News and Updates

Last week, 3 lucky Bloodlines players won a full 5L/50Lumen container just by participating in 5 Bloodlines bite or claw attacks. This week’s contest will be a little more challenging: turn one fresh victim to a vampire or a lycan before midnight SL time this Saturday, and you’ll be entered to win a free, full 20-Liter blood Tank or Cask, 20L Cider Barrel, or a full 200-Lumen Bone or Iron Prism. Any of these containers will satisfy the Curse for 80 long, dark nights. To win, you must be the first one to bite the fresh victim or the first person to bite them after they drink the Wormwood potion, and then they have to fill to 5Liters of Vital or 50 Lumens to turn full Vampire or Lycan. Good hunting and a full moon to all the Bloodlines night stalkers out there…

UPDATE :

Congratulations to Azazel87 of The Vampire Blood Horde, loveless Carpathia of Rogue Coven Clan, and Anahi Sheriffe of Rose Noire Horde! Each of them have won their choice of a full 20-liter Tank, Cask, or Cider Barrel, or a 200-Lumen Prism!

This Saturday night, we’ll be doing a drawing for three free Bloodlines containers, filled with 100% pure Bloodlines Vital Blood, freshly fermented Bloodlines Cider, or bright Bloodlines Lumens. All you have to do to enter is share a vampire bite or lycan scratch with 5 of your friends between now and midnight SL time on Saturday. Being the attacker or the victim counts. These don’t have to be shared with fresh victims, they can be with any 5 Bloodlines players. The three lucky winners will have their choice of a Tank, a Cask, a Cider Barrel, or a Bone or Iron Prism. Winners will be announced here this Sunday, so get out there and get your hunt on!

UPDATE: Out of 566 Bloodlines players who qualified by being involved in 5 or more vampire or lycan attacks in the past couple of days, we have randomly selected SissaPantera, LadyYepperz, and TitanCronnos! Each of them will be receiving their choice of a free, full 5L Blood, 5L Cider, or 50-Lumen container. Congratulations!

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!

UPDATE 3/27/2012: After reading all of the feedback that we received, we’ve decided not to go ahead with this update. The description of this update caused a lot of confusion, and we don’t want to make any updates that cause anyone to worry about their stats. We only want to make updates that people are generally excited about, and some people thought that this was fair, but no one was really excited about it. Thanks to everyone who let us know their thoughts!

UPDATE: No one likes the idea of souls from “dormant” minions no longer totaling upwards, so scratch that. Also, many people don’t like the idea of having to be involved in a bite every 30 days, so now the proposal has changed to: just log in once every 30 days and wear one of your HUDs, and you’ll stay listed in the stats. If you don’t log in for 30 days, you’ll go “dormant”. If you log in after being dormant, you will come back from being dormant, and will be back in the stats. To clarify, this will not affect souls or other stats, it would just remove dormant players from rankings.

ORIGINAL POST: We’ve heard from some of you about the issue with players ranked in the stats on slbloodlines.com no longer actively participating in the Bloodlines community, or perhaps not having logged in for a long time, and we agree that players ranked in the live stats on the website should be current, active players of Bloodlines. We have a simple approach that we believe would accomplish this, but before we put it in place, we’d like to hear what you think.

Here’s our idea: make sure that anyone listed in the stats (generation, royalty, wealth) has been involved in a vampire bite or lycan attack in the last 30 days. So, if a vampire goes 30 days without biting anyone, or being bitten, they would automatically become dormant. Dormant vampires would not appear on the public stats, and would be moved to a separate list. A dormant vampire could come back and be re-listed on the stats simply by biting or being bitten.

Another idea we’d like to propose is the idea of the souls of dormant vampires no longer adding to the total souls of their liege, similar to humans. So, feel free to comment on this post, or contact Lyle Maeterlinck or Mars Bracken in-world with your thoughts on this potential change. We’ll be taking feedback on this until Monday, March 26. After that, we’ll let everyone know what we decide to do with this.

Office hours are on for this Friday:

• Where: the Bloodlines store on Liquid Frontier (click to teleport)
  
• When: Friday, July 15, from 12-1PM SL time (Pacific)

We hope to see you all there!

Last Friday, several dozen Bloodlines players joined us for our first weekly office hours at Liquid Frontier. We really enjoyed talking to everyone, and we’re sorry if we weren’t able to get to your question. We’ll be doing it again this week, at the same time and place:

• Where: the Bloodlines store on Liquid Frontier (click to teleport)
  
• When: Friday, July 1, from 12-1PM SL time (Pacific)

Last week, not everyone who wanted to come was able to get on the sim, so if you want to attend, be sure to get there early. For future meetings, we will try to put in place a system so that more people can attend, and that the question / answer cycle can be more organized. These sessions are a work in progress, thanks for bearing with us while we find the best way to approach it, and as always, your suggestions are welcome.

