End-of-the-Year Updates

I’ve been planning this update post since the summer, pushing it back till I had more tangible and definite information to share with you all. Alas, life finds a way to mess even with the best laid plans, and here we are. So rather than post a detailed roadmap, we’ll deviate a bit this time and focus on the state of things. A post in the hand is worth two in WIP hell, or something like that. So let’s have a look at this year in a quasi Year in Review post.

Roadmap Woes

Putting together a roadmap is difficult for a number of reasons I’d like to talk about first. While I certainly like to have a roadmap, and they sure are exciting, experience has taught me that announcing one can complicate things fast. Priorities can shift and volunteers can have life events crop up. So when they can’t deliver, the project inevitably ends up in my backlog. It’s there, adding to my already significant pile, because it is still expected to happen eventually. Sometimes it involves time and effort from the playerbase too (feedback, report cycle), so not following through on that would break the compact made when said effort was asked for.

That’s just the way things are in any environment that largely relies on volunteers, and now even more so as we are all volunteers equally. You all may well know and understand these facts already but it bears repeating every so often. Like the fact that volunteer-driven development cannot always immediately focus on what the game needs. By which I mean that even if there is a bug or something that needs to be addressed, sometimes other things will supersede that because the well-being of the staff demands that it does. As an example, I have a project nearing completion that I coded in September when I could not rally brain power for anything else. It was the only thing that sparked joy, so better that than nothing. As a result, I’d much rather announce things when they are almost done or announce small-scale projects and goals. Then refresh the roadmap as those are completed. At least for the time being, until I am fully caught up on the bulk of the backlog and our admin team is fully reinvigorated. And speaking of…

State of the Team

My absence this year impacted the admin team too. While we have other people around who can make all manner of things happen, that does not negate the need for a producer on the team. Beyond rubber-stamping projects, it’s about collaboration, advice, ideas, support, and all manner of rallying, coordinating, and planning. Everything’s easier and more fun when we’re working together and have someone in the big picture role to steer the course.

So onto the team itself then. Everyone listed as active in HELP GODS (the ‘commonly seen within Lusternia’ section) is still part of the team. You may not have seen or heard from a few people on that list in a while, but they are still with us. They are dealing with life and will become active as and when they are able to. Even while not active, they can still be leaned on for their specific lore knowledge or skills, which is tremendously helpful. You might notice that Darvellan is missing from the list but he’s still with us, having transitioned to a fully behind-the-scenes role as Velzyium. That is sure to sadden Darvellan fans, but it’s better for Lusternia and him. With a new job and a demanding schedule, he gets very little time to work on things and when he does, he’s most productive when building awesome things at his own pace.

We still have four Ephemerals on the team too but the ‘life sucks’ curse has gotten to them as well. They’ve been with us for a while and they are all not that far from full admin roles. However, before that happens they do all need to find time to recommit and wrap up their training. Nothing would be gained from nudging them into divine roles that they disappear from in two weeks because life continues to leave little room for them to be here. Next year I hope to open a call for Ephemerals again but given the fact that few prefer to be admins to being players, and as we have received zero applications last call, I am wary of being optimistic. Maybe we’ll be surprised!

On the coding end, we have Ais, Orael, and me. Ais has mainly been able to be here in an advisory capacity this year – which is worth a lot in and of itself as Ais’ knowledge of Rapture (the game’s engine) is legendary. Our coders have test servers primarily because of the Docker solution Ais has put together for us, and whenever we need a new admin tool coded, Ais is there. Orael has made a comeback this year as well and has put together a new feature over the summer – more on that later. We also have four ‘mortal coders’ – players who code for us – but only two of them are currently active. Those two are our veterans and have helped implement complex reports in the past so the code’s in good hands.

Projects

“The last 2 percent is the hardest to get, that’s why they leave it in the milk.” – Brooklyn Nine-Nine

While the quote is obviously pure nonsense, it always makes me laugh. Sometimes it does feel like the last 2% is the hardest to get. We’re in the final stages of a few projects right now, and have been since the summer. The amount of time a final stage takes differs from project to project and often depends on the availability of specific people. I’d like to list a few of them but please keep in mind that it may be a while before it’s all done and that this is far from a complete list of things we’re working on:

