Just a sidenode after going through it with the ashock (Game designer): There’ll be a change rolled out soon for fortbattles: It won’t be possible any more to find more than one chest per fight. Instead, more players will get a chest. Should go online everywhere sometime this week.
Last week we slowly updated all markets and worlds to 1.30. For certain markets it took longer than expected, but in the end, we finally made it through the list. Now we are a bit in between the gap of cleaning up smaller and bigger issues between two releases. We currently don’t work on any new features but just performance optimize certain features or dent out older problems. 1.30 will have several silent micro patches that will be rolled out without extra announcements (unless there’s a clearly visible new feature introduced – there a few smaller issues we might take up). The valentine’s event is about to be ready (it’ll be a really really small thing). I am not sure if you all are going to like it – it’ll need a bit of trying and socializing with fellow players. Right now it isn’t entirely fair, especially finding out how the thing works will be a bit costly for players. Maybe we’ll skew it so that it’s entirely fair or at least giving a decent clue how it’s meant to be handled. There’s some time left to handle it, but we have to hurry already to get the translations through and all that…
Meanwhile the chat server prototype solves some old problems but also makes a few new problems. It’s not the solution we endorse, but it’s a solution. Currently there are some bugs out there left (the fort battle chat is not working on all worlds as expected – that is fixed but needs to be rolled out still). It’s been running during last week pretty smoothly and I did not have to spend much time on investigating issues of it (maybe 5% of my work time).
1.31 features are still not settled – we have to make some decisions soon about what will be included and what is left out – or if we micro patch certain stuff into 1.30.
Over Christmas time, we had too few people at the company (including me) to continue the update process. So we stalled it for one week until after new year. That’s pretty much now. We’ve updated now the Polish and Netherlands’ worlds to 1.30 (note: The Christmas quest was extended so everyone can finish it). We will continue tomorrow with further markets. Part of the problem was or is, that 1.30 raises the user’s activity so much that the servers run out of resources. If we’d updated all markets at once, the servers would fail alltogether. To prevent that from happening, we have to update the servers one by one.
Otherwise from that: Happy new Year everyone!
