July 07, 2010

Update Time

I'm Sick.

Sorry I haven't updated the Design Notes this week. Here's what we've got going on:

Chickencow Tee!

We FINALLY have a BEAUTIFUL Chickencow T-shirt coming to Heromart! IT IS NOT ON SALE YET but when it DOES go on sale it will come with some chickencow pets for the various games, including a NON-MEMBER mini-chickencow pet for AQW!

Cluck Cluck Moo.

I'm more excited about this shirt than I have been about any of our other swag, mainly because it was my idea. See how majesticly the chickencow spreads it's mighty wings and soars through space? You can almost her it's bone-rattling... uh.. roar. Mido, our current graphic-design intern is responsible for this masterwork. Clutch, right?

Tall Tales

We are taking a small break from Chaos before to turn our attention to the next Chaos Lord. This weekend starts a new kind of adventure, it's a flashback tale of how you saved an entire village from a hungry giant, in AQW's own version of Jack and The Beanstalk.

Picture the setting: You are sitting in Yulgar's Inn telling tales of your adventures to a group of children gathered at your feet, reliving your adventure in the form of AQW quests, running around a terrifying giant's home, no larger than a mouse.

New weapons like the Cotton Swab staff, and the Acorn Cap helm. The Dust Bunny pet.

Defender Class

We haven't forgotten what we said. We are still working on the Guardian Class skill rewrite. The Guardian has long been our flagship member status from AQ classic, and it means a lot to Artix (and quite a few of the players from the game that started it all) that we make the Guardian skills more closely resemble the BoA Skills from the original AdventureQuest, and the Guradian Class from DragonFable.

Once Dumoose has reworked the skills, we will balance them against the DragonLord and Star Lord classes, then we will move the current Guardian tanking skills into the Defender art and make Defender Class availible in all 3 verification shops.

It won't be coming this weekend, but I'll keep you guys updated on the project and when it WILL be released.

NO Green Starsword.

A few days ago, a players asked me via Twitter if a weapon got enough support behind it, would it be made in game? I answered "We always do our best to listen to the wishes of the community. So, yeah, we probably would." which most of you know to be true. We pull idea pretty regularly from the AQW forums.

The same player asked how many supporters it would require, to which i answered "Considering if the petition goes through people will suddenly petition for everything, it has to be high. I'll say 3000 signatures."

I was thinking that if someone was driven enough to get 3K AQW players to sign a petition on some petition website, and all 3k signatures were legit and it wasn't an silly request like "give everyone free memberships" then I would happily reward that kind of effort by creating the item and probably name it after that person.

It takes a real leader to get that many people together behind one idea and respect that kind of power. I've seen it a few times in my life and it's pretty awe-inspiring.

We're VERY big on interacting with you guys and allowing you to build Lore through your own requests & decisions, but this suddenly degenerated into insanity.

People were spamming all the servers telling people that I promised to make a non-member free green starsword if 3000 people wore green at the same time, which I never said.

Some of these players were demaning that other players wear green "or else". There were some threats, lots of spamming on the staff facebook and twitter accounts, and outright madness on the forums that even eventually degerated into some rude and very offensive comments.

THOSE are not the kind of actions that I would consider rewarding. As i finally said on my twitter, after 2 days of mass spamming from a few rather rude people, "There are NO PLANS to make any starswords anytime soon... Not to say we won't make one someday. I love green, so we probably will. But not like this. Bullying people and ruining fun to get your way."

I'm sorry if you're disapponted by this announcement. I know a lot of people were promised a lot of crazy things by people who had no place to promise anything but we want to keep this game, and all of our games, FUN... and that wasn't fun.

It just goes to show you that some people can get excited about something, thoughtlessly take things way too far and ruin the fun for everyone.

What a mess.