12th September Development Livestream

This past Saturday, 12th September, Aonia and Orael held a livestream to announce the next Big Project for Lusternia: the Economy!

If you missed the Livestream, don’t fear. Enclosed here is a video of the entire thing, plus a complete transcript. I’ve done you the service of removing the word ‘um’. Trust me, you’re grateful for this.

A: Hello there everyone and welcome to another livestream – I’m Aonia, if you’ve not heard my voice before, and I’m here with Orael who is my co-producer for Lusternia. Say hello.

O: Hey everybody. How’s it going. We’re excited to be here and let you know what’s going on.

A: Yeah so we’ve got – what we’re basically going to do today is we’re going to take you through our major projects for Lusternia, both our current major project and the project that will follow after that, and then we’re going to take you through some of our minor projects as well, just to give you some updates to give you an idea of what working on. This obviously doesn’t encompass absolutely everything we’re working on, as there’s obviously quite a few things that are being done by volunteers in your communes and cities, that sort of level, and things that are being built that we can’t talk about. This is really just to cover with you the major development projects that are going on right now.

A: And the first one of those that we’re going to talk to you about is Endzone. So you’ve probably heard us talk about Endzone before. Basically this is sort of a supplement to the demigod changes that we put in earlier this year. Orael, do you want to talk a little bit about sort of our general aim with Endzone, and you know, the sort of thing we’re trying to achieve.

O: Yeah. Basically what we’re trying to achieve with this is just some more exciting, more engaging endgame play. One where you know, you can go in, and you have to really really…work out, you have to figure it out and and achieve all your goals there. And you’re gonna have to go in and solve the problems, and – I dunno – do much more than just let your auto basher run to defeat it.

O: The goal is something that’s enjoyable, something that’s fun, and something that you, you know, you can get lots of lots of practice with, lots of fun with.

A: Yeah, and one of the other things that we have sort of teased a little bit, we haven’t talk about extensively, obviously this is, we’ve got areas in Lusternia that do function as PvE areas, but this is one of the first times really apart from the Astral Plane where we very specifically designed a PvE area. And I think something it’s really important for you to know is the – this entire area is very much – whilst the PvE aspect is its function, the whole thing is dripping in lore that I’m so excited to give to you.

A: I’m not going to tell you any details, but I will tell you is that it expands upon and reveals a very significant part of the histories. Everyone who’s working on it – and it is really very much the entire team working on the building side of it – are really excited. And [to chat] we are talking, if you’re having trouble hearing us then try refreshing your stream, that helps sometimes.

A: But yeah, so we’re very very excited about the concept of what we’re giving you both on a metal level in terms of how it functions, and also in terms of its in character setup. One of the things that we’re doing sort of in terms of its functionality is that we are – we want to make sure it’s not somewhere that you go once and you achieve things and you don’t go again. Or you go once and you get, you know, your honours lines and the success of having completed something, and then you really just go back in there to, you know, just grind some essence or some XP.

A: So one of the things we’re doing is we’re making sure there’s a system that’s part of the area that gives you a reason beyond XP and gold, whatever it might be, to keep going back there. And that’s something that we we felt very strongly that we wanted to give you as a as an extra level of reason to go.

A: Now the biggest question of course is when do you get to go and see whatever this area may be? So we are hoping and expecting and aiming to release Endzone this year. We do have a schedule on our end that we’re trying to work to, we’re choosing not reveal to that because if we don’t manage to meet it, we don’t want to, you know, promise something we can’t give. That something that’s really important to both Orael and I, is to make sure, you know, when we promise you something it’s something we really expect to deliver. And part of that is making sure that this is the most awesome it could be before we give it out to you.

A: Endzone is the project that has suffered the most from our pandemic related delays. That’s largely due to the fact that so many people are working on it, and all of us individually have obviously suffered effects from the pandemic both big and small. We’ve been prioritising looking after people, but also balancing that with moving things forward.

A: So…that’s sort of a general overview, and we can now take some questions specifically about Endzone. We cannot promise you that we’re going to answer all of them, but ask away, if you have any questions about things we’ve just said, or questions about Endzone more in general, throw them in the chat now, and we’ll see what we can and can’t answer.

A: First of all we’ve got a question already from Nelras. Yeah, we can tell you that [the system to give a reason beyond XP/gold] shouldn’t directly have an effect on PvP balance I think it’s fair to say?

O: Very minor. If anything it’ll be very very minor. Pretty much non-existent I don’t think. I’m hesitant to say that there won’t be any affect, just because you never know how things are going to interact, but the goal is for it not to have any affect on PvP. It’s mostly a PvE area. It’s going to be – you know, to answer Malarious’s question, it isn’t – it’s going to be to begin with a specific area, but it’s a system that will let us expand on it and more areas and stuff.

