Asherons Call: New AC Transition Update

AC Executive Producer's Transition Update
posted on 15-Apr-2004
Just wanted to give you all a quick update on some of the outstanding MS-to-Turbine transition items:

Buying the Games Online
The option to purchase ACDM and AC2 on FilePlanet has been up over a month now and the results are encouraging: several thousand of you have purchased new accounts and the trend is good.

In addition to FilePlanet, on April 22nd we plan to open our own online shopping cart with the following purchase options:

Asheron's Call: Dark Majesty CD-Key Only: $12.95
Asheron's Call: Dark Majesty CD-Key + Download of the Client: $12.95
Asheron's Call: Dark Majesty Physical Disc and CD-Key by Mail: $12.95 + $6.95 Shipping and
Handling

Asheron's Call 2: Fallen Kings CD-Key Only: $12.95
Asheron's Call 2: Fallen Kings CD-Key + Download of the Client: $12.95
Asheron's Call 2: Fallen Kings Physical Disc and CD-Key by Mail: $12.95 + $6.95 Shipping and
Handling

You'll note that we'll be selling and mailing discs to those who prefer not to download the clients. A couple caveats on that option:

Due to the VAT in Europe and other tax complexities, we're initially going to open that option to North America only, not Europe or Asia.
Not to worry: we're working with a group right now to sort out those issues and we expect to be able to ship physical discs around the world in another couple months. In the meantime, the game clients will remain online here and FilePlanet for download, so they'll at least be available for those who want them.

The game client discs that we'll ship will be the latest version of each game, including the latest monthly episodes. If you download AC2, however, you will not get the very-high-res texture set that comes with the CD version.
Only the most powerful top-end machines can use these textures, and they are very large, so they aren't included in the downloaded version. However, we intend to make the very-high-res textures available as a separate download in the future.

AC1's New SQL Hardware
In an earlier post on the AC forums, I discussed some of the issues involved with moving the player databases of the AC1 worlds from their current aged SQL server machines onto new hardware (and we do mean "aged;" there's Viking graffiti on one of the machines). At present, two worlds, Darktide and Harvestgain, have been moved. Morningthaw is scheduled to be moved early next week and Wintersebb shortly thereafter.

After that, we have some more work to do on the hardware to get ready for the other four worlds, so there will be a bit of a delay before we move them over. We'll keep you informed and let you know well in advance of when we're going to make those moves. We know theses outages are a royal pain in the butt for you and we apologize for them. We just feel it necessary to start upgrading the equipment now, before it becomes a dire emergency.

Besides, we can make a pretty penny by selling the machine tagged by Leif Ericsson.

Billing System Transition
We're still looking at late summer to make the transition off of Passport and the Zone and onto a new billing system. Believe me, we're going as fast as we safely can with this one, but a certain amount of caution is required (to say the least).

We've started work coding the new launcher and what our server lead Gator refers to as "the scary red box." That's the box on his coding diagram where authentication, billing and the games come together, talk to each other and allow players to be verified and get into the games. It is also where almost everyone else in the industry has crashed and burned on their first launch of a billing system, so we're being very careful how we approach this one; we don't want to add to that statistic.

As we get closer to the transition time, we'll start talking about the process of moving subscriptions over from Microsoft to us, so you'll be ready for the day. In the meantime, however, there is one extremely important step you can take to make it easier on both of us:

Keeping a Passport ID active is easy; just log into it at least once every thirty (30) days.

An important note about AC2 @msgamestudios.com Passport IDs: If you chose to use the @msgamestudios.com option as your Passport ID when you registered your AC2 account, you need to understand that it is not a valid email address. This means that Microsoft has no way to contact you before they delete the account. If you let it lie inactive long enough, Microsoft will delete it and you will lose access your characters permanently.

Right now, the only reliable way we know of to keep that from happening is to log into the account every four to six months, which means re-subscribing at least one month out of every four to six months to make sure the @msgamestudios.com Passport ID isn't deleted. We're trying to get confirmation from Microsoft Billing, Passport and Hotmail on the particulars of these issues and how they handle them; as soon as we get the info, we'll pass it on to you. If we can work out another way to do it before the billing transition, we'll post about it, but that is the way it stands right now.

That's it for now. I'll post another update in the 2 to 4 weeks, as we have more info to pass on. I know there have been some bumps in this transition, as we predicted when we first announced it. Thanks for being patient with us; we appreciate mightily.

-Jessica