News and Updates

UPDATE 4/1/12:

Just an update: we are planning HUD updates for tonight. This is not an April Fool’s joke. More updates to come…

UPDATE 3/30/12, 5 PM:

We’ve reviewed everyone’s feedback on the impending HUD updates, and as a result, we’ve got a new proposal. All the updates below are going to be put into place, except for the ability to Glamour someone before they are a part of the game. We agree that this will probably cause too much confusion. So, Glamour will only work on your own direct human minions, and it will only last for an hour, unless broken by your human before that limit. Also, it will not cost blood or lumens in order to use. So, we’re not going to implement the option of Glamouring someone before they have joined in order to prevent them from using the Wormwood. To be clear, your human minions will have to agree to be Glamoured, and will be able to break the Glamour if they wish. For now, this will just be a fun new power that you will be able to use when role-playing with your humans if you wish.

PREVIOUSLY:

Later this week, we’re going to be updating the Thirst, Rage, and Human HUDs with a few new features and fixes. All HUDs are going to be getting the ability to register and manage accounts for logging into the Bloodlines website. If you already own a Blood or Lumen scanner, you already have an account, and the account you can manage with your HUD will be the same as the account you can manage on your scanner. This is so that everyone can have an account to log in. In the near future, we’re going to be building some new features into the website that you can use only when logged in, such as customizing your Bloodlines web profile, and this HUD update will allow us to launch those new features.

As part of this update, we’re going to be moving Charisma voting to the website. So, instead of the button on the HUD, you’ll be able to log into the website, and on everyone’s profile will be a button to send them a charisma point for the day.

We’re also going to be adding a new power: Glamour for vampires, and Terror for lycans. Of course, hybrids will be able to use either one. Glamour / Terror has different effects, depending on the status of the victim (who will have to agree to Glamour / Terror request for it to work). If you Glamour or Terror a new player who has not yet worn a HUD, it will prevent them from drinking the Wormwood potion in order to free their soul from limbo. That means that their soul will always go to you first if you bite them and then they join. Using a Glamour will cost a vampire 1L of vital blood, and a Terror will cost a lycan 10 lumens. Only humans and new players can be Glamoured / Terrored.  If you Glamour or Terror a human who has already joined, you will be able to bite them without asking, until they break the Glamour or Terror, which can be done with your HUD.

Let us know what you think of these updates, or if you have any thoughts for changes you think we should get into the HUDs for this release.

Happy hunting!

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.

UPDATE: all systems should be up again. If you experience any further issues, please contact Lyle Maeterlinck or Mars Bracken, and we will get it addressed for you. Thanks for your patience with this while we responded to this service interruption.

PREVIOUSLY: There has been a network outage that has affected communication between Second Life servers and our servers. Our web host is currently working to resolve the issue, and we are working on a work-around to get traffic working again between the servers. We will have the system up and running again as soon as possible, thanks for your patience. Stay tuned to this blog post for updates.

Today we made some long-awaited updates to the Bloodlines War website: allowing everyone the ability to vote on dominion bases, and a new Lethality stat.

First, we’ll talk about the lethality update. Lethality is still calculated in the same way, that is, kills, one-hit kills, and body count still increase it, and deaths decrease it, but now there is more than one lethality being calculated: all-time lethality, and recent lethality. The rankings on the home page will reflect recent lethality, but all-time lethality will still be listed on the stats page.

Next, Dominion base voting. When you log into the website, you will see a new form on Dominion profiles that lets you “upvote” or “downvote” any particular Dominion base, by +1 or -1. Each person can vote on each base only once, and you can leave a note on the profile. The note is only visible to you (and to us), and is just a spot where you can write a note about why you voted it up or down, in case you want it for later reference. You can change your vote at any time, or you can change your vote to 0 if you want to effectively remove it. The rating of a base determines whether it is visible on the strongholds list. All bases will still be on the strongholds list, regardless of what their rating is, but bases with a rating below a certain viewing threshold relative to other rated bases will be hidden on the list. You can view hidden bases by clicking on them in the list. There are also links at the top of the list that will let you collapse or expand all rows.

