[AC] Weekly Update 9/25/06

[Ziv]

[turbine]

http://forums.ac.turbinegames.com/showt ... hp?t=31591

Good afternoon and welcome to the September 25th edition of the AC weekly update.

This week the team continues to work on things for the October event. This is always one of our favorite times of the year, getting to work on things for the festival season. Some of the most creative things we have done came from the festival events. Not to mention some the fun had at the creative meetings throwing out the ideas. Overall the way things look right now, everyone should enjoy this year just as much as years past, if not more.

While I have your attention I would like to address why I haven’t been posting as much lately. The last few weeks have been really busy for me and everyone on the team. Along with making sure that the monthly updates get out on time, we have been doing alot of work getting things set for our ad campaign. Between getting the assets together and working out all the contracts and building the online ads, things have been on the busy side. Not to mention that we are still working on giving the website a facelift in the not so distant future. I am not trying to use any of these things as an excuse for not posting as much, since it is my job to keep everyone informed as much as possible as to what is going on. I just wanted to let everyone know that while I have not been posting as much, I am still reading every post on the forums and every PM sent to me.

So on that note, I am going to use the rest of this update to answer a couple of questions.

Will we ever see a “Cast on Strike” imbue?
Right now there are no plans to add this as a player imbue. As always this can change in the future as we move forward, but for now it is not in the foreseeable future.

Can we have a new PvP server?
This is a question that seems to pop up every couple of months. We have no plans to open another server at this time. Our goals right now are to focus on the worlds we have already. The amount of time and resources it would take to start another world would severely take away from the normal flow of things on the worlds we have now. That is not to say this will never happen, but right now we are more focused on what we have already.

What is the deal with the preorder gem?
So this has been one of the more debated topics on the forums over the last few months. Many possible solutions have come to us through some heated discussions here on the forums. As of today while I am writing this we have not yet made a decision on this issue. Of the things that have been suggested to us there are a few that stand out. Make an augmentation for an 8% health bonus. Not quite as good as the 10% but good enough that the balance issue is gone, plus players who did not preorder would have to give up some XP to get it. The 8% would not be stackable with the preorder gem. Another solution suggested was to sell the preorder gem to players who wanted to buy it for a nominal fee online. Again, most preorder folks did not have to buy them so they got something for free while these people need to pay for it. Yet another suggestion was just make the gem not work in PvP or when you are red. This one is quite frankly not possible right now, and not fair. Players should not be punished just because they choose to take part in PvP or play on Darktide. As you can see this is not an easy decision for us.

There were just a couple of the options that have been laid out before us, there were many more that have been sent to us since this issue came up. This is not an easy choice for us to make, but it is something we are going to have to make a decision about. Let me be clear that the above examples are not necessarily the ones we are going to choose from but rather just the first couple of examples I looked at on my list. When the time comes that we have made a final decision we will let everyone know.


That’s about it for this week. Everyone have a great day and see you all in Dereth!
__________________
Andy "Frelorn" Cataldo
AC Community Relations
Turbine, Inc