February 2007 Letter to the Players

[Ziv]

[turbine]

http://ac.turbine.com/?page_id=513

Hello there and welcome to the February 2007 Letter to the Players. The people of Dereth have been diligent in their search for Asheron. A new fighting area has been discovered. Will anyone be able to discover the secrets of this new Colosseum?

The Colosseum.
This is pretty much what it sounds like. The Colosseum is a dungeon of sorts with repeatable content. The premise is very simple. Players will enter the Colosseum and fight their way through increasingly difficult stages. There is no timer on repeating, so players will be able to enter The Colosseum as often as they would like, as long as their initial 60 minute timer is up.

Players of any level will be able to participate, but The Colosseum is geared towards fellowships. In order to go through, you must be part of a fellowship. When players enter, they will be in a staging area which will be used by everyone. This is a great place to get your fellowships together, or to find a group to tag along with. Once in a fellowship, one person will need to purchase a ticket at a reasonable cost from a nearby NPC. That person will then give the ticket to the starter NPC who will lock the fellowship and let them know they can enter The Colosseum.

The initial download time upon entering is a bit longer than most places. The drop is not hot so players are safe upon entrance and should only have to go through this download once. Once you hand in your ticket, your fellowship will have 1 hour to finish the Arena from the time that they start. After this time is up they will all be teleported out of the arena and will be able to speak to the NPC to get their reward. The rewards will depend on how far the fellowship has made it in The Colosseum. If you die in the arena you will be able to re-enter through the first door and then go through all the doors that you have passed through, they will remain open and the creatures will remain dead in previous stages as long as you are within the 1 hour time limit allotted to your fellowship. We have made The Colosseum an area in the game where you will not drop death items, due to very high possibility of people not being able to recover their corpses.

There will be 5 branches of The Colosseum so 5 fellowships full of players may do The Colosseum every hour. Once a fellowship is inside a branch of The Colosseum, that branch is locked from letting other players in. In the coming months we have plans to further update The Colosseum with things such as Boss fights, which can be unlocked by completing various stages in The Colosseum. We have also made it possible for higher level players to skip the first few low levels if they so choose.


Squelch Panel
The Squelch Panel has been added to the game. Players will be able to locate the Squelch Panel on their social tab. In order to add a player to your squelch list, simply add the players name to the space provided in the panel and hit the Squelch Character button. If you want to squelch the account associated with that character, just hit the squelch account button after putting the character name in the space provided. The display will tell players if it is an account or character squelch.


Craft Buffing Pets
Craft Buffing Pets have been added to the game. These pets will provide buffs to Cooking, Alchemy, Fletching, and Lockpick. These buffs are stackable with all other similar spells.


Spell Words and Squelching
Players who have another player squelched will now be able to see that players spell words, even though they are squelched. If a player has filtered spellcasting, they will still not be able to see the spell words.


NPC Interactions
Once again the team has been hard at work trying to discover ways we can continue to improve the tech and functionality of Asheron's Call. One of the things that has been developed is the ability for NPC's to determine what a player has in their packs. For example, if Player A has 10 diamond powders in their pack and they talk to a certain NPC, that NPC will be able to see that and decide what message to send to Player A. This will give us the ability to start offering questing choices. So a player who has a particular item or items in their pack may get a different response then the player next to him who doesn't. While this may not seem overly exciting, it will give us the opportunity to do some things with player, NPC interactions that we had not been able to do in the past.

In concept
These are game changes that we are thinking about for upcoming events. We cannot guarantee when or even if these changes will be added to the game, as scheduling and priorities can change. These changes are in addition to the new quests, dungeons, and items we will be adding to the game. Each month we will be discussing one new in concept topic, in order to give you as much information about the item that we can.

One of the end game concepts we are looking at is an invasion mechanic that will bring interest and combat into some of the towns of Asheron's Call. Although we don't want to reveal the story reasons or culprits behind such an invasion, the encounter would be designed to not only provide players an opportunity to battle in certain town layouts but to engage in competitive content as well.

The central focal point behind the invasion is a rift that summons the invading creatures. So long as the rift exists the creatures will slowly spawn around the landscape. This makes the invaded town a dangerous place to be. More importantly to players is that the rift itself can be destabilized and destroyed. The person who finally destroys the rift gets a valuable reward.

In order to destroy the rift, the players must take something from the invading creatures. This item gives the rift power and enough of these can destabilize it. In order to destroy the rift the players must kill the creatures and gather some number of these items. The first person to gather enough of these items loots the rift and takes the reward. This destroys the rift and ends the invasion, at least until the invading force can once again muster the magical power to create another rift. All of these items are drop on death, and these items will fade after an hour so you have limited time to gather them.

On PvP servers, this mechanic creates a battlefield where the players must not only kill the invading force, but they must escape other players trying to kill them for their items. The battle will carry the players street to street, fighting off invading creatures and each other for the right to loot the rift. The encounter is meant to highlight street to street combat in the complex environment of the cities. On PvE servers the players must race to kill enough creatures to earn the right to destroy the rift and claim the reward. The players can choose to cooperate to end the invasion or to compete for these items by racing to kill the required number of creatures before anyone else. Since the items fade after one hour the players not only have a time limit in which to gather these items, but they cannot save up items for future invasions.

In order to maximize the chance that players can participate either solo or in groups, the rifts won't simply appear without warning. Each rift creates a tell tale energy signature in the town some time before it goes active. The rift appears and changes color as it becomes closer to being active. This allows players to gather friends and allies before the carnage begins.

As we create and test the scenario we will be looking at the specific numbers and tweaking the details of the mechanics to create the best experience possible. We will be looking at the difficulty to kill each creature, the chance it will drop an item, the number of items needed to loot and destroy the rift, the time the rift will take from first appearance to becoming active, and of course the all important "valuable items" found in the rift.

So there are just some of the things we have in store for Asheron's Call in February and beyond. Please remember that along with everything listed here, there are several new quests and exciting things going into the game for the February event.

[Kezz]

Und jetzt soll mal einer sagen Asherons Call stirbt...

Geile Ideen

[Ziv]

Jo, die Konzept Idee finde ich auch wieder Klasse ...