Ahoy everyone,

It has been a long time since we had an official forthcoming updates announcement. It is time to fix this issue and put things straight so everyone will be aware on the forthcoming game developments.

I have categorized the forthcoming updates in groups. This means that before a new group can start, the prior group should finish first. There are no specific priorities for the elements of each group though.

Priority Group A
-Implementation of in-game moderators. We are speaking for stage 1, the beta stage. During this stage we will assign the first ever in-game moderators which will be players. During this stage, their role will be limited to dealing with the in-game forums/comments. This implementation is nearly finished.

-Global Events improvements. These include comments ability as well as better broadcasting across the game. [Implemented]

-New type of events: Market events. Interested players will be able to get feeds on various market changes such as; ships, cards, credits and bounties. [Implemented]

[Optional] Ability to personalize Tavern default page. [Postponed]

Nation Diplomacy complimentary features. These are:
-Governor appointing via the King [Implemented]
-Trading Pacts

Finally, we will read through all Mini Requests topic. We will create topics for ideas, where needed. We will approve and implement mini requests. We will disapprove and discard unfitting ideas. Once we are done, we will deprecate the topic and start a new one.

So this is the right time to post there any last thoughts/ideas you might have.

Priority Group B

-Plantations

-More in-game roleplaying elements

-During this period we need to determine the next big feature that will follow after plantations. This is a very important step and it is harder than the implementation of plantations themselves. I will remind everyone the stagnation that followed the Blockades idea where we reached some dead ends. We are here to help forward that idea as well as more.

Current Work

We are currently working through Global Events interface. In fact, we are rebuilding this from scratch piece by piece as we are adding extra features and a platform that will support further extensions in the future.

The is actually not the first time we work though it to upgrade Global Events. The different part this time around is that we are deprecating how things worked in the past and also we are transferring old data to the new system.This is crucial as in this way all recorded history will not be lost but instead will become part of the forthcoming global events features.

For example, right now the system do not really knows to whom each event belongs to. After we are done, it will know. Thus, it will be able to notify you, for example, when someone comments on an event that addresses you.

Awesome! And glad to see we are progressing toward plantations. Looking forward to playing around with those!

Yay

Excellent.

We have finished our work on Global Events infrastructure. This resulted in some extra game features, like the latest Global Events option in Tavern page, comments section as well as notifications for players when someone else posts on an event that refers to them. You can control these notifications through your profile notifications (click on your name at the top menu -> then to notifications at the right hand menu).

We also worked towards the ability of players to arrange the Tavern. We almost completed this but we eventually postponed it as there seems no need for this yet.

The little footer banner that informed of an active special offer was adding unneeded extra height so we removed it in sake of a vertical banner at the same page.

We also fixed some issues that we found in the game and mostly relevant to the Global Events but not limited to that. For example we expanded the Feed History pop up window's width to make it more viable.

We issued a small update to the credits exchange. You can now view all your transaction history as well as the latest 300 market transactions. The number 300 we chose will be revised in the future. It is more like an unneeded limit. We will also add the ability to report transactions there. We want to add a lot more features there, such as histograms of transactions. More notifications tools perhaps. With time these will come.

Up next, we have the rest elements at the Priority Group A. The moderators selection announcement is being delayed because we had not yet the time to test the existing mod workspace and also improve it in a more visible way. This is not a huge priority now though but perhaps we can see progress to this in the coming week.

Regarding priority group B, I have posted today some "dev notes" that could help you determine your own priorities. Your personal wishlists are important at this stage. You can take this ideas in mind and update them if you like. This will help us prioritize better as well.

Till these forthcoming updates are over, I will be providing constant feedback so you know the whereabouts of implementation time. Hopefully, the Governor appointing and trade pacts will be soon available.

During the past few days we completed the Governor appointing from the King. The feature launched yesterday and the last patch has been applied this morning. Hopefully it will work without any side effects during the update.

We also continued our work in Pacts. We are going to focus on 2 pacts right now. Both will be relevant to the title perks where through the offered pacts, countries will be able to "sell" the perks of their own port to other nations. For more details, check what the Pacts Suggestion includes. We are in a good stage and we want to finish this till Friday. If we do not make it in Friday, there will be no development work this weekend so it will be pushed for Monday.

We also completed the first stage of the events system for markets. This is a preliminary version where we utilize the existing system to produce live notifications. Players can choose through their notifications what to receive but there are also time limits:
-For Bounties, you must have logged in the last 24hours to get the notification.
-For Ships/Voodoo, you must be online to receive them (as online, we count the players who keep their browser page open or have been away for less than 10 minutes).

We also worked on some game polishing, like fixing the sort issue of treaties in diplomacy page. Or adding a navigator for the latest forum topics. However such implementations may take a secondary role for now as we want to focus on the major features more.

Work in Plantations is continuous, as well as in preparing the next major feature. If we are able to fully decide in detail our next step, this will come faster and this is currently our pursuit in our attempt to pull some trees faster than ever before.

It has been 2 weeks since I gave you an update. I am trying to do this weekly or biweekly, depending on the amount of progress we have scored.

First and foremost, as you all noticed, there are no Pacts. I will create a post about pacts at its thread as it is a long one. All you need to know at this topic is that we are no longer actively working on them. There is some bad luck too as we already spent a lot of time on them but hopefully this work will not go entirely in vain in the future. Ultimately though, what matters most is to ensure that new features are improving the game.

The rest of the two weeks we have focused in Plantations. Soon we will be able to post some more details about them as we set forth in the final stage of development.

In between, we had some interface improvements. Generally, we have decided to gradually upgrade the interface, instead of just getting a new one. We got several ideas there but we also need to find the right artist for the job to implement it.

We are also focusing again in bringing more people into the game. If you notice, there are again many people joining the game. Let's not hide behind our finger though; the majority of the signups are coming from paid ads. This is how it is done after all. For games of our size, we can bring about 1000 players per month in this way. Right now, we are bringing around 65 a day though, which is a better number but cannot be maintained for the whole month. If we manage to keep 10-20 of them every month, it is all we need to cover losses and also increase the active daily players. Which means that if every guild puts as an objective to train 1 player monthly, the half job would be done.

Captain Jack wrote:The rest of the two weeks we have focused in Plantations. Soon we will be able to post some more details about them as we set forth in the final stage of development.

Looking forward to this new stage in PG CJ. Cant wait!

How does the mass upgrade of warehouses work?