Update of the Avatar #196 – 2016.09.30: Play R34 Now, Q4 Schedule, R33 Lot Raffle Winners, R34 Postmortem, Telethon, Inside Portalarium, and More!

Greetings Fellow Avatars!

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

• Play Release 34 Now!
• Q4 2016 Schedule
• Release 33 Lot Deed Raffle Winners
• Release 34 Postmortem Invite
• Fall into Winter Telethon of the Avatar
• Markee Dragon’s: Portalarium Inside Look + Shooter Jennings
• New Halloween Goodies, Musical Instruments, and Fireplaces
• Upcoming Events
• Community Resources – Players Helping Players
• Job Openings (1)
• Recommended Projects to Back

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Play Release 34 Now!

Release 34 successfully launched yesterday, September 29, with thousands of backers downloading, patching, and logging in to check out the changes! There’s lots of new content to explore, including:

• Necropolis Polish
• Estgard Polish
• Bone Armor
• Cooking and Food Expansions
• Halloween Content
• Daily Oracle Confessions
• R33 Lot Deed Raffle Winners
• R34 Free Lot Deed Raffle Tickets for Non Property Owners
• Over 45 new Crafting Recipes
• New Combat Skills and Spells
• New Musical Instruments
• New Emotes

…and much more

Check out the Release 34 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 34!

If you have not backed the game, you will need to register and login at www.shroudoftheavatar.com, select the “Get Early Access!” button in the right side-bar, and purchase one of our game access bundles. Game Early Access is also available on Steam Early Access.

Release 34 Player Instructions

Release 34 Known Issue

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Q4 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, sometimes 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.

For the fourth quarter of 2016, we will continue to polish the Path of Love while moving on to the Path of Courage. We will continue to expand Crafting with focus on Cooking, Food, Agriculture, Alcohol, and Fishing in particular. Combat will continue to be balanced and will expand to include cover as well as a refactor of Damage Types and Resistances. Town Sieges and Roving Encounters will also come online to greatly expand our feature set.

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 35, October 27, 2016

• Story: The Path of Love will continue to be polished with a focus on the Tower of the Shuttered Eye along with continued work on Ardoris. We will also continue polish on the Path of Courage.
• Multiplayer Combat Balance: A pass will be made through combat skills, creature stats, player stats, advancement rates, zone difficulties, and other values for continued balance of multiplayer combat. We may also create additional skills, spells, and combos.
• Player Towns & Player Housing:  POT Owners will now be able to select from a set of start points for their town. Also, new housing content will appear; including new Elven homes for the Elven bundles and Testing Incentive Program decorations. Finally, updates to Dynamic Player-Owned Towns that have locked submission forms will appear in the game.
• Offline Reward Delivery: Reward delivery for Offline Mode will become available to players using this mode to play.
• Roving Encounters: Potential encounters (wandering merchants, monsters, etc.) will appear on the overworld for players to engage (or avoid).
• Crafting: Cooking, Food, and Agriculture will be the focus of Release 35, with one of the major goals being the reduction in reliance on purchasing ingredients from NPC merchants to cook food. This means increasing the number of plants in Agriculture and polishing Agriculture itself, including the addition of features like water harvesting. We also hope to add Alcohol recipes and Teachable Recipes. Finally, the visual effect for items that have been Enchanted or Masterworked will be redone.
• Character: Ardoris will be the first city where we begin adding region specific clothing (Japanese themed) for the residents, including unique armor for guards, clothing for citizens, and regalia for royalty. Work will also continue on Summer Telethon items, including Flaming Bagpipes and Firedancing.

