News and Updates

Tonight we will have a brief period of maintenance starting at 3:00AM SL time, and lasting for approximately 10 minutes. Note that this only affects Bloodlines War and the Liquid Vendor System. Bloodlines Thirst, Rage, and Human systems and websites will not be affected by this maintenance. Please refrain from making purchases during this time at Bloodlines stores and from Bloodlines affiliate vendors. If you have any questions, please contact Lyle Maeterlinck.

Over the past 14 hours or so, Bloodlines has been suffering intermittent downtime due to a networking problem at our webhost. We wanted to let you know how sorry we are for this unacceptable interruption to the system, and that we are doing everything we can to reduce the downtime as much as possible. The service interruption was caused by a hardware upgrade at the data center where the Bloodlines servers are hosted, and this hardware upgrade caused unexpected problems. So, this service interruption should be a very rare and unusual event. While the system is up and healthy for now, we are not out of the woods yet, they have told us that they are continuing to work on the problem, and that additional periods of downtime may happen before it is complete. If you made any purchases during the downtime that you did not receive, please send a notecard to Lyle Maeterlinck, and I will make sure you get your delivery as soon as possible. Thanks very much for your patience and understanding while we get through this!

UPDATE: Scheduled maintenance tonight has been postponed until tomorrow night, Thursday, March 13, 2014, for the same time, 2-3PM. No scheduled maintenance will happen today. We’re very sorry for any confusion that this causes.

Previously:

The Bloodlines Thirst, Rage, and Human systems are scheduled to be unavailable from approximately 2:00 AM SL time until approximately 3:00AM SL time tomorrow morning, Wednesday, March 12, 2014 for server updates. Bloodlines War will remain available during this time. We expect this to be the last period of downtime for routine maintenance for the foreseeable future. We’re sorry for any inconvenience this causes.

This maintenance period is going to be adding a layer of robustness to our server architecture that will protect us against future problems, and help ensure the availability and durability of Bloodlines for a long time to come.

Please let me (Lyle Maeterlinck) know if you have any questions. Thanks to all of you for making Bloodlines the ultimate vampire community in Second Life!

Hi everyone, overnight tonight we are having a period of scheduled maintenance starting at about 3:00AM SL time. We expect the maintenance to last for 30 to 45 minutes. During this time, all Bloodlines services will be unavailable, including the Bloodlines website, and all in-world web-connected items. To view the status of the Bloodlines system during the downtime, please stay tuned to http://status.slbloodlines.com.

We’re really sorry about this. We take downtime of the system very seriously, and will be taking additional steps to prevent future maintenance episodes of this kind.  If you have any questions regarding the downtime, please contact me (Lyle Maeterlinck) in-world. Thanks!

Today we made some updates to the Bloodlines generations and stats. We have released a new subdomain for Bloodlines at hybrid.slbloodlines.com. If you have the Thirst HUD, you have a profile on slbloodlines.com, if you have the Rage HUD, you have a profile on lycan.slbloodlines.com, and now, if you have both, you get another profile where you can access both your vampire and lycan stats on the hybrid site.

This comes with some updates to the stats and generations. Before, hybrids were part of either the lycan or the vampire stats depending on what resource they were dominant in: blood or lumens. Now, anyone who is both enraged and embraced will show in the hybrid stats. If you are only embraced, you will show in the vampire stats, and if you are only enraged, you will only show in the lycan stats. To move from the hybrid stats to the vampire stats, you would need to drink Wolfsbane, and to move from the hybrid stats to the lycan stats, you would need to drink Nightshade. If you’re hybrid, you can safely do this without losing any souls.

Humans have a new homepage where they can compete for the stats Cider Wealth, Lumen Fountain, Blood Fountain, and also compete in a soul ranking. We’ve made a number of other small improvements to the website that we hope make it easier to browse. Let us know what you think!

We would like to give everyone a heads-up that we are preparing to finally make some much-requested updates to the Bloodlines stats. We are adding two new stats pages, one for Hybrids, and one for Humans.

This means that if you are currently a Hybrid (both embraced and enraged), and you are currently in the Vampire or Lycan stats for Generation or Royalty, you will be moved to the Hybrid stats. This means that instead of only two players being Generation 1, now there will be three. This also opens up two more slots in Generation 2, four more in Generation 3, eight more in Generation 4, etc. If you are a Hybrid currently in the Vampire stats and want to stay there, you will need to drink the Wolfsbane potion, and if you are currently a Hybrid in the Lycan stats and want to stay there, you will need to drink the Nightshade potion. You don’t have to do this yet. As we get closer to launching these changes, we will let you know exactly when it is going to happen.

For Humans, this means you finally get your own Bloodlines homepage and separate stats. We’re adding rankings for Cider Wealth and total amount of humanity converted into blood or lumens.

We’re also going to be making some updates to the site to make them easier to navigate and access on mobile devices.

UPDATE: 6/29/2012: A few of you expressed some concerns about privacy on your profiles, so we have given you an additional option for how to display your attack lists. Through your profile editor, you can set it so that it displays the old way, with attacks listed by the date of the first attack, or the new way, with names sized according to the number of attacks from or on that person.

