Hello everyone! First of all, thank you all for visiting. It’s been a high priority of mine to make our website into a hub of useful server information and resources.  I hope you all make good use of our new TAW Codex and other links that will enhance your time as a community member of The Ancient World!

This blog post covers many changes and things to expect when TAW re-opens on Saturday August 17th. We will have one more blog post leading up to the re-opening.

There is a lot of news for us to cover today. So with that out of the way, let’s begin!

It has been almost a full year since our last map render update. The changes to the world since last year are huge. Check out the updated map render and see for yourself!

Work is underway to overhaul the Continents with new content! The first of these continents is Sadrith Mora – which has had new content added such as coral reefs, overgrown forests, bamboo jungles and pandas!

We now have a working build of CreativeGates (our portal network plugin). However, our old portal data could not be converted to the new 1.14.4 format. As a result all of our portal networks are down and must be rebuilt from scratch. I plan to have all of our Port Orange and Euloria services back up and running in time for the re-opening on Saturday.

Some great news! Massivecraft’s Factions has been updated by a third party to support the new 1.14.4 format, resulting in all of our old Faction data remaining intact! However, we will still be keeping the No-Raiding rule in effect until the end of August as planned.

Our Voting system will be making a return for 1.14.4! This also includes Vote Points and the Vote Shop. Visit the Voting page on the TAW Codex for more info.

We are changing the way donation rewards work. For a time, the only donation rewards were pet tiers. Recently I’ve introduced nameplate recoloring as a bonus reward for donators. But I would like to take this an extra step further into something more balanced.

What do future donators receive?

Starting from 1.14.4, all future donators will receive

• a nameplate recoloring
• a unique tag of your choosing,
• one Pet (depending upon the amount donated).

I will be revamping the Pet’s codex page to reflect these changes. This will not however effect existing owners of pets. These changes will only reflect on any future donators.

This also marks the end of our racial tag system that we introduced a few years ago. You can still have your custom racial tag if you are a donator, or you may ask for your own unique title of your choosing.

So receiving entire tiers of pets is going bye bye?

Yes. The main change here to take note of is the reduction from entire pet tiers by donation to only a single pet from the tier you qualify for. For example – if you donate over $4, this will qualify you for 1 pet out of the $4 tier instead of all the pets in the tier.

While I think it’s great to give out all the pets (who doesn’t want them all?), I also feel it diminishes the value of them when they are given out in such quantity in a single instance.

What about existing donators? do we keep all our pets?

Of course. Also, If you are an existing donator then I owe you a unique tag of your choosing as well. So be sure to bring that up with me the next time you see me online – assuming I don’t bring it up first.