News and Updates

This is just a reminder: old catalogue vendors will be turned off on March 7. If you haven’t gone to the Bloodlines store and gotten new catalogue vendors since we made our last announcement, please do so now. There are new catalogue vendors available for Bloodlines Thirst, Bloodlines Lycans, Bloodlines Humans, Bloodlines War, and Crypt items. These new vendors have a gifting feature, and include update terminals and key grabbers. You can also change the size and material of the vendors by clicking on the backing board. All you should have to do is delete your old vendors and replace them with the new ones.

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.

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.

We’re excited to announce the release of the following new Bloodlines items:

1. The Human HUD
2. The Blood Vial
3. The Lumen Vial
4. The Insignia
5. Cider Barrels
6. Cider Jug Refills
7. Cider Siphon

The human products are available at these locations (click for SLURL):

• Liquid Designs
• Liquid East
• Liquid South
• Eternal Orchard
• Ravaged Orchard

We think that these new items are a lot of fun and will bring new and interesting role play experiences. We hope you have a blast with them!

This Friday afternoon, December 17, we’re releasing 7 new exciting Bloodlines products!

1. Cider Barrels: Humans can drink cider to restore their humanity. A great way to attract friendly humans.
2. Cider Refill Jugs: 5L refills to fill Cider Barrels with.
3. Cider Siphons: transfer cider between barrels quickly.
4. The Human HUD: registers you for the Bloodlines system with a Human Blood Type, allows you to drink from Cider Barrels, allows you to offer blood and lumens to vampires and lycans, and gives you the new human profile.
5. Blood Vials: transferable vials that you can bleed into and give to friends to wear around their neck. The vial displays whose blood it is in world and on your profile, so you can collect and trade a little piece of your friends (or your enemies)!
6. Lumen Vials: just like Blood Vials, but for Lumens.
7. The Insignia: this is a recruitment system for clan leaders. You can set up a server with a texture and a notecard, and it comes with a copy/transfer badge that will display your clan Insignia and vend a notecard with information about your clan when worn.

Please direct any questions about these new products to Lyle Maeterlinck. When the new products are released for purchase, we’ll announce it here!

Tonight we have released the much-anticipated new War weapons: the handgun, the sword, and the flamethrower! We’re really excited about this release, and we think these weapons are a ton of fun to play with. We’re also releasing some custom-built structures and items to help you build your battlezone: The Medieval Fortress and The Apocalypse Fortress are two structures custom-designed for Bloodlines War battles, plus we’re releasing our signature Hedge Maze from the ground level of Liquid Designs, so you can set up your own hedge maze base with the Dominion, or just use it to battle your friends! Plus, we have a handful of other old and new accessories featured in the Bloodlines War store that you can use to decorate your battlefield. Check out the Bloodlines War store at Liquid Badlands now!

As we mentioned in our post last week, we’re also releasing new versions of the mines and health serums, so that they are no-transfer. There are still some people out there using exploits to crack permissions on items, and then selling them. So, we have to continue with our updates to make all of our items no-transfer. We hope you were able to use up your current mines and serums over the last week, but if you weren’t, please refer to our post from last week on how to trade them in.

We’d also like to explain some adjustments we’ve made to the damage done by the various war weapons. On most weapons, we’ve scaled all of the damage down a bit, so that fights should start lasting a bit longer. Here’s what you need to know about the adjustments we’ve made:

1. The bare fist now only does 3 damage instead of 5.
2. The claw (Rage) and fang (Thirst) attacks now have the possibility of getting you a one-hit kill, depending on how high your Vital Blood (for the fangs), or Lumens (for the claws) currently are. The higher your vampire or lycan energy is, the more likely it will be that you’ll be able to slash an artery, but you’ve still got to have a bit of luck. If you don’t get a one-hit kill, then damage is based on your distance, and also how lucky you are.
3. The Psionic Blast works the same way as before, but you might find that it does a little less damage than it used to.
4. The  Handgun also has a chance of getting a lethal wound, based on your body count. The higher your body count, the greater the chance you’ll have of getting a head shot, but you’ll still need a bit of luck. If you don’t get a head shot, the damage done is based on some luck and on how far away you were when you fired.
5. The Sword has a chance of getting a lethal wound based on your current health. The higher your current health, the harder you’ll be able to swing when trying to chop an enemy in half. If you don’t score a lethal wound, the damage done is based on luck and how far away you were when you swung.
6. It’s not possible to get a one-hit kill with the flamethrower. The closer you are, the more damage you’ll do.

Thanks to everyone for their support, and we hope you all have a great time playing War!

We’re pleased to announce a release date for the new Bloodlines: War weapons. The Handgun, The Sword, and The Flamethrower will be released one week from today, on Tuesday, August 17th! The Handgun has a ‘silenced’ mode so that you can have a gunfight anywhere in Second Life without rezzing bullets and creating collisions with other residents. You can also use this silenced mode in areas where you don’t have permission to rez objects. Both the bullets and the sword contain blood effects when they make contact with other Bloodlines War players.

