This is the first monthly report. We will try to compile these monthly. Bi-weekly ones were unrealistic.
Here is the outline of what I will present to you today:
-Main Development: Plantations open Beta
-Recent Developments
-Playerbase growth
-How you can help
-Epilogue
Main Development: Plantations Open Beta
A few hours ago, we opened the public beta for plantations. The beginning of the end of their development has now started. The first hours have been without any issues. We have scheduled a lot of things for beta.
Here is our current schedule which we will try to honor:
( June 3-6 ) Coding: Expect numerous implementations during these days. Nothing too major. Most will be relative to plantations.
( June 7-14) Design Phase: No coding will take place during this time. We need to finalize the details for plantation events. Hopefully, we will make it but we are not too sure it will be enough.
( June 15-17) Coding: We will implement the events system and end the Beta.
Recent Developments
During this recent time, we had some other improvements, besides the work on plantations.
Cometchat Improvements
We removed annoying flash for the notification sound. We also improved the styling. There are 2 more annoying issues that we want to fix sooner or later. One, the space between the two boxes prevents clicking at the page. This must be fixed. Secondly. the iphone zoom issues need to be fixed too.
Spam
We had some spam incidents a few days ago. We resolved them with an anti-spam tool which we even managed to test in short time. You might have got an email for a PM but when you logged in, there was no message. This is because we deleted the spammy PMs.
User Interface
We need radical improvements to the user interface. However, these cannot happen at one day. We had qute many improvements during the past few weeks.
Port Stocks
We now have Local Population helping in port production, for every port, once port stocks for the production drops below 10M. This is 750,000 crates per day.
Banks
Since the last report, we had several improvements for banks. These were mainly needed for plantations. We got Chartered Banks, Cunning Accountants and Bank Priorities for payments.
Playerbase Growth
372 new players joined in the last 30 days, this is a bad metric but it is also the result of a change in marketing approach.
In a comparison between June and May, we did far better in May.
On the good news side, we have several newcomers that seem to stick for now.
Our daily active count and core engaging users have been slightly increased.
Overall active players have slightly increased.
This means that we slightly improved our retention rates, as new users count were too low.
This is mostly thanks to guilds work.
How you can help
There are three things you can do right now:
a)Update your personal wishlist
We will need to plot the future for the game and your input is needed.
b)If you have extra time to help with chores, we need to filter the suggestions forum. It is a tough work and we will require volunteers. You can message me in-game at #1 to declare interest/ask.
Here is a topic that explains what needs to be done: viewtopic.php?f=48&t=4422
c)Help with playerbase growth/retention
This is an everlasting need. Hopefully, in the following months we will be able to improve the game as much as it is needed to relief this burden from you.
Epilogue
This signals the end of this monthly report. Next one will be in August. There is a lot of work ahead till then!
For any questions or feedback, please post!
Till next time then!
