Dev Diary 21 :: 2016 :: July

[Ray]

Hi Guys....

Sorry for the late dev blog post for this month.

Listat had a nice Q&A, and one of the questions was regarding our updating the community on what is going on. Since things are always so chaotic here it tends to be hard to hold consistency but we are going to try:

-1 major monthly Blog Post (This one)
and
-Weekly dev blog posts on Sunday

-----------------------

Lets get started on what we are doing, how things are going, and the direction we are headed in.

Monthly Events
-We will be working on more permanent setups to events, with far more testing involved. We still need to design a few events to ensure we have 12 unique monthly events, but i'm looking forward to finishing those and being able to work on more fun activities like events.

-August's event will be the Invasion Event (rehash). For those that did not enjoy this event last time, don't worry, it's being simplified and will not allow or require playing the same levels 400 times.

-We will be looking at a way to improve how Event Points work soon for newer players, or long-term players who may have missed out on prior events, without diminishing the value for those who have been around since the beginning of IOU.

Event is out, so....what are you working on?
We are taking ~2 week break from jumping into some massive system. We needed a break away from creating new monstrocities to go back to the drawing board and start fixing some long-term issues/oversights. I think some of you will be excited for these changes

Just a few to name that are already in the works or completed:

1. Ability to force start challenges without required amount of players (Part of recent Q&A by listat - sorry for the delay on this)
2. New top rank system that allows you to see your overall rank and those around you, even beyond the top 200. New cohorts to be added with potential new rewards
3. Ghosting - If a member logs off while in your party, or goes into a challenge, they will go into ghosted mode, and continue attacking just as if they were online
4. Online Gains vs Offline Gains - Kill-based rewards are coming back! I have never been satisfied with the online gains setup since the offline gains system change, and we have some great ideas to ensure the positive portions about online gains vs offline gains remains, while ridding you all of the ugly confusing timer-based gains. 
5. Quicker server maintenances & update publishing
   

Other things about to be worked on in the next week:

1. Invasion Event (private testing)
2. Bingo
3. Server stability issues
4. Client-tracking of failed loads, stuck on Loading Character Data - auto-retry system
5. Ability to change your password (iourpg.com users)
6. Ability to trade your tiny packs for larger packs
7. Option for purchase confirmation
   

And then...

• We have been talking about a new system similar to the Support System, but based on amount of days played instead of how many diamonds you have accumulated. This system will stack.
• A new challenge this month
• A brand new event game design for September
• New expedition & PvP system design
  

July 20th is the date i'm looking at starting to prep all development into the new expedition & pvp system. 

There's plenty more going on behind the scenes (I think a brain gasket blew recently) , so hopefully I can fill in more details on our weekly Sunday blog posts.

Cheers,
Ray

[Ray]

Hey Folks,

As mentioned we are going to do our best to do a quick-note weekly Sunday dev blog, along with a major dev blog once a month

Here's some quick notes:

• We have been working to clean up bugs/oversights with the new Top-List Ranking, Ghosting, etc. Hopefully that should be out later next week.
• We should have a new UI kit coming very soon, ahead of the main UI rehaul which will allow us to start revamping window-by-window, and I can't express my excitement to finally get that going...
• Lineage System - pretty much complete, but we will likely wait until the beginning of next month for this release to avoid releasing too many new systems at once; avoiding chaos if problems arise.
• Minor work on a new Level-Up reward system, giving new milestone rewards to players. It's not official, we are just testing the waters a bit with this for now....also, don't worry, retroactive will be your friend on this if we move forward with it! 
• Tiny Pack trading has been in testing and appears to be working fine. Should be released in the next patch.
• Ability to change your password (IOURPG, not other portals yet for off-site access) has been implemented for the next release.
• Minor work on Bingo has begun.
• Invasion Event client-side development mostly complete. Server-side with testing coming soon. As mentioned before we lost most of the old code/assets for this, but are reworking it all.
• We have been discussing the future and what we'd like to see within it.....I won't go into detail until we are much closer to development stage, but there's quite a bit coming this year, as deserved after the hellish months of Migration
  

Cheers,
Ray

[Ray]

Heylo...

Today's patch was interesting to say the least. I expected issues, but not on the level that was received unfortunately. Because of that, offline gains have been disabled until the next maintenance patch (hopefully by Tuesday).

Some players decided to take advantage of offline gains being absurd, and we will be comparing logs tomorrow to start generating rollbacks for those players, along with fixing players whose NO-AP records are still borked from a while back.

We had testing for this patch but of course the volume of a small test group vs the live global servers are two completely different scales.

If you play on Kong or iourpg.com and are interested in testing the latest features, events, bug-issues, please feel free to join us over at:

https://discord.gg/0swWvJsHG6CCBLdY

There's a channel called #instructions with details, and a channel called #what-to-test with priority testing

Thanks guys,
Ray

[Ray]

Hola - Last Quick Dev Blog of the month.

The last patch making a complete turnaround (and hybrid use of) the gains system was bumpy, but I think we are getting back on track with things since. There's a few things coming in real soon but i'm going to keep this blog short so I have a bit more to go through in next week's monthly blog.

We are looking at delaying the Monthly event just one day, releasing it on Tuesday, August 2nd. No time specified as of yet, and we also have a couple other releases coming very shortly after the invasion event. I expect three good patches coming out next month.

Ray