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

• Richard Garriott no longer CEO of Portalarium
• Fishing Phase 2 Updates: Trophies & Lava Fish
• Starting Scenes & New User Experience Rework

Richard Garriott no longer CEO of Portalarium

So some backers noticed that on the dev team page on the Shroud of the Avatar website, that CEO was removed by Portalarium, from Richard Garriott’s job title.  When you add on top of it, that Board of Directors meeting was mentioned in the “Standup Corner” post, questions and of speculation occured.  This of course is of no surprise that on social media (facebook and twitter), reddit, discord, and even some articles started to pop on gaming websites, wondering what was happening with Richard Garriott. Worst case scenarios were especially prevalent, cause the previous found who left Portalarium, Dallas Snell, left with not even a peep from Portalarium, the dev team, or even Dallas himself, is it really any wonder people would consider possible worst case scenarios as being a possibility?

Richard posted a response on the SotA forum’s that evening:

As we have adjusted our direction and team to focus on Episode 2 we have decided to eliminate any titles and positions with the word Officer, including my own which was CEO. This leaves me to focus on my true role as Creative Director while Chris Spears and Starr Long can focus on the running of the team.

– Lord British

Richard also tweeted the following:

MMORPG.com reached out and updated their article accordingly, just as they said they would do. Now I know some backers (current and former) who assumed the worst, however, many are still unsatisfied with the answer from Richard and Portalarium.  Many consider this more to be a move to distance Richard from the game and the company as the game has certainly failed to live up to expectations overall, despite some improvements since Launch.

In the interesting speculations and postings, the technical director of SotA, Chris Spears, posted a response to MMORPG.com’s initial article on social media. Based on the update they did to their own article, and the history in their “news” section in regards to SotA, I would say his claims were unfounded and were unprofessional.  If anything MMORPG.com has been too kind in regards to Portalarium.

Sadly, the link to his bad behavior no longer works as I believe he deleted his post. I checked with the wayback machine aka archive.org and sadly no cached version of it existed there.  However, pcgames.de made note of it in their article about Chris’ attack of MMORPG. I found their analysis of this situation to be very accurate.  Please check it out, and translate the article if you do not read German.

Fishing Phase 2 Updates: Trophies & Lava Fish

Fishing Phase 2 is going to include expansions to the fishing system as highlighted in past updates and dev livestreams.  This week devs reveal the Lava Fish and a bunch of the new fish mounted as trophies!

Starting Scenes & New User Experience Rework

As mentioned July by Portalarium, they wanted to improve the New User Experience by separating the tutorials from the story spaces in the three starting areas (Solace Bridge, Highvale, and Blood River). They are building a new focused tutorial space in the Isle of Storms that walks you through the game basics in a gated fashion (i.e. you cannot advance to the next room until you prove you can swing a sword). Once you complete all the tutorials you will then journey through the Lunar Rift to one of the three starting areas. Those areas are being polished to be more focused and tighter in their direction. They are also removing the tutorial elements and having them be almost entirely focused on story.

New Isle of Storms Tutorial Area:

Rebuilt Solace Bridge: