Greetings Fellow Avatars!

Here’s what we have for you in this week’s edition of Update of the Avatar:

• Discord Server
• New Female Avatar
• Kiln Cistern (a work in progress)
• New Community Manager: Berek
• Spring Telethon Rewards

Shroud of the Avatar Discord Server

Discord is a platform that has been designed with gamers and gaming in general in mind. It provides both Text and VoIP chat and runs on Mac OS X, Microsoft Windows, Android, iOS, or in a browser.  At only 1 year old, it is a growing platform  that has been embraced by many and I foresee will continue to grow and in some ways overtake such platforms as TeamSpeak, Mumble, IRC, and maybe even Skype.  Best of all, it is free and does not require you to host a server on your own like Teamspeak or Mumble.  While SotA currently has IRC chat thanks to Ultima Codex.  The gracious owner of Ultima Codex, WTF Dragon, has setup a Discord Server as well, specifically for those of us in the Shroud of the Avatar community.  Lord Viator has also integrated a bot into Discord so that the IRC chat and Discord text chat are linked so we can interact between the two using whichever platform you prefer.  Give those two men some love and thanks for their continued hard work.  Feel free to join in today – https://discord.gg/010CjUU74ncJukwgl.

New Female Avatar

[From a Dev+ Forum Post by Kevin “Uglyfist” Wells]

Hello again everyone. First, I want to give many thanks to the community for the flattering and constructive feedback from my last post about the male avatar update. It was a great experience and totally made the work feel worth it with all the positive feedback.

It’s player character polish debut time again, and I’m very excited to say that the female avatar has been updated. Much like the male avatar update, I started from scratch and built and integrated the character over a two-release period.

With this update, the idea was to take what we had, and without completely changing the aesthetic, remake the art in a way that improves the quality but doesn’t completely change the look and feel with which players are already so familiar. Basically, the goal was to keep the female avatar looking as she was before, but with more polish and bit of a push toward an athletic look.

Also, as with the male avatar update, I have to give thanks to Matt Schmitz and Fletcher Kinnear for helping me get this new character working well with animations and all the many equippables.

I hope you guys love it and I can’t wait to hear back from everybody.

Kiln Cistern (a work in progress)

NOTE: Kiln Cistern is scheduled to go live in R31

[From a Dev+ Forum Post by Dan “PlagueofLocust” Brennan] 

Kiln’s water supply is in jeopardy! Something foul is going on within the Kiln Cistern. It falls to you to navigate its system of locked doors and flooded hallways to reach its deepest chamber. Rise to the challenge and solve the problem before the good citizens of Kiln run out of precious water.

New Community Manager: Berek

Another exciting bit of news is the welcoming of a new community manager Mathew “Berek” Anderson to the SotA devteam! He’s an old school Ultima Online player, an ice cream lover, and an original Shroud backer. He also shares my love of Settlers of Catan. The SotA community has been in need of a dedicated community manager as Firelotus spends much of her time on story and game related stuff, and thus doesn’t have the time to always be able to handle issues.  A dedicated manager would be able to handle that much needed attention to the community that it has been in need of for quite a while.

Firelotus introduced him to the community this Monday with this forum post, with Berek then following up by introducing himself:

Thanks Gina! Greetings and salutations community!

I’m excited and proud to be the new community manager for Shroud of the Avatar. When I had the opportunity join Portalarium and work with such an amazing community, I had to make the move. I believe that a great game is made most successful by what I call the Community Glue. The amazing Portalarium team combined with a positive, friendly, and respectful community are the ingredients for that glue.

When it comes to Shroud of the Avatar, I’m all in – watching every Hangout of the Avatar, NBNN update, participating here in the forums, and of course checking out all of the community activities in the game itself. There’s always something to look forward to and amazing to look back on every day in this community. I wish I previously had more time to play and get to know all of you, but that’s ok, because now we have that chance .

Hopefully this is all great to hear, but you probably still want to know who the heck I am…

The story begins in a highly contested land called Felucca, where the rule of law is in the hands of the individual. This was the first time I explored an MMORPG world, and was nearly my last. I was minding my own business, simply fishing alongside a creek, when a thief came up to attack me. Little did he know that I was once lord of a nearby kingdom and quite able to handle a petty thief.

