I had a whole bunch of announcements, so much so that they made their own grab bag. Read on!
You may have noticed that the "guild bounty points in exchange for guild house rent" NPCs were removed from the 1.63 patch notes. Our goal is to get this feature back in the game with the 1.64 patch, just FYI.
Undocumented feature alert: our rent collecting system will check your consignment merchant for money if the rent is due and you've forgotten to put the gold on your house. The system will always check the house for money first, but the money on the consignment merchant does act as a little safety net.
Got a fun in game event you'd like to share with the rest of the community? Did you just make 50? Did your favorite crafter finally achieve LGM status? Did your character get married in game? Look up and check out the Community News tab there at the top of the Herald. Submit a story today!
In recent weeks, a number of "returning" customers have asked if there's any way to acquire a year and nine months of patches without that agonizing download. There is now -
http://www.mythicstore.com/merchant.CFM?pid=79&step=4. We're charging for the cost of the CD and our time to burn it – but it's free if you buy anything else from the store.
Just in case you weren't aware, we have an informal "good citizen" reward program. The first person to report an exploit or a dupe without first exploiting it receives a prize. Just today I talked to a gentleman who reported a dupe to us (first testing it with a hat pattern, to see if it truly was a dupe). From next Monday onwards, he'll be playing the game for free, and he and his wife will be our guests as beta testers in every closed beta from now on. It's the least we could do for someone who directly contributed to the betterment of the game. So, should you find something with the potential to be seriously harmful to the game, please send an appeal with all the information, and an email to me (Sanya@mythicentertainment.com, with the header DUPE). The reward depends on the severity of the problem (i.e., not everything scores a free account
), but I will demonstrate our gratitude in some way if you're indeed the first to report the problem, and you've done so in honesty and good faith.
A frequently asked question – do you guys at Mythic play the game? We sure do. We even send around little emails when another of our characters hits 50 or saves up enough to get their house =) We belong to a number of different guilds (anonymously, of course!) to get a better view of the "player on the street" perspective. We also play independently, to check out the feel of the game for those that choose to remain unguilded. So be nice to random strangers :P. I particularly appreciate the nice people that give my little lowbies piles of gold. You see, Mythic people can be and have been fired for *any* form of cheating in Dark Age of Camelot. We do not help ourselves, or friends, under any circumstances with exp or gold or items. In fact, we do not log into live servers with anything but a naturally grown and leveled (or /leveled) character. As a result, we have to scrimp for that first suit of "good" armor just like everyone else.
We can and do create characters and gold on Pendragon out of thin air – it's often necessary for testing purposes. But the live servers will never be subjected to mysterious characters appearing out of thin air, and no one on a live server will suddenly wield a magic weapon or come into a huge pile of gold. Too many of us have played MMOGs for too long. That kind of behavior destroys the integrity of the game, and is useless to us anyway – we know you cannot make balance decisions by creating a character and jumping into the game with no context or experience.
And, that's all I've got tonight. The questions will return next week.