Post:Fang Cove - 01/14/2012 - 04:04

Re: Fang Cove · on 01/14/2012 04:04 AM CST	3200
>that, according to the description, took a huge amount of time from the game's staff Before similar feelings continue to come up, let me try put some things into perspective. This has been a personal project of mine for almost as long as I've been on staff. While many people have helped over the years, it's been a number of small contributions that come together to make the large release that this was. The bulk of the work on this area was always done by members of the Premium/Platinum teams. Almost all of the coding I did myself. Until a few months ago, Premium and Platinum were "my" responsibility, and this project was a part of that role. While they may not be the group I oversee now, they're still a group of players I care a great deal about. At no point did work on this project pull away from work on X3, quests or any other projects past or present. It was always a "Hey if you have time and interest, here's what we're still waiting on..." and folks could volunteer. There's a very generous staff up here, and I'm very grateful for all the volunteers over this project's lifetime. Doing events for Premium players presented us with a hurdle that was difficult (but not impossible) to overcome -- it can be hard to have Premium-only events. We absolutely can do merchants and alterations in the Seacaves or do invasions in Premium hunting areas. But often when we've done this, we get assists, reports or IG commentary about people being left out. "It doesn't make sense that the fields are being overrun with {critter}, but the monk won't let us in to help!" We agree. By and large, Prime is open to everyone with just a (comparatively) few small groups of Premium rooms here and there. It's difficult to develop political groups or anything long-term or large-scale when you don't have a place to call home, so to speak. Fang Cove gives us this. Fang Cove is an area of the game available by and large to Premium players with a small bubble available to basic subscribers. On the GM side of things, this opens up amazing event opportunities for us. We can develop the Estate Holder Council further, we can get involved in Ilithi's politics, we can develop a long-term storyline with some "big bad". To attempt any of this in the existing bubbles is clumsy and awkward at best. >Is there really no consideration for keeping the game going for the non-premies I think this is over exaggerating a fair bit. Is X3 going to be Premium only? Is mining Premium only? Smithing? Tailoring? Personal caravans? Familiar alterations? Kanton's Dagger or any of the re-released quests? Item stackers? Fluff hiders? An entire guild was created from the ground up and released faster than the Fang Cove project was completed. The game as a whole sees a LOT of ongoing updates and releases, whereas Premium players may get a few nods each year. We're not going to be making dozens of Fang Cove-sized projects around the game for Premium players. We're going to take this one and build on it. We're going to do our best to establish a community and events around it. Do we hope that more people sign up for Premium to take advantage of it? Simutronics is a business, so I'm sure they do. This is a nice set of incentives bundled together that may or may not draw more in, but that was never my goal in getting the area created and released. My goal was simply to give Premium players something they hadn't seen before while also giving staff a new set of tools to interact with them in easier and more fun ways.
This message was originally posted in Discussions with DragonRealms Staff and Player \ Responses to GM/Official Announcements, by DR-ZADRAES on the play.net forums.