Unless you frequent Discord with Mag, Hilo, and I playing games, many of you are probably wondering why there's been such a dearth of updates of any kind to C2. Turns out there's a reason for that, and it's all because of the order of things we're getting things done on Loka. Basically we're in a couple of phases of work, and because I'm the major bottleneck, I have to do all of the plugin dev of it all. Though I was on vacation last week, you've all certainly noticed that things were still happening in terms of updates, bug fixes, but nothing about C2...
So what am I doing? Basically C2 is the last item in a list of things we've decided needed to be done before "The Big Marketing Push Number 2". These are those things:
So that's what's up, and that's what's been going on. Hopefully this answers some questions that have been stirring about amongst everyone. As always, ask away if you have questions.
Go Forth!
-Crypt
So what am I doing? Basically C2 is the last item in a list of things we've decided needed to be done before "The Big Marketing Push Number 2". These are those things:
- Stabilize Loka - The very most focused work has been on simply fixing bugs, addressing/polishing bad systems, and overall making everything just work. The /report feature has been absolute knockout success in helping with this. A thousand thanks to all of the people who have been reporting bugs.
For a very long time Loka has had more features come out than bugs fixed. New stuff is cool, but not being able to do basic things like /tpa, /tpahere, making towns, etc sucks and makes new players quit real fast. Loka has to run right and everything that new players do has to work. Veterans will stick through bugs, but new players won't. - Monetize - We're not P2W and we have no plans to be, but we also earn extremely little money from donations; mostly because the rewards suck and are expensive. For Loka to market and get lots of new players, we have to be able to pay for it (and just running the server is expensive enough). There are lots of opportunities on things to sell to players and still be EULA-compliant. The Fishing Rod is the first example of the kinds of things we're preparing to release.
On top of that, donating was always kind of funky. I had to manually check my email and then use the server console to hand out gifts. While that wasn't bad and I respond to emails extremely quickly, that's just now how purchasing thing should work. As of writing this, Loka is now fully able to receive a donation/store purchase, verify, and immediately hand you your reward in-game.
So, that's great, and we have a bunch of new purchase options coming soon that are along the same vein of Stat Tracking (like the fishing rod). We will have bundles, and all that jazz, and hopefully people will see some value in the purchases and our marketing coffers can grow! We needed the store and backend systems working before Marketing so that it can all work flawlessly (and have time for testing) before we get lots of new players who may be interested in doing so. It all adds to the professionalism of Loka. - Conquest 2.0 - So that's next. Once we get our new store launched with our new items/offers, which will be in the next few days, I can switch fully to C2 and get that going. It's still a LOT of work, but we will absolutely need testing of the system on the PTS. As always there will be a call to help test features in Discord. The more it's tested, the better it can be on first-launch. I can't give a good ETA on this, but hopefully we'll have good major pieces of it testable within the next two weeks.
So that's what's up, and that's what's been going on. Hopefully this answers some questions that have been stirring about amongst everyone. As always, ask away if you have questions.
Go Forth!
-Crypt
