News and Updates

Office hours are on for this Friday:

• Where: the Bloodlines store on Liquid Frontier (click to teleport)
  
• When: Friday, July 29, from 2:30-3:30PM SL time (Pacific)

Last time, our entire office hours were spent on questions about Bloodlines War. So, we may need to have a separate office hours scheduled just for War, or do alternate weeks for War. Either way, we think we would like to devote this week’s hours to non-War issues. Let us know what you think. We hope to see you all there!

Office hours are on for this Friday:

• Where: the Bloodlines store on Liquid Frontier (click to teleport)
  
• When: Friday, July 22, from 2:30-3:30PM SL time (Pacific)

We hope to see you all there!

Today we released the following updates:

• War HUD 1.9
• Psionic Blast 1.5
• Handgun 1.1
• Sword 1.1
• Flamethrower 1.1

All weapons were updated to prevent multiple attachments in Second Life viewer 2. The Handgun and the HUD were updated for greater reliability on hits, and to fix the issue with targets getting transferred from other targeted weapons. In 24 hours, we will disable the current versions of all of these items, and it will be required for you to have an update. Provided you have a valid purchase record for the item, the update will be automatically delivered to you when you wear the item.

One new feature in the War HUD is the ability for army commanders to transfer their armies to other soldiers within their army. This can be done by going to Settings > Army > New Commander. The new commander must be a registered, active Bloodlines War player, and must currently be in your army. This is useful for transferring your army to a new owner, while keeping the same army stats.

We’re also excited to announce that the War HUD now has support for the Liquid Designs Accounts feature, which allows you to register an account to log into the War website at http://war.slbloodlines.com. We’ll be announcing more about what this will allow you to do in the near future. For now, you can create your account by going to Settings > Account > Register on your Bloodlines War HUD. If you already own the Bloodlines Blood or Lumen Scan, you already have an account, and you can use the same credentials to log into the War website.

For now, the only authenticated feature on the War website is a poll regarding new standardized rules for all Dominion Bases. Read the proposed rules here. At the bottom of the rules, you can log in and take a poll to state your opinion on the rules. These rules are not currently in effect, and won’t go into effect until after the end of the poll. Please keep in mind that these rules are only for public bases, or bases listed in the stats on the website. You can have a private base that isn’t listed, and have whatever local rules you want. The intention of these rules is to make the stats more meaningful by making sure that all ranked bases are following a minimum set of standards. We look forward to hearing your comments on these proposed rules.

Very soon, we will be announcing more about the accounts feature on war.slbloodlines.com, but we hope to allow players to have more customized profiles and to use the website to connect to other players. Thanks for playing Bloodlines War!

Office hours are on for this Friday:

• Where: the Bloodlines store on Liquid Frontier (click to teleport)
  
• When: Friday, July 15, from 12-1PM SL time (Pacific)

We hope to see you all there!

Official Bloodlines items are not currently sold on the Second Life Marketplace. The only items that Liquid Designs currently sells on the marketplace are Crypt items, and can be found here. An old copied version of the Thirst is currently being sold on the marketplace for L$850. It is a deactivated copy, and will not work. Do not buy it! You can buy official Bloodlines items in the stores on the following regions: Liquid Designs, Liquid East, Liquid Badlands, Liquid South, and Liquid Frontier.

We’re currently working on updates to the war items, and on the community features that we mentioned in the meetings over the last two weeks, so we won’t be holding office hours tomorrow afternoon. However, we hope to pick up office hours again next week at Liquid Frontier. In the meantime, you can contact us directly in-world with any questions you have.

