August 30, 2007

Another Expansion in the Works, and You Can Name It!

FujiQ let us in on some key information. It's been some time since we've heard any word about what's going on for AE.

FujiQ posted in What has IWG been up to?:
Hi Everyone,

A lot of questions have been raised lately and I'm here to answer some of them for you. First, just to keep you in the loop, we've been spending a considerable amount of time on an update for Dransik. It's coming along very well.

We've also been working on the next AE update which will be released after the Dransik update. More information will be forthcoming about that over time.

While I'm at it, I'd like to invite the community to help us out. You see, a few AE players mentioned something about the sea and boats...well, it seems that all that commotion got our attention over here at IWG. I'm very excited to announce that we've just started breaking ground on the next AE expansion. The details of the expansion are still being finalized. What's in it, you ask? Islands to discover, sea monsters to battle, underwater dungeons to explore, and more!

You know what this means? Wake up those sea legs because it's CONTEST TIME! Today we started the Expansion Naming Contest which you can access on this forum thread. All are invited to enter suggestions for the name of the next AE expansion. The winner will receive the expansion free of charge! Remember, it's a sea themed expansion.

You asked for it. You got it!

See you in game soon!

Sincerely,

FujiQ
Marketing Manager

So besides the update for Dransik, there's at least one more coming for Ashen Empires before work begins on the new expansion. There have been quite a few people who have vehemently argued for the right to sea travel and now it looks like they're going to be able to do it. The only thing I remember about boats in AE is the old menu icon at the bottom of the screen that never worked. :p

August 20, 2007

Scammer Alert

Seems the guy behind the now infamous GC scams is at it again.

OneEye posted in selling/buying account posts:
There have been a rash of "im buying a 100+ level account!" posts. Please note, that the person posting this is a known scammer, both in game and out of game via credit card and paypal fraud. Do not fall victim to this scam.

Buying and selling accounts in general is not allowed. Accounts that can be proven to be bought or sold will be banned.


Folks, don't try and play this off like it's got nothing to do with you. Very likely, if not you then someone you know will fall for this. And they will likely get no money from it either. Be smart and don't sell your account.

August 13, 2007

Who says they don't listen? :p

So I come home today and see this little nugget on the Announcement forum:

OneEye posted in 8/13 Hotfix:
-There is now a 5 minute grace period from when you logout/are disconnected from the game before you are teleported out of the various higher-end dungeons.
-Alignment message should no longer be displayed if you have alignment lock enabled.


Seems like an ordinary hotfix, right? Well, here's the catch. A couple of people have been posting recently something along the lines of "the DEVs don't listen to the players" etc. etc. Well, the cool thing about this hotfix--both of these were suggestions by the players.

Telarin posted in Boss Campers:
They could put some kind of timer on it. If you log out, and right back in, as in a DC, you stay where you were. If you log out for more than 5 minutes, you get kicked out.

Mecia posted in Ummm, so are rep goes down for healing yourself?:
Also, I locked my rep at 10000, I killed a RT, my rep whent to 9998, why does my rep go down when Its locked, Also, I stayd at red aling with 998 rep when I healed MYSELF I whent to 10058..

Well, maybe not so much #2 :p But it is proof that they are paying attention to what we tell them.

August 11, 2007

Hotfix!

Just a couple of bugs fixed today. Haven't seen a hotfix in a while!

OneEye posted in 8/11 Hotfix:
-Alchemy bug where only a single item was created
-Proudblood Traitor should once again talk

August 07, 2007

The New Guy Finally has a Name

There's been talk from the DEVs regarding a new DEV. But they kept referring to him as "the new guy" or "him" or "he". Well, apparently he's been properly jumped in finally earned a name of himself!

FujiQ posted in Welcome Dev Alanzo!:
Hi Everyone,

Please give a warm welcome to our newest Developer, Alanzo Dragor. He is training up on Dransik right now and will be moving to Ashen Empires soon.


If you happened to read the Q&A, this must be the guy whose first "major" task will be to find out a way of doing Quest Logs without killing the 1000s that are already there. A hearty "Good Luck" to Alanzo :)

Got Hotmail?

If you use msn hotmail, then you have a problem (other than using MSN hotmail). According to the DEVs, hotmail's been bouncing support emails. So if you have an issue with support and you have a hotmail account, you'll never get a reply. FujiQ explains:

FujiQ posted in Attention Hotmail Users:
On behalf of the support team, I just want to remind everyone that we tend to discourage the use of Hotmail email accounts.

For one thing, Hotmail accounts are not very secure. Also, we recently discovered that our support emails to Hotmail have been bouncing because Microsoft has blocked our servers. If you use a hotmail account and haven't heard back from support on a problem, please try to email them again from a different address. Sorry for the inconvenience, but it doesn't look like there's much we can do about the Hotmail problem.

Thanks!