A: And that’s – that’s something we’ve built from the ground up – like even in terms of the documentation we’re keeping on the back end, we’re making sure we got documentation both for the specific endzone and also for the endzone system as a whole.

O: Yeah.

A: So our next question is what are the risks of death as a mostly fully artefacted person. Do you want to take that one?

O: High. It’s one of those things where if you’re not paying any attention whatsoever, it’s going to be very easy for you to die.

A: And one of the things that we’re doing: when we get to the testing stage, we want to make sure – whilst we said before we don’t want player testing as we want the whole thing to be a surprise for you, we will be doing very extensive testing on the admin end. We’re all very excited to get to pretend to be players again! One of the things we want to make sure we do is that we test the area as a person who is fully artefacted, and really powerful, and also as a person who’s a brand new demigod and hasn’t really got much.

A: We’ve got a whole flurry of questions! I think most of them are for you. Are there going to be anti-competition or anti-choke pointing mechanics.

O: I’m not sure what that means, to be honest.

A: Yeah. Can you expand, lightpaw on what you’re going for there? – Nepenthe, I am not going to answer what the lore of the area is mostly related to. I will say that the histories does contain all of Elders, Vernals, and mortal races. It could well be one of them, it could be none of them.

O: As far as group sizes, I don’t think – I think this first area we’re doing will be designed for any group size – like we’ll try to make it adjust to the size of the group in the place I think to begin with. But in the future we may have areas that are very much group dependent.

A: I’ve got a question that’s come to me separately – so I have a question about whether Endzone is going to have anything that might be inaccessible to blind players. I can – I’m going to actually talk a bit about that later, because I want to talk about our work on accessibility – I can tell you there will not be anything sort of ASCII puzzle wise in Endzone that will affect you. We’re working very hard to ensure that even if we do have something that we add that might be an issue like that, that we funnel it through our inbuilt screenreader system so you’ve got a version that will display that will make sense. We’ve done that a lot with ASCII art and things that exist in the game right now.

A: [To chat] There might be cats.

A: Oh okay so we’ve got a follow up – that’s – lightpaw’s got a follow up to that question.

O: So, I mean, it’s – the whole point of Endzone is it’s intended to be a group working together to get through it. So I mean it’s not so much that people will be competing for it as, like, instead they have to work together to get through it. Is the general goal.

A: We are going to, we are thinking a lot about how it’s going to reset as an area, and how that’s all going to function – and of the spawning of the different mobs that you’ll be fighting. And we do want to make sure that it’s not, you know, one group goes in there and it gets cleared out for six hours and no one else can do it. We’ll – there’s a balance between that and stopping it from being somewhere where you just sit too infinitely. That is definitely something that we’re thinking about.

A: And yes the stream is being recorded and it will be uploaded a later date. Thank you for the reminder this time I was the one responsible for pressing start record, so I made sure to make sure that happened.

A: So in terms of that lore question – I would say that if you have a deeper knowledge of lore you might get more out of certain things. But I wouldn’t say you – don’t expect a need to be, you know, a knowledge champion in order to make sense of it. The whole point is that – I think with any lore that it should be accessible to everyone. With any area, anything like that, you absolutely will, you know, have people who will get more out of it if they know if it’s a bit of lore that they’re really into that sort of thing. So yes and no, I think, is what I’m trying to say. But it is from, it is related to something in the core histories – it’s not from – it’s not related to any obscure thing elsewhere within the game.

A: Are there any more question on that sort of thing? If there are not then what I’ll do is I’ll move onto describing and announcing what our next project is.

A: Okay. So. As a sort of general overview – oh, well done. Get one more question in there, okay. Yeah so it is group focused. One of the things we’re going to do in testing is really have a look at, you know, how many people you can do the the area with, if there’s a tipping point. We’re aiming for a sort of mid sized group with this one generally. In the future we might do areas that – we’ve talked about doing Endzones for solo players, we’ve talked about doing Endzones that are like, for the big Astral bashing groups you get which I know are very fun. So, yeah, I think we’re sort of aiming for groups of 5 or so. That’s a very vague thing though, because obviously no two groups are the same. But yeah, in general, it should be tuned so that it can vary a little bit.

A: So [reading] compare the length and difficulty of questing in Icewynd and does the questing need to be done in a group?

A: You are working on the presumption that there are quests in the Endzone area! And there may well not be. Not every area has to have a quest in it necessarily. I know that’s something that Estarra previously was very strong on, it’s not something that I necessarily hold to. Okay.

O: And as far as how it compares to Astral – it doesn’t compare to Astral bashing. That’s all I’ll say for that.

