Asherons Call: March LttP is Up!

Welcome to the March Letter to the Players!

We have seen some exciting changes over the past few months as Dereth continues to evolve and change. We've seen the beginning of the PvP improvements that we have been discussing with the community, as well as some new character options such as the title panel. What is in store for us this month? Let's get right to it and find out!

Decisions, Decisions!
The storyline continues this month with more decision-based quests. What decisions will you make? Make sure you make the right choices when deciding which side of the war you want to be on. Every decision we make has consequences.

PvP Combat
After soliciting extensive feedback from the PvP community, this month we have made the first set of changes aimed at improving the PvP experience. You can read more about these changes here: PVP Changes. We are really excited about these changes and we can't wait to see what you think of them in action. We will of course continue to review all your feedback on these improvements and make tweaks based on that feedback.

Temple Revision
Since we revised the Temples of Forgetfulness and Enlightenment in December, they have suffered from some minor usability issues. In order to correct those issues, we have made two small changes to the temples.

First, both temples now contain an NPC who would be happy to take any unused tokens that you may have mistakenly picked up. This NPC will also decrement your quest flags so that you will then be able to pick up another - hopefully correct - token in its place.

In addition, we have split up the timers on the attribute gems so that players can no longer make the fatal mistake of picking up 18 of one type of token. Players can now only pick up 9 untrain tokens and 9 train tokens at once. As a side effect of this change, all players will have their attribute token timers reset with the March update. Players will also be able to keep any attribute tokens that they may have already had. This change will not affect the timers on skill tokens at all.

And finally, the books in the Temples of Enlightenment and Forgetfulness have been updated to reflect all of the recent changes to the temples.

Language Filter
In response to your requests, we have added a simple language filter this month. This filter can be activated in the character options section of your user interface. It is off by default. When the filter is on, vulgar words that appear in any kind of chat - including tells, fellowship chat, global chats, and indeed every other kind of game chat - will be masked with asterisks.

We want to be very clear about something: this filter is not a substitute for customer service. If you see someone using profanity, please report them and we will do our best to solve the problem. This filter is simply a means to help reduce the visibility of these words to those people who do not wish to see them in the meantime.

Housing Improvements
Starting with the March update, all characters on the account of a character who owns a house will have greater permissions involving house management. These characters will be able to add and remove guests, add and remove storage permissions, open and close the house, boot freeloaders, and even place items on the house's hooks. There are only two things that a non-owner character on the same account can't do with a house: abandon the house, and change the allegiance permissions. In addition, other characters on your account will be automatically removed from the house guest list the first time they log in, thus making more space for legitimate guests.

We've also made some changes to the command @house available, which lists how many houses of each type and available for purchase and the locations of the houses (except apartments). First off, we added a shorter alias for @house available, called @hslist. Secondly, this command now takes as a parameter the type of house you'd like to list. For instance, @hslist villa will show you a list of only the available villas, while @hslist mansion will show you only mansions. Keep in mind that the list of results is still limited to 400 houses, however, so if there are more than 400 cottages available you will only see the first 400 locations.

In-Concept
Based on feedback from players as well as members of the team, we are going to be revising this section of the Letter to the Players. Starting next month, when we list items in this section they will come with some explaination as to what each item is. So instead of just listing the things we want to do, we will list them with a description of each item.

Please remeber that along with everything that is listed here, there are several new quests and other new and exciting things going into the game for the March event.

So that's what's in store for March! We're excited about this month, and we look forward to your feedback!