Everything you need to know about Release (and Guilds)

I went on the IncGamers podcast today and talked briefly about the launch! It includes awesome answers such as "*pause* I lost my train of thought there." If you're interested in checking it out, I'm on at around the 30 minute mark.

Many people have asked for more information on how guilds work. On the social panel you can create a guild. Names are not unique, so call it what you want. Powerful guilds can obtain tags that appear next to their members' names in chat. This requires sacrificing a set of end-game Maps, each of which corresponds to a letter or symbol in the tag. Tags are unique and some symbols are much rarer than others. Tags can be 3-6 symbols in length. While you're in a guild, you can chat to other members (even across leagues!) with the & symbol. The guild leader can set membership permissions (Leader, Officer, Member). Officers can also invite new Members.

Guilds start with 30 member slots and you can purchase sets of 10 extra slots for 100 points ($1 each). There's currently a maximum of 200. We may increase this in the future once we fully understand their impact on server performance. Guild stash tabs (which are all nameable/colourable) can also be purchased. The guild leader can set permissions on which tiers of members can view, add items and remove items from tabs.

Only the guild leader can purchase microtransactions for their guild, but members and officers can donate points to their guild to help with these purchases. The guild leader can accept and reject point donations on the guild webpage (on this site). If they accept a point donation, then they are unable to kick that member out of the guild for three months. It's possible to reject donations if you don't really want to take their points.

Guilds are joined by account, rather than by character.

As mentioned in the patch notes, Guild Challenges are coming very soon.

The 1.0.0 patch notes that we posted yesterday contained some incomplete information about how we changed Righteous Fire. The correct patch note is:

• The damage bonus now starts at 40% instead of 30%, but only increases by 1% per level, instead of 3%. Righteous Fire now burns nearby monsters and the character based on a percentage of life and a percentage of energy shield of the caster.

I'm going to get back to work now - not many hours left! See you at launch :)