Here is a brief run-down on some of the top questions and requests that were brought up at last week’s meeting:

1. Problems with vendors: some people had been having trouble with deliveries from vendors. We have made some updates to resolve the issues, and we’ve seen a great reduction in missed deliveries, and the affiliate vendors should deliver a lot faster as well.
2. War item updates: Second Life Viewer 2 makes it possible to attach more than one item to the same attach point. This has allowed War players to attach multiple weapon and HUD instances simultaneously in order to gain an advantage. We have a fix for this problem, and we will be updating the War HUD and the Psionic Blast as soon as testing is complete, which should be in a matter of days.
3. Apple trees / bulk apples / cider shots: at this time, we don’t have a plan to release shots of apple cider, because the apples basically have the same functionality. We currently don’t have a way to sell more than one apple at a time, because they need to be individually rezzed prior to purchase so they can register with our system. We released the cider barrels as a way to buy a large source of Humanity at one time. Apple trees can only be on our sims because of the way that the apples pre-register with our system.
4. Lumen shots: this is an often-requested item, and it is on our list of planned items to release.
5. Age issues: we have no official policy on real life or Second Life age, please refer to Linden Labs policies on this.
6. Harassment issues: in general, there is a limited amount we can do about it. The actions you can take are to mute them, ban them from your land, or file an abuse report on them using Help > Report Abuse, and avoid them. If someone is harassing you in one of our chat groups or on our land, you can report it to us and we will take a look at it.
7. Other races: we think it would be cool to add some other races or HUDs to Bloodlines eventually, but we don’t have any other races planned at this time.
8. Hybrid HUD: at this time, we don’t have plans to release a separate Hybrid HUD.
9. War bases and public accessibility: All war bases that are listed in the public stats must be “publicly accessible”. Because of the freedom that you have in Second Life on your own land, many creative means have been taken to prevent people from taking a base while still calling the base “publicly accessible”. We realize the need to have a standard set of rules that all bases must abide by in order to make the public rankings meaningful. We are working on the technology we would need to enforce standardized rules. We will update you as soon as we know more on this.
10. Forums: online forums are currently under development.
11. There were many other good questions that I hope we answered to a satisfactory level.

If you have a question, join us this Friday!

This Friday, you can meet and chat with the creators of Bloodlines, Mars Bracken and Lyle Maeterlinck at our first weekly office hours:

• Where: the Bloodlines store on Liquid Frontier (click to teleport)
  
• When: Friday, June 24, from 12-1PM SL time (Pacific)

You can arrive and chat with us about anything you want to discuss or would like us to address. We hope to make this a weekly occurrence, but the time and location may change in subsequent weeks. Stay tuned to this blog for updates!

We’re excited to announce the release of new catalogue vendors!

The new catalogue vendors have several highly requested features: the ability to gift, an included update kiosk, and an included key grabber. You can use the update terminal to get redelivery of any copyable product you’ve previously purchased from Liquid Designs.

There are 6 sets of vendors for you to set up if you wish: The Thirst, The Rage, War, Humans, Crypt Avatar, and Crypt Land.

To make the vendors fit with your store size and decor, you can change the size and background material of the vendor board cluster by clicking on the vendor board backing and using the menu. If you want to delete the backing board, you can, but before you delete it, you can use it to set the size of your vendors.

The old catalogue vendors will be disabled in about 30 days, so around March 7. This means that you have 30 days to replace your catalogue vendors if you want to keep selling Bloodlines items on your own land. All you need to do is delete your old catalogue vendors or take them into inventory, and replace them with the new vendors you can get at any Bloodlines store for 1 Linden. Bloodlines stores are located on Liquid Designs, Liquid East, Liquid South, Liquid Badlands, and Liquid Frontier.

If you have any questions about the new catalogue vendors, please contact Lyle Maeterlinck or Mars Bracken in-world.

UPDATE: Everyone’s blood values should be correct at this point, if they aren’t, please let Lyle Maeterlinck know, and we will fix it.

UPDATE 1:02 pm: Everyone who has a status other than human should have a correct vital blood value. The only blood transfers we are unable to rebuild are from blood being sent through blood bonds. If you sent blood through a blood bond since yesterday morning, it may be rolled back and sent back to the original sender. If you believe your vital blood is not correct, please let Lyle Maeterlinck know.

UPDATE: There are still some issues with vital blood values being wrong. If your vital blood is wrong, please be patient, and it should be corrected shortly. In the meantime, you can continue playing the game normally. We assure you that your vital blood will be corrected.

Last night there was a database error where for a few hours, everyone’s blood was showing an incorrect value. We believe that the issue has been repaired. If you believe that your vital blood is not correct or if you have any other problems with your stats, please contact Lyle Maeterlinck in-world, and let him know what you believe your blood should be. As a result of this, the curse was canceled last night. We’re sorry for any inconvenience that this caused.

The way the Bloodlines vendors, website, and HUDs interact with the “Resident” surname have been updated today. When using vendors and attempting to gift to an avatar with the last name of Resident, you no longer have to type both names, you can type just their first user name and it should find them. On the website, we have scrubbed the last name “Resident” from all the profiles and listings, and searches can be made using just the first name of these new avatars. All HUD functions that deal with avatar names, IE lieging, can be done now by typing just the first name of any avatar with a Resident last name. In all these cases, however, typing both first and last names still works.

We hope that makes things a little easier to deal with, and makes our newer players feel less stigma towards their status as souls and Minions.