Update of the Avatar #131 – 2015.06.26: Play R19 Now!, Port Phoenix, Player/Dev Combat Scrum, Forum Changes, $10 for $10 Last Day, and More!

Greetings Fellow Avatars!

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

• Play Release 19 Now!
• Player Owned Town #3: The Swamp Town of Port Phoenix
• Player/Developer Collaboration: The Combat Scrum
• SpeedTree Blogs About SotA
• New Adobe Homes and Decos
• The Challenge of Openness and Collaboration
• $10 for $10 Summer Bonus Ends Tomorrow!
• World Builder/Level Designer and VFX Artist Job Openings
• In-game Community Weekend Events
• Receiving Pledge Rewards and Add-On Items
• Changes to Store Credit Conversions
• Steam Access Keys Available for All Backers
• How to Cancel Monthly Layaway Payment Plans
• This Week In the News
• Upcoming Events
• Recommended Games to Back

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Play Release 19 Now!

Avatars Radio FireLotus Release 19 Party hosted at Memorial Caretaker’s Cemetery lot in Ash Haven. Check out more screenshots in the Release 19 Screenshot Gallery.

Release 19 successfully launched yesterday, June 25, with thousands of backers downloading, patching, logging in, and checking out the new changes! Lots of new content to explore, including:

• Port Phoenix: SotA’s first swamp biome Player Owned Town
• Zombies!
• Etceter Crag Mines
• Chaos Magic that rewrite the rules when cast
• 15 New Combo Skills
• Combat Balance Overhaul
• More Dyeability and Material Colors
• An Actual Gustball
• Player Written Books
• Public Cache Chests
• Enhanced Player Owned Lot and Town Permissions
• …and more!

Check out the Release 19 Instructions update for detailed information about all the new R19 content.

The Grand Tour Quest
Just as in our last several releases, we’ve included a Grand Tour Quest designed to guide you through all the new content. You will be able to get the Kobold Commander Mask by completing the Release 19 Grand Tour Quest. This reward can only be unlocked during Release 19 (did someone say rares?), so be sure to log in soon and talk to all the Tour Guides!

And if you need a little help with the R19 Grand Tour Quest, this month we have two video walk-thrus for you to select from. Thanks to The Mad Hermit and Envyco!:

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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 19!

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 19 Player Instructions

Release 19 Known Issues

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R19 Patch Notes

Thanks to all our community members that jumped right into this Release and started reporting bugs. We’ve already fixed quite a few of them and pushed out several patches. Click here for the most up-to-date Patch Notes.

June 26, 2015

Build Number 285: 5:00 PM

Fixes:

• Charge skill should no longer happen in slow motion
• Fixed issue where you could not jump after executing a free attack
• Increased movement speeds on Overworld
• Fixed terrain looking black on player town islands
• Fixed various collision issues with Adobe Keep
• Improvements to chair assignments in Soltown refugee camp
• Fixed secret door in Knight Benefactor house
• Fixed floating door in The Clink
• Fixed issue with free attack and sitting that could put the interface in a bad state
• Reduced training cost for all tier 2 and above skills
• Fixed some broken dresses
• Fixed issue where decorations could be placed inside of other things.
• Fixed bug that prevented a player from putting more items in the bank after putting in a non-empty container
• Lots of Etceter Crag Mines mining nodes are now fixed
• Fixed inaccessible ore and crystal nodes in these maps: Grunvald Shardfall, Verdantis Shardfall, and Graff Gem Mines
• Made Tap Soul to be more effective.
• Solace Bridge: Fixed an oyster bed at (40.7, 37.2, 86.8) so it can be harvested
• Fixed broken Lich in the Necropolis

Known Issues:

