It's not ALL Foundations questions, I just thought that title would be funny. Moving right along:
Q: Why don't you ever ban cheaters?
A: In the same twenty four hour block of email that this question was included in, I had four people writing to complain about being banned for cheating – people saying they deserved another chance, that being banned for cheating was too harsh a penalty. (To which I say "wah," incidentally. I hear there are games out there that turn a blind eye towards cheaters, perhaps one of them will be happy to have you.) We do ban, and suspend, and do whatever we need to do. But we also don't discuss the action we take against an account with anyone but the owner of that account, and sometimes, it takes time to gather enough proof to ban. Just report cheating as you come across it, we will investigate. Remember, however, that just receiving a beat down doesn't mean the other guy was cheating. Think carefully, and then appeal.
Q: I got a drop called a Giant Ring, except it goes in the wrist slot. It's a ring, not a bracer, so is this a bug?
A: No, that's us being clever. The ring of a Giant must be really big, so big that a regular sized person could even wear it as a bracelet.
Q: How can I get my name to appear on the Housing Directory?
A: For now, you need to type /webdisplay trades. Until we get a new command in 1.64, we "piggybacked" the command onto the one that displays your trade skill level. If you want to keep your crafter skill off the Herald, but wouldn't mind being in the directory, just wait a little longer for the specific command.
Q: I got myself a nifty 100 BP rent token… only to discover that my lock box will only hold a maximum of 80. Yikes! What can I do!?
A: Hang onto your token until 1.64. We're putting in something to let you trade in your supersized token in exchange for five smaller tokens. (It's not a question of unstacking them – they aren't stacks. They are single tokens worth X amount.)
Q: In the access permissions for housing, one of the options you can enable is the option to banish? How do we go about banishing someone from our home?
A: The command is /boot (playername). You don't actually have to type the parentheses, and you should be standing inside your house with the one you wish booted on your target. So, if I want to boot a guy named Drizzt TheUnorginal out of my house, I would target him, and type /boot Drizzt - and then he's gone.
Q: Regarding the Unique Object Generator in the frontier. With my cleric, scout and wizard I have hunted out there a lot since the generator was put in the frontier. The drop rate is very, very good. Great place to farm for items for my new /leveled characters. However, it seems to be designed primarily for mages, necromancers, and reavers – all the class specific loot seems to be for them.
A: I asked the lead content producer, and he tells me that there is a camp with assigned loot for every class out in the frontier. It sounds like you're hanging out in the areas that are dropping mage, necro, and reaver loot, since that's all you're getting. Move around a bit more
Q: (Insert question about rent.)
A: Okay, here's the deal. You buy a lot. The weekly rent clock starts ticking the day you buy it. The AMOUNT of rent you pay is calculated by the size of your home. We don't allow for land speculators in our game, you must build on your property within one week of purchasing the land, or lose the lot. This is not a bug, this is entirely intentional – you have exactly seven days to build, or the system won't know what to charge you and will take back the lot.
So it doesn't matter when in that first week you build your house, rent is still due one week after you buy your lot. Buying a lot on July 1st in the evening, and waiting until the morning of the 8th to build, is more than likely borrowing trouble.
After you build your home, your house will want rent money dropped onto it (you can drop the money nearly anywhere on the interior or the exterior). The system *wants* you to have enough money on the house to pay your rent, and it will nag nag nag until you pay up. Every time you zone into the Foundations area that has your house and lot, you will see a message telling you that you need to pay, until sufficient funds are dropped onto the house. This warning isn't a joke! You will not see it unless you need to fork over more money.
To avoid losing your house, you should try to put money on your house as soon as you see the warning. If you wait until the last minute, you may find you've waited too long… and you'll have to get your things from the repo man.
As always, if your home disappears due to a bug, we will get it all back for you. We have extensive logs and can find out what we need to do if your loss was bug related (and who dropped money on the house, and when they dropped the money, and how much money was there) – just remember that pulling those logs takes a lot of time, and you may not hear back from us for a few days. Please don't appeal asking how we're doing on your appeal – that will make the process take longer for everyone, and even one minute extra feels like forever when it's your stuff you're asking about.
Q: It has been said that people on our server are claiming a keep, setting the keep level 10 , put the doors to lvl 4 and release it shortly after its lvl 10. This way they don't waste bounty sitting on a mid to low level keep for hours.
The reason they do this is to save bps. Making one keep lvl 10 keep releasing it and having it for 12+ hours this way burns less bounty points than setting the same keep lvl 5 and losing it one hour later 3x in one day.
My question is: IS this a Bug? Or are keeps SUPPOSED to remain at level 10 after you release them?
A: This was a bug we have since fixed. Keeps will revert to their start level when a guild chooses to release. But please note – DOORS remain at whatever level they were upgraded to until the keep falls and is taken over by the next invading force. Keeps cost bounty points to maintain, but door strength is based on wood and player crafting, with no maintenance costs.
Q: I heard that you were putting in a "search vendor" feature for the next patch. I'm looking for specific armor sets and would like to know whose porch I should go to. So, is it true?
A: Yes, the search vendor feature is scheduled for 1.64 (as in, no promises, but we're working on it right now). The search feature will work zone wide for each housing zone. (Each server has nine housing zones, and will soon have twelve.) So, just as in real life, if you don't like the selection at one mall, head over to the mall in the next county and see what they've got to offer. Twelve shopping areas should make for an interesting variety!
Q: Is it possible as a homeowner to set it so that all my characters can port home using the Hearth Scrolls? It seems now that only the actual person who bought the house can and all the alts cannot. The reason I find this very frustrating is that all my slots are filled and I play all my characters.
A: I understand the frustration. This has been a very popular question this week, and I have passed it and your feedback on – right now, all I can tell you is that it's not possible at this time, and we're looking into the different options.
Q: (Insert person here) was crossteaming. Do you care?
A: Yes, we care. From the head of in-game services: "If they suspect someone of cross teaming, they should appeal. We investigate every appeal regarding any violation. We do not, however, contact the customer back who appealed. We can't give out any info on any other account, so we can't tell them what actions we took, other than it was investigated."
Sanya here: I know a certain number of you (as befits the audience of a game set roughly in the medieval period) are fans of public hangings and guillotines set in the town square. But we have to run our customer service team by the standards of the modern era – and that means every account is entitled to privacy, and THAT means we can't tell you what we've done or not done and why to someone else's account.
Anyway, your appeals aren't going into a black hole; it is in our best interest to make our game as free of cheaters as possible.
Q: I was just wondering how a spell gets completely resisted. Not to be confused with the 'resists' stats that are raisable by items.
I was wondering if say, I had a level 50 Wizard with say 50 points in fire and 20 points in ice. Would my level 20 ice spells be resisted more because they are level 20 spells, or would they be resisted the same as my level 50 spells, only doing less damage? I wish to know this because it is important to how I'm basing my specs of some characters I wish to make.
A: Our spell designer told me that lower level spells are resisted more (they have a lower "to-hit" chance). Hope that helps!
All righty! I don't have much in the way of announcements, so… I'll just get out of the way and let you get to your weekend. For those of you who sent in NON-Foundations questions – I got them, they've been passed on, and I'm told I'll get the answers next week.