Deed upgrades will give a credit to a home purchase until 4/2/2019 9pm CST

Any deed upgrade will grant you a credit of 1/3 (one third) of the COTO price to a new home. Email Atos in-game with the home you want to purchase and the purchase price of the home and he will send you the home. He did some of this live on stream.

In addition, if you upgraded a deed and you have an expired home, he offered to upgrade that expired home to the next home that matches that lot size. This is pretty huge and something you need to check out.

New Patches

There is a new patch going out tonight that includes 3 separate builds. There are two more patches coming after this one. Terrain issues are taking a while to fix and that is why there will be more builds to progressively push out all of the fixes. This unity upgrade hit pretty hard. 12 maps should be fixed in this patch.

There is a shader upgrade that allows for terrain instancing which allows for offloading work from the CPU to the GPU. This might allow for the episode 2 zone to be a much larger overworld map. This sounded really interesting. It still sounds like the overworld map for ep. 2 will not be an adventure zone, just a larger map that allows for more detail. Bottom line: that tech should be in-game this release and fully vetted by the time they add on the episode 2 lands.

IL2CPP will be in the very last patch of this series. This allows for compile time optimization of the code instead of real-time. This takes work off of our game machines and bakes it into the executable. It allows for a deeper optimization, as well.

Totems

Chris went into detail on what went wrong with the Lich totems. Kobold totems were copied and pasted from the Lich totem objects and not all of their attributes were updated correctly, so when you made the recipe for the Kobold 1 totem a Lich 6 was given to the crafter. This doesn't sound correct, since we saw in-game that one person had multiple copies of the totem listed for sale. Anyway, he confirmed that the next patch removes those Tier 6 Lich totems and switches them back to the correct Level 1 Kobold totem.

He mentioned a separate issue that was rewarding level 2 kobold totems incorrectly and players were being allowed to keep those, so... k. It's tough to know what's actually going on with exploits. Obviously, Portalarium doesn't want to scream from the roof top that there's an exploit and explain how to reproduce it, because people will just go hog wild.

Shroud of the Avatar Episode 1 book

Some people were awarded a physical copy of the book (forgot the name) and that is being held up by a copyright issue that Darkstarr is in the middle of resolving. It doesn't sound like the publisher or author believed Portalarium had a right to physical copies of the book.

What's the total gold value of all items in-game?

7.3 billion gold. Chris didn't say what values he was using for each item in-game. Is it the average price of items on player owned vendors or npc vendors? He didn't get into details as this was just a quick contest. The guessed ranged all the way up into the trillions lol.

7.3 billion gold equates to $401,500 to $474,500 of value on the forums, which ranges from $5.5 to 6.5 per 100,000 gold. With that number in mind, I would lean toward this number being based on NPC vendor prices, which are very low.

Dropping Quests

Someone asked about the ability to drop a quest from your log book. Dropping a quest in a chain of quests can cause havoc evidently, so it's not immediately evident that that ability will be available. What if we want to just hide the quest somewhere and not delete it? There was no answer.

Infinite Bait Exploit

Chris explained that a player had edited the local game memory to give themselves infinite bait in-game. This would allow them to catch 1 blood leech, change the count in his local memory and fish indefinitely with that one piece of bait. The server was accurately tracking the real count of bait in his inventory, but the client didn't stop them from fishing with blood leeches.

This is hacking plain and simple. It did not sound like it resulted in any ban of the player, which has happened in the past when players gave themselves super speed or strength even online mode and stream it happening.

This exploit should not be available any longer, so that's good.

Elrond Got a Shout Out

Chris claimed that Elrond was a "good and fair crafter" and if he could put that on a billboard in-game, he would. Elrond was getting some hate and Chris backed him. Elrond is a very high-level crafter in-game and runs Crafters Town. It's probably one of the most amazing single player displays of vendor goods in-game. In the past, there have been towns dedicated to one players trade, but I doubt any of them ever had as many items listed as Elrond.

The other crazy single-player displays is Cristiano Kimberlin's steady take over of Brittany Alleys. He's been buying lots and has branded all of his locations with heraldry. It's impressive! He literally just offered to buy my lot in there, as I wrote this.

Taunt

We all knew taunt was screwed, but did we know how messed up it was? Well a level 1 taunt ability had the same effect as a level 100 taunt ability. Well, well. This won't be fixed until the next release, so hang in there true believers.

There are some mobs that can entirely wipe aggro, so there will be some skill required by the taunter to keep aggro. Death bunnies specifically were mentioned, so it seems like we might see several bosses with the ability to clear all taunt stats and attack the highest DPS or healer in the group until a taunt is cast. Cool!

Bludgeon's Will Be Improved Next Release

Promises, promises. Bludgeon's are a great farming weapon, when you have specialized in the weapon as you get two knock out abilities and can basically paralyze a mob for 30 seconds. Watch Alphaine's stream to see the master a work (except in PvP, bludgeons are terrible in PvP). Chris gave no specifics.

Dungeon Spawner Tech May Be Available as Town Spawners

Player-owned town owners that want to create a special event or challenge in their town may get the ability to add a spawner like the one placed in the dungeon in their town and give their residents a challenge.

This sounds really cool and an opportunity for town owners to create great Role Playing or PvE challenges independently of a GM.

Vendor Upgrades

This part of the stream made me nuts. Chris gave no definitive answers on WHAT was to be done to player-owned vendors. There's plenty to do. I have listing fatigue myself. I have to list and relist several 100 items per day (Titania Xylia in-game). Changes that would alleviate that fatigue are more than welcome IMO, but we don't even know what they are doing, so....

Wizard Smoke is going to be doing this work, but the Ranking System comes first!

Ranking System Updates

Chris was jumping from topic to topic quickly, but he did list off the potential ranking systems:

PvP

Crafter

Vendors

Top Dungeons

Top Dungeons sounded interesting. Chris detailed that you could interact with the town crier and he would tell you which dungeons have been played the most and which were the largest. I want just a simple world-wide interface for finding dungeons, however, leveraging the town criers would be cool too.

The others sounded like there would be a global interface associated with them, but the system sounds like it is in the design phase.

Ranking systems will come before vendor upgrades.

Streaming on Twitch is helping Shroud of the Avatar Grow

Chris has definitively claimed that he sees an increase in new players joining the game now that he streams. I think he's right. The shroudoftheavatar stream generally draws over 100 viewers and often up to 150 and that's growing. It's easy for someone browsing content on stream to see the value of a stream of that size and drop by. Hopefully, Chris keeps building the following with regular streaming and begins to snowball the overall audience on twitch. Chris has gotten really good about raiding another streamer, as soon as, he wraps up his stream, so stream shroud of the avatar! It's free marketing and the best way to relate the game to new players.

Tooltip Delays Will Be User-definable

I am sure you've all been exposed to the seizure inducing tooltips before. Well, after 5 years, Chris hates them too and stated that the delay should be user-definable, so hovering over an item won't pop-up the item details instantly any longer.

Deco Contest Confirmed

So, it was not an April Fool's joke. A player-owned town will be given away as the top prize of the crafting contest. See the reasoning in my last post.