Shroud of the Avatar – Update of the Avatar #303
Greetings Friends! Here’s what we have for you in this week’s edition of Update of the Avatar:
- Play Release 59 Now!
- SotA goes Free to Play
- NPC Town Review
Play Release 59 Now!
Release 59 launched October 26 wish such changes as:
- Fishing Phase 2
- Pumpkin Head and his minions (seasonal)
- a “New User Experience”
- Universal Chat (costs $2 for new players to be able to use)
- Decay Removed (Will be replaced with something New)
- Spooky Dungeon Entrance Patterns
- Players Forced into Open Multiple Player mode in Towns, Overworld, and Outskirts maps.
- …and much more!
Check out the Release 59 Instructions update for detailed information about all the new content.
SotA Goes Free to Play aka F2P
If you haven’t noticed yet, Shroud of the Avatar is Free to Play on Steam now. According to the Release 59 Instructions (see final article below for the R59 info) the devs have:
We have removed the previous gameplay restrictions of story, trade and lot ownership from our free players. Now free players can trade with other players, own land, and play through the entire story! We have also lowered the price for posting in the forums from $5 to only $1 (the cost of the Universal Chat Orb when on sale). This means that you no longer need to make a purchase to have the real Shroud of the Avatar experience!
Basically, the limitations on the Trial Account system is coming to an end, and they are going Free to Play as a play to try and grow their player base. While I do not have confirmation on whether the 50 skill point max limit still is in place, the rest of limitations have basically come to an end. The full story, trading, and lot & home ownership basically gives them no reason to give $ to help what continues to appear to be a dire financial situation for Portalarium. Universal Chat for new accounts is still only $2 for access. Because of this I would foresee this to be popular method for mules, accounts used for Real Money Trading that are separate from ppls’ main accounts. They desperately need more people in the game who are buying from the Addon Store & Rewards Program/Subscription, so this is their method of choice to try and do that. Sadly I would say, with the newly “revamped” NUE aka: “new user experience”, I do not foresee this working out for them. If anything, they shouldn’t have touched the NUE and fixed more important issues like the UI.
WTF Dragon wrote an email for us here at Ultima Codex, to Richard Garriott, to inquire about this move to Free to Play and here is his statement on this:
For 6 months we already had a free to play client that was “hamstrung” until you crossed a paywall. You could not trade (and other features) for example, until you paid, to prevent mules, bots and cheats often found in full F2P. We realized that keeping visitors OUT of the economy also had a down side, to them and others. People who wanted to take them on adventures, could not do so fully with the list of things we blocked.
So, we explored other ways to block cheating and give more full access to non-paying visitors. We instead pulled out or soul bound the initial starting gear, and added paywalls further into play (such as gaining access to global chat for $1). That way free to play players could not spam or mule easily. Anyone that has paid even $1, we can ban far more easily than a bot created one of many accounts.
So, yes, we now let people play fully, for free. Pretty much nothing else has changed about the title or its economics. We just moved the initial sales from being a barrier before you play, to being inside the game once you have experienced the game. We believe the key to SotA’s future success is bringing in more people. We believe the new NUE and features are strong enough that visitors will choose to stay. The new F2P approach will minimize the barriers to people choosing to at least give us a try!
Access to Episode 2 content is already being sold, it has an upfront cost. And likely will well through its launch. People who do not have Ep2 access will not be able to “beta” those areas in progress.
– Richard
NPC Town Review
Both myself and Sergorn Dragon have posted articles in the past few months, either summarizing the state of Shroud of the Avatar and Portalarium post-release or Reviewing SotA. Sergorn’s review is far more comprehensive and well thought out than any other review I have seen in written or video format. If you haven’t seen it, it is worth your time. While playing through the main quest lines to completion was nice for me, just to finally be able to uninstall the game and lay out my thoughts, Sergorn has continued to work to put together a list of all the NPC towns and his review on each. Please note that this list ONLY lists NPC towns that appear on the cloth map and that on the overland have that scroll title over them.. There will NOT be any Player Owned Towns or Player Run Towns. I will attach a PDF below for you if you wish to read it in this format as well.
Sergorn Dragon’s notes about the various NPC towns in Shroud of the Avatar, focusing on their relative states of completeness.
So as a summary from Sergorn, SotA had 43 NPC Towns/Villages:
8 cities are in state that can be considered in complete/near complete state
9 cities are in semi-complete state, some good stuff but obviously not all done
all the rest is basically empty filler shit
That’s 24 cities
Seeing this, I was being generous in my article, clearly my lack of exploring and focusing on the main story quests, caused me to not nearly see how incomplete Episode One of Shroud of the Avatar truly is.
*That’s 24 cities*
Ouch. And to think I was concerned about my non-npc town being Uncloned. That is obviously never going to happen (there are still many many towns that are exact duplicates of each other)
To be fair, the vast majority of NPCs towns are uncloned as of now. I went through each of the 40+ cities and only a handful were cloned from another city… but you know doesn’t change the fact they are basically empty anyway.
This isn’t surprising to me. After the initial land rush and the lack of new players joining the game, I was thankfully able to unload my holdfast. I really don’t know what I was thinking buying this damn thing when there were so many NPC towns that simply weren’t filling up. I truly cringe at the thought of all those players who bought POTS only to have them lost when the game goes under.
They’re in a worse state than people realise; I’ve been stalling on releasing the information because I’ve been negotiating with the media to try and get wider coverage, but because I now have legal documents the media is more, not less worried about being sued for covering it. A ridiculous Catch 22, but there you go; instead I’m now starting work on a video, taking the risk upon myself yet again, and revealing what happened when I took them to Arbitration.
They either can’t even afford the process, or were deliberately trying to avoid it, because they didn’t dare attend. On August 16th it was disclosed they’d never even paid the $250 to vet their claim to AAA accreditation, and that was added to the fees they owed too. They were given a two week extension to begin the process of registering for my case, but then tried to avoid that too.
In the end, the case had to be closed on the 4th September, but Portalarium were removed from the scheme, and told to take any reference to the AAA off their EULA as they were abusing the process. As of this date, nearly 2 months later and knowing I have the legal correspondence proving it, they are still claiming their backers have the coverage of Arbitration. They don’t, the AAA won’t touch them now.
The legal advice I’ve been given is that if it’s not outright maliciousness, they’re stalling to try and ensure they can sell Shroud, and dissolve the company before their various liabilities catch up with them… or hoping bankruptcy means they’ve got nothing left to take by the time anyone slogs through the process to be owed anything. I never cared about the money, it was always stopping the harassment that mattered to me, but it’s possible Shroud won’t even be around long enough for there to be any left to explain why they let it happen.
Look for the video soon, but no promises as to when: Trying to keep it understandable is proving quite the slog… and I’ve got 2 years of evidence piled up. What a miserable experience this all turned out to be.