ORIGINAL POST:

We’re excited to announce new Bloodlines profiles on the Thirst, Rage, and Human websites! Now, you can upload a profile photo, say something about yourself, and choose a font for your name to display in! Also, if you’re a clan leader, you can edit your clan profile with a group photo, and a clan emblem. If you upload a clan emblem, it will display on all of your clan member’s profiles, and link back to the clan.

To edit your profile or clan profile, just log into the website, and then mouse over your name in the upper right corner of the site to get the dropdown menu. In the dropdown menu are links to your profile, clan profile, and to your editor pages where you can edit your profile. More exciting updates are coming soon

We’d like to give you a heads up on a new feature on the Bloodlines website: web profiles! Very soon, you will be able to customize your Bloodlines web profile with a profile photo, about text, and you can even choose from a selected number of very cool fonts for your name! Also, clan leaders will be able to write about their clan on the website, and upload a group photo and clan emblem for their clan. Clan emblems will show on the profiles of all clan members, and the group photo will show on the new clan profile. We thought you might want to get your profile photos ready, so here are a few guidelines:

Profile photos are square, and will be resized to 180 x 180 pixels.

Clan emlems are square, and will be resized to 100 x 100 pixels.

Clan group photos have a 2:1 aspect ratio (width:height), and will be resized to 400 x 200 pixels.

We are also working on a new feature for the website called “Haunts”, where you will be able to register your Bloodlines bar, club, castle, roleplay area, or hangout on the Bloodlines website. You’ll be able to promote your location and your events there. Then, residents will be able to view a list of events going on at Bloodlines Haunts at any given time, and teleport right from the website. So, get your Vampire Castle, Blood Room, Lycan Bar, or Human Hangout ready for visitors! Stay tuned for more details on this!

Some people have been expressing concerns regarding privacy when logging into the slbloodlines.com website. There have been some unfounded rumors going around, such as that the new Bloodlines HUD “logs your IP”, which is false. It may be possible for some items within Second Life to get access to your IP address using shared media, depending on what viewer you’re using, but no Bloodlines item currently uses shared media features within SL. For more information on shared media and what you can do to protect your privacy, see this linden blog post on shared media. The website does collect hardware and software information when you log in for the purpose of maintaining sessions between the server and your client (browser), but this is not different than any website that you can log into. Keep in mind that you are not required to log into the website in order to play Bloodlines. The reason we created the website logins is to deliver cool new features like profile photos, customized profiles, clan profiles, and a richer way to interact with each other on the website. In order to provide these features, we need to put authentication in place, so that only you can edit your own profile. You have the option of logging into the website if you want access to these upcoming features, but it is by no means required.

Some have also expressed concerns about privacy when changing their password in-world. Also, some people have been trying to log into slbloodlines.com with their Second Life password. Do not try to log into slbloodlines.com with your Second Life password, it won’t work. We don’t know what your Second Life password is, and can’t authenticate you with it. Your password for slbloodlines.com is a different password that you create with your HUD by going to Settings > Account > Register. Right now, when you change your password, you do it over chat on a randomly selected channel. It is technically possible for someone to hear this password if they have a channel scanner. So, we advise you to only change your password when you are out of chat range of other avatars. We will be issuing another update soon that will make an attempt to make this process more secure. Please do not make your password for slbloodlines.com the same as your second life password; use a unique password. We don’t store passwords in plain text, we only store passwords as encrypted hashes, so not even we can see the password you have chosen, and if an attacker were to gain access to our database, they would not have the passwords you have chosen either.

We take your security and privacy seriously, and we take measures to keep your information as secure as possible. If you have any questions about privacy or security, please see our privacy policy, or feel free to contact Lyle Maeterlinck in-world with questions.

Tonight, we’re excited to announce the following updated Bloodlines HUDs: Thirst 3.5, the Rage 1.3, and the Human 1.1. You should be auto-delivered your update when you log in. If not, you can get the updates from any update terminal at Liquid Estate (Liquid Designs, Liquid East, Liquid South, Liquid Badlands, or Liquid Frontier). There are several notable new features on the HUDs:

1. You can register an account so you can log into slbloodlines.com by going to settings > account > register. You can also change or reset your password using this menu. There isn’t a great deal you can do by logging in at the moment, but this update will allow us to bring lots of cool new features to the Bloodlines website.
2. Charisma sending has been removed from the HUDs. We’re sorry about the inconvenience on this, but it was just being too badly abused by people logging in hundreds of alts or bots in order to game the stats. Now, you can send Charisma by logging into the website, and pushing the +1 Charisma button on your friends profiles. This won’t give us the ability to absolutely stop people abusing the system with alts, but we will be able to implement controls to make it more difficult to game this stat.
3. Glamour and Terror: this is a fun new power that you can use with your human minions. If you Glamour (with the thirst), or Terror (with the Rage) your minions, you will be able to bite or claw them without receiving further confirmation for one hour. If you agree to be Glamoured or Terrored, you can break this at any time by going to Settings > (clan or group) > Resist Liege. This will also be broken if you unliege from your liege.
4. You will probably also notice some minor updates to the website: now the groups and group rosters are listed on separate pages, and the groups page has a search function now. For a sneak peek at the types of updates coming to slbloodlines.com, check out The Fortune Hunt.

We hope you like these updates, more exciting updates coming soon!