There wasn't a report in time for March, so this one will cover both months. There are two reasons why we have not got a report for March. The first one is that I have not taken all Admin reports on time and the second one is that I had not many things to mention from my behalf.
Also, the format of the report will be fresh this time with different categories than the rest. Finally, from now on, all such reports will be posted in Announcements (instead of Game Discussion where all the previous are).
Player Dev Team Report
Their size is sufficient but I would personally prefer more people joining sooner than later. It is important that all players help out the team efforts. In general, if you wish to join the team, please contact DezNutz directly.
Currently, their main task is to approve/disapprove all open suggestions while help all new ones mature. They also are trying to get a baseline for the Dogger, a new fishing ship.
During the past two months they have been particular helpful in designing the final version of the Flagship Baseline and plantation related ideas.
They were particularly active at our community channel.
Social Networks
The good news are that we are meeting all set objectives. However, there is a need to expand to more social networks as we mainly are active only in FB. For this to happen, we need more players. If you are interested to help, contact Meliva or Zephore who is acting as a temporal admin there on behalf of Wolfie.
Game Promotion
The ad budget for March and April was reduced. However, it is still considerable. The PR promotion team is currently promoting our game free of any cost right now. They are also trying to find ways to promote the game through paid plans. The biggest problem we face in game promotion is that the retention rates are awful. This skyrockets the cost per active player we retain through advertising up to a point that it makes it cost ineffective. If you can help towards this direction, please contact Smog, the PR admin with your ideas.
Pirates Glory Wiki
The wiki, which can be found at https://wiki.piratesglory.com/Main_Page is a fresh project which is entirely run by the community. DezNutz has been a great contributor so far and is by default the Coordinator of the Wiki Project.
Meliva, our community administrator, has appointed Psychodad as the Wiki Administrator at an attempt to pass the whole wiki management to a player different than DezNutz. Something important to happen for several reasons. I am not sure where we stand at this process right now. I am expecting to receive some updates about it soon and I hope that during May we will see some movement there.
The objective is that wiki will act as the Manual for the game, organizing all the scarce info found currently at various game files and the forums, putting them all in one place: the wiki.
The administrator will be responsible to carry this on-going process and preferably, with a team. If you would like to help, contact Psychodad directly.
Game Development Report
During March, not many things were done to report. Mainly, the maintenance period which started in February, was continued up to a point. Perhaps the most important part to report about this procedure is the obvious (I hope to all) improvement of website speed. This was after all one of the primary objectives. If you do not have a bottleneck at your own end (ie slow computer or line) the website should serve really fast.
During April, we also had the Easter vacation time, during which some things were left behind. However, in both months I have dedicated much time in the design process, solving some key issues that have been troubling implementations. As for the development time, this was divided into the following categories: bug fixing, interface improvement and plantations.
-Regarding fixes, in general, PG is considered bug free so most of this issues were either small, rare or short lived. The one fix that really stands out is thee long lasting issue with fleets getting stuck (fishing related). This is something that troubled me a lot in the past and I put a lot of work during April to isolate it. Eventually, the fix came yesterday and should prevent any fleets from getting stuck again. Any already stuck fleets though (at all cases, they will be few) will still need to be manually fixed, so send me a PM about it.
-Regarding plantations and interface improvements, the highlight is the Workers Market and what it brought along.
The feature itself, Workers Market, is very similar to the Resources Market, so I saved significant coding time because of that. However, some other required abilities, such as casting all costs of plantations, or providing transparency in the workers you buy, made this feature a bit complicated.
The feature opened yesterday and you can now use it. Right now, when you sell a worker, this is not displayed as a plantation income anywhere. However, it is LOGGED as such. Which means that in the near future, it will be DISPLAYED as such as well.
The reason this does not happen now is because I want to redesign the way General Trade Report works. It is quite broad right now and many players have complained about it over the years. Especially for plantations it can be misleading and this causes frustration. We need greater categorization of all elements there.
So, the good news is that we have workers market already ready for this new reporting style. The bad news is that you do not get to see this part yet. Since the redesigned Trade Report is going to take some time to happen, I am intending to find a temporal solution for the workers. It is not something I prefer but I cannot leave it without reporting. I expect to finish this whole workers market reporting part within May. Most of the work is done after all and it is only a matter of priorities.
Regarding priorities, the top priority for May is to finish the Flagship baseline. I do not recall any code progress on it, perhaps there is but I cannot recall as it has been a long time since I worked on it. So, as things stand now, it will be nearly miraculous to make it during May. If we wanted to be optimistic, we should speak for June and if we wanted to be realistic, we would speak for July. However, I really want it done as soon as possible, so I intend to put really extra work to it and hope it does not prove too troublesome.
Once Flagship is done, some interface redesign will take place. I already made some work there so this will not take long.
Plantations version 1.0 will not be rolled out with random events. I do not think the playerbase is ready for this yet as the adoption of plantations is not yet widespread. Therefore the guards infrastructure will not be actually-simulated but will become pseudo-simulated. So, there will be no fires, uprisings and corruption as events but as an average simulation.
To make it easier on the troubled plantation owners, we will make this to only have positive effect. As a result, a plantation with 5 stars Guards, will get a production bonus whereas a plantation with 0 stars, will get no bonus.
As an addon, well managed plantations will enjoy an extra bonus (as in actual simulation, such plantation would have reduced chances of bad events).
The final chapter that remains for PG version 2.0 is the newcomers/tutorial missions. I have already put some design work here but I will not share yet. Probably in the next report when the above will be done.
Playerbase Growth
Advertising went well in March but not well in April. The reason is that we tried different pricing plans. We expect better results in May. Our target is around 1500 accounts per month (or 50 per day). This however needs to be obtained at the right price and we are in the process of tweaking towards this end.
As someone asked, there is no limit in server capacity in number of players we can handle. This server is running well below capacity and it could easily handle 10x the current population or more.
New accounts last 30 days: 352
New accounts since last report: 1,694
Here is an overview on account metrics:
Accounts Status
Total Accounts 127,681
Total Characters 13,627
Without Character 114,054
Characters flagged Active 6,767
Characters flagged inactive 6,860
Epilogue
This signals the end of this report. The next report will be created hopefully next month, right after I receive all admin reports.
For any questions or feedback, please post!
Also, if you read the WHOLE post, please POST below. I want to know who actually reads everything in these posts in an effort to make them more consumable in the future.
Till next time then!
Bermuda