We will also be updating the Health Serum and the Mine so that they are no-transfer. We regret having to do this, but there are a small group of residents who have permissions-cracked versions of our transferable items, and sell them at below cost. As a result, we have to update all of our transferable items to be no-transfer, and we will not be releasing any more transferable items. So, you have one week to use up all of your current health serums and mines (a great excuse to create a nice big minefield), because after 8/17/10, they will no longer work. If you still have any mines or health serums left over after this date, you can trade them in for the new versions. If you see residents selling any health serums or mines for very low prices, please don’t buy them, they are counterfeit. We are only able to trade in mines and health serums if you originally purchased them directly from us, and not from a reseller. We can’t guarantee any item that’s purchased from a reseller. You must seek a guarantee from the avatar you’re buying from.

If you need to trade in your items, please observe the following procedure:

1. Items must be placed in a folder, and NAME THE FOLDER WITH YOUR NAME ONLY. To do this, go to your inventory, and select New > Folder. Right-click on the folder and select ‘Rename’, then type your avatar name. Drag and drop your items into this folder.
2. Please don’t name the folder with any text other than your avatar name. Including additional or different text will delay your trade-in.
3. Include a note card with a copy of your transaction history for the purchase. You can get this by logging into your account on Secondlife.com, then going to Account > Transaction history, and copying and pasting the transaction information into the notecard. Drag the note card into the folder with your name on it.
4. Pass the folder to Noire Luminos, but please do not start sending in mines or health serums until after they are deactivated on 8/17/10.

We appreciate everyone’s patience while we worked on the new War Weapons, and for your patience with the item trade-ins. We have more exciting Bloodlines additions that will be released in the coming weeks, so check this blog often for updates.

We heard you. The majority of you don’t like the idea of account expiration, so we’re not going to do it.  However, we’d like to clear up a misunderstanding that a few have had. Several people wrote to us with the idea that we were going to “void” or “cancel” the infinity amulets, or limit all infinity amulets to 90 days, and this is not what our proposal or our intention was. We didn’t mean to cause any panic. We think this might have come from some people who didn’t read the blog post with the proposed changes, but maybe heard about it from others and didn’t get the whole story. The proposal was to put an expiration date on Bloodlines accounts so that souls held by people who never log in and play could be released into play for people who are logging in and playing.  Anyway, for now we will not be putting expiration dates on Bloodlines accounts, so accounts with Infinity Amulets can hold souls indefinitely, even if they never log in again.

However, most people liked the idea of being able to use the Electrum potion more than once in a lifetime, and this can help clear up the issue of players having their souls held by other players that they cannot reach. Based on your reactions, and on our evaluation, we think that being able to use the Electrum potion once every 90 days is reasonable. So, this means that starting today, everyone who hasn’t drank the Electrum potion in the last 90 days will be able to drink it again, and once every 90 days after. So, if you drank the potion 30 days ago, you will be able to drink it 60 days from today. The price of the potion will remain the same.

To reiterate: nothing has changed with regard to amulets or account expiration, and we have no plans to make further changes in this regard at this time. The only thing that has changed is, now you can use the Electrum potion once every 90 days. We hope that this solves the problem of not being able to get your soul off of an abandoned account. Please let us know if you have any questions about this.

Thanks again for all of your feedback, and thanks for playing Bloodlines!

We are considering the following changes to the Bloodlines game, and we wanted to open this up to comment from players. Recently, the most common complaint that we’ve been getting is that someone’s soul is being held hostage, or by someone who doesn’t log into SL anymore (and has the infinity amulet), and the person has already drank Electrum. These are the dead ends in the game that we created the Electrum potion to clear up, so that no matter what, there was always a last-resort way to move your soul. After release, we got a lot of compliments on the potion from people who could finally move their soul, and we got a lot of complaints about it from people who didn’t want to let certain souls go. Also, at the time, we were also accused of only releasing the potion so we could make more money, which is not the case. We made the potion expensive as a deterrent to it’s use, so that players would try to negotiate for souls and move them using the soul reaper instead of just buying the potion. A big part of the game is negotiating and making deals with other players. In an attempt to try to satisfy everyone (which we have found to be difficult), we made it so that the Electrum potion could only be used once, ever. After that, you might reach a dead end.

Now we are seeing a lot of people who have drank the Electrum potion some time in the last year, and now the person who has their soul isn’t around anymore, or the person who got them to drink the Electrum had them drink it so that they could never move their soul again. So, we have reached new dead ends in the game, and we need to do something in order to open them up. The first change we are considering is an account expiration if it isn’t used. Right now, if you don’t have an amulet, the Curse will eventually take all of your Blood, and your souls will go to the abyss. But, if you have the amulet, and you never log in again, all of your souls will just sit there forever.

These are the two changes we are considering:

1. If an account hasn’t drank blood in the previous 90 days, even if they have an infinity amulet, they will be drained of blood and destroyed, sending souls to the abyss. This doesn’t mean that the account would be closed, they could always log back in and drink blood to become a vampire again, but their souls would be sent to the Abyss and freed into the game again.
2. The permanent one-drink limit on the Electrum potion could be lifted. We could impose an additional limit, such as it can only be drank once every X number of months/weeks/days.

Please feel free to comment on the above changes in the comments string of this blog post, or in any of the Bloodlines groups in-world. If you’d like to send us your thoughts privately, feel free to send an IM or a notecard to Lyle Maeterlinck or Mars Bracken  in world.

The Bloodlines War HUD has been updated to 1.7. This is not a mandatory update, so the 1.6 HUD will work with the 1.7 HUD, but it should fix any lockup problems in 1.6.