Asheron's Call Homepage

[Frelorn]

Hello everyone. I hope we are all well today. I know in the past few weeks when I have done this update I have answered a few questions and then told you what was going on in the week. For this update I am going to do something a little different.

I wanted to use this opportunity to let you all know about a great new feature going into the game in January (tentatively). When you first log in after the January event goes live you will notice a new “friends” tab on the social panel. This panel will be a list of your friends and their online status, sorted first by online status, and then alphabetically. With this panel you will be able to do all of the things you could do with the existing friends list, as well as some new functionality.

One of the coolest things about this new friends panel is the ability to appear offline. With a simple click of a button you will appear offline to everyone, until you choose to hit the button again. You will be able to send tells to people on your friends list by selecting that person and clicking the send tell button on the panel. This will auto fill the /tell friends name into your chat bar. You will also be able remove friends by selecting them and hitting the remove button. In addition, your friends list will now hold up to 50 people!

Having this new friends panel means that your old friends list will no longer be useful. You will however, be able to type in the command @friends old. This will give you a list of all the people who were on your friends list before the January event. The one drawback to this new system is that you will need to manually enter all of your old friends into your new friends panel.

As far as this week goes, we are in the final stages of QA testing on the January event and we are well into the writing process for February. We also use this time to go over things we want in the future. I won’t get into specifics, but there are some really great ideas that we are looking forward to adding to the game.

Oh yea, before I forget… The tentative launch date for the January event is Wednesday January 18. The name of this event is Reprisals! That means that as long as everything goes according to plans, I will have the LttP out on Friday.

[Davidge]

Rock on!

Now what about the privacy features I have mentioned in the past?

Can we also selectively block people from seeing our online status?

Can people that add us to their list be known by us so we can protect our privacy from unwanted stalkers?

[Rakshas]

ok cool!! where's my letter from the producer?

[Hectorb911]

Great News Frelorn and Great Job Turbine! Thanks for the update

[Frelorn]

Originally Posted by Rakshas

ok cool!! where's my letter from the producer?

http://ac.turbine.com/?page_id=433

[Frelorn]

Can we also selectively block people from seeing our online status?

As of right now you can only block everyone or no one. It is not selective.

Can people that add us to their list be known by us so we can protect our privacy from unwanted stalkers?

There isn't any type of notification right now, but I like the idea. I will bring it up to the team and see what they have to say.

[Davidge]

Thank you Frelorn, bringing up that aspect with the team is all I ask for now - at least regarding the Friends feature set. <evil grin>

To enlarge the idea a bit: Think MSN's IM privacy features. When someone adds you to their contact list, ( if you have privacy turned on, ) you get a notice that they added you to their list, and you are asked if you want to allow them to see your online status or not, and if you want to add them to your list.

If you answer yes, they are added to your list and they can then see your status.

If you answer no, they are NOT added to your list and they are unable to see your online status, you always appear offline to them.

Additionally you have to ability to change the status on an individual basis for existing contacts on your list, by blocking or unblocking them. Blocking them makes you appear offline at all times, regardless of your true status.

With the addition of block all or unblock all, you are partway there already -- which btw is already another nice feature about MSN IM.


.

[TheKnight]

Thanks for the update Frelorn, the friends panel is something that we players have been asking for many years now so it's good to see this is finally going to be making it into the game.

I also like that you can appear offline if you don't want to be disturbed for various reasons. Running Quests, Hunting, Tinkering etc etc.

I look forward to what you guys have planned for this patch and for the future.

But just for future referances can you please tell us in advance the next time you guys go and change the IP address of the auth server? This would save alot of headaches for both us the customers and you guys at Turbine.

Regards

[Lucky Devil]

Glad you found time to make a tab for friends, so much more important than everything else we've wanted or were promised... I'm cancelling my subcription.

[PartyVT]

With a simple click of a button you will appear offline to everyone, until you choose to hit the button again

If I go "offline" and someone @tells me, will the tell get through to me, or will it say that the char is not online right now?

Else small scripts could be written to circumvent the privacy aspect.

I would like to propose the following idea:

turning "offline" on and "notell" on at the same time will result in not showing up in the friends list, and people trying to message you will get the message that you are not online

turning just "offline" on would result in not showing up in the friends list, but people could @tell you

[Heideggar]

Glad to hear about the friends tab. I find trying to decide who, of my old friends, to remove in order to put in a new one rather saddening, like I won't know if they log on to say hi, nor will they. 50 is a pretty good amount. Well, when I compare it to the 15!? we have now, it sounds like a lot : )

[Davidge]

Indeed, being able to add/list 50 friends is awesome.

I especially like the fact that Turbine is including sorting by status and alpha on that list.



.

[Celestin]

I would just like to weigh in and say that, regarding this week's issue with the IP change, that I feel that people were quite hard on you, though justifiable so in a way.

It really shouldn't have been an issue, you should have been able to at least forward requests to the old IP on to the new IP or -something-. I may not be a business major, but I've learned enough good marketing practices from my minor to see that you're not doing a very good job at delivering anything but the minimum possible to satisfy people, which means that some often aren't satisfied at all as a result.

I realize it wasn't your fault, you weren't informed, but it did seem like there wasn't much being done about the issue, which it seems could have been easily solved by distributing a small little installer that would load up a temporary .ini, then distribute a similar one later this week to set it back to normal. I am sure this would have satisfied most players, if not all of them. And it would have taken what, 5 minutes to write, half an hour to test, and you could have had it up on the website with a short disclaimer an hour after discovering the problem. That's the sort of thing most of us expect from good customer service reps, which is essentially what you are as the Community Relations person.

[Cezium]

Have a good week. make sure to earn our money down the road.

[Kid]

What is the point of the News for the Week (or Weekly Updates)? Seriously Frelorn, give me a reason why you post these because this thread should be called "Mini-LttP" instead of "News for the Week". I'm not looking for a ban...I'm looking for a serious answer.