News and Updates

A few months ago, Second Life changed the way new avatar names are selected.  Avatars select a ‘user name’ when signing up, then can select a different ‘display name’ that’s shown in world. Everyone who signed up before this new system was implemented has a ‘legacy name’, or a name with a traditional first and last name, and a user name of firstname.lastname. The ‘legacy name’ of new residents is their user name as the first name, and the last name ‘Resident’. Bloodlines currently uses legacy names for everyone, so all new players have the last name ‘Resident’ on the website. We realize the need to update the system in order to adapt to this new change, and we wanted to present some possible options for how we could address the problem and solicit feedback from everyone. Please post comments on this post with your feedback and concerns.

First, we wanted to say that while it’s possible for us to update the HUDs to collect current display names and display them on your profiles, because display names are subject to change, we won’t be using display names in any official sense. That is, you couldn’t set someone as your liege by using their display name, or transfer a soul by referring to that soul’s current display name. We need to stick to a naming system that doesn’t change.

The first possibility that we see in addressing this is just to filter out the last name ‘Resident’, and your name in Bloodlines will just become your Second Life user name. Names that show up on profiles and in the stats, including in bite lists, minion lists, and soul lists would all just be the avatar’s single user name.

The second possibility is to allow all new residents with the last name ‘Resident’ to choose a last name to use just for Bloodlines, so their first name would be their second life user name, and their last name would be their chosen Bloodlines last name. We could either set this up so that there is a limited number of possible Bloodlines last names, or just let people choose whatever last name they want. I think if we chose this option, we would have to have a way to indicate whether a name is a Second Life legacy name, like “Lyle Maeterlinck”, or whether a name is a Bloodlines name, like if someone named “Lyle Resident” made the Bloodlines name “Lyle Vampiros”. Also, if we did this option, we would have to find a way to ensure that no ‘Bloodlines name’ was the same as any existing Second Life legacy name, so that “Lyle Resident” would not be able to choose “Lyle Maeterlinck” as their Bloodlines name. This might be an argument for restricting possible Bloodlines last names to a list of names that don’t overlap with any Second Life legacy names, to prevent any possible confusion.

If you have any comments or questions, please leave a comment!

We would like to address the possibility of  “gaming” the lethality ranking in Bloodlines War. It’s possible to gather many alts around a mine, and blow them up to artificially increase 1-hit kills. We are considering updating the lethality algorithm to put less weight on 1-hit kills from mines, and more weight on 1-hit kills achieved with other weapons, and we wanted to see what everyone thinks of this. Please leave your thoughts in the comments. Thanks!

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!

Today, we are proud to announce the release of three new and exciting classes of products: Bonds, Scanners, and the Coffin / Sarcophagus. Here is more information on these new products:

The Blood Bond
The Lumen Bond
The Coffin
The Sarcophagus
The Blood Scan
The Lumen Scan

We had originally announced that these products would be released yesterday, but we ran into some unexpected problems that we needed to take some extra time to fix. We thank you for your patience with us.

We also released an update to the Thirst and Rage HUDs yesterday. If you’re using the 3.2 or before, we will not be able to send you an auto-update, because we had to disable the auto-update server for that item due to counterfeiting. If you have the 3.3, you should receive an auto-update when you wear your HUD. If you don’t, please send a notecard to Lyle Maeterlinck, and include your transaction history if possible. I will get you an updated HUD as soon as possible.

The major change to the HUDs is the Charisma feature. Charisma is a measure of influence. There are four products that can send Charisma: The Thirst, The Rage, the Lumen Bond, and the Blood Bond. If you own all four products, you can send up to four Charisma points per day. However, with the Blood Bond and the Lumen Bond, you can only send Charisma points to your bonded partner.

We hope you get a great deal of enjoyment out of these products. Thanks to everyone for your support, suggestions, and encouragement!

Get ready – this Saturday, we’re unveiling a new Bloodlines metric to strive for, and 3 exciting new items.