RELEASE 36, November 17, 2016

• Story: Path of Love polish will continue but primary focus will begin shifting to the Path of Courage with special attention on Estgard. We also hope to have the new PVP area begin coming online with the town area first.
• Combat: We plan to refactor how Damage Types and Resistances work to better balance different weapon types, spell schools, and creature types against each other. This will also improve the variety of crafted items.
• Player Towns & Player Housing: Towns with player housing will now dynamically update their icon on the Overworld based on various data, including number of claimed lots and online population. Additionally we will continue to expand the Dynamic POT Tool set. Also Obsidian homes for the Obsidian bundles will come online. Finally, updates to Dynamic Player-Owned Towns that have locked submission forms will appear in the game.
• Crafting: Crafting will be refactored to include the new Damage Types and Resistances. We will also add more Enchantments and Masterwork modifiers, including some related to Celestial Mechanics.
• Character: We will begin work polishing the Kobolds and updating them to better reflect their lore (much of the technology in Novia can be attributed to them). We will also work on the Testing Incentives Program Wearables and Summer Telethon items.
• Social: Guilds will now be able to form alliances with each other and we will be introducing a new default guild for all new players called the Outlander Guild.

RELEASE 37, December 15, 2016

• Story: The Path of Courage polish will continue with focus on Harvest and Resolute. We will also continue expansion of the new PVP area with the addition of the dungeons area. Finally, the NPC Conversation System will be getting a much needed refactoring and polish pass.
• Town Sieges: The first iteration of Town Sieges will come online where periodically you will have to fight through battle lines to get into and out of a town under siege by the 8 Obsidian Cabalists.
• Combat: The cover system will be introduced and will modify attack and defense values when you (or your target) are behind cover.
• Player Towns & Player Housing: The first iteration of Player Owned Town Blessings will go live where monuments placed in POTs will grant long term buffs whose power and/or duration will be based on the population of the town. Also, more Obsidian homes for the Obsidian bundles will appear. The ability to Rent Rooms in a player home will start to become available to homeowners. Additionally, work will begin on the first Static POTs. Finally, updates to Dynamic Player-Owned Towns that have locked submission forms will appear in the game.
• Crafting: Fishing will get an expansion and polish pass. We will also expand weapon recipes to include more visual variants (Elven, Norgard, Obsidian, Kobold).
• Character: Valhold will be the second city where we begin adding region specific clothing (Viking themed) for the residents, including unique armor for guards, clothing for citizens, garb for merchants, and regalia for royalty. We will also begin introducing the first of the Obsidian Cabalists.

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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Release 33 Lot Deed Raffle Winners

Yesterday we had our the drawing for our very first Lot Deed Raffle and we awarded 675 lot deeds to lucky winners who bought tickets. Winners can claim their deed simply by logging into the game and claiming rewards at any bank. As a reminder, here is the breakdown of how many deeds of each type and size we awarded:

Place Anywhere Deeds (75):

• Row: 40
• Village: 20
• Town: 10
• City: 5

City Winners:

• Dan Smith
• Herr Rottenmeier
• Krissa Lox
• Lindsey Water
• Mac Tain

Player Owned Town Deeds (600):

• Row: 320
• Village: 160
• Town: 80
• City: 40

City Winners:

• Adam Crow
• Aleana
• Alecs Graham
• Andernut
• Arivan Tine
• Arnaeus Moonglow
• Arthur Legendary
• Baldrith
• Cannibowl Corpse
• Doctor
• Draklon
• Joe
• Latnem Chaos
• Mandalar
• Nataurz
• Nerone
• Oakenhammer
• Oblivious
• Peabo
• Phacops
• Raven Cross
• Rickson
• Robyn Hood
• Six Reuge
• StarLord
• Stryker Sparhawk
• Turvaine Blackwell
• Vivian Bolton
• White Widow
• Wind Silvermoon
• Womby

For a complete list of all winners, please see this post.

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Release 34 Postmortem Invite

Join us Tuesday, October 11th at 3:00 PM Central (20:00 UTC) for our monthly Hangout of the Avatar! The team will be chatting about Release 34 and looking ahead to Release 35.

As always, we will be giving out rare Lord British artifacts of immense power and glory, and answering your latest questions. For a chance to win an artifact, be in Discord chat during the livestream. There will be multiple chances to win throughout the broadcast!

Livestream has concluded! Watch the archived recording on YouTube at:

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Fall into Winter Telethon of the Avatar

Avatars! Are you ready to join us and continue celebrating the biggest event to hit New Britannia since the great cataclysm itself? Today, we’re announcing the ‘Fall Into Winter’ Telethon!

