Update of the Avatar #80 – 2014.07.04: R7 Re-Opens for RTX, 10% Pledge Bonus Extended, R7 Perspectives, Alienware R8 Access Keys, and More!

Greetings Fellow Avatars!

Here’s what we have for you in this week’s edition of Update of the Avatar:

• Release 7 Re-Opens For RTX Weekend!
• 10% Pledge Bonus Extended thru July 6th!
• Release 7 Perspectives (and R8 Focuses on PvP)
• The Mad Hermit’s Video of Net’s Crazy Maze
• Alienware Sponsors 1000 Access Keys and Prizes for Release 8
• Duke’s Keep Lot
• Ancestor’s Cloak
• Admiral’s Outfit for Boats Stretch Goal
• Upcoming Events

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Release 7 Re-Opens for RTX Weekend!

Some of you may recall that we launched our Kickstarter campaign in March 2013 with a live broadcast from the Rooster Teeth studios here in Austin, Texas. We’re excited to announce that Shroud of the Avatar will be showing at the RTX Convention hosted by Rooster Teeth, July 4-6.

Alienware is providing their kicka** X51 gaming rigs to power the game demos, and Plantronics is furnishing their awesome RIG headsets so attendees have an optimal game audio experience! If you’re a fan of Plantronics Gaming Headsets (like we are), then check out their Plantronics Gaming Facebook page, and if you like what you see then give them a “Like”!

If you’re at the convention then stop by, say Hi, and check out the latest version of the game (we’re in booth #235)

We’re re-opening Release 7 during the RTX convention the weekend of July 4-6, so be sure and check it out if you weren’t able to make it during the normally scheduled weekend access (June 26-29).

If you have not backed the game yet, you will need to register and login at www.shroudoftheavatar.com, select the “Pledge or Send Gift!” button in the right side-bar, and purchase a pledge at the $45 Adventurer level or above. For a limited time, you can get the Adventurer pledge for only $25 with the Alienware Pledge Upgrade Coupon (see details below).

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10% Pledge Bonus Extended 2 Extra Days!

If you were thinking of pledging your support to the development of Shroud of the Avatar, or upgrading your existing pledge, now’s a great time to do it! In conjunction with re-opening Release 7 for the entire RTX 2014 weekend, we’re extending the 10% Pledge Bonus promotion thru July 6th!

For all new pledges or pledge upgrades that you purchase for yourself, or as a gift, between 12:00 am CST June 5, 2014 and 12:00 am CST July 7, 2014 we will add another 10% to your pledge! (Note: the original date started on June 6 but since we published the new reward information in the public forums on June 5 it was decided to start the pledge bonus promotion a day earlier)

For example, if you love the new Row House included as a bonus reward in the Ancestor tier and purchase the pledge for $275, we will add an additional $28 to your pledge account ($275 times 10% equals $27.50 rounded up to $28; our pledge package doesn’t handle cents so we round up to nearest dollar).

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Release 7 Perspectives (and R8 Focuses on PvP)

From Lord British:

What a great community we have! The growth of guilds and townships has already begun, and I look forward to seeing how they continue to shape the world of New Britannia. The City of Pax Lair completed even more creative and astounding construction in Valemark, but we also had the chance to see other great cities emerge (including the Celtic Holdfast which was a personal favorite of mine). I was also able to participate in a delightful community run quest, as well as orate onstage about the history of the Fauns and Satyrs of New Britannia. While participating in those activities I had the chance to brainstorm with the community about player run quests and how we can best support them.

I am looking forward to the next couple of releases, which will include even more of the mainland map. (The Graf Gem Mine was just the start!) But what I am most excited about is the upcoming combat improvements, including our first tests involving PVP! We listened to YOU, the community, and decided to focus on PVP as early as possible, as this allows us to balance and tune combat in PVE and PVP at the same time versus sequentially. Since we firmly believe PVP is an integral part of Shroud of the Avatar, we wanted to dedicate as much time as we can to get it right.

The AI concerns that have been brought up will still be addressed in later releases, so PVE folks should take heart. Though we are slightly shifting focus to include PVP combat, we are not ignoring PVE; just solving the AI issues after we have basic combat a bit more balanced and polished.

In total, I was incredibly impressed with what the community accomplished during Release 7, as well as what the team was able to deliver to you. Both vastly exceeded what I expected could be done so early in the development process.

And for those of you eager to jump back in, Release 7 will be re-opened for RTX July 4 – 6. Huzzah!

[Join the conversation in the forums]

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From Chris Spears:

The big news is that the mean play session for the more than 21,000 logins was way up at…around 43 minutes…if you’re comparing to R6 stats, remember that this is per session NOT per user. We were at around an hour per user in R6 vs something closer to 3 hours in R7!

