Even if I’m side-eyeing the heck out of Shroud of the Avatar, I do have to give a smile and a nod to the developing MMO’s love of community events, and with this week’s Avatar’s Update, there are a couple of notable things on that front to point out. Particularly since the rest of the newsletter consists of much of the same features as previous weeks.
Specifically, Catnip Games will be hosting two new events: A monthly screenshot and video contest with the chance to win player-owned town deeds, and monthly rare item bounties that task players with finding a rare drop from a PvP scene and a PvE scene.
Speaking of monthly events, SOTA’s ongoing fishing tourney event will also be moving to a monthly format, which will also see an increase to the number of scenes these tourneys take place and adjustments to prizes. Weekly fishing tourneys will still push on until this change, which is due to start when Release 87 goes live on February 25th.
In other SOTA news, Catnip announced today that it’s “going to pass on moving to Unity 2019.”
“Based on numerous Unity forum reports and now our own testing, 2019 is significantly (20-40%) slower than 2018. Huge fail. :/ The same threads show that early versions of 2020 is much closer to 2018 in performance at 10% slower. There were only a few player facing improvements in 2019, the big one being possibly some reduced hitching. Most the improvements were developer facing only. So after this fun 40+ hours of work to get us working on 2019, I’ve decided to keep us on 2018 until 2020 is more stable. I just can’t justify a 20-40% frame rate hit for players for an improved dev experience. 2020 currently has better performance than 2019 and more player facing improvements as well. Once it is further along we’ll try and move to 2020. Yes, I know it is 2021 but…Unity. :/”
