Letter to the Players

[Sun_al-Mage]

Liest sich ja sehr interessant , auch der Allegiance Chat Channel


January 2004
Letter to the Players


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Welcome to the first Letter to the Players of 2004! This will be a very exciting and challenging year for Asheron's Call. Hopefully by now you've seen the announcement that Turbine is purchasing the Asheron's Call franchise from Microsoft. If you've missed that somehow, just check out the announcements on Turbine's Asheron's Call website.

One thing that you'll be seeing more of in the next few months is information from us. In addition to updates regarding the transition of services from Microsoft to Turbine, we'll have more information from the Live Team regarding where the game is and where it's going. Some of these articles will be questions that we ask you, the fans, similar to our PK Lite request for feedback. Other articles won't focus as much on questions, but will be more like informal essays about our plans and goals for various game mechanics and content. We look forward to sharing our ideas with you, and we know we'll get a lot of great feedback either way.

Things have been equally as busy in Dereth. To the surprise of many, High Queen Elysa Strathelar awoke from her coma with a new drive and determination. The High Council has been restructured, and Nuhmudira is no longer a member.

Many have sought the identity of the High Queen's would-be assassin and have been well-rewarded for their efforts. Meanwhile, the Undead fight the Olthoi deep in the bowels of Dereth.

It is a new year both in our world and in Dereth, and this new year brings many changes. We believe you'll be very excited about them—we know we are!

Allegiance Chat
In the January event, we'll be introducing a feature that many of you have been asking about for some time—server-wide allegiance chat!

Our initial implementation of allegiance chat is very straightforward—if I am in an allegiance, and I type @a Hi! or /a Hi!, all the members of my allegiance will see [Allegiance] Ibn says, "Hi!"

If you are in an allegiance, you will be added into your allegiance chat channel as soon as you log in. If you aren't in an allegiance, you'll be added as soon as you swear to a patron, or have someone swear to you.

If you do not wish to see Allegiance chat, type @filter –allegiance, just as you would for any other message type. When you want to see it again, type @unfilter –allegiance. If you @squelch a character, you will no longer see that character's speech in Allegiance chat.

We plan to add a number of additional features to Allegiance chat, as time permits. For example, currently there is no way for a monarch to remove someone from the Allegiance chat channel other than removing that character from the allegiance completely. We hope to introduce that feature, as well as other options, shortly.

We're also very excited about other possible uses for this technology. Zyrca, srand, and Gator – our server engineer—worked very hard to make this possible, and it creates a number of opportunities. You should see more information from us on this soon.

January Event Delayed
So, those are two bits of good news...here's the bad news. You will have to wait a little longer than expected to get these two new features, as well as the rest of the great content we have planned for the January event. We are moving our event date back in order to allow for the Asheron's Call 1 server datacenter move, currently planned for January 20 through January 23. (Click here for more information on the move.)

You might be thinking, "Why not just make the January event live during the move downtime?" This is something that we did consider. However, we want to make sure that the worlds are running normally after the move before we make any changes to them. To that end, the January event is now currently scheduled for Tuesday, January 27.

AC1 ACCMTY Forums
As per this post, on February 1, we'll be moving official support from the AC1 ACCMTY forums to the Turbine AC1 forums located here. We will not be doing any live team support on the ACCMTY forums after that. Update your bookmarks!

The Singularity Caul
Recent events have hinted at some major changes in store for the Caul. With that in mind, I bring you a warning:

DO NOT leave any characters logged off ANYWHERE on the Caul when the worlds come down for the January event! Not if you value their lives and death items, that is!

That's all for now. Remember, we still have a long road ahead of us as the transition continues. We'll provide more information whenever we can. Thanks for sticking with us. I hope you're as excited as we are!

See you in Dereth!

-- Ibn