Every year we form a Movember team called Moustache of the Avatar to raise funds for Movember. To date we have raised over $3300 through fundraising for Movember. We have also created dedicated items for our Movember Make a Difference store including a Moustache Helm, Shield, and Cloak. Last year we even created Darkstarr and Lord British Follicular Reliquaries with Darkstarr and Lord British versions of the Movember items. Those items and other Movember tagged items have raised over $7,000 for Movember to date!

Stay tuned for Release 60 when the 2018 Winter items will start appearing including the 2018 Snow Family and 2018 Snowman Masks which this year feature moustaches in honor of Movember!

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We are experiencing lockups when loading certain parts of our website like the Add On Store. If you encounter this problem we recommend trying an alternate browser to see if that resolves the issue for you, we are currently experiencing the least issues with Firefox.

Update: The issue happened only on Chrome, as far as we can tell, and it is due to Chrome not being able to handle more than just a few CSS animations (in this case spinning a .png file) without sometimes deadlocking. We removed those for now to work around this Chrome bug.

The Release 59 Livestream is set for Friday November 2! All Avatars from around the world are welcome to join us in the livestream activities. We will be doing deep dives, answering questions, having sales, handing out prizes, and tracking towards stretch goals. In honor of Fishing Phase 2 going live in Release 59 the theme for this livestream is Fish!

LIVESTREAM SCHEDULE (Central Time Zone)

Monthly livestreams are on Twitch and include answers to your gameplay questions, world building tours, prize giveaways, sales on items, and more! Here is the schedule:

UPDATED:

• 3PM: Introductions
• 3:30PM: Deep Dive 1: Fishing
• 4:30PM: Q&A
• 5:15PM: Deep Dive 2: Boss Behaviors
• NEW! 6:00PM: Deep Dive 3: Deck Building
• 7PM: Ending Announcements

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[From a forum post by Starr “Darkstarr” Long]

Avatars,

Please read this entire message, as well as the linked Player Guide and Known Issues.

Release 59 of Shroud of the Avatar goes live this Thursday, October 25, at 10:30 AM US Central Daylight Time (15:30 UTC).

Release 59 is the first release in which we focused on the current iteration of our Top 10 Priorities (from Q4 2018 post). We made fantastic progress on every single one of these priorities including various quality of life fixes (decay removed, universal chat, etc.), systems polish, tons of bug fixes, performance improvements, user interface polish (deck selector), seasonal content (Pumpkin Head!), a revamped New User Experience, Fishing Phase 2 (water types, more fish, more skills, etc.), more content & features for Player-Made Dungeons (more rooms as loot, more entrance patterns, etc.), and boxes are now available through our website and Amazon!

Going forward we are going to slightly modify how we do our release notes. In the past we have transcribed a lot of the details from our internal tracking tool, JIRA, into this post to make these 10–20 page informational dispersal about what was done for the release. Instead of doing that, we are now going to make this post a “highlights” post with a link to a google spreadsheet that lists all the tasks and bugs that were completed for the release. This will both save time in production that we can devote to other tasks and it will also allow you the players to connect issues you reported to the actual JIRA numbers we posted in response in the forums! We hope you enjoy this new format.

New User Experience Revamp: For Release 59, we have revamped and improved the New User Experience by separating the tutorials from the story spaces in the three starting areas (Battle of Solace Bridge, Battle of Highvale, and Blood River Massacre). We have also built a new focused tutorial space in the Isle of Storms that walks you through the game basics in a gated fashion (i.e. you cannot advance to the next room until you prove you can swing a sword). Another change is that choosing your story path is now independent of your starting decks! Read more…

Another content packed weekly Community Livestream is this Friday October 26 at 4 PM CDT on Twitch!

This week we are going to talk about Deck Building! In our classless skills system the deck building mechanic allows you to build a set of skills around a theme and equip them along with associated gear. Decks can be built to be a “class” (fighter, ranger, mage, etc.) as well as for certain situations (PVP, boss fight, etc.). In Release 59 as part of the New User experience revamp we now start you with three different decks instead of just one per path and we polished the visuals for the deck selection UI so we thought it would be a good time to have Travis “Vas Corp Por” Koleski, Joaquin “Wizardsmoke” Del Canto, and Chris “Atos” Spears walk you through the fine points of our deck building mechanics.

