Good Morning Friends! One week ago, it was brought to my attention there was an email blast supposedly from Portalarium, about a free login reward.  however this email blast came from a different email address than what has been used by their regular email blasts to backers/players.  This not only confused a number of people who I spoke to and those contacted me, but the question of who got the email and who didn’t came up across the board.

In the email (see below) you can see they sent out a blast to encourage people to return to Shroud of the Avatar.  In my reaching out to players most never received this email. In fact the only emails they get are from the connect@ email address. However, this email blast came from a newsletter@ email address.  Fascinating enough, an account that has no pledge account got this email twice, in the span of the past week.  However that same individual has a separate email account that is tied to both KS and a SotA pledge, and that one never got an email. In fact the normal connect@ emails stopped years ago for the no pledge account. Why this one would suddenly get emails encouraging the recipient to return when the email account has never had a pledge account to even play, especially from an all new email address, certainly creates suspicion.

On top of that, a few people I spoke to logged in and informed me that they never got their rewards. I did ask them if they checked their Reward section as Rewards had recently changed to auto claiming. And so I decided to go directly to Starr Long.

In reaching out to Starr Long, I got answers to some of the questions I posed to him:

•  “It appears that most individuals I reached out to did not receive a copy of this email. Were only certain accounts eligible for this email/offer…”
•  Before I bring up the people who did not receive items, I inquire –  “do these rewards arrive then in June? I bring this up because those who I spoke to, who did received this email, and did log in, did not receive any items. “
• I asked about the difference in email address used as more than a dozen individuals questioned the legitimacy of it.
• I inquired about “What size lot home is this? Is it simply one that can be acquired already in-game and not via pledge or In Game Addon Store? “

Starr Long did get back to me with the following emails:

Not much for details from Starr which did not surprise me.  However, I was able to share with those I reached out that this reward is for all players. This was definitely well received.  One thought I crossed my mind while writing this post is, “will there be regular monthly login rewards?”  However, you can also see he says this blast email is only being done in batches, so many people are not getting it. I didn’t pry into if they were sending them internally, using a free level account newsletter service like MailChimp offers, or if they are using one of a number of other options out there including the favorite of some of us, using Amazon’s Web Services.  As you can see, Starr says the email is irrelevant.  The reputation of the IP address as well as the domain that the email is sent from plays a role when dealing with spam filters, etc.  Plus when customers are used to a certain email address, when the email address changes, with no warning, it will spark questions as to legitimacy.  If this is a new method for them for sending out mass emails, what would also explain the batches as it helps build reputation.

I was then informed in voice chat on a non-discord platform, that Starr had posted a forum post just before his initial email to me.  It would have been nice to have been told that more info was available there, when I emailed originally no info was posted anywhere on the forum or website about this reward. From his forum post we learn the following: that the 3 story house is a row lot size home. The 3-story Wood & Plaster Row Home basically has an extra floor compared to the home that comes with the free row lot that all players receive just by playing the game.

So again communication from Portalarium is lacking. However, I hope for those who do still play Shroud of the Avatar, that they take advantage of what some are obviously seeing as a positive.  Let us here know, did you get this email blast? did you successfully get your reward?