• Cloaks sorting and bunching through the body of players when doing directional changes
• Time is not in synchronized between scenes that have the new sky vs. the old sky
• Red crystal nodes in Etceter Crag Mines are all yielding blue crystals.
• Books with writing in them (including Player Made Books) cannot be used as decorations
• If your video drivers are out of date characters will appear as if they are covered in triangles.
• Some cities are experiencing performance spikes
• Some assets create flash bulb like sparks on screen
• The screen may go dark unexpectedly in some cases.  If this occurs, you can open the video options and turn off Tone Mapping as a temporary fix.
• Many pledge, add on, and stretch goal items have not yet been built and/or do not yet have tech support. These will not be complete until later this year
• The update to Unity 5 caused a host of general texture and lighting related issues, and not all of these have been resolved.
• Distant tree billboards may have a white outline that is especially noticeable at night, and some trees may shimmer with white at night.
• Skin tone will sometimes not match properly on different parts of the body
• Unity 5 engine bug: Terrain is not accepting shadow casting lights and terrain lighting shows up on grid vs. radius
• ALT key can no longer be bound. This was necessary to re-enable quick self cast with ALT
• Unity 5 Engine Bug: Objects in the foreground sort incorrectly against objects in the distance like trees and the horizon

[Complete Patch Notes…]

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Player Owned Town #3: The Swamp Town of Port Phoenix

Our third Player Owned Town, Port Phoenix, launched with Release 19 yesterday! It is the first PoT to use the swamp biome template. The citizens of Port Phoenix are working diligently to get moved in. Next week, after they’ve had more time to get settled in, we’ll share more images and Port Phoenix lore. In the meantime, here are a few “moving day” images from the Release 19 Screenshot Gallery:

Wow! What a moving day feast! We usually just buy some beer and pizza for our moving day helpers!

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Special Event

Phoenix Republic Founders Ball on Friday, June 26 at 6pm CST

Join the leaders of New Britannia and the founders of the Phoenix Republic in the founders ball! This ball will be preceded with a welcome speech and dinner, then toasts all around followed by dancing and celebrations. /zone Kazyn Phoenixfyre to attend or go to Port Phoenix via the ship near Etceter.

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Player/Developer Collaboration: The Combat Scrum

The “Combat Scrum” is made up of 15 players and 5 devs.  We have met at least once per week for the past 5 weeks to test out new systems, new skills, demonstrate exploits, and discuss ways to make combat better.  Usually they last about 90 minutes and I take notes and create tasks during the session so we don’t lose that knowledge.

Since only the devs know how things really fit together and what changes are easy or hard, I push the players to focus on telling us problems, not fixes.  Then I propose fixes and try to get them in for the next session for them to test.  Each session has resulted in about 10 items to be addressed.

Some examples of actionable player feedback included rolling back changes to how armor worked. I moved hits so they hit a random location and just used the armor for that location.  Players expressed too much concern over it though because they felt like it was too punishing to the guys who were highly concerned with the look of their character and less concerned with min-maxing.

Also, based on their feedback I added set bonuses for armor.  I put that in for one session and they tried it out and liked it, but they pointed out that it could be punishing to people who liked to wear the quest hats or gear from their pledge.  So the next session I updated it so pieces could be set as “universal” meaning they work with any set!

I constantly use the Kibana tools for analyzing combat data.  An important example is the “Skill Usage” chart.  Seeing how much skills are used is one of the best ways to find things that are unbalanced and tune them.  For example, here is a snap shot from last month:

This is way out of whack.  Deathtouch is used almost twice as much as the next closest skill!  Based on this, I went and tuned death magic very slightly and made a few small tweaks to double slash. The chart shows what effect that change had on skill usage:

Still a ways to go but just a few tweaks and already got closer to a flatter slope!  For R19, Death Touch was moved up the tree one level to make it a bit more challenging to get to.  I’m shooting to have this MUCH flatter by R21.  Flat meaning that players are using a wide variety of skills instead of just a few unbalanced ones.

Chris “Dippy Dragon” Spears

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SpeedTree Blogs About SotA

One of the awesome outcomes of switching to Unity 5 is that it provided native support for SpeedTrees. SpeedTrees are a massive visual improvement, and performance improvement, and we’ve been slowly replacing all our regular trees with SpeedTrees since Release 16. The SpeedTree tools are a pretty big deal, including winning an Academy Award this year:

On February 7, 2015, at a ceremony in Beverly Hills, California, a Scientific and Technical Academy Award® was presented to the three principal developers of SpeedTree®: IDV co-founders Michael Sechrest and Chris King, and Senior Software Architect Greg Croft.

