Avatar’s Update #267: Vendor Variations and Improvements

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

Game Development

News Announcements

Community Updates

Vendor Variations & Improvements (cont.)

This week we added images for the new Male Shopkeepers, Female Vendor variations, and Male Vendor variations.

[From a Dev+ Forum Post by Starr “Darkstarr” Long]

Male Shopkeepers: These player vendor outfits are based on Victorian shopkeeper wear and early concept sketches Denis Loubet made. They come in several outfit colors and face options. In Release 52 we will get female shopkeepers as well based on similar concepts.

Female Player Vendors: These are female versions (including different faces and outfit color variations) of the original player vendor outfit with the fur collar.

Male Player Vendors: These are male versions (including different faces and outfit color variations) of the original player vendor outfit with the fur collar.

New Harvestable Trees

[From a Dev+ Forum Post by Starr “Darkstarr” Long]

We have replaced the placeholder harvestable trees that have been in the game since the very first prototypes with new trees that actually look like the two tree types: Pine and Maple. These trees have died or become diseased so are ideal for clearing. They can be identified by their slightly different coloration from the surrounding trees .

We also updated the tree chopping animation to better align with the trees.

New Pine:

New Maple:

Both New Trees:

The Making of South Fetid Swamp (cont.)

The South Fetid Swamp is a Tier 3 scene located on the western end of the Verdantis region. It is the site of an ancient siege and is now littered with the skeletons of soldiers, battered siege machines, and moss covered encampments. Rumors abound of treasures still hidden in the ruined keep, but the local swamp dwellers scoff at such silliness and laugh at the Outlanders who die trying to find it. Methane is known to rise from the bog on occasion, producing small fires on the surface of the water.

[From a Dev+ Forum Post by Esteben “SorcerousSteve” Zaldivar]

Hey guys! SorcerousSteve here to give you the latest on South Fetid Swamp!

Below we catch a glimpse of Irvine Castle long rumored to have a hidden treasure within its walls.

A raised village deep in the fetid swamp.

Alligator hunting is a big sport in the Fetid Swamp, alongside this the swamp locals are master fishermen who constantly tell tales of fish the size of a full grown man!

Deep in the bayou.

Looking north to Irvine Castle, the swamp in the foreground with the remaining signs of a huge battle that shook this region in ages past.

Check out the South Fetid Swamp! Coming R51!

Esteben Zaldivar

Heraldry Items (cont.)

This week we added the Founder Heater Heraldry Shield to the growing list of Heraldry Items.

[From a Dev+ Forum Post by Starr “Darkstarr” Long]

Founder Heater Heraldry Shield

Release 49 Telethon Items

[From a Dev+ Forum Post by Starr “Darkstarr” Long]

We have begun creating the items from the Release 49 Postmortem Telethon. The theme was once again Icy and our very own Fletcher “Scathana” Kinnear and Reid Rollo have been hard at work freezing their hands off sculpting new frozen treats for you!

Snowdragon:

Frostpipe:/jugglesnowballs:

URGENT: Confirm Your Physical Rewards Shipping Address!

We are extending the deadline to confirm your physical address to March 9, 2018.

If you are receiving physical goods as part of pledge rewards, and have not yet confirmed your physical address, please do so now.

For those who are receiving physical goods and have confirmed their physical addresses, you will receive another email from us stating the shipping address we have for you on file. At that time, please verify we have the correct address.

Please see your account Profile Settings page to update your mailing address.

Scroll down to Shipping Address.
Input your Name and Address.
Click “Update Profile”.
If you are presented with alternate addresses, please confirm the correct one.

For shipments outside the United States, you must have an International Shipping Voucher listed on your account. If you do not, you can purchase one here.

We will keep you posted on the official Shroud of the Avatar website, forums, and Kickstarter page with any new information, such as a more specific shipment date.

If you have any issues along the way, please email support@portalarium.com.

Thank you for your patience! We could not have made Shroud of the Avatar without your support!

