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.

The Deal With Faction Quests

Catherine Firemane is a new member of our community that's stirring up some controversy with his (relatively) well thought out responses and participation on the forums. He recently asked a question and raised some issues with the LK/CK and Patron quests, focusing on why they were so different. OneEye responded to these issues.

OneEye posted in Task Masters:

Catherine, 2 and 3 of your points are as designed. Point 3 for example allows for lower levels to complete these quests with the same effort as higher levels and get rewarded with nice items. Most of the very early faction quest items are in fact intended for lower levels.

You are new so you don't know that AE players gravitate onto certain pet issues while ignoring all of the things that have been added or fixed. There were no taskmasters at all until earlier this year for example.

That certainly explains why the early items seem so powerless and perhaps why there are so few people actively taking a part in these quests. I think The Freshest Diva, though, sums up this latter point well, though:

The Freshest Diva said in Patron / LK quests - fix please:

You can't cancel patrons at all, even if you get something that is impossible, and you can and will.

For those of you saying it should be this impossible, have you seen the set? It's for collectors. It's not for use. Just a bunch of decorational pieces to wear in pride of your home city, perhaps in parades or events. It's not as if it will give your character any increase of power or wealth whatsoever.

Interesting how such a thing is one of the hardest things in the game to obtain.

It'd be nice if these items were a little better for the effort it takes to acquire them all. I'm up to something like 160 quests done and I'm only up to the +5orb helmet.

Help IWG Track Down the "Mage Casting" Bug

As a mage, I've never personally experienced this bug. But it seems that several players have and constantly hold the DEVs responsible. The problem has (always) been that the DEVs cannot reproduce the bug, so it's incredibly difficult to fix.

If you've got a sure-fire way to crash your client, it's best to try and find a way to reproduce it and then post about it. These are the best ways of getting a bug fixed; not just for Ashen Empires but ANY program.

So, if you think you've got the skillz that thrillz, post your steps in $ Constant Reminders $. It looks like OneEye's keeping an eye on it. Now's your chance to be heard.

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.

Keep Your Eyes Open for Pvp

Just a small nugget of info. In a discussion about possible Pvp tournaments, OneEye had this to say:

OneEye posted in Supported Ongoing PvP Tournament:

There is something new coming for PvP very soon (for both servers)

The Taskmasters Dilemna

It's been almost a year since the taskmasters were first introduced to Ashen Empires. At first, they were met with some resistance as some people believed that this would mean more people doing crafts and less people providing the "quality experiences" that fewer tradeskillers meant to the community. Now it seems that everyone's at least had some experience with the taskmasters.

The problem, however, is that the taskmasters still aren't complete. Sure, there are several major skills covered. However, there remain a few that aren't. And some seem downright too demanding.

OneEye commented on the taskmaster design.

OneEye posted in Task Masters:

I've learned my lesson - never put anything in the game as a 'to be done later' feature.

-the reason it was done this way is I am able to hotfix the script behind NPCs who are alredy in the world, but adding an NPC requires a 'take down the server' update.

The impression I'm getting from this is that, at the very least, getting the NPC's in was a goal. As long as the NPC's were already in the world, OneEye could add the logic while the server was running and then simply announce that the taskmasters were ready. The alternative would have been that we would have had to wait for an update to see a new taskmaster or two.

So you have to ask yourself, which method would you have preferred? I can see the benefit of both.

Eggs are on their way back to stores.

A long time ago, you used to be able to buy eggs from stores. This made cake and pie making a lot easier, since clicking on chickens and only getting one egg at a time was...well....not as egg-siting as it sounded ;) But it seems we're due for some love in the next full update.

OneEye posted in Eggs in provision shops:

added chicken eggs to provisioner shops for next full update.

This might spell doom for those who enjoy clicking on chickens and selling quantities of eggs. But this, in turn, might mean more people getting into mixing again. And I'm all for not trying to find and trap chickens ;)

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. :)

A Hotfix for the BFD!!