Just another good reason to switch to GMail.

August 03, 2007

So you say you just bought a 6 month subscription, eh?

I think everyone pretty much knew what kind of fallout to expect from the price reduction. Well, maybe not the exact type of fallout. But definitely we all knew someone was going to say something. Well, good news for those who did. IWG listened. And they've left a little sumthin sumthin for ya.

FujiQ posted in Price Reduction Gift:
Hi Everyone,

We evaluated the commentary and opinions stated on the forums this week about the price reduction. In the original announcement about the price reduction I said that we weren't going to reimburse tokens or money because, plain and simple, we can't. However, we feel that there are some loyal players who got the short end of the stick during that process.

Here's what we've decided to do. Players who purchased a 3 or 6 month subscription any time between July 1 and July 30 will receive a gift of appreciation from IWG that is equivalent to the difference between the respective old and new subscription prices. Those players will see the gift appear in their AE store. They may use it on whichever character they choose. Those who purchased a 1 month subscription have not been included in this compensation for technological reasons.

IWG always makes an effort to respond as best as we can to player opinions and suggestions. Thank you, as always, for your patronage. I hope to see you in game soon!

I wish I could get the same service from my Gas Station! :)

August 02, 2007

OneEye responds to some of the "tougher" questions.

Quite a few people thought that the DEVs were pulling a fast one by shying away from the tougher questions. So they started asking them in the forums. And they got some answers.

If you follow the forums pretty regularly, you'll get to know who the people are and what their prime concerns are. Leah, for example, usually talks about two major subjects: Hair and Quest Logs. Both of these questions have been answered before (and we've covered the answer to the hair question here). But this response went into some more (or oft forgotten) detail. There's even a bit about the concern of "Pay to access" dungeons.

OneEye posted in Meeting with devs on servers ....:
Hair - The paperdoll data we got from TKO when we bought the game was corrupted. There is no source art available. That means we have to re-create the paperdoll system from scratch to 'fix the hair'. The original system at TKO took 2-3 artists 2-3 months to get to the state it is at now (about 90% complete - this was never fully finished before TKO shut the Austin team down). That is alot of man months of work - something we haven't had the luxury of doing up until now - we have 1 artist.

It is something that is important to us however and we are constantly trying to come up with solutions - I personally don't like the look of any of the current paperdolls and would love to re-create it.

Quest Log - All quests are in script code - not in some kind of quest editor. Dransik/AE have had several different designers write quest code over the years - all of them without standards. There are literally 1000's (there are about 90,000 lines of script code in AE now) of quests now in the game. So, in order to create a quest log, all of those quests would have to be standardized in some way. Doing so is a giant undertaking and would more than likely break tons of current content.

Last week a new programmer started for us. We have him kind of training up on Dransik right now. When he moves over to AE, one of his first taks will be to try to figure out how to solve this problem.

Dungeon - over the last 6 months we have reduced the monthly cost of AE by 33% - from $8.95 a month to $6.00. In order to keep reducing the price we have to do some creative thing like the broken finger dungeon.

Reducing the price is important to us to bring more players to the game. We have made the game basically free for anyone to play for as long as they want with some 'premium' benefits.

BF is just a premium content feature. And lets face it, even with spending a full day of online time in this dungeon every month (3x.75) you are still spending less money per month than you were 6 months ago. AND - this dungeon isn't something that is required to enter. You can choose to go or not. Over time there will be other 'hot' areas which will make this dungeon less attractive - remember for example when VF was the place to be. Now it is rarely used. This is a cycle in all MMO adventure games.

OneEye also gave a response to another question about Pvp.

OneEye posted in Meeting with devs on servers ....:
changes were made to balance the 'classes' of the game to address PvP concerns. Changes were also made the the alignment system both on the overall alignment scale and how alignemnt was recovered.

The big change that small segment of the community wants is non-alignment based inventory drops. The people that want this are very vocal, but are a minority. This is an issue that will never make everyone happy and thus right now it is better to leave the system alone until some kind of compromise can be reached.

This and a couple of other responses on the thread made me think. Just how many people are satisfied with the PDD system as it is? And what changes, if any, would the "majority" agree to? Flat PDD rates? No PDD? PDD only when wanted?

August 01, 2007

Dev Q&A

AE's first "House of Commons" in game seemed to go off without many problems. People got to go to party island and meet the creators of the game.

Leah was kind enough to go through her chat logs and pull out the questions answered by the DEVs. She's posted it on the forums. Here's a sample:

Posted in Meeting with devs on servers ....:
(Shout) (*GM) Wintergreen: OE - Nith asks when will the tailoring, runcrafting, and Farming taskmaskets be functional?

(Shout) (*DEV) OneEye: they will come online with the next major update. I also have a cooking trainer inline as wel


Definitely worth a read if you're interested in what's going on with the game.