July 30, 2007

Subscription Prices Lowered

It's finally happened! The DEVs said that the price would slowly and gradually come down. Well, this is just the beginning.

FujiQ posted in Subscription Price Reduction
Hello Everyone,

For the past couple of months, we've been talking about lowering the subscription price gradually until Ashen Empires is completely free to play. Today marks the beginning of that process! Check out the website to see the changes we've made to monthly subscription prices. 1, 3 and 7 day subscriptions have remained the same. The price changes went into effect this afternoon and will not be applied retroactively.

Some expansion prices have been changed as well. The Talazar's Revenge and Sands of Creation bundle has been dropped from 599 to 499, and the single Talazar's Revenge expansion has been lowered from 350 to 299.

Thank you as always for your continued support.

Sincerely,

FujiQ & The IWG Team

On the website, you can see that the subscription prices for 1 month, 3 month, and 6 month subscriptions are now 120, 345, and 660 tokens a piece respectively. This equates to new prices of $6.00, $17.25, and $33.00 now. That's $2.00 per month off of the old prices.

This should make buying tokens a little easier for those who don't directly pay for tokens. And for those of us who do pay for tokens, now we have a little extra spending room in terms of extras.

July 24, 2007

More info on the Q&A

FujiQ updated the website with a bit more information about the Q&A mentioned in the newsletter. Most importantly, it shows the location of the portal to "Party Island".

FujiQ posted on the Ashen Empires Website:
Want to get some one on one time with OneEye? Have a burning question for Burningspear? Wait no more! We'll be holding a DEV Question and Answer session next Tuesday, July 31st, from 3pm to 4pm CDT (8pm to 9pm GMT).

The following developers will be attending: OneEye, Zarquon, Burningspear, Madmax, TheTyrant, and our newest developer, Alanzo. The support team (Wintergreen, MonkeyFist, and myself) will also be in attendance.

The session will be held on Party Island, which is accessible from a portal located just north of the central chamber in Lotor's Summer Palace (see the red block in the picture below).

Please come prepared with your questions. We'll have our GMs moderating questions (and spammers).

We look forward to meeting you in game!!


See you there :)

July 23, 2007

Free Weekend! Woot!

Oh yes! What's better than free? You can't beat free.

FujiQ posted on the Ashen Empires Website:
The update and patch last week were quite time consuming. We'd like to make that up to our community and thank you all for your patience with a free weekend!

Here's how it will work: If you're already a subscriber, we'll add three days to your subscription free of charge. Subscribers will receive their 3 free days on Friday at 2pm CDT. These days will be tacked onto the current subscription balance.

Non subscribers will see their subscription start on Friday, July 27 at 2pm CDT and last until Monday, July 30 at 2pm CDT. To see what benefits you receive as a subscriber, please see the section under subscriptions on the Item List page.

Enjoy!


So if you're a new player just starting out or a returning player looking to go hunt with old friends, this is the weekend to do it! FREE! YEAH, BABY!

July 22, 2007

Found this little bit of randomness while perusing the boards. 420 brought up the old Quest log issue and this seemed to attract a post from FujiQ.

FujiQ posted in Can We Have Quest Log PLZ?:
we know the game needs a quest log. it's a huge project, worse than the hair fix. perhaps our newest employee can start out by tackling that project :)

/me goes to hunt down this other announcment....New DEV?!?

July 21, 2007

More Website Updates

Updates galore! It seems that the website is really getting some use after all. With the new look and the new stat pages, you'd think everything was done. Well, almost. Check this out.

FujiQ posted on the Ashen Empires Website:
The website got cleaned-up this week and is feeling shiny! Here's a list of what's changed:
  • Guilds and Combat pages are no longer empty.
  • AE Reporters Tempester and The Freshest Diva now have their own section on the website.
  • The skills page now shows you the list of skills for each profession/class.
  • The Item List in the Store Info section now describes the benefits of having a subscription.
  • A new fan site has been added: AE Server Status by Jonny Hunter
  • Left navigation bar has been universally applied to all pages.
  • Website has been tested in Internet Explorer and several formatting issues fixed
  • The Player spotlight on Onix and Celtico has been corrected (originally flipped)
  • The Rules of Conduct have been updated to their current version.

