Asherons Call: State of the Code Updated (twice!)

January 23, 2002

This is the latest installment of a frequently updated series of reports on The State of the Code for Asheron's Call. In this report, we keep players informed as to the state of some of the more technical aspects of AC, particularly bugs we are working on and technical limitations of which you should be aware. Look at the News page on the Zone for other articles about recent additions and changes to Asheron's Call.

Specialized Credit Limit
When we initially introduced the post-creation specialization quest in November, we limited the number of credits that any character could invest into specialized skills to a total of 50. Basically, this meant that post-creation specialization did not give you access to any specilized skillsets that you could not normally select at character creation. We instituted this limit because we like to start out conservative -- we wanted to watch the effects of skill sellback on game balance before allowing for more specialized characters. We did, however, discuss the possibility of increaing this limit, or lifting it all together, sometime in the future.

We were working on a small increase to the specialization credit limit for February with the intention of increasing the limit for all characters, but hadn't fully implemented this feature. For this reason, certain skillsets are now possible that involve more than 50 specialized credits. Although this was not intended behavior for January, we will not be taking the servers down to do a special rollback of this bug in January because we don't want to penalize our players with lost progress due to a rollback. Some characters may be able to benefit from this bug slightly in January, but in February everyone will be able to benefit equally from the changed dynamic. So don't panic if you see a new template in the Marketplace -- you'll be able to do that yourself (if you choose to) soon.

Warehouse Annex
When you are exploring the Warehouse Annex this month, please be thorough. If you leave the Annex without the Valara Crystal, you may be unable to reenter the Annex to get the crystal and your progress on the quest will be stalled until next month.

Marketplace
We expect a high volume of traffic in the Marketplace once it is live in the world, as many people will rush to put their trade bots there and others will simply be curious. For those of you playing on older machines, we recommend not rushing to see the Marketplace the first day of the patch and waiting for the high volume of initial curiosity seekers to level out.

Arwic
The wall around Arwic may cause reduced framerate on some systems. We will work on ways to improve this.

Gaerlan
The Gaerlan quest dynamic has been changed in many places to make it more robust. Hopefully, this should allow all Derethians their chance to kill Gaerlan in a more timely fashion.