Producer's Letter - Stuart Zissu

Upcoming Patch 1.105, promise of a new Live Event, and new payment options for EU are the hot topics for Stuart Zissu's latest Producer's Letter:

I love Summer time.

Warm temperatures, longer days, lighter clothes, it all points to the relaxing days of summer, and what better way to relax than taking the fight to your enemies on the field of battle. Here at BioWare Mythic we believe that the fight is what it's all about, and that's why we're excited to continue bringing you new and compelling changes to Dark Age of Camelot.

I want to start off by thanking all of our players who came out for the very first Developer Lead Live Event, "Infernal Awakenings".  We (literally) had a blast playing on the Live Servers with everyone, especially when it came to dropping a spark or two on some heads. (For the record, Demons don't have Facebook pages... they're on MySpace). Community reaction was so overwhelmingly positive that we immediately dove into development of the next Live Event. We're extremely excited about the opportunities that this new program presents and can’t wait to share more details on the next Live Event very soon. And not to worry, we're planning on making the next event continue through multiple time zones in order to make it accessible to more players.

Next, let's talk about what's in store for 1.105. For starters, if you haven't checked out the new training window on the Pendragon Public Test Server, I suggest you log in and see what all the excitement is about. To say that we've merely just upgraded the training window UI is an understatement!

With the new training window UI, players can now work out their specialization lines all at once. Want to see what it will take to get to that new style? Just slide the sliders and see what you can do. You can even see the most recent styles and skills you will get with your setup. Here's an example of the new training window in action.

Want more details on which Styles you will attain through training?  Then check out the Ability Summary tab. Here you can page through all the abilities your character will have at his or her disposal once you train with the current setup, as you can see in this screenshot.

The new Realm Abilities tab can be used to train your Realm abilities in the same manner as you did your spec lines. Ignore Pain 3? Just slide over until 3 is displayed. First Aid 2? Slide it on over!

Once Specializations and Realm Abilities are to your liking, hit the train button once and everything is immediately trained. No more endless clicking to use all your spec points. No more training one point too far in a spec line because you clicked the train button too many times. Trainers (and players!) in all three Realms are rejoicing - no longer must they suffer the endless poking and prodding of countless training clicks!

So there's the UI, but now it's time to talk Europe.

When last I wrote, I alluded that we were working on implementing a solution that allowed players on the Kattraeth and Glamorgan clusters to play together while still letting them play in their own languages.  This is still our long term goal, however in the interim, we have decided to open transfers from Kattraeth to Ywain. Please remember that if you plan on taking advantage of this free character transfer to Ywain, the English Language client is needed to play the game without issue. The English Language client can be found here. Be sure to select English when running the installer.

In an effort to make Dark Age of Camelot accessible to more players, we have also added new payment methods to the account center.  In addition to time cards, European players can now pay with Visa, Master Card, American Express, and Discover cards.  If your payment method of choice is not currently supported, rest assured that we will continue to investigate supporting other payment methods as demand allows.

Finally, Die Silver Fox is coming to GamesCom: Cologne, along with Andy Belford and Carrie Gouskos (Producer, Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning). While in Germany, we’re looking forward to getting together with the community and throwing back a few Kölsch. We'll be posting more information in the coming days on the Herald about when and where the BioWare Mythic Fan Gathering will be at GamesCom.

Until then, I'll see you in the Frontier.