In selecting SpeedTree for this honor, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences wrote:

“This software substantially improves an artist’s ability to create specifically designed trees and vegetation by combining a procedural building process with the flexibility of intuitive, direct manipulation of every detail.”

SpeedTree use has been confirmed in dozens of major films since the software was featured prominently in 2009’s Avatar, which received nine Oscar® nominations and three Oscars. Several other Oscar-winning and -nominated films have featured SpeedTree, including The Great Gatsby and The Wolf of Wall Street, as well as blockbusters like The Avengers, X-Men: Days of Future Past, Iron Man 3, and Maleficent.

Additionally, you’ll find SpeedTrees in many, many AAA games, including Witcher 3, Destiny, Assassin’s Creed, Call of Duty 3, Grand Theft Auto IV, Batman Arkham Knight, and the list goes on!

Needless to say, we felt very honored to be included in such distinguished company when SpeedTree posted an article last week about our use of SpeedTrees in Shroud of the Avatar! Especially when they prefaced their article with the comment: “Now, fair warning, there are some people in this office who cut their gaming teeth on the Ultima series starting with Ultima II. To say that we’re excited to be working with this talented studio is an understatement.”

Here is what they had to say:

SpeedTree and Shroud of The Avatar: Forsaken Virtues

Shroud of The Avatar: Forsaken Virtues is a forthcoming game from the creator of the Ultima series Richard Garriott, Starr Long, the director of Ultima Online, and Tracy Hickman, the author of Dragonlance. Now, fair warning, there are some people in this office who cut their gaming teeth on the Ultima series starting with Ultima II. To say that we’re excited to be working with this talented studio is an understatement.

The game has moved into Unity 5, where it will use the power of the new engine to feature deep character building, single player offline play, player driven economy and more. They were kind enough to share some of the latest screenshots from environments where they’ve begun replacing trees with SpeedTrees (See below).

You can jump in the world they are building now by pledging $45 and gaining early access. Be sure to follow their blog as well for updates and announcements as development continues. We’re looking forward to seeing this game grow as one more example of great games being made with Unity 5!

Also, be sure to check out what’s so exciting about SpeedTree in Unity

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New Adobe Homes and Decos

We added seven new Adobe homes and one new Adobe decoration, including our first city sized home, to the Add-On Store! These homes fit almost any locale, especially the dry, desert areas.

Adobe Stables – This 3-room stable decoration can be placed on a property along with your home.

 

Adobe with Roof Access Village Home – This 1-story, 3 room, village home includes roof-top access.

 

Adobe 2-Story with 3-Level Terrace Village Home – This 2-story, 6 room, village home includes a three level terrace leading to the roof-top.

 

Adobe 2-Story with Upper Deck Village Home – This 2-story, 3 room, village home includes an upper level deck.

 

Adobe 2-Story with Patio & Balcony Village Home – This 2-story, 4 room, village home includes a back patio and upper level balcony.

 

Adobe 2-Story Village Home – This 2-story village home includes 4 rooms.

 

Adobe Brick 2-Story with Roof Access Village Home – this 2-story, 7 room, village home includes roof-top access.

 

Adobe Brick 2-Story Keep with Courtyard City Home – This spacious 2-story, 18 room, city home includes roof-top access, and a grand, central courtyard.

To give you a better sense of just how large this city home is, here you can see it beside the Adobe 2-Story Village Home:

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The Challenge of Openness and Collaboration

Some of Portalarium’s most important founding principles are “Openness/Transparency”, “Collaboration” and “Sharing of ideas and opinions.”  We have put great effort into living by these principles on a daily basis with all stakeholders of the Portalarium tribe (employees, investors, partners, backers, community members, etc.).