Release 51 Postmortem Telethon

Greetings Avatars,

The R51 Postmortem Telethon is coming up fast on March 2 from 3-7pm CT! Starr’s birthday is also coming up (March 12), so we’re celebrating with some Darkstarr themed stretch goals! We are also expiring a bunch of items with major changes to the store immediately after the telethon including changes to crown pricing, bundle pricing, and available inventory. See the forum announcement on these changes for more details.

LIVESTREAM SCHEDULE (Central Time Zone)

Telethons are livestreamed on Twitch and include answers to your gameplay questions, world building tours, prize giveaways, sales on items, and more! Here is the schedule:

3PM: Introductions and Postmortem Q&A
3:45PM: Deep Dive 1: Combat
4:30PM: World Building Tour: New Scenes & Side Quests
5:30PM: Deep Dive 2: Physical Goods
6:15PM: Postmortem Q&A Continues
7PM: Ending Announcements

Schedule is subject to change. Check back here before the telethon begins!

EXPIRING ITEMS:

Main Expirations:
- Seasonal Recurring:

STRETCH GOALS (Darkstarr Themed!)

As a special bonus, we are offering funding rewards to any backer that pledges a minimum of $5 for twelve hours during the day of the telethon, on March 2 from 12:00 PM to 11:59 PM CT (Spending Store Credit to make $5 minimum purchase does not apply) .

NOTE: While the livestream ends at 7pm CT, everyone will have until 11:59 PM CT to spend $5 to get the stretch goals. We will announce the final total on the following day.

$10K: /mosh (The ultimate chaotic dance!)
$25K: Darkstarr Morningstar
$35K: Darkstarr Pavers: pavers with Darkstarr symbol
$50K: Darkstarr Throne
$65K: Darkstarr Clocktower (Darkstarr loves watches!)
$80K: Darkstarr Black Chain Armor: Special chain version of the custom armor in the Darkstarr Concept painting

*Please keep in mind that stretch goal rewards take time to develop and will most likely not be available in-game until Release 53 at the earliest. We will keep you updated!

CHEER ON THE DEVS!

StarrDancing For every $2,500 donated, all devs on camera have to dance, sing, or perform some other act of amazement.

Additionally, we will be spinning the Wheel of Fortune! The wheel will have 12 different categories of sales plus the Lord British and Darkstarr wildcards where they get to choose any category! Each time a category comes up it will go on sale at approx. 20% off for 1 hour.

WHEEL OF FORTUNE FLASH SALES:

WIN THESE GREAT PRIZES!

In-game items!
Bank Upgrades
COTOs
RelicsbyRild.com merchandise
and a bunch of items we will announce on the livestream!

We will be giving prizes away on an hourly basis with many being given away multiple times. If you wish to win prizes during the event, be in Discord chat! We will be active on Twitch and YouTube chats as well, but they will not be our portal for prize giveaways.

SUBMIT YOUR QUESTIONS!

We will be answering questions throughout the livestream, so submit them in the comments section of the original post at this link (not this weekly update!) or on Discord chat during the event.

Please do NOT post questions containing:

More than 3 questions in total
Bugs or other problems best posted in the bug forums
“When is this coming” or anything related to schedule (for those answers please refer to our quarterly updates or our post release plans)
Questions with more than a couple of sentences. Please keep them brief! We will likely understand the context of your interest, so just ask the question and we’ll be able to respond.

For bug reports and extra idea suggestions, please use the forums for this purpose.

A Final Thought: We see a LOT of repeat questions and requests. Please consider reading one of the other missed question posts, watching one of the previous post mortems, reading one of the post mortem transcripts, and/or reading our Post Episode 1 plan post before posting a question. Your question might have already been answered.

Keep an eye on @ShroudofAvatar for updates before, during, and after the livestream. See you on Twitch at 3:00 PM CT on March 2!

Release 51 on the QA Server

An early version of R51 went live on the QA server on Monday and players started testing almost immediately. They also started reviewing and offering feedback on an early version of the R51 post.