As the thief struggled with my hand bag, I managed to grab my short sword, hitting him on the head with the blunt edge. Stunned, but not deterred, the thief pulled a large dagger out from his back scabbard, taking a jab at my torso. This was no thief, but an assassin! As the assassin attempted to recover from a poor strike, I swung quickly upward, slicing through his outstretched wrist and severing his hand.

While the assassin screamed in rage, an old man on horseback came up along the nearby trail. He quickly stunned my would-be assassin with a lightning strike spell, allowing me to secure the assassin. The old man and I then headed to the nearby town of Minoc to turn the assassin into jail, and post a town hall notice that the local roads were to be watched carefully over the next few days.

After that incident, I was forever known by my new friend and the town’s people as Berek, Illustrious Lord and Skilled Fisherman!

On the less dangerous but no less adventurous side of my career, my community management experience started at various MMORPG networks like Stratics.com. I was also a guide in the EverQuest guide program, as well as getting my house decorating priorities in order in Ultima Online. A few years ago, I swam across the ocean to China to teach English for a year, before returning and continuing my work at studios like Portalarium.

Most importantly for you, I am not so much a ‘manager’, but your guide and supporter, a supporter for your shared quest to build a great community for Shroud of the Avatar. I’ve seen many faces interested in the game since the Kickstarter, so I’m keen in working with all of you to make this community a success. There’s a lot of exciting game content coming up, so let’s work together to make it a fun experience for all avatars!

For now, some fun facts about myself:

• Favorite all-time board game is Settlers of Catan (Explorers & Pirates specifically)
• Shamefully lost every competitive LARP event I’ve been a part of
• Favorite films include Star Trek, Star Wars, Stargate, 2001, Goonies, Labyrinth, Neverending Story
• I’m a techy, so I love randomly rearranging and upgrading parts in my computers
• First person to guess my favorite dessert gets a SotA t-shirt .

For all other mischievous shenanigans, you can visit my website at: http://www.mathewanderson.com, or just ask me here.

See you in New Britannia!

Mathew “Berek” Anderson
Senior Community Manager
Shroud of the Avatar

The thread took many fun twists and turns from there but by far our favorite was when community member, enderandrew, described what he imagined the interview process must have been like (and got it fairly accurate):

• Starr: I see you worked with Stratics and your resume looks good.
• Joseph: Hey, I’m back in the office. Do you like fart jokes and whiskey?
• Berek: What?
• Lum: You may also be required to sing and dance to David Bowie.
• Berek: What kind of community are you running here?
• Richard: What is your stance on cannibalism and killing kids in games?
• Berek: Did you just say what I think you said?
• Chris: Where are we going to put him? The Dippy Bird is using our last desk.
• Everyone: We just got another $2,500 in pledges. Everyone do a shot!
• Berek: I thought you only did that during telethons.
• Starr: The secret to cramming in tons of content and features with a small team and never missing a release is to maintain the Ballmer Peak. Now, do you know how to correctly pronounce Corpions?
• Berek: Are you talking about scorpions?
• Chris: He’ll have to work on that.
• Lum: You’re forgetting the important questions. Does he own birds?
• Berek: You lost me at Ballmer Peak.

Image Courtesy of xkcd

And in case you are worried that he won’t be able to keep up with our shenanigans here’s a pic of Berek as Deadpool wearing a Pikachu beating a Pikachu with a sword:

Spring Telethon Rewards

The Spring Festival of the Avatar Telethon was a success as they achieved all the Stretch Goal Rewards and even had to create new ones! They even accelerated development of the rewards and they will be available in Release 30!

Starting with Release 30, Spring Telethon Funding Stretch Goal Rewards will be rewarded to any backers that pledged a minimum of $5 from the start of the Spring telethon, until Midnight May 2 (Spending Store Credit to make $5 minimum purchase does not apply). Here’s a sneak peek at the Flower Crown, Butterfly pet, and Dragonfly pet: