This week had some huge threads going, with lots of responses by the devs! One of the largest was the "Holy Hand Grenades" thread, which gathered quite a wide variety of humorous responses, not relating to Asheron's Call. I've included those responses that do relate to AC, but if you'd like to read the entire thread, here is the link.
Reminder: May's Patch (Prodigal Sons) is scheduled for Tuesday, May 22. Worlds will be down from 8am EDT – 3pm EDT.
This week the team is continuing to work on getting the server problems resolved. Severlin has been putting in some crazy hours trying to look through all of the data we have gathered thus far. We have made some progress in getting to the bottom of these issues, but we have not found a resolution yet. We will continue to investigate and pour through data until we get the matter resolved.
Next week is that time again, Patch time! This is a reminder that the May event, Prodigal Sons is scheduled to go live on Tuesday May 22nd. On that day the worlds will be down from 8am EDT – 3pm EDT. If for some reason that date changes, we will give you as much notice as possible. Please note that due to many circumstances including the ongoing server issues, this month’s content may appear a bit lighter than normal. Anything we were unable to complete for this month should however make it in for June, along with what was already on the schedule for that month. There is still going to be plenty for everyone to do this month, but we would have liked to be able to get more done. Time was just not on our side this month.
The issue of death macros and continued use of the /die command continues to come up here and with customer service, so I want to be clear on a few things. The use of any macros which cause you die intentionally over and over again is a Code of Conduct violation. As well as the intentional dropping of multiple corpses in an effort to either glitch the game in some way or to cause others lag. Despite the claims by some, even those people who no longer drop corpses still cause a performance hit to the servers when they continually use the /die command. If you are found to be abusing this function in any way shape or form you can and will be subject to disciplinary action from our customer service team. To that end, the team is investigating the idea of putting a timer on the use of the /die command.
Some of you may have noticed some odd things with the website and forums today. This is a result of the now completed upgrade to the web tools we use for the main website. If you notice something on the site that is now missing or not working as it was before, please drop me a pm with the info and I will get it fixed as soon as I can. In the meantime I am going to archiving and cleaning up some of the older stuff on the main site. As much as we all love the rich history of the game, there are many articles and pages that are simply out of date and they need to be updated or just removed. That is going to be my main focus over the next few weeks.
So that the folks contributing are aware we have been keeping a close watch on the New Augment suggestion thread. There are some really good ideas there so far. Now without making any promises, the discussion has come up about adding some new Augments in to the mix. If and when we do go forward with these, I would like to see us pull from the ideas we have seen here so far. Good work folks, keep it up!
That’s about it for now. Everyone have a great day, and see you all in Dereth!
__________________
Andy "Frelorn" Cataldo
AC Community Relations
Turbine, Inc
This week was an unusually light week on the forums. It may be that some of the staff were on vacation, or they are busy with the server issues, or busy with the prep work for May's patch, or all of the above... either way, I'm sure things will be back to normal soon!
I'm including links to the Asheron's Call Screensaver in this week's issue, for those who may have missed them when they were released. Enjoy!
This Week in Review (Issues 15 - 18)[ 1 Comment ] Print News | Category: News So this month's been a little slow on the AC front - with good reason, with LotRO going gold, our favourite producers have been just a little distracted of late! Well, now that it's out, we can expect more attention!
This edition summarises:
Turbine looking for more staff
May 2007 Calendar
The April Event
Also, we'd like to take this opportunity to remind you that AC Vault is interested in any AC related news you may have. If you have a special AC event or message, you can send it to us and your message could well be posted on our front page!
Hi there and welcome to this week’s edition of the weekly update.
This week we are continuing to investigate the rather frustrating issues that have been affecting some of the servers. As it stands right now we have still not been able to locate the cause of these problems. We are going to continue to investigate the issues until they are resolved. We appreciate your patience while we continue to troubleshoot the problems. We are still hopeful that we can get these issues resolved.
The team is working on getting all of the kinks and bugs out of the content for the May event. This is also the time when the balance is worked out for the quests and we begin looking at what will hopefully be the final version of things for the update.
Right now we have tentatively schedule patch day to be Tuesday, May 22nd, with the event being named Prodigal Sons. If there are any changes to the schedule, we will of course let everyone know as soon as possible.
The updates to the web tools I mentioned last week are going as planned and we should be able to use the new tools sometime next week. When that happens I will begin the massive project of cleaning up and archiving the main website. While this is occurring, you may notice some strange behavior from some pages on the website. We will be trying to keep the errors that appear to a minimum amount, but with this much information stored on the site, we are sure to have some strange things showing up or disappearing on us.
