News and Updates

The new potions are on sale now. They are no-transfer, but the Wormwood, Hemlock, and Electrum have an option to allow you to use the potion on another player (with their consent). As such, the potions should do exactly what you’re used to, but with the added benefit that you don’t have to gift or lend money to another player to purchase a potion, which will have the added side effect of less potion scamming by new players. The Nightshade and the Wolfsbane won’t work on another player, you can only drink it yourself.

The old potions are deactivated. As stated in a a previous post, this is to prevent the counterfeits floating around out there from spoiling the game. We are doing a potion trade-in – but *only* for those potions purchased directly from Bloodlines stores or official catalogue vendors. If you have a stockpile of potions that qualify, here is the procedure for trading them in:

1) Create a new folder and name it ” <Your Name> + Potion Trade ”

2) Put your stockpile of potions in the folder

3) Pass the folder to Noire Luminos

Once Noire receives your folder, she will put it in the queue for a trade in. Trades will happen first-come, first-serve, so please be patient as there may be many folders ahead of yours in the cue. Noire will get to them as quickly as possible. When she gets to your folder, Noire will check to see how many potions you have purchased from Bloodlines (minus those that you have been recorded as “drank” in the database) and she will return your folder to you with the according number of potions in it. In other words, please don’t bother passing Noire a folder full of potions that you purchased from a third party or potion bank, because Noire will just pass them back to you.

Finally, thank you for your patience during this transition. We are excited to be moving on to getting some new items released very soon!

We banned a handful of avatars from Bloodlines earlier this week, and we wanted to respond to questions about why. There were rumors that we banned the avatars for selling blood, and this is not the case. We banned the avatars for using an exploit to obtain blood for free. We have evidence in our server logs of the actions of these avatars. The records in our database could not have been created by avatars using our system in the way it was intended to be used. Among the avatars who were removed was a prominent blood merchant and many of his alts.

In our server logs, we had many instances of multiple containers being sent fill requests at exactly the same time from the same avatar. In order to do this, the offenders first figured out the channel that the container listens on from the dialog menu. Once you have this channel, you can create an item to chat the “1 L” message on that channel. You can click any number of tanks and give them the fill command, and then have your special prim chat the “1 L” message from a dialog on the channel that the containers are listening on. This gives them all the command at exactly the same time. Because the requests are coming in simultaneously, they all check your blood level simultaneously, and can fill 1L from your veins into multiple containers at once, giving them all 1 L at the same time. This is how you can turn 1L into as many liters as the number of tanks you gave the fill command. This is how many of the large blood banks have been operating. This exploit has now been closed.

We have nothing against selling blood as long as it is legally obtained. There are two legal ways to obtain blood: to drink it from an avatar who has paid for a HUD, and to buy it in a Liquid Designs store in the form of a filled blood container, a blood shot, or a blood bottle. We intend for blood to be sold and traded. That’s why we made the containers in the first place, because we thought it would be fun for people to collect blood and sell it, trade it for other things, or give it as gifts to friends. If we did not intend for blood to be sold or transferred, we wouldn’t just ban people for selling it, we would put in place a technical restriction to prevent it. However, we cannot tolerate blood being illegally obtained through an exploit and sold for personal financial gain.

Everyone should also be aware that we do not guarantee that any items that are not purchased directly from our stores will work. If you bought it from a reseller, that’s fine, but if you want a guarantee, you will have to seek it from the seller. I’ll say that one more time because it’s so important: we can only guarantee items if you buy them directly from Liquid Designs stores or from our official catalogue vendors. If you buy anything from another store or a reseller, we recommend making sure that they have a money-back guarantee on their products. If their products don’t work and you can’t get your money back, we can’t help you. On the other hand, if you buy a product from us, and it doesn’t get delivered or doesn’t work, we will either replace it or refund you. This is the case with the potions, which are soon to be replaced by new versions. If you buy them from us, and we have a valid purchase record for you, of course we guarantee our products and will make sure that you get the product you paid for. This means that if you have potions in inventory that cease to work, and you are the original purchaser, we will replace them with new versions. But if you bought it from another avatar, you will have to seek a refund or replacement from them.