There are a lot of “tricks” that people have used in order to make their bases difficult to take, and whether a given base is fair is a subjective matter. We want to continue to allow people to make creative and interesting bases without too much restriction. However, we want to make sure that bases are not made to be effectively impossible, or unfairly difficult. Now, the community of war players can downvote bases that they believe to be unfair, and upvote bases that they believe to be fair, fun, or interesting. So, if you’re running a war base that you want to make into a stronghold, it’s best to make sure that it is fair and that you treat people fairly who show up to play at your base.

As a reminder, all bases in the public stats must be publicly accessible. This means that a brand-new noob who has nothing except the Bloodlines War HUD must be able to reach your pylons without any special attachments or viewers. If you have a flight ejector, all pylons must be in range of the standard Second Life jump on the official viewer, even if you are giving out the attachment for free at your base. You’re free to give out whatever attachment you want, but you cannot set up your pylons so they are inaccessible without it. Generally, if Lyle Maeterlinck shows up to your base and can’t figure out how to get to your pylons within a reasonable amount of time, your base will be marked as a private base until it has been made accessible. If you have a hidden teleporter, there should be a big, obvious sign that says there is a hidden teleporter, and give a clue for how to find it.

Feel free to comment on this post with any thoughts you have about this update.

Last night the Bloodlines servers were down from about 2AM SL time to 3AM SL time. This was going to be “regularly scheduled maintenance”, but there was a miscommunication with our web host about when it was supposed to happen, and that ‘s why you weren’t warned about it ahead of time. We so sorry for not being able to alert you ahead of time, and for any inconvenience that this downtime caused. The server was intentionally taken down in order to upgrade it.

The good news is that Bloodlines has been migrated to better hardware with better scaling capability, so we should see much faster performance, and far fewer service interruptions in the future, if any. If you have any questions about this, or if you notice any problems with your products or stats, please let Lyle Maeterlinck know in-world. Thanks everyone for your patience with us on this!

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.

We are pleased to announce the long-awaited arrival of the Bloodlines lycan system, The Rage. We know it’s long overdue, but we couldn’t rush it out, we wanted to make it as richly featured as The Thirst, and we agonized over the details. We’ve configured it so that The Thirst and The Rage can stand alone, or can seamlessly integrate, depending on how you want to use it. Vampires and Lycans can exchange attacks, and can mix together in clans and packs. Or, you can become both enraged and embraced to achieve the status of Hybrid, moving back and forth between both worlds. For all the details, please see the Vampire / Lycan interaction section of our new Game Guide.

We’ve been through a lot of testing, but it’s a complicated system and we can’t guarantee you won’t run into any errors. If you run into a problem, just send a notecard to Lyle Maeterlinck with a description of the problem, and we promise we’ll get it corrected right away.

Over the last year and two months, thousands of you have endured a relentless Vampire Curse to form the true vampire armies of Second Life. You have taken part in an adventure that encompasses both real and invented stories, and every one of your characters have left their mark on the story of Bloodlines forever.

Now arise the Lycan armies. I’m sure you’re with us when we say that we can’t wait to see what happens next.

Also, there is another big development just over the horizon, so stay tuned…

Thanks to everyone for your support!

Mars Bracken and Lyle Maeterlinck

Liquid Designs

You’ve probably noticed that we’ve made some updates to this website. We’ve removed the FAQ, and we’ll soon be updating the ‘about’ page to a comprehensive guide to the Bloodlines game, and including the information that was previously contained in the FAQ. We know it’s long overdue, and we promise as soon as it’s complete it will be posted.  Also, the ‘clans’ page has been changed to ‘groups’ so it can encompass Vampire clans, and the upcoming Lycan packs. You might have also noticed that we’ve changed the way that stats are displayed on the groups page, we’re now providing some extra information about clans. Before, the clan listing only showed the total number of historical members of the clan. Now, it shows both the currently active members and the total historical members. “Active” members is the total of humans and vampires. If someone has a status of destroyed, or has deactivated their profile using the garlic necklace, they are not counted in the active total. At the top of each clan roster, you can now see the number of vampires, humans, destroyed players, and total historical members in the clan. This is only a change in the data displayed on the website, and is not a “rule change” in the game. It also has nothing to do with souls or soul counts. The reason this display change was made was to make the listing meaningful and to reflect the active player membership in the clans, rather than a historical total.

We plan on making more extensive updates to the website over the next few days, and releasing many new exciting products. Stay tuned to this blog for status updates, and thanks for playing Bloodlines!