R51 is full of new content most of which is now on the QA server for early testing.

Framerate improvements
Skill Proficiency
Lost Vale
Scene Rebuilds: South Midmaer Way, South Fetid Swamp
Quests that reward Virtue Leggings
Tameable Wild Boars
Polished Bears
Vendor Patterns

Reminder that testing on QA makes you eligible for Testing Incentive Rewards including gold crowns, the Ant Farm, Antennae, Bug Cloak, and Bug Paintings!

For Rent Flier (and Boards)

[From a Forum Post by Starr “Darkstarr” Long]

Greetings Avatars,

We know that home ownership requires a large commitment of either real dollars or in-game gold. This can be quite daunting to new players. However, our game offers other options that many players may not even be aware of, including renting from other players or even free housing offered by generous owners. We want players to be aware of all the alternative housing options besides ownership. We have already added a link to the Rental Services & Free Places to Live subforum to all housing and property deed items in the store.

Starting with Release 51, all players will start with a flier in their backpack that also links to this subforum. In Release 52 we will also add Bulletin Boards with links to this subforum in all the starting cities. Please be sure to list your rental availability and free places in that subforum so players can easily find them. We have noticed a good number of the free locations are not listed in the Rental Services subforum and are instead listed in “New Player Welcome” and therefore will not be discovered via this new method.

If you have any questions about placing your own rental ad there, or how the forum marketplace works, you can post your questions in the general marketplace forum section, or contact a community team lead like @Berek or @Cerus to help you out.

Free Trial: Choose Any Path!

With Release 50, Free Trial users can now choose any of the three paths (Truth, Love, or Courage) to start, but after selection are locked to that single path going forward. We changed this from locking them to a path that we had chosen (Courage) because we felt this misrepresented a core part of the brand of the game, which is “choice in all things” (ex. choosing your path, no classes, choose virtue/non-virtue, etc.).

Free Trial access allows you to play the entire game in any of the Online modes with a few key differences in game play. You will be able to explore hundreds of scenes, talk with thousands of players, adventure through the opening quests, and gain experience and skills as you get used to the world of New Britannia!

Here is the updated list of Visitor limits:

The term (Visitor) is appended to their character name
Max skill level set to 50
NEW! Limited to a single Story Path (Truth, Love or Courage)
Cannot purchase nor sell items via Player Vendors nor Public Vendors
No ownership of player property nor use of player property signs
Cannot move/interact with items on a player property (even if given permissions)
Cannot interact with public chests
Cannot give items to other players via Trade or Mail
Cannot flag as Open PVP
Cannot gain nor create ransom items when you kill or are killed in PVP (in Open PVP zones)
Character data may be deleted if not eventually upgraded to a paid account
Cannot play in Offline Mode

Join us in New Britannia for free today!

Weekend Flash Sale: Hollow Log House, Trees & Plants

In honor of the in-game craftable hanging plants as well as the Log Cabin and Hollow Log homes that went into the game for Release 50, we are putting Trees, Plants, and the Hollow Log House on sale this weekend!

Get a look at the lineup below. All of the sale items are available on the Add-On Store, and several are also available for sale on in-game Gold Crown Merchants (located in Ardoris, Central Brittany, Resolute, Aerie, and Owl’s Head):

Job Opening: Executive Assistant

Thank you for your interest in Portalarium! We currently have an opening in Austin, Texas for a full-time, Executive Assistant position, as described below. If you’d like to join the Portalarium Tribe, the team building the ground-breaking Shroud of the Avatar game, please submit your resume/cover letter to: jobs@portalarium.com

Job Summary:

Assisting founder/CEO with company and personal administrative tasks including: managing calendars, making travel plans, meeting and event arrangements, payment and filing of invoices, managing mail, preparation of reports, and errands. General office administration tasks include coordinating general office activities and operations, maintain stocks of office supplies, manage phone calls and general office correspondence (e-mail, letters, packages etc.), support budgeting and bookkeeping procedures, create and update records and databases with personnel, financial and other data, assist colleagues whenever necessary.

