Greetings Friends! Welcome to the biweekly update post on Shroud of the Avatar. As always thanks for your comments in the previous post, feel free to continue to leave feedback, thoughts, and more.  In today’s post we have updates or thoughts on the following:

• WTF Dragon’s update post on the physical rewards
• Release 68
• Out of Touch “Project to Support” post

WTF Dragon’s update post on the physical rewards

Back on July 19th, our very own Withstand the Fury Dragon (aka WTF Dragon) posted a separate post on the Physical Goods Shipping Update, based on the info made available by the developers. Check out his article here.

The two big things to note were:

• Portalarium used Chris Spear’s wife’s shipping account instead of their own. Could this be because of their financial situation, or was it simply for a cheaper shipping rate?
• Portalarium does not yet have an update on the physical book reward. Starr Long claims they are still trying to work out something with the publisher.

Release 68

Release 68 launched July 25, with such following updates/changes, including:

• New Brittany Graveyard Quest
• Mannequins to display Clothing and Armor
• Crafting Masteries available upon achieving 100 skill level in parent skills
• Persistent State for Lights
• More Top Tier Tameable Creatures in Scenes
• Player Lot Permissions Restructure – lots of changes
  • Tenant is now a lot access level (just below Kindred) instead of a play mode. A player with tenant access can move decorations on a lot, place decorations, and take decorations that they placed. Stacking constraints have been removed for tenants. Tenants may place vendors, and participate in agriculture.
  • Players with Kindred or higher access may move items on a lot – even those placed by other players.
  • The property manager UI no longer treats tenant items specially. Only the lot owner may use the property manager UI.
  • The player placing a decoration on a lot shares ownership of the item with the other players who have access to the lot. Previously, decorations placed on a lot became the property of the lot owner.
  • “Send to the bank” now sends decorations to the bank of the player who placed the item. Previously all lot contents went to the bank of the lot owner.
  • Moving items on a lot no longer changes permission settings.
  • Decorations can now be flagged to allow “move-only” access to players with public access. (Non-banned players can move the item, but not take it.)
• Combat Balance – pet healing balancing among other changes
• and More!

Feel free to check out the full Release 68 Instructions post here for more details and information.

Out of Touch “Project to Support” post

Portalarium will periodically have, in their “Avatar’s update” posts on their website, a “project to support”.  In Update #342, Portalarium highlights and encourages people to support “Avatars Radio”.  Now, Avatars Radio has shut down since 11:59pm July 15th. We highlighted this in a past post here on the Codex.  Amber Raine posted a public notice about this.  As one of the earliest and best known community organizations, it certainly feels as if whomever wrote the update post is out of touch with what has been going on in the SotA community. I wonder if this is due to the #bandwidth issue they seem to have been having. Sadly, I see being out of touch with gamers and/or a specific game’s community as nothing out of the ordinary. This is because it has been something many video game developers and “video game journalists” are having an issue with, especially these past few years.