Greetings Fellow Avatars! Not alot of information this week, hope you all had a great weekend!

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

• Tropical Island POT Polish
• Upcoming Economic Balance Changes
• Testing Incentives Program
• Sales of Virtual Items for Real Currency Policy

Tropical Island POT Polish

When the dev team launched the Tropical Island Player Owned Town Template in Release 30 back in May, they were moving quickly to get it launched and in the hands of our POT owners. It was based on the Island 01 template and was a simple swap of tree type mostly without really any other major changes. Owners who chose this template were understandably underwhelmed by this variation so they decided that it needed another pass at this Island.

Upcoming Economic Balance Changes

[From a Forum post by Starr “Darkstarr” Long]

We have been carefully analyzing the distributed wealth of our current player base and we have uncovered some critical issues that need addressing quickly. The biggest issue is that the top 10% of players have 90% of the gold while the bottom 90% are incredibly poor and can barely afford to play. This has manifested itself in various ways, including the following:

• Exclusive Use of “Reagent Free” Decks: On one hand this shows the flexibility of our deck building and skill system and every player should have a “Reagent Free” deck in their arsenal, but that’s not the only deck they should be able to use!
• Tons of Inventory on Vendors: Lots and lots of items on vendors and no one buying.

We cannot simply increase the overall influx of resources and gold into the game because that will cause inflation and damage the overall health of the economy. It would also only further increase the disparity between the wealthiest few and the poorest masses.

Instead, we need to come up with ways to add wealth to the more deprived players that cannot then be ground repeatedly to either increase inflation or add even more wealth to the already wealthy. To that end, we are going to start making the following changes. Some of these will begin showing up as soon as Release 34, but some may take longer as they are a bit intensive to implement. Please note the values below are all best estimates / starting values.

• Daily Oracle Confession: Visiting the Oracle on a daily basis and discussing how you are faring on your journey along the Paths of Truth, Love, and Courage will earn you 500 gold per day. You must answer her accurately based on your personal actions.
• Town Crier Outlander Registration: Novians do not exactly trust Outlanders and want to make sure they know where they are traveling around to. Thus, they started an Outlander Tracking Program. Each time you visit a Town Crier for the first time in any town will earn you 100 gold.
• Starting Area Resource Yields: We are going to slightly increase the overall resource yields in the scenes around the starting areas.
• Reagent Spawner Balance: We are reviewing the reagent spawners to make sure they are evenly balanced against the power of the spells they are used with and well dispersed in the scenes so players won’t have to exclusively rely on merchants.
• Quest Gold Rewards: We are going through all the non-repeatable quests and either adding gold rewards (if not present) or increasing the gold rewards (if gold already present).
• Skill Quests: Currently only Tier 5 Skills like Summon Elemental have quests from Master Trainers associated with them. We are going to add more quests from trainers for earlier skills like Rend (Blades), Piercing Shot (Ranged), Lightning (Air), etc. These will include gold rewards.

This is just the first of many such adjustments we will make to insure that the economy is properly balanced yet sustainable over the long term. Thank you for your patience as we make these improvements.

Testing Incentives Program

[From a Forum post by Starr “Darkstarr” Long]

Greetings Avatars,

Thank you everyone for the amazing work you all do reporting issues in the game. It is only through your bug reports that we can find and fix issues with the game.

The volume of reported issues from the Live Server has remained steady, but now that we have reached persistence, it is understandably challenging to convince players to divide their time between the “real” world of Novia and the fleeting world of the QA Server. However, we still have a critical need for testing on the QA Server right before a monthly Release goes live.

