Greetings Fellow Avatars!  A short update this week as there is not much news.  So here’s what we have for you in this week’s edition of Update of the Avatar:

• The Making of Brittany Estates
• Pledge Stats Update

The Making of Brittany Estates

NOTE: Brittany Estates is primarily comprised of City sized lots and is scheduled to go live in Release 32.

[From a Dev+ Forum Post by Richard “RrMatey” Matey]

Hey guys back again to keep you posted on the progress of another Brittany neighborhood. Brittany Estates is a gated community with lovely scenery and magnificent gardens. A great place to settle down and find that house or castle of your dreams.

One of the new things I experimented with in this scene is creating running water streams / rivers. So far it’s been very successful and here are some shots of a small stream that runs through Brittany Estates.

Pledge Stats Update

[From a Dev+ Forum Post by Dallas Snell]

Greetings Avatars,

It’s been a year since we last posted pledge stats (see May 2015 report) and we’ve received several requests from the community for an update…so, here ya go!

This first chart shows the change in pledge counts from May 2015 to June 2016. The data does not include Steam Early Access, Guilt Pledges, or unassigned pledges.

The largest percentage increase was the Knight Marshal (increased 84% from 109 to 201). The largest increase in sheer quantity was the Ancestor tier, which increased by 441 pledges (followed closely by Immortal Adventurer at 416 pledge increase). The Ancestor tier became quite popular once it was improved to include a tax-free row lot and 2-story row house!

This next chart shows the change in pledge revenue per tier from May 2015 to June 2016. The Duke pledge tier posted the largest gains, by far (just as it did last May):

This next chart shows the current pledge data with the pledge counts as vertical bars and the dollar value of each pledge tier as a gold line. The Knight tier was dethroned for the first time in terms of pledge revenue, being handily trounced by the increasingly popular Duke tier.

Since the Citizen pledge has been expired, we show it and the Edelmann tiers separately for this report (unlike previous reports where we combined them). Those pledges had been selling at almost equal rates until the Citizen expired, and now the Edelmann is beginning to pull ahead.

Quite honestly, we’re surprised that every Citizen pledge owner hasn’t upgraded to Edelmann, since it is only $25 to upgrade and for that you move 9 groups earlier in Lot Selection Priority, receive a unique beer brewing recipe, a German automaton (inspired by the Rathaus-Glockenspiel in Munich), a Deutsche Dogge pet, a unique bird bath deco, an additional “Edelmann” title (and even more rewards if you are a Founder-era or Royal Founder-era backer)!

Pledges with property (Ancestor and above) represent 12% of all backers (up 2% from May 2015 report) and 70% of all pledge revenue (up 7% from May 2015 report). Pledges without property represent 88% of all backers and 30% of pledge revenue.

And this final table shows the current number of Player Owned Towns that have been purchased thru Jun 16, 2016. A total of 310 towns have been sold, up from 202 reported in May 2015. Of these 310 towns, only 230 have direct Overland Map access, and the remaining 80 towns are linked to other POTs or to NPC towns.