Developer's Desk June Edition (discussion)

[Amarie Ancalimon]

Please use this thread to discuss this month's Developer's Desk email.

[lightning claw]

Awesome !!! *wipers a bit that cant play atm *

Hate to poke you but can we have a tid bit about the "Seasonal Summer event " you have leaked in ether the last Devs desk or i think it was the one be for

can you throw us a cuppel of trinkets ?


Pleas Pleas Keep the blighted ankiors spawn up but this time add more ages! something all ped's and dragons alike can join in to (Harder to kill maybe )

[Nisse]

It's interesting to hear the tier 2 revamp is coming up.

Is it can be time for Crankenspank's return?

I miss that ole' goon :>

[Vahrokh]

My feedback:

Since, unlike in the merge, in:

Guild Communities
http://community.istaria.com/forum/s...ad.php?t=18496

...I don't read about plot owners getting a "plot token" I suppose all those who have an active subscription will just keep what they have.

Starting with this assumption (which might be wrong, I don't know), when I read about:

As we prepare for plots to be reclaimed and made available for purchase, we are also looking closely at communities where the plots are too small to be useful. In the coming weeks the design team will be looking through various communities through the world, starting with guild communities where plots were very small, and resizing them to be larger where possible. We'll continue this "Community Revamp" past the time that plot reclaim and auctions happen in hopes of making each community as attractive and useful a place for players to build as possible within land constraints.

I feel like to ask for the following:

- Are lairs a valuable part of a community for you?

- Hence, are lairs going to be looked at?

- Hence, are all the sea level lairs going to be fixed? As of now my guild at Baker is sensibly damaged for having the lairs at sea level, unsold despite lairs are so scarce, because if you enter them you drown. I consider this fully about being "in hopes of making each community as attractive and useful a place for players to build as possible within land constraints".

- Otherwise, if you are unable to fix all those lairs, are all those who are faithfully paying for a yearly plot enabled subscription instead of a basic subscription (and totally unable to even enter their lair) going to be reimbursed? And getting a plot token to be sure they will be able to get a lair after reclaimations since they own one right now?

Because as of now:

http://support.istaria.com/support-c...=CDU-17253-569

my May 8 ticket has been closed and I have never heard of any response again.

Greetings,
I have passed this information onto the live team. I can assure you that we will be looking into a resolution for this issue that can be patched out to the live servers ASAP. Thank you

For someone paying for a plot "slot" since:

Grandfather Subscription - 12 Month 09/15/2007 09/15/2008 PayPal (Can Use Credit Cards) $119.40

I think I might be entitled entering my lair, which happens to be in my guild land and in a very nice "sight" of a mountain over the sea.

I'd also settle back for another of my guild community lairs, if only they weren't all bugged.

[Guaran]

Welcome news on the plot resizing.

I like Vahrokh's suggestion that lairs also be considered for a bit of resizing as well. I've found I barely had room for all 5 t6 craft rooms and a t5 hall. And if a new transmutation chamber comes in thats a seperate room, I will not have anyplace to build it. I did the best I could with the space to make a nice, relatively easy to navigate lair (means not every nook and cranny on every level is used) but do hope to have room for that last t6 craft shop if needed.

[Salis]

Indeed, an upsize of many lairs, aswell as the bugfixing of those at sea levels, would be very welcome.
More lairs would be welcome too.
Also to make any community attractive, a portal pad in and a teleporter out would be a nice addition. Many communities even with larger plots in them stay unpurchased due to the unacttractiveness of not being able to get it and out fast.

Salis

[Takora Drakan]

Like lightning claw said, a summer festival would be a very nice idea, but you have more important things going on at the moment, maybe next year?

I hope our poor biped friends will benefit from the plot resizeing, smaller than 60x60 is very bad for a biped, they can barley fit machines on them. And please merge/remove those many tiny 25x25 plots, noone wants them, really.

[Vlisson]

ok nothing new

but i like that you resize some useless plots

[Vahrokh]

Originally Posted by Vlisson

ok nothing new

but i like that you resize some useless plots

It looks like "nothing new" but they:

- created a program to detect and mail warn people going out of plots.

- are redesigning plots. In case you wonder how nice and comfortable the thing is, I suggest you open a random file in your world cache folder. There's a sadistic amount of flags, tags and information to change, plot by plot, sector by sector. Even with an editor I think I'd throw my computer out of the window after some hours, a la Lunus way.

[Amarie Ancalimon]

A few points to clarify:

When I say "plots" unless I specifically say "and lairs", I'm usually meaning both.

That said, existing lairs can not be resized without causing all sorts of issues on the live servers. Issues that we aren't going to set ourselves up to deal with. So lairs are not a part of the resizing plans.

Now with THAT said, fixing "water logged" lairs is an on going process that we will continue to work on. If you believe your lair (or one in your community) is having flooding issues and needs to be pumped out, and we aren't aware of that, please do let us know. We keep a list of lairs that our world building team needs to put their "sump pump" into action on.

[Deth]

I was hoping my self that the request for bigger lairs were a joke. Complaining that you can not fit every T6 chamber is your lair is a little over the top I think when most plots can barely fit 1 maybe 2 T6 buildings. But otherwise good info.

[Vahrokh]

Originally Posted by Amarië Ancalímon

Now with THAT said, fixing "water logged" lairs is an on going process that we will continue to work on. If you believe your lair (or one in your community) is having flooding issues and needs to be pumped out, and we aren't aware of that, please do let us know. We keep a list of lairs that our world building team needs to put their "sump pump" into action on.

How do we know of what lairs are you aware of? Is there a list of "known bugged" lairs to check out?

I know of two isles with multiple "flood risk" lairs. All have the entrance at near sea level. I'd gladly go and check them out for you, but (possibly because they are bugged?) they are not built enough to go deep inside to report back.

In fact, if they owners did like me, it's not immediately apparent that the lairs are bugged (and dragons are tall and see the effects later). I made a plot plan spanning in the depths and "walked inside it" (drowned, had to recall and this automatically erases the whole plan ).

Still unsure wether it was a true error or just an odd bug in the plan editor, I kept building but in the end I indeed met water even with real corridors and slope.

Finally, is this ongoing plan to fix lairs something to rely on? I mean, I'd love to keep my lair as it's in a place I like (and in the guild town area) but I would not want to end up not bidding on a working lair and then be stuck with the broken lair because everyone else grabbed all the working lairs for themselves.

[Deth]

*Emissary Hat on*

The safest way to do it would be to start a thread down in bugs and request that people only post locations of lairs that have the problem that way we the players and the devs both have a list to look at and people know where to go to check if they have one to add or if it has already been listed.

*Emissary Hat off*

[Amarie Ancalimon]

Originally Posted by Vahrokh

How do we know of what lairs are you aware of? Is there a list of "known bugged" lairs to check out?

Because if you have one of the bugged lairs, you know that you've submitted a support ticket on it or not.

We don't intentionally make lairs that are bugged and underwater. In fact, I think I'm pretty safe in saying that the only lairs we know of that are having water issues are those that have been reported already.

I can try to get a list from our world builder of those lairs he's aware of, but as Deth said, the best way to get a comprehensive list (if that's what you're looking for) is probably to ask here on the forums who has reported their lair as bugged.

[Hoberton]

Nice Developer's letter but one thing was missing. The two new Dragon spells. Was hoping to hear that discussion was possibly happening to take off the limitation of who can scribe and make these two spell formulas.