Recent Developments
The last report was on December 28 and since then, we have a lot of new things into the game. It has been a very busy month in both foreground and background. The highlight is of course the Warehouse management feature which added extra functionality for trade routes, party cards and the ability to trade resources with other players.
-We also got Combat Rankings, Ships Market improvements (bulk buy/receive), Newcomers rankings and the ability to mass sell cannons of each fleet.
-A lot of work has been done on the interface, with a brand new court page, improved HQ page and a lot of new illustrations for voodoo cards.
-Finally, a ton of improvements or fixes have been addressed during this month.
Like I said, a LOT of work.
Special Offers Engine
We have now completed a full year with Special Offers engine. For those unaware, this is the engine that automatically creates special offers, without our interference. Looking back at the engine deeds in the past year, we ended up that the frequency of special offers were a lot. Sometimes, we even had 2 per month. This could continue if we had a playerbase growth during the past year: The more players we have, the less income from each individual is required. The more players you have, the more players they pay and as a result the more the room for us to make better prices. This is what special offers eventually are; a reduction of price for those who pay. Since things did not go well in the playerbase growth in 2018, we cannot continue with the same frequency. Therefore, we tweaked the engine to have longer cooldowns in between offers. They are still random to an extend so we cannot know before hand how exactly it will turn out. But eventually, special offers will be rare compared to the past year.
Development Schedule
Our current focus continues to be the game interface, improvements for newcomers and more PvE/PvP based features. The new element is that we are also looking for features to further increase player to player interaction.
The FAST FORWARD speed at which we are working for the past few months is going to end soon. There are several reasons for this and I want to list them all. I do not regret for any of the fast forward features though but I acknowledge that there are reasons that this cannot continue forever.
1)The game is already large and every new element needs a lot of design and thought before implementing it. It is quite risky to implement new things without gathering a lot of feedback. I will use Plantations here as in contrary to popular belief, they were made in fast forward speed. This is why 6 months after their release, we still discuss about them.
2)The game changes so fast and so dramatically that it upsets part of the playerbase. This is not something unimportant. Actually, I feel that this is the second time we have come to a similar point. New features need their time for everyone to adjust before they seek something new.
3)Most importantly, as new features eventually help the game despite the 2 reasons mentioned above, it has to do with the cost of developing. Too much work in such short time is counterproductive. Furthermore, it is not only about cost and counter production but also exhaustion. This dedication started in May, 2018. We had a very small break during August and the rest of the time, is overtime. It's humanly impossible to continue at this rhythm. We are not big enough to be able to expand our workforce. This is the main reason we started the Player Dev Team, to receive help from the playerbase.
Playerbase Growth
The playerbase growth has been very good this past month, due to high spending in advertising. The good news are not going to last though as the game cannot afford high spending for a series of months. Still, advertising will continue. At this rate, we estimate that in March we will beat our previous record for active players in the game. We are currently nearing this number.
New accounts last 30 days: 1,819 (1040 in last report, an increase of 174%).
Here is an overview on account metrics (in brackets, change since last report):
Accounts Status
Total Accounts 122,396 (+1820)
Total Characters 17,837 (+844)
Without Character 104,559 (+976)
Characters flagged Active 4,882 (+864)
Characters flagged inactive 12,955 (-20)
How can you help
The game has 2 major needs right now:
a)We need more players.
b)We need help in development.
For b, participating in the development forums, player dev team is the way to go. For a) one way is to bring friends into the game. You can always use your personal link to also receive a proper reward for this. This is a very important step.
Epilogue
This signals the end of this monthly report. There is no ETA for the next though. There is a drop of interest in these reports and as a result we will revert to our old way of communicating progress: spontaneous reports.
For any questions or feedback, please post!
Till next time then!
