Now that we have begun allocating Overland Map locations for Player Owned Towns (PoTs), we have encountered some map density issues. We have decided to cap the number of PoTs with Overland map access rights at 230 total. This means there are only 0 more available PoTs that will have Overland map access rights.

Once those remaining 0 PoTs have sold (via full payment or monthly payment plan), any additional PoTs purchased will not have Overland map access rights, but must connect to another PoT that has Overland map access. Additionally, PoTs that do not have Overland map access (or have foregone that right), and have not requested connection to another PoT with Overland map access, will be connected to one NPC town in the quadrant/biome you requested (you may request a specific NPC town to connect to in your PoT Submission form and we will do our best to honor such requests).

Additionally, we are including Player Owned Towns (with or without Overland map access rights) in our 10% Summer Bonus promotion! Starting at 10am CST, July 10 and running through Midnight CST, August 31, 2015, you will receive an additional 10% bonus added to your Store Credit for any Player Owned Town purchases/upgrades (including monthly payment plans).

(NOTE: The 10% Bonus will be applied to your Store Credit within 24 hours of your purchase; 10% Bonus is for pledge or Player Owned Town purchases/upgrades/payment plans only and does not apply to Add-On, Stretch Goal, or Make a Difference Store purchases; Existing Store Credit applied toward a purchase does not qualify for the 10% Bonus)

Check out this entertaining video that our pals over at inXile made for the final 48 hour countdown of their Bard’s Tale IV Kickstarter Campaign!

Final 2 Days of the Bard’s Tale IV Kickstarter

Bard’s Tale IV is helping drive the revival of the dungeon crawler genre! As described by inXile, it is a single-player, party-based cRPG with dynamic phase-based combat, challenging puzzles and riddles, and a game set to beautiful Gaelic music, where the Bard’s songs and melodies affect gameplay. They’ve already met their funding goal, passed their first three stretch goals, but need your help with their next stretch goal (the RPG “Super Team”, Bruce Cordell, Wolfgang Baur, and Sean K. Reynolds, design three custom dungeons), as well as collecting more of their cool Social Achievements. Click here to check out their Kickstarter campaign!

Some of Portalarium’s most important founding principles are “Openness/Transparency”, “Collaboration” and “Sharing of ideas and opinions.”  We have put great effort into living by these principles on a daily basis with all stakeholders of the Portalarium tribe (employees, investors, partners, backers, community members, etc.).

One of the ways we acted on these principles was to create and maintain public forums, open for the entire world to participate in, both viewing and posting. We reserved some areas of our forums for backers only, but we felt it was important there be a community forum where the dev team, backers, and non-backers could interact with each other, share ideas and opinions, collaborate, and brainstorm.

For two years, we’ve been able to keep our public forums freely open for both viewing and posting. Unfortunately, recent abuse of our public forums by spammers is forcing us to remove free posting privileges. Our volunteer forum moderators are drowning in the hordes of spam posts that have recently invaded our public forums. For the past couple of weeks, our web dev team (i.e. Tassilo Philipp) had to set aside higher priority game and web development tasks while he endeavored to close the holes the spammers are getting through.

We on the executive management team felt it was necessary to stop spending our backers pledge money on the endless efforts necessary to block spammers, and instead, stop them by making them pay to post. We’ve anguished over this decision for weeks, as it is a compromise of our principles, and we will suffer from the loss of ideas that often resulted from free sharing of opinions in our public forums. However, we believe this is the best course of action to take at this time.

Please know that we do not consider this a permanent situation. As our funds and team priorities allow, we will continue to revisit the integration of automated spam tools that may allow us to re-open our general forums for free public posting.

In the meantime, starting June 29, 2015, our General Forums will remain open for everyone to read, but you must be a backer to post. All existing backers (including Steam Early Access backers) will be able to post. Non-backers can purchase forum posting privileges with our new $5 Forum Posting Pledge, which can be upgraded to a full game pledge at any time. If you pledged through Kickstarter you will need to link your Kickstarter account for forum posting privileges.

Dallas Snell
COO/Founder/Portalarium

To help everyone get their summer off to a great start, we’re having a $10 for $10 Summer Bonus Promotion! If you make any single purchase of $10 or more on the SotA website between 3pm CDT June 11 and 10 am CDT June 27 we will make a one-time deposit of an extra $10 into your Store Credit! Happy Summer!

[NOTE: The $10 for $10 offer can be exercised only once during the promotion period.
$10 Store Credit should show up in your account within 24 hours of a qualifying purchase]