State of the Union - July 2014.

Hello Realmers!

It’s time for another Realm update, but this one is a little special - it’s been a year since this team has been together on Realm!
This is the perfect time to take a look back: the good, the bad (a bit of the ugly), and what we have in store for the near future.
Before getting into the update there’s a bit of housecleaning to do.

Here’s the Terms of Service (ToS): Read it. Read it again. Got it? Good. We don’t take ToS violations lightly. Play by these rules and everything will be fine. Push the boundaries or cross the line regarding any part of the ToS, and with sufficient evidence your account will be banned, up to and including a permanent ban. If you think something is borderline / questionable, ask before posting it, or just don’t post it at all. We don’t ban people without a good reason (and evidence), nor will we discuss bans publicly.

Quick Year Recap:

Overall, we’ve learned a lot about Realm and how this community interacts with it, as well as what players want and expect from us.

• We’ve progressively gotten better at releasing content in a more timely and predictable manner.
• We fixed a number of long standing issues with the game (yes, there are still many, many more). We had to start somewhere!
• Involved the community more - events, contests, dungeon submissions, and player created dungeon releases.

If you look at this last year as the new team “getting their legs”, this next year will be when we “stretch them out”. In short, we have a lot of stuff lined up: Arena updates, new Dungeons, Daily Quests, regularly released rebalance efforts, and Housing to name a few. See below for some additional details on what’s next.

The Year in Recap - Areas for Reflection:

Certainly players and fans will have a list that with vary from this one, but here are some of the top things that we’ve identified via feedback and general “player interest” that needs improvement:

• Content: While we have been expanding vanity for the past year, players overall would like to see more that is outside vanity -- we're working on making a much more solid content plan.
• Security: obviously in the last year we’ve had two incidents (Sept 2013 and Feb 2014), and we’ve put a number of things in place to provide a safer and more secure environment. We are taking time this half to dedicate to adding more features that help with this. This is also where you can help! Please report any suspicious activity to the forums, or the rotmg reddit page OR via Support. Thanks again for your support.
• Stability: This is a difficult problem to 100% solve for all players, but it remains something that we need to continue to work on. We have a big change coming at some point between now and the end of the year that I’ll describe in a bit more detail in the “What’s Next for Realm” section.

The good news is that we feel that we’ve made progress. There’s also still plenty of areas for improvement. We’ll work on the things we know, and continue to listen to feedback from the community to help guide us.

What’s Next for Realm:

There are a lot of different features and pieces of content that we’d like to focus on, but as always we have to try and pick and choose things that we know will be exciting for players, and can be accomplished in a reasonable time frame to hit the goal of releasing content more consistently.

Data Base Migration:
Wait, that sounds boring! Yeah, it is. Unfortunately, it’s also necessary work that has to be done sometime during the next 6 months. What does it mean for the players? Well, in theory this should give us a performance boost on the backend, but how that translates to actual gains in game is unknown. What about my account? It’s safe right? All of this data is hosted by Google so it should be quite safe. We’ll provide more details when we actually start this work, and we’ll be doing a test run on our testing environment database before we doing anything in the LIVE environment.

Arena Update:
We currently have a spec for updates to the Arena, and we’re pretty excited about updating it to give players another way to play the game. The current Arena is underutilized because the overall experience is lacking in a couple of key ways: 1) There’s very little reward, and 2) It’s open-ended. This will be the first big feature that we focus on in H2.

Daily Quests:
Daily Quests will be handed out by a new Nexus character - the “Junk Dealer”. The Junk Dealer is always looking for some specific items for his shop - and that’s where the Daily Quests come in. The Junk Dealer will tell you what he wants, and what he’ll give you in return. You may already have some things you can trade in, OR you may have to hunt for it. Once you find the item you can go to him and turn it in for the reward. The rewards can be any number of things, but initially he’ll be giving out “Tokens”. What are Tokens and what can they be used for? Tokens are a new currency that can be collected and used at the “Fortune Teller”. The Fortune Teller is a new mini-game that allows players to use Tokens or Gold to play for a chance at items and other rewards. This feature is in development and will be available on Testing “soon”, and pending test feedback will be live late July / early August.

Dungeons / Events:
Our next dungeon is already in development (design stage) and has a pretty cool concept and some interesting “old dungeon” style design features (you’ll have to wait and see what that means). In addition to this new dungeon, we’ll be taking a look at some of our older dungeons during the half with an eye towards making them more challenging for players. As a side note, we’ll be reviewing the drop rates on the Events in the game (Avatar, Rock Dragon etc) since this is something that has been discussed previously.

Housing:
We have a design for player housing that we need to review internally, but we think it’s pretty exciting. The release date and final feature set are still to be determined, but we wanted to let you know that it was coming!

Fame:
Fame is going to stay the way it is - it’ll be used to purchase some things in the shops, and will be used for certain special events similar to what we did during the Month of the Mad God. As a currency there is a massive gap between players that is literally impossible to balance and maintain fairness for everyone. We do have plans to use Fame in other unique ways, but it’s likely that any new features will be in 2015.

