It being Friday, there is of course another Update of the Avatar — the 81st, if you can believe it — posted on the Shroud of the Avatar website. And since Golem Dragon is out for the evening, you get one of my somewhat condensed summaries of the update, instead of his more comprehensive coverage thereof.

Shroud of the Avatar was shown off at RTX 2014 — Portalarium has partnered with Rooster Teeth in the past to promote the game — recently, and evidently it was a hit with the crowd.

What a blast RTX was last weekend! Over 30,000 attendees flooded the Austin Convention Center during the RTX weekend event! The attendees were not your usual hard-core MMO gamers, so we had the opportunity to introduce Shroud of the Avatar to thousands of players that had never heard of it before! And they loved it! Several team members and their significant others hosted the booth, including Starr Long, Rick & Brekken Holtrop, Finn Staber, Brandon Cotton, Joseph Toschlog, Ken Pfile, Geoff and Becca Mellon, Chris Spears, and even one of our Lord of the Manor backers, “Winfield”! They all said the response was 100% positive from everyone they demonstrated the game to!

You can find additional pictures from the event in the Update. (One notes that RTX 2014 was, unless I am greatly mistaken, Rustic Dragon’s last outing as a Portalarium staff member. A bittersweet thing, that.)

PvP is another big topic in this Update, which makes sense given that Portalarium has completely shifted the focus of the upcoming pre-alpha Release 8 so as to add initial PvP systems to the game. Chris Spears’ comments on it more or less lay out the attention that Portalarium is giving to PvP as Release 8 draws near:

We are now one (short) week into our 8 or 9 week sprint to make combat and PVP FUN! While the team as a whole is always redefining what it means to be agile developers, we’re taking it up a notch further while working on this particular section.

We went and found the people on the team most interested in it, cleared their schedules of almost all other work, and are having them focus exclusively on PVP and combat. Every day we do a PVP play session together with the whole team. After the session, the small group involved with combat get together and discuss what stuff needs the most love for that day. We write it all on a whiteboard and decide who is going to be working on which items. Tasks are created and assigned and then the whiteboard is erased.

And apparently, the Portalarium team spend at least half an hour each day in a PvP free-for-all, which evidently takes place in the basement arena of a castle home. Which I suppose is a good thing — more testing is preferable — though I confess I’d rather see them work on a feature that isn’t particular to the online component of the game. NPC schedules, for example, would be a welcome addition, and would be a small measure of reassurance for those who backed the game for its single-player component.

If you’re a Developer+ backer of Shroud of the Avatar, one of the rewards you qualify for is to help create an NPC for the game. This process has actually kicked off; Portalarium are now accepting submissions of NPC names for the city of Ardoris. (Where’s that, you ask? Check here.)

Some notes:

• We have well over 2,000 backers at the Developer tier who qualify for this reward. We had discussed if there was any way to enable that many backers to supply dialogue for their NPCs but as some of you already surmised, given the sheer number of NPCs to be added, that isn’t going to be possible. We still *very* much want to bring player-written NPCs into the game, and will continue to discuss how best to make that happen while still maintaining a high level of quality and polish for our game’s story and dialogue.
• NPC visual customization, as you may have noticed, is still at a very early stage in development. Right now for the backers who want to be added to Ardoris, we cannot offer any visual customization options beyond our standard gallery of NPC models. If you would like to have input over the visual customization of your NPC, please wait for further releases when we can offer this.
• Response to this will be on a first-come first-served basis for each call for responses. If your NPC doesn’t appear in Ardoris, feel free to respond again next month and thereafter. We have quite a few towns and cities to populate!
• When responding, please list a first and second choice for profession; some of these are going to be very limited in number.Still with us? Great! Here’s what we need this month (this is the low end of what we expect to need; we’ll take submissions on a first-come first-serve basis)

Other news in the update, which I won’t summarize at quite the same length as above, includes Dame Lori and Sir Frank, two very active members of the Shroud of the Avatar community, receiving their Order of the New Britannian Empire (ONBE) medals from Richard Garriott…via his telepresence robot, no less. Congratulations to both.

Alienware is giving away Release 8 access keys. And if you haven’t done so already, don’t forget to claim your $20 pledge upgrade, which Alienware is also sponsoring.

If you’ve read Ready Player One, you might get a kick out of the Sword of the Ba’Heer that will now be featured in the game. It evidently is permanently enchanted to serve as a light source.

Also, player-owned towns can now be purchased on a layaway plan. There’s also now a dedicated store page just for the towns themselves.