Recent Developments
You can track the Changelog for a complete list of changes in February. In general, not many changes have been made in the game.
The second part of the month was mainly dedicated in game maintenance. Game maintenance constitutes a large part of the development time. While maintenance can take place daily, we had a long time to dedicate our time to it. As a result,a pile of work has been waiting. As maintenance, we define tasks such as server issues, network issues and scripts development that help us to deal with them in an automatic way. We have dedicated two weeks already to this but we are not done.
Specifically, the main tasks we dealt in maintenance in these 2 weeks, had to do with
1)A long lasting issue (2+ years) that has been affecting Facebook Login, Google Login, Paypal and Paysafecard payments. The particular problem has troubled us multiple times before and it has created issues such as inability to login to the game or a delay in delivering the credits on time. The issue was related to our server and it is now fixed.
2)Another major issue we dealt with in these two weeks has to do with a degradation of game speed that was caused mainly by "a band of rampant bots" that have been hitting our public pages (and forums) relentlessly. This issue has now been dealt with and we already see improvements at the game speed.
3)Backups was another thing we dealt with in this month. Specifically, we added an extra location at the cloud. We currently have several locations where we keep game backups and this is always good for game longevity.
Maintenance is not over as I already said. We mainly want to improve some email related issues and we also want to attend to our disk space management. These are tasks that will take place during March.
During February we also created a wiki for the game. You can find it at https://wiki.piratesglory.com/ and use it.
Players as Community Administrators
During February we have made a great step forward in regards to players assistance in running the game. Specifically, most of the game management is now at players hands. You can find full details of the roles here: viewtopic.php?f=2&t=4883
The above topic is important to be kept up-to-date at all times. If you find any inconsistencies there, please kindly inform any forum mod to update it.
In-game administration remains and will remain at our hands. However, the in-game forums can currently be partially moderated. Once a centralized tool is created, all in-game forums administration will pass entirely to players as well.
The important assumptions that you should keep from this transition are the following:
-I will no longer be replying to your posts at the forums. The community Administrator and forum moderators will do instead. I will read 100% of the posts and reply where needed for Bugs forums. I will no longer follow the rest of the forums and any read or replies will be spontaneous.
-Anything you need that is related to the forums (like moving a topic, keeping forums clean etc) these are responsibilities that have been undertaken by the forum mods.
-I will no longer be guiding development of player suggestions. The dev team will do instead. In general, the administration of all player ideas will be conducted by the dev team. The dev team will also have the responsibility of keeping clean Discussion and Suggestions thread.
-The key role for all player suggestions, their final approval and their prioritization before implementation is held by the Development Administrator. Currently, this position is held by myself. As a result, we retain the final word for any suggestion. However, it is my full intention to surrender this place to a player. The minimum requirement before we reach a stage to consider this possibility is to have at least 10 members in the dev team. 2 of them should also be promoted to coordinators (currently, we have 1 coordinator and 7 members in total, so we are not that far).
All current administrators will compile a report and send it to me. Once I receive all reports from them, I will compile the monthly report for you. So, the next monthly report will have direct input from the various game admins.
Development
The development will continue on our initial schedule for now, which has been simplified. Here are the main points:
-Plantations to Version 1.0
-Interface Improvements
-Newcomer missions/tutorials
-Possibly Flagship if we receive a final version from the players.
Once the 4 points are completed, the game will move to version 2.0
Marketing Report
Since we now have a PR team, I will also be compiling a marketing report. I will share with all of you some of our advertising policies.
We have been spending more than our income into advertising in the past 3 months. We will continue in March as well. However, this cannot continue as the game has more expenses than just advertising and our overall spending puts out position at stake. The game needs to be profitable to remain online. Therefore we will re-assess our policy in April. Our current planning is to reduce advertising in April to about half of our profit. This policy will be maintained in May and June. Then we will re-assess in July. This will definitely change in case PG 2.0 comes as we will invest in extra advertising to support the new version.
Playerbase Growth
Thanks to generous advertising, as analyzed above, we had a lot of new players joining the game in this month.
New accounts last 30 days: 2,920 (1,819 in last report, an increase of 161%).
New accounts since last report: 3,591
Here is an overview on account metrics (in brackets, change since last report):
Accounts Status
Total Accounts 125,987 (+3591)
Total Characters 13,655 (-4182, thanks to a deletion of several thousands of inactive characters during February)
Without Character 112,332 (+7773)
Characters flagged Active 6,750 (+1868 This is the important metric)
Characters flagged inactive 6,905 (-6050 So we currently have about 6k less inactive characters in the game. 7k inactive characters in the game is still large though so we may remove more, with stricter standards in the future)
How can you help
The current structure of the Player Roles should be sufficient in giving you direction in how to help. Currently we have 4 teams where you can apply to relevant administrators and help:
1)Forum Mods Team (contact Meliva for admission)
2)Players Dev Team (contact DezNutz for admission)
3)PR Team (contact Clockwork for admission)
4)Social Networks Team (contact Wolfie for admission)
During March, we will also create a new team for the WIKI. We will need a new administrator there and a few players in his/her team. If you are interested, please contact Meliva about it.
Epilogue
This signals the end of this monthly report. The next report will be created once I receive all monthly reports from every player administrator, in early April.
For any questions or feedback, please post!
Till next time then!