A: Yeah. Astral is very different, in a number of ways. Okay! So.

A: One of the things that we are trying to do with our major projects is sort of make it clear that, realistically with the size of our development team, we’re gonna produce something between two and three major development projects a year. Obviously that’s vague, cause no two projects are the same. Different projects have different hiccups – sometimes a global pandemic happens – but generally we’re looking at two to three major projects a year. So what we’re going to announce to you now is what the project that will follow Endzone is going to be. And we’re expecting this project to take quite a long time, and you’ll understand why in a moment. Orael, would you like to do the honours of announcing our next project?

O: The next big project…drumroll please…will be a really hard, intricate look into the Economy. And working on the Economy. I know a lot of you have been concerned about commodities and how much they come into the system, and that there’s an appearance that we’re running out of commodties. And we’ve always said that yeah, we’re aware that there’s more coming out than going in at the moment. That wasn’t a question we had to answer at that point in time. But now is the time to answer that question.

O: We plan on taking a really intricate look into the details of it. So it’s going to take a while. It’s going to take a couple of months for us just to detail how it exactly works and everything.

A: One of the problems our economy system has at the moment, and one of the reasons it fails, is that it’s a lot of modular things added on to each other. Without a sort of global top down overarching goal for how the economy should work and idea for how the general flow of things should occur. And that’s what we really want to do this time, the reason it’s gonna take quite a long time, is that we want to make sure we work out what is the purpose of Lusternia’s economy, what are the – I don’t quite want to say rules that we want to meet – but that sort of thing. And that involves looking at almost anything that could touch the economy so it does include commodities and commodity generation, it includes government styles because lots of those have effects, it includes holding villages and things like that. Tradeskills. You can just keep going and going and going.

A: We don’t have any ideas for it already because this is our next project, not our project right now. We have seen a lot of feedback from people that we will be taking into account. We are aware of the 8000 word epic and we’ll start – when we get to that project – start looking at gathering information about how things are now. I don’t know if there’s anything else you wanted to say on that, Orael?

O: No, just that the big thing will be it’s going to take a lot of time I think. Because we want to make sure we do it in depth and do it right.

A: Yeah I mean our expectatation is – obviously we don’t quite know when we’re going to start this. We do expect it to take several months just to work out what the problems are, and what our goals are for that structure so we will keep you updated as we go through that development process. Obviously there’s a limit to how much information we can give in advance. We do want to try and answer some questions now, but obviously that’s very speculative. So if you do have any questions go for it, but we can’t tell you specifics right now beyond a general how we want to approach it.

A: I will tell you definitely don’t want to make things super scarce – the whole point is to ensure that you can do the things that you want to do. But there has to be some sort of flow in there. You know, we equally don’t want to make commodities too available, because that sort of just goes back to the opposite problem.

O: Yeah. And if you guys have suggestions for books on virtual economies I’ll take all of them. I’ve been watching videos and stuff, so if you have suggestions feel free to message or email or whatever

A: So there’s a question – do we plan on looking at making metal comms easier to generate so that we don’t have to kill loyals to get ores. Definitely commodity generation is one of the things will be looking at. I am aware there’s a there’s an imbalance in the generation of basically every commodity, and one of the imbalances is that you have to attack loyal mobs in order to get certain comms whereas you don’t with others. There’s more – is it more sheep than cows? Cows than sheep? – that sort of thing. All of that is stuff we want to look at.

A: [To chat] No, peep chili will not be a new currency.

A: In terms of a direction we’re leaning – I don’t know that we have a direction that we’re leaving right now in terms of a top-down view other than the – you know it should be effectively a loop. That has some vague sort of balance. That’s a terrible way of putting it – maybe you can put it better.

O: I think the big thing to know is that we really haven’t – we’re announcing this as what we’re going to do but we haven’t started it at all. Our first step is to kind of look and see how it works currently and then go for solutions from that point. So I dunno, active or passive, or top down, you know – that sort of stuff, I have no idea which way will go at this point. I think it’s going to depend on what we discover as we dive in.

A: Yeah and that – obviously that’s definitely one of the dualities will have to consider, of whether we want to push towards just active production or a balance of passive and active and that sort of thing.

A: Will there be new uses for anomalies included –

O: Potentially.

A: – yeah, that’s something we could consider.

O: Another thing on anomalies, as a side note we can always do – we left room with timequake to expand those to use anomalies for other stuff too. Maybe different research branch or expanding what we have currently or what not. So there’s not – we don’t necessarily need to go in an economy direction with that, we have other options there.

A: And that’s the thing, that’s – it’s a smaller thing that’s much easier to add onto that structure that’s already there.

O: Yeah.