It seems we'll actually have a reason to go to the official site now other than for the download. Now if only they added an RSS feed ;)

Wedding Reception Set for Sunday, July 29

Remember those wedding bells? Remember how there was no cake?!? Oi! What's a wedding without the big cake anyway? Well, Lotor and Anne will make it up to us.

FujiQ posted in on the Ashen Empires Website:
King Lotor and Queen Anne would like to extend their gratitude to those who attended their wedding in June. The royal newlyweds would also like to thank you in person at their reception, which will be held on Sunday, July 29 at Party Island. Party island is accessible from the portal inside the northern most central chamber in Lotor's Summer Palace. The GMs of Ashen Empires will also be running various events leading up to the reception.

Server times for the reception are as follows:
Legends: 1pm CDT / 6pm UTC
Heroes: 3pm CDT / 8pm UTC

More time conversions can be found here.


Let the celebrations commence!

July 20, 2007

15 Tokens and What do ya Get?

Lara Orcsplitter has (attempted to) open a discussion about the new Pay to play dungeon we got in this update. Of course, this has proved to be a very hot topic among the players. Some people see it as a ploy by IWG to get the players to pay more money while others see it as another option to enjoy the game for literally less than a dollar.

All this discussion seems to have stirred the attention of at least one IWG official, though. So here's some official words from FujiQ regarding the decision.

FujiQ posted in broken finger with no flames:
Hey Everyone,

First, thanks for posting, Lara. This is an important topic that concerns everyone. I'm sorry I didn't get to this earlier. This matter is extremely important to us. As with any business, yes, we are trying to make money. But we also care about this game and our players. The developers whose names are sometimes cursed on this forum literally broke their wallets trying to save this game so more people could enjoy it. That has been the goal from the beginning. Expect to see the subscription cost coming down slowly but surely.

We by no means wish to roll over our players with sneaky pyschological tricks, but please realize that AE is a difficult sell. It's a fun game, our players know this, but in this world graphics (and a huge marketing budget) are very helpful in getting the marketer's foot through that first door. Of course, the game graphics has its own charm, but do you see where I'm going with this?

I know (very painfully even) that the recent dungeon has sparked some debate about the current system. We're piloting new waters with this type of pricing strategy so the feedback we've been receiving from all of you has been taken into consideration. We promise to work through these issues if you promise to be a little patient with us. And please be patient with each other. :) As always, thank you.

Sincerely,

FujiQ
Marketing Manager
on behalf of the IWG staff

Keep in mind some of the important aspects of this post:

1) IWG wants to lower the cost of the subscription fee.
2) IWG is experimenting with what pricing models will best accomplish #1.
3) AE isn't an easy sell, thanks to issues like Graphics and a smaller marketing budget.

When you think about the 75 cents you're going to spend to check out the new dungeon, remember that you're not obligated to spend it. It's an option. And apparently it's one worth trying out.

July 19, 2007

Statistics Page is Back!

This has been a long time coming. Many people have been asking for the statistics pages for a long time. Finally, those people have an answer. And it's in the form of statistickey goodness.

FujiQ posted in Statistics Page:

The stats pages are live again! You can check them out here. Thank GM Siyone when you get the chance for working so hard on this for everyone.

I have been asked several times if we are going to put the stats back on your account home page. We have been considering fixing that as well, but no decision has been made yet.

You might notice that on the web site stats is only linked from the index/home page. This is because when I updated the site I had to put the complete header/footer files on each page. However, Zarq just taught me what a master page is so now I get to go back and fix that on every page! But I haven't done that yet so in the meantime bookmark and remember to go back to index to find stats. Sorry for the inconvenience, I hope to have that fixed within the next few days.


One thing I noticed right off is that this statistics page combines what used to be two separate pages. Originally, quests and character rankings were on one page and skill rankings were on another. Putting it all on one page is a nice touch. Also I noticed that they're using GET strings in the URL. Can anyone say "Bookmark" ? ;)

July 18, 2007

Another Patch Scheduled for Thursday

I have to apologize for the lack of updates here. There's been a lot going on during the update process and I've managed to miss most of it. I'll spend some time later on (probably this weekend) compiling what's come out of IWG.

