Asherons Call: A Small Batch of Q&A

Question: UliAlewright_TD - Is triggering the Gaerlan quest still bugged? A group of us on TD tried for 4 hours straight to spawn the 20-39 guardian portal for Gaerlan's quest. During that time, we checked periodically for portals in Eastham (none), or elementals in Qal (none), to see if someone else was running the quest. In four hours, we never got the guardian portal to spawn. Is this "normal", or is the quest still bugged? It's pretty frustrating, in any case.
Answer: Orion-Turbine - Yes. I have found that the portal is still bugged if the previous group fails to reach a point, the stopgap fails. I'll be posting the final changes to the quest soon on the www.accmty.com boards.

Question: Angelic0 - Why are there no Children NPC's in the game? Can't they just shrink down the human avatar like they have with others and have some kid NPCs in game. I mean there are men and women npcs in the game...maybe sex is prohibited in dereth?
Answer: Orion-Turbine - There are two answers here.

[li]1) Parents are smart enough to shield their children from the horror of the outside world. No sense in having them carted off and cooked by the local mosswarts.
[li]2) Shrinking the human avatar doesn't exactly the way you would think it would. We've done it once for one video and the proportions were odd and the face was even odder so we decided that once was good enough.

Question: videian - Shields....a current issue. They are to powerful, everyone knows this, the amount of damage they suck up is sick.
Answer: Orion-Turbine - Actually, the shield hollow creatures that were added are rare, and will continue to be so. We're not disregarding shields all together either. We are well aware that a shield does allow a melee character to negate nearly all damage that come at them. Remember folks we are constantly evolving the game world, and we intend to continue doing so.

Question: Buk_mt - Devastater's killing blow nearly turns you inside out! Common enough sentence for the level 100+ dungeon. But why did it kill my level 29 mage on the surface so close to the village? My mage has no HOPE against something like that.
Answer: Orion-Turbine - Can someone PM coords for that area, I want to make sure to clear that spawn if it is misplaced. There should be no creatures that tough in the lower area.

Question: dugfromthearth - so are melees dead again? mages were the class of choice six months ago. They were just vastly more powerful then everyone else. Then Turbine went through a lot of work to bring melees up to mage level. Now they add an island that is basically free xp for mages and archers, and negates the only advantage melees have - their shield. So of course there will be diehards playing melees, but are we going to revert back to hordes of mages or archers? Did Turbine in one stroke undue 6 months of rebalancing?
Answer: Orion-Turbine - There are 2 new creatures that ignore shields. Those same new creatures this month, also ignore the mainstay of a mage, Life Protections. Therefore they are creatures that are equally hard for all three major template types with the exception of those that have truly high Melee Defenses. Last month these boards rang with sentiment that shields were too powerful, this month they ring with the statement we've negated their entire existence because we added 2 creatures that ignore them. There are now a total of 5 creatures in the game that ignore shields. One is easily evaded another is the first of the higher level more dangerous creatures, two are meant to be more group friendly rather than solo friendly and the last is the Olthoi Queen. Difficult yes. Impossible no.

Question: KungFuTzu - Idea for restoring ground-loot. Instead of effectively ruining one of the best aspects of this game (the loot system), just reduce the amount of junk loot that spawns. There's a lot of monsters in the game that will drop junk that no one collects.
Answer: Sean_Huxter - This effectively ruins nothing. I've played it quite a bit since we changed it, and I'm perfectly happy with the system. I was totally against it when it was on the whiteboard. Yet it plays well. I was wrong. Considering the amount of cycles wasted by the server keeping track of every tiny item dropped on the ground, this is a big win. The servers now have to concentrate only on corpses timing down, not every single item. SO they have that much less work to do. The number of corpses will probably never come close to reaching the amount of junk that used to be on the ground, each following its own house-keeping rules (ie: taking up server resources.) And why not make corpses disappear right after they are opened and looted? Because others may be able to pick through the carcass. If you are playing in a fellowship, you loot a corpse, take only the items YOU want, and the fellowship can then look through them to get things you would have left behind. Instead of making all that go away right away, we allow others to grab what THEY find useful off a corpse. IF you are an archer, and you see a cool bow, but are not interested in the excellent staff or shield, why make those disappear right away? We allow the others in your party to take advantage of that shield and that staff before it all goes away. After having played it now for some time, doing quite a bit of scavenging, I find I've made much more money in the past two weeks than I have in a long long time.

Question: Devastator.BM-FF - I know a secret about the new islands. There is a very big reason for it's implementation, and what it offers players brings Turbine and M$, exactly what they wanted. It's not what you think, but I'd like to see what wild imaginations you all have out there? What do you think the big secret is?
Answer: Sean_Huxter - No. He doesn't. Really.

Question: piejack - I think I figured out why it rains so much in AC. It's because I always login at the same time and noticed that it rains 100% when I login, so I bet the rain/day/night timer is on a switch that is identical day-to-day. I login in every night 10pm CST, and it's raining. I know this because I'm out at my house in the desert. I posted "why does it rain 80% of the time" when in reality the timer just happenes to go off the same time every night. Let's test this /e tests.
Answer: Sean_Huxter - Actually the day timer is 2:07 specifically so that if you log on the same time each day the day won't be the same. As for why it rains and snows at the same time in the mountains, I guess Dereth must be a lot like the Avalon Peninsula in Newfoundland...

Question: Xalac_Mersun - So, with 5 minute corpse, will Plat/Pyreal spawn rates be increased?
Answer: Sean_Huxter - That is not the reason the Pyreal Golem spawns were causing problems. The two are entirely separate server issues. Each was causing its problems but the Pyreal Golem problem was much, much worse. That one caused servers to do very bad things, which exacerbated a condition that caused people to be stuck in-world. The corpse change is simply a wise server optimization. Optimization is good.

Question: Catkicker-SC - Has srand been kidnapped by ac2? She's logging in to these boards so she's still around. but, she's not posting. eather she's been kidnapped(and we need to launch a rescue mission) or she's too busy to post(working on something cool and new for us here in ac).
Answer: srand - Too busy to post. I worked on AC2 in the past. I work on AC now. Stop thinking I'll desert you. Hmph.

Question: Raylin_DuNotin - Is This A Known Bug With Character Creation? Ok, I made a new character tonight at the behest of some friends. They convinced me to try out an extreme life archer character. Part of this template is a starting strength of 10. When I logged though I had no arrows at all, and no spells even though I'd spec'd Life and trained Critter. I talked to a few friends who used the same template and they said the same thing happened to them. No arrows and no spells.
Answer: srand - Interesting. Yes, this does appear to be a bug. I'll see if I can get it fixed for next update.