Welcome to Release 37, Avatars!
Normally our release cycle lasts approximately four weeks, giving us 3 weeks of development time and 1 week of polish before the release goes live on the last Thursday of the month. However, November and December each have holidays that require us to do our release earlier in those months. That only gives us 2 weeks of development time and 1 week of polish before we release. Despite that brevity and our focus on performance, we still managed to deliver a lot of new content.
Performance: It has been far too many releases since we focused on issues related to performance, so we made the hard decision to push out some work on features in order to focus most of our programming team on performance. We have made a wide swath of changes that have improved just about every aspect of performance, including install size, load times, frame rate, and stability. We still have much work to do, and large cities with lots of characters and decorations can still cause some machines to struggle.
Story and Sieges: The Path of Love continued to get further refinement through the Necropolis, Spite, and all the way through to the Crypt of the Avatar. We also did some major refinements to the visuals of Ardoris to give it a much more distinct look and feel. Additionally, we completely rebuilt the Superstition Canyon control point. Finally, towns will start falling under siege and players will have to fight their way through blockades when those towns are besieged.
Also, remember that while we are providing new content with each release, our community is working overtime to make new events for you to enjoy. Be sure to check out a couple of the event calendars run by our community members (via in-game book or the player-run websites: Avatars Circle and Events of the Avatars). You can also get the latest official events on the Main Website.
To check out all that has been added in Release 37, visit the R37 Instructions announcement.
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