Responsibilities and Duties:

Assist founder/CEO with company and personal administrative tasks including: managing calendars, making travel plans, meeting and event arrangements, payment and filing of invoices, managing mail, preparation of reports, and errands.Coordinating general office activities and operations
Assist executive staff and colleagues whenever needed
Maintain stocks of office supplies
Manage phone calls and general office correspondence (e-mail, letters, packages etc.)
Support budgeting and bookkeeping procedures
Create and update records and databases with personnel, financial and other data

Qualifications and Skills:

Minimum 2 years experience as an executive assistant to a C-level executive
Has a professional writing style that represents Portalarium and CEO well
Able to follow creative/technical/business conversations
Ability to craft business correspondence, as well as ~750 word articles when provided general ideas to develop
When given research materials or a publicly available topic to research, will be able to conduct search and summarize key points on a topic efficiently.
Able to efficiently translate assigned tasks (verbal or written) into prioritized checklists/schedules and can effectively manage those checklists/schedules.
Is able to self-organize and self-prioritize when necessary
Expert Outlook Calendar management, able to clearly detail pertinent event information
High attention to detail
High adaptability & takes feedback well
Self-driven with high work ethics, able to stay focused on work-related tasks, seeks out tasks during down time.
High level of self-reliance
Willingness to tackle all kinds of tasks for any and all admin needs
Proficiency with Microsoft Windows environment and Microsoft Office (Excel, PowerPoint, Word), Adobe Acrobat, Docusign, etc.
OPTIONAL: Basic accounting including use of Quickbooks
OPTIONAL: Familiarity with Google Docs, Google Sheets, Dropbox, Slack, and JIRA

This position starts as a full-time contract position with potential transition to full-time employee within 6-12 months. Once the transition to employee occurs, then the employee position includes company paid medical, dental, and vision through United Healthcare.

Job Types: Full-time, Contract

Salary: $15.00 to $22.50 /hour

Upcoming Events Calendar

Feb 22, 2018 – Release 51
Mar 2, 2018 – Release 51 Postmortem
Mar 13, 2018 – SXSW Interactive: Overhead Transit: Cable, Hyperloop, PRT & Drones
Mar 14, 2018 – Launch Event at Bob Bullock Museum
Mar 15, 2018 – SXSW Interactive: $100,000 Blockchain Investment Challenge
Mar 15, 2018 – SXSW Gaming: It’s Here! Shroud of the Avatar and What’s Coming Next
Mar 15 – 17, 2018 – SXSW Gaming Expo Booth 2516
Mar 17, 2018 – SXSW Gaming: The Ever-Evolving Nature of Game Crowdfunding
Mar 21 – 23, 2018 – GDC: Classic Game Postmortem: ‘Ultima Online’
Mar 27, 2018 – Release 52: Launch Candidate
April 26, 2018 – Release 53
May 31, 2018 – Release 54
June 28, 2018 – Release 55
July 26, 2018 – Release 56
Aug 21 – 25, 2018 – Gamescom
Aug 30, 2018 – Release 57

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.

Virtue Marathon 2018 This Sunday

Avatars, on your marks!

Join Lord British and the crew from Portalarium, AERIE Fund, and Meretz as we tackle the 5K, Half Marathon and Full Marathon to raise funds and awareness for the Children’s Miracle Network Hospital Network at the Austin Marathon 2018.

This event is open to all community members, friends and families to attend and/or support!

Austin Marathon Event Info:
When: Sunday, February 18th
Where: Downtown Austin, TX

Although the deadline to participate as a member of Team Avatars has passed, you can still show your support by making a tax-deductible donation (via this page) to the CMHN. Every bit helps and will push Team Avatars to cross that finish line!! Donate $25 or more to the CMHN and receive a Virtue Marathon 2018 in-game digital cloak! (pictured above). No need to attend the event in Austin to redeem.

