The Twins visit Paul and By: Tevatron and Lucifer's Prince of HG
Two brothers finaly get around to visiting one of AC's ...
Saturday, 12 May, 2007 - AC Vault News
This Week in Review (Issues 15 - 18)[ 1 Comment ] Print News | Category: News So this month's been a little slow on the AC front - with good reason, with LotRO going gold, our favourite producers have been just a little distracted of late! Well, now that it's out, we can expect more attention!
This edition summarises:
Turbine looking for more staff
May 2007 Calendar
The April Event
Also, we'd like to take this opportunity to remind you that AC Vault is interested in any AC related news you may have. If you have a special AC event or message, you can send it to us and your message could well be posted on our front page!
Hi there and welcome to this week’s edition of the weekly update.
This week we are continuing to investigate the rather frustrating issues that have been affecting some of the servers. As it stands right now we have still not been able to locate the cause of these problems. We are going to continue to investigate the issues until they are resolved. We appreciate your patience while we continue to troubleshoot the problems. We are still hopeful that we can get these issues resolved.
The team is working on getting all of the kinks and bugs out of the content for the May event. This is also the time when the balance is worked out for the quests and we begin looking at what will hopefully be the final version of things for the update.
Right now we have tentatively schedule patch day to be Tuesday, May 22nd, with the event being named Prodigal Sons. If there are any changes to the schedule, we will of course let everyone know as soon as possible.
The updates to the web tools I mentioned last week are going as planned and we should be able to use the new tools sometime next week. When that happens I will begin the massive project of cleaning up and archiving the main website. While this is occurring, you may notice some strange behavior from some pages on the website. We will be trying to keep the errors that appear to a minimum amount, but with this much information stored on the site, we are sure to have some strange things showing up or disappearing on us.
I know that the last couple of updates have been a little bit lighter in information than some folks would like however, right now our focus is on getting the new content completed and getting the server issues fixed. Once things return to some semblance of normality, we will then return to the more detail packed goodness that everyone likes to see.
That’s about it for now. Everyone have a great week, and see you all in Dereth!
__________________
Andy "Frelorn" Cataldo
AC Community Relations
Turbine, Inc
This week had some interesting discussions about the emergence of the "Death Macros" that have evidently become popular on Darktide. (Personally I cannot imagine why anyone would want to increase their death counts, I'm proud of not having died even 100 times on one of my higher level characters! To each his/her own!)
Also of note, this week's Weekly Update was pretty long, and filled with some really great information and tidbits.
Weekly Update 05/02/07[ Comment ] Print News | Category: News - Turbine Hi there and welcome to this week’s edition of the weekly update. We have a few things that need to be addressed, so let’s get right to it.
The issue of Colosseum keys keeps coming up, so I am going to be as clear as possible on this so we can finally lay this to rest. Our traditional policy on lost items is and has been that if you lose an item or do not get said item, we generally will not replace the item. There are exceptions in cases where we do not have a fix in place and it is easy for customer service to track. In this particular case I wanted to be a nice guy and replace what I felt was a valuable item, even though it goes against our longstanding policy. In hindsight this was not the best idea I have had in my time here as Community manager. One mistake I made was not being clear on who should and should not have their keys replaced, so I will do that now.
It was a pretty quiet week around the Turbine AC boards this week, but for a well understood and good reason. This week marked the official retail launch of Lord of the Rings Online, so I'm sure there were lots of parties to attend and lots of other cool stuff going on! Congratulations Turbine!
This week the team is busy getting the things they have designed implemented on to the test servers and making the paper versions of their quest ideas come to life. This is also the time when our QA staff begins the process of testing the new quests and giving feedback to the Devs.
We are continuing to investigate the problems that have been occurring on some of the worlds, which have been causing players to get timed out of the game or “stuck” in a state where they cannot log in to the game. On one of the more recent incidents we were able to get some rally good specific data, and the team is going through this data in hopes of finding out what may be causing these continuing issues. We are working very hard to find a solution to this problem, and will continue to do so until we have fixed whatever may be causing it. We would also like to take this chance to apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused players. We are taking this issue very, very seriously.
Finally, I was reading through the forums today and some interesting questions were brought up in a post by KronikJames. So, I am going to do my best to answer those questions here.
1. when ever we have an idea and post it here it would be nice to know if the idea is brought up in some Turbine meeting and what was said and if it is placed on the possible list or at least the good idea list.
With the entire team reading the forums, a good number of the things we discuss are based off of player ideas. While we may not always give direct credit to those folks, we always like to see the ideas that players come up with. We try to discuss these ideas as much as we can and we will continue to do so going forward.
2. when you guys/gals have a meeting it would be cool if we could watch and listen to it. just to see what a meeting is like for you. it would be like a Day in the Life of Frelorn or Django or whoever...
While in theory this may sound like a good idea, there are way too many things discussed in meeting that cannot be seen or heard by the public for many reasons, including us not wanting to give out company secrets. While I suppose we could change the meeting structure for something like this, doing that would kind of defeat the purpose. So in short, this is probably not going to happen.