Last Friday, several dozen Bloodlines players joined us for our first weekly office hours at Liquid Frontier. We really enjoyed talking to everyone, and we’re sorry if we weren’t able to get to your question. We’ll be doing it again this week, at the same time and place:

• Where: the Bloodlines store on Liquid Frontier (click to teleport)
  
• When: Friday, July 1, from 12-1PM SL time (Pacific)

Last week, not everyone who wanted to come was able to get on the sim, so if you want to attend, be sure to get there early. For future meetings, we will try to put in place a system so that more people can attend, and that the question / answer cycle can be more organized. These sessions are a work in progress, thanks for bearing with us while we find the best way to approach it, and as always, your suggestions are welcome.

Here is a brief run-down on some of the top questions and requests that were brought up at last week’s meeting:

1. Problems with vendors: some people had been having trouble with deliveries from vendors. We have made some updates to resolve the issues, and we’ve seen a great reduction in missed deliveries, and the affiliate vendors should deliver a lot faster as well.
2. War item updates: Second Life Viewer 2 makes it possible to attach more than one item to the same attach point. This has allowed War players to attach multiple weapon and HUD instances simultaneously in order to gain an advantage. We have a fix for this problem, and we will be updating the War HUD and the Psionic Blast as soon as testing is complete, which should be in a matter of days.
3. Apple trees / bulk apples / cider shots: at this time, we don’t have a plan to release shots of apple cider, because the apples basically have the same functionality. We currently don’t have a way to sell more than one apple at a time, because they need to be individually rezzed prior to purchase so they can register with our system. We released the cider barrels as a way to buy a large source of Humanity at one time. Apple trees can only be on our sims because of the way that the apples pre-register with our system.
4. Lumen shots: this is an often-requested item, and it is on our list of planned items to release.
5. Age issues: we have no official policy on real life or Second Life age, please refer to Linden Labs policies on this.
6. Harassment issues: in general, there is a limited amount we can do about it. The actions you can take are to mute them, ban them from your land, or file an abuse report on them using Help > Report Abuse, and avoid them. If someone is harassing you in one of our chat groups or on our land, you can report it to us and we will take a look at it.
7. Other races: we think it would be cool to add some other races or HUDs to Bloodlines eventually, but we don’t have any other races planned at this time.
8. Hybrid HUD: at this time, we don’t have plans to release a separate Hybrid HUD.
9. War bases and public accessibility: All war bases that are listed in the public stats must be “publicly accessible”. Because of the freedom that you have in Second Life on your own land, many creative means have been taken to prevent people from taking a base while still calling the base “publicly accessible”. We realize the need to have a standard set of rules that all bases must abide by in order to make the public rankings meaningful. We are working on the technology we would need to enforce standardized rules. We will update you as soon as we know more on this.
10. Forums: online forums are currently under development.
11. There were many other good questions that I hope we answered to a satisfactory level.

If you have a question, join us this Friday!

This Friday, you can meet and chat with the creators of Bloodlines, Mars Bracken and Lyle Maeterlinck at our first weekly office hours:

• Where: the Bloodlines store on Liquid Frontier (click to teleport)
  
• When: Friday, June 24, from 12-1PM SL time (Pacific)

You can arrive and chat with us about anything you want to discuss or would like us to address. We hope to make this a weekly occurrence, but the time and location may change in subsequent weeks. Stay tuned to this blog for 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.

UPDATE 5:30am SL time: I expect bases should be back up again by 5:40am SL time.

UPDATE: The maintenance routines are taking longer than expected to run. Bases will be back up as soon as possible.

Tomorrow morning at 5:00 am SL time (GMT-8), we will be performing some maintenance on the Bloodlines: War system in order to increase the stability and reliability of the system. The website will remain up and your HUDs and weapons will still work, but Dominion bases will be down for approximately 15 minutes. They will be deactivated and locked when the maintenance begins, and approximately 15 minutes later, they will automatically reset. This applies only to version 2.0 Dominions. If you have a Dominion base that is older than version 2.0, please hand it to Lyle Maeterlinck in a folder with your name on it and we’ll send you back a 2.0 right away. Please feel free to comment or contact Lyle Maeterlinck in-world with any questions or concerns.