[A SotA Public Forum post by Starr Long]
Greetings Avatars,
Thank you to our loyal backers of Shroud of the Avatar. We were not going to let torrential rains, high winds, tornadoes, microbursts, downed trees, blown out windows, massive power losses, or any other weather calamity thrown our way stop us from delivering Release 18! Access for all backers at First Responder level and above begins this Thursday, May 28 at 10:30 AM Central Time (16:30 UTC).
NOTE: Servers will be down from 9:00 AM until 10:30 AM Thursday morning in order to upload the build.
Please read this entire message, as well as the linked instructions and known issues.
We are far from launch, in a constant state of change, and we do not yet have in-game systems to inform players of these changes or to share ways to help them to explore new content and systems. This means we rely entirely on this message and the linked instructions and known issues to convey the current game state. We regularly have to answer questions or filter bug reports from helpful players, because they elect not to read this valuable information. By taking a few moments to read through this information, a great deal of our time and efforts can be redirected to focus on new “unanswered” questions, and addressing critical issues impacting each release. We greatly appreciate you taking the time to review this post, and for all the truly valuable feedback you continue to provide.
Release 17 included a lot of new content including the first Player Owned Town, Crafting Events, Player Titles, an Experience Doubler, and Lot Access Permissions. It was also our attempt to finish a bunch of work related to the Unity 5 upgrade. The good news is that the new content improved the play experience (for the most part). However, a lot of other issues were introduced in the process. For instance, we completely reworked our character state machine which governs everything the character does (animating, moving, fighting, spellcasting, etc.). This rework will, in the long term, make the game better by giving us better controls for things like blending between animations. In the near term, however, it broke almost everything and took us an entire week after the release to address the biggest issues.
Additionally, combat had been neglected for many months. As many of you have pointed out, it has been unbalanced, buggy, and almost unplayable for a few releases (and R17 actually made it worse!). On top of all that, our new user experience has been beyond challenging–punishing is more accurate, in fact. Based on those three issues, we decided to spend more time on overall improvements to combat and the new user experience. Unfortunately, that means we had to move some deliverables out of this release, but the game is now much more playable.
Also, remember we are providing new content with each release and our community is working overtime to make new events for you to enjoy. Be sure to check out a couple of the Community Events Calendars run by our community members (via in game book or the player run websites Avatars Circle Community Events and Events of the Avatars calendar).
Without further ado, here are the R18 deliverables.
Read more…
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