Everyone! We must continue our struggle to perfection! We had William15 and Zero participate in our Skype meeting. Iiridayn was there in spirit and gave us some important information just beforehand.

As a dev team we ask that you create a ticket when you experience an issue. It is totally fine to PM me as well but a ticket avoids anything/anyone falling through the cracks. It also gives us a way to keep you informed as to our progress.

Any ticket marked existential crisis is immediately marked low priority. (You know who you are) ((We should be fixing that pretty soon TBH))

We appreciate all of the bug finding everyone has been doing this week. Notes from the meeting:

There are issues with evening resets which we believe are impacting round resets as well as news archiving. There have been requests for old archives to be shared. This is an on going discussion and we should have more information on this next week. We do not know if we will be able to recover the recently missing archived news. This is a work in progress.

We have yet to discover the reasoning and legitimacy of all of the new player spawns. Some ideas have been suggested and we are looking at implementation. The last thing we want to do is exclude any real potential players as our top priority.

Many smaller tickets that were submitted have been assigned for remedy. No timeline on these as we can only afford volunteer developers. We were facing an ugly union strike when we demanded they be finished tonight. In the end we gave into the union and the tasks will be completed and I (miss) quote "wheneverIfeelikeit".

We are very excited with the activity we are seeing. Keep us posted on anything we can do to make your experience more fun. We do put a pin in a lot of ideas but rest assured we are doing our best to prioritize. We are no longer trapped by the recode and have a "little" more freedom to work on certain live issues. A lot of our work will still be on recoded pages to push them live with small fixes. Progress will certainly be delayed this week as there are quite a few things on the live version that need lovin'.

TL;DR:
Lots of small and a few somewhat serious things are broken. We are going to fix them. We have no idea when. We love you and are doing our best. Keep up the good work!


:Edit:
Side note #1: We banned a spammer this morning and deleted all of their posts. Please keep an eye out if we miss anything like this as we want to deal with it promptly.

Side Note #2: A few weeks ago we dropped the players by points stats page down to 25 to encourage a state of competition to rank as well as make us look more active. We are really looking forward to have all listed players as active point scorers.

Side Note #3: You are all great. May the sun shine upon you.

__________________________
I am here to help in anyway I can! Let's have fun!

In my opinion, the game has had the worst activity ever.

Reference last rounds results
1. ReaperOfSouls 597,682 8,393,741
2. Serenity 460,785 11,263,763
3. Hunted Shadow 150,616 1,354,512
4. LKoRR 66,765 68,946
5. tiernan19 24,662 3,968,733
6. nosferatu 6,617 18,415,918
7. Tom Bomadial 5,692 31,895,508
8. zyx 4,629 5,357,303
9. Okwaho 862 14,410
10. Gold Rush 189 12,957,067
11. theepicsnail 93 834
12. Eragon ShadeSlayre 36 5,204,098
13. Corperation Co 12 12
14. william15 8 2,399
15. skunk sk ninja 0 0

I consider maybe 5 players actually playing. Now go to rounds like 60 and before.. (just throwing a number out there, the list was 50+ players playing. That is the activity we need back. How can we achieve this? I know I'm not helping the situation but I feel if more people played the game I would enjoy it more. How are we going to make people interested in this game? Or is it not possible? How about bring back older players? Either way if you look at round by round its seems like a downward spiral as far as activity goes, with certain vets reappearing and then leaving once again. We need fresh faces.

I think the addition of you as a game motivator is a great start and same with the weekly meetings. If it wasn't for that the game would probably be completely dead. I just wish there was some great fix, I just cant think of what that would be..

That is the grand plan. In terms of the smaller details like what we are going to do is a little foggy.
Last month was just heartbreaking. We are excited about the December round. That us an important clarification because you are one hundred percent right in your analysis.
Our current plan is finishing the recode. This is not a giant release of features but more of streamlining nearly 15 year old code. A big issue is small fixes and fun changes are a giant pain to make as regularly they break the whole game. With the recode being partially complete and soon pushed to live we will be able to make those small changes to improve game experience.
Once we deal with the backlog of tickets (the ones that are not giant game changing mechanics ideas) and the list we have of smaller important things we will start to visit things like balance and fun per hour.
We feel that there are a lot of small fixes that will add huge overall value. With our limited time we are pushing for these as they are the biggest time to reward ratio. As we progress you will see us bite off a much bigger chunk of updates.
My role as community manager is to provide a face, support and ultimately increase activity. This is important and I am really enjoying it. However when compared to the countless hours Iiridayn and Will put in it is not a lot.
Even more important than the dev team is each of you. Go create a vendetta or simply kill a planet!

__________________________
I am here to help in anyway I can! Let's have fun!