Update of the Avatar #183 – 2016.07.01: Play R31 Now!, R31 Postmortem Invite, Q3-2016 Schedule, New Elven Armor, Brittany Estates, and More!

Greetings Fellow Avatars!

Here’s what we have for you in this week’s edition of Update of the Avatar:

• Play Release 31 Now
• Release 31 Postmortem (with exclusive items)
• Shroud in the News: MMORPG R31 and Jearbear’s Top 10 2016/17 MMOs
• Q3 2016 Schedule Update
• Elven Armor
• The Making of Brittany Estates
• Add-On Store Goodies!
• 26 Day Countdown to Summer 2016 Expiration Event, Part 1
• The Sword of Midras SotA Novel for Hardcover, Kindle, Nook and Audiobook
• Upcoming Events
• Community Resources – Players Helping Players
• Status of ONBE Shipments
• Backer Shipping Addresses
• Recommended Projects to Back

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Play Release 31 Now!

Release 31 successfully launched yesterday, June 30, with thousands of backers downloading, patching, logging in, and checking out the new changes! There’s lots of new content to explore, including:

• New scenes including Brittany Alleys and Brittany Wharfs
• New User Experience Polish including a completely reworked Solace Bridge
• “New You” in-game Character Customization
• Gems unlocking specific enchantments on weapons
• Salvage returning components at high skill levels
• Revamped Housing Permissions system
• New Camera Effects including Depth of Field and Sharpness Filter
• …and much more

Check out the Release 31 Instructions update for detailed information about all the new content.

We need all your help with testing the new patches, putting more stress on our multiplayer servers, and testing the new game content, so please join us in playing Release 31!

If you have not backed the game yet, you will need to register and login at www.shroudoftheavatar.com, select the “Pledge or Send Gift!” button in the right side-bar, and purchase a pledge at the $45 Adventurer level or above. The basic Adventurer level pledge is also available on Steam Early Access.

Release 31 Player Instructions

Release 31 Known Issues

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Release 31 Postmortem:

Join us Thursday, July 7th at 3:00 PM Central (20:00 UTC) for our monthly Hangout of the Avatar! The team will be chatting about Release 31 and looking ahead to Release 32 (important updates coming this week on R32!).

And of note, let it be known that Lord British and Lord Darkstarr will play host to a special reliquary event… and blood will be spilled! Consider the squeamish among you forewarned.

As always, we will be giving out awesome swag, and answering your questions. For a chance to win a prize, join Discord chat during the broadcast. Be sure to stick around throughout the Hangout for multiple chances to win!

Tweet with us @ShroudofAvatar during the Hangout to know when a winner has been announced!

Watch here at 3pm CDT on Thursday, July 7th:

Post your questions in the post here! Only one post submission allowed, and keep questions to 3 or less! This will allow us to get to as many players as possible.

Please keep in mind that questions and feedback related to this release’s specific topics will be given priority and really verbose questions may be skipped, as they can be a challenge to shorten and summarize live on the air. In brief… please keep your questions… brief.

Thank you!

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Shroud in the News:

MMORPG.com: Release 31: Nearly Move-in Ready?: Red Thomas wrote another interesting article for MMORPG, this time focusing on how we are getting ready for Final wipe and lot selection. Here’s an excerpt from Red’s article titled: Release 31: Nearly Move-in Ready? 

Just a month until final wipe. In many ways, the 31st release for Shroud of the Avatar is summed in that simple statement. So many things are right, a few things aren’t quite there yet, there’s a certain anticipation of finally being able to play in a truly persistent game-state, and yet there’s this nagging concern in the back of my mind that the concept might be a little too ambitious.

Of course, it’s too ambitious. No one creative enough to develop video games is going to limit themselves to realistic expectations. Whatever mental switch most people have that warns them of projected danger, it’s non-existent in the minds of entrepreneurs and game developers. It takes experience and great mental discipline to drive entire teams of that sort of people towards some semblance of a marketable product, a process made even harder when it’s done right in front of the player-base and with all the opportunities for comment that entails.

