thread to comment on the LttP.

Finally I would like to give an update on the CDkeys. We have isolated the issue that has been causing us trouble and we are actively working on getting everything resolved as quickly as possible. When we have more information for you, I will make sure and pass it along.

That’s it for now. Everyone have a great week, and see you all in Dereth!
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Andy "Frelorn" Cataldo
AC Community Relations
Turbine, Inc