Star Date: 19 December, 3014

Flavescent Friday!  The Flavescent Friday shops are open now in Soluna City Main. They will stay open for the weekend, and then will disappear for another year at 7 PM EST (server time) on Monday, 22 December, so grab your rares and discounted items now, while the sale is hot!

All-new Frostval missions on Planet Thoh! Gianna Glow's first script with some minor co-authoring by Ash, who built the missions. New art courtesy of Lyris. Very exciting never-before-seen all-new missions are live now, with more coming soon.

Follow @Lyris_AE on Twitter for exciting previews and storyline hints like this:

Star Date: 12 December, 3014

Replay Frostvals Past: The sidebar button in Soluna City Main will take you to Planet Thoh to revisit missions from past years.

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Star Date: 4 December 3014 

MQ On YouTube?  A dedicated longtime player known as DrePlaysGames on YouTube has started a series of MechQuest videos! Here's the link to his channel . (Disclosure - he's not just a random player, but actually someone I know in real life.)

Do you have MechQuest videos, or ideas for them that you've never gotten off the ground? Let's see what you've got! Email me the link to your video or channel, or you can also use Twitter to let me know. You've got a chance to get it shared on the Design Notes. No guarantee of course - if I get a zillion responses I'll end up having to pick some randomly to highlight.  They don't have to be instructional - they can be amusing or exciting or surreal or whatever direction your artistic vision takes you. What they should be to qualify as something I might share is pretty simple - they should be clean - no hax, no swearing - and basically family-friendly. 

Flavescent Friday Wishlists! Start making your wishlists because we'll have a forum post for your input shortly.  What's Flavescent Friday, you ask? We put items into a special limited-time discount shop for you and also choose a few rare items to include (some of those are not discounted). 

Please do not make suggestions for any of the following: 

Anything that has been promised as perma-rare 
Arthurian Eagle/Pirate Raider 
Other AvP war rares 
Crystal Asteroid rares (especially Shadow Blight/Purge) 

One of us from the MQ team will set up a forums thread for your wishlists within the next day or so. For those who don't use the forums, we'll have some kind of alternative. 

Now I need to wrap everything up for tomorrow's Turkageddon release! Nearly everything is done - I just need to get the mecha battles set up and the rewards shops plugged in and a couple of elements of the "outro" squared away. And finish the town interface. So I'll talk with you again soon. 

(Also for this week: Ash & Lyris are working on this year's Zorbo, and Clarion is creating an e-blade for his birthday, too.) 

Star Date 30 November, 3012:

Incoming transmission from Plasma Charge!

Flavescent Friday! It’s Friday - this week we released a fresh new Flavescent Friday shop with some fantastic gear! This year’s shop includes rares from the legendary Arthurian Vs Pirate war, Friday the 13th, and past springtime rares by the ever-awesome Charfade! The shop also contains an assortment of permanent  content at a deep discount, which should be fun to fight with! The sale will be on until Monday at 5pm EST, so be sure to snatch these bargains while you can.

G.E.A.R.S.  Games coming… soon?

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It's November! Such a busy time getting ready to bring you all sorts of holiday and non-holiday-but-long-promised goodness! I haven't had much time to write to you lately, and for now mainly I've got news for you from Plasma Charge and Practel. Plasma Charge has been doing some art & animation, and Practel is starting to learn about coding. Arklen, blues, Korin, minar, Vivi, and I have all been working quietly and busily on upcoming stuff as well. Anyhow, here's the news for the day! The actual Star Date on this first one is November 16, 3011

Incoming Transmission…A message to all mecha pilots, long time no see. I hope you’ve all had an excellent  Mogloween. New items!Head to HAL’s hair shop to check out another two new hairstyles, one for the guys and one for the girls! Bug Fixes!The Tyrano mecha series has had a fix made so it can walk around areas like Romero!The Romero sword fight Gremlin has finally been squished!
Gameplay Updates!The Cure Sys-Zero quest now has lower rolls to help new players progress. Also, Mae fixed some typos.You’ll also have a better chance to find one of the parts in Warlic’s Find Starship Parts quest.If you can think of other quests with tedious rolls please let us know here on the forums! 

Thanks, Plasma Charge! And now, here's Practel:

Howdy!

