http://ac.turbine.com/?page_id=516
New Content and Functionality
- The Colosseum.
This is pretty much what it sounds like. The Colosseum is a dungeon of sorts with repeatable content. The premise is very simple. Players will enter the Colosseum and fight their way through increasingly difficult stages. There is no timer on repeating, so players will be able to enter The Colosseum as often as they would like, as long as their initial 60 minute timer is up.
Players of any level will be able to participate, but The Colosseum is geared towards fellowships. In order to go through, you must be part of a fellowship. When players enter, they will be in a staging area which will be used by everyone. This is a great place to get your fellowships together, or to find a group to tag along with. Once in a fellowship, one person will need to purchase a ticket at a reasonable cost from a nearby NPC. That person will then give the ticket to the starter NPC who will lock the fellowship and let them know they can enter The Colosseum.
The initial download time upon entering is a bit longer than most places. The drop is not hot so players are safe upon entrance and should only have to go through this download once. Once you hand in your ticket, your fellowship will have 1 hour to finish the Arena from the time that they start. After this time is up they will all be teleported out of the arena and will be able to speak to the NPC to get their reward. The rewards will depend on how far the fellowship has made it in The Colosseum. If you die in the arena you will be able to re-enter through the first door and then go through all the doors that you have passed through, they will remain open and the creatures will remain dead in previous stages as long as you are within the 1 hour time limit allotted to your fellowship. We have made The Colosseum an area in the game where you will not drop death items, due to very high possibility of people not being able to recover their corpses.
There will be 5 branches of The Colosseum so 5 fellowships full of players may do The Colosseum every hour. Once a fellowship is inside a branch of The Colosseum, that branch is locked from letting other players in. In the coming months we have plans to further update The Colosseum with things such as Boss fights, which can be unlocked by completing various stages in The Colosseum. We have also made it possible for higher level players to skip the first few low levels if they so choose.
- Squelch Panel
The Squelch Panel has been added to the game. Players will be able to locate the Squelch Panel on their social tab. In order to add a player to your squelch list, simply add the players name to the space provided in the panel and hit the Squelch Character button. If you want to squelch the account associated with that character, just hit the squelch account button after putting the character name in the space provided. The display will tell players if it is an account or character squelch.
- Craft Buffing Pets
Craft Buffing Pets have been added to the game. These pets will provide buffs to Cooking, Alchemy, Fletching, and Lockpick. These buffs are stackable with all other similar spells.
- NPC Interactions
Once again the team has been hard at work trying to discover ways we can continue to improve the tech and functionality of Asheron's Call. One of the things that is being developed is the ability for NPC's to determine what a player has in their packs. For example, if Player A has 10 diamond powders in their pack and they talk to a certain NPC, that NPC will be able to see that and decide what message to send to Player A. This will give us the ability to start offering questing choices. So a player who has a particular item or items in their pack may get a different response then the player next to him who doesn't. While this may not seem overly exciting, it will give us the opportunity to do some things with player, NPC interactions that we had not been able to do in the past.
Miscellaneous Changes and Improvements
- The Pallid and Squallid Moars were not able to be hit by melee attacks. This has been fixed and these creatures can now be hit by our melee friends
- Based on player feedback Bosh Bosh will now drop tokens that players can turn in to the kill task NPC for the title and the xp.
- The Regal Quarterstaff had the display name of Noble Quarterstaff. This has been fixed and it should now have the proper name
- Falatacot created portals on Bur now have the correct artwork
