Messaging is incredibly important and I just realized that apart from occasional updates on discord I didn't give much info on where we're heading with the server / what's the plan / what I'm working on right now / etc. Let me fix that.
I keep saying this is a community-driven server. I hope it really is. The main feature here is the editor and ability to contribute to the server yourself, so that the growth isn't bottlenecked by a few privileged people (admins, GMs). I put my trust in this community and I hope the tools I make will make this server different from all the others which already went down. I think the concept is something completely new - nobody created such tools before. At least for PW - I didn't do research on other games.
The last two weeks were rather busy:
- We launched the server!
- We had to launch a separate test server to test things on.
- Some of the backend code blew up on the first day. It just wasn't tested with this many players online. Specifically, a bug prevented backups from being created. The first backup we have now is from April 17th. It's a shame, as I wanted to analyze the data from the launch and make some graphs of how players develop their characters.
- One custom quest was bugged, allowing people to complete it more than once and get unfair advantage. A few people did so. One was banned for purposely abusing it.
- We prepared a basic vote system - no shop yet, but you can already collect vote points.
- FB exchange npc offered 8 XP scrolls for lv70+ instead of just 1. A bug in the editor didn't let us change this.
- Players were able to dupe items & coins on server restarts. To fix it, we had to fix those 5 minute rollbacks on restarts
- The project preview completely broke. Even today, clicking the link on project page on the forums gives you a black screen.
That last one... I'll get back to it later. There's also a few unresolved issues:
- BH appeared to be very unreliable - Occasionally you're unable to pick up a quest or finish it. It's a bug in the original server files.
- ^ Similar with crazy stone.
- Fashion exchange doesn't work. There's a bug somewhere in the editor
- Everyone is low on bank and inventory space. There's a lot of bank alts around.
- TW is disabled.
- FC/GV is completely broken.
It is probably expected of me to deal with those issues quickly. Yet, I don't seem to be working on them - I don't. I know we'll have to fix those at some point, but an absolute top priority to me is getting the editor functional. We say it's a community-driven server, but we can't even preview the community-created content right now. Fixing those issues takes time that could be used to be fix our tools instead. Eventually, with the tools working it could be anyone to fix BH or prepare a questline for inventory stones. I know fixing the issues is important, but even with all of those fixed we're still just a standard PW server which will likely rot in the following weeks. We have to do better than that - focus on the community-driven aspect.
Nevertheless, we're in the middle of testing TW and have a solution for inventory stones ready, waiting on us, GMs to agree with the idea. We'll fix things that are critical or require not that much time, but everything else needs to wait.
Not all of the issues that need our attention can be made public immediately. That's why I stopped giving daily updates, but let me get back to it now.
I hope this makes our position a bit clearer. Thanks!