That is why we are launching the Testing Incentives Program. This program will include exclusives that can only be earned on the QA Server,  but there are lots of awards that can be earned on the live servers as well. Each Release, exceptional contributors selected through quality bug reports, document edits, etc. will be eligible for rewards. The rewards will be given out as individual items, not all at once. Initial rewards will include the following (and may expand over time):

• Testing Incentive Rewards: These rewards can be earned through playing and reporting on both the Live and QA Servers.
  • Titles: Players will rank up through these after demonstrating a solid record of reproducible bugs with detailed information (ex. coordinates and screenshots)
    • Pest Controller
    • Expert Pest Controller
    • Master Pest Controller
    • Royal Pest Controller
  • Antennae: worn in the head slot
  • Bugs Cloak: features lots of ants
  • Bug Cloak: This cloak features one giant ant.
  • Bug Sprayer: Equippable with /bugspray emote that makes a green cloud

• QA Server Exclusive Rewards: These rewards can only be earned through play time and bug reporting on the QA Server (but of course they will be delivered to you on the Live Server).
  • COTOs for Time: Players who spend at least 4 hours of play time per Release on the QA Server will receive 5 Gold COTOs. Please note this is active play that we will verify via logging. You cannot simply login and stand still.
  • Ant Farm: Decoration you can place in your house with ants crawling around in it. Don’t break it!
  • Corpion Chair: Don’t fear the cushion of its deadly comfort!
  • Set of Bug Paintings: An assortment of Classical still life paintings featuring insects
  • Insect Leg Table
  • Butterfly Chair

We hope to have the program begin with the QA Server and Live Server tests of Release 34, so stay tuned for an official “go!” announcement.

Thank you everyone for the incredible work so far and we look forward to more of it in the future.

Sales of Virtual Items for Real Currency Policy

[From a Forum post by Starr “Darkstarr” Long]

Greeting Avatars,

As many of you are aware, for a very long time we have supported the sale of virtual goods like Pledges, Pledge Rewards, Add On Store Items, etc. via our Player Marketplace subforum. Our reasoning is that this activity will occur no matter what our position on it is, so we feel that it is better to have it in a place where we and the community can see it easily.

Even though we support these activities, we understand that they can threaten the suspension of disbelief we all work very hard to maintain around the game world we have built together. To that end, we must insist that, for now, all Real Currency sales happen in the Player Marketplace only and never be mentioned inside the game nor in any other part of the Forums.

The current rules for those transactions are the following:

• Player Marketplace Only: All sales involving Real Currency (USD, Euros, etc.) can only be discussed, advertised, etc. in the Player Marketplace subforum.
• Bans for Out of Marketplace Posts: Any mention, post, information, text, advertising, etc. of any kind of a sale that refers to Real Currency in Shroud of the Avatar official locations outside of the Player Marketplace (i.e. the main forums, Shroud Discord chat, Shroud Facebook Page, inside the game) is against the rules. The game is especially off limits for these kinds of messages (except for the final resolution of the sale which has to happen in the game via secure trade and will, of course, necessitate some in game communication). Offenders will receive a warning. Repeated offenses will result in bans, up to and including permanent bans across multiple accounts.
• All Virtual Items Allowed: Sales for Real Currency can include any virtual goods, including Add On Store items, Pledge Rewards, and virtual currency (gold).
• Portalarium Not Liable: Portalarium is not liable for any of these transactions. They are solely between the buyer and seller.

We understand that the inclusion of gold as one of the virtual goods that can be bought and sold will cause some of you concern, but we believe that in the end it is just another virtual good like the others. I would like to address the main concerns we have seen.

• Inflation: As you have seen we have been monitoring VERY carefully the influx of gold into the economy and we do not believe the sales of gold will increase the likelihood of inflation anymore than any other factors.
• Exploits: All the rules of enforcement related to exploits will of course still apply. As you have seen, we are very aggressive about finding exploits and enforcing punishment of users that abuse them.
• Competition for Resources: With our multiple modes of play, you are almost guaranteed to never be competing with someone “farming” for gold because they will most likely be in Single Player Online mode.
• Intrusion: As you can see by the above rules we will aggressively repel any intrusion into the game or into the main forums of real currency transactions. We feel VERY strongly about keeping the sanctity of our world intact.

If you see any activities occurring that go against these rules, please do not mention them (or the persons involved) in public areas. For in-game occurrences, you can report them by right-clicking on the offending player and selecting the “Report Player” or “Report Content” options and choose “Other” from the context menu. Alternatively, you may use the /reportcontent or /reportplayer commands in the chat window. For occurrences outside of the game, you can use the Forum Report option or contact us at support@portalarium.com.