With one month of development left until the final wipe, there are legitimate questions about whether the team can reach the expected state or not. In this month’s article, we’ll take a look at some of the bigger updates in this release, as well as a couple of other major shifts in direction for the team. Unlike the last major trajectory change with the targeting system, I’ll explain why I like these a lot and why some people may not. Lastly, I’ll also be spending a bit of time exploring the current state of the game with how it relates to the final wipe.

Stuff of Newness

The standard pace of new scenes continues unabated as the team rolls out a solid list of both player-owned towns and player-run towns (The latter being developed towns that are not owned by a specific player, but don’t have any particular story element located in them.  Think of them basically as empty developer-placed space to drop a house.).  New story scenes, mostly around Brittany, have been added.  Also, several cloned scenes have been placed in the more remote areas to even out resource gathering and adventuring space. [Read More]

Jearbear’s Top 10 Upcoming MMO’s of 2016-2017! Youtube host and Twitch streamer Jearbear picked Shroud of the Avatar as #6 in his list of Top 10 MMO’s coming out in the next year in a recent video.

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Q3 2016 Schedule Update

[From a forum post by Starr “Darkstarr” Long]

Greetings Avatars,

As we have stated previously, our goal is to once-per-quarter post an updated schedule for our monthly releases. Even though these goals will likely change somewhat as we react to feedback, we feel it is important to provide you an updated roadmap periodically.

Our goal continues to be to deliver our backers content each and every month so that we can get feedback and use it to iterate improvements. This continues to benefit the game, with sweeping changes, like the switch over to use-based advancement. Meeting that monthly goal is our highest priority, but we require flexibility in our deliverables in order to meet that goal. As you have seen in previous releases, sometimes we push things out, but we also often pull new things in.

The third quarter of 2016 starts with the Final Wipe and Lot Selection and then moves on to steadily progressing through the list of features and content promised during our Kickstarter.

As always, all dates, durations, and deliverables are subject to change as we adjust our designs based on direct feedback from you, our backers.

RELEASE 32, July 28, 2016

• Final Wipe: Please note that if you have been waiting to convert your purchases to store credits, these will be your FINAL three chances to do so as long as you do NOT claim your rewards at the bank. There will be three windows the week of release to convert your purchases to store credit. These windows will be on Monday, Wednesday, and then finally on the day of release, Thursday. This will work exactly as it has in previous releases.
• Lot Selection: Starting at 11:00 CDT players can begin selecting lots in the game in order of their lot selection group. You can view your lot selection group on your account page.
• Story: The Love Path will get a major polish pass with a special focus on NPC behaviors in Soltown and Ardoris. Greater Brittany will be finished with the addition of the final neighborhood of Brittany Estates, a plush area composed mostly of City sized lots. Additionally several NPC towns, including Spite, that are currently clones will be replaced with original scenes.
• New User Experience Polish: Continued polish passes will be done on the Tutorials, hints, and starting scenes with special focus on the Isle of Storms and Bloodriver.
• Service Hardening: We will continue a series of passes through the client, authentication, and server to harden the service for security and customer service. Special attention will be paid to the Patcher.
• Player Towns & Player Housing: Player-Owned Towns that have locked submission forms will appear in the game. New variations on the town templates may also appear.
• Performance: Major efforts will be done to optimize performance.  This will include frame rate improvements, load time improvements, and memory footprint improvements.
• Multiplayer Economic Balance: A pass will be made through creature loot bundles, merchant pricing, property taxes, public vendor fees, harvesting rates, agriculture growth, crafting recipe ingredient amounts, and other factors to begin establishing an equilibrium for the multiplayer economy
• Multiplayer Combat Balance: A pass will be made through combat skills, creature stats, player stats, advancement rates, zone difficulties, and other values to establish an equilibrium for multiplayer combat.
• Crafting: More enchantments and more masterwork modifiers will come online. Most decorations will be removed from NPC merchants and moved to recipes for crafters. Additionally several homes will be craftable for the first time.
• Character: A polish pass will be completed through all the hair styles.