One of the ways we acted on these principles was to create and maintain public forums, open for the entire world to participate in, both viewing and posting. We reserved some areas of our forums for backers only, but we felt it was important there be a community forum where the dev team, backers, and non-backers could interact with each other, share ideas and opinions, collaborate, and brainstorm.

For two years, we’ve been able to keep our public forums freely open for both viewing and posting. Unfortunately, recent abuse of our public forums by spammers is forcing us to remove free posting privileges. Our volunteer forum moderators are drowning in the hordes of spam posts that have recently invaded our public forums. For the past couple of weeks, our web dev team (i.e. Tassilo Philipp) had to set aside higher priority game and web development tasks while he endeavored to close the holes the spammers are getting through.

We on the executive management team felt it was necessary to stop spending our backers pledge money on the endless efforts necessary to block spammers, and instead, stop them by making them pay to post. We’ve anguished over this decision for weeks, as it is a compromise of our principles, and we will suffer from the loss of ideas that often resulted from free sharing of opinions in our public forums. However, we believe this is the best course of action to take at this time.

Please know that we do not consider this a permanent situation. As our funds and team priorities allow, we will continue to revisit the integration of automated spam tools that may allow us to re-open our general forums for free public posting.

In the meantime, starting June 29, 2015, our General Forums will remain open for everyone to read, but you must be a backer to post. All existing backers (including Steam Early Access backers) will be able to post. Non-backers can purchase forum posting privileges with our new $5 Forum Posting Pledge, which can be upgraded to a full game pledge at any time. If you pledged through Kickstarter you will need to link your Kickstarter account for forum posting privileges.

Dallas Snell
COO/Founder/Portalarium

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Last Day To Get Your $10 for $10 Summer Bonus

To help everyone get their summer off to a great start, we’re having a $10 for $10 Summer Bonus Promotion! If you make any single purchase of $10 or more on the SotA website between 3pm CDT June 11 and 10 am CDT June 27 we will make a one-time deposit of an extra $10 into your Store Credit! Happy Summer!

[NOTE: The $10 for $10 offer can be exercised only once during the promotion period.
$10 Store Credit should show up in your account within 24 hours of a qualifying purchase]

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World Builder/Level Designer and VFX Artist Job Openings

We currently have openings for junior-level to senior-level World Builder/Level Designers for Shroud of the Avatar. Qualifications for the “ideal candidate” are:

• Minimum 2 years industry experience for junior-level (preferably on a shipped game)
• Unity3D proficiency
• Scripting ability
• Experience building, texturing, and decorating natural, terrain based exterior environments
• An artistic eye for detail, with strong scene compositional skills

We also have an opening for VFX artist with the following “ideal” qualifications:

• Minimum 3 years experience as VFX artist for games
• Unity3D proficiency
• FX scripting and ability to create custom FX shaders
• Artistic and technical particle effect skills

If you’d like to join the Portalarium Tribe working on the ground-breaking Shroud of the Avatar, please submit your resume to jobs@portalarium.com. Provide links to your work (if possible), including actual game play, videos footage, and document form (images, maps, and event descriptions).

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In-game Weekend Community Events

Our amazing community has another great lineup of in-game events planned for this weekend. Special thanks to community member SpookyJenny (aka Jenny Phoenixfyre in-game) for her help in compiling the latest schedule of player events from the Avatar’s Circle Community Events calendar and the Events of the Avatars community calendar:

Special Event – Phoenix Republic Founders Ball on Friday, June 26 at 6pm CST

Join the leaders of New Britannia and the founders of the Phoenix Republic in the founders ball! This ball will be preceded with a welcome speech and dinner, then toasts all around followed by dancing and celebrations. /zone Kazyn Phoenixfyre to attend or go to Port Phoenix via the ship near Exceter.

