Hello, everyone! Happy Sunday!

I wanted to quickly address some issues some have had with the Singing Stones.

Originally, The Singing Stones were intended to rely on one of the dryads being in the vicinity to activate this. Unfortunately, we has promised you guys the stones this weekend, and we worked late into the night squishing some last minute bugs from testing. I left a blog post last evening to reassure you that we would honor our promise to have them out last night.

You know what they say about best laid plans. We had some permissions issues that we had to quickly resolve before we could distribute it, and as we were coming up on Midnight (est, for the majority of the team) it was decided to leave the dryad censor out as there was no time to adequately test that unless we delayed the release, which I wouldn't do given our promise.

This meant that no Dryad presence was necessary to activate the stones, which was okay with me, as it meant more people could enjoy and experience the game. It was a trade off. This was a huge project undertaken by Moxie, so that I could focus on the upcoming expansion. She and her commissioned scripter did a fantastic job that provided a unique experience that moved the game itself forward. While we would have preferred to have the Dryad requirement in (Simply to tie the lore together more sturdily), at the final hour it wasn't practical, and it didn't seem fair to ask you to wait once again, as the stones had already been delayed once, and a lot of our customers were very unhappy about that.

To create the game itself took a lot of time, with the art assets, the sounds (All which were custom made) and have it scripted to perform complex actions, which the coder achieved in a breathtaking fashion that we were all very proud of. Ultimately, the Singing Stones, like many things planned, were intended to be a part of the unfolding story revolving around your Meeroos that you wouldn't have to pay for. We were certain from the beginning that these "side experiences" would be free for our players.

But it appears the bad (No dryad required) largely outweighed the good (Us putting it out on an awesome game time as promised with the free gift)and instead of it being embraced as a fun side experience, it's caused a lot of ugly accusations and attacks, once again. So, we're going to continue developing the expansion, which was due to come with more puzzles and mysteries for the community to participate in, but to avoid further community disruption we've opted to discontinue those plans in order to work on the core game only. This, right now, seems to be the most logical step.

We hope you enjoyed the puzzles, despite the no-dryad requirement. Although it was a feature we expected and even wrote about here, we didn't feel that it would result in such chaos. For the disharmony that has ensured, we're very sorry, but have learned a valuable lesson.

We're not discontinuing these plans as punishment, to place blame or out of spite. They did not fetch a good response, and the devotion of time and resources didn't benefit the community who locked in conflict regarding it. We believe we can use our time more wisely on the expansion and use this time to do things correctly and without a margin of error.

See you all this coming week!