3. how about a contest where the winner gets to come out and hang out at Turbine for the day at Turbine's Expense. it would be a behind the scenes look at Turbine from a players point of view.
I know in the old days of Turbine there were instances where something like this would happen. I can certainly inquire about doing something like this again as a contest reward of some sort. Getting it past our legal team could be the tricky part, but it does not hurt to ask.
4. how about double xp offers to get players to return. this would be where you send out an email to a bunch of players who are not subscribed and you tell them for the this weekend their acct is reactivated for free for and they get double xp for it as well. this might help people play agian and maybe reactivate. just a thought.
This one is easy. We have no plans for another double XP weekend anytime soon. We are however looking into getting some kind of welcome back type promotion together for former players. When I have more details about this I will post the information.
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
This week was a pretty quiet week at Turbine, due to the holiday, patch day, and the big storm system that went through the NE this week. But the Devs did answer some pretty interesting questions this week despite all of that!
This week saw a lot of different items on the forums, including information regarding upcoming changes to the way the Event news will be done, as well as the Producer's Letter, and the release notes for April!
Reminder: Monday April 16th is a holiday for Turbine, and the April Patch is on Tuesday, April 17th.
Before I discuss our plans for the future, I'd like to review our accomplishments in the last year.
One of the first things we did last year was to fulfill a promise to the PvP community. We rebalanced the damage and mechanics of PvP combat to make fights faster, more lethal, and more exciting. We based our changes on feedback and discussion with PvP players on our boards, and we are pleased with the way things turned out. Now that we feel good about the way PvP combat works, it's time to focus on another way to improve PvP: giving people something to fight over. I'll get back to this issue when I discuss future plans.
This Week in Review (Issues #13 and 14)[ 1 Comment ] Print News | Category: News This week's news includes the exclusive teaser shot, our new colosseum strategy guidebook, three Turbine updates, three This Week With Turbines, two new quest guides for Ulgrim's drinking contest and and Tanada, and one april desktop calendar (I think that can be sung to the tune of Twelve Days of Christmas, by the way)
This guide covers how to beat the Colosseum. Up until now, it has only been beaten by a few select groups on a few servers. This is a proven method of beating the clock used twice on Morningthaw sofar.
Check out our new guide here and please leave some comments.
Weekly Update 04/10/07[ 2 Comments ] Print News | Category: News - Turbine Hello there and welcome to the Weekly update. I apologize for the delay on this weeks update, things have been very hectic around the office these last couple of weeks and we are all doing what we can to help each other out.
So let’s get down to business, shall we?
This week the team has been discussing a few different things. One of the things that came up in our most recent meeting was PK issues. Despite what some may say, we are in fact reading your posts on what you think could be done to improve our PvP game. Some of the items in particular that have been brought up are healing/chugging in PK, as well as the negative/positive effects of “harming” people. This discussion was in large part brought up as a direct result of discussions going on here in the forums. I would expect to hear more about this going forward. In particular we will be asking some more questions about these very issues.
We had some issues this week on Darktide and Morningthaw with players getting stuck or frozen. The team is investigating this and we are optimistic that we will be able to get to the bottom of what was/is causing this to occur.
In the coming months you may notice a change to how we release the patch notes, Letter to the Players, Dev notes. As we grow as a company we want to start having more processes and ways of doing things that are inline with all of our other titles. This will just make it easier for everyone involved as we continue to help each other out. At first these changes will be subtle, and not noticed by most, but in the end we all feel it will better help us communicate what is going in the game each month. Once we have everything ironed out and have a uniform system in place, I will give you all of the details on what these changes will be and how they will affect everyone who reads these notes that come out every month. Please do not worry though, the fiction will still come out every month as well as all of the information you would get from the LttP and the Dev Notes. These will just come in a somewhat different format.
The list of folks who will be getting replacement Colosseum keys has been given to the person who will be replacing them. If you are one of these people, please be aware that at some point a member of our staff will be attempting to contact you in-game in the near future.
Last but not least, a reminder that Tuesday April 17th is our scheduled day for the April event, Strange Sightings. If the day needs to change for any reason, we will let you all know. Also, this upcoming Monday the 16th is a holiday for us, so the team will not be in the office that day. This of course means that the weekly update will come at some point on Tuesday the 17th.
That’s about it for now. Everyone have a great week!
__________________
Andy "Frelorn" Cataldo
AC Community Relations
Turbine, Inc
This was April Fool's Week, and there were some pretty funny posts. (To avoid confusion, I avoided adding those posts to the column, but I urge everyone to read the threads from the 1st and 2nd!)
The Undiscovered Content thread is just like the Energizer Bunny... it keeps going, and going, and going.... and it is still going! Nearly 50 pages of replies, ideas, thoughts, and hints from Turbine folks. As usual, I simply give a link to the thread, to avoid spoilers.
Finally, for those folks to participate in PK/PKL there is a thread going that has many replies by Django, who it seems knows quite a bit about PK. While I didn't post every reply (because they refer to data given in the thread) I did link to the post, so it is easy to find.
