Sins of a New Year

We are back and eager to push out more updates. We've done 29 since March and we aim to continue the same pace in 2015. While I had expected to spend much of my holiday vacation away from Sins of a Dark Age, I actually spent a lot of the time watching Soada Twitch streams from a fantastic group of tightly knit new players, MMOBomb, and all our previous dedicated players.The simultaneous arrival of many new players and the networking effect of talented streamers has really helped to spread the word, shorten queue times and generate lots of constructive feedback. Personally, I think I underestimated the effect passionate streamers (including one crazy 24 hour streamer!) could have at this stage of development. As a result, we have decided to change a few things around in the schedule in order to implement some of their recommendations and add some further support for Sins of a Dark Age streaming. I'd like to call attention to a couple of the streaming changes in the works - though keep in mind this doesn't cover everything.First, we'll continue to issue keys to dedicated streamers which they can distribute at their discretion (contact keys@ironcladgames.com if you fit the bill). Next, we are going to phase out in-client screen capture for Twitch streaming. Unfortunately, Twitch discontinued support of their SDK which makes it difficult for us to optimize it as we can't access the code. But, on the bright side it looks like streamers prefer to use dedicated software like OBS which are regularly updated with optimizations and customization features. So, instead of trying to replace dedicated streaming software we are going to focus on providing in-game support in other ways. The simplest example is we are going to improve our other Twitch integrations like being able to send and receive Twitch chat from within the game client.A more elaborate Twitch integration goal is to allow Sins of a Dark Age Twitch streamers to giveaway rewards to viewers. Each official streamer will receive a special button that will randomly select a viewer and give them a Sins of a Dark Age gift. These may include crafting material bundles, recipes, Hero Gear or even a Hero Skin! The more viewers you have the better the reward. Once used, the gifting power will go on cooldown but you can reduce the cooldown by streaming. We hope this will help tighten the relationship between streamer, viewer and Soada.The Sins of a Dark Age community is growing and development continues at a steady pace. Looking forward to a great 2015! Thanks for the support!