For now, it seems that due to continued issues with the current update (and if you've been away like me, a visit to the forums will definitely enlighten) the servers need a quick patch to resolve a few bugs.

FujiQ posted in Patch Tomorrow:
Hi Everyone,

Tomorrow morning at 10:00am CST (4:00pm GMT) we are taking the servers down to do a patch. We estimate that it will be a quick patch. This should tidy up some of the bugs from the update. In the mean time, you can add AE on MySpace and Facebook or check out the new website!


After a Tuesday update that went all day, I can only imagine what the response will be Thursday morning. Let's hope this update does go up as planned and we can all get back to having fun.

July 16, 2007

Dev Said talks with OneEye and Gets Details about the Update

I managed to get an interview with OneEye about today's update. Honestly, this is my first interview with a Game Developer and I tried my best to ask questions that both you and I wanted to know the answers to. Personally, I don't think they turned out too bad :) Though if I do get another chance to talk with OneEye, I might try and get a little more insight into what goes on in the brain of a Mono-optic Game Designer ;)

Don't worry, though. DevSaid does not disappoint. With all the rumors and the hype surrounding the update, I focused on what you guys wanted to know more about--what's in the update?!? I managed to find out some info about why the delay in the update as well as what new content to expect. Masks, a party island for Dev Q&A, and even some info about where some of the new items may come from. By all means, read on! You know you're curious ;)

DevSaid (DS): Thank you, OneEye, for taking the time to sit down and answer some of our questions. Let's start with the most obvious question. You said that you were ready to release the update just before your vacation. However, the decision was made to delay it since you didn't want any bugs from your additions to hurt the game while you were gone. Now that you're back, we were kept waiting for just a little while longer. Why the additional time?

OneEye (OE): There were several things that we wanted to further test and we had to schedule the update around some other things we have going on around here.

DS: In our last update about the update, we were told we could expect new quests, new monsters, more taskmasters, lots of new items, and even some new book quests like the rock trolls near josody one. Were there more things that you've added since then for this update?

OE: We've made a new Party Island accessible all the time from Lotor's Summer Palace, increased the party size to 20 and of course did lots of work tracking down the server lag issue. Player stat and ranking pages were also revamped and should be deployed shortly after the update.

Party Island will be used for several upcoming events, including an in-game Developer Question and Answer session.

DS: What about those new quests? Any hints about those that you might want to share? Quest-specific goodies, for instance?

OE: As always, I'll say that you'll just have to go out and explore :) . I will say that as well as adding new quests we've also fixed several issues with older quests that may have been blocking players from finishing them. If you were stuck on a certain quest, go back and try it again.

DS: In a recent post, you've said that you've been able to track the lag and server stability down to an issue in the memory garbage collection.

How has the progress on that fix been? What kind of improvement to the lag can we expect?

OE: We've done a lot of work to track down where the server is doing the garbage collection. For those who don't know this is the process of a program cleaning up memory. With a 'managed' language, the developers don't fully control when this happens, so the clean-up can happen at inopportune or non-appropriate times. The work we did controls when the collection, making the server much smarter.

DS: The token special during June was a nice and unexpected touch. Will there be more specials that we can look forward to?

OE: Sure, we are always looking to provide more bang for the buck. We talk all the time about how to reduce the average users cost to play the game. I hope we can make an announcement regarding our long term plans in the very near future.

DS: You mentioned that we could expect some monster masks to be available in the store. Besides the masks, are there other things that will be added to the store this time around? What about in the near future?

OE: Right now there are 4 monster packs, the basic pack, the deluxe pack, the avatar pack and the Dragon pack. Each mask has really cool creatures the player can polymorph into. The deluxe for example has an Ettin, a Horned Devil, an Ogre, a Rock Troll, an Eye of Valekar a Giant Skeleton, a Demon and a Storm Giant. Cool Stuff.

In the future I'm sure we will have more fun items, for example, I'm pretty sure we will do some more holiday themed house packs - Halloween and Christmas are right around the corner!

DS: A few players have been concerned about the end-game content. Will this update bring more content to those high levelers still looking for a challenge?

