October Letter to the Players

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Welcome to the October 2003 Letter to the Players. As the forces of Dereth focus on ridding the land of the Olthoi, we can't help but wonder what lies on the horizon.

PK Lite Corpse Timer
Starting with the October event, PK Lite corpses will follow the same rules as monster corpses. If they are opened and closed, they will decay immediately. If they are never opened, they will decay in five minutes. This should help cut down on the graphics impact caused by PK Lite combat in high-traffic areas.

When we initially proposed PK Lite and asked for feedback on our forums, the majority of players responded that they did want corpses. Unfortunately, since PK Lite has been so popular, there's been a problem with too many corpses. We could take them out of the game, but as they were included by request, we would prefer to leave them. In addition, leaving them as they are gives us the option to create some form of PK Lite death trophy in the future.

We thank you all for helping to clean up your corpses in the meantime, and ask that you continue to do so even after these changes.

Masks
We've traditionally added new masks each October. This year, in addition to any other content we might add, we'll be tweaking the existing Virindi and heritage masks. We're bringing all masks into line with the current creature difficulty breakdowns, and some are being made more useful. These changes may include how you obtain and repair the masks.

The most important change, and the one we feel is necessary to mention in advance, will be to the requirements of Pwyll's Guard, the Shroud of Night, and the higher-level Koji's Beast. These three masks previously had wield requirements of 300 base skill in Dagger, Staff, and Unarmed, respectively. These are being changed to activation requirements of 350 buffed skill.

We felt that players like to wear the heritage masks for decoration and fun, and that the wield requirements of the high-level masks prevented them from being used in this fashion. While the change should not impact many players, we wanted to let you know ahead of time so that it doesn't take you by surprise.

Fellowship Improvements
Last month, we made some changes to the fellowship system. You no longer need to walk over to someone to recruit them into your fellowship, and we gave you an option to automatically accept fellowship requests.

This month you'll be seeing additional fellowship improvements, plus two new features:

Fellowships will no longer automatically disband if the leader quits or is disconnected. Fellowship leaders can also assign leadership to a different character.

Players can create Open Fellowships, which allow any member to recruit new members.
We also believe we have fixed the bug that could, in certain situations, change your target to a fellowship member. You'll find more details regarding these changes in the Rollout Article!

The October Event
Judging by our schedule in past months, you would expect the October event to take place a week and a half after this Letter is posted. This month, however, the event will be roughly a week later than normal. Our current target for the event is the last week in October.

The Zone has plans for annual maintenance in late October, and asked us if we would be willing to push our event back a week. This was to ensure that none of their maintenance would impact our event in any way.

To get you through the extra week, the teaser will be a little longer than usual, and spread out over a few days.

In other event news, the October download will be larger than usual. (If you watch the splash screens after the download is complete, you'll see one of the reasons why.)

The AC:DM Website
We're planning a number of changes for the Turbine AC:DM website, including a total revamp of the AC:DM forums. We mention it here because we may need to take the entire site down for a week or more as we make these updates. Current plans have this downtime happening just after the October event, but it may be shifted earlier or later as necessary. We'll be posting more information on the site and on the forums as it becomes available.

Looking Forward
In previous years, October has been the beginning of the winter festival months, a "break" from the more intense action of previous months. As you can see by the continued Olthoi attacks, however, this October will be anything but a break!

As a result, November and December will be our festival months. They may feel a little different from the past few months of story-driven content. In these two months, we'll be focusing on fixing bugs, cleaning up existing content, and trying to implement a few pieces of content that didn't quite fit with the most recent story arc. So there will be interesting new content, but not epic storyline content.

That's all we've got for today! Remember that a number of details that you used to see in the Letter to the Players can now be found in the Rollout Article, which is posted on the day of the event.

See you in Dereth!