For us, this wasn’t a huge shock. Just adding in more social elements, like being able to have multiple people share lots and a real trading system was really all it took for people to start to work together as a team which helped people bond!

So, this was the first release for the new overworld map direction. What people saw was about 2 weeks of research, discovery, and trial and error and then about 3 days of putting it to use. Very much lacking in polish but hopefully enough to give people an idea of the direction.

… lets talk about the epic decorating throw down that happened in Valemark. From what I can tell, the citizens of Valemark decided that they wanted to see if they could break the server. Two competing neighbors were building mazes out crafted cabinets, shelves, and other crafted items. They then decided that just having hundreds of shelves built into a maze was not nearly enough torture for our servers or the frame rates and decided to fill every damn shelf with stuff!

I encouraged them to keep going to see when things would break…For those who were curious, I think BurningToad checked and found that there were around 5,351 decorations on the lot! Yowsa!

Now to talk about R8 stuff! Starr’s post will have the rough goals were setting for R8. My goal is simple, make PVP fun. For those in Dev+, I’m going to try to post often over there on what changes are going in and why we are making the various changes. I’ll start with a post on Monday summing up what got done on our first, short week of work on PVP!

[Read the rest of this post in the forums]

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From Starr Long:

Greetings Avatars,

Every release I am reminded that the way we are making this game together is as exciting as the game itself. The invaluable input all of you provide after playing each release is going to make a truly compelling product while providing an amazing journey to get there.

Release 7 is a great example of momentum on a project at this point in its life cycle. This momentum can be positive with results like delivering over a dozen extra items. The momentum can be negative as well. In the case of R7, some of those new items (like pre-built lighting in all the player houses) resulted in some cost to performance. Performance was also affected by the growing interest that players have shown with our decorating and crafting systems. In Valemark, this resulted in a maze factory and two very elaborate mazes (Riya’s maze with the shelves had over 5000 items in it!) This, of course, made loading and playing that scene almost impossible, but taught us some valuable lessons. However, the results were stunning and really highlighted the power of expression that is in players hands now that we have enabled permissions that allow players to share property.

Release 7 therefore exposed some issues we need to address soon about performance and optimizations. In order to do so, especially the issues related to decorations, we are going to add item limits to both lots and houses (sad trombone) as well as a handful of other changes to how we handle lights, windows, etc. At the same time we have started adding into our schedule items that players can use to build that are less performance intensive (hedge mazes, wall partitions, etc.).

Release 7 was the first release in a while where we did not add any significant content to the combat system and we really felt it. It made us realize we need to spend a couple of releases focused on increasing the functionality of our combat. It also prompted us to reevaluate our plan to delay PVP tasks until after combat was more built out. Many of you in the community argued that delaying PVP could be harmful in the long run, and we heard you. We now feel that in order to make combat (PVE & PVP) the best it can be, we need to do PVP now, not later. Utilizing PVP will be an amazing tool to balance combat systems and data. We also feel it is important for us to work on PVP now so that we can show just how committed we are to PVP being integral to Shroud.

To that end, we have moved our daily play sessions to death matches in the Castle Arena (yes Lum did post a pic to Facebook of himself standing over my corpse after he killed me). We then meet to discuss the results and iterate for the next day’s sessions. Even in this super rough early stage, we are having fun! It is also helping us prioritize what systems we need to shore up, including things like line of sight, combat facing (that matters), damage types / resistances, interrupts (yes!), innate skills, better information about current target, buff/debuff indicators, low ammo indicators, etc.

This of course triggers one of my favorite mantras: “The only constant is change.” In other words we had to completely revamp the Q3 plan starting with R8 (yes I know I just released that plan to you all a month ago). Here is the revised R8 plan (with the old R8 plan below my signature for reference). I will post an updated plan for R9 soon, R10 will remain a polish release.

RELEASE 8 (revised), July 24 – 27, 2014:

• Open PVP Areas: Certain parts of the map will now allow open PVP. Currently we have been testing this functionality in the Castle Basement Arena. For now there will be very little structure to this; it will basically be just deathmatch.
• Combat Systems: We will be iterating and adding to the fundamental systems that support combat, including more secondary effects like bludgeons damaging gear and heavy armor lowering your pool of focus. We are also going to introduce and experiment with interrupts, combat facing, and more sophisticated line of sight checks.
• Damage Types & Resistances: Damage types and resistances (fire, ice, physical, etc.) will begin to affect combat.
• Combat Skills: We are moving to a new strategy of going deeper vs. broader in skill creation. For Release 8 our goal is to flesh out more of the schools of Fire, Blades, and Heavy Armor.
• Status Indicators: We are adding status indicators for things like low ammo, damaged/broken gear, buffs, debuffs, etc.
• Scenes: Ardoris, the waterfront city on the main continent filled with canals and framed by two opposing castles, will now be available to players. Ardoris will also be the first map with Row Houses. Other adventuring scenes on the main continent will also appear. These new scenes on the mainland will be accessed via the Lunar Rifts which will now change destinations based on time of day.
• New Creatures: Several new creatures will come online including a new mimic and a Fire Elemental, as well as variations on existing creatures (liches, kobolds, etc.).
• Crafting: Durability and Repair will come online.
• Overworld Animating Avatars: Players will now see their avatars (along with their party members) animating on the overworld map.
• Intro Cinematic: We are making an animatic version of the intro with narration by our very own Bill Johnson (aka The Guardian).