A: Okay so just a few last moments to ask any other questions about the economy. I’m sorry we can’t obviously give you more exact answers about that this time. The really important thing we want you to know is that we are going to be looking at that.

A: I’ve had another question that’s come to me separately – I will get to that later cause you’ll see I’m actually about to talk about that in a bit. [Reading] How do we decide on what projects to take on as our major focus? So it’s a mixture of things we know we want to do and things – feedback from the community of problems and concerns that all of you have. We generally – we have what we call a star map which is a list of things we want to tackle at some point. And we’ll sort of add to that and often what will happen is Orael and I will sit down and look at the star map and say – you know, what of these do we think is the next thing we should do, what works best with where we are in the year, cause obviously at different points in the year different things are happening. Yeah, it’s really a mixture.

O: I mean from my standpoint it’s a matter of what’s going to have the – you know, what we spend our time on should have a significant impact on the player base. If we’re doing a project we want it to associate as many people as possible.

A: Yeah.

O: So that’s kind of one of the things I look at too.

A: Okay, so unless there’s any more – I think Llani that’s more of a question about Timequakes rather than Economy specifically.

O: We’ll be finishing the Defence overhaul eventually.

A: Okay so what we going to do is move on – there may be a short time depending to ask some more questions at the end so we’ll see how we go. What we’re going to do now is we’ve both got a couple of – I’ve called them minor projects but they’re really not very small. So I’m not sure why I called them that. And we’ve both got a couple of each that we’re both going to talk about.

A: So actually since I’ve just had that come through as a question – one of the things I want to give you an update on is Ascension. Now we spoke earlier in the year, when Ascension happened, about the fact that we do want to revisit and look at the format of Ascension. And I say that very generally because I mean it in a very all-encompassing way. I mean everything from the exact rules and setup of each contest, to the contest as a whole, to Ascension’s link to our overall, overarching plot. Every aspect of Ascension and how it is run and what it means for Lusternia as a whole.

A: Now I don’t have a lot to say about that right now again this is very early on. It’s more that we wanted to update and let you know that we’re now at the point where we have started discussions about Ascension, and we are starting to look at what we think the problems are and how we’re then going to tackle them. You might be thinking – my goodness, Aonia, it’s incredibly early to be doing that, but because of the link between Ascension and the year plot, and in terms of the fact that there’s quite a lot to discuss here, and it’s a really important thing for Lusternia as a whole – that’s why we’ve started that this early.

A: [To chat] It could be a rap battle, who knows.

A: But yeah I – the only thing I can say is that it really helped us having it in the summer as well, so the one thing you should not expect is for us to suddenly go…Ascension is in January! Because that’s not going to happen. So you can assume it will it will be later on, in whatever format it appears in.

A: So that’s one of mine – Orael do you want to talk about one of yours?

O: Yeah. Yeah the other thing that’s been working on – as you guys know we just recently pushed a big batch of serverside curing updates, aiming to help with lag reduction and help improve it in general. There’s a mortal coder who’s been doing a bunch of work on that stuff, that’s all he’s doing. And he’s continuing the work on that stuff, he actually just gave me an update a little bit ago. You know, he’s going to keep working on things like improving ice curing to allow applying wounds while waiting on a limb, improve affliction tracking and the hidden status for ice stuff, and look at toggling things like climb out of pits, and kind of making the unknown afflictions curing better than it is right now.

O: You know there’s that topic on the forums if you guys want to make comments on the forums – I mean that’s being perused. But yeah, so we’re still, you know, pushing our work into that to help make it better. The first batch of changes I think went over pretty well minus the not being able to sit down ever again bug.

A: That’s a small thing.

O: But overall it’s a very very good change. So – he’s doing good work, he’ll keep working at it, and yeah – that’s where we’re at with that.

A: One of the things to mention with that we think it’s hopefully made some improvements to lag.

O: Yeah, it should have. I haven’t had a look at it specifically but it should definitely do it.

[Some unclear phrases here where they talk over each other – nothing vital]

A: Okay so my second thing is an update about our inclusivity project. Now this I’m – it’s going to be a bit vague and I do apologise for that. We are now onto several points that are being worked on a lot behind the scenes and will be released slowly. These are wider reaching concerns that affect more than one thing. And I’m very sorry that I can’t really be more specific than that. We will be very explicit about what we changed and why once things are released but I don’t want to spoil any sort of plot related things that are occurring, because many of these changes are things – we’re trying to make sure there’s, you know, we, let’s use this opportunity and have some really cool plot for how things are changing.