What exciting events can you expect throughout the day? An array of fun activities and engaging content, many of which you can directly participate in with us in-game! We are also giving away a ton of fabulous prizes, and if the stretch goals shown below are met, we will add that amazing new content to the game.

As usual, your questions will be answered throughout the event. You can pre-post your questions right here in the article’s comments section, or post questions during the telethon in Discord chat.

At 11:59 PM CDT (4:59 UTC) on November 28, 2016, we are expiring the following content / features:

• House Stacking in Bundles (only 1 House per Bundle going forward)
• Adobe 2-Story with Upper Deck Village Home
• Adobe 2-Story with Patio & Balcony Village Home
• Adobe 2-Story Village Home
• Adobe Brick 2-Story with Roof Access Village Home
• All Kobold Masks (some will still be exclusively available in Kobold Bundles)
• All Prosperity Tool Packs (will still be available in as part of Bundles)
• Wax Cylinder Soundtrack Vol 1
• Battle Banner
• 2016 Jack O Lanterns
• 2016 Jack O Lantern Mask
• 2016 Jack O Lantern Mask with Glow
• 2016 Grim Reaper Statue
• 2016 Grim Reaper Mask
• 2016 Rotten Armor
• 2016 Rotten Flesh Cloak
• /juggleseveredheads
• /jugglezombieheads
• /jugglejackolanterns
• 2016 Spooky Soundtrack

Help us to achieve the following goals during this next event!

As a special bonus, we are offering Telethon Funding Stretch Goal Rewards to any backer that pledges a minimum of $5 from the start of the telethon, until Midnight (Spending Store Credit to make $5 minimum purchase does not apply). The Fall Into Winter Telethon of the Avatar Funding Stretch Goal Rewards are:

• $10K: /rainautumnleaves
• $25K: Autumn Leaf Crown (increases length of /rainautumnleaves emote)
• $35K: Autumn Fairy Leaf Dress + Autumn Leaf Wings
• $50K: Pet Squirrel
• $65K and beyond: Secret Winter items!

 

Did you see what was unlocked during last month’s telethon? Let’s make it happen again in Part 2!

Cheer on the Devs!

For every $2,500 donated, all developers on camera have to either dance, sing, or drink a shot of alcohol.

Additionally, we will be spinning the Wheel of Fortune & Doom! The wheel will have 14 items at any given time, but dozens of total prizes ultimately will be given away! This includes developers that, if selected, have to either dance, sing, or drink a shot of alcohol.

As the wheel is spun, what is selected will be replaced by something else. Details list of wheel items coming soon. Items already selected will be removed for a time (some may not come back onto the wheel for the rest of the telethon. Keep in mind that some of these may never come up, so cross your fingers for your preferred item!

Watch The Telethon live on Twitch! You will also be able to watch at: youtube.com/portalarium! The final recording will be archived on YouTube after the event as well.

If you wish to win prizes during the Telethon event, be in Discord chat! Also keep an eye on @ShroudofAvatar for updates before, during, and after the telethon.

See you on the livestream chat at Noon this coming November 28th!

*There will be some really awesome prizes awarded during the telethon, but you have to be present in the Discord chatroom to qualify for each drawing. Please keep in mind that questions and feedback related to each segment 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. Only 3 Questions per person!

Warning: Telethon is Rated PG-13 for Alcoholic Content
(might get upgraded to Rated-R depending on rate of pledges)

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Markee Dragon’s: Portalarium Inside Look + Shooter Jennings

Recently Markee Dragon visited the Portalarium offices and got a bonus concert thanks to Shooter Jennings. Check it out:

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New Halloween Goodies, Musical Instruments, and Fireplaces

As you probably saw from the Release 34 Post, we have tons of new content in the Add-On Store including lots of Seasonal items. To help everyone better understand the relative availability of each item, we have come up with some new labels:

• Seasonal Recurring: This is an item that will only be available on the store during a certain time frame. For instance, the Day of the Dead masks are only available during October and November each year for Halloween.
• Seasonal Rare: These items are only available once for a season and then do not return to the store ever (except when Dallas and Starr have a senior moment). These are almost always labeled with the specific year they are delivered, but not always. For example: 2016 Jack O Lantern Mask is available only for October and November 2016.
• Seasonal: Themed and on sale for a season, but otherwise available year round in the store and only ever leave the store during major expiration events like when we have telethons. Example: The Gothic Mansion which is on 50% sale until November 28th and will go on sale again next year at this same time.
• No Label: These items are available year round in the store and only ever leave the store during major expiration events like when we have seasonal telethons. We will always broadcast these expirations well in advance (at least 30-90 days). For example, the Adobe Houses expiring during the Fall to Winter Telethon on November 28th (see above).