OE: Yes - there are also 157 new items in this update, many aimed at the high level players. Dragon drops for example have been enhanced with many of these newer items.

DS: What about low to mid level players? What things can they look forward to in this update?

OE: There are several new quests and item that target the mid-level player as well.

DS: The Warden Mage armor set and the Ancient Sword of Agon are two of the most powerful and contraversial possessions players can get in the game nowadays. Since they have been introduced, there's been many threads and many posts about how they impact gameplay. How do you think these items fit in the overall balance? Do they need to be adjusted or are they just right?

OE: Both the Warden and ASoA have been adjusted slightly with this update. This adjustment brings them more into line with their difficulty to be acquired.

DS: Pvp has always been a hot button issue concerning updates. Are you satisified with the pvp game? Are there things that you may want to change to the way Pvp works in the future?

OE: A PvP battle always has a winner and a loser. The loser is never going to be happy with the situation - so you are starting from the standpoint of 50% of the people involved in PvP being unhappy. I think that players are as balanced as they have ever been, but I also think there is room for improvement. We may have a few things up are sleeves to make PvP even more fun and exciting in the near future.

DS: How's Mukarramma? We haven't seem him lately.

OE: Check him after the update. Good luck in trying to beat him :) .

July 15, 2007

Remember, it's just an Update.

It's been a month and a half since the update was supposed to be released. All the delay has seemed to kick up new hopes and new possibilities. But remember--it's just an update. A few bug fixes and a few new things to play around with. But no new landmasses, towns, etc. OneEye clarifies:

OneEye posted in woooot update is ere!:
We concentrated more on bug fixes and lag fixing. This isn't an expansion, just a game update. There are over 150 fixes right now - im hoping to close a few more tomorrow.

150 bug fixes and everyone still has their favorites. Looking forward to the build notes. :)

Ashen Empires Developments to be phased out.

Looks like the original AE blog is going the way of Ol' Yeller. With the changes in the AE website, it looks like the aim is to put all the news and other bloggable bits right on the homepage.

FujiQ posted in woooot update is ere!:
Once the website kinks have been worked out, which should be soon, we'll be posting all announcements on the website/forums and will be no longer using the AE Dev blog.

One less place to look for info makes it easier to compile exactly where the new information is all coming from. Though I think it would be nice if the DEVs had a place where they could post stuff like "Y'know, I worked on this for the past week and it still pisses me off."

July 14, 2007

Lots of stuff planned for July

According to the newsletter, we've got quite a few things to look forward to this month. Besides the update, there's also the continued event with Lotor's Wedding (for you RP fans) and some new masks in the store (which we've covered in a previous article). But here's what really caught my eye:

Posted in the July 2007 Newsletter
Developer Q&A
Want to get some one on one time with One Eye? Have a burning question for Burningspear? Wait no more! We want to give you the chance to meet the Devs in game and ask them some questions during a special Dev Q&A session to be held in Lotor’s Summer Palace. Server times will be announced on the AE Website.


Looking forward to that one. It reminds me of the old House of Commons chats. Except this time, it will be done in game. I'm not sure this is a good idea, though. At least on IRC, you can mute allow only certain people to talk. Can you imagine how many mutes they're going to have to do in game?

Update goes live on Monday!

The long wait is almost over! Just a couple more days now.

FujiQ posted in Update:
It is my pleasure to announce that the much anticipated update is almost here! On Monday at 10:00am CST / 6:00pm GMT, the servers will be down anywhere from 2-6 hours while we make the update live. More information to posted soon from OE about what's new and what's been fixed.

Diamond accounts starting to appear.

It's been about four (or five, depending on where you started counting) months since the update that brought our subscription changes. Since then, we've seen a host of people with bronze, silver, and gold pips beside their names. Now the first Diamond subscribers are starting to appear.

OneEye posted in IMPORTANT: Ashen Empires Service Changes (UPDATED):
What are the subscription levels?
Ashen Empires accounts will be separated into four levels. All levels will be represented by an in-game icon next to a player's name.
  • Gold - A gold icon indicates a player with a current active Ashen Empires account with 30 or more consecutive days paid.