Also this is the first Friday to earn the Release 59 Fish themed stretch goals by making a purchase or by participating in the Rewards program! As a reminder we will be having massive sales (up to 50% off!) from noon to midnight on Friday to help us hit those stretch goals.

• $10K: Fish Pavers 
• $25K: Fish Throne
• $35K: Fish Mask Set
• $50K: Big Trophy Fish Stone Statue Set
• $65K: Fish Shield & Swordfish Sword
• $75K: Big Fish Mask Set (Shark & Lava!)
• $85K: Unique Dungeon Encounter Room with Fishing Spot
• $95K: Fish Scale Armor

As usual we will be giving out prizes at 4:15 and 4:45! To be eligible all you need to do is either make any purchase in the store or log into the game and type “Reel it in” in the chat window (no purchase necessary).

Watch on Twitch this Friday at 4 PM CDT!

Read more…

As many of you know we are expiring all of our bundles before the end of the year. Viking and Kobold bundles expire on November 30. Elven, Obsidian, and Shogun bundles expire on December 21. In Release 59 we will be adding the contents of the bundles to crown vendors as single purchases, however they will not have any upgrade functionality. Based on numerous requests from those of you who have been saving up your crowns we are going to offer an alternative path for upgrading bundles using crowns. For a limited time (offer ends December 21, 2018) you can purchase a service voucher to use crowns to upgrade your bundle!

If you wish to upgrade your bundle with crowns please email us at support@portalarium.com BEFORE purchasing the voucher. In the request please list the name of the bundle you wish to upgrade, and the bundle you wish to upgrade it to (e.g., Elven 2-Story Row Tax Free Bundle to Elven Village Tax Free Bundle). We will then determine how many crowns you need for the upgrade and notify you of that amount so you can decide before proceeding. Only then will you purchase the voucher and we will then remove the crowns from your inventory.

Please note that we will be using the same exchange rates that are currently on the store for this transaction.

To celebrate our first holiday season since launching we are putting most items* in the store on sale for 50% off, our deepest discounts ever, every Friday noon to midnight, until December 21, 2018!

Additionally we are having our first sale on Gold Crowns of the Obsidians ever! Some packages are discounted as much as 20% every weekend through December 21, 2018!

*Note that this sale does not include the already discounted and expiring Bundles and associated items.

Another content packed weekly Community Livestream is this Friday October 19 at 4 PM CDT on Twitch!

This week we are going to talk about the rebuilt New User Experience that is going live in Release 59. This includes a new tutorial area in Isle of Storms and a rebuilt version of Solace Bridge. Keith “Sannio” Quinn and Travis “Vas Corp Por” Koleski will walk us through the new tutorial area and discuss the key differences and improvements of this experience including how choosing your story path is now independent of your starting decks.

This is the final Friday to earn the Release 58 Dragon themed stretchgoals by making a purchase or by participating in the Rewards program! These stretchgoals are in honor of the Wyverns which went live in Release 58. We have already hit the first three goals!

• ACHIEVED $10K: Dragon Egg Decorations
• ACHIEVED $25K: /breathefirespiral
• ACHIEVED $35K: Dragon Skin Rugs (2 colors)
• $50K: Dragon Dungeon Entrance Pattern
• $65K: Dragon Bow & Dragon Plate Helm
• $80K: Dragon Sword & Dragon Polearm
• $90K: Dragon Mask Set (multiple color variants) with smoke VFX
• $100K: Unique Dungeon Dragon Encounter Room

As usual we will be giving out prizes at 4:15 and 4:45! To be eligible all you need to do is either make any purchase in the store or log into the game and type “Light it up” in the chat window (no purchase necessary).

Watch on Twitch this Friday at 4 PM CDT!

Read more…