• Custom Beast Submission System – that’s the project Orael has been working on and which is finished on his end. It will make it possible to request custom beasts through an in-game request system rather than e-mail and significantly cut down on the work required to make those beasts once approved. Having this in-game means we can have all admins easily help review things and then make the beast with just a few clicks. We could even rope in mortal reviewers into it if necessary. The system has options for all manner of flags to request on the beast too and room to submit lines for staple features like delivery and retriever. Once it’s up and running, we can expand it to dwellers as well. This project is the closest to completion as it has gone through a few phases of testing on our end already, and now only requires my final tests, the writing of new help files, and staging of all the changes. And the hardest 2% – my and Orael’s availability to release and patch up any issues.
• Plaxios Lowlands Revamp – Remember Plaxios? We do! The currently flooded area has been receiving all kinds of fixes, updates, and tweaks. Once we got into it, it turned out a lot more was wrong there than just a few issues with the epic quests. While the brunt of the rewrites has already happened, there are still some issues left to figure out and a lot of testing that needs to happen. It will be ready when it’s ready. After Plaxios I really hope to return to Amberni.
• Uilani’s Secret Project – I wouldn’t call this almost ready but it’s closer to done than not. Perhaps 60% done overall. The coding is about 80% done as only a few features are missing, but we still need to do thorough testing, some building to complement the release, and of course write the help files. You’ll need to let me keep the details of this one under wraps for now as it’s my first coding project of this size and half the fun is the surprise.
• Mystery Pocket – This is not an actual pocket in your robes. A pocket is what we call a quest added to an existing area which comes with its own rooms and story. There’s one that’s almost done. The final steps are a walkthrough (that’s when I test and review something), post-walkthrough tweaks, release prep, and the release itself. This will likely be released in January.
• Arowin’s Sketchartist Academy – Freshmen, are you ready to advance to Sophomores? I would not call the next stage of development for the academy close to done, but it is in progress. Collecting all the information necessary for the next stage is quite tedious so it’s been broken down into smaller tasks that are being knocked out as inspiration strikes. The system itself is ready for the next level to be added, was built that way to begin with, in fact, so now we’re just gathering the pieces.

Plans

Here’s what I am hoping to get done in the near future: a general list in lieu of a roadmap.

I think we’ll let the rest of December revolve just around Solstice because that’s enough work as it is, especially on the heels of the Creatrix Festival and the Haunting. Time permitting, we’ll try to release the Custom Beast Request System too. In addition to that, I’ll continue to work on Iron Realms-wide things, such as this cross-realm Solstice event. More on IRE work a bit later. There’s also ongoing ‘invisible work’ that pushes various projects forward, gets bugs fixed, issues resolved, and so on.

When we come back from all the merriment in the new year there are a few things that will be high on my list of priorities. In no particular order: report decisions, support queue, some timequake and commodity tweaks, vastly overdue event posts, goop craftables, and resumption of artbards. At some point, sooner than later, we will also need to start improving our newbie experience considerably. That’s just the tip of the backlog iceberg but we’ve got to start somewhere. Keep in mind this list refers to me specifically, others will be working on other things too.

IRE Projects

This may surprise you, but even though Lusternia is in legacy mode, I am still participating in producer meetings. After we switched to legacy mode, I usually just kept up to date through meeting notes. But since this summer IRE has been pursuing broader projects that can benefit and involve all the games, including legacy ones, and by choice I have been a part of that (as has Starmourn). You’ve now seen the Solstice cross-realm event that we’ve been working on together, but a lot of other work has happened too. We’ve been working on the websites (plugin reviews, SEO, new content), social media, player retention (including newbies) – to name a few of the projects. I cannot elaborate on all of it as it’s ongoing work but it benefits Lusternia so I will continue to participate.

One of the great things that has come out of it for us is that we got a new metrics system. I should probably say -a- metrics system, period, as we didn’t really have one beyond some newbie statistics that have not been updated to track the current newbie intro. This new one offers a wealth of data, not just on newbies but on orgs and guilds too. For example, we can now check when a specific org is the most active, specific times and days on average. You’d think we should have had access to such data already, right? We didn’t. There are a few metrics, mainly related to newbies, that still need to be hooked into our system but what we already have is great too.

Statistics

I mentioned we have some newbie metrics but how about some stats from all across the game in addition to that? Here you go!

• Online time is up since the summer – both in terms of players online and how long they are online.
• 197 newbies were created in the last 90 days – while the vast majority of those are alts (often returnees) and end up deleted, there are new players among this count who have stuck around too. Hi, newcomers!
• 75 issues have been resolved in the issues system, and I expect that count to get to around 100 before the year’s out.
• 411 designs have been approved through the amazing work of our mortal reviewers and the Charites team.
• 15 library books have been written by players – Gaudiguch was the most active here.
• 7 stage performances have been produced by players – Magnagora was the most active here.
• 86 pieces of gossip made it into the pilgrim camp. Be sure to config gossipalert on if you like to be in the loop.
• 54 pieces of player-added gossip has been spread by the pilgrims, scholars, and bards of the Basin of Life.
• 97 entirely new objects were created this year for story/gameplay purposes.
• 11 story events took place. Bit hard to count those precisely but that’s a fair estimate.
• 426 bugs have been filed and 569 bugs have been resolved. 323 of those were resolved by Orael alone.
• 120 typos have been filed and 125 typos have been resolved.
• There are 868 bugs and 47 typos outstanding in the system.

Not too shabby for a year during which I was mostly absent. To wish us all a great 2026 risks jinxing it so instead: let’s keep on keeping on!