[FirebrandCrestOfArma]

Avec un peu de retard par rapport à sa publication, voici le Developers' Desk du mois d'août 2008. Celui-ci est plus excitant qu'à l'habitude avec, bien sûr, le redimensionnement des plots et les Reclamations, mais aussi de nouveaux bâtiments raciaux très attendus et le travail qui continue sur le Blighted Labyrinth. Vivement les prochains patch notes de Blight!


My Fellow Istarians,

As summer winds down and those of you escaping the heat behind your computers start to emerge, we continue to work tirelessly on multitudes of exciting projects (so tirelessly, in fact, we worked right past our July Developer's Desk). Before you wander out in to the bright sunlight to watch the leaves turn, let us bring you up to date on what has been happening here in Istaria.

After many announcements and discussions, the much anticipated Plot Reclamation began in late July. This past month the content team took a close look at the housing situation in Istaria. As you have probably heard by now, we've reclaimed plots from those who had not paid their rent (subscription fee) and set a temporary lock down on the buying and selling of plots across Istaria. This has enabled the team to take a fresh look at the world and set a new minimum standard for plot sizes. They will continue to work in August on resizing plots in communities across Istaria.
The current plan is to finish this "plot revamp", and launch plot auctions soon after that. So prepare your building supplies for the luxuriously larger plots that are soon to come.

In addition to newer and larger plots, our art team has been compiling lists and ideas on new buildings. Requests for Gnomish tinkering shops and Saris housing - just to name a few - have been pouring in, so keep an eye out for announcements on the release of new racial buildings and the return of some old favorites. We haven't forgotten about the Lairs though. You can expect a dozen or more new dragon murals to come, along with the release of the brand new Transmutation Chamber. So keep an eye on the community site for a sneak preview.

The Summer Festival is in full swing outside of Tazoon. If you haven't stopped by yet then grab a friend and enjoy the food, fireworks, and fun in celebration of Pax Istaria. Looking forward to the excitement of the Fall Festival? We are too! The development team continues work on the contests and goodies that will come in celebration of the changing season.

In the adventuring world, work continues on the Blighted Labyrinth that was first announced a few months ago. Our hard working art team is working along side the content team to bring you some of the creatures and items that were planned for the Labyrinth when this project was first proposed.
They're also looking at this as a way to provide some much needed "end-game" content to those dedicated crafters and adventurers who have been patiently waiting for new challenges. Unfortunately I'm still sworn to secrecy regarding any more specifics than that, but as a hint, I can tell you that the phrase "under lock and key" comes to mind for part of the content.

As always, the team continues to work on fixing bugs as they are reported and time allows. We appreciate the player feedback that we get outlining various bugs and issues that come up with the game. For example, players reported that in one of our more recent patches the wisp residue left behind when a wisp was "born" was causing many players to have their own special "disco floor" around the residue. As it wasn't intended to send any player into a 70's dancing flashback, the team worked together and was able to find, and fix this problem on our internal test servers. The fix will be patched out with our next delta, so keep watch on the community website for patch notes.

You will see a new feature out of game that has been added to our Customer Support Services. We are now allowing players to transfer characters from one live shard (Chaos or Order only) to another for a one time transfer fee of $24.95 per character. Such transfers are limited to once every 3 months for a particular character, and will only occur between Order and Chaos.
Character copy to the Blight test shard will remain free. Characters will be transfered with their personal inventory only, which includes what is in their vault at the time of the transfer request. They will not own a plot on the shard which they are moving to, nor will they be given any of the items or novians for structures, that were on the plot owned on the previous shard. Feel free to deconstruct structures or sell plots before requesting a transfer. Please note that this is a transfer - not a copy - so the character will be deleted from the original shard.

We have also added the ability for players to request that a character they deleted be restored to their account for a one time fee of $24.95 per character. We will make every attempt to restore the character to the status it was in when it was deleted, but if the character can not be restored for some reason, we will refund the fee and notify you via email.

Both of these services can be requested by adding a Character Transfer Token or Character Recovery Token to your account through the account management center at https://accounts.istaria.com. Once you've added the appropriate token, please submit your request through the support site at http://support.istaria.com.

We look forward to bringing you more new developments. While the temperatures outside drop, the excitement in Istaria soars.

- Amarie

Please join us on our forums to discuss this month's Developer's Desk email: http://community.istaria.com/forum/s...d.php?p=195730