A: And I’m incredibly excited about what a lot of the volunteers working on this are doing and I want to be clear that a lot of the changes that you’re seeing, any improvements that you’re seeing are coming from our volunteers who are working really hard on this project that – whilst I’m leading it I kind of produced…not out of nowhere obviously because it comes from very good and very important reasons but it wasn’t in its size on our docket, and our volunteers have been amazing at helping with it.

A: This does include – this is the one thing I can be more specific on – on the ongoing implementation of non-binary gender there remain some issues with that in terms of…well there’s a lot of them and it’s, a lot of it’s just making sure that we’ve got systems in place in things like emotes and honours lines – I think honours lines is all done now and emotes we have a fix, so it’s just going through all of the emotes as they get reported and getting them sorted.

A: We do want to open non-binary gender up to mobiles, but we want to make sure it’s sorted on the player side and Divine side first, before we then go and add you know a whole other dimension to it. Now one of the things we’ve added on to the inclusivity project and you will have seen from this stream is that we are also working on greater accessibility. Now obviously this is relevant in game in terms of our systems for people using screen readers, which I talked a bit about earlier – but one of the places where we are really trying to make improvements is on our platforms that are beyond Lusternia so here, our social media our website, things like that.

A: You will find things like – obviously we’ve got closed captions here today, we’re starting to put alt text on all of our images on Facebook and Twitter, and things like that – this is something with very much learning about as we go along. So if you ever do have something that you as a user find would be – you know that you’re having a problem with, or would be better in a different way, do get in touch with us and let us know. Because often we don’t know. We have – it’s even down to things like the colours we use for things, to make sure that they are accessible to people with different levels of colour blindness. It really takes having someone who knows that sort of experience to help us see where there’s a problem so that we can then fix it.

A: So yeah, that’s…that’s where we are we are on that. I mean to be honest before I started this I didn’t even know there were different kinds of colour blindness – I was only vaguely aware of it, but we actually we have tested several things admist our team in the Havens to make sure that it cannot be readed properly – readed? Gosh, what’s happened to my English today – that it can all be read clearly.

A: In terms of ASCII art puzzles. I also don’t actually like ASCII very much. So this actually got fixed – I say fixed, improved a while ago. Previously all of our ASCII art was quite literally printed thing, I think is the best way to describe it. Now all of our things like fireworks and things like that go through a function that we have – where you get the ASCII version, and then there is also always a text-only version. I realise text only is a weird description because ASCII is in itself text, but you have the ASCII version that looks like a butterfly, and then you will have the sentence ‘A firework that resembles a butterfly appears.’ That sort of thing.

A: In terms of – so that’s something we’ve already done – I’m not gonna say we’ve got every instance of ASCII art in existence. If you do find any that don’t have that set up please report it to us and we’ll make sure it gets moved onto a better system. And this doesn’t apply to all puzzles and things like that – some of our puzzles have a screenreader friendly system. Our – we’ve got a screenreader friendly…Mastermind! That’s the name of the puzzle that I hate, and I know we’ve worked to do that with other puzzles as they’ve been added.

A: In terms of going stuff back through all our existing puzzles we don’t currently have – I’d love to do it – we don’t currently have the resources to. Especially cause puzzle prog is – I mean people running away screaming from it so…

A: [Responding to chat] In terms of changes to existing plot or lore – there will be changes to existing plot and lore. Inevitably. But we’re endeavouring to make sure that those changes make sense, that they’re done sensitively to whatever the issue is, that they are done in a way the improves Lusternia in all senses. So we don’t want – a lot of the changes we made thus far have been things that we can just simply change, for example changing the original name of Epicure’s Alley was something we could do that was just a name change, it was very much just cosmetic and wasn’t a problem.

A: A lot of things we’re onto now all the things are more complicated and are the things that are more entrenched or more complicated in their relations, and we’re trying to make sure that when we’re changing them we’re also making those stories better in every way. As well as ensuring that they make sure that Lusternia is a place where everyone is comfortable. I’m sorry that is very vague. As I say, I don’t want to spoil things but that’s very much our aim, and the aim of everyone working on it.

A: So yes, that’s me in terms of inclusivity – would you like to talk about bugs?

O: Yeah. So the last thing we want to talk about is just that – moving forward, Aonia and the team have done a great job on game bugs, with having bug parties and all that stuff, but one of my goals – once we finish Endzone up – is to help really start cracking down on the code bugs again. So that’s one of our goals is just to reduce those and get those down. Yeah, and just kinda take care of it that way – so nothing big and exciting to announce there, just that’s, that’s one of our goals.

O: I think that’s it about bugs.

A: Yeah. Yeah. So we were aiming for about an hour, we’ve got 20 minutes left, if any of you have questions that you’d like to ask – this can at this point be about anything – I can’t promise will answer everything but we will do our best if we’re able to.