Recurring Events

• The R19 Unreliable Travel Guide
  • The Unreliable Travel Guide, created at the SotA Writing Round Table, is not an event, but a a collection of hilarious short stories published by two drunken layabouts who have nothing better to do than try to derive a dishonest income from newly arrived avatars. (details)
• “The Tavern Respite” RP Event (Mondays, 8pm CST)
  • The tavern door opens before you, and the scent of pipe and stew waft outwards with a wall of warmth from the hearth. Join in with the patrons of the Bear Tavern as they share tales of their adventures amid endless mugs of ale, legs of mutton, and merriment unbounded (details)!
• Happy Hour Wednesdays (Wednesdays, 8pm CST)
  • Otherwise known as “Spend Stryker’s Gold” – Stryker will open a bar tab at one of the local Novia taverns for an hour or so for drinks, stories, news, critique of the arts, dancing, and otherwise unplanned mayhem. Zone /Stryker Sparhawk or watch this thread for locations each week!
• Vengeance Madness (Fridays, 6pm CST)
  • This is an Open PvP event where everyone fights it out in a royal rumble to see who the ultimate death dealer is! (City of Vengeance; /zone Bambino LudoVate)
• Daily Breakfast Club – 12am CST (London UK); 6am CST (Central US); 3pm CST (Sydney Australia)
  • Breakfast Clubs offer a time when people from around different time zones can gather. (Wody’s Pub, Paxlair)
• Phoenix Republic Open Mic Night (Thursdays, 7pm CST)
  • Come hang out in Wody’s Bar. Have a story or a song, Maybe want to do some stand up? Every Thursday the audience will vote on the winner of the weekly prize (PaxLair, Wody’s Bar, /zone Kazyn Phoenixfyre or Jack Knyfe)
• Beach Party by BMC (Fridays at 9pm CST)
  • Come join the BMC for dancing and fun at the Beach (/zone River Beauchamp or Wind Silverrmoon)
• Challenge Dungeon Run (Fridays at 7pm CST)
  • This is a self-host event, meet at the Braemar Cemetery and organize into groups to take on the infamous Chillblain’s Compendium of Pain & Suffering!

Saturday, June 27

• 9:00am CST PaxLair Working Hours
  • PaxLair town and community “working hours” are for anyone interested in PaxLair. (/zone Winfield)
• 10:00am CST Bear Tavern – War of 5 Armies
  • War has broken out on the island of Brave Coast. Pick a side and join the fray! Prizes! (Meet in Kingsport on the dock with the boat to Brave Coast; details)
• 11:00am CST Church of the Dark Star – Saturday Service
  • Join Lady Amber Raine, High Priestess of the Church of the Dark Star along with Kazyn Phoenixfyre of the Church of the Sun, as they bring another thought provoking service. (PaxLair; details) [Note: First Release 19 service will happen on June 27 at 11am in Port Phoenix. The location of our second building]
• 12:00pm CST Welcome Quest R19
  • Welcome Quest showcases many of the Player-owned and Player-ran towns in New Britannia. Come for unique events in each town. (/zone Dara Brae; details)
• 2:00pm CST All Towns Gathering – Port Phoenix
  • The All Player Towns Gathering is a time for many Player Owned and Run Towns to tell people about their towns and hear the latest news about town development and diplomacy. Everyone is invited to attend and is a perfect time to meet town leaders and learn what the towns are like. (Port Phoenix; /zone Kazyn Phoenixfyre or /zone Winfield)
• 5:00pm CST Phoenix Republic Trade Fair
  • Come learn from masters of their craft, buy crafted specialty goods, listen to music, party and other such attractions at the Phoenix Republic Trade Fair. Also a good opportunity to sell your goods and resources. (Port Phoenix)
• 5:00pm CST Vengeance 1v1 Tournament
  • The longest running Player vs Player tournament in Shroud of the Avatar. (City of Vengeance)