The new metric is Charisma, and it will be an indicator of influence. It won’t be based on current stats: everyone will start from zero. As time passes, the most influential players will be revealed. This addition will include an update to both the Thirst and the Rage HUDs. This new metric will not affect any of the current rankings in Bloodlines.

The new items are:

The Blood Bond / The Lumen Bond: This item is a partnering Bond that will link you through Vital Blood or Lumens to another player. In addition to the symbolic bonding in SL and on the web profile, there are game perks for the bonded players.

The Coffin / The Sarcophagus: In addition to being functional prim furniture with animations, this item will allow you to transfer blood or lumens instantly to anyone, even if they’re offline.

The Blood Scan / The Lumen Scan: This scanner provides a web-based clan management system that will help you keep tabs on your minions and your souls and help you track your progress over time. Scan for Minions in need of blood, liege changes, and more.

If the current Bloodlines stores on Liquid Designs and Liquid West are too laggy, we’ve got a new blood shop set up at Liquid Badlands.

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 get a lot of questions about deactivated blood containers and lumen prisms, so here is some information that will help you understand why your container might be deactivated, and what to do about it.

When a container is deactivated, it means that it may still exist in-world, but will not work. The serial number of that container is marked as deactivated, so any container with that serial number will no longer work. We deactivate containers for several reasons: sometimes when we close a bloodlines account, we deactivate the containers on that account so they can no longer be used.  Sometimes, when someone accidentally breaks their container by pulling the script out of it, or a container gets mangled by a Second Life error, we’ll deactivate that container and replace it. On rare occasions, containers fail to register with our system when they’re first rezzed by the vendors, and in this case, we replace them, but the non-activated version will still exist in the purchaser’s inventory.

Also, it’s still possible to copy no-copy items in Second Life through sim rollbacks, where a sim is rolled back to a previous state, when an item was rezzed, from a present state where the item exists in inventory. Since only the sim is rolled back and not your inventory, the item now exists in two places, and you have two copies of the same container. However, both of these containers will have the same serial number, so it’s not as if you have twice as much blood. There is still the same amount of blood, it can just be accessed through two different containers now. So, if you drink from one copy of a copied container, you’re drinking from all of them. There happens to be a certain 15L tank that’s been deliberately copied thousands of times and handed out to thousands of people. We deactivated this container a long time ago, but people continue to hand out non-working copies of it, and I still get questions every day about why a 15L tank that someone got “as a gift” won’t work. It won’t work because we deactivated it, because it’s a copied container.

Here is a procedure to follow if you get your hands on a deactivated container:

1. Did you buy it directly from the Bloodlines store, and are you the first owner of this container? IM Lyle Maeterlinck, and he will replace it for you.
2. Did you get it from a friend as a gift? Ask your friend about it.
3. Did you purchase it from a blood tank reseller? You might have just gotten taken advantage of, but there’s a chance the seller didn’t know it was deleted. Contact the person you bought it from, tell them it’s deactivated, and hope that they’ll give you a refund or a replacement. But, this would never happen to you, because you follow our procedure of how to buy an aftermarket blood container and would never, ever, buy a blood container without testing it and being certain that it works first, right?

Any time you buy a container from a reseller, we can’t guarantee that container. You have to seek a guarantee from the seller. Here’s why: even if you follow our procedure, and the container you’re buying works, there’s no way for you to know if there’s another copy of that container floating around out there, because copying exploits still exist. If this is the case, there’s a chance that this container will be eventually deactivated as a copy. There is a low chance of this happening, but it is still a risk you should be aware of when buying a blood or lumen container. The only way you’ll get a risk-free guarantee from us is if you buy them from us. If you want a risk-free guarantee and you want to buy from a reseller, you have to get their risk-free guarantee. To buy from us, use the rez vendors in the Bloodlines Thirst Store on Liquid Designs or Liquid East, or the rez vendors in the Bloodlines Rage store on Liquid South.

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.