Bloodlines systems will be unavailable today, Thursday, July 13 from 4-4:05pm SL time for scheduled maintenance. We’re sorry for the short notice on this, and any inconvenience that it causes. Thanks for your patience during this time. If you miss any purchases during this time, or have any questions, please contact Lyle Maeterlinck in-world.
Bloodlines systems will be unavailable today, Wednesday, July 12 from 2-2:10pm SL time for scheduled maintenance. We’re sorry for the short notice on this, and any inconvenience that it causes. Thanks for your patience during this time. If you miss any purchases during this time, or have any questions, please contact Lyle Maeterlinck in-world.
Bloodlines will be in maintenance mode tomorrow morning, July 10, 2017 from 3-3:20am SL time for scheduled upgrades. We apologize for the inconvenience, and thanks for your patience during this time. If you have any questions, please contact Lyle Maeterlinck in-world. Thanks!
We’ve done some minor mesh updates to the Nightshade and Wolfsbane potions, and are giving away a free gifts for the next month (June 26th-July 26th)!
The purchaser of either potion will receive two Rare textures, one for Tanks and one for Iron Prisms. After purchase, the textures will automatically show up in your Rare Library and be available in your Tank or Iron Prism texturing menu (the “Texture” button, under “PotionCabinet”). You will only receive one set per purchase, so apply and use them wisely!
No limit to the number of purchases / textures, but the free gift period ends on July 26th.
Update 5/23/17: We’ve made some additional changes to the achievements. First, many of you will be happy to know that based on overwhelming community feedback, we removed the throttle on Haunt visits. We realize many people have turned the Haunt-visiting at single locations in to a sort of mini-game, and that the throttling greatly hindered this. We studied and reassessed the situation, and have concluded that this aspect of the achievements, while the requests did seem to be coming in at a high rate, was probably not being automated, at least not by the vast majority of players who enjoyed this activity. We still urge you to strive to visit a variety of different Haunt locations instead of standing in one place at large Haunt farms. You can always access active Haunts using the Haunt button on your HUD.
We’ve also added some additional controls on the biting / clawing achievements (Berserk and Frenzy) in order to make gaming of these achievements using alts less rewarding. If you’re doing these achievements honestly with your friends instead of logging in lists of alts, you probably won’t notice any change. If any of your attacks do get throttled, make sure you aren’t logging in a long list of alts to attack, and instead, try to interact with a variety of real Bloodlines players in order to gain your achievements. Thanks everyone for your feedback and patience with us while we work to address these situations, and please let us know if you have any other thoughts.
Original post follows:
Yesterday we made a couple of adjustments to the Detective, Investigator, Voyager, and World Travels achievements. We believe that some people may have been using automated tools to cheat at these achievements. We commend people on their creativity and motivation in getting these achievements, but we also have to take the measures we can in order to prevent cheating, gaming, and exploits.
Wikipedia defines an exploit as:
“the use of a bug or glitches, game system, rates, hit boxes, or speed, etc. by a player to their advantage in a manner not intended by the game’s designers. Exploits have been classified as a form of cheating”
To be very clear, nobody has hacked or compromised any Bloodlines items; rather some players have found ways to automate avatar logins or clicks in order to cheat at the achievements. We were also seeing things like 4 haunt visits per second, second after second, and thousands of avatar scans that run 24 hours per day. We see patterns in our logs that are clearly not legitimate actions performed by human players. So, we put in place some measures that we hope will make it inconvenient to cheat at the achievements.
This could be referred to as nerfing:
“Among game developers, MMORPG designers are especially likely to nerf aspects of a game in order to maintain game balance. Occasionally, a new feature (such as an item, class, or skill) may be made too powerful, unfair, or too easily obtained to the extent that it unbalances the game system. This is sometimes due to an unforeseen method of using or acquiring the object that was not considered by the developers. The frequency of nerfing and the scale of nerfing vary widely from game to game but almost all massively multiplayer games have engaged in nerfing at some point.”
Keep in mind that all scans and haunt visits will keep working just as they always have: you will always get scan data back, and information on haunts no matter what. The only thing that has changed is whether you get achievements for those actions. If you are playing in good faith, and finding real players to scan instead of logging in thousands of alts, and if you are visiting legitimate haunts instead of clicking as fast as you can at a haunt farm, it is very unlikely that any of the updates will affect you.
If you have any questions, please contact Lyle Maeterlinck. Happy achieving!
We are pleased to announce that the refill stations have been updated. They are now all-mesh environments, we’ve (hopefully) made them more easy to use, and there’s particle and sound effects added.
To help raise awareness of their new locations and to celebrate their creation, we’ve made some station-themed Limited Rares which will be available for the next month. From May 15 – June 15, whenever you make a purchase at a refill station you will automatically be delivered a license into your Rare Library for the appropriate cider, blood or lumen container shown above.
Locations:
New Cider Refill Station – Badlands
New Lumen Refill Station – South
We’ve done some minor mesh updates to the Valerian Potion, and are giving away a free gift during the month of April!
The purchaser of a Valerian 4 Pack will receive two Rare textures, one for Tanks and one for Iron Prisms. After you’ve rezzed your crate, the textures will automatically show up in your Tank or Iron Prism texturing menu (the “Texture” button, under “PotionCabinet”). You will only receive one set per purchase, so apply and use them wisely!
No limit to the number of purchases / textures, but the free gift period ends on May 1st.
We did a mesh update of all the Bloodlines: War weapons! They’re all now lower prim, shrink much smaller, and are available in vendors immediately.
You can update your Handgun, Flamethrower, or Swords at any Liquid Designs Updater terminal.
We updated The Serum! It’s now mesh, lower prim, and available in vendors immediately.
Due the vast number of the old serums still in SL, we will unfortunately be unable to do a trade-in. However any serums you currently own should continue to work just fine!
We updated The Mine this week. In addition to now being mesh and 1 prim, we’ve also added a feature that allows you to rename the mine. This should help fool the mine detectors out there!
Due the vast number of Mines in SL, we will unfortunately be unable to do a trade-in. However any mines you currently own should continue to work just fine!