Sunday, June 28

• 6:30am CST Explore Novia with royalsexy (PaxLair Moon Tower, /zone royalsexy)
• 10:00am CST Phoenix Republic Town Hall/Working Hours
  • A Gathering of members of the Phoenix Republic to cover important topic areas of the month. (Republic Town Hall, Port Phoenix, /zone Kazyn Phoenixfyre or Jack Knyfe)
• 12:00am CST Novian Academy: Roleplay Courses by Luka Melehan
  • Join Luka Melehan as she teaches an ongoing course on Roleplay! In this course, you can learn how to get accustomed to roleplaying in New Britannia and participate in future roleplay events. (/zone Luka Melahan, details)
• 1:00pm CST 3D Maze Anniversary
  • Visit PaxLair maze and celebrate 1 Year of 3D Mazes in New Britannia. Prizes for the people who solve the maze. (PaxLair; /zone Net; details)
• 2:00pm CST Hangout of the Avatar – POT and COMBAT
  • The next community hangout will be on player owned towns and combat. (details)
• 3:00pm CST Gustball
  • Two teams are pitted against each other in a sporting event not dissimilar from soccer, football, and basketball. The object of the game is to Gust a Gustball around the field and into your opponent’s goal (PaxLair, /zone Bambino Ludovate, details)
• 5:00pm CST BMC Grid Iron Feast and Registration
  • Register to compete in the BMC Gridiron and mingle with other participants and spectators before the big fight! (details)
• 5:30pm CST BMC Gladiator’s Grid-Iron
  • The BMC is proud to present the nastiest, the foulest, the most feared arena in all of New Britannia! The Grid-Iron is equipped with a pit-style arena, locker rooms, a VIP round-table, betting & vendor booths, and all the blood-sport you can handle. (Merriston, west of Ardoris, details)
• 7:00pm CST PaxLair Meeting
  • Come see what PaxLair is up to in Novia and other town areas! Many people also attend from towns and guilds for a bit of a weekly wrap-up and what’s happening. Good discussions!  (PaxLair, /zone Winfield)
• 8:00pm CST Fishing with Winfield
  • Come sit with Winfield on a log or rock to hear some fish tales or tell your own. Chat about anything from the moons to the earth worms. Spend a relaxing day in nature near a stream or lake — bring insect repellent or a sword.  (some lake or pond, /zone Winfield)

Be sure and check out the Release 19 Events thread in the SotA forums for additional events that may not be included here.

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Receiving Pledge Rewards and Add-On Items

Go to any bank to claim your Add-On items and Pledge rewards. There is a banker NPC in every map where there is player housing because when you switch houses or unclaim a lot, all the decorations will go to your bank. In most locations the Town Crier is now also a banker.

Banks are local only. You can see your items in other bank locations (they appear in location tabs), but you can only access the items in the bank you are currently at. Pledge rewards are an exception to this and can be accessed from any location.

[NOTE: there are some Add-On and Pledge reward items that have not been built yet so you may notice some of your items not showing up in your bank. If you delete your character, all equipped and inventory items, including pledge reward items, will be deleted and cannot be recovered until the next wipe]

Player Bank Upgrades

Your bank inventory size can easily be upgraded with in-game gold, with the price in gold increasing the larger your bank gets. For those that need/want really big banks faster, we’ve added a Bank Upgrade to the Add-On Store. Currently, each Bank Upgrade adds 10 more slots to your bank inventory, but that number is subject to change based on game balancing needs.

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Changes to Store Credit Conversions

If you wish to convert any of your purchased Add-On items to Store Credit, you will need to do so before logging into Shroud of the Avatar.

The instant you log into the game all of your available Pledge reward items and available Add-On items will be flagged as “claimed” and deposited in your in-game bank. Once the Add-On items are “claimed” they cannot be converted to Store Credit until the next wipe (which is currently unpredictable). After you’ve logged into SotA, the “Convert to Credits” button on your account page will be deactivated for all those items available in the game, so if you had any plans to sell back some of your Add-On items, make sure you do it before you log into the game!

We intend to change the claiming process in an upcoming Release so that items are not automatically claimed when logging in, but will require you to actively claim them in your bank before they can be used.

If you purchase any new Add-On items, or upgrade your Pledge tier, those new items and upgraded rewards will automatically appear in your in-game bank the next time you log into the game (providing those items are available in the game).

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Steam Access Keys Available for All SotA Backers

SotA successfully launched on Steam Early Access on November 24, and we’ve made Steam Access Keys available to all our backers as part of their basic pledge rewards! Once you’ve redeemed your Steam Access Key you’ll have the option of playing SotA either with the Steam client or the regular game client (or both).