Another hotfix with glorious hotfix goodies...

OneEye posted in 9/17 Hotfix:

-Dungeon logout timer fixed
-2nd confirmation option added when rebuilding your house from a deed
-Increased Broken Finger Lever Boss chance.

I have no idea what the "dungeon logout timer" is. But points two and three are good news.

Beware of Deeds (bltn edition)

Tempester started a sort of "help the homeless" topic when Dell accidentally had his house rebuilt when he clicked on a deed in the middle of his home.

By the way, if you have a house and you click on a blueprint, you're asked if you want to rebuild the house. If you click yes, you lose everything in the home and you start back at an empty plot. This just goes to show you that you need to be very careful and read before you click.

There was some confusion over whether this was a bug or a feature. OneEye did comment (and further down in the thread) gave us some input on a solution to keep this from happening again.

OneEye posted in Donations for Housing Fund:

The clicking deed to rebuild house was a feature that users asked for awhile back. It says something like "are you sure you wish to destroy your house?"

For a future update I have added a "are you really sure you wish to destroy your house?" 2nd step.

I'm not sure how this could be considered a bug.

---

Later on...

i tested it the other day when i saw the report and then looked at the code. Before this change to the deeds, you would get a message that said "can't use deed here". A bug was put in that when using the deed it would not show that message but give you the prompt to rebuild instead. It seemed like a reasonable request as most people do read the warning messages when they come up - but like I said, I've added a double warn message for a future patch.

Whether or not this extra message will actually stop people from accidentally bulldozing their homestead remains to be seen. Personally, I wouldn't mind a timer between the time when you schedule your house for demolition and when the house is actually demolished. I mean, it would be pretty hard to make a mistake if you have time to correct it, right?

What's the deal with "bltn edition", Nwellyn?

Oh, you noticed that, did you? "bltn" stands for "Better Late than Never"--meaning that I'm covering this a few days (or up to a week) after the fact. Sorry I couldn't get this posted sooner. Life has a habit of taking the time you've got and investing it in stuff you don't want to do. :p

Some interesting stuff about the Broken Finger Dungeon

Midnight started a thread not too long ago about how the bosses weren't spawning in the Broken Finger Dungeon. Well, it's not necessarily about how the bosses weren't spawning. It's more about how you're paying extra to get access to premium content and not receiving all the content. Naturally, this upsets those players who regularly go.

Both FujiQ and OneEye had some information on the matter. Quite a few players have asked that the timer count only when you are in the dungeon. FujiQ responded on that.

FujiQ posted in Broken Finger Dungeon: The Ingenious Scam? (Page 2)

We've been asked if the BF dungeon worked so that the 8 hours only counted for time spent in the dungeon but the way the game is architected keeps us from being able to do that.

Lara Orcsplitter responded to this and asked why a second NPC couldn't be added to stop the timer. Perhaps this can be looked into. But I keep thinking that people would still complain because they forgot to talk to this NPC.

A real shocker (at least to some people) came in the form of OneEye's input on the content there.

OneEye posted in Broken Finger Dungeon: The Ingenious Scam? (Page 3):

BF was designed as a 1 hour experience, if the dungeon was changed to a in-dungeon experience, the timer would be reduced accordingly.

So what we're really getting for 15 tokens is the ability to experience "everything" in approximately 8 opportunities. In reality, it's probably more along the lines of a little over 6 times. It's almost like getting 15 pulls at the nickel slots except the jackpot is some exclusive items.

Hotfix and a couple of bugs are fixed.

Proof that they're still alive in Austin comes in the form of a couple of quick bug fixes.

OneEye posted in 9/7/2007 Hotfix:

-Mukkarama portal bug fixed
-Lloyd Dogen quest bug fixed

Probably related to this thread.

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.

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

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?

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 :) .

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. :)

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.