Hot on the heels of Shark Week, congrats to Wizard101’s 12th Birthday! We celebrated the terrific occasion by bringing back your birthday favorites, running member benefits all-month long, and of course... giving away some festive items!
Several community videos celebrating the birthday have been released so far (thanks community for the awesome inspirational words!), including this one by Kyle IceWielder:
We also had a ton of fun dancing the day away with the community in The Commons with our pets. How cute are corgis? SUPER CUTE!
Happy birthday to Wizard101 and congrats to the community for making it 12 amazing years with many more to come!
Meanwhile, here’s a brief list of what exciting news occurred recently:
AUG 5: Abracadoodle #204 crafted
AUG 7: Shark Week began
AUG 11: Ice Deckathalon event began
AUG 17: New Summer Monstrodome released
AUG 18: Lost Pages event
AUG 18: Inaugural Beastmoon Monster Mayhem event began
AUG 25: New Islander’s Spellemental Pack
AUG 26: National Dog Day celebrations (stay tuned for Cat Day!)
AUG 27: KI Live and a new Karamelle teaser, the Apple Brudel
AUG 31: New Paleo Piggle Pet released
AUG 31: Jellymancer concept revealed by Nana
SEP 1: Fall Scroll of Fortune begins
And of course, the daily Nana updates @NanasKaramelle which includes a weekly Free Sample to readers. Nana is so nice, isn’t she?
Keep updated on the latest news for next month on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram, including special announcements from community fansites! Read on for more fun happenings with the community and their Spiral activities.
THE LATEST GOODIES FROM NANA
Nana has been busy promoting her Karamelle Delights business! Here’s what she’s been up to since the grand opening of @NanasKaramelle.
First look of Karamelle City:
“Willkommen to Karamelle City, capital of Karamelle, the sweetest world in the Candied Isles. Just take in all that splendor.” - Nana @NanasKaramelle
Nana’s So Sweet...
“Show your support for dear old Nana by dressing up as our Mascot! Then capture an image of you and your friends in that outfit and post it here.” - Nana @NanasKaramelle
Free Samples!
Be sure to head on over to @NanasKaramelle where Nana is giving out weekly pet snack samples for your pets! The one above is an example of the most recent giveaway. Keep watch later in the week for the next giveaway we’re sure she’ll have!
Color Nana!
“Would you dearies care to finish this picture for Nana? Share the results so we can have a looksee.” - Nana @NanasKaramelle
Full Color Jellymancer Concept
KI Live viewers got an exclusive first look at the Apple Brudel concept:
And fresh off the presses at the release of this newsletter, a mysterious new creature is revealed!
Nana and all workers at Nana’s Olde Fashioned Karamelle Delights thank you for your patronage. Be sure to follow @NanasKaramelle on Twitter for more about this strange new occurrence in the Spiral!
KI LIVE WITH SPARCK & PROFESSOR FALMEA
We had another fun KI Live! We spilled the beans on yet another Karamelle teaser (are we teasing too much? If so, just let us know, we can stop!) We also had a couple of surprise guests come on to say hello to the community.
If you missed the show, you can now watch it on YouTube:
Secret Reader Bonus - As of this newsletter's announcement, for those who didn't get a chance to redeem the KI Live giveaway code yet, we opened it up again (ROCKCREW2020) for another 500 redemptions!
A great gameplay tip submitted to KI Live comes from Dreamgalleon21154:
“There are many helpful Quest Trees out there to help you know exactly where you are in questing! If you want to know how much left you have in a world, go ahead and check out one of the fan sites' helpful quest trees.” - Dreamgalleon21154
PRODUCER'S LETTER
We know you love hearing from Professor Falmea whom always has some sort of profound thing to say about the next event or major content release, or a great question to ask the community. She’s had a lot to say recently too, so she put much of her latest thoughts about the general state of the game into a new Producer’s Letter for you to check out.
“My Dear Wizards,
The summer heat feels the same as it ever was, and also just a little different this year. While the outside world is topsy turvy (quite an understatement, I realize), we here at KingsIsle are committed to maintaining the Spiral as a place for our community that feels safe, stable, and positive. We want to ensure that Wizard101 remains a space for you to connect with your friends and family. The team has been dreaming up ways for you to better adventure and socialize in the Spiral and means for you to advance your Wizard to new heights, including beginning the Arc 4 storyline in Karamelle! We’ve been fortunate enough to have the opportunity to do some long-standing housekeeping to support Wizard’s growth and longevity, allowing us to be there here for you for many, many years to come. Also, we’re truly excited to celebrate Wizard’s 12th anniversary with you all September long!