Mini-dungeons:
These have taken a bit of a back seat to some of the bigger features above, but we will still release new ones, as well as provide a way to earn them in the Realm. The main goal is that they fit into the larger lore of Realm, and add some flavor to our favorite Mad God.

Pet Skins and Gifting Items are still on the radar and are both features that we want to release ASAP.

The last thing to keep an eye on - we’ll be nerfing and buffing things with greater regularity. Keep reading for some details from Dr. Bearsworth on the first batches of rebalance that we’ll be rolling out.

Dr. Bearsworth Update:

Hello fellow players! DrBearsworth here. I know it’s been awhile since I’ve posted on the forums, so I wanted to give insight into upcoming development changes that I’ve been working on.

Class Rebalance:

Class rebalance has been going well. The first three classes (Paladin, Priest, and Mystic) have their changes locked in, but still require bug testing which will be upcoming this next week. Most of our effort is now on the wisdom modifier, explained below, which will release in tandem with this rebalance effort. Overall, players will be exposed to similar skills with new modifications which on the whole have been interesting. While I cannot release details yet, know that within the month of July I plan to have this release out and to the community (given no interruption). Further questions may be posted in the appropriate thread.

The Wisdom Problem:

Wisdom Modifier One of the larger tasks we have been working on is what exactly to do with Vitality and Wisdom in a post-pets world to still give them viability and strength to specific classes. The simplest place to start was with wisdom. Wisdom will affect the range, duration, damage, etc of specific skills. Here’s some fast tid bits:

• Not all classes will be affected immediately. This will be a gradual roll out as we rebalance classes.
• Two classes that will be affected are Rogue and Warrior; their skills will receive very minor tweaks.
• For support classes: As you increase your wisdom:
  • Priests will heal for more and at a larger range.
  • Group buffs, like those from Paladin, will be at a larger range and increase in duration.
  • Debuffs, like those from Mystic, will also see increased durations and ranges.
• Imagine how this will affect defensive and offensive classes!

With that, feel free to comment in the appropriate thread. Closing Thoughts It is my mission to begin a cadence by which this team balances our game. Weapons, classes, items, dungeons, the realm itself will all eventually be under the lens. I know it has been a long time coming, but hopefully you can wait just a little longer. Bearsworth out.

The Year in Recap - What We Released: July 2013 ~ June 2014

July was our first month together as a team. The bulk of this month was spent getting up to speed, learning the tools, and coming up with a roadmap for the rest of the year.

August was our first real release:

• The first three Epic Dungeons: Woodland Labyrinth, Deadwater Docks, and The Crawling Depths.

September:

• We kicked it off with the release of The Battle for the Nexus and 6 new vanity items.
• Vault expansion
• 3D hardware acceleration came out at the end of the month to take advantage of GPU’s and relieve stress off of the CPU as much as possible.

October:

• We released our first “Limited” item, the Skull-Splitter Sword.
• The Halloween Nexus went live.

November:

• November was spent working on The Shatters and the Mystery Box feature

December:
December was a busy month that culminated in two significant releases:

• Launched the long awaited player submitted dungeon “The Shatters”
• Launched the new Mystery Boxes mini-game.
• Released new holiday items
• The Bow of Eternal Frost and Frostbite.
• Free character skin - Snowman
• Participated in the Steam Winter Sale and offered 6 exclusive skins via Steam.

January:
Early in the New Year we were focused on bug fixes.

• Launched the Avatar event boss that would drop The Shatters.

February:
We suffered through an extended period of downtime.

• When the game was back online on 2/20 we launched a 10 day long “Player Appreciation” event with a number of giveaways, in game events, and hopefully some fun stuff for everyone. - Released the Bella dungeon, which could drop 1 of 6 new vanity items or 2 new skins- Free “Realmway” skin Artemis.We do sincerely appreciate this community for all of their support. Thanks again for sticking with us.

March:
March was primarily spent on bug fixes, support and content for April.

• 2 character skins
• St. Patrick’s Day cloth
• Spring Nexus update.

April:
In April we released the Lair of Shaitan, a mini-dungeon concept that’s focused just on the boss fight. We had a number of other releases as well:

• Loot bag refactor
• 2 Spring cloths
• Stanley the Bunny Skin
• The Graveyard tab reintroduced to the character select screen.

May:
May was again focused on smaller releases, while the bulk of the team worked on June content:

• Fixed a truckload of spelling and grammar issues.
• Added in new chat filters and chat options that can be accessed directly from the chat window.

June:
June was the Month of the Mad God:

• A number of different reskinned items and weapons were released throughout the month:
• Weapons and Items: Solstice set, Sword of the Mad God, Dagger of the Amethyst Prism, Bow of the Morning Star, and the Sword of Illumination.
• Skins: Nexus no Miko, Drow Trickster, B.B. Wolf, Lil Red, King Knifeula, Ranger, Holy Avenger, and Witch
• Lair of Draconis was released. And uh, then RE-released. More on this here.- Pet effects - the first of which showed up in Lair of Draconis. More on this here as well!
• Participated in the Steam Summer Sale and released 5 new exclusive weapons.