RELEASE 33, August 25, 2016

• Story: The polish pass through the Love Path of the story will continue with special focus on NPC behaviors in the town of Spite. Brittany NPCs will also get a behavior improvement pass. Additionally several NPC towns that are currently clones will be replaced with original scenes.
• New User Experience Polish: Continued polish passes will be done on the Tutorials, hints, and starting scenes with special focus on Highvale.
• Player Towns & Player Housing: Player-Owned Towns that have locked submission forms will appear in the game. New variations on the town templates may also appear. Additionally the Lot Deed Lottery system for in game purchase of Lot Deeds will come online.
• Offline Mode Combat Balance: A pass will be made through the game to adjust combat balance for play in offline mode with companions.
• Offline Mode: Patching and Reward delivery for Offline Mode become available to players using this mode to play.
• Crafting: Cooking and the Food System will expand with more recipes and more functionality including more food buffs.
• Creatures: We will begin a major polish pass through our creatures.

RELEASE 34, September 29, 2016

• Story:  A final polish pass will be completed through the Love Path of the story and we will begin a polish pass on the Courage Path. Aerie and Resolute NPCs will also get a behavior improvement pass. Additionally several NPC towns that are currently clones will be replaced with original scenes.
• Player Towns & Player Housing: Player-Owned Towns that have locked submission forms will appear in the game. New variations on the town templates may also appear.
• Offline Economy: The economy in offline mode will be tuned to be better balanced for single player. NPC merchants will buy player crafted items at a profit to the player for instance. Additionally pledge and add-on store items will be available from NPC merchants for purchase with in-game gold.
• Crafting: Recipes will become teachable (much like emotes). Agriculture will get a polish pass and some new content.
• Creatures: We will continue a major polish pass through our creatures.
• Roving Encounters: Potential encounters (wandering merchants, monsters, etc.) will appear on the overworld for players to engage (or avoid).

We continue to be incredibly thankful for the support we receive from this amazing community. While the funding you provide makes all of this possible, it pales in comparison with the faith you have in us, the feedback you provide us, and the content you are making for everyone to enjoy. We are humbly grateful, and we cannot wait to see you again in New Britannia!

Before I go, I wanted to include an excerpt from my original post about our Early Release Schedule that is important to set the framework for our ongoing schedule:

As a crowd funded and crowd sourced project, we feel it is incredibly important that we provide our backers with information and access well before game studios would normally do so in a traditional development model. Traditionally, the players are given information and access only after the development team has already decided exactly how things will be done, and at times, even after it has already been implemented. By the time the public normally has access to the product, there is usually no time to meaningfully react to the public feedback.

Shroud of the Avatar is different than the traditional model, as we intend to offer our backers extremely early access to information and even the game itself. With that said, we also want to be very careful that we only provide access to portions of the game when they are ready for a wider range of feedback. If we can play it internally and we know it is not ready, then there is nothing to be gained by having a wider audience come to the same conclusion. In fact, it could be quite damaging to do so.

Our strategy over the next few months is to provide you with focused and iterative releases of content. Your feedback during these releases will be critical to making the final product the best it can be, and we appreciate that you are all so willing to devote your time to helping us. With each release, we will have specific tests we will ask you all to make. As we get closer, we will send instructions on how to download, install, report bugs, etc. After each release we will review the results and reevaluate the plan including the duration of availability of each release. Please note that game data will be wiped periodically during early access.

It is important to note that all dates, durations, and deliverables are subject to change.

Sincerely,
Starr Long
Executive Producer
Shroud of the Avatar

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Elven Armor

Last week we updated you on the polish work that Fletcher “Skullmuncher34” Kinnear was performing on the Elven Armor from the now expired Elven Stretch Goal. We showed you the Elven Mage Robes and Elven Fighter Armor. Below you can see the Elven Archer Armor.

Elven Archer Armor by Shroud of the Avatar

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