A: [Reading] How far ahead in time do we actually plan for projects? – It’s a mixture of both…so I mentioned earlier we’ve got our star map, which is the things we’d like to do in the future, and then obviously we’re announcing the project after the one we’re doing so it’s kind of both, but it’s not like we can tell you we’re doing Economy and then this next thing and then this next thing. Stuff comes up and changes – we do have an idea of the directions we want to go in general.

O: [To chat] The bug status updates – I can look at that and see if – I thought it did already, but yeah so there should be the configuration alwaysmessage on. And it should message you whether you’re online or not online. So if you have that on it should do it, but I’ll double check that it does. That should be easy to do if it doesn’t. I don’t know if it works on bugs, I think it does. But if it doesn’t, I’ll make it work on bugs.

O: As far as envoy reports, moving forward, our goal is to do it every four to six months, we just wrapped up some. In – did I finish in July, or August?

A: Time…time is strange.

O: Yeah. I just wrapped up the last set in July or August so we’ll probably look for another round probably, maybe December/January or so. Depending on how Endzones go and stuff, so. And if something like climax comes up again where it’s a big, game-changing, easy-to-use thing that’s murdering people left to right, we can look at changing it outside Envoy Reports for sure.

A: Yeah I mean, it’s not that changes to PvP balance or anything can only be made through Envoy Reports. We do change things as and when it’s needed, it’s more that Envoy Reports are a time where we – and by we I mean Orael, really – carve out time to focus on those specifically so.

A: [Reading] So if someone thinks that there’s a skill that needs changes is there a correct way to submit that as a report?

O: I mean you can always submit, like, multiple reports when the new round opens up. If you think there’s a big, big problem, you’re always welcome to email me the suggested changes and stuff [At orael@lusternia.com]. I definitely don’t wanna – any changes that we’re going to make are probably going to be run by the playerbase first. I know that some people don’t like opening up the forums and what not, but I think it’s best just to be transparant on what changes we’re looking at and what changes we’re suggesting to the players in general. So just. That’s kinda, gonna be…

O: [Reading] What do you think about changing stats to be less uniform?

O: I’m kind of 50/50 torn on that. I think one – I think changing stats to be less uniform, where warriors are the big tanks and birds do tons of damage but die to two hits – I think that makes things more interesting and more fun. But part of the overhaul goal was the make things more uniform. It’s kinda like – bouncing back and forth. I don’t know if you guys are aware, but I’m definitely a fan of a system where people have to make choices in what they do. Make choices in like, you know, I’m going to be defensive against fire, but it’s going to open me up to cold damage or whatever. The kind of thing where – you know I’d rather a system where we choose what you think, but are weaker in other areas, rather than people just being awesome at everything. Cause I think that’s a more boring system to play in. So I’m definitely – there’s definitely good points about things being less uniform, overall. So yes, I’m open to ideas that change that.

O: [To Chat] Archery knights will probably not happen in a long time. [Pause] Ah. I just missed the sarcasm tag there.

A: [Laughs]

O: But yeah. I think less uniform stuff could be a lot of fun.

A: And we were talking earlier about the fact that that extends sort of all over the place in the sense that some – you know some classes are better one on one than others, and some are better in groups and in different sized groups, and that’s the thing – that’s always going to be something that makes combat interesting.

A: [To Chat] In terms of using PVP skills abilities on denizens in Endzone – no you will not be able to use abilities you couldn’t-

O: Well. In this first system? Definitely not. There will be a little bit of stuff you can do in this first round but, you know, part of the fun of the system may be to allow that kind of stuff to happen in the future. So we’ll see.

A: Yeah. But not as a blanket thing.

O: [To Chat] I mean, you know, with the tradeoff system, if you don’t want to use one thing to lower something else I think that’s part of the goal right, like you can either be average all around or you can be really good at one thing but then you’re suffering on another end. I think that’s what makes it more interesting, right, do you want to be okay at everything or do you want to be like really good at one thing and bad at another thing. I don’t think that’s a problem. So. It forces choices, and choices are fun.

O: [Reading] Bring back Darvellan

[Incoherent talking over one another]

A: So there was one question which is when do we get to kill off Zvoltz. But uh, um. So real question: have you thought about new skills for some classes, and new secondaries. I think we’d always love to, but adding a new skill is a lot of work which Orael can probably speak to you better than I can.

O: Yeah. It is a ton of work. It’s a ton of work to add anything new, or even just to change out the existing stuff. The, it – yeah, just it’s difficult to do. And I’m not opposed to it, but when you add stuff you add new balance problems, new other issues or whatever. Yeah. So there’s no plans for that stuff as of now, but in general it’s a lot of fun.

A: And that does include trade skills as well. Whilst tradeskills obviously may not necessarily have the PvP balance issue, they involve a lot of work on different sides, the Charites side, but we – this is not me promising there will be new tradeskills when we look at the economy, but looking at the economy will involve us looking at tradeskills. We will be in that region.

A: In terms of, we discussed Endzone and the accessibility of puzzles, [reading] are there puzzles in Endzone. That really depends what you mean by puzzle – and I don’t think we’re going to go further than that. I know that there is a pervasive player theory that there are puzzles in the sense that you’d think of in a quest – and there seems to be an obessesion with this theory. We will find out whether it’s correct or not.

O: [Laughs]

A: [To Chat] Aucagolei does still exist, it’s just that they’re in a place that only appears at certain times. So. [Laughs]

O: [To Chat] Don’t thank us for the Mage trophies, thank the player report that did it.

A: Yeah.

O: I forget who wrote it, but.

A: [Reading] In the Economy can we consider looking at high vs low magic parity, herbs and – yeah, that’s sort of the thing I mean about looking at the accessibility of trade skills. Both in terms of what magic it requires, what classes can and can’t get access to things, that all affects the economy system because – you know the number of people that can take say, brewmeister, affects how available brewmeister products are. I’ve possibly picked the worst example [laughs] yes, that is the sort of thing we will be looking at at that point.

A: In terms of Aetra – ugh – Aethergoop crafting for existing tradeskills – it’s sort of inevitable we’re going to end up looking at the Aethergoop crafting system, but we don’t have specific plans right now.

A: [To Chat] Aucagolei may still be there, you’ll have to wait and find out if the Chateau opens to go in the future.

A: So this is – this is one for you, then, Orael. [Reading] Is there any plan to look at the PvP balance of high and low magic.

O: Yeah. I mean there’s no direct plan to be like – yes let’s look at that stuff. No, there’s no plan to look at it. I’m not sure – is there really that big a discrepancy between the two? I mean I know that Greater Pentagram got nerfed and doesn’t last long, but – well, you can reduce Serpent now with…I forget what the skill is, the breaking the shield skill or whatever.

A: That’s a very specific name.

O: Yeah. Yeah, kether/violet. Yeah you can reduce Serpent times with nullify/void – yeah there’s things that counter serpent, and you’ve got to remember too that serpent costs 10 power, so it’s not, it’s not a cheap thing to use. There’s ways to counter it.

A: [To Chat] And yes, Anniversary, or as it’s called in-character now the Festival of the Creatrix, is coming up – that is in October and we will be announcing all of the plans for that next week.

O: [To Chat] I think you’ll find that Endzones will be an alternative to Astral bashing. So I’m not – I mean that was kind of what the goal was, is a big high level endzone, endgame place for people to bash. So.

A: [To Chat] And yes, the Wayfaire will be open, as it always is, during the Festival of the Creatrix.

A: We have another 10 minutes we can stay if anyone else has any other questions. [To Chat] The Festival name changed last year – it was all announced in-character. It’s always been an awkward thing that we have all of these Anniversary events but obviously the concept of an Anniversary has absolutely no relevance in character. So the Festival of the Creatrix is now – is what it’s referred to in-character. You will still find us saying Anniversary out of character.

A: [Reading] Joined late and I might have missed the question, do we have any idea when Endzone might be released?

A: We have answered that earlier but I’ll quickly repeat it – we’re hoping this year, we have a timeline we’re working to but we’re not releasing that timeline because we don’t want to promise something and then not be able to keep it. So we’re hoping – yeah. When it is ready, is the real answer. But somewhere, somewhere in the next few months.

A: In terms of content for those not yet in endgame – there’s always content for those not yet in endgame. One of the – I mean we’ve been talking about some of the big, wide-reaching development projects but all of the patron groups right now are working on different things for the communes and cities. Be they things that have been put through via patron request, or things that they coming up with on they’re own. We have a system now on the back end that we started at the beginning of this year and has gone really well, to empower patron teams to create things for their organisations – and that’s gotten everyone some some really cool things. So yes in the sense that…well, the Economy, for a start.

A: Okay, so there’s a couple of questions maybe more for you, Orael, about whether someone oversees psychodrama and how to suggest changes to that.

O: Yeah. I mean at this point it’d be a reporting thing, right, you’d have to suggest during reports. There’s nobody who oversees it in particular at this point in time. [Reading] More ikons for orders. [To Chat] I mean talk to your patron about that. There’s no one who overlooks it so the only real way to get a change in there would be to you know, have a report at this point. Cause we’ve just got priorities elsewhere. And the same with an organised wargames league – I think it’d be a great idea, to be honest, I think it could be fun. But I’m worried that – I mean we’ve already got the ranked arena combat league, and all that kind of other stuff. You know, it’d just be another system that we’d have to plan out and make sure it’s not gamed as much as it can be. So, yeah. It’s not something I’m opposed to, just not something that’s on our plate right now.

A: In terms of order specific psychodrama cards, custom ikons are something that Gods could technically ask for. It may be that some people don’t realise they could do that, so I can remind them – it may be and I think it’s much more likely to be – that creating icons is fiddly and awkward. And it’s much easier to create other fun things for you than it is to create psychodrama cards. So it is really probably that rather than them not caring to.

A: We’ve got just a few minutes left if anyone has any last minute questions we can go over those, otherwise – you will have noticed possibly by now that we have been streaming sort of every other month which is a thing we’re vaguely trying to keep to. We’re trying to do them semi-regularly for you because we think it’s been really useful for us and it’s been really nice for you as well.

A: [Reading] Is there anything you can do to make things better for us? Any bug category we want broken, or anything we think may cause lag. [Pause] The existence of players causes lag.

O: [Laughs]

A: Leaning on your enter key when you’re particularly hitting a lot of command failure that causes lag as well. [Laughs] I mean – lag things, we are steadily working through those. The SSC stuff is the stuff currently that’s being worked on, and there’s some other stuff we’ve done behind the scenes that’s boring.

A: In terms of make yourself better for us generally – I’m thinking of doing a blog post about this in the future actually is sort of ways you can help Lusternia. The single biggest way you could help Lusternia is – tell your friends about Lusternia! Get them to come and try it out and see what they think of it. That’s the best thing you can do to help us as a whole.

A: [Reading] Should you do anything else when bugs timeout and you have to resubmit the bug. [To Chat] No – as long as you resubmitted it, it’s not a problem. Obviously one of the aims – one of the reasons to get the bug numbers down is that things will be much less likely to time out because they, you know, we’ll have a lower numbers so we’ll be able to get to them.

A: [Reading] Where are we as far as helping with combat spam, Orael?

O: We’re doing pretty good so far. We’ve – you know the first big one was the GMCP changes that Ianir did, or Ianir, however you say it. That was a huge cause of lag and that’s reduced stuff a lot. And that’s reduced calls of the SSC things by 90%, I think, when I looked at it. And you know a lot of the things that too, that when we’re adding them in, I’m adding them in with the expectation of reducing lag now. So recently we just did the rooting and celerity changes. And when we did that it, you know, it’s probably a minor cause of lag, but it made things significantly faster on the end – so we’re not calling things as much. So it’s definitely something that’s just going to be a continual project we work on. So. Something we just keep in mind as we go.

A: And so – where’s the question I was looking at – oh, things in terms of marketing Lusternia better. Follow us on our social media accounts! Actually follow us! I know obviously a lot of people are in the Unofficial Discord that has a bot that sends all of our Tweets straight away – and I can tell you the Gremlins love that when they make a typo, and it goes there and they can’t get rid of it. Actually follow us on Facebook, actually follow us on Twitter, following us here [on Twitch] also helps you more than it helps us to be fair. Sharing things, liking things – it really makes a big difference in all of the insidious algorithms that work in the back there to get those things seen by other people. That’s – that’s a really helpful thing that you can do, as well as just talking about it, and engaging with us on that social media. And don’t underestimate the power of the Twitter Gremlins.

A: In terms of TMS rankings, we do get people who come through to TMS, I won’t say it’s a vast number, but it does help in some way. And it’s nice to beat Aetolia.

O: And yeah, as far as combining messages from stuff – that’s definitely something I’m going to look at at some point. That was one of the suggestions when I was talking to other games is combining messages and third-party messages from people. But the key there is that we’re not taken away important messages that people need to see in order to coordinate. So it’s gonna take some –

A: I think melds got compressed in the overhaul a bit already, didn’t they?

O: Yes and no. I think it depends who you talk to.

A: [Laughs]

O: I tried to compress them.

A: Okay, and that takes us to 8 o’clock – so thank you all very much for coming. It’s been lovely to talk to all of you, and to announce our awesome next project. We will be likely – if we want to seek specific feedback regarding the economy, when we get to it we will do that at the time. But by all means start talking about things on the forums. Forums is much better for giving feedback than Discord, because Discord scrolls a lot. If you put things on the forums we’re much much more likely to see it, So if you want to give any economy related feedback that’s the place to throw it! Otherwise thank you very much for coming, and we will see all of you again whenever our next stream may be. And we hope to give you some exciting news about Endzone in not too much longer – we’ll see how it goes.

O: Yep! Thanks everybody.

A: Thanks. Bye guys!