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

• New Tutorial Area
• Bundle and Item Expirations
• Shipping Phase 2 – You may need to pay for Shipping AGAIN and Check Your Shipping Address by Nov 2!

New Tutorial Area

Part of the dev’s Q4 efforts to improve the New User Experience is 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 supposedly polished to be more focused and tighter in their direction, such as removing the tutorial elements and having them be more focused on story.  In the case of Solace Bridge this means rebuilding it completely.

This week devs showed off more views of the new Isle of Storms Tutorial Area which was also the focus of a livestream:

Bundles and Item Expirations

Devs will also be expiring several bundles and items that are included in those bundles including pets, weapons, decorations and homes. The Viking and Kobold Bundles are expiring at 11:59 PM CT on November 30.  The Elven, Obsidian, and Shogun Bundles are expiring on December 21, 2018.   Devs even added Episode 2 access to these bundles to try and push sales.

NOTE: This is a final expiration. Upgrades will not be allowed after these bundles expire.

Physical Goods Shipping Phase 2 – You may need to pay for Shipping AGAIN and Check your Shipping Address by Nov 2!

As the SotA devs prepare to do the next batch of shipping and hopefully get Collector’s Boxes to backers who didn’t get theirs before.  However some backers learned that despite already paying for $15 international shipping back during the Kickstarter, they are now being charged the International Shipping again. To add insult to injury, Portalarium is charging them double the cost it was during the Kickstarter.

Please note the “bug” mentioned below in a dev team member post to be suspicious. In a previous forum post, they claimed it was “not working the way we intended”. I chalk this up to poor planing after all these years that, along with the double charging of shipping, can be attributed to being just another piece of proof of the continuing mismanagement on the part of Portalarium. I know many backers like myself who are still waiting for an actual secure website after all these years, that doesn’t use a highly customized version of WordPress.

[From a forum post by Serafina]

We would like to thank you for your continued patience with getting Physical Rewards out to you.

As you may already know, we had issues with the address verification system unconfirming addresses. We have removed the bugged system.

If you are due physical goods with your pledge but haven’t gotten them yet, we plan to ship them out to you with Phase 2, which is scheduled for later in Q4.

WHAT YOU NEED TO DO NOW:

1. Make sure your Shipping Address is filled out on the Account page under Edit Profile.

2. Check the box below it that reads, “Ship my physical rewards to this address! (This box must be checked for physical rewards to be shipped.)”

3. Click the “Update Profile” button at the bottom of the page.

If your address was confirmed before this change, the checkbox should be checked already, but please make sure it’s checked and you click Update Profile to be safe.

For shipping addresses outside the United States, you must have International Shipping listed under your Add-Ons tab on your Account page. If you do not have it listed, you can purchase International Shipping in the Game Services store.

The deadline for checking the checkbox and purchasing International Shipping on your account (if applicable) is November 2, 2018.

Thank you again for your continued patience and support!

I hope those of you who haven’t gotten your boxes do.  I will say the map is the one nice thing about the collector’s box, however with no physical copy of the book still and no answer on which version of the book, despite language inconsistencies from Starr Long, the cost for the box still feels overpriced for any retail or collector’s version.