"Halistran" wrote:

It is with a heavy heart that we must announce the end of our support for Asheron's Call and Asheron’s Call 2, and will close both services on January 31st, 2017.

This decision did not come easy, and we know this is disappointing for many of you. This game is a labor of love, and it's not easy for us to bring it to an end.

We have had a phenomenally long run; one of the longest in the world of MMORPGs, and that in and of itself is a spectacular feat. We are proud of our legacy, and the entire Asheron's Call team has been honored to adventure with you for nearly twenty years. We thank you very much for being a part of it.

It’s been an amazing run. You’ve done Asheron Realaidain proud.

Between now and January 31st, 2017, the game will remain available to play, completely free, for any player currently with an account. New account creation will be disabled.

If you have any questions, please visit support.wbgames.com

Well the AC site has gotten several additions as well as a new theme. Even though Turbine has announced the end of support for Asheron's Call I have gotten the bug to look at it again. A little bit of playing although I realized that I am pretty rusty with the whole game.

Anyhow the site has been updated since I had to do some forum changes anyhow I got bored and added some areas to the AC site as well as rethemed the site and forums.

Turbine announced earlier this year that Asheron's Call would be entering "Maintenance Mode" meaning no new updates would be added to the game and sooner or later the AC Servers would go dark.

With this announcement Turbine made a peculiar announcement in which they will be allowing the Fans to setup Fan Servers to run Asheron's Call after the servers go dark. However no character data would be transferred from Turbine to these fan servers, meaning everyone would be starting at a blank slate. As well the servers would be precompiled meaning there would be little way for anyone to continue the updates of the servers/clients after the Official Servers go dark.

Its been a heck of a run for Asheron's Call, 15 years of running even as the odds for the game diminished, Turbine has been maintaining minimal staffing for Asheron's Call for several years now, even when they decided to relaunch Asheron's Call 2.

Greetings!

Asheron’s Call 2 has returned! We have opened up a new server for anyone who has an active Asheron’s Call subscription to play Asheron’s Call 2 for free! Although we would have loved to revisit some of our old characters with you, we were not able to bring over any of your old characters. We do, however, present this new Asheron’s Call 2 server, Dawnsong, to all active Asheron’s Call players with a paid subscription or who purchase an ACTD retail key and subscribe.

What does this mean to you?

Below is a link to the Asheron’s Call 2 client installer so you may get the game up and running. This will provide access to the new Dawnsong server. Although the server has passed our initial tests, we have a lot of monitoring and tweaking to do to the game environment and we want to ensure that our players understand that. This game service will be provided as a beta for all players with an active Asheron’s Call account. That said, the game server is currently up and running. So join us for a nostalgic trip back to a Dereth where the golden age was not interrupted.

If you are an active paid AC1 subscriber there will be no need to create a new account for Asheron’s Call 2; you will simply log into the Asheron’s Call 2 game using your current Asheron’s Call credentials.

Please note that this is a beta, the environment might have some known issues that we will be working on. The friend’s list functionality, for example, will not be available when this new server goes into beta. As can happen during a beta release, the server might be taken down for maintenance or troubleshooting at some inconvenient times if deemed necessary. See you in game!

July Prop - Filling in the Blanks

Every Month Turbine pushes new content to the Servers of Asheron's Call. Here you will find the July Prop information

Greetings and welcome to the July Event Release Notes! The Team has been hard at work addressing some previously know issues and adding new and exciting content to the game for July. So without further delay, let’s see what is new and exciting this month in Asheron’s Call!

Strange and weird.

That is what I think when I look at the time between my departure from Dereth and my, now, return to the world. In 2004 I retired from Asheron's Call and assumed I would never return to the world of Dereth as I had grown tired and even a bit weary of the way the game had gone.

Silver-wolfe, Tiaya and I struck out to Anarchy Online with a new hope of expanding the presence of the Guild onto a new game. The game was fun, heck the guild actually still exists on Anarchy Online, but none of us really play it anymore.

But I digress. Sunday I logged into Dereth for the first time in so many years. Experiencing dereth again for the first time I examined William Ohmsford and wondered how he managed to reach the sad state he was in. 31% vitae broke and without... Shoes....

I've managed to scrounge up a few followers in the case of my other characters and Brynn's account.

So I got bored and decided to recode the AC part of the site to look a bit more like the site we had back when Johud was still the Monarch of the AC Guild. Way back when we had the domain darktideregulators.org ...

As I go along and change things I hope those who see it notice some similarities to the old site. Enjoy

Yeah not like anyone actually reads this stuff but,

I did a bit of site recoding to clean up a bunch of well space...

The site code previous to the updates was almost 400 megs of (I'm really not sure what it was) files, after the recode to the site we are sitting at just over 100 megs (see why I have no idea)

The site contains some archival stuff such as the old AC Diplomacy page and some other fun archives. Check it out if you get bored.

So the other day I was sitting around talking to a few Ex-Regs and Allies of the Regs from Darktide discussing things that used to happen and fond memories of the game from times gone by. During the conversation I did a search on Google for "Darktide Regulators" and to my suprise I came across a Thesis paper written in 2003 by a Student at the Department of Computing Science at the GOTEBORG UNIVERSITY AND CHALMERS UNIVERSITY OF TECHNOLOGY. So I said hrm what is this?

As I browsed through the paper about User Centric Online Gaming, specifically MMORPG's, I came across why "Darktide Regulators" received a hit for this paper. The individual used our old website to reference actual social codes of Darktide. Using the specific Clan Code of Conduct to show how Social Guidelines are included in Games such as Asheron's Call and especially a Server such as Darktide.

Anyhow yeah just thought it was pretty nice to run into a reference of our guild from way back when somewhere :)

http://www.cse.chalmers.se/research/group/idc/theses/03/pdf/dereth.pdf - Link no longer valid 2025

WESTWOOD, Mass. Dec 17, 2003 - Turbine Entertainment Software Corp., a leading developer and publisher of online subscription entertainment, announced today that it signed a final agreement to purchase the complete Asheron's Call massively multiplayer online game franchise from Microsoft Game Studios. The franchise transfer includes all Asheron's Call intellectual properties, including Asheron's Call, Asheron's Call : Dark Majesty and Asheron's Call 2: Fallen Kings.

What does this really mean? I personally think that question is up to the future to show however since I have no love for M$ I feel its a good thing.

I have of course ran and done research to see what I can gleen off the situation and here is what I find.

Yes, we're committed to developing expansion packs for the games. Again, this is going to take some time. We'll be starting with AC1, since it has been two years since they've seen an expansion. When we get closer to having a schedule, we'll announce it. I stress one more time: It will take some time to start putting all this together. Don't expect definitive answers in the next few days.

Looks to me like there is a future for the game and perhaps even some major overhaul of most of the rules etc that M$ wouldn't do anything about.

But again we will have to wait and see.