With Shroud of the Avatar’s tenth pre-alpha test release — colloquially known as Release 10 (or simply R10) — beginning tomorrow, Portalarium’s Starr Long has posted a set of instructions to help backers get in and try out this latest iteration of the game.

Greetings Avatars,

Thank you to our loyal backers of Shroud of the Avatar. Release 10 access for all backers at First Responder level and above (as well as those who signed up at PAX Prime and DragonCon*) begins this Thursday, September 25 at 10:30 AM Central Time. Release 10 access will end on Monday, September 29 at 10:00 AM Central Time. Starting today, you can begin installing and patching (see instructions below), but login will not be enabled until Thursday morning.

*Reminder that if you signed up via PAX, Dragoncon, Plantronics, Alienware, or MMORPG.com you MUST register on our website with the same email you entered for those promotions or you will not be able to play the game. You will NOT be receiving a key nor a separate email from this one.

We are very excited for all of you to get into this release and start giving us feedback. As a reminder, approximately every three months we focus a release mostly on polish and that is what Release 10 was focused on. Despite that focus, we did manage to get quite a bit of new content in as well.

We also made changes to increase player population densities in the game because we observed players becoming more and more spread out as we added more scenes; especially scenes with player housing. Speaking of player housing, we also noticed many people claiming houses, but not actually using nor decorating them. To address both these issues, we reduced the number of scenes with player housing and we introduced costs to lot claiming and house deed purchases (deeds can be purchased from the bartender in Owl’s Head). We also reduced the number of PVP arenas to only two. Hopefully this will concentrate the players in fewer areas, and increase the number of decorated buildings. See below for more details on these changes.

We have also seen a slight decline in participation in each release, only offset by newcomers from partner promotions (E3, Alienware, MMORPG.com, etc.). So we are introducing a unique hat that can only be obtained by playing in each release and completing a quest.

For full details on what is new and different in Release 10, either hit up our event entry for it here, or check out Starr Long’s original post at the Shroud of the Avatar website.