AC - Weekly Update 07/25/07 : AC News

Hello there and welcome to this week’s edition of the Asheron’s Call update!

First and foremost I want to start off talking about the reasoning behind the changes that were made to The Master and the robe, since that seems to be the main discussion going on post patch.

When that section of the Colosseum was first introduced in June, it was found that it was entirely too easy for players to get to the master. It was originally intended to work as it does now, meaning you would need to finish the Colosseum before you would gain access to The Master. Once we found that there was an issue with how the quest was working, the decision was made that it needed to be fixed. A side effect of this issue was that players were able to acquire the rewards much easier than we had intended. We did not feel however that this was an issue that warranted additional downtime to fix, as we try to keep the amount of downtime to a minimal amount.

Over the course of the rest of the month, players found that this was a rather easy way to level mules and alternate characters, which was not our intention. This task as a whole was/is supposed to difficult. When the fix was put in, I somehow missed it on the list of changes that were made going in for the July event. That of course makes it appear as if we were trying to deceive players, which we were not. That was a simple mistake made in gathering the information, and I apologize for that.

The thinking behind the changes made to the robe were pretty straight forward. We felt that it was not fair to those who would have to work hard to get to the master once he was working as we intended, if we allowed all those people who had done the quest when it was not right to keep the reward, which was not comparable to the amount of work they had to do to acquire the robe. The point is that the risk vs reward factor was way off base with how the whole thing worked in the June event. That robe is considered by many to be one of the best items in the game. To be able to get something like that with almost no effort and make an huge amount of xp once you have already done it was not something that we wanted. So the change was made.

Should people have had more warning this change was coming? Absolutely. Do we feel this change was necessary? Definitely. Will we try to not have this happen again in the future? Yes.

Again we apologize for not giving you the proper warning that this change was coming, but in the grand scheme of things we feel it was needed.

We put in what we hope is the final adjustment to address the few remaining players who were still getting booted for CoC violations. As far as we can see this latest adjustment has pretty much resolved the issue. If anyone is still getting booted, we suggest making sure all of your third party applications are up to date and that you are not running any questionable programs. We will of course continue to monitor the situation to be sure, but as of right now it appears we can finally move on to other things.

A couple of questions about Live ops have come up so I Just wanted to let everyone know that as of right now we have not scheduled anything yet, but Geneva has submitted a couple of ideas for us to look over. Once they have the official ok, then it will be up to Geneva to get things going. Keep an eye on the Live events forum for any announcements or scheduled events.

That is about it for now. Everyone have a great week and see you all in Dereth!