Greetings everyone. As a few of you know already, there has been considerable

work put into modernising Avalon for the twenty-first century. It has meant the

last six weeks have not seen updates to the realm, in favour of pursuing these

essentials. Part of this renovation is our new payment system, which is being

announced ahead of other improvements and web-based upgrades.

FINISHED AND RELEASED

PRICES TAX-INCLUSIVE: The biggest change all customers will see is that there

is no longer any tax or fees added after purchase. The old VAT and exchange fee

of 22% has been removed as of 7th March 2017. All prices are as you see them in

the realm. This means from now on, everything is in effect 22% cheaper.

NEW PAYMENT SYSTEM READY: Under the hood, there is a new payment system with

Stripe, the largest online processor in the world, and we are now operating as

a new company holding for Avalon and its activities, by the name of Avalon

Real-Time Publications. You will see on your statements AVALON RTP. We

appreciate it if you contact your bank to validate these charges for the first

time, so that there is no interruption in your service. All payment data is now

securely held and managed by our processor. We are going through individually

by hand to ensure all initial setup is accurate and smooth. Please continue

using PURCHASE as you have.

UPCOMING OUT OF GAME

ACCOUNT PORTAL: There will be another announcement soon when we release the

public site for managing your details. It will replace SUBSCRIBE for managing

your own subscriptions, details, and characters. More details on this

transition will be in its own annoucement. Be sure your email is correctly set

to your primary address. Use EMAIL <new email> to change it.

CLIENTS: The loss of Lumiere because of Adobe Flash v24.0.0 blocking cross site

ports has meant many of you now must use Umbra, which is by all rights a beta

application and not exactly compatible with everything. We apologise for this

inconvenience. It will be replaced with a fresh HTML5/CSS/JS based application

called Umbra/2 that works on all platforms including mobile Android and iOS.

This is the next area of attack after the payment gateway and systems are

completely functional. Initial testing and release will be sometime in April or

May.

COMMUNITY: The website Meetplace.net is still in our possession and all data

has been retained, but the system it used was far too chaotic to sustain. The

third major revision of our web technologies will be a new site for Avalon

itself, which will include the BB and Meetplace data. The future forum will use

Discourse and be integrated with the rest of the site using your email as

login. There are many areas the site can improve community activity and we are

dedicated to improving it month on month over the year. There is no firm date

for this project's completion but an early release is likely within the next

four months.

ACCOUNTS: We also have as a long term goal to create a new login system that

can incorporate Facebook and Google. It would supercede the current

character/password system, by logging in with an email address and managing

your characters from there, without further passwords, and holding your details

against a single customer account. This will not only streamline mobile usage

but address much of this hysteria about seconds. It is still in the planning

stages but with the new payment gateway and system, it is the first major

change to the website and client we intend to implement.

I urge you all to make sure your email on all of your characters is accurate

and set to your primary email address, so that payments, receipts, characters,

and logins are unified and simplified as these improvements are released to the

public.

UPCOMING IN GAME

FIXES: A lot of fixes occurred over the months of November to January and there

are many more to come. These will be addressed as and when we can, between work

on the new client and site. While it may appear slow to you, our faithful

players, we request some patience.

ENGINE AND SERVER: Along with major engine upgrades, we will be moving servers

and connectivity should be vastly improved. A new automated system for

restoring from any fault is already in the works.

SKILLS: Many of you know about the skill system transitioning to a new form. We

will return to implementing abilities for the Thief and Knight professions in

the new format. Certain bugs will inevitably occur during this period and will

be addressed as soon as possible. We appreciate your patience in this matter.

NOVICEHOOD: The novice system will inevitably move to being a chapter or task

based one and become more open ended. This is actually a transitional format,

as the proper form is far too ambitious to countenance at this time, as you can

see from this massive bulletin.

WARFARE: Warfare will need and receive serious attention this year but only

once everything above has settled down. Once it is stable, there will be some

significant changes including village factions that annually throw off the yoke

of their oppressors, providing a new form of competitive empire. This will

likely be pushed into 2017 Q3 or Q4, simply because of our other concerns

taking priority.

CONCLUSION

This was a long update to all of you to bring you up to speed. Please read

through it carefully to understand the state of the realm and what to expect.

We appreciate all feedback and especially appreciate players filling gaps until

we reach them. Special thanks go to Draegothe for his community forum, Pandora,

Avaviosi, and Shakralay for their help with novices, and many of you who have

realised not to nag or harass the administration while we are working so hard.

As before, all in-game hiccups, queries, and issues should be brought before

Geolin first. All finance and coding matters brought to myself, Cornelius. Use

BUG judiciously. Do not be afraid to ask questions of your peers.

This concludes the bulletin. Further details on each of the above will be in

the upcoming newsletter and updates will be presented on the News BB as and

when we have something more to announce.

-_Cornelius, the all-consuming

Written and shown unedited exactly as rendered by text based game bulletin board on Avalon Online RPG and by my hand on the 5th of Springflower, in the year 1423.