Progress Update: 10/7

[Sic]

In wanting to keep in line with at least weekly updates, I wanted to impress upon the community as to where we’re at and what we’re working on.

On the mechanical side of things, Rex and I are going through a final polish of the release build for Requiem. This constitutes the following:

1) Finalizing design decisions on current, old and new development projects to ensure they hold true to our standards of fun, fairness and practicality.
2) Instituting final balancing passes on all critical systems (such as magic balancing) from data acquired during beta.
3) Reviewing intended launch systems to assure full functionality and fixing production-floor bugs where they are found.
4) As part of review, readily identifying portions of systems and mechanics that would take more than a night to work on and excluding them from launch.

As you can see, our focus is making sure that everything that is functional and “done” is working together nicely, and the stuff that isn’t 100% feature complete is left for post-launch roadmaps. We do not want to get bogged down with “ah-hah” moments where we end up spending days or weeks designing new systems. Over the course of the next few weeks, starting as early as Monday or Tuesday of this week, I will be posting newly revised changelogs of our major systems and the skills that incorporate them. These changelogs will include what’s new, what’s fixed, and what is being classified as “post-launch” development.

Map development and in-game development is going great as well. We were able to recover a lot more data than we previously had thought thanks to some stashed away backups. I’d like to take a moment to thank our talented GM team of Rubi, Raconteur, and Thrax whom are working daily to create content, ensure spawns look good, and help populate the First Province. Furthermore, hats off to the testing team for diving back in to the fray and the map development team for helping us polish the map up for release.

On the subject of player help, we will be publishing our reward program for player-volunteers and staff members as an effort to help show you guys how these people (and us) are being compensated for their time. We will also be publishing new positions for those interested to apply for; these include map decoration, testing help, application approval and more.

Stay tuned for more soon!