Your Professor is an extremely goal-oriented individual, it's just one of those things built into us Producer-types. As such, we set some specific intentions goals for Wizard101 for 2020. I'm going to talk about a few of them here, and how they’ve influenced our decisions about what goes into our updates and how we approach them.”
- Leah “Professor Falmea” Rubin
Have a read of the complete Producer’s Letter and let us know what you think in the forums or on social media!
MATCHMAKING DEV DIARY
Ben "Ratbeard" Durbin Lead Designer
Ben “Ratbeard” Durbin and team have been working hard on finding ways to improve the game’s matchmaking system and how ranked PvP works. Much of that work has been shaped by your feedback too. Check out Ben's extensive dev diary released just last week that goes into all the details of how certain systems currently work and what may be changed in the future:
“Hello Wizards!
Esteemed PvPers, lapsed and future PvPers, and the PvP curious:
Today we’d like to give you some more details about the changes coming soon to PvP Matchmaking, as well as an update on some PvP-related changes that we will be rolling out in the near future.
Matchmaking
Generally speaking, unless specifically mentioned otherwise, the changes we will be discussing here apply to 1v1 Ranked PvP. Players frequently ask, “What about team PvP?” and/or “What about tourneys?” and while we agree that these are important PvP features, our first and primary focus is on getting the fundamentals of PvP into good working order – and that means starting with 1v1.
Matchmaking is handled by a Matchmaking Server. The Matchmaking Server waits for players to attempt to find a match via the kiosk, and this prompts the Matchmaking Server to either add that player to its existing queue or “spin up” a new queue. The Matchmaking Server does not create a queue on any particular schedule, but on an as-needed basis. Once a queue is created, the Matchmaking Server waits for a specified period of time and keeps adding players to the queue until it is time to create matches and prompt players. This waiting period can be set by us, and we will modify it as needed to best serve the players. The waiting time can’t be too long, or players will get frustrated waiting for a match; and it can’t be too short, or the player pool will be too small to create good matches. We can also force the Matchmaking Server to start making matches as soon as it has a certain number of players in the queue, and we can force it not to start making matches (extending the queueing period) if there aren’t enough players in the queue.
When the queuing time period is complete, the Matchmaking Server begins making matches. It starts by sorting all players into a list, following a specified order of sorting criteria (see below), and then it begins making matches by just going down the list – it offers a match to player 1 and player 2, player 3 and player 4, player 5 and player 6, and so on, until it reaches the end of the list. Each pair of players gets their arena prompt at the same time, and, assuming they accept, off they go. Players who don’t accept their match, who don’t click in time, and the “odd man out” are simply moved over to the next queue to continue waiting.” - Ben “Ratbeard” Durbin
In addition to the above Karamelle concept art teasers, Adam has been busy recently creating even more cool new concept art! Check out his latest on Twitter:
“Here's the Hamster Suit you can get in the Karamelle pre-quest. I started painting my gear designs, to better explain the materials and textures to the modelers.” - Adam Roush
“Here's the Punk Flamingo mount. I had fun with the design on this one, particularly the plaid heart tattoo and the spiky vest.” - Adam Roush
“Here's Admiral Dynt from Empyrea pt 2. Had fun designing the aethyr effects.” - Adam Roush
“Here's the Celestian player gear from the Celestian Spellement pack. This is probably my favorite gear sets to have designed, loved mixing fantasy/scifi elements, especially the energy cloth/armor.” - Adam Roush
And CheerValX's great video about the pre-Karamelle quests starting with Bryce Crispie:
ART SPOTLIGHT
For this month’s art spotlight, we are showcasing a drawing of Bolin from @MiaSmithArt:
“Painting of my w101 fan character Bolin!... Hope y'all like it!” - Mia
We would love to see more screenshots and art from the community for next month’s newsletter. Do you have something amazing to share? Send it to us in an email to community@kingsisle.com! We’re always interested in showing off more fan art, gameplay guides, videos, and other content.
Thanks, Wizards!
COMMUNITY NEWS
Community art by: Swordroll
Keep updated on what’s happening in the community right here in our Community News section! For every newsletter, we receive direct from the community links to new gameplay guides, exciting upcoming contests, and much more. Thanks to the following fansites and other community leaders for their contributions this month!
There was a ton of excitement over the reveal of Karamelle and Nana's Twitter account this past month! Here are two video spotlights showcases the reveal so far:
Question for our readers - is there a section we should add? Tweet your suggestion to @Wizard101 and we’ll select the top idea we can implement to win 5,000 Crowns!
Be sure to follow the game and its community on social media!
If you didn’t yet read our article on online safety, please take a moment to stop by our KingsIsle Blog and read the post titled Account Security Best Practices. There’s important information in the article to manage and protect your entire family’s accounts.