See the full forum post for details!

The Magnificent Trophy Rooms Contest

Get your homes ready! You have the fun opportunity to show off your hunting heroism, crafting coordination, and trophy triumphs in this new three part contest.

Adding on to last year’s trophy room contest, we now have the wild boars and updated wolves to make into new trophies! Here’s how the contest will work…

PART 1: Hunt down a creature, defeat another player (to get their skull), or catch a fish!

PART 2: Craft the trophy from that creature (human skulls come as-is, no preparation needed…)

PART 3: Display your trophy triumphs in a single room of a house you have access to!

Submissions Must Include:

2-3 screens of combating a creature that can provide a trophy (1x with UI, 1x without)
2-3 screens of you in the crafting process for creating the trophies (2x with UI)
3 screens of your trophy room (1x with UI, 2x without UI, different angles, lighting, etc.)
Brief one paragraph description for each screenshot category. Please include as much basic detail about the location and other statistics that might be useful for others wanting to hunt the area to craft their own trophies.

Submit all screenshots in a single post response to This Forum Thread. Deadline to submit is Monday, Feb. 26 at 11:59pm CT.

[Read More…]

PaxLair’s Campground Sleepover – February 16 – 10pm CT

From Sean Silverfoot: Come to our sleepover at the PaxLair Campsite!

Date: February 16th, 2018 at 10pm NBT ~ Central Time (US)

Location: PaxLair Castle grounds ~ Arrive at dock, go to sign post choose Boundry #1 ~ Head down hill and make hard right ~ follow road lot is on left across from Tavern Building.

All stories should come in book form which we will want a copy of at the time to store for historic purposes. Please make sure your name is on them! To have your story read by DJ Alleine Dragonfyre on air it must be submitted to us no later than Thursday morning. The persons judged with with the best campfire stories will win prizes!

Dance music by Avatars Radio DJ. Prizes for best “sleepover” attire! Be creative and ready to show off your style! Gather round the campfire…

Congrats to The Syndicate Guild’s 22nd Anniversary!

Founded in 1996, The Syndicate (www.LLTS.org) turned 22 years old on February 1st. As one of the founding guilds in our SOTA community, The Syndicate is the Guinness World Record holder for the longest, continuously operating guild. Their online gaming presences host more than 1,200 members with many of them having been a part of the community for 10 to 20 years or more.

Annually they host SyndCon where several hundred members get together for 5 days. We at Portalarium have attended for the past several years and there is never a shortage of questions, comments and ideas about Shroud of the Avatar. In fact, the idea for the dragon statue that you can buy from the online store and even the very earliest concepts of player run towns came out of SyndCon.

The Syndicate stands out as the progenitor to what modern guilds have become. Since their founding, almost 100 million other guilds have come and gone yet they have found some kind of secret sauce to keep their presence alive and they are not shy about helping other communities tweak their formula for success when asked.

Within Shroud you may find The Syndicate in their capital city of Arx Draconis, or in one of their surrounding towns.

Did You Know: All Creatures Have Vulnerabilities!

Avatars! This is Elgarion from @SotAHelp with a regular “Did You Know?” feature. Expect to see these posted regularly on community channels, and here in the weekly update!

Did you know creatures in @ShroudofAvatar oft feature vulnerabilities to certain attack types? Undead are vulnerable to Sun and Life Magic yet resistant to Death Magic! Which of your encounters revealed such fantastical oddities, Avatar?

For future weekly updates, we will be rotating these Did You Knows with the Getting Started Videos and other community How-To posts. If you have a tip to share, please send them to Berek!

Recommended Projects to Support – Wasteland 3

Our friends over at inXile are well on their way to developing Wasteland 3! The game is a party-based role-playing game with complex story reactivity and strategic combat. It also features an engaging story utilizing a newly-revamped dialog tree system from Torment: Tides of Numenera!

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

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.