Message #127087

[Penchant]

April Issue

Dev Plan

Currently the renewed Titans system is being finished up this month to replace the Magistrates. As well there is the War Improvements Package. Look here for more information and to participate in discussion on the topic.

Dev Work Done

Continued the Ice Age and has done more with Dwilight's rogue invasion

A Night of Ominous Lights   (1 day, 21 hours ago)
message to Everyone on Dwilight
The past few days have been cloudy, and mariners sailing the seas west of Dwilight have reported seeing a strange light reflecting off the clouds further out to sea. Today, though, a strong wind has scoured the skies clear, and at midnight the first quarter moon rises clear and bright.

Its light shining down meets another light from below: an eerie greenish glow, emanating from the western sea. It source is beyond sight of shore, but ships sailing just far enough west that they can barely see land return with their captains pale and shuddering as they report that the light is shining from terrible glaciers just visible from their vantage point within sight of land.

Just when most people are putting it aside and beginning to sink into an uneasy slumber, though, yet another phenomenon appears: vast transparent curtains of greenish-purple light rippling throughout the night sky. This aurora must be the harbinger of something dreadful, for as soon as it appears, a strange sound begins to emanate from woods and rocky highlands, and wilderness all across the continent. It grows in strength until it is clear that every monster on the continent is giving tongue in a terrible howl. The moment it reaches an unbearable volume, it stops, and at the same instant, the aurora vanishes. Then the earth begins to tremble as thousands of clawed, hooved, and padded feet begin thundering toward the west...toward the Iceglow.

The freezing has continued, and the monsters on Dwilight are all going to the West, even those that are already on the west island are heading west. What will happen once they get there is yet to be known. To address some people's concerns regarding the event:

When the dev team sat down and decided to make a determination of how to achieve our goals, we set out a clear policy that we would not consider political boundaries when setting policy. There was a suggestion or two that perhaps the event could be used to help reshape the politics of some islands. We quickly, and almost unanimously, decided that this was not desirable. We do not want to sit down and say "These realms are good, and we should preserve them. These realms are bad, and should be destroyed." This subjective decision process is bad for the game and the players. Who wants to be the player that has the dev team come down and say "For the good of the game, we have decided that your realm, specifically, has to be eliminated."

Part of the assumption that you're making is that, if we would have tried to use political boundaries and specific realm traits to determine which realms should die, that we would have of course agreed that your realm would be saved. You have no guarantee that this is the case. Perhaps we would have closed the north. Or the south. Or the outside of both halves. Or pared the north and south down by 25% of the map size. Or maybe we would have blown a huge hole in the middle of both the eastern and western halves. Who knows? In any case, there's no guarantee that Barca, or Asylon, or Niselur, or Astrum, or any other specific realm would have survived the decision process.

So in the end, we decided to go with island history, and revert the western half to a monster-riddled wilderness. I'm sorry that some realms had to be destroyed in the process. But at least, in the end, every player knows that what was done was not done in an effort to specifically target any individual realm or alliance. This is true of the decisions made regarding all islands.

You have my personal promise on that fact. And if the personal promise of the dev team is not good enough for you, then there is absolutely nothing that can be done to convince you of how things were done, and why they had to be done that way.

I think - from what I hear right and left - that most players are actually unhappy about the solution at all because of instead one realm, many realms of them are affected and would just hear from the dev team an honest "ok that didn't work out as we wanted, we should just have done better something else".

Yes, that's always what people want you to say when they think you're wrong.

But what about when they're wrong—or, at best, very premature in their assessment?

An event like this is guaranteed to produce those feelings in a large number of people, no matter how we choose the regions to remove. And the other alternative—simply doing nothing—is also not viable. Sure, it doesn't piss lots of people off and make them leave now—but it also doesn't make the game engaging and exciting in the future, which will, over time, cause a lot of people to leave nonetheless.

if you are wrong, that is not decided yet,

This is the key here.

but for most, with the limited information given, it sounds like this.

Limited, biased, non-scientific information—and, ultimately, however accurate it is, all of it is simply giving the result we knew would happen: Some people who are being affected by the ice and the monsters are leaving the game. During the event and a period immediately following it, I would be shocked to find that account deletions did not outpace account creations.

The point is not, and never was, for the shrinking itself to create more interest and bring in more people. We tried to come up with ways to fluff and manage the shrinking that would help to mitigate the damage, but there's no way we can completely eliminate it.

The point of these actions was never about making things better now. It was always about making things better in the future.

The sooner you all realize that, and stop looking at the results in the present as "proof" that our actions were wrong, the sooner you can all get back to playing the game, and we can get back to improving it, rather than having to spend vast amounts of time on the forum each day refuting the same tired arguments over and over again.

I'm not entirely sure what you mean by "choice modifier," but...

The reason we were focusing on noble density is because that is a very strong predictor of two things: first, being able to find meaningful interaction, and second, being able to maintain your realm without dedicating a large proportion of the realm's nobility purely to that.

We believe that the increased density will lead to more interaction, and more opportunity for war between the realms that are left, because there will be more nobles available who are not tied to region maintenance.

Both those things should increase overall fun, and thus retention.

However, we do have other plans in the works that we hope will also improve matters. Believe me, no one would be happier than me if we could implement all these changes and see a resulting rise in the player count that means we can immediately start "giving back" regions that we glaciated or...monster-ated. (Nom.)

Shut down the Magistrates and started work on renewing the Titans system.

After giving proper time to the Magistrates experiment, we have decided to take the lessons it has provided us and unite the Titan and Magistrate systems. Moving forward, we will be taking the best advantages of the Magistrate system, with the transparency of open reports and verdicts, and combining it with the Titans' private discussions and information gathering tools. Reflecting upon the Magistrate experiment, we find that the public discussion on each case distracted the Magistrates, resulted in a large share of forum vitriol, and usually offered little in benefit to each case. We also found that Magistrates listing the initial report and final verdicts helped clarify the game's position on edge situations and helped share knowledge of what was acceptable and unacceptable in the game. We hope to improve upon both these aspects with the new Titans.

Starting immediately, the Titans will once again be the body to which all complaints about other players should be submitted. However, they are undergoing an overhaul that should help to increase transparency and responsiveness, which will take several more days to complete. Any complaints submitted before then will be addressed, but be aware that there will be a delay.

Its been talked about for a few months and it has finally been decided to in fact shut down the Magistrates. Anaris is currently in the process of taking the good things from the Magistrates and some other things as well to renew the Titans again to be the sole judicial body in Battlemaster.

Priests can once more see the military in the region they are in and their realm's regions.

This is on a trial basis, so if it is found people are abusing it, it will likely be revoked soon after.

April Fools- Create a Daimon.

We apologize to those who may have fallen a little too hard for the "undercover Daimon" joke.

For those who have enough character slots, we invite you to keep the adventurer and enjoy playing the adventurer game. For those who do not, you can simply pause or delete the "Daimon" character and continue playing as normal.

Normal restrictions on pausing a new character have been lifted temporarily.

Players had the ability to "Create a Daimon" being told that they could choose several abilities to have, starting out with none and gaining 1 a day. It was said that you were pretending to a peasant for the time being. Unfortunately the next day came, and instead of the daimons gaining their powers their reports gamewide of crazy peasants thinking they were peasants, and thus the daimons, which seemed like adventurers when you played, were in fact just adventurers.

Miscellaneous

With Tom consolidating his social media pages, please like Tom's Games, his new Facebook page.

What was your first active role in a realm?

Feel free to ask any questions, about the game, development, or the newsletter.