Click here for instructions to redeem your Steam access key and installing the Steam SotA client…

If you play SotA on Steam you can collect the SotA Trading Cards! Collect a full set of SotA trading cards to earn SotA badges, profile backgrounds, and emoticons that help you customize your profile and show off your Shroud of the Avatar gameplay. Check out Steam’s trading card FAQ for more information.

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Word-of-Mouth Marketing

Our goal is to make Shroud of the Avatar the best game we can for you, our backers, and the best way we can do that is by growing our community of backers through the power of word-of-mouth marketing. That’s where we could use your help! With essentially no marketing budget, we rely on things like press coverage and friend-to-friend networking on platforms such as Facebook and Steam. Here’s how you can help us with your word-of-mouth efforts:

If You Like SotA then Like Us On Facebook

Facebook can be a powerful word-of-mouth marketing tool at very little cost, but only if we can reach a large enough network of Facebook users. You can help us to reach a larger Facebook audience simply by going to the Shroud of the Avatar Facebook page and clicking on the “Like” button. If every one of our 50k+ backers gave us a “Like” the marketing reach of our Facebook posts would be incredible!

If You Like SotA then Write Us a Positive Steam Review

One of the most important word-of-mouth tools on the massive Steam platform is their user reviews. Many Steam users rely on a game’s Steam reviews to help them decide if they want to play a game or not. If you feel positive about SotA, or feel positive about what SotA may become, even if you have concerns and issues, then please jump over to our Steam Store Page and give us a positive review (and feel free to include your concerns and issues in that review as well)!

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How to Cancel Monthly Layaway Payment Plans and What In-Game Rewards to Expect

Remember that Pledge payment plans are not canceled automatically after reaching the desired pledge. You must manually cancel your monthly payment plan, which can be done at anytime on your SotA Account page. We apologize for any inconvenience this might cause, but it is a result of how recurring billing functions with PayPal, Amazon, and Stripe (our credit card service).

If you are on a monthly payment plan, the rewards you receive in-game may not reflect the final pledge tier you are making payments toward, but will reflect the rewards for the current pledge tier that your cumulative monthly payments have reached (your current pledge tier is shown on your Account page on the SotA website).

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This Week In the News

June 18 – SpeedTree and Shroud of The Avatar: Forsaken Virtues

June 21 – E3 2015: Interview – Lord British returns with Shroud of the Avatar

June 23 – MMORPG: Shroud of the Avatar Release 19 – Player-Centric Development

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Upcoming Events

2015.07.25 – SotA at Classic Game Fest 2015
2015.07.30 – Release 20
2015.08.27 – Release 21
2015.08.28 – SotA at Syndcon
2015.09.04 – SotA at Dragon Con
2015.09.24 – Release 22
2015.10.29 – Release 23

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Recommended Games to Back

The Bard’s Tale IV Kickstarter in Final Two Weeks

Bard’s Tale IV is joining the revival of the dungeon crawler genre. As described by inXile, it is a single-player, party-based cRPG with dynamic phase-based combat, challenging puzzles and riddles, and a game set to beautiful Gaelic music, where the Bard’s songs and melodies affect gameplay. They’ve already met their funding goal, passed their first stretch goal, but need your help with their next stretch goal (enhanced crafting system), as well as collecting more of their cool Social Achievements.

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Underworld: Ascendant

Far more than a dungeon crawl, Underworld Ascendant is a next-generation sequel to the legendary fantasy RPG’s Ultima Underworld & Ultima Underworld 2. It not only modernizes the series’ visuals and user interface to take full advantage of the today’s powerful PC’s, it innovates in bold new ways.

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Crowfall

In this Throne War Simulator, characters are persistent but the campaign worlds are not, thanks to voxel technology which enables fully-destructible settings. A seamless blend of an MMO with a large-scale strategy game, players are immortal champions, traveling between realms to fight in an eternal War of the Gods.