New Instruments and Fireplaces

New 2016 Spooky Rare Items

New 2016 Spooky Recurring Items

New 2016 Spooky Sale Items

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Upcoming Events

2016.10.27 – Release 35
2016.11.04 – SotA Con (Fan convention w/devs)
2016.11.17 – Release 36
2016.11.28 – Fall into Winter Telethon of the Avatar
2016.12.15 – Release 37
2017.01.27 – Release 38

Community Activities

Visit the official Community Calendar to see the great lineup of activities our amazing community has planned for this weekend! And be sure to check out this month’s Release Events thread in the SotA forums for additional events.

Event of the Week – R34 Welcome Quest at Beran’s Reach!

In a continuation of the hugely successful Welcome Quests organised by the Venerable Duke Greagoir, The Bear Tavern is pleased to announce that it will be hosting the R34 event! We’re stepping in to do our bit to ensure that this noble tradition stays alive.

Held on the 1st of October at 12pm / mid-day NBT, we’ll be hosting an array of activities. Expect music! Expect theatre! Expect beer! We’ll be throwing our doors well and truly open to the entire community, giving everyone a chance to meet and have fun in a relaxed and friendly setting for all.

Join this event! View the community’s announcement post in the forums.

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Community Resources – Players Helping Players

• The official SotA New Player Welcome Forum and the Player Created Resources Forum have the best player created resources for Shroud of the Avatar, whether it’s a Player Written Guide, a Video Walk-through, or a Wiki-type Website.

Visit the official Community Resources page for a complete listing of all things community.

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Job Openings (1)

Programmer

We currently have an opening for a Programmer for Shroud of the Avatar. Qualifications for the “ideal candidate” are:

• Minimum 2 years industry experience
• Strong C#/C++ skills
• Database development experience
• Awesome debugging skills
• Windows programming experience
• Network programming experience
• Extensive Multi-threaded programming experience
• Ability to work in unstructured, non-hierarchical environment
• Strong software architecture skills
• BONUS SKILLS (any one or more of these):
  • Minimum 5 years industry experience (minimum of at least 1 shipped game)
  • Unity development experience
  • Mac development
  • Avid game player
  • Web development experience (C#, PHP, ASP.NET, XML/web services, JavaScript)
  • UNIX experience
  • MMO game development experience

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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Recommended Projects to Back

Wasteland 3

We want to give you advance notice that our friends over at inXile are prepping to launch a crowdfunding campaign for Wasteland 3, a party-based role-playing game with complex story reactivity and strategic combat! The game features a deep and engaging story utilizing a newly-revamped dialog tree system from the celebrated writers of Torment: Tides of Numenera!

By including vehicles, environmental dangers, and a revamped, more fluid action system, inXile is evolving on Wasteland 2’s deep tactical turn-based combat and unique encounter design. Play by yourself or with a friend in story-driven synchronous or asynchronous multiplayer. Choices open up (or close off) mission opportunities, areas to explore, story arcs, and lots of other content.

The game will be set in the savage lands of frozen Colorado, where survival is difficult and a happy outcome is never guaranteed. Your Ranger Base is a core part of the experience. As you help the local people and establish a reputation in Colorado, quests and narrative will force you to make decisions on how to lead. Players will face difficult moral choices and make sacrifices that will change the game world.

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Backer Shipping Addresses

In preparation for shipping backers’ physical pledge rewards later this year, we have added Shipping Address fields to your Account Profile page. To enter your shipping address, log in to the SotA website, select “Account” in top right corner, then select “Edit Profile” located in top left corner, beneath your Avatar image.

A reminder to be sure that support@portalarium.com is unblocked from your e-mail account!

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