I know that the last couple of updates have been a little bit lighter in information than some folks would like however, right now our focus is on getting the new content completed and getting the server issues fixed. Once things return to some semblance of normality, we will then return to the more detail packed goodness that everyone likes to see.
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
This week had some interesting discussions about the emergence of the "Death Macros" that have evidently become popular on Darktide. (Personally I cannot imagine why anyone would want to increase their death counts, I'm proud of not having died even 100 times on one of my higher level characters! To each his/her own!)
Also of note, this week's Weekly Update was pretty long, and filled with some really great information and tidbits.
Weekly Update 05/02/07[ Comment ] Print News | Category: News - Turbine Hi there and welcome to this week’s edition of the weekly update. We have a few things that need to be addressed, so let’s get right to it.
The issue of Colosseum keys keeps coming up, so I am going to be as clear as possible on this so we can finally lay this to rest. Our traditional policy on lost items is and has been that if you lose an item or do not get said item, we generally will not replace the item. There are exceptions in cases where we do not have a fix in place and it is easy for customer service to track. In this particular case I wanted to be a nice guy and replace what I felt was a valuable item, even though it goes against our longstanding policy. In hindsight this was not the best idea I have had in my time here as Community manager. One mistake I made was not being clear on who should and should not have their keys replaced, so I will do that now.
It was a pretty quiet week around the Turbine AC boards this week, but for a well understood and good reason. This week marked the official retail launch of Lord of the Rings Online, so I'm sure there were lots of parties to attend and lots of other cool stuff going on! Congratulations Turbine!
This week the team is busy getting the things they have designed implemented on to the test servers and making the paper versions of their quest ideas come to life. This is also the time when our QA staff begins the process of testing the new quests and giving feedback to the Devs.
We are continuing to investigate the problems that have been occurring on some of the worlds, which have been causing players to get timed out of the game or “stuck” in a state where they cannot log in to the game. On one of the more recent incidents we were able to get some rally good specific data, and the team is going through this data in hopes of finding out what may be causing these continuing issues. We are working very hard to find a solution to this problem, and will continue to do so until we have fixed whatever may be causing it. We would also like to take this chance to apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused players. We are taking this issue very, very seriously.
Finally, I was reading through the forums today and some interesting questions were brought up in a post by KronikJames. So, I am going to do my best to answer those questions here.
1. when ever we have an idea and post it here it would be nice to know if the idea is brought up in some Turbine meeting and what was said and if it is placed on the possible list or at least the good idea list.
With the entire team reading the forums, a good number of the things we discuss are based off of player ideas. While we may not always give direct credit to those folks, we always like to see the ideas that players come up with. We try to discuss these ideas as much as we can and we will continue to do so going forward.
2. when you guys/gals have a meeting it would be cool if we could watch and listen to it. just to see what a meeting is like for you. it would be like a Day in the Life of Frelorn or Django or whoever...
While in theory this may sound like a good idea, there are way too many things discussed in meeting that cannot be seen or heard by the public for many reasons, including us not wanting to give out company secrets. While I suppose we could change the meeting structure for something like this, doing that would kind of defeat the purpose. So in short, this is probably not going to happen.
3. how about a contest where the winner gets to come out and hang out at Turbine for the day at Turbine's Expense. it would be a behind the scenes look at Turbine from a players point of view.
I know in the old days of Turbine there were instances where something like this would happen. I can certainly inquire about doing something like this again as a contest reward of some sort. Getting it past our legal team could be the tricky part, but it does not hurt to ask.
4. how about double xp offers to get players to return. this would be where you send out an email to a bunch of players who are not subscribed and you tell them for the this weekend their acct is reactivated for free for and they get double xp for it as well. this might help people play agian and maybe reactivate. just a thought.
This one is easy. We have no plans for another double XP weekend anytime soon. We are however looking into getting some kind of welcome back type promotion together for former players. When I have more details about this I will post the information.
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
This week was a pretty quiet week at Turbine, due to the holiday, patch day, and the big storm system that went through the NE this week. But the Devs did answer some pretty interesting questions this week despite all of that!
This week saw a lot of different items on the forums, including information regarding upcoming changes to the way the Event news will be done, as well as the Producer's Letter, and the release notes for April!
Reminder: Monday April 16th is a holiday for Turbine, and the April Patch is on Tuesday, April 17th.
