Greetings Avatars! In just over two weeks Shroud will be making a huge move! For those who haven’t been keeping up, Chris “Atos” Spears has been working madly on a massive overhaul of Shroud of the Avatar. 2000+ bug fixes, massive improvements to performance on client and server, hundreds of new game systems, and dozens of long-requested features and changes.
The target date for the switch is currently October 1, 2026. At roughly 6AM CST, the Shroud servers will come down. A snapshot of the existing player data will be moved over to the new shard, a massive data migration will be done and the game will come up hopefully by noon CST for play. If you want to see what all the excitement is about, the current server is open to the public for the next two weeks for testing and your current login should work.
There is a greater than zero chance, while doing testing, we’ll decide to postpone the migration, fix a few more issues, and retry the migration a day or two later but so far things are looking very good. Steam is currently the biggest risk but we’re expecting to have that worked out in the next week. For now the plan is to not move to a new webserver BUT that will be coming in the near future as well along with updating our forums to the latest version.
Important dates:
- NOW – Chaos Shard test server is open for business! Go see what is coming! Report issues to the new Oracle feature. Open it currently by doing /oracle in chat but a button will be added for it shortly to replace the old help system
- Over the next few weeks, expect a few data resets on the Chaos server as we do trial runs on migrating accounts and data.
- October 1, 2026 at roughly 6AM CST, the live servers will come down as if it were a normal patch. Players will need to grab the new patcher and client and patch up. (Good news, new patcher is smaller, lighter, and faster, as is the whole game!)
- October 1, 2026 hopefully by Noon CST, the new server comes online for play! Again, greater than zero chance we’ll see some problem and just reopen the old servers for another day or two while we work out the kinks.
- Next 2 weeks, expect patches every 1 to 2 days to address any emergency issues!
- Next few months, expect patches weekly vs monthly.
So what big changes do people need to know about? Hundreds of big things have changed and we’ll pull together a detailed list before October 1st. Two important ones that need to be called out as they will dramatically change play for some players.
First, BALANCE. A massive, long-overdue balance pass will be mostly done. Bards have been completely reshaped into a… BARD! A LOT of players were playing bard due to their balance issues but the new bard is very much a bard and a different play style, focused on buffing and supporting. Tamers, the other balance issue for different reasons, have had some much more minor changes made to them. The good news is that the AI for pets and all NPCs, has been cleaned up and polished to behave much better. The bad news is that tamers will be much less likely to survive if they are used to just going AFK. Pets heal less and have shorter leashes and require you pay attention to them. The last one that has been adjusted that will demand a rethinking of play styles is Shield of Air, which has had its numbers tuned quite a bit. The math for it previously was simply broken and allowed players to tank dragons and bosses without much risk. The math has been adjusted and focus potions will have reduced effect while Shield of Air is up.
Lots of other balance items were made to increase power as well to make other playstyles more viable. Our goal was to pull off as many bandaids as possible at once for things that just felt broken. From here on out, it will mostly be boosting vs nerfing.
Second, we are changing our policy for what is acceptable in NPC towns. For a variety of reasons, a few dozen players decided they wanted to be land barons in game. They claimed hundreds of lots in NPC towns (not PRTs or POTs) and have sat on them, some since the first day the game went live without any intention of using them. Going forward, we will be adopting the same policy other games with non-instanced land have, that this type of behavior is a form of griefing, by blocking shared content with no intent of actually using it. We will also be switching to a new system that prevents trading lots from one player to another and instead, unclaiming lots ONLY IN NPC TOWNS, will instead put the lot up for a lottery, where they receive a percentage of proceeds.
To be clear, these are the only towns that are NPC towns currently and impacted by this change: Aerie, Ardoris, Braemar, Bramble, Brittany Alleys, Brittany Estates, Brittany Fields, Brittany Wharfs, Broochash, Brookside, Celestis, Central Brittany, Desolis, Eastmarch, Elad’s Lighthouse, Estgard, Etceter, Fortus End, Goti, Graff Island, Harvest, Jaanaford, Kiln, Kingsport, Mud, Noreach, Northwood, Owl’s Head, Point West, Port Graff, Resolute, Solania, Soltown, Spite, Storms Reach, Vertas, Westend, Xenos, and Yew.
When the new server goes live, abandoning lots in those towns will send the lot to a global lottery system and the lot owner will get half the proceeds from ticket sales. Any player can view lots up for sale and buy tickets for gold. After 72 hours, a ticket will be drawn and the winner announced. The winner will have 72 hours to claim the lot. If they don’t, it will be claimable by anyone. The goal of this system is to remove the incentive to squat with the intent of reselling. If over time, we still see a few players with a significant number of lots each owned in those towns but not in use, we will implement an eviction notice system to deal with them that will give them 7 days notice and the option to voluntarily put it up for lottery
The goal is to make it so we don’t have a handful of players blocking limited in game content for hundreds of players, no matter what their justification for doing it. NPC towns are special in that new players have to travel to them and they are some of their first exposure to the game.