I’d also like to emphasize that we do not ban people for personal or financial reasons. We ban people for violating our explicitly stated terms of service, or the terms of service of Second Life. It has been suggested that we have banned blood sellers for competing with us in blood sales. It’s easy to forget that all blood that is legally obtained is originally purchased from us, either in the form of a tank or a HUD, so it is not really possible for a blood merchant to compete with us without breaking the law. Merchants who operate honestly support and enhance the Bloodlines system. The recent bans are not an attack on blood merchants, it is quite the opposite: they are actually in defense of honest blood merchants.

So, here’s my advice for everyone: if you find an exploit, don’t use it, report it. If you find items being sold for impossibly low prices, don’t buy them, report it. If something seems too good to be true, it is.

To all of the honest players, all we can do is apologize for letting this exploit go for as long as we did. We haven’t been on vacation, we’ve been working on other projects that have demanded our attention. I’m also sorry that you haven’t seen anything new from us for a while. In the next few weeks, we have some very exciting additions to the system coming out, including 3 new War weapons, and 3 new exciting Bloodlines items. We also have a brand new social game unrelated to Bloodlines coming out later this summer that we think will be our most fun game yet. Stay tuned to this blog for updates. Thanks to everyone for your continued support!

There are a large number of potions out there being sold at below-market prices. They are counterfeit. It is not possible to legally obtain an Electrum potion for less than 999L, or any of the other potions for less than 225L if you buy them in a 4-pack. We do not guarantee the operation of any product unless it is purchased directly from one of the Liquid Designs stores and you have a verifiable purchase record with us. Within a matter of days, all potions in inventory will be deactivated, and new potions will be released with no-transfer permissions. For your protection, do not purchase potions anywhere other than directly from a Liquid Designs vendor. If you need potions, we do not recommend buying the large stockpiles of potions being offered by criminals. If you do, we will not be able to help you when they are deactivated.

*** Please note  – if you have purchased your potion from a Bloodlines vendor or catalogue vendor, and we have a transaction record of it, you will be able to trade your discontinued potions in to Noire Luminos for the new version. Also, the new version will allow you to “Offer” the potion to another player to drink (much like offering a bite), so you will still be able to use your stockpiled potions on other players (with their consent, of course) as long as they were purchased from Bloodlines.

Currently Second Life is having some serious issues! We are receiving reports about avatars rezzing casks, tanks, and prisms in-world and having them returned mangled or broken. We strongly suggest holding off on rezzing no-copy items until the Lindens say the coast is clear; you can follow the progress of the bugs on the Linden status blog here: http://status.secondlifegrid.net/.

We would like to inform everyone of two new support policies:

1. We will no longer replace lost casks and tanks. If you lose a blood container from your inventory, even if it is through no fault of your own, we can no longer deactivate it and send you a new one. Note that if you give or sell a container to someone else, it will still appear on your page until they rez it in-world. We know that Second Life sometimes eats or mangles inventory items, and we’re very sorry if this happens to you, but we can’t be held responsible for correcting these types of errors. Please be very careful in keeping track of your items. We suggest that you organize your containers into a special folder in your inventory, and write down where you rez your containers and who you hand them to and when. If your containers are missing, try clearing your cache by going to Edit > Preferences > Network, then press the ‘Clear Cache’ button and relog. Also try searching your inventory for the words ‘tank’, ‘cask’, or ‘prism’. We will, however, still replace containers that failed to register when first purchased. If you got a container from somewhere other than our stores, and it is deactivated, go to the person you got it from and ask them about it. We can’t guarantee containers unless purchased directly from us.
2. We will not transfer items, souls, or minions from one avatar to another for any reason other than a gifting error. This means that if you have an alt account who has items on it, and you lose this account for any reason, including deliberately closing it, or getting wrongfully banned by Linden Labs through no fault of your own, we will not transfer the souls, minions, items, or blood to your new account. We recommend that you use only one account and use that account responsibly. The one situation where we will transfer items from one account to another is in the case of a gifting error, where an item goes to you instead of the target avatar when using the gifting function on the main store vendors.