It's been a while since my last Design Notes! Don't worry, I'm still here and working on more than ever! This Wednesday the Mogloween event and maps will be going away once again for another year, however there will be the release of previous years Turkageddon! I've been working on a new Thanksgiving/Fall Soluna City, and here's a small sneak peek below! 

http://cms.mechquest.com/mq/images/Turk2iizz13.png  

"Nom nom nom"

I've also been working on the One-Eyed Doll CD weapon that will be coming out on Wednesday! This weapon is packed with sheer awesomeness, I love it!

http://cms.mechquest.com/mq/images/shredz2d3u3o.png 

"I declare awesomeness and pew pew!"

Finally, good luck to all of you Heros who are finishing up school before Thanksgiving break! It seems like this is the time where teachers just want to slam you with tests and quizes, and believe me, that's not fun.

Stay safe and have a wonderful Thanksgiving,

Practel 

Thanks, Practel! Happy Turkageddon, everyone! I'd like to take this opportunity to wish all of you American players a happy Thanksgiving as well. We are planning Flavescent Friday for November 30th this year. A special weapon coming to the holiday shop tomorrow will give you a hint as to one of the mecha models that will be in the FF shop.  What do you hope to see in the Flavescent Friday shop? Please let us know here! 

Flavescent Friday! The Event section of the Shops interface is where you will find the Flavescent Friday Discounts and Rares! There is a limited selection of Rare mecha models as well as non-rares. The non-rares are 50% off the normal selling price!  The weapons selected are 50% off as well.  The version of the RARE Chronomech that is in the shop is not quite identical to the one that was offered with the 3011 Calendar. It scales only to Level 50 and has been named differently to help distinguish it from the promotional version.  

We took your input on the forums and considered the pros and cons of everything you said you would want to see (and not to see) in the shops this year.  It turned into a lively debate again, and it was fascinating to see what interests you.  Honestly I was originally considering limiting this year's offerings to mechas only, but everyone was interested in having a weapons shop - and I'd like to remind you that we have the Salvage quest in Soluna City which really does fill that niche nicely.  This year's selection of weapons is mostly for over level 20 - but you can stock up now in advance for when you attain that higher level!  (The level range is my fault - I was so focused on getting just the right mecha models selected that I ended up putting weapons on the back burner.) There is a chance that I might add something for the neglected levels, as suggested by ZamuelNow on the forums - Korin gave his blessing so it just depends on how the weekend plays out.  I do love the name "Saturated Saturday" that ZamuelNow came up with!

Korin & I decided that Flavescent Friday will last for the entire weekend, so you have time to decide what you'd like to add to your inventory!  Keep an eye on the shop, in case we have time to add anything. No promises, but if I add something I'll put out a quick Design Note!

Planet Liath: The Black and White Planet! Liath is now open to everyone who has completed Val's quests at the Museum and also has flight clearance! There are now Non-Star-Captain shoulders in the reward shop (the Nova Gem Preview weapons are Rare FOREVER) and Star Captains still have a nice shoulder in the shop as well, although it is a bit different from the SC Exclusive Preview version. blues designed the specials and Vivi coded them up - and Vivi also made their database entries and did the shop work! Huzzah! (Debut in the database!) (And many many thanks!)

Minar arted up the cool and all-new backgrounds for the town and new element for the new quest, and there's an 'establishing shot' he also made that isn't LIVE yet, because we are adding a landing cutscene next week.  (I'll be plotting that out next, along with a little extra dialogue.) Many thanks to Minar for being such an integral part of our dev team while still going to school, etc. !!

Korin let me put together the general visual design for this planet and much of the storyline planning and specific dialogue - I tell you this because I am starting to hear that people don't know who does what, and I generally tell you what everyone else does but not too much about what I do.  We do a lot of collaboration as well. So for example I'm hoping Lyris will have time to work with me on one of her awesome animated cutscenes for the landing ... 

Korin has introduced a brilliant feature in the quest after you arrive in the town - making rolls to advance much easier and more hopeful - it actually made me not care about rolling under the required number while testing, because I was given hope that I'd succeed and the end was really in sight - and it was! What do you think of this new feature? The new 'organic' dinosaurs are Korin's brainchild (or should that be "brainchildren") too! 

