Patch Notes are Here!

The update's here. And that means a list of things that were changed. Here's what's new in the world of Ashen Empires.

OneEye posted in 10/25 Patch Notes:

New Store Items
-Halloween Pack. A mask pack to turn you into your favorite halloween monsters. Halloween themed house items.

-Wedding Set. Wedding themed armor and clothing.

-Thanksgiving Set. A mask pack to turn you into a turkey, indian and pilgrim. Thanksgiving themed clothing items.

-Advanced Skill Reset. Reset all skills from level 106+.

Features
-Low/mid dungeon. Dalvon Mine has been taken over by some pesky kobolds.
-Ryonkah has made a comeback
-Tailoring taskmaster is functional.
-Memorial to former TKO-artist Brian Smith added.
-One time city alignment reset
-Eggs are now purchasable in some stores
-Dairy Cow added

Bugs and Changes
-Several spawns adjusted, including many lower level SoC spawns
-Treasure drop tables adjusted for very high end creatures
-Several armor/weapons adjusted to be more inline with their level range.

Click on the link above to get the list of bug fixes. Happy hunting :)

Update for 10/25

It's about time we had another update. OneEye's announced it, so it's officially expected now.

OneEye posted in Servers down for update 10/25:

The servers (H, L and Dransik) will be down for an update on Thursday, October 25th at 10am CST.

Things we're looking forward to include:

• Eggs back in stores! [Source]
  

• Woodrow (Problems with Bats scroll quest) will move from Lotor's Castle to Lotor's Summer Palace. [Source]

• The ability to change your faction patron via Lotor's Steward (also in Lotor's Summer Palace) [Source]

• The Wurm spawn around the spawngate in Dragons has been decreased. Should make it easier to survive at that spawngate. [Source]

And, of course, a list of bug fixes. Don't forget the Halloween Event as well.

10/11 Hotfix

A small hotfix to address some small bugs. Even one that had to deal with a particular, mischievous GM

OneEye posted in 10/11 Hotfix:

-Added Runecrafting Taskmaster
-Tweaked Leatherworking Taskmaster values
-Fixed several Shadow Quest issues
-Fixed several spelling errors
-Fixed Body Spells so Rauric can't crash the server again :)

You can read about how Rauric crashed the server in this thread.

Got any reporting talent?

Looks like there's another opening for reporters. If you like to write for Ashen Empires, this is your chance to put your pen where your virtual parchment is.

FujiQ posted in AE Reporter Opening:

IWG will begin accepting applications to fill one spot on the AE Reporter team. To be considered, you must be an active and vocal community member with no past violations on your record. You also must be willing and able to write at least two articles a month, at a minimum of 250 words each, about various community and game events.

If you are chosen to become a reporter, you will receive a complimentary subscription. Your posts will appear on the AE Website as well.

Those interested in applying should send a sample piece of at least 250 words to support@ashenempires.com with the subject "AE Reporter Submission." Please tell us your player name in the same email. You may send plain text or an attached word document.

Good luck

Halloween Event set for October 30/31!

It's that time of year again. In a growing tradition, IWG will be holding it's 3rd annual Halloween event. This year, with more candy!

FujiQ posted in Halloween Event 2007:

Ready your weapons and clear your calendars, my friends, because this Halloween IWG invites you to a day of dungeon crawling, candy collecting, prize winning madness. It's going down at the Halloween dungeon which opens only once a year. New candy and new candy holders will be introduced to commemorate the 2007 event.

The Halloween dungeon, which is located in King Lotor's castle (not to be confused with Lotor's Summer Palace), will open twice on each server:

Tuesday the 30th
Legends: 10am-12pm CST, 3pm-5pm UTC
Heroes: 5pm-7pm CST, 10pm-12am UTC

Wednesday the 31st
Heroes: 10am-12pm CST, 3pm-5pm UTC
Legends: 5pm-7pm CST, 10pm-12am UTC

For more time conversions, you can use this website.

Hoping they'll do one on a Saturday...See you there! :)

No Server Downtime After All!

Remember that downtime we were supposed to have?

Burning Spear posted in No Server Downtime 10/4/2007:

We managed to update everything without having to bring down the game servers.

Assuming we don't discover a problem in the next hour or so there should be no down time.

Gotta love the new hotfix system :)

Look out for Thursday Downtime!! :(

One has to wonder what the impact of this downtime will be.

OneEye posted in System Downtime 10/4/2007:

Ashen Empires and Dransik will be down starting at:

09:00:00 Thursday October 4, 2007 CST / 14:00:00 Thursday October 4, 2007 GMT

This downtime is for routine maintenance. Stay tuned to the forums during the downtime for periodic updates on when the servers will be back and available.

Maybe while the servers are down, they'll give us some details on what they've been working on. I'm especially interested to find out if they have another Halloween event planned and what it might entail. :)

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

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.

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

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.

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! :)

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.

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" ? ;)

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.

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.

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

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.

Get them while supplies last!

A while back, in myReporters Announced in the First Newsletter post, we got a little surprise. A Summer bonus was announced. Well, all good things must come to an end, eventually :)

FujiQ posted in End of June:

The end of June is drawing near which means the token special is about to expire! Take advantage of this deal before Sunday, July 1st to get the 10% token bonus on all token purchases made through the Iron Will Games website.

Our international players will want to plan accordingly for the difference in time zones. IWG will be using CDT time. To calculate the time for your specific time zone, visit this website.

Now's a good time to stock up on tokens. You might as well get some while the getting's good.