News and Updates

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: Maintenance is complete, everything should be back up and running again. Please check your affiliate vendors, and if they are still displaying the ‘Vendor Being Serviced’ texture, just click on them and select ‘update’ or ‘power on’, and they should come back up.

PREVIOUSLY: Tonight the Liquid Vendor System and The Fortune Hunt will be down for maintenance for 30-60 minutes, starting at 3:00 AM SL time. Bloodlines products will not be affected by this downtime, but you won’t be able to make new purchases during this time from main store vendors, or affiliate vendors.

If you have affiliate vendors set up, they will be put into maintenance mode shortly before 3:00AM, and after the maintenance is complete, we will bring them back online again. We will update this blog post when the maintenance is complete. If you have affiliate vendors on your land, you may want to check on them once maintenance is complete to make sure they were able to be brought back online. If you see the product textures on your vendors instead of the “Vendor being serviced” texture, then they are online and it is safe to make purchases. If they are still showing the “Vendor being serviced” texture, just click on them and select ‘update’, and this should bring them back online.

We apologize for any inconvenience this causes, please let us know if you have any questions or experience any issues as a result of 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 released version 1.1 of the Coffins and the Sarcophagus. To get your update, you can just re-rez your copy of the Coffin or the Sarcophagus, and it will automatically deliver you the update.

The new versions include features to make sending Vital Blood and Lumens to your friends easier and faster. You can add quick lists of up to 25 names that you can easily select from lists on the menus. This way, if you have a few names that you regularly send blood or lumens to, you can program them in and you don’t have to chat them every time. Also, you can create a consistent link with a given container that will last for up to 15 minutes, so that you don’t have to select the container every time you send blood or lumens. Another convenient feature is the fill to max option, which allows you to fill someone to their maximum blood or lumens in a single send.

We hope you enjoy these new features, and get many thousands of years out of your Liquid Designs Coffin or Sarcophagus.

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.

There has been a hardware issue at our webhost, and we’re expecting about 20 minutes of downtime tonight, starting at about 8:45pm. Stay tuned to this blog post for updates. We’re very sorry for any inconvenience that this will cause.

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!

Lyle Maeterlinck

Lyle Maeterlinck, co-creator of Bloodlines, will be helping to host the Second Life Vampire Forums today from 9am to 4pm as part of “Vampires in Second Life: A Resident-Hosted Event“. Please feel free to come by the forums to talk about a full range of vampire topics. We would love to have the perspective of Bloodlines players at this event!

The Moonshine

We’re excited to announce a surprise release today of the Lumen shot, which we’re calling ‘The Moonshine‘. It comes in a stylish bar glass with an iron base and a crescent moon printed on the bottom of the glass. Just like the ever popular Blood Shot, the Moonshine can be sipped or shot. You can get one at the various hangouts around the Liquid sims, or stock up on them and offer them to your guests at your bar or castle!

The Moonshine is available now in the following places:

• The Rage Store at Liquid South
• The Haunt Bar
• Liquid South Welcome Area
• Liquid Designs Welcome Area
• Liquid East Welcome Area

We hope you enjoy this fun new product!

Recently, we proposed a set of rules for Bloodlines War Dominion bases that would apply to any bases that wished to be a part of the public stats on the website. The purpose of this was to attempt to make the stats meaningful by making sure that all of the ranked bases were playing by a minimum basic set of standards. We released a poll that asked players for feedback on these rules. The rules included guidelines for using land controls (bans) for protecting a base. We had suggested a system where players would be able to mark bases as not complying with the final global rules, and then could be inspected by base inspectors that would manage which bases can be in the public stats.

The problem at the root of this effort is the conflict between the flexibility and control that Second Life offers, and the desire to have many bases meaningfully compete with each other in a global ranking. We have come to the conclusion that the level of restriction we would have to put in place in order to put ranked bases on equal footing would be too limiting of the freedom you currently have with setting up bases, and that we would not be able to adequately enforce these restrictions anyway. Also, we would not be able to investigate and resolve disputes over local bans. This means that you could defend your base using individual bans (as many people have done), and there really isn’t anything we can do about it.

What this means is that we will not be able to have a truly meaningful global ranking that compares Dominion bases to each other. So, there will be some changes with the stats displayed on war.slbloodlines.com. The global Strongholds ranking has been removed, and instead, durations that the bases were held by various armies has been moved to the individual Dominion pages. Bases will no longer be competing against each other for how long they can be held by a specific army, but instead, two armies can compete against each other to capture the same base and see how long each of them can hold it for. The system will effectively consider all bases to be privately held and managed by local rules. To put it another way, each base will have its own individual stats that you can compete for. The Strongholds list has been replaced by the ‘Battlezones’ list, representing the most popular bases. Bases that are set up to be impossible to take probably won’t be near the top of this list. As the system currently stands, it provides incentives to make your base as difficult to take as possible. We believe the new system will give armies incentives to work together to set up bases and local rules that are fair and fun to play.

If someone bans you from their land, we can do nothing to intervene, and we suggest you contact them to work it out, or just go somewhere else. There can be no such thing as an “unfair banning”, as a land owner can ban you from their land for any reason, or for no reason at all.

An additional change that some of you have noticed is that we are now throttling pylon captures to one per second. For a long time, certain people have set up bases to “game” the system to get as many pylon capture points as possible, by putting all of their pylons in a row on alternating channels, and running up and down the row, in some cases capturing five or more pylons per second.

We have seen enormous creativity and ingenuity devoted to designing interesting Dominion bases, and we are grateful to everyone who has genuinely supported the system with their efforts, and we hope you will support this effort to keep the game fun, and the stats meaningful. Thanks for everyone’s input and comments that help us continue to improve Liquid games. Feel free to leave a comment if you have any questions or thoughts you would like to share.