Also remember Release 7 will be open again for RTX July 4 – 6.

Release 7 is (not quite) dead! Long live Release 8!

Sincerely,
Darkstarr aka Starr Long

[Join the conversation in the forums]

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Be sure and check out the Release 7 Player Gallery thread in the forums. There are 8 pages of some astounding player captured images from Release 7! Here are a few samples:

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The Mad Hermit’s Video of Net’s Crazy Maze

We not only had Riya’s amazing maze constructed of decorated shelves to explore during Release 7, but SotA community member, The Mad Hermit, created this video of a second, over-the-top, 3D maze crafted from wardrobes by Net and his cohorts:

In Shroud of the Avatar Pre-Alpha R7 community members (Net, Soleidad, Winfield PaxLair, Duke Violation and OneAndOnly) got together and crafted Wardrobes. 800 of them. Then assembled them into a five story vertical maze with roof access. It’s crazy clever and worth a look if you happen to be in Valemark during this release…Read Net’s Forum Post Regarding the Maze

The video is a “must see”, so take a few minutes, crank the video quality up to HD, and let The Mad Hermit lead you through this amazingly crazy maze:

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Alienware Sponsors 1000 Access Keys and Prizes for Release 8

Over the next two weeks, 1000 members of Alienware’s Shroud of the Avatar Group will be granted early access to Release 8 (July 24-27). Here’s the link to join up and qualify for the Alienware R8 Access Keys giveaway: http://na.alienwarearena.com/giveaways/shroud-of-the-avatar-release-8-key-giveaway

In addition, Alienware is sponsoring prizes to be given away randomly to players that log in to Release 8 during the weekend access period. Stay tuned to a future update for more details…

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Alienware Sponsors $20 Pledge Upgrade Coupon

Alienware’s powerful gaming rigs are a perfect match for Shroud of the Avatar! To show their support, Alienware is sponsoring $20 SotA Pledge Upgrade Coupons to members of their Alienware Arena community!

These coupons can be used to start a SotA pledge account (for new backers), or to add $20 to an existing pledge account. If, for example, you have a $90 Royal Artisan Pledge, you can use the Alienware coupon to bump you up to a $110 Virtual Collector Pledge.

Pretty sweet deal, right? So, hurry over to the Alienware Arena website and get your $20 Pledge Upgrade Coupon now!

[NOTE: Only one Alienware Pledge Upgrade Coupon can be used per account. Coupon does not apply to Add-On Store items]

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Duke’s Keep Lot

We received some pretty convincing feedback from our community that the Duke’s lot was undersized for the value of the Duke Pledge tier, and we ultimately agreed. As was announced in Epic Update #76, We doubled the size of the Duke’s lot, now twice the size of the City lot. Here you can see the new size of the Duke’s Keep lot in relation to all the lots:

Here is the Founder Duke Castle nestled within a heavily fortified Duke Keep Lot:

Or, if you prefer a less fortified Duke Keep Lot (we plan on eventually allowing different fence types for player selection):

So you can get a feel for the extra roominess of the new double-sized Duke Keep Lot, here is an image of the Benefactor and Founder Duke Castles sitting in City Lots:

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Ancestor’s Cloak

This Ancestor’s Cloak is one of the recently added rewards to the Ancestor Pledge tier, adorned with our newly designed Ancestor’s Symbol:

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Admiral’s Outfit for Boats Stretch Goal

Last week we introduced Boats to the Stretch Goal Store, which will allow you to sail boats around the waterways of New Britannia. Here are the Admiral’s Hat and outfits included in that stretch goal:

 

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Upcoming Events

2014.07.04 – SotA at RTX
2014.07.24 – Release 8 Access
2014.08.09 – SotA at synDCon
2014.08.21 – Release 9 Access
2014.08.29 – SotA at PAX Prime Seattle
2014.08.29 – SotA at Dragoncon
2014.09.25 – Release 10 Access
2014.10.23 – Release 11 Access
2014.11.14 – Duke & Lord of the Manor VIP Design Roundtable with Lord British and Portalarium Studio Tour
2014.11.15 – HoBLotH II: Legends of the Hearth
2014.11.20 – Release 12 Access
2014.12.18 – Release 13 Access

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