Thanks for your cooperation on the two above policies.

We’d like to invite everyone to join the official Bloodlines groups in Second Life. There are three official groups:

1. The Thirst: Bloodlines
2. The Rage: Bloodlines
3. Bloodlines War

These three groups can be used to discuss anything related to Bloodlines. However, please refrain from advertising events or products, and please be respectful to each other in these groups. Verbal abuse or harassment will not be tolerated.

There are many other Bloodlines groups that have been created for various purposes, and we encourage you to join the other groups if you like them and they enhance your experience. However, please keep in mind that the groups listed above are the only three official groups that are moderated by Bloodlines staff. If you have a question about any other Bloodlines group,  please contact the group owner.

On a personal note, I want to thank everyone who has taken it upon themselves to create and moderate Bloodlines related groups that fulfill a variety of purposes for Bloodlines players. I love to see everyone getting into the game and collaborating and communicating. However, in the interest of simplifying things, I’ve decided to limit my participation to the three official Bloodlines groups listed above. Many people have come to us with their ideas for additional Bloodlines groups and the services they provide. Feel free to create any groups you like related to Bloodlines, but keep in mind that we do not officially endorse any non-official groups.

We updated the Thirst to version 3.3 today. This is a mandatory security update. The new version should be auto-delivered to you. If you don’t receive it, you can receive your update from the update terminals at Liquid East.

We have discovered avatars selling counterfeit Infinity Amulets. If anyone tries to sell you an Infinity Amulet for less than the price of $7999, it is definitely counterfeit, and will be deactivated, and you will probably not get your money back. There is absolutely no legitimate reason for anyone to be selling an Infinity Amulet for less than $7999, as there is no legal way to get one from us for less than that price. Infinity Amulets only work for the first person to wear them, so there is no way for someone to use it for a while, then sell it for a lower price. The item is transfer, but the protection it gives is not.

If you have purchased an Infinity Amulet for less than this price from anyone, your best bet is to come forward to us and let us know who you bought it from, and for how much. We’ll do our best to help you, but only if you’re honest with us. If anyone offers or has offered to sell you an Infinity Amulet for less than $7999, please report their name to us right away. If you want to buy an Infinity Amulet, make sure you buy it yourself directly from a vendor. If you legitimately bought an Infinity Amulet from one of our vendors, you have nothing to worry about.

We have recently updated our vendor system, and that includes the Catalogue vendors. The new vendors are much less laggy (on average by half, sometimes more depending on the sim). Your old catalogue vendors will continue to work, however we strongly advise converting to the new version. Ideally the new lower-lag versions will result in less undelivered sales, as well as a less laggy sim for you and your clan.

The updated vendors are available now, and depending on which one you own you may be able to get a Redelivery from one of our Update Terminals. If not, they are still just 1 Linden, for sale to the left of either the Thirst, Rage or WAR main vendors on the respective sims.

One note however – the Catalogue Vendors now only can be rezzed by those with payment info on file. (Purchases can still be made by people with no payment info, however). This is a change aimed at allowing us to track and deal with the occasional shady activities that people attempt in regards to the catalogue vendors. It’s a rare occurrence, but something we take seriously so as to protect the integrity of the system and the games. We understand this change will negatively affect those who are unable to file payment info with Linden Labs, and we apologize. We are hopeful that some of the new developments that LL has underway in regards to transaction tracking may allow us to loosen restrictions like this on Catalogue Vendor usage in the future, but until then we have to put certain safeguards in place.

For those of you negatively impacted by this, however, we do have a slight silver lining to offer. As a result of updating the vendor system, we’ve reduced lag on our home sims (Bloodlines East, West, South, and Badlands). So making the trip there when necessary should be slightly less arduous.

Once again, we hope the new Catalogue Vendors create less lag and redelivery issues for you. Thanks for your patience. Happy hunting!

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!