*Teaser* Arklen has sent along a something that is animated and relates to Planet Liath... something blues and Vivi will definitely be involved in working on, and something I'll have a hand in... speculations welcome, but no further spoilers are forthcoming anytime soon! 

Have a fantastic weekend - thanks for playing MechQuest!

MQ's very first annual Flavescent Friday is finally here! Visit Soluna for tons of discounted weapons and mecha models! There are even a few rare weapons from back in the day!  

(Flavescent?? It's a real word, meaning a color, defined as "yellow, yellowish, or turning yellow."  A symbol of Autumn in areas where the trees change the color of their leaves.)  

It was difficult to decide what-all to discount this year - we listened to you on the forums and included as much as was both reasonable and feasible.  Re-releasing rares is a tricky proposition, and we wanted to be fair to those who love their weapons that are no longer available in shops while still providing something special.  There's a lot of lively discussion on the forums and I hope you'll join in! The main purpose of this shop is to provide items at a discount, so I think we succeeded - there are a LOT of items and mecha models!

My fingers are quite literally numb - actually the tops of my hands, starting around the wrist area. This was a LOT of list-making and typing in the database to get all the prices slashed - and to keep records of the original prices for Sunday at 11AM Server Time, when the shops close and the typing begins again to put them all back to their originals!  This shop turned into what Korin called my "baby" - I consulted with him, Warlic, and Vivi plus with you-all on the forums, so I can't really take all the credit.  Except for one thing - the typing.  I did all the typing.  Vivi caught a mistake in pricing before everything went Live and I did the Zorbo dance around the dining room thinking that might be the only error.  I made a few more, as it turned out ... I think I closed a window with un-updated tabs prematurely, was what happened.  I had 8 windows open in the database with up to 20 tabs per window.  I would like to thank some people who alerted me via IRC to those post-release mistakes in the price-slashing - you would recognize them as ZanpakuTô and zeke50100 on the forums.  Thanks!

I think you should go visit the shops in Soluna to see what's there because there is no way I'm typing out lists - haha!  Geekatron chassis!  RARE AvP weapons! And MORE!

I did make L33 versions of the Khael series mecha models for NSC, SC, and NG, and an extra NG model at L42 - these have the slashed prices, and will go into the regular shops at regular price when the Flavescent Friday sale ends.

I would have liked to make some higher-level versions of non-rare weapons for this but instead what I'd like to do is to get your input on the forums of what non-rare (available in the game) weapons you would like to see get higher level versions.  (Not new specials - that would be a separate project - just higher levels.) And if we make a separate forum thread for that, the link will be on the forums!  

I think I have a pretty good grasp on what non-rare mecha models you'd like to see get revivals (updated specials plus higher levels) or just higher level versions - more about that after Frostval, though.  Thoh is coming! Snow is coming!  

Snow Forecast! Minar is working on some really cool weapons for the Star Captain Giftboxes!  Vivi and Minar and I had a blast last night, chillin' together - I even got a brain freeze.  The wrapped gifts arrive for Star Captains on Wednesday (and the boxes mean nothing - their specials change when the gifts unwrap later in the Frostval season)!!!!

Mogloween and Turkageddon: Korin mentioned that I should let you know that we are leaving Mogloween up until we take the Flavescent Friday shops out on Sunday (access Mogloween via Jack in Soluna City until he's gone) - and then Turkageddon will stay up until this upcoming Friday.  I know I said it was leaving earlier but we decided (Korin actually decided) that it would stay up a bit longer.

Museum! New Museum exhibits including a special "Staff Pick" from a forum member who didn't even submit it for consideration! Run West to the Art Museum to check out Bladebrawl's art and art created by Hellsoarer, JoRanManzor, Xin the Ultimate, Kid Asero, and Draco1236 !  Talk to Circe in the Art Museum to get your own replica to hang in your Starship (if you are a Star Captain) and also to find out how you can participate and get YOUR artwork in the game for people all over the world to see!  (I'm not kidding when I say all over the world - I talk with people who play in: Malaysia, Romania, the Philippines, Austria, Australia, the Netherlands, Portugal, Mexico, Brazil, Israel, Ecuador - the list goes on.)

(No more lists! I'm done writing, going to go Zorbo-Dance some more now!) Have a great weekend! I'll be around on Sunday for sure, re-pricing stuff, and checking in as usual tomorrow.  Thanks for playing!