  • Silver - A silver icon indicates a player who has an active account, but has paid for a period of less than one consecutive month.

  • Diamond - Player has been a subscriber (at gold or silver level) for 6 continuous months. Rock on!

  • Bronze - A Bronze icon indicates a player who does not have an active paid account (Silver or Gold). Bronze players may explore the entire world, including the 2 expansion areas (if they have those expansions active on their account).

    Bronze player do have some limitations once they leave Valinor. Bronze players will be limited in experience they can earn per day and items they can loot and craft. Bronze players will not be able to trade or party with other players and they will not be allowed to engage in player vs player (PvP) combat (unless they are attacked).


Maybe the Diamonds are showing up a couple of months early, but it's nice to see which players are truly the loyal die-hards. And now they've got the pips to prove it.

Read more about it on the forum topic Yus ! I have my diamond now :D

July 10, 2007

Picture Interlude

Wonder what all OneEye saw while he was on vacation? Well, we get lucky. There's a post over on the official AE blog with a link to the Europe trip through the eyes of a mono-optic. :)

OneEye posted on Ashen Empires Developments:
Here are some shots from my recent trip to Holland, Germany, Czech Republic and Austria. I'm working on labeling them.

The Link

Go check em out. It's a nice break from the daily grind. And for those of us who have never been to Europe, it's a good start for vacation planners.

July 08, 2007

Bug Reporting the Right Way

Apparently, there's a few issues regarding players and their ability to report bugs. :D Well, it really should be no surprise. :p After all, it is OUR community after all. But in true AE fashion, someone who works with bugs all day came forth to help us in figuring out just what the AE bug report and resolution process is like from the DEV side:

GM Timaeus posted in Bug reporting:
This is a thread to give a kind of guideline on bug reporting. I've been receiving some annoying reports about the same bug from the same people, so i thought I'd make a thread explaining a few things.
  1. Always report new bugs that you find.
  2. Never tell your friends to report the same bug. that will NOT make the fix any faster.
  3. Do NOT report the same bug more than once.
  4. If you're not sure if something is a bug or not, feel free to post about it on the bugs forum or let me know.
  5. Don't leave the body of the bug report empty. Even if the subject line explains the bug fully, write something in the body of the report. You can even copy/paste the subject line but leaving it blank can make searching for some bugs harder than it should be.
  6. Try to make a subject line that is as descriptive as possible. Things like "construction in bugged" or "the TM is not working" are really vague.
  7. Do not report multiple bugs in the same report. Different bugs get assigned to different DEVs and get different priorities. Reporting more than 1 bug in one report makes things harder and may result in the bug taking longer to be fixed. Of course, related bugs could, at times, be combined into one report. For example not being able to plant rose and cherry seeds don't require 2 reports but things like "I can't plant rose seeds. And btw, I crash when i try to heal" is no good.
  8. Personal char/account problems should be reported to support via email.
This is just a small explanation on how bug fixing works. Hopefully it'll help some players when reporting bugs.

Player reports a bug. The bug goes into the database. A DEV gets assigned to this bug. Once fixed, the bug is marked as fixed and waits for the update to actually be fixed on the live servers (unless it's one that could be hotfixed).

I wanted to give this brief explanation due to the numerous "I reported this bug 3 times now!!!" reports. Most bugs only get fixed when the update is released. It doesn't matter if you reported the bug 2 or 3 times or if it's been 1 or 2 months (assuming there has been no updates in these 2 months). Please follow the following procedure when reporting a bug:

1- Send bug report
2- Wait for update
3- Check if the bug you reported is under the list of fixed bugs.
4- If it is in the fixed list and the bug is still not fixed, send in another report (preferably with the bug # that is shown in the fixed bugs list).
5- Wait for the next update.

Most importantly, do NOT send multiple reports about the bug during the waiting period before the update is released.

I'm making this topic sticky for a while so everyone can see it. I'm also leaving it open for discussion if anyone has any questions or concerns.

Staying on topic here, Siyone later posted a response in another thread regarding bug reports. In this one, Siyone's responding to Lara Orcsplitter's complaint about disappearing items:

GM Siyone posted in two things that sux:
quote:
Originally posted by Lara Orcsplitter

1. YET AGAIN i move something from BP to crate in bank and it vanishes. This tiem it was 550 iron ingots. Whats the point of gathering resources when all your time and work is wiped out because of badly game written code. Sort this bug out once and for all ffs. ATM theres a not-to-insignificant chance that something vanishes when you move it, which is stupid stupid stupid (and yes i checked all the container in the bank, relogged etc etc etc)

*edit* 5 mins after posting , Black Dragon has a stack of pie vanish in the same way. You gonna DO something about this IWG, or just ignore it ?



The problem with this report is that several times a day, many people move things from their backpack to a crate in the bank and the item does not vanish. Testing this just now showed me that I could move an item into and out of a bank crate from my backpack, backpack containers, and other bank crates. So as it stands from these details alone, I can't reproduce the bug. That's not to say that this doesn't happen. It just means that there are circumstances that you and your friend are having that I'm not.

When the devs get a bug like this where they only have a symptom and not the full diagnosis, there's only so much that they can do to "fix" the bug. Some people may remember that the April 5th patch helped a little. Several new checks were introduced to help keep the items from disappearing. But these were based on the same type of report we have here. And while these checks may not have completely eliminated the problem, they do help to prevent it in some cases.

What we need is a clearer understanding of what's going on when an item disappears. You need to include other details. Did you experience a pause in play while the transfer was occurring? Were you dragging an item on top of a container or directly into a slot in the container? Was the container open? What slot in your backpack were you dragging from? Did you have a separate stack of these items somewhere else in your bank? All of these may be factors in determining the cause of this bug.

Remember. The devil is in the details. And we need you to be as detailed as possible when reporting a bug.

So there we have it--two GMs on the same subject. That's rare in itself, don't ya think? But all in all, if we want the bugs to get fixed we need to do more than just complain about the issues. We need to go about reporting bugs the right way. If we do good reporting, then we've done our part. We can only wait for the DEVs to do their's. After all, they're the ones programming, not us.

Answer to the Lag Question

I've been out of it a couple days--not the best thing to be when a DEV comes back from vacation. They usually want to talk about stuff :)

For instance, OneEye did have an answer to what the current culprit to our lag is all about. He was responding to Dark Master, who thought it may be the connection. Well, it's not.

OneEye posted in Just to clear this up:
good guess, but wrong.

the current server lag is happening due to an coding issue called 'garbage collection'. If you want to read a bit about what that means this is a good place to start, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garbage_collection_(computer_science).

The next update should see a major improvement/elimination of this phenomenon.


So it's not something dealing with the connection (although, we probably shouldn't say that as a definitive "it's not"....it very well could be just one of many issues). Chances are that this will bring more discussion about how the server handles memory (i.e. mobs, bank space, etc.). But for those who love DEV details, this is definitely going to be a talking point.

July 04, 2007

The Vacation's Over

OneEye's back from vacation. Just in time to watch the fireworks in Austin (or wherever's close to his home). And he announces in so few words just as much:

OneEye posted in yay - I'm back:
Good to be home...

I kid you not. That's all he says (for now). Fanfare? I guess we'll have to wait for the update.

July 03, 2007

Yes, we'll even blog that.

I had a bit of hesitation before posting this. But seeing as it's in the Official announcements...and because I'm a little curious how often this will happen...I figured I'd blog this too. So yeah...database maintenance.

FujiQ posted in Database Maintenance:
Hi Everyone,

We had to do some database maintenance this morning, but it took longer than expected. The servers are back up and running now. Sorry for not announcing this earlier and for any inconvenience it may have caused you.

Hope you had a nice break from AE in the mean time :)

Sincerely,

FujiQ
Marketing Manager

July 02, 2007

It'll take less than 5 minutes.

FujiQ's starting to show a little of her marketing colors by asking the players to participate in a small survey.

FujiQ posted in 5 minute survey:
Hi Everyone!

I'd like to invite you to participate in a short marketing survey. The survey will take only a few minutes but will be extremely helpful.


Click here
to take the survey, and be sure to pass it along to your AE friends!

It doesn't take too